Calvinist Boo Crew Discussion with Andrew Rappaport

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Opening Banter and Show Introduction

Welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this is a proud podcast member. Check out Striving for Eternity at strivingforeturning .org or go to Christian Podcast Community at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

Check out all we have to offer there. On this episode, I was invited on to the Calvinist Boo Crew. Great conversation. We kind of never got to the main topic that we were supposed to, which was a specific area of the doctrine of salvation.

But we went into a whole lot of other areas, discussed apologetics, discussed the doctrine of salvation, a lot of different things we discussed. Great conversation. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Andrew Rappaport’s Conversion from Judaism to Christ

All right. Hello. Welcome to the Calvinist Boo Crew. And I just want to say this is JC Bear. I'm with Bradster. And we have a special guest today. And it is a pleasure. It is an honor and a privilege to be talking with Andrew Rapoport.

Andrew, it is a joy to have you on. You come with great bona fides as we get to talk with you here. And it is just a joy to have you on. Brother, the first thing I want to do is just say welcome to you.

Happy New Year. And how did your holidays go?

Uneventful, the way I like them. Just got to spend some time with family. And the cold of north of New Hampshire.

But we had a great time. That's great. We know Bradster is from California. So he is no stranger to some pretty great weather. And I live in Florida. So I've also been blessed with perhaps more than my fair share.

But New Hampshire is definitely up in the snow belt. But I am told that it is beautiful up there this time of year. So is that part of the charm for you? Are the beautiful winters and the luscious, cool, winter chill air?

No, my daughter lives up that way. And she's pregnant and couldn't come to me. So my wife's whole family all went up to her. And so, yeah, I'm more looking forward to tomorrow when I leave for Florida.

I'll be preaching New Year's Day at a church in Orlando, actually in Winter Garden, Florida. Oh, that's awesome.

That's awesome. Well, let me just introduce you. This is Andrew Rapoport. He is the executive director of Striving for Eternity Ministries. He has written a systematic theology. He travels the country preaching, and it is a beautiful thing, Brother Andrew, to have you on today.

Welcome to Calvinist Boo Crew. And if it's all right to just start off asking, how did you come to the Lord, and what was it like, and how did it change your life?

Sure, I came to Christ out of a Jewish home. I was not looking to become a Christian, or actually didn't want anything to do with Christ. I always preface this with a warning, because Christians get upset when I say this, because they just don't understand Judaism.

But growing up a generation after the Holocaust, the Roman Catholic Church supported Hitler. And so to Jewish people, all Christians are just Catholic, just different denominations of Catholic. And so because of that, I was raised believing Jesus Christ is Hitler's God.

I wanted nothing to do with Christ. So it wasn't that I was looking for anything. In fact, I thought my Judaism saved me. But I had a conversation with a gentleman who basically was sharing the gospel with me, and I told him, literally, I said, hey, I'm God's chosen people, I'm in like Flynn, because I thought my Judaism saved me.

That's what I was raised to believe. And he ended up saying some things that got me to say, well, you give me a logical reason to believe, and I'll believe. And so we sat down, and here's a guy. People ask, does God have a sense of humor?

We know he weeped, but does he have a sense of humor? And I always say yes. At that time, 16 years old, I was very proud of my intellect. I have 168 IQ, which is just barely above genius, barely. But I passed the test for Mensa, and I was very arrogant about my intelligence back then.

Here's a guy that never even passed the sixth grade, and he's going to give me the most important information I ever had. So here's a guy who knew his Bible. That's something he knew. And so in three and a half hours, we sat down, and he just shared basically prophecies.

And I was trying to argue them away and realize that mathematically, it's impossible for these prophecies to be fulfilled by chance. Now, there's some things that are self-fulfilling, so I ignored those.

But I was running calculations in my head, and I just said, Chuck, we're beyond statistical impossibility, which is 10 to the 48th power. He said, what does that mean? I said, well, that means it's impossible for these things to have been fulfilled by chance.

So at that point, I accepted the New Testament had to have been written by God. But I didn't know anything about the New Testament. So he starts explaining to me that Jesus came and died for our sin. He died, was buried, rose from the dead.

And I said, stop, Chuck. People don't rise from the dead. People rot. And so the resurrection became a major thing of, can I explain that away? And I gave most of the, if you ever read Josh McDowell's work, all of the false views of the resurrection.

I had all of them. I came up with all the ones that are in his book. I have one that I believe is still original with me. My last argument was maybe they dug a hole underneath the tomb, came up through the center, stuck the body out.

And Chuck's like, through stone? In three days? They didn't have heavy equipment back then. So I just, I remember putting my hands, my head in my hands, and just shaking my head. And he says, what's wrong?

I said, well, if Jesus rose from the dead, he's God. He's like, that's what I've been trying to tell you. Well, if he's God, I'm accountable to him. I knew I was a sinner. That was not a problem. I almost burned my house down twice once we put it out with a fire extinguisher, the second time with a fire department.

Me being a sinner was not hard to believe. It was more that I didn't think I needed a Savior. And so recognizing that Jesus is God and he died in my place for my sin made me realize I needed a Savior.

And I needed one specific Savior being Christ. And so within three and a half hours, I turned from believing Jesus Christ is Hitler's God to being a follower of Christ. That's amazing, brother.

Praise God. Praise God. Now, I noticed on the Statement of Faith for Striving for Eternity Ministries, I noticed the very first entry in there talks about the Holy Scriptures. And you've already talked about there was this immediacy to them, there was this impactfulness to them that really puts you in a place that— I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounded compelling.

What is it about the Scriptures that you think are so convincing that they are the Word of God?

Well, so I'm a presuppositional, so let me explain what that means. It means that there's—and everyone has presuppositions, things that they believe that ultimately you can't go beyond that to try to prove it.

In other words, God exists. He has spoken. If there's anything that can prove God exists, that thing is greater than God. So you have axioms, things you have to accept as true, but you ultimately have nothing that you can prove.

But the reality is you can't explain anything that we talk about in reality or science without God existing. It's a necessary starting point because you can't explain anything without— you wouldn't be able to explain our ability to reason, which is required for science and having conversations like this.

Things like knowledge, intelligence, truth, all of these things are immaterial things. They require an immaterial source. So if you reject God, you have no way of explaining your ability to reason. That's not what chemical reactions do.

They don't produce things like reason or laws of logic. The laws of logic exist outside of human thinking. So you have to start with certain things. And the fact that God has spoken, well, the only way we can know anything about him is if he reveals it.

There's no other way. You can sit there and look at the stars, and you can know some things about God. Scripture even says this. You can look at the stars, Romans chapter 1. You can look at creation and know something about God's attributes, but you can't know about salvation.

You only know that from Scripture. In fact, I remember an interview that was done with an African guy that—. He's from Africa. Staring up at the stars, he looks at the stars and says, There's got to be a God.

How did all of this just come about? And he said he just called out and said, God, whoever you are, I know if you exist, you must be good, and I'm not, and I need to get right with you, but I don't know how.

And he ends up leaving and coming to New York City to get a degree in art. And in New York City, he's walking around, he picks up a gospel tract, and he reads this gospel tract and says, That's the God I was talking to on the beach.

Well, God gave him what? Scripture. That gospel tract was filled with Scripture that told him how to get right with God. So creation can tell us some things about God, but it can't inform us with how we get right with God or tell us as much as we can know about God without him revealing it to us.

Because he is utterly holy, and that means he's utterly unlike us. And we cannot even begin to conceive what God is like, a being that knows everything. He doesn't learn a thing. He just knows it all.

He's eternal. Everything is an eternal now to him. Just try to picture Adam and Eve are in the garden, Abraham's offering Isaac, Jesus is on the cross, we're having this conversation. All of it's the same now.

We can't even conceive of something like that because we're so bound by time. We learn. We know things after learning it through observation. God didn't observe things to know them. He just knows it. We can't comprehend that kind of being.

And so if he doesn't reveal it to us, we can't know it. And he hasn't revealed everything to us. He makes that clear, Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 29. The secret things belong unto the Lord, but that which he has revealed to us, that we obey and teach to our children.

So there's a lot more to God than he's revealed to us because our finite minds cannot comprehend him.

General Revelation, Scripture, and the Necessity of God

Andrew, I love that story about the man coming, the man looking up at the skies and believing and calling out because it reminds me of what Psalm 19 says. The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.

Day after day, they continue to speak. Night after night, they make him known. And that is power. That's one of the things that I think is important for us to communicate to people because I hear a lot of people talk about, well, I could believe the Bible is inspired in the way that Shakespeare is an inspiring form of English or Homer might inspire wondrous thoughts of adventure for me.

But when we Christians talk about inspiration, we're talking about a power that has an immediacy to move and act the human soul. Did you have any thoughts or evidences of such things happening in your life prior to that conversation where you came to Christ?

As far as things that revealed God existed?

Right. Were there any echoes of this Psalm 19 in your life before that you maybe saw, but maybe you hadn't put everything together?

Well, I always knew God exists because you can't, like I said earlier, you can't explain everything we see in reality without God. There's no way to deal with the fact that here you have all of these immaterial things.

Let's do a little explanation here then. So you say someone that says, well, I don't believe God exists. Okay, well, you have a couple of options. We look at the universe. One, option one, is that the universe has always existed.

It never had a beginning. And therefore, you don't have to explain the universe having a beginning because it just always existed. Option two is the universe created itself. Or option three, someone or something created the universe.

Now, there are no other options other than those that I know of. So as we examine these, well, if we study the law of thermodynamics, both the first and second law, the first law of thermodynamics shows that the universe had a beginning.

There was a beginning to mass and energy. So if there was a beginning to the universe, then the universe cannot have always existed. So we can exclude that one. We can look at the second one and realize that when we look at the second law of logic, law of non-contradiction, that says you can't have A and not A at the same time in the same way.

So let me explain that because that sounds a little technical. I can't have $20 in my wallet and not have $20 in my wallet at the same time and in the same way. Now, I could have had $20 in my wallet, but you took it out of my wallet and now it's not there.

That's the same time. Or I could say I have $20 in my wallet, but really it's monopoly money, and you're talking actual U .S. currency. That would not be in the same way. Well, for the universe to have created itself, it would first have to exist.

And therefore, it breaks the second law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, because the universe would have had to first exist to be able to create itself. So it could not be a self-creation because that violates the laws of logic.

That makes the argument invalid. So now we've excluded the first two. So what are we left with? Someone or something created the universe. It is the only logical and scientific argument. In fact, when we do science, when we follow a scientific method, there has to be an experiment that we can create.

We can recreate it. It could be documented. It's observed and documented. Well, there's only one case where we have that for the creation of the universe, and that's in scripture. When God, who created the universe, observed that creation, documented that creation, and that's all we have to go off of of what he has documented.

So to reject that, you have to reject both science and logic to be able to make the argument that the universe always existed or that it created itself. The Occam's razor, which is that the simplest argument is usually the right one, the only one we're left with is that someone or something created the universe and that someone is, we call, God.

Truth, Morality, and the Nature of God

Now, an interesting challenge to these ideas, this foundationalism that you're speaking of, this idea that revelation is a necessity to have knowledge of such a kind of God, has been challenged in the past few hundred years in, for example, secular forms of the Enlightenment.

Think of here of the turn, the turn from the objective to the subjective, the turn to the inner look, looking inside of one's self to determine what is ultimately true. Think of the usurpation of science.

Now, when I was young, I'm not all that old, but when I was young, science actually referred to something that we would quote-unquote say was hard in the sense that it was objective and independent. But today now we see that this formerly great word is now being used to justify all sorts of things that don't have those same objective qualities.

And so one of the statements that you put on your Statement of Faith that thrilled me, that I loved how you put it was, you said this, you said, the only means of interpreting Scripture is a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation.

And I think what I liked about that, and I think what called out to me with that was this idea that there really is, in some sense, a science of theology. It's not just a bunch of us getting together and coming up with a God by consensus, coming up with a God by looking into the inner self.

What do you, how do you talk with people who speak these sorts of modernistic ideas of the supremacy of self and your truth, my truth, those kinds of things?

How do you talk to those people? Well, they unknowingly lost the argument right from the beginning. Because once they deny truth, they end up in a position where they want to tell you you're wrong and they're right, but they've just given up that argument.

And I usually would like to point that out to them. I usually say, well, you're wrong. They go, no, I'm right. No, no, you're wrong. No, I'm right. No, you're wrong, and you have no argument against it.

Because in your world, I have my truth, you have your truth. So it doesn't matter that I think you're wrong. Now, are you wrong because I said you're wrong? No, I'm right because I think I'm right. So then which one of us is actually right?

They will always argue for truth when you point out that they're wrong. Now, I tried this with a friend of mine. She asked me, what do I do when I go to college campuses and these students just want to argue there is no right and wrong, there's just your truth and my truth.

I said, ask them for their wallet. And when they give it to you, leave. And she said, it doesn't work. I said, why? She goes, because they let me walk off. I said, yeah, because they know you as a Christian are going to come back.

Don't come back. Just leave. And when they call the police, say, first off, you got it on video that they gave it to you. So they can't accuse you of stealing. But when they call the police, give it back to them and say, why'd you call the police?

Did you believe that I was wrong? Right? The reality is that they live in a world where they believe in absolutes. But they want to deny that absolutes exist because if there's absolutes, then that, again, goes back to the necessity of God existing.

Why? When we talk about right and wrong, where do we get this from? When we talk about morality, it's universal, meaning that it applies to every human being that ever lived in history, everywhere. It's absolute, meaning that there's no wiggle room.

It's not a truth for you and a truth for me. It's truth. And it's immaterial. Now, when we look at this, that requires an absolute, immaterial, universal being or source for these things. When we say something's wrong, and this may be something that people don't think about, what makes lying wrong?

The answer to that is God is not a liar. We know right from wrong or good and evil from the nature of God. I had once in New York City, I had this guy, Jason, he's challenging me as I was doing open air evangelism, and he says, there is no God because there's evil in the world.

There is no God because there's evil in this world. I said, sir, tell me how there could be evil in the world without God. See, one of the things is that he was used to just challenging and throwing out arguments.

He never actually had to answer. And so I said, you tell me how you can have evil without God. He goes, well, you tell me what evil is. I said, I didn't say it exists. You did. You have the burden to answer that.

He says, you tell me what evil is. I said, okay, evil is the absence of good, and good is defined by the nature of God. So how can you have evil without God? He threw up his hands and walked out of the crowd because he had no answers.

Because in a secular worldview, you have no basis to say anything is right or wrong. Therefore, you have to agree with the Nazis when they were on trial and said, hey, we said it was okay to murder millions of people.

Therefore, it was okay because they decided the culture had accepted that. That's our thinking of the culture today. They want to argue that just because numbers of people agree, that makes it right. What ultimately happens then?

Might makes right. It's whatever is, who's ever stronger, who's ever has the power and the control, that makes it right. And people will say, if you get someone to finally go, okay, well, that's fine.

Really? So you're okay with rape? And they go, I never said that. Well, what is rape? Rape is always might makes right. If the rapist is stronger, he rapes. If he's weaker, no rape occurs. That's might makes right.

So you should never be against rape if you think might makes right. And suddenly they go, wait, no, no, no, no. Rape is wrong. You see, let's look at that. What makes rape wrong? So the question I will ask people is, is the act of rape always wrong?

I'm being very specific here. The act itself of raping, is that always? Now, if it's always, it means that's universal. It applies to everybody everywhere. Is the act of rape always wrong? Now, every one of your listeners, every one of you listening, you're saying yes.

Why? Now, this is where we get to the question. I will say rape is wrong because God is not a rapist. That's what makes it wrong. But if you don't believe in God, how do you argue? Well, you argue, well, it's because it causes harm to somebody.

That's the answer I always get. Okay, harm. Let's examine that. In New Jersey, there was a dentist and it was discovered that he was putting women out to do surgery and he was raping them. But they didn't know they had sexual intercourse.

One woman did because she knew she hadn't slept with anyone and she was pregnant. She figured the only way it could have happened, the only time she was unaware of what she was doing, was that time, had a paternity test, yep, that was the guy.

Interesting that as that came into the news, many other women ended up realizing that they too had gotten pregnant, had a paternity test, found out that was the guy. Interesting thing that happened with these women, they never suffered the harm of rape until they discovered they were raped.

Therefore, it wasn't the act of rape that was wrong, that caused harm, it was the knowledge of rape. So if you're going to be consistent, what you should do is keep people ignorant of being raped because that causes no harm.

The interesting thing that what happened with that was that after they had the knowledge, then they started suffering all the things that people suffer when they realize the PSD and all that. They started having that after the knowledge of it.

So people will suddenly jump to, well, consent. Okay, so now we're moving the goalpost. Now it's okay, well, this was the reason, now that's the reason. So we're going to start with the conclusion and move the goalpost so we can get something that sticks.

Well, how do you know that they didn't consent? They were unconscious, they were unaware. Consent didn't matter then. You see, whatever their argument, they're going to keep moving that goalpost. Why?

Because they don't have an absolute standard for why rape is wrong, but they'll say it is. I have an absolute standard I can appeal to. The nature of God. God's not a rapist, therefore rape is wrong.

The Doctrine of Man, Sin, and Human Suppression of Truth

Now, Andrew, one of the things that also comes up in relation to these modern ideas, I remember just a generation or two ago, there seemed to be a much greater understanding that there is something off, and that's in the kindest sense, but there's something wrong with the human animal himself.

And that is to say, we are not the rational animals of philosophy. We do not behave in that way. In fact, we live up to standards that we ourselves agree that we cannot meet. With that in mind, before you were saved, you said that you knew, you had an understanding that you had fallen short.

As you became saved and as you read about what your nature was in sin in the Scriptures, how did that unwind to you, and how do you talk to people today who maybe haven't put the pieces together that there's another component, and that is to say the doctrine of man and how we are affected and who we are?

Yeah, and I would, I guess I just may clarify, I would not say humans are animals. I think that's actually an argument that seeps in in people's thinking from evolution, right? We're made completely separate from animals.

Animals don't have a self-consciousness like we have. They're not made in the image of God. They don't have his attributes. But our starting point has to be God exists. And actually, here's the thing.

If you come across anyone that says, I'm an atheist, my response is, no, you're not. And what do you mean? You're going to tell me what I believe? No, the creator, the one who created you, who knows everything, says that everybody, every single human knows God exists.

This is Romans chapter one, but they suppress that truth in unrighteousness. So there's not a single human being that doesn't know God exists. That's the starting point. This is why I say we don't argue whether God exists or not, because the person you're talking to already knows God exists.

They know that to be true. As it says in scripture, it's evident to them, but they suppress that. And so what you're observing as they're arguing that God doesn't exist, you're observing their suppression of truth.

That's what you're observing. Now, when they do that, well, what does scripture say? The fool says in his heart there is no God. Why does he use such language? They're using their God-given ability to reason to reason that God doesn't exist.

So you would not have an ability to reason without God, but you're using that ability to reason that God gives you to say God doesn't exist. You've already proven yourself false, okay? And this is, by the way, I'll say this.

What you often have people wanting to do is they want to use the natural sciences to prove the existence of God. You prove to me God exists using natural science. That's a category error, okay? That's a fallacy in logic.

It makes an invalid argument, because the natural, if you're going to use the science of the natural world to study something that created the natural world and therefore is by definition supernatural or outside of nature, you cannot use the natural world to prove the immaterial.

So you can't use material things to prove the immaterial. It doesn't work. It's a category error. So you have to rely, as you had said, on philosophy and religion. Those are the sciences. Those are the branches of science that we use to discuss whether God exists.

And when we look at that, the only way we can know anything about God is if he reveals it to us, because he is utterly unlike us. So that's why we have to have scripture. We have to have his word. So not only does he have to exist, but we can't really know him unless he reveals it to us.

And so these are things that I know a lot of Christians get worried and, oh, I don't know how to answer these really intelligent atheists. I do a show every week, Apologetics Live. It's on Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern Time.

Anybody can come in. They just go to apologeticslive .com. There's a link to join every week, usually unless we're doing a formal debate. But anyone can come in. And I was asked once, are you ever afraid of who's...

I never know what the conversation's going to be. I never know who's going to come in. Are you ever afraid? Do you ever feel like you're not ready to handle it? And I tell people, all I do is I study scripture and logic, because the scripture's going to tell me the truth, and the logic is going to point out their fallacies.

And that's all I do. You don't have to be a genius to figure it out. You just study the scriptures, study logic, and you're good.

Interpreting Scripture by Authorial Intent and Historical Context

I love that. I love that. When you read the scriptures and you heard about Christ, first of all, in that initial two-and-a-half-hour conversation with that gentleman, there were aspects of salvation that you hadn't fully fleshed out.

And yet there was that immediacy, there was that belief, there was that regeneration. When you started reading the scriptures afterwards with an eye to understanding what God had done in you, how did you start to sort that out?

And you talk about reading the scriptures, and you talk about this grammatical, historical approach, this way of understanding and interpreting the scriptures carefully. Is it not necessarily about getting hung up on a particular method, but how did it unfold in your life over the first, what was it, first few months, first few years?

More years, yeah. No, I was two years before I met any other Christians. I knew that when my parents found out, and they almost did, they went casket shopping when they found out I became a Christian.

And so they were going to bury an empty casket and I was going to be dead to them. And that's what I fully expected they would do. So it was just me and a Bible. And there's a lot of things I did not know.

Did I believe Jesus was God? Yes. But I had no knowledge of the Trinity. And people say, well, how did you understand God the Father and Jesus Christ? I just figured Jesus is God. I couldn't comprehend that, but that's okay.

There's a lot of things about God I can't comprehend. And some of it came much later, many years later, as I got into studying theology. But a lot of things were just read the Bible. And how do we read any work of art, right?

We're going to follow the laws of language. I know a lot of people will argue, well, the Bible is a supernatural book. It's God's revelation, and therefore we have to use a different method to interpret it.

But what is it that God gave us to interpret language? Oh, it's called language. It's grammar. The rules of interpretation don't change. What you want to do is understand what's called authorial intent.

What did the author mean by what he wrote? Now, with Scripture, there's two authors, the human author and the divine author. And so we have to get to the question of what did, sometimes the human author doesn't have a full grasp of what the divine author is having him write.

And we see that in Scripture, where some other authors will say that. They don't fully comprehend, or they'll call things a mystery. And so we have to recognize that we're going to look at this and interpret it in its timeframe, what it meant at that time, and to the meaning that it had from the author to that audience.

Not trying to read it in a 21st century mind first. That's a mistake. And a lot of people make mistakes because they don't understand something of the culture. Let me give you an example I use all the time.

A passage I hear many, many people preach about is in Matthew, where Jesus says, when they ask him, when is the end times? And he says, basically, no man knows the day or the hour, not the angels, but only the Father knows.

And people say, oh, see, in Jesus's humanity, there's something he didn't know, but he knew it in his divinity. Well, that's actually a heresy when you start dividing the nature of Christ. And people don't even recognize because they're trying to rationalize, how could Jesus know something and not know something?

And if you understand Judaism and understand something of the times of Judaism, you understand that there's an idiom that says, no man knows the day or the hour, not the Son, only the Father knows. It refers to a Jewish wedding.

What does it mean? Well, the idiom is one where the father would tell the son, you're going to get married, prepare a house. And so the son prepares the house. It might be an addition onto the father's house.

But once it's ready, at any time the father sees fit, he says, go get your bride. Who is it that knows when the marriage is going to take place? Not the son, only the father. And so this idiom became a idiom to mean, live your life in expectancy as if any moment is the moment.

Anytime it can happen. Well, actually, if you keep reading in Matthew, what Jesus says there, that's exactly what he ends up saying. He reinforces the idiom by saying, live in expectant lifestyle as if any moment could be the moment.

So it matches with the idiom. It is easier to say, well, hey, this is the way that, this is what they would have understood at the time. Now, granted, the idiom that we use today does not mention angels.

And so we all say, well, see, the idiom that's used in Judaism today doesn't mention angels. Therefore, it's not the same idiom. Well, idioms do change sometimes. Maybe the thing of angels was dropped.

It's easier to believe that the idiom had dropped the idea of angels. Why? Well, because we know that Judaism, rabbinic Judaism over time also dropped the belief in angels. So maybe that argument got dropped because they weren't believing in angels anymore.

And so that didn't work in the idiom. That's an easy to understand thing to see why that idiom could have changed over time. So once you look at that as an idiom, it fits with the context. It's right in line with that.

It's talking about the same thing that the marriage is talking about with the idiom. There's no other explanation necessary. But once you start saying that Jesus can know something and not know something, you're actually into a heresy without realizing it.

And this is why we have to dig into the scriptures to say, yeah, it's hard work to dig in and say, well, what's being said here? When Jesus said that, I believe his listeners knew very clearly what he was saying.

Another example would be John 10, John 9, John 8, and John 10. When he claims to be God, people will say, well, Jesus never said I am God. I had this debate with a Muslim once at a university and he said, Jesus never said, I am God worship me.