Road Trip DL from Lubbock, Texas!

Well, that was fun. Not the way it's supposed to work. But yeah, here we are.

Live, live programs. And, you know, I guess I haven't done it well enough for the past two years while on the road.

So Rich has made it so he can do all the stuff remotely. But, you know, I don't know.

It is what it is. So here we go. So yes, we are live in Lubbock, Texas.

And well, it's close to Lubbock, Texas anyways. Just got some rain.

Not enough to really test anything, but got some rain and the wind and maybe there'll be some more coming.

I mean, I'm watching the weather, the radar, but it's going south of us now. So I don't really think I'm going to get hit.

I have got to silence things here and mute things and do all sorts of other stuff where you're going to be hearing lots of ding, ding, dings in the background.

Anyway, so we're here in Lubbock. I'll be speaking Saturday and Sunday and then heading over to Las Cruces for Tuesday evening.

Got the stuff there on. We're starting Saturday at 530. I've got that now. We're getting started early enough that we can cover what we need to cover.

And I was just in Amarillo. That's why I'm wearing my Amarillo, Texas shirt. And man,

I got to tell you something. You know, when you run into something that's really cool, I might as well tell you about it real quick.

I have no idea. And I stayed at an RV park being asked about Las Cruces time.

I don't know. I'll find out when I get there. Um, follow the church. I'm sure they'll tell you.

They haven't told me. Um, so, um, okay.

I'm, I'm okay. Did it, did it, did it did go up here and mute.

There we go. Mute for one hour. It's the only way this is going to work. Okay. There we go. I'll see things, but it's going to be ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding all the time.

I can't have ding, ding, ding, all the time. I was at a, um, I found the new RV park. Um, and I'll be honest with you that this is, this is how easy this is.

Um, I love Chewy's C -H -U -Y apostrophe S Chewy's. It's a

Mexican place, mainly in, I've never seen it outside of Texas, but I think it's only in Texas. They've got great chips to salsa.

I'm fasting today, so I shouldn't be talking about food, but anyway. Um, and I looked at the

Chewy's and I looked and there was an RV park that I'd never been to, not quite within walking distance, within a mile.

And I was like, Oh, well, let's, let's try this one out. We haven't tried this. I've always stayed at the same

KOA in, in, uh, Amarillo every time I've gone through, which has been many times and that's right next to the airport.

So you get to hear jet engines and prop engines, and there's a railroad track nearby and a free freeway nearby.

So you, you get the entire orchestra of RV park sounds, background sounds, um, all night long.

It's great. Um, so anyway, you know, I made a reservation, did nothing about it.

It was, it seemed to be fairly highly rated. And I pulled in yesterday. Now it's attached to this store that you could spend hours just, uh, browsing in this place and going upstairs and find another little nook and cranny.

And they had, they had a water, not a waterfall, but well, it was at an angle, I guess, sort of a waterfall next to one of the stairs and, um, just, and they even have a, have a

Christmas section that's open all, all year long. Um, and you have to mute this one too.

There's just mute, mute, mute everywhere. Mute for an hour. There we go. Um, anyway, really neat stuff.

I mean, if you really wanted to do something cool, you know, like for Christmas, uh, go there in November.

They even said they have a thing in November where everything's on sale and stuff. Um, super, super nice folks.

Uh, the place was laid out real well. You had little half fences in between each of the units and it was, it was, um,

Fort Amarillo RV park or RV resort. Sometimes it says both.

Anyways, if you're a fellow RVer man, uh, put it on the list. It's, uh, it was,

I wrote him a nice review and, um, in the RV life thing that we used and, uh, it was great.

So I had to buy a shirt, you know, um, you gotta, gotta commemorate the time you were there.

So that's why I'm wearing an Amarillo shirt today. All right. Got lots to get to. Um, one interesting thing is of course,

I mentioned this father, Mark Beard, and we didn't play the thing.

It's, it's a little over two minutes. Of course, a two minute long video could take the entire program to respond to. Um, but I mentioned on the last program, and so Chris Arnzen was listening and of course,

Chris Arnzen just likes to set up debates. And so he, uh, he contacts me on Facebook, which is the worst way to contact me, but that's how he does it.

And he says, uh, if, if the guy you're talking to is father Mark Beard from a place in Mississippi, he died in 2023.

So, and this does look like a little bit lower resolution type thing. So, you know, um, and so I, once I got here,

I had an opportunity to look him up and yep, same guy. So as Chris and I both mentioned, uh, he's not going to be debating the subject of purgatory because he knows better now.

Um, but I sort of felt like, well, since, since we played this, um, since we made reference to it, uh, let's go ahead and cover it.

Let's go ahead and talk about it. And, uh, we'll, uh, uh,

I'll be brief, you know, I'm not gonna go back over everything we've done. No, we've, we've done debates on this program.

I debated Tim Staples on the dividing line of first Corinthians chapter three. I've done formal debates.

Um, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't think any of them were even close. Um, purgatory is so clearly and painfully unbiblical, but the way he starts off is insulting, but it's sort of funny.

I mean, it reminds me, I guess it's the, the, the Senator, is he also from Mississippi that always does, you know, all those amazing, uh, speeches where he says crazy fun stuff.

Uh, maybe it's just a Southern thing. Um, but anyway, here's, um, let's go ahead and walk through this.

And, uh, I'll, like I said, I'll try to be fairly brief with this, but, um, let's see how we can make this, uh, this work.

Think about what I just told you. Yes. The village idiot. When people tell you, when somebody comes to tell you that purgatory is not scriptural, the village has met their man.

Think about what I just told you. Okay. So what he's saying, of course, is, um, that if someone tells you what

I just told you, that purgatory is not scriptural, they're the village idiot. Okay.

Well, that's a pretty strong statement. The question is, um, he's going to go on to say how script, how scriptural purgatory is.

Let's find out how deep his actual assertion is. How much does he really know?

Uh, or is this sort of your Roman bravado? And there is a lot of Roman bravado out there these days.

A lot of it. Yes. The village idiot has now come. You think about what

I'm telling you. You are looking for an English word in a book written in Greek.

No, that's not what we're talking about. When we say something's not scriptural, we're not looking for an

English. We're not sitting here going, oh, the word purgatory needs to appear in the Bible. See here's, this is the same thing that the hyper reform do when they attack biblicism.

Oh, there's all these people under that. The word doesn't, isn't the Bible. That's what biblicism. No, wake up people.

Have you not read Calvin? Have you not read Luther? Have you not read Zwingli? Have you not read anything in the

Reformation at all? When they're saying that something is not scriptural, they're saying it is not consistent with scriptural teaching.

It has nothing to do with whether the word appears or not. So here you've got a Romanist doing it and yet you've got reformed people that do it too.

And they should know better. I mean, they really, really should know better. The height of idiocracy.

An English word in a book written in Greek. Why don't you look the word Trinity? Why don't you look for the word incarnation?

Okay. And this, everybody knows that one of the things that bugs me tremendously is when

Romanism tries to parallel the divine revelation in scripture of the incarnation.

Okay. That's John 1, 14. Okay. The word became flesh.

All right. We can go to Galatians. We can go to other places, but John 1, 14, that makes it scriptural.

We may use a term that comes from Latin, incarnation, to describe that.

We're not asking that the word incarnation appears. Sarx Agenata is the

Greek. Okay. If incarnation accurately represents what Sarx Agenata means, then we're good.

All right. Same thing with Trinity. All right. We can talk about all the texts that plainly teachers one

God, three divine persons and their equality and the essence and all the rest of that kind of stuff. But that's what scriptural would be.

It doesn't have to use the singular word. So he's wrong. And a lot of our reformed brethren are too.

They're not in the Bible either. It's because it's an English word in a book written in Greek. My brother says in Christ, it is scriptural what's going on there.

And I will prove it to you. I will give you scriptural passages and then I'll explain them.

Philippians two, every name has been in heaven on earth and under the earth.

You've been in heaven because you're before the throne of God. You've been in the on earth because you want to be before the throne of God.

Nobody's been in the knee in hell. If you hadn't been, you wouldn't be there to begin with. So where have you been in your knee?

Now, this is a, hey, if you've never heard this kind of argument before, it might leave you going,

I hadn't thought about that. Until you learn a little something about ancient cosmologies and the fact that what is being said is that all of creation above, on, and under, it's not trying to locate places.

In fact, the funny thing is when you debate Romanists on this subject, on the subject of Purgatory, um, they will be very quick to tell you, well, you know, the church has never formally defined that fire is a part of Purgatory.

Now you go by, you go by FX Shoop's book, Purgatory, and you read, you read hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of Roman Catholic piety on the subject of Purgatory from say 1400 to the present, um, and fires everywhere.

You know, I've told you before, and I think I showed it to you once, the picture of the, the handprint on this piece of wood somewhere in Europe, I think it's

Italy, uh, where, uh, um, a religious woman who was in Purgatory appeared to, uh, this sister in this order, and when she touched that, she was so hot, the fire was so hot that it left that mark on this wooden beam and, you know, all the rest of the kind of stuff.

The literature is filled with it. Oh, but the church has never specifically defined that, that, that fire is a part of this, and it's never specifically defined what?

Where it is. Oh, it's under the earth.

Oh, that's a dogma too. It's so convenient. You know, when you claim ultimate authorities, it's so convenient to just get to say, oh, well, you know, um, we haven't really said that one, but the way we did say this one, it's under the earth.

Well, brothers in Christ, if you go to Matthew five or Luke 12, there's a story about you will meet with your opponent.

And if you do not settle with your opponent, he will turn you over to the judge. The judge will turn you over to the jailer and the jailer will throw you into the prison and you will not get out until you've paid the last penny.

Well, my brother, sister Christ, if you go and translate it in their language, do you know the word opponent is

Antico? It's the devil. So if you don't meet with the devil and settle up, the good

Lord will judge you. He will throw you into the prison, which can't be held because you never get out. Can't be heaven because why would you call it that?

He's speaking of heaven's hospital and you won't get out until you pay the last penny. He's speaking of heaven's hospital.

Oh, that's a, that's certainly what Jesus was talking about, right? You know, these guys don't give a hoot as to what the original audience would have understood about any of this.

I mean, seriously. Um, yes, that is a very common, those are common texts that are used, have been used to substantiate the concept of purgatory.

And just as first Corinthians three is an abuse and the one before this was an abuse. These are, these texts have nothing to do with what they're being forced to address at all.

Um, talking about forgiveness, talking about human relationships, but now all of a sudden that gets to become indulgences and purgatory and, and whether you have, uh, uh, temporal punishments of sins on your soul.

And it's, um, truly amazing, truly amazing what you can do in scripture when you, uh, have an ultimate authority other than scripture itself.

St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians makes the argument that on the day of your judgment, on the day of your judgment, you will be tested by fire.

And if you survive that fire, you'll be rewarded. But if not, you will only be purged and will only make it through fire.

They wouldn't send you. Okay. Um, not gonna go back over first Corinthians chapter three.

If you want to hear an entire debate on the subject, um, here on the dividing line with Catholic apologist,

Tim Stables, look it up. Um, first Corinthians chapter three has nothing to do with purgatory. It is an abuse of the text.

And if you want to see that proven beyond question, look up Peter Stravinskis on YouTube.

And one of the first things that's going to come up is going to be my cross -examination of him in our debate in 2001.

Um, where we discussed first Corinthians chapter three, here, you have a guy to earn

PhDs from Ivy league schools, the editor of the Catholic answer. Um, and he collapsed, he completely fell apart.

He had clearly never thought through that text and had never heard another perspective on it.

Um, and it's not like it was some new perspective. I just simply walked through the text. I'm sitting there with the

Greek texts and just going, okay, what does this mean? What does this mean? Then that would mean this, right?

But that's not your position. So can you explain that? And he collapsed.

I mean, that's the only way to describe that cross -examination is it was in 200 plus debates.

Um, that was one of the clearest instances where debate demonstrated in cross -examination, the inability of a position to survive being questioned.

That was one, I think one of the best examples in, uh, in all those years to help because once you're there, you never come out my brother and sister in Christ.

It is throughout scripture that this takes place. Matter of fact, if you went to the old Testament, Psalm say like 60, 64, you'll see him speak of it.

You'll actually hear him speak about what it means to be tested by fire. If you went to chapters like Malachi.

Um, but there is no fire in Purgatory. Now, Hey, give him credit.

At least he's not like the new batch of Catholic apologists or a lot. It might be instantaneous.

And we don't know anything about fire and, you know, they'll, they'll do stuff like this and, you know, and they'll, they'll get away with it.

Um, but you know, I prefer old time Roman Catholics who actually believed what they believed and weren't doing all this, uh, dilly dallying around with stuff.

Isaiah four, all of them speak about it. My brothers in Christ, why do I tell you these things?

Because it is scriptural. So any reference to fire in the Bible obviously has something to do with a dogma that was defined, uh, you know, 1300 years after Christ, 1400 years after Christ.

Um, you know, we don't need to worry about context. We don't need to worry about what it meant to the original audience.

No, we're good. And you need to know the truth. Okay. So you need to know the truth.

And, um, yeah. And the truth is that has nothing to do with what the Bible teaches.

They, it is a blasphemy against the finished work of Christ. And we're not going to go back over all that stuff right now because, um, we already have done that many, many times, but, uh, you know,

I'm sorry that he's gone. Uh, would, would like to have had the opportunity to tell him the truth about this stuff before he left, but, uh, that didn't happen.

So, um, it's good to find out these things when you can, uh, really is.

All right. Um, what else did I have queued up here? Um, I mean,

I've got the Hansen thing, um, that it, that it, that it sort of got thrown off by how we got started today.

Um, I'm, I'm seeing that, uh, Jeff is talking about the

Hansen stuff today too. So if you're, if you listen to Apology Radio, um, okay.

I know this isn't, I know this is meant to be humorous, but it's so accurate.

That's why it is humorous. But a, uh, a Mr. Marshall sent me, um, and this is actually some, someone called especially the memes, uh, a guy named

Darren Carlson, Darren M. Carlson had posted, this is a baptism questionnaire from a church in South Asia.

So in other words, highly Islamic areas primarily. Well, I'm assuming that there could be other religions as well, but here's the baptism questionnaire.

And I can guarantee you this is not the baptism questionnaire at any Southern Baptist church in the United States. Are you willing to leave home and lose the blessing of your father?

Are you willing to lose your job? Are you willing to go to the village and those who persecute you, forgive them and share the love of Christ with them?

Are you willing to give an offering to the Lord? Are you willing to be beaten rather than deny your faith? Are you willing to go to prison?

Are you willing to die for Jesus? That's not the normal baptismal questionnaire in the

U S. Someone took that and said, this is the baptism questionnaire from Joel Webbins church. Okay.

I'm sure it's not. Um, but if you've been listening, as these guys have been going off,

I mean that so much of the stuff they're saying now you can't tell the difference between them and the stone choir.

Um, I mean, we kept saying that was direction. This was going and, uh, that's the direction it's going.

Are you willing to call Christians who don't agree with you fake and gay? That's pretty common. Are you willing to blame the

Jews for everything wrong in the world, including rap music and the Scofield reference Bible? Um, Hey, the first Bible I read through from beginning and in the year long thing was a

Scofield reference, but it was a new Scofield reference Bible, which would make me an apostate to the people who liked the old schedule.

Um, are you willing to publicly declare that Jesus didn't need to be a Jew? Uh, are you willing to, to discourage your daughter from marrying

Christians outside of her race? Well, they did that. Are you willing to build ministries with Catholics and white nationalists for the good of creating a

Christian nation? Well, that one is spot on. I mean, boing right on the beep, right on the nose.

Are you willing to withhold belief in the Holocaust until you've done 10 ,000 hours of research? Well, yeah, that one came straight out of that recording.

Uh, long, long, long, long, long ago. Um, yeah, there you go.

Um, there was something else here. Um, Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm in the wrong column. That would help. Oh, okay. Yeah. Wanted to get to this. We have told you over and over and over again that there is a massive difference between how we do churchism.

I say we, I mean, Bible believing, um, reformed.

I, again, that, that particular term, there are people who don't want to give me that term and I don't really care what they think.

I care less and less every day what the reformed think, um, when they're not being reformed as far as theology goes.

But anyway, big theology, not the little things they're very focused on. Anyway, um, when, when we talk about scripture and church history, and when we do church history, unless you've become a hyper -confessionalist that has to defend the people who wrote your confession or something like that, we can just let history be history.

We can let the early church fathers be the early church fathers. We can let the reformers be the reformers, you know? Um, I've, I've told the story before in 2017, we did our, our, uh, tour of, uh,

Germany right before the Reformation Day. I mean, just a month before Reformation Day.

Um, I started off in Berlin telling our people, our little group, it's just one bus, uh, but we had tremendous time together.

Um, we, I told them the first night, the first, the first talk

I gave them, I said to them, now, now I realize that some of the men that we're going to be studying and that we're going to be seeing where they lived, where they died, where they preached, um, some of these men would not extend the right hand of fellowship to us.

And in fact, many of them would have been very happy to have us in prison. Um, but we need to recognize that reality and be thankful for them.

Despite that, this is, this is what being mature is all about.

And the folks that put the tour on said to me right after we got done and everybody had left, no one's ever said anything like that before.

And they had had big names. If I gave the names of people that, that on this, had done this tour, big names, no one's ever said anything like that at all.

I mean, they were blown away. And of course we went and saw Fritz Erba's, um, final resting place.

And, you know, we talked about it and I said, if you don't, if you're not honest with who the reformers were or with who the early church fathers were, you're presenting a caricature, not a history.

And online today, caricatures win the day because people aren't concerned about whether you're being truthful.

Clicks, followers, Patreon subscriptions, whatever. That's, that's all that's important these days.

And that's, that's sad, but that's, that's the way that it is. So I've said over and over again, let the early church be the early church.

Let Jerome be Jerome. We're going to talk about Jerome here for a second. Brilliant biblical scholar.

Right about everything, even on that? No. Theologian? No, no. Yeah. All sorts of major, major problems when it comes to the monastic movement and, and human sexuality.

And, uh, I mean, just think about Paula and, and I'm not talking about Paula White either.

Um, all the stuff with nuns and the early development of the monastic movement and just a mess.

Okay. So I can look at Jerome and go brilliant scholar. One of the few early church writers who knew both

Greek and Hebrew, very few had his command of the languages and the manuscripts.

Um, and so he's an important witness to all sorts of things. And see, the problem is fundamentalists, they'll go,

Oh, he, he said all sorts of bad theological things. So I don't want to spend any time understanding what he believed about anything else.

And that's where fundamentalism falls off the rails. That's where it all comes apart is you, you end up with that kind of thinking.

Um, and you can't do church history that way. You're, you're not doing church history that way. Um, you're just creating a caricature.

It's a cartoon version and almost a large majority.

Well, yeah, I'd say 98 % of Roman Catholic apologetics that I'm seeing online.

It's a cartoon. It's a, it's a cartoon. You know, last program went through Irenaeus.

Oh, here's a, here's a part of a sentence. Boo, blow that up. It's the papacy.

No, it's not. Uh, honest Roman Catholic historians know that, but they're not posting a lot of stuff on, on X either.

So we've addressed this guy named Catholic Maximus a number of times and he's going after Westhoff because West just repeats the standard accepted, scholarly published perspective that was even understood within Roman Catholicism up until the

Council of Trent anyways, that Jerome, since he learned

Hebrew, he learned Hebrew from Jews and now people are going after him for that, by the way.

That's, that, that's the new thing. I haven't kept up with this one guy. It's, um,

I hope that's wrong. The thermometer that I have up on the wall that says it's 92 degrees in here.

I hope that isn't correct because when you turn the AC on in here, you can not really hear me speak.

Um, so there's a little bit of semi -cool air coming down from the other room.

I should have, should have brought the thing in here so I could turn that down in there. So it'd blow a little bit more cool air in here.

Um, I hope that's just because it's up against the wall and the sun is hitting that wall.

I hope that's all it is. It's getting toasty in here. There's no two ways about it. Um, I'm going to turn this little fan up.

You might hear a little more in the background now, but it's not much of a fan, so it'll, if I start glistening.

Yeah. Whew. Um, anyway, it's warm in Lubbock. It really is.

Um, so Westhoff is just repeating what has been understood for a long, long time.

Um, even just before the

Council of Trent, you have credentialed, widely accepted, widely respected

Roman Catholic scholars who reject the apocryphal books as being fully canonical. Now, one of the problems here, uh,

Catholic apologists like to play games with the fact that many in the early church had different levels of canonicity in the sense of, um, canonical as in fully authoritative for determining doctrine and dogma versus a lesser form of canonical, which means, uh, you know, they could be a blessing to read.

You can read them in church, but you should never refer to them to prove a point in doctrine, of doctrine.

Now that's what Jerome's working with. And it's very plain from his, uh, introductions to a number of different books, uh, especially in his commentary on Galatians.

It's very clear that, uh, Jerome held to what we would call the

Jewish canon, which did not include the apocryphal books as being fully authoritative. Now, does he make reference to them?

Of course. Um, does he quote from them? Of course. But that doesn't mean that he feels that they're fully canonical.

And this is the point. Catholic apologists don't concern themselves about that level of accuracy.

Um, if it gets clicks, post it. Um, so there's a, there's a clip where, uh,

Wesley is just repeating the reality that you confirm for yourself. Um, and Catholic Maximus says, utterly false.

Jerome never treated the Deuterocanonical books as apocryphal. Of course he did. It's documented. What are you talking about?

He used them authoritatively throughout his entire life, minus a brief window of about five years. So again, not recognizing the difference between, and the alleged citations he gave, not proving doctrine, not proving dogma, um, quoting, but not making it fully canonical as in authoritative.

That was his position. No one really argues that, but here's the point. When you get online these days with some of these zealots, they don't care.

See, once you have a system that tells you, this is what you're going to find. This is what you have to believe. That's what you're going to believe.

That's what you're going to do. That's what you're going to say. Um, and so he also says in the, in one of these quotes, um, he quotes

Westhoff. We know what the Bible looked like in Jesus's day, the old Testament, and it didn't include these other books. That's a true statement.

His response is no, all caps, you know, sort of like the King James only guys, you know, all caps, no

Bible existed. There was no fixed canon. And I'm like, wow.

Okay. Now I've said to much of these guys, you need to read, um, Beckwith.

You need to at least deal with it better than the few people who've attempted,

Matute and others who've tried to poke some holes, but they just, it's, it's, it's too deep for most of these guys to be able to really do that.

Um, you need to look up what it means to be laid aside in the temple, uh, what books were laid aside in the temple of that early canonical process amongst the

Jewish people themselves, which again, these days, Oh, Jewish people. No, don't want that. Um, but it's just so absurd.

It literally is absurd for someone to say no Bible existed. There was no fixed canon.

Um, the worst you could possibly do, I suppose, you don't mind if I take some drinks since it's now says it's 93 .5

degrees. This is just fizzy water with electrolytes.

Cause like I said, um, I had to move my weekly fasting day. It's not a religious thing.

So no, I'm not going to lose a reward. Uh, it's really good for your body to fast. I'm doing a 36 hour fast, which means

I can eat tomorrow morning for breakfast started last night. Um, does amazing things for your body.

It really does. I, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to argue with people about this. I do not want you sending emails.

Do not bother rich with all of your fasting emails or your anti -fasting emails, or you need to fax fast this way.

Stop. Don't even hit send. Okay. Not interested going straight in the trash.

If you send it, have no interest in arguing with anybody about this. I've simply done enough reading to go, you know, you look at Americans today, you look at videos from back in the 1970s and Americans are fat.

Okay. It's probably RFK junior is probably right.

It's all the processed foods. It's all the chemicals probably a lot of that stuff. Um, the simple fact is yes.

Stop forcing your body to be making those decisions as to store fat, burn fat, whatever you let it have a day off each week.

You know, tonight I won't have eaten for 24 hours. So when I sleep, my body's not having to do anything other than build clean fix.

Okay. So yeah, that's why I'm doing it. And some of you have noticed it's had a major impact.

I've lost over 60 pounds, uh, in what, 10 months, something like that. Um, energy levels through the roof, um, lifting weights, doing everything else.

So yeah, I think, um, I can highly recommend it to, but I'm not a medical doctor and this is not medical advice.

Yeah. I need to put that up on the screen or something. Uh, when you mentioned something like this, anyway, all of that, just because I took a drink of fizzy water with, um, electrolytes in it.

Um, what I'm trying to talk about here is it is simply absurd to say that there was no fixed canon.

Were there books that you could argue may have been disputed, even amongst the

Jews, you know, the alleged council of Jamnia, which there really wasn't council of Jamnia, but the discussions that took place about some minor texts that have zero impact on theology, um, at all.

Um, were there, were there questions, um, about books that didn't contain the name, the name of God or something like that?

Okay, fine. That has next to nothing to do with the fact that the Tanakh was fully recognized the

Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim. Now what's exactly in the Ketuvim, the writings? Um, sure.

There might be two or three books. Esther was discussed. Fine. Any question about the

Torah? None. None. Zero. What infallible magisterium, uh, determined that?

There was none. There was none. Um, the

Nevi 'im, the prophets, um, the Psalms. Are there some differences between the

Septuagint and the Hebrew version of the Psalms? Very minor, but yes, very, very small.

Um, mainly has to do with divisions. Oh, yeah, there are some translational issues.

There are some technical issues too. Uh, no one's disputing any of that, but no one with a functional brainstem says that when

Jesus held men accountable to the scriptures that they were sitting around going, what's he talking about?

I got no idea. And this is the type of hyper skepticism that you get not only from the cults, but from the atheists.

And here it's Romanists throwing it out there. Um, all this does is demonstrate really what

I've said over and over again. Once you accept Rome's ultimate authority, there's not really a lot of reasoning with you because you can't look at history.

Not, not, you can't accept the verdict of history. You can't accept the, the testimony of history because you've been told what you're going to see in history and you just simply have to believe it.

Just accept it. That's, that's where you are. And that's why sometimes it's like, it's not even worth it.

So, you know, I'm not going back and forth with him on X right now. I'm talking to you all about it.

I'm using him as an example, reaching a much larger audience going, here's the reality.

And I'm not going to spend 10 hours going rounds with someone who's not listening to what

I'm saying. Anyways, he can't hear, he can't hear what I'm saying because he's accepted an authority that says, don't listen, don't listen.

It's, um, it's amazing to watch. It really is, but there it is. Okay. Um, so we did, yeah,

I'm not sure this is where we were. I think I skipped ahead somehow, but I'm not going to, you know, we're, we're making such slow progress on this anyways.

And the whole point is that, um, listening to this conversation between Jacob Hanson and Ali Vestekhi raises all sorts of important issues, all sorts of different theological issues.

We've been spending a lot of time on the Mormon priesthood. I've got folks up in Utah that are working on a priesthood debate.

I really hope we can get one going for April of next year. Why not October? Because I've got the

Craig Trillia debate. And after listening, if you listened to the last program, after listening, um, to Pseudodionysus and listening to the shortest section of the

Dionysian corpus and how central that is to Eastern Orthodox theology, belief, practice, um, how deeply that influenced

Thomas Aquinas, medieval Roman Catholicism, doctor of the church, um, tradition says that on the table at the

Council of Trent, they had the Bible and the Summa Theologica. Um, maybe you get an idea now of how important that debate really is and why

I'm not, I'm just simply not willing to, uh, put that in a secondary position that, that needs to be done well and done right.

Uh, so I'm just going to pick back up. Hopefully this will work, uh, with the conversation and, uh, we'll, um, we got started about six minutes late today due to technical issues.

And so I will go till six minutes after or so or longer if I need to, but the thing up on the wall says 95 .5

right now. So, and I'm wearing a long sleeve shirt so I can wear this.

And you know why I'm wearing a long sleeve shirt? It's Rich's fault. Most things are Rich's fault.

Um, but I'm wearing a long sleeve shirt so that I can have someplace to pin the stinking microphone because he doesn't like when

I just put it on the little stand. It's, it doesn't have good enough sound. And so here

I am, I'm sweating Rich and it's all your fault. I just want everybody to know that. The distinction, absolutely.

In the sense that we are mortal and we're in this life and we're participating in the experience that we have. Not, well, not currently.

Perhaps they're pre -embodied, uh, beings or they're, they're post embodied beings that are no longer embodied.

Um, but we don't make this distinction between that there's all these different sort of species of creatures that are out there.

We believe that we are all, uh, you know, human beings, angels, uh, even

God, that these are, that these are, that we are all children of God. Okay.

Now, uh, oops. Well, let's do it this way. Okay. Um, this is interesting to me because what he's saying here is orthodox

LDS theology, but it is deeply connected to infinite regression.

Um, this gets us into the fact that Mormons have disagreed with each other over this topic.

Um, since the early days in Utah, when

Orson Pratt, Parley P. Pratt, Brigham Young, they're, they're creating

LDS theology. Um, um, well, yeah, if I did, the, uh, microphone goes with it.

Um, they're creating LDS theology and they don't necessarily agree with each other 100 % on things like the nature of intelligences and what does the premortal existence look like and things like that.

Predominant views end up being sort of the official view of the church.

And I have read for you within the past six months, um, the eternal marriage ceremony student manual that makes it very clear.

God, men, and angels are all the same species in Mormonism. That's the point he's about to make. He's about to abuse

Acts chapter 17 to try to say God, men, and angels are all the same order of being, just different levels of exaltation.

And that's what he's saying here, but that's always been a part of the Orthodox understanding of eternal progression and, um, infinite regress.

You know, there's a God before God, before God, before God. So it's a little bit interesting because I would think that at this point, given that Hansen is willing to, um, move away from that, that, um, you know, maybe five years from now, he won't believe this anymore.

I don't know. Uh, he, he, we might say a work in progress, but then again, so was

Joseph Smith at his death. So, uh, who knows where it's going to end up. Okay, wait, even

God, what do you mean? So we believe here's the, here's a real radical Latter -day Saint doctrine.

Um, it is that we are all, every single person is a child of God, that you

Ali have a spark of divinity within you, within your spirit. Okay. So that, again, this is, this is the state, this is, this is

Orthodox LDS theology. No two ways about it. Um, and you need to understand this is where Mormonism wants to sound, they're going to go, he's going to go to Act 17 and he's going to talk about the term genos, and he's going to use genus, but that's not actually what genos means in the context.

Um, but they're going to make it sound as Christian as possible when it is the most radical denial of the fundamental truth of Christianity, which is

God is God, and we are his creatures. I mean, there's nothing more basic to the

Tanakh, the Torah, Nevi 'im, Ketuvim, to the Hebrew scriptures, than Yahweh is the eternal creator of all things.

That's how Yahweh demonstrates he is God, is he's the creator of all things. Um, the distinction between the one true

God, and Yahweh is El Elyon, by the way, the highest God. Um, you can stand on your head in Deuteronomy 32 all you want.

Um, if you allow the Old Testament to speak as the Old Testament, there's no question about that.

Um, that distinction between God and man, between God and everything else, absolutely necessary.

That's why they have to play the games they play with Isaiah, because Isaiah makes it so plain, and so that's why, um, you know, uh,

Kwaku and other LDS apologists online are using this, well, it's like, uh, it's like, you know, this is what

McClellan was saying. It's like, if I'm a Buffalo Bills fan,

I will say they are the only football team. No, I won't. No, I won't.

I mean, I'm not a football fan anymore, but I was born in Minneapolis, which is now a third world country.

Um, but I was born in Minneapolis, and so as a kid, you know, you're a Vikings fan. I never said the

Vikings were the only football team, never even crossed my mind. So I think that's one of the worst examples, but that's what they use.

That's like saying, that's all they were doing is, uh, is, is all Isaiah is doing, and all

Jeremiah is doing, and all the rest of the prophets are doing, is saying that Yahweh is the, is the most important God for Israel.

They're not making a grand statement. Yes, they are, because we're talking about creation. This is such a lame argument.

It is so shallow. Don't you all sit around going, man, can't we come up with something better than this?

Because this is really shallow, because actually, whenever this, there's one

God thing comes up, it's, it's connected directly to creation of all things, not just in one corner of a universe of universes and all the rest of this kind of stuff they have to come up with.

Don't you all sit around and, and go, man, we got to come up with something better. Um, you should be, if, if you're, if you're not, uh, you, you, you need to do that.

Okay. Um, and we would look at, for example, um, you know, in Acts 17,

Paul is talking to the pagans, and he says that God hath made of one blood, all nations of men to dwell on the earth, or to dwell on all the face of the earth, for we are also his genus.

Do you know the word genus means in Greek? Are you familiar with that? Kind, type. Exactly. Kind or type. So if we were to look at this, it says that we are also his kind or type.

Now, doesn't that sound great? I mean, you know, someone who's never read Acts chapter 17, they might be sitting there going, wow, man, 97 .3.

Woo. Okay. Um, they might be going, oh, that's, that's deep. That's, that's really cool.

Um, until you go and read Acts chapter 17. And so I'd like to just remind you of the part he didn't read because the part he didn't read totally changes the, well, it defines the part that he did read.

Um, so for a while, I was passing through starting verse 23 and examining the objects of your worship.

Oh, he's examining the objects of their worship. I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown

God. Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. That was a pretty brilliant opening to use something they all, they've all seen it.

They know exactly what he's referring to. And now he's going to proclaim to them that unknown

God that was put there in case they miss somebody. We don't want someone getting mad at us.

So we're going to put an altar up to the unknown God in case he didn't reveal himself clearly.

Or who knows? So the

God who made the world and all things in it. Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait a minute.

Um, poiesos, poies, oh, to make. That doesn't mean to organize.

And in Mormon theology, God doesn't make anything. He can't create anything. He can't, one of the main things that they deny, and I'm pretty certain that Jacob Hansen dies too, is kratio ex nihilo, creation out of or into nothing.

God can't do that. He organizes pre -existing matter. So we're not talking about the Mormon God right at the start.

We're talking about the Christian God who created all things, made the world and all things in it.

That's the first thing Paul proclaims to the Greeks, because they don't have a God like that either. Even Zeus comes out of the created order.

He is subject to certain aspects of the created order. He can manipulate things, but he's subject to the created order.

This takes us back to Jeremiah chapter 10. The apologetic that God gave to his people when they're in captivity, to the people who are encouraging them to engage in idolatry, was the gods that did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from under the heavens and from the earth.

If your God is not the creator of all things, he doesn't exist. Period. Paul's in perfect line with that.

The God who made the world and all things in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath and all things.

Not some things, all things. And in Mormon theology, you have a question, what about intelligences?

How could, if God's one of those intelligences, how could he have given rise to the other intelligences?

How can he be the ground of being of those other intelligences? Again, Mormonism and Christianity are light years apart.

When Joseph Smith said, we have imagined, supposed, that God was God from all eternity, I will take away the veil so that you may see, he separated himself and all of his followers for eternity from the

Christian faith. It's amazing to see people today trying to change that, trying to undo what

Joseph Smith did. The only way you can do that is by rejecting Joseph Smith. Now, you can do that piecemeal, which is what's happening now, it's being done piecemeal, but anyway.

Verse 26, and he made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, their boundaries, their habitation.

He's actually sovereign over mankind, sovereign over nations, sovereign over what takes place in time itself, because the boundaries, the borders between nations, those have been fluid forever, because they're the result of war and colonization and everything else.

God's sovereign over all of them. That they would seek God if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

Now, there's been a lot of discussion about all this, especially in regards to human anthropology, doctrine of man.

This is the same Paul who wrote Romans chapter 1, there's none who seeks after God, so you have to put all that together. He's talking to pagans who think they already have it figured out, and in fact look down at the rest of mankind as not having gotten as much enlightenment as the

Greek philosophers who are worshiping idols were, and this would be offensive to them, because from their perspective, you come to know

God by climbing this philosophical ladder, and Paul is saying, no,

God actually has revealed himself in creation, not as a part of creation, but as the creator, and though he's not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and exist.

Now, is that true of Elohim in LDS theology? No, it's not.

He's not the ground of being. He is the member of our species that holds the highest level of exaltation that is involved with us,

I guess would be the way to put it, but he's not the ground of all being. He's not the creator, he's the organizer, so none of this fits the

Mormon God, so I don't even know why they're, well, I do know why they're, of course I know why they're using it, but if things were honest,

I wouldn't even know why they'd be looking at this, because it starts so far away from Mormonism.

In him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, for we also are his offspring.

Now, did he say that part? I'm not going to go back to look at it. Did he say that he was, this is actually a quote from Aretas, this is the quote from a

Greek writer, this isn't a quote from the Old Testament, this isn't, he's using one of their own writers to do what?

To draw the contrast between a living being and a stone.

That's what he's doing. It's interesting in the Epistle of Diognetus, which is probably around 120

AD, exact same kind of rhetoric, exact same kind of apologetic is used, very, very effectively.

And so, being then the offspring of God, now Mormonism goes, see, God has a body of flesh and bones and he has children and he has pre -existent wives and he was sealed to them in a temple on another planet and nothing, no one who ever read these words for 1 ,844 years, well, okay, this has been written, so 1 ,790 years, no one ever dreamed up anything like that at all.

It is sheer insanity to think that's what Paul is talking about here, and yet that's what we're told by Mormons he's talking about here.

What is he actually saying? Being then the offspring of God, and by the way, the term genos, yes, it means kind, but see, we use genus in a scientific form that had not yet developed at this point.

So, genos means family, race, kind, offspring, depending on context.

What's context? Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to suppose the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the craft and thought of man.

So, what is the context here? The altar to the unknown God, the gods that they're worshiping at the

Areopagus, over against the God who's the creator of all things and gives life to all things.

So, Paul has made sure we know God is different, he is separate, and he is the source of life, he's living, therefore we shouldn't be worshiping stones.

That's what's going on here. It's amazing what Acts 17 can be brought to serve by various people.

Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now commanding men that everyone everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he determined having furnished proof to all by raising from the dead, and as soon as he mentions anastasis and resurrection, boom, that's it.

That's the end for them. They listened up to this point, but that was just too offensive, because fundamental to Greek thought was salvation was escaping the physical body, escaping the physical realm.

So, they fully understood that when he said the term anastasis, having raised him from the dead, when they heard anastasin, nekron, they're like, too silly, nothing more, we're not going to talk to this guy anymore, he's nuts.

And so, they got rid of him. But this is just a good example.

We only got, what, two minutes farther in? And what are we talking about?

If you watch the debate that Jim Renahan and I had with the two fellows from the

Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Cross and Marcus Ford, if you ever watched it, we were halfway through that debate before,

I think it was crossing, yeah, it was crossing, I think it was during cross -examination, he sort of stopped and he goes, so, do you think that Jesus's body actually came alive and walked out of the tomb?

And this was halfway through the debate. And what does that show?

That people on that wildly left -hand spectrum of things have all these spiritualized understandings of what resurrection is and all the rest of this stuff, and they just don't get the

Christian message. And they're just as skeptical and filled with unbelief as the

Greeks on Mars Hill were. And the funny thing is, look at Acts 17, 34.

Even though they shut him down, Paul still had a few converts there, and one of them was named

Dionysius Areopagus, from the Areopagus. And that's supposedly the author of what

I read to you on the last program. Now you're starting to get the idea of how important this stuff is, because if you actually believe, like Thomas Aquinas believed, that one of the people who heard

Paul give this sermon and then was converted and became one of his disciples and was taught by him, if you believed he wrote that stuff, that's first generation, that's right after the apostles, that's going to have the highest authority of anything you can possibly find.

And that's going to determine how you interpret scripture. Can you imagine interpreting scripture in light of that stuff I was just reading you on the last program?

Now you see. Now you see, said the blind man.

So anyways, all right, so there we go. Another road trip DL done. According to the thermometer up there,

I don't think this is accurate, okay? I'm not sure what's going on. I think it's just because it's right up against the wall there and the sun's right there and it's right there.

It's got no shade at all. It says it, oh, it just changed. It says it's 98 degrees.

I don't think that's accurate. I'm going to have to like get one and put it down here near the fan or something like that, because there's, there is a little bit of cool air.

I'm not dripping with sweat. I'm moist, but I'm not dripping with sweat. So what we may have to do in the future is

I like, I like the, the Alpha and Omega thing back here, but you know, the world, world's not going to end if that door is open, you know?

And then I've, I've got a big old, oh, oh, feel that cool air. Feel that cool air coming in right now.

That may be enough to do it. It's actually dropped it up there already. But I can put a fan out in the other room and you really can't hear it and it would keep it from getting super, super warm.

So we're, we're learning, you know, when we took this out the first time it was, it was during the cold stuff, relatively cold stuff.

So, oh, well, why?

Well, I guess because you spent all the time doing it. It's all dark all of a sudden. It doesn't look anything like, camera two doesn't look anything like camera one anymore.

But yeah, Rich wants you to see, there's, here's, here's camera two. So this is not, look how much darker

I am. And I think it's because the sun's down now.

So anyway, here's camera two. You can see what I'm looking at there.

There's the little fan over there and my little doohickey whopper in there. Then you can see the, the

Abu Bakr Asidic Mosque in Erasmus, South Africa, 2013.

And see the P52 up there on the wall.

And up above is, I'm preaching in Luther's pulpit. You can just see the bottom of that one. I could,

I could move the camera, I suppose. But someday I'm going to aim the camera out the door, out the window, which is right next to it.

So you can see like a storm or something like that. Or maybe, maybe a big old massive 45 footer slowly going by right outside.

We'll do something fun like that. So, yep. Rich just jumped into, just jumped into the

ATEM remotely and is brightening up the, the picture, but it's too late, dude. It's, it's, it's the end of the program.

So, all right. When will we get to be getting back together again? That is a very, very good question.

Cause I'm speaking this weekend here in Lubbock. And then Tuesday, I'm speaking in the evening.

And that's, and Monday, I've got a long leg.

We'll see. We'll see what we can put together. We'll just do our best and see what we can do.

Sometimes travel schedule is travel schedule. So we'll, we'll do the best that we can do. So anyways, thanks for listening to the program today.

Hopefully it was useful to you. We throw a lot of crazy stuff at you. Enjoy it. We'll see you next time.