America Tells God to Get Lost/Divine Revelation Cannot be Limited by Men’s Philosophical Systems

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Even Rich noticed, and I'm rather proud of myself,

I will admit, that the little tree in the corner there, it's the same one

I had last night. And if you watched the program last night, it's just a, like,

I was gonna say something like $2 .99 tree from Target, but is anything $2 .99

anymore? It was probably five bucks, who knows, but it was cheapest thing I could find. And all of a sudden, the thought crossed my mind.

I have these, they call them fairy lights, I don't like the name, but they're just, I'd never seen these before, but they're,

I don't know how to describe it, it's not wire, but it's metal strands, like wire, with LEDs embedded in them along the way.

And they're super cheap, undoubtedly made in China. But they make pretty light, and all of a sudden, thought crossed my mind,

I could wrap, because I had a string going along here, I could wrap those around the tree.

Yeah, yeah, worked out well. And when the wind's not blowing nearly as bad tonight, it's finally slowing down.

But I will tell you, okay, these are just confessions of a desert dog who is back in the

Midwest when it's cold. I went out this morning, I think it was, the wind chill was 15 degrees.

I think it was like 20, 26, something like 26, 25 Fahrenheit, and the wind is just whipping.

And so I bundled up a good bit, but after I got done doing some stuff with the truck and the unit and stuff like that,

I come in and I was gonna get on bikes, I was changing socks, my toes were red.

And I'm like, oh, okay, that was only like 15, 20 minutes at the most.

Now, of course, do not have insulated shoes. I have a pair of somewhere around here that I could have worn that would have helped.

But yeah, I can see, you read those little stories about the mountain climbers and stuff like that.

Okay, yeah, all righty, yeah. Doesn't happen in Phoenix. The low 20s are the absolute record, like once in every two decades or something like that.

Anyway, I thought I'd start off with something a little lighter because look, one of the main reasons we need to do the program today is due to the fact that the

Senate of the United States yesterday, in essence, extended a legislative middle finger directly at God.

When you think about it, Sodom and Gomorrah had very little light, very little light.

You would not have found this anywhere in Sodom and Gomorrah because it hadn't been written yet.

And all they had was Lot. And though he was righteous, doesn't seem like he was, should we say overly evangelistic, if we can use that very anachronistic term at that point.

They didn't have much light. And when they descended into utter depravity, the judgment that came was still astonishingly stark.

And firm and final with very little light. And Jesus brings that out.

He brings out when he speaks to his own people, the

Jewish people and brings judgment against Chorazin and Bethsaida and the cities of Galilee that had much more light than Sodom and Gomorrah had, much more light.

Still not as much as what we have today. Didn't have

Ephesians, didn't have John, but in Jesus's context, they had

Jesus walking amongst them. That's the brightest light you can get. But even before Jesus had come, they had had the prophets, they had

Moses, they had the writings. And Jesus points out it'll be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah, which was a huge insult to them.

They viewed themselves as extremely superior to Sodom and Gomorrah, they were the children of Abraham.

And so how many copies of this are floating around in the

United States of America and have been from the start, even the non -Christians who were a part of founding this culture knew this.

I would guess that most of them who weren't even Christians knew this book better than a lot of Christians do today.

I mean, it was how reading was taught and that remained the case for a very, very, very long period of time, till Dewey came along anyways.

And so we have had tremendous light and continue to have, for anyone who would want to know

God's truth, the availability is astonishing, right? And yet yesterday, the

Senate of the United States with sufficient votes, thanks to the fact that Republicans are simply slow moving secularists in general, there are exceptions, but they're unfortunately a small number of exceptions, voted.

And some people would say, all they did was they put into law what had been forced upon the nation by the absurdity of the

Obergefell decision. And it was an absurd decision. Anyone who's read it knows that it was written out of emotion and not out of any kind of meaningful legal or historical perspective.

But because of what Justice Thomas said, and I really wonder if he's not sitting around going,

I really shouldn't have said what I said. I mean, what he said was true, but it's what at least prompted this.

This is something that was, this is getting the Equality Act through the back door. So they just use that as a means of accomplishing this.

That's all. But some people are saying, this is just window dressing.

This is just the left doing something before they lose control of one of the two houses.

In January, throwing a dog bone to their base. That's all this is.

No, it's not. This is,

Obergefell was bad enough, but by putting this in law in this fashion, this is the next step.

And there've been many, many, many steps before it. This goes way back, but it's the next step in the whole series of steps of ridding the

United States of America of constitutional law, of the First Amendment, of any concept of meaningful religious freedom.

It is the next step in the secularization of, this is what the left has wanted to do for a long, long time.

And when you think back on the fact that this removes

DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which has been around for a quarter century, when it was initially passed, there were a lot of people then who would've said it really wasn't necessary.

But of course, many people who voted for DOMA, who are still in the government now just vote against it.

It was a bipartisan measure back then. I didn't hear anybody begging for forgiveness for how evil they had been back then to do that, because what we need to understand is it was a politically expedient decision in,

I think it was 1996. And it was a politically expedient decision yesterday.

And what that proves is that politics has very little to do with objective truth, morality, ethics, or anything like that in the

United States of America. Politics should be all about that in any nation, this is key here, any nation that would ask for God's blessing, which this nation used to do.

I realized that most young people would struggle to realize this or to even conceive of it.

But the fact of the matter is that this nation in its wars asked for God's help and assistance.

We think of the last great, great struggle against clear and obvious evil in the

Nazis in Germany, in Japan, in Italy, what were called the

Axis Powers. And it was not considered strange in any way.

That the government and the president would encourage prayer for the

United States Armed Forces. I've mentioned before, you can buy them on eBay. The United States government printed a

New Testament that it distributed in the Armed Forces, which included a section up front where the president,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, recommended the reading of the New Testament to the members of the

Armed Forces, all sorts of things like that. Now, wise historians would say that the process that has led us to where we are now had already begun back then, and it had.

There are people who have thought generationally in how to break down the

Christian consensus that gave us our law, that gave us our form of government.

For example, there are people just so upset about things like how our elections are determined, and the difference between the

Senate and the House, and all these types of things. And that flowed from the

Christian consensus at the time that recognized the corruption of power and the need to separate powers.

So that you didn't have kings and corrupt autocrats doing whatever they wanna do.

If you really want to maintain the idea of justice and equality, not equity, they're not the same thing, then you want to limit what man can do because you recognize what?

The nature of man as the creature of God in the fallen state, as the creature of God in the fallen state.

And that is no longer, that is to be rejected, it is to be pilloried.

Now, but that didn't happen the day before yesterday. That has been developing for a very, very, very long time.

And one thing we can learn from this is the people who promote the culture of death, they can be very patient and have, they look down the road a long ways.

And sometimes Christians, you would think that of all people we would be the ones that would think long -term.

I think that way more now. I think that was, again, one of the issues in how

I was raised is you weren't, you weren't being challenged to get the big picture, the long -term picture, because there wasn't gonna be a long -term.

I mean, once I started reading books, I was reading late great planet earth and stuff like that.

And people are talking about the 10 headed beast and it's the European Union and it's just right around the corner.

And so you don't think long -term. Pretty much every generation down through church history, it's done the same thing.

You don't think long -term, you, we are the last generation, this is it.

And so short -term thinking, short -term survival is pretty much what we all did.

And these other folks are thinking long -term and they're laying the foundations and they're laying the seeds now there are seeds of corruption and evil.

They're destructive, but they're doing it. And now there were, thankfully,

Christians who were thinking long -term and that's where we need to be very much so, need to be doing the same thing now is thinking long -term and working long -term.

That's the only way that we can possibly do what needs to be done in our day.

But the point is that what happened yesterday, we can lament, we can mourn of the inevitable result of these things.

We can mourn the fact that there are the David French's of the world who can disconnect.

They read it, they know what's in it, but they can't see that it specifically says blessed is the nation that what?

Whose God is Yahweh, every nation has a God. And what was done yesterday, clearly said to the world, we want to have nothing to do with the

God that we once professed to follow, whose word was quoted in our

Supreme Court documents and whose faith defined our very law.

We want nothing to do with that God any longer. Our God is now the state, our

God is sexual perversity. When you can have the level of sexual perversity that we see in the current regime and the promotion of sexual perversity, this is a part of the secular deity, the deification of the state and the deification of human autonomy and the destruction of those things that God has given us that are good.

So again, this didn't start yesterday. It was well underway when

DOMA was passed in 96. And you might say, well, but then why'd they pass it? It was expedient at the time, but the worldview issues that have given rise to what we're seeing now, we're already being taught in universities at that time.

And I know I for decades would see these articles and I'd hear about the professor at Berkeley that said that the coming climate disaster, whether that was global freezing or global warming or whatever thing they were coming up at the moment should be the basis of whether we are allowed to travel freely and stuff like that.

And everybody just laughed these things off. It's insanity. No one would ever take that seriously.

And so it just keeps growing and growing. And eventually those graduates end up getting themselves elected with George Soros' help and the

World Economic Forum's help. And now they are in the Netherlands forcibly closing farms for mythology of doing something for the environment.

So in other words, starve people to death for the environment. They are more than happy to do that. They are more than happy to do that.

We have an abundance of fossil fuels and now those have become satanic when in reality they're the very lifeblood of civilization itself.

We have become more and more expert at the burning of these fuels in a responsible fashion.

China could if it wanted to, but it doesn't want to. They don't care. And so you're demonizing everything that provides civilization and good and life.

And then you glorify everything that destroys civilization and destroys humanity. This is the culture of death.

And this is the struggle right now between the culture of life and the culture of death.

So what do we have to do as Christians? It's one thing to identify these things.

And sadly, we have to do that because of the David French is the world and he's just the one on the margin.

I mean, we're not even talking about all of the apostate leftist people in United Church Christ and United Methodist Church liberal side and the liberal

Presbyterians and the liberal Lutherans and all those people that aren't really liberal, they're just leftist. They help the left and they help the culture of death by providing cover for them.

And I only mentioned David French because here was someone who you would think and only a few years ago recognized the foolishness of black robed deities but now has been co -opted by the thinking that simply doesn't understand blessed is the nation whose

God is Yahweh and sin is a reproach to any people.

So if a nation is to pray for God's blessing, then there has to be an objective standard by which they can know who is it that God will bless.

But when was the last time you heard anyone saying, we are absolutely dependent upon the blessing of God as a nation?

You won't hear it. You're just not gonna hear it any longer. Secularism cannot stand for something like that to be said with clarity and with force.

And so when Christians don't have the big picture, when they don't recognize or when they've just bought the idea that all that stuff in the

Bible, that's just all Old Testament stuff and it really doesn't have anything to do with today. Now in the

New Testament, it's just all a free for all. We can't actually tell the world what would be necessary to have a foundation to ask for God's blessing.

There are a lot of professing

Christians, writing Christians, speaking Christians today that if you really pushed, they could not answer the question.

So if a nation wants to pray for God's blessing, what does that nation need to do?

And the theology of a lot of evangelicals would be just believe in Jesus.

Okay, we get that, but what does that mean? What's that going to result in?

Well, I really can't get specific, but if you're right with the

Lord, then you wanna do the right things. And how do I know what the right things are? How do we tell the people this is how we can seek

God's blessing? And they're just, the answers are really clear if you have 66 books in your canon, but a lot of evangelicals only have 27 at best and even some of them are

Hebrews, not so sure. If you have a fully biblical view of scripture, you're gonna be able to answer those questions.

But there's a lot of people just get really, really, really nervous when you say, yeah, actually

God has revealed for us and to us what we need to do and what is pleasing in his sight.

So what do we do? Well, I think more than ever before, we all are recognizing,

I think it was just simply sort of a function of my own being an apologist that I introduced my children repeatedly to the concept of Christian worldview and all the things related to that.

That has never been more important than now. As Deuteronomy instructed us to instruct our children in God's law to speak about God and his ways as we're going out or coming in, as we're walking along the way.

In other words, in all of life, there is to be an application.

There is to be not so much a hiding.

You know, we don't stick our head in the sand, but discuss what has happened with our children.

And make sure they understand why mom and dad take the stand that they do and how it's a life issue, how it's an issue that will impact their lives and the lives of their children.

Give them that foundation and then live consistently with what you have said to them.

That's the tricky and the hard part for a lot of us. And we never do it perfectly well, but we certainly seek to make the attempt to do so and repent when we don't.

But the church is called to have a prophetic voice. You know, I didn't queue it up, but, and I don't have the reference off top of my head, so I'm not sure exactly if I can find it real quickly.

But remember the conversation that, I think it's after here.

The conversation, yeah, okay. There we go. Acts 24.

Remember what happens with Felix and Acts 24, 24.

But some days later, Felix arrived with Drusilla, his wife, who was a Jewess and summoned

Paul and heard him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. But as he was discussing righteousness, self -control and the judgment to come,

Felix became frightened and answered, go away for the present and when I find time, I will call for you. At the same time, he was also hoping that money would be given to him by Paul.

Therefore, he also used to summon him quite often and converse with him. But after two years had passed,

Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus and wishing to do Jews a favor, Felix left

Paul in prison. We know that Paul spoke with Felix about faith in Christ Jesus.

Is that all he spoke to Paul about, spoke with Felix about? But as he was discussing righteousness, self -control and judgment to come, okay, we know there's a lot in the

New Testament about righteousness, both in the sense of forensic righteousness before God, but there's also much about righteousness as in moral justice.

Self -control, that is a term that would refer to, the enkratia, mastery of oneself, which had connections to some aspects of Roman moral and ethical theory and practice,

I guess you would say, but was very often ignored and everybody knew it at that time in history.

And the judgment to come, Acts 17 31, Acts 17 31.

And by the way, just in passing, I ran into something about a whole nother debate and dispute going on, where someone was talking about how

Acts 17 31, where Christ will judge the world,

God's gonna judge the world through the man he has appointed, raised him from the dead, gave evidence to all people, that there are people who would say that happened in AD 70.

That was not a judgment of the world. That was a judgment of the

Jewish covenant breakers. That was not a judgment of the world. It's, wow.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees, but there are people who are saying that. The judgment to come, remember

Paul didn't have a new Testament. So what was he using?

What was he presenting to Felix? Drusilla was a Jewess. Drusilla would have known at least something of what we call the

Old Testament scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures. And that would have been the foundation of what

Paul is explaining and exegeting to him in light of the fulfillment in Christ.

But that would have been the foundation for explaining what righteousness, self -control. Think there's anything about self -control in Proverbs maybe?

The Psalter someplace. Illustrations of what happens when you don't have self -control in the prophets major and minor.

Yeah, lots of stuff like that. And the judgment to come. Hmm, so what does it tell us about where we are today?

We now live in a nation where we have a leader who is incompetent, he's mentally incompetent.

He doesn't know where he is, when he is. Can't string three sentences together unless he's drugged up. And that's not disrespectful, that's just a fact.

That's the reality. What's disrespectful is the fact they've run a man and put him in office who can simply be told what to do.

Who has to have a note card, sit down, say this. This is the leader of the free world?

No. That means other unelected people are in charge and that's absolutely evil.

They're absolutely evil. But when that man signs that document profaning marriage and that's what this is.

This is a profanation of marriage. Well, Bergefell was. This is a and in your face

God move by the government of the United States. This is the highest expressions of authority in the

United States saying, you know what? We hate God's ways so much and we're enjoying our rebellion so much that we're gonna write it in the sky.

We are going to say to God, we hate your ways. We hate your law. We hate that we once actually submitted to any of it at all by having it in our law.

And so we are going to take yet another step towards silencing your church and persecuting your people and perverting every good gift you could ever imagine that you could give to us.

We don't want your blessing. We want your judgment. That's what they've done.

And so if you are a believing Christian in a land that is just basically sitting there putting up the middle finger to God each and every day every time you run up on those

LGBTQ flags or the transgender flags and you're saying we don't care what you say.

We are throwing off every chain when that which is vile is honored amongst men the wicked strut about.

And that's what we have now. And we've had it for a long time, but it just it's getting more and more and more clear and obvious.

So what do we do? Do we just sit there and complain about it?

We have to be a prophetic voice. And we do so positively by sowing into our children and taking long view.

That's how they did it. They took the long view and we have to have the long view but they were simply trusting in their plots and schemes.

And what we have to trust in is the grace of God. And you might say, oh, great.

Which says a lot about us. You know, it's like when Paul met with the

Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20 and he knows it's the last time he's gonna see them.

And he had trained these men. And he knows, he says, I know that after I leave men are gonna rise up from your own ranks from amongst the people

I myself trained. Paul had a sort of Scottish realism about him.

He knew even amongst the men that he himself had sought to choose the best men.

Not everybody finishes well. And he says, men are gonna rise up and they're gonna draw disciples away.

And then, so what does he, he says, but I commend you to God and the word of his grace.

Oh, how about, could we have like a Pope? Nope, don't have a Pope for you.

Nope, that's not how I wanna do things. How about a prophet? How about a governing body?

How about some new scriptures? You know, all the rest of this stuff. What does he commend them to? Same thing he says to Timothy at the end.

That which is the honest of us. And we want what we think is a bigger bat, but we don't realize that the weapons of our warfare have to be weapons that are consistent with God's purpose.

And God's purpose is to change hearts and minds. And so what he's given us is enough.

I have seen what happens in the hearts of men and women when they love

God's word, when they are committed to its sufficiency, when they are committed,

I am going to hold the same views of scripture that Jesus had.

I'm gonna follow my Lord. Well, they do that and they stand firm.

We need to think long -term and we need to seek to please

God in all things and never please men. And that may be very, very costly. Very, very costly.

And when God's judgment comes upon our land, we will suffer, but not eternally.

We will be purged of the love of physical things and we'll need to realize that the people around us are being purged of the love of physical things without having a new heart.

That's pretty rough. But in all this, we have to be prophetic. We have to be the voice that is there when the walls fall down, when secularism collapses in upon itself, because it's empty.

It has nothing. You listen to these people, you listen to those senators and you're just left going so vacant, so empty.

Oh goodness, it's horrific. It will collapse in upon itself.

And when it does, we need to be the ones leaving the testimony, even if it's through martyrdom.

This is the way. Not the Mandalorian way. This is the way.

This is the real way. The way to light that will show you how to live and have peace between you and your

God and you and your neighbor must, without question, go through an empty tomb outside Jerusalem.

There is no other way. That's the only path. That's the only place that light is gonna be found, is flowing out of that empty tomb and out of bending the knee to the one who rose from that tomb and is ascended on high and thrown on high.

That has to be our message. We have to be able to explain to the world, this is where you went wrong.

Not so much, we told you so. Well, we better have told them so. But once it all comes apart, okay, we did tell you so, but here's where we are and here's what needs to be done.

Because secularism will provide nothing. Its epistemology is corrupt. Its worldview is corrupt.

And it cannot deal with the fact that man has made the image of God. That's all there is to it. So these types of historical events, and it was a historical event, should speak to us and remind us that we are to be salt and light.

And salt and light, light is not loved in a world in love with darkness.

So stop hoping that the world's gonna like you because it's not going to. That doesn't mean, obviously, that you just seek to be a complete and royal jerk.

Salt and light, that's what we need. That's what we're called to do and to be.

Okay, shifting gears here in the last 18 minutes or so of the program,

I wanted to get back to, I have a bad habit of starting things and not necessarily finishing them when it comes to topics on the program, just because there's so many things going on and stuff like that.

But quite some time ago, I began responding to, and I wanna try to finish up, not today, but finish up, responding to a well -written, generally avoiding personalities attempt to argue for the,

I don't like, I think it's inappropriate to use terms like classical theism because it's, then you have to define what you're talking about.

The term itself seemingly came from open theists and it's ironic how few of my critics have ever actually debated open theists or tried to deal with that issue.

But the phrase classical theism, when it comes to how those originally used, we're all classical theists and so it doesn't matter.

So this is the great tradition to mystic, new and imbalanced emphasis upon such things as the extended implications of divine simplicity in separable operations stuff, okay?

The stuff we've been talking about for a long time. And basically saying, look, you have that which is clearly found here, and then you have the light that comes from this to a certain point.

And then after that, you get into speculative theology. You get out into areas where there has been disagreement for a long, long time amongst a lot of different people.

And then what happens is people will come along and say, ah, but there shouldn't be. And everybody needs to cross their T's and dot their

I's like Aquinas did. And then all will be well. Or you need to have Christian Platonism.

You know, there was a picture posted by Matthew Barrett out of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a doctoral seminar, big old stack of books.

And it was all on Christian Platonism and Aquinas and all this stuff.

And this is how you defend the Trinity, okay? You know, that's one of the problems that these guys have is

I've been defending the Trinity for longer than most have been alive and never had to do any of that.

So now if they come along and say, but no, that's the only way to really do it, then that's where the cancellation stuff comes from.

They have to. I'm not sure when they're gonna get around to doing that.

You know, sort of be useful, I guess. Defending the Trinity in the context of a doctoral seminar at a

Trinitarian seminary is not that big of a deal. That's sort of expected.

When I listen and when I interact with this article, this is the third article from the

Baptist Dogmatics. And I read what they're saying.

I just sit there going, this is why you're not taking it out into the apologetic realm.

I was just looking at a guy today. So this is the key to apologetic success. And I'm like, well, more power to you, bro.

I haven't seen you doing it yet, but more power to you. So anyway, looking to the article, this is the third article.

We started looking at this earlier, but I was just reviewing things. They talked about the first article addressed methodological issues and sought to explain why a divide exists between white and his interlocutors.

White's primary emphasis is the minds of the human authors and the original audience, whereas we emphasize the mind of God as real in scripture.

This is, of course, a truly absurd false dichotomy.

Men spoke from God as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit. So men spoke from God. So you need to understand what they said and you understand what they're trying to communicate to their audience.

And I will stand with Calvin on this. Dr. Claussen has been writing some really neat stuff based on not only

Calvin's prefatory remarks to his commentary on Romans, but also an introduction to a work he never finished on the homilies of Chrysostom.

And it's self -evident that I hold the exact same perspective that what

I defined a few months ago in an article as reformed biblicism is what John Calvin believed.

Now, Calvin's getting canceled. We've had people already say that Calvin wasn't much of a

Trinitarian theologian. Calvin will be canceled by those who continue down this path.

They will eventually, they're gonna have to make a decision where either you cancel Calvin or you cancel Aquinas. You cannot hold the two of them together.

It's just not, it doesn't work. But on the issue of exegesis, we already went through that first article and point out the many errors in it and the errors in argumentation.

This difference manifests itself in the kinds of questions White asks versus our concern with the primary author.

The second article sought to explain how theological exegesis works as it seeks to discern the substructure of the text, i .e.

this is how you create your theology and then you use it as the lens through which you read scripture and pretend that's the substructure, but it's actually just the lens that determines what you're gonna see in scripture.

We saw that in the second article. Ultimately, we are striving to know the theology that precedes, underlies, and is revealed in the text.

One way to know that is by the words and what they communicate. If you try to start someplace else, you're never gonna get to that, you're just theologizing, that's all you're doing.

It is God's theology, not our theology, that we are after. Well, that's a meaningless statement because we all say that.

This theology is intrinsic to the text, which we sought to demonstrate as we located the Spirit in Matthew 24, 36.

And I just simply remind you, the Spirit's not in Matthew 24, 36, and that gives you a really good idea of what theologizing the text is all about.

When you can look at Matthew 24, 36, remove it from its context and say, this is what it says about the

Holy Spirit, though the Holy Spirit's never mentioned, that is, I think, one of the classical examples of theologizing without doing your exegesis first.

And calling your theologizing exegesis. Now we turn our attention to the Son's statement about His knowledge.

Hey, we're, we are at Matthew 24, 36, finally. We went a long ways to get there.

Consider the words the text reads, but that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but the Father alone.

What does it mean that the Son does not know? We will answer this question in several steps. Now, remember, simplicity man here.

I said, this is a difficult text and we should not go beyond what it says and should not make application of it in contrast to or contradiction to other clear statements that are made in scripture.

But we also need to recognize this is the Son speaking. He has in the same context spoken as the

Son in His relationship to the Father. And that it is the simplistic methodology that says, well, let's go over here.

Let's not worry about this text. Let's create our theology over here and bring it over. And we will use it.

It's like one of those, I need to get this done again. It's been years since I had an eye exam, but the thing that the doctor brings down and sticks over your face and click, click, click, click.

And then the always frustrating, sometimes it's easy, which is better?

A, B. And sometimes it's like night and day.

And then there's other times it's like, I don't know, it's like asking me, is there too much salt on these

McDonald's French fries? Depends on the day, it's just, I don't know. But it determines what you're gonna see and you can click, click, click and click, click, click.

And so that's what we're doing is we'll bring this over here and click, click, click, click and we'll find a way to explain this text so that it's no longer troubling to us.

That's the easy way. It's indefensible outside the

Christian faith. It's indefensible outside of our narrow little theological spectrums, but that's how it's normally done to be perfectly honest.

First, let's see. First, you must identify the subject speaking, which is the second person of the

Godhead, the eternal son. You just made your decision before starting the question.

This is the son speaking. Yes, no question about it, but this is the incarnate son who has been talking about the coming destruction of Jerusalem.

And we all confess he is incarnate. So he is speaking as the son in relationship to the father.

And so the question that we're gonna have is what is it that can explain how the son would say that this knowledge is the father's alone in comparison to men, angels, and the son?

Is there something about being incarnate? And see what's gotten me into trouble is

I've simply said, as we used to all say all the time, and as many people before us have said, that this is an example of the humiliation of the son, the incarnation, and the fact that to be the incarnate one, there are certain aspects of the divine glory and exercise of divine privileges and rights and so on and so forth that are veiled so that Christ can do what he and the father and the son have determined is necessary to bring about eternal redemption, which would glorify the triune

God. And so as we look at this, take the example, and I'm not sure why no one has bothered to try to respond to this, but take the obvious example that's given to us in scripture.

In fact, it's given to us in Matthew. And in fact, it had already been given to us in Matthew before this, his glory.

Because remember, the Mount of Transfiguration is before Matthew chapter 24. The son veils his glory, does he not?

Is glory definitional of God? Well, yeah,

God is glorious by nature. And nothing can take away his glory.

Nothing can detract from his glory. Nothing can add to his glory in that sense, because it's perfect in all ways and all things.

And yet, Jesus, no one was blinded or burned up in the presence of Christ in the incarnate state.

So you can come up with other words if you want to try to sound smart and things like that.

But there was a veiling, and lots of fine Orthodox theologians have used that term.

If you don't like it, you're not gonna get along with almost anybody. Go have your fun, we're not concerned about you.

I'm just not, I'm just tired of that kind of picky and stuff.

So as we read through this, switch out knowledge for glory, because God's omniscience,

God's glory. If there can be a veiling of the one, then there can be a veiling of the other, both for the purposes of accomplishing redemption.

It doesn't mean that the Son was not eternally glorious and will not be eternally glorious in the future. None of that.

But the incarnation is absolutely unique. Absolutely unique. There is nothing you can compare it to.

And it was also, in its earthly manifestation, temporary.

In the sense of birth to giving of life and resurrection.

Now, it's not temporary in the sense that, there's a lot of Christians that think that Jesus laid aside his human nature or something after the resurrection and just, no, eternally the

God -man, which is in and of itself, an amazing thing to contemplate.

And I'll just say this again. What God did in Christ is far bigger than any philosophical system mankind has ever invented.

And when you stink and take your philosophical systems and try to limit what you find in scripture, it'll always break all of them.

And you will either end up diminishing the biblical revelation or getting rid of your human philosophical categories that just simply aren't big enough to deal with what's actually found in scripture.

That's a reality. That's a reality. I mean, just think about Jesus being the

God -man for eternity. That's how we are in union with God, is through him, through union with Christ.

It also raises all sorts of questions about appropriations and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

But anyway, get to that another time. First, we must identify the subject of speaking, which is the second person that God had, the eternal son.

Why do we call him son? Because he is the one who is eternally begotten of the father. Second, we must ask how the son is distinguished from the father and the spirit

Christians following the whole of scripture have invariably answered only by his eternal relation of origin from the father.

Where did Ignatius say that? Clement? Tertullian?

Epistle of Diognetus, Madison, great seven. Did they use that term? How about the apostles? I'd like to find this eternal relation of origin language.

No, that is theological terminology that we have developed later on to answer questions.

Don't sit here and say that Christians following the whole of scripture have invariably answered.

They did not answer in that way for hundreds of years until the questions were being asked.

And even then at that point, the question becomes, what exactly do you mean by that?

When you say that later on it's gonna say,

I mean, I almost marked it. I forget where it is down here, but we're basically saying this is the, all the father and the son has, how is he as soon as the spirit pursues the father and son.

Okay, we distinguish first as Godhead. We do not divide the essence, obviously. Oh man,

I wish I had marked it. Well, the reason I didn't mark it is because this program isn't letting me do that right now.

But it's specifically said what recently someone said, no one actually ever says that, but it said, this is the only way that you can make that distinction.

And it's not the only way. Again, if you can look at what the

New Testament says about the son, for example, not considering the equality he had with the father, something to be grasped are pogmons, but made himself of no reputation.

Did the father give consideration to the equality he had with the son? How about the spirit?

Or is that something that the son alone did? Again, if your theological system isn't big enough to answer these questions, then it's probably because you have a philosophical system underlying it that's not big enough to handle these things.

But these are biblical questions. That's a question raised by the scripture itself.

So is there anything at all unique about the relationship between father and son revealed in a statement such as, did not give consideration to that equality he had with the father?

Again, if you have to stand on your head to even think about that, then may

I suggest to you that maybe you've already adopted some stuff you shouldn't adopt and you need to question it.

Might help, might help. I'm gonna look for that one because there was, like I said, there was a specific statement and maybe in the process

I'll find out how to reactivate outlinings in this particular program because I think an upgrade, get rid of it.

I hate when upgrades do things like that because it's really not an upgrade. So I'll find some way of marking that because I see that we've gone beyond our time.

It's not like I've got something to go do, but when you're doing this on the road and doing it wirelessly without being wired and not even using the wifi and stuff like that, it's always best to sort of limit how long you push those things.

I think we had a pretty good connection last time. So I'll ask how this one went and we'll go on from there.

Anyway, we've talked about some pretty heavy stuff today and that's just what we do, but try to do it in such a way as to encourage you to read, ponder and believe.

Read, ponder and believe and may God truly bless his people.

Rock solid, good. I'm glad because we're actually not even running 5G on this.

We're running 4G, but it seems to be, there's probably, I'm probably right near a tower or something nearby and that's helpful.

So that's good. Read, ponder and believe the word of God. We've been encouraging people in that way, well, as of August of next year for 40 years in this ministry.

And so no one should be overly surprised that that's what we're continuing to do, even when it becomes unpopular to do so.

Anyway, I'm not sure again, schedule because coming, starting

Friday, I'll be, we can try to do something on Friday, I think, but I start teaching

Friday night at Covenant of Grace Church and then Saturday and Sunday and then

Monday night I'll be down Jonesboro. And so it's back on the road and moving quick and stuff like that.

So we will do our best to fill in with driving lines when we can't get dividing lines in and things like that.

So yeah, I'm gonna enjoy that. I've noticed that on the camera, it looks, it doesn't look quite, it glows more than in real life.

I'm not sure why that is, but I don't know, it just sort of turned out. I mean,

I'm now looking at the thing and yeah, okay, I guess it sort of looks, yeah, anyways, it'll be fun.