A Double Radio Free Dividing Line

Greetings! Welcome to The Dividing Line. Yes, I wanted it live. We don't need themes today because we're going to be playing themes twice. So if you play the opening theme and then that theme and then that theme as three themes, it would take up the entire time.

We wouldn't have time to do anything else. That's what I meant by give it to me live. Welcome to The Dividing Line and today, double edition, the Radio Free Geneva and Radio Free Damascus. But before I get into that, I've got to almost waste some time, to be very honest with you, to address two of the things.

I just can't let them hold until Thursday to address them, so I need to take a little of the time that I want to be using for other things just to address these things. Catholic Answers has put up a blog post basically saying we're a bunch of liars or whatever, showing great confusion on their part.

Here's simple facts, simple response. We did a debate with Tim Staples. We made the debate available to Tim Staples. We'll provide you with the MP3, et cetera, et cetera. Look, folks, this is the simple facts of what happened.

A, they never made it available. Now they're saying, well, it's because we couldn't do MP3s. I don't know what took them so long to get around MP3s. We've been doing them for how long? We've been doing MP3s a decade, maybe something like that.

Yeah, about a decade. But it was too short for CDs. Well, 90 Minutes, isn't that two CDs? We can put it in one? Okay, well, that's fine, but it's too short. But they said they don't do single CD things.

Yeah, but see, we know where to find things, and so we found a 90-minute CD that you can record 90 minutes with.

But that's the point. Maybe they don't do it. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me. The point is they said it was too short, and that's why they didn't make it available. And then all of a sudden we start talking about it, and they want to make it available.

Look, the fact of the matter is I know the folks in the Catholic Answers Forums. I know many of them listen to this program. I know that any debate whatsoever where they felt that they bested me, such as in the Jimmy Akin non-debate where Jimmy Akin gets all this extra time, and the callers call in and determine topics, they make those things available.

Have you noticed how few of the debates we've done in the past with anyone from Catholic Answers are still available? They're just sort of disappearing. If they felt that this particular debate was a slam dunk, and that's how they always present all of Tim Staple's stuff, if they're going to make the stuff that he did with Steve Gregg available, there was no reason on God's green earth why they wouldn't make this available.

It would have been easy to add it in to stuff that Tim did on Purgatory and stuff like that. They just didn't want to make it available, and it was not until we said the debate. How many times in this program we had mentioned, Boy, those folks over at Catholic Answers ain't doing anything about this.

You don't think people in the Catholic Answers Forums were well aware of that? Of course they were well aware of that. The Catholic Answers Forums are the forums where anything goes when it comes to me.

Any accusation, no matter how inflammatory, how libelous, how slanderous, is perfectly fair game in the Catholic Answers Forums. They want to believe, and the worst possible things about me. The fact of the matter is, what that debate demonstrated is that 1 Corinthians chapter 3 has nothing to do with Purgatory, and that you cannot defend that concept without engaging in the most egregious eisegesis.

And so it was not until we put up that banner ad that they contacted us to make that debate available. And I leave it to the listening audience. Why do you think they did that within, what, two weeks after we did that?

I think there's a pretty obvious reason why that is. And I think our putting up that banner ad is what forced them to make that available. They didn't contact us. They didn't go, oh, you know, now we're doing MP3s, we ought to get that.

No, if we hadn't put that banner ad up, they never would have made that debate available, period. End of discussion. That's all there is to it. That's the reality on that. Secondly, in regards to the Pope stuff, like I said last week, the idea of everybody's redeemed and stuff like that, that's not unusual.

I really appreciated Turgeon Phan's blog article demonstrating the contradiction in the Pope's and their teachings on that subject. That's a topic we've pointed out many times before, that modern Rome's teaching and ancient Rome's teachings, not the same thing on many subjects.

But in regards to the issue of redemption, the issue is not, oh gosh, now all the atheists are saved. The issue was the Pope does not use language the way that the apostles did. And he's supposed to be their successor.

He is not limited by biblical categories of theological terminology. His language is not defined by that. His language is defined by Roman theology and really a less than conservative strain of that in some areas.

That's why I think a lot of people would have to admit, boy, these sort of impromptu, off teleprompter homilies could be a really interesting source of information. Very, very interesting source of information.

That's really what the issue there is. And, of course, I would argue very strongly that the Pope was wrong in saying that atheists can do good. There is none that does good. That's Romans chapter three, especially one who denies the existence of his creator, for crying out loud.

You say, well, it's a different kind of good. No, again, the bishop of Rome might want to speak with the voice of the epistle to the Romans. That would be a good thing, I think, to do in the future. With that, we have Radio Free Geneva and Radio Free Damascus.

Which one comes first? Radio Free Geneva. Yes, go ahead. Let him start.

I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them. They're following men instead of the word of God.

Our helper, he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

And I, on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out, he died for all. Those who elected were selected.

For still our ancient foe does seek to work us woe. His craft and power are great and done with cruel hate.

Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers.

On earth is not his equal.

I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever.

We're not the right man on our side. The man of God's own choose.

Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper-Calvinist. Now, whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper-Calvinists.

You ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is he.

I've said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper-Calvinism and Calvinism. It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper-Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism.

Lord, swallow his name. Read my book. From age to age the same. And he must win the battle.

And now, from our underground bunker, hidden deep beneath Liberty University, where no one would think to look, safe from those mother Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and re-read George Bryson's book, we are Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say to his own eternal glory.

All right, we got a lot of requests for me to do this, and I finally had an opportunity last week to listen in, and so I'm going to begin a response to the Calvinist call-in day on Line of Fire with Michael Brown.

And I've let Michael know this. I think Michael's a little nervous about this, to be perfectly honest with you. But a lot of folks said, look, we'd like to hear what you'd have to say, how you'd respond, especially to the assertions of some of the biblical texts.

I guess some of them had not been addressed directly in what we've already done in the past, though I think we're getting pretty close to having covered most of them. The public debate was really more focused upon, I think, the key issue of whether you believe that there is a divine decree and God's relationship to time and things like that.

What was weird was only a few of the callers were actually Calvinists. The majority were like, well, I'm a fence sitter, I'm not really a Calvinist, but what about this, or something like that. So only the first few callers were actually Calvinists, including a good old Brian from Long Island called in, and we're going to play the entirety of Brian's call.

And he got Michael upset. The one person who called that I know personally. Brian's the one that flew me out to Long Island to preach at Doug McMaster's installation at New Hyde Park Baptist Church a few weeks ago.

So good old Brian called in and got under Michael's skin, I'm afraid. So we're going to listen to that, and we are going to try to give a Reformed response. There's some really interesting comments there.

And then once we get about—we're not going to get through all of it by any stretch of the imagination, even though we're doing a jumbo edition of the program today, then we're going to switch over to Radio Free Damascus, and I'm going to start a series in response to Yusuf Ismail.

I've done this many times before, as you all know. When I have a major debate coming up, one of the things I try to do is to— oh, thank you very much. We have the Blu-ray and DVD available now of the Southern Evangelical Seminary Predestination Debate.

It is at store .aomin .org if you'd like to go and get that. I'm supposed to do things like that. I'm not very good at doing things like that. As you can tell, that was really a natural transition. But anyway—no, that's okay.

We'll stick with this. Keep your hands off that microphone. Anyway, I have many times done reviews of lectures, debates, et cetera, by people I'm going to be debating to try to help them to prepare for our debate, to make it a better debate.

Now, there's not too many people that do that. In fact, let me think for a second. No, I can't think of anybody that does that. I've tried to—I don't honestly think—I can't think of anybody who does entire debate reviews publicly, makes it available for the people I'm going to be debating.

Here's what I'm going to say. Here's how I respond to what you're saying before the debate actually takes place. But that's—I really want these debates to be useful. And so that's—and when you're confident of the truth, that's the way to do it.

And so I'm going to be responding to the debate that took place between William Lane Craig and Yusuf Ismail in 2010, which, interestingly enough, was arranged—in fact, the fellow who arranged the Southern Evangelical Seminary debate between myself and Michael Brown is the one who arranged the debate between Yusuf Ismail and William Lane Craig and told me that, and he's mentioned in the debate.

So Simon Brace is his name. So we will be doing that in the second half of the program today. So that's what is on tap. So with that, let's get to it. I wanted to start off by responding to the primary thing that Michael said a number of times, where he basically asked the question, does it really matter?

One, I would like to see if my Calvinist friends can demonstrate that it actually matters in terms of having a belief one way or the other on this. In other words, as far as our service of God, as far as our service to the world, as far as our passion to see the lost saved and Jesus glorified, in practical terms, not theoretical terms, in practical terms, does it actually matter?

I actually believe that you can be a Calvinist, you can be an Arminian, and if you are committed to the Great Commission, if you live your life, say, the same way that Whitefield and Wesley did, or the same way that Spurgeon and Moody did, I mean, just put people on different sides of the equation, if you live with a passion to see the lost saved and discipled, and a passion to see God glorified and you're committed to praying and doing what you know how to do, then if God chooses or He doesn't choose or however it works out, that's His business, and we go about doing the work.

Why divide over it? Why make a major issue over it? That's something I'd like to discuss with you as well. Now, by the way, I do have things sped up just a little bit. That's what I normally do in debates, so that we can get more material covered, because I talk fast, and so that means everybody else has to talk fast too.

And I've been told that when other people then speed this program up to listen to it fast, that that can cause a problem, but there's nothing we can do about that. Does it matter? I mentioned, I believe I mentioned, I have a recollection of mentioning, in our debate anyways, that one of the things that does concern me, and I think this is an answer to one of the audience questions, is that it does matter.

For example, I do not believe Michael and I could team up to debate a Roman Catholic on a soteriological issue. We couldn't. I don't believe we could team up to debate the Mass, because my understanding of the primary problem with the Mass is that the representation of the one sacrifice of Christ in the Mass does not accomplish the perfection of those for whom it is made.

And I don't believe Michael believes that the death of Christ actually, in and of itself, accomplishes the perfection of those for whom it's made, because he believes it's made for every single person.

And since not everybody's going to be saved, then we don't approach that subject in the same way. We don't have the same view. And so, later on, he's going to say he doesn't believe that we should use terms like Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, etc., etc.

I'm going to respond to that at that point. But he also included the terms monergistic and synergistic, and objected that basically we were rigging the deck by using these terms that, honestly, have a long historical usage as descriptive of the difference between whether you believe that there is one force that saves, that God's grace saves perfectly, or you believe that there are two forces, that there is a combination, a joint effort, in essence, in bringing about salvation.

But the difference between being a monergist and a synergist, there are many practical ramifications. Apologetically, there are. I think a sharp individual that we would be debating might raise those issues.

As I mentioned, not only Roman Catholics, but some others in soteriological areas. And so, we are limited, unfortunately, in the areas that we can team up and have a consistent position in response to other people.

I am troubled by that, but I think it's necessary to point it out and to be honest about it. A. No, I just didn't do a Canadian thing. That was A, as in now B. I think that there is also an apologetic ramification as to how we argue.

Michael is going to ask a number of the callers, and we're going to get to some of this, I think, today. Is God doing everything he can do to save every single individual? And my answer is an obvious, clear, and my goodness, the Bible is awfully clear on this, No!

And I'll be honest, I don't know how someone who is an expert in the Old Testament can say anything other than that. How can anyone say, Oh yeah, God is doing the exact same thing to save the Amorite high priest that he's doing to save Moses.

Everything that he does with the children of Israel. He's doing the exact same stuff with the Egyptians, and the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, and the faraway people in lands like China. He's got the Old Testament sacrifices pointing to the coming Lamb, and he's got the prophecies, and he's sending prophets, and he's sending scriptures.

No, he's not. No, he's not. There's no evidence of that. So the idea that, well yeah, God's just giving 100 effort for every single individual, I see absolutely no evidence of that. Where does the Bible say, I am trying to save every person equally, and I only accomplish it with those who cooperate with me.

I just, I don't see it. As such as I don't see it, that's just directly contradictory to everything that we do see. And if God was already doing that, why does he send Christians all over the world? Why is there this big transition into sending people out with the gospel?

Just a lot of differences with this there. So it matters in, for example, how we argue with atheists. I approach the person I'm talking to as a person who is enslaved to sin. I do not present the evidence of the existence of God to an individual as if they are in the position to judge God's word.

They're not. They're creatures. They are condemned creatures. The wrath of God abides upon them, and they have no right to judge the existence of God. And I do not put them in a position of thinking they can in any way, shape, or form.

So there's a lot of practical ramifications there. There's practical ramifications in regards to the doctrine of the church, how we worship, the regulative principle. And I think this has come out, and certainly in how the church is to be ordered and what the church is to be doing and what its focus is and things like that.

So I really do believe it matters and that that's why we should talk about it. And that's why I do talk about it. That's why I've written books on it, because I do believe that it matters. And I do believe that obviously Michael believes he's being more faithful.

He's going to say that. He's being more faithful and more consistent with the biblical text than I am. Obviously, I believe the opposite, that I am being more consistent with the biblical text. But especially as an apologist, that's really important.

Everybody knows it's really important for me. Yeah, that James White guy, he's that consistency dude. Well, I don't know how you define truth. I remember logic class I took. How do you define truth without using the term consistency?

You just have to be consistent. So I think that it does actually make a difference in a number of different areas. And it can out on the street in the proclamation of the gospel too. Because whether you are proclaiming the gospel and calling sinners to repentance with the assumption that they have the capacity and ability in and of themselves to make that effort successful.

Or whether you are trusting that God will miraculously perform the work of regeneration. That, honestly, Reformed churches are not the ones that have come up with some of the wild and crazy how to get a person through the church doors ideas.

For the very reason that if you're consistently Reformed, you're going to trust the Holy Spirit to do that by the power of the gospel. Not all these other things and ways that things are done. And so on and so forth.

So I think it does make a difference. Now, the one thing that Michael and I did correspond about is his story. And he wrote some fairly long emails back to me. I think it was very straightforward in saying, I did have that experience.

Because I talked a little bit about what made me a Calvinist. Well, here's what he said on the program. Here's his own statement. In fact, I'm going to close it down to normal speed. So you actually hear how he actually put this.

You tell me if this is my description. Well, I'll tell you what my description is first. Then you listen to what Michael said. And then you tell me whether you think that they're saying the same thing.

Why am I Reformed? Believe me, it would be I'd probably have five staff people outside this room if I wasn't Reformed because we'd have a much wider support base and a whole lot more churches that would want to have us in and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

I've said many times the best way to keep your ministry small is to address Roman Catholicism, Islam, and to be Reformed. And that's really, I think, a true observation. But I became Reformed as I was studying the Word of God.

I was not raised anti-Reformed. I was raised certainly in what would have been a non-Reformed context as far as the churches I was a part of, the language that would be used. I wasn't familiar with terms like particular redemption or limited atonement or issues like that.

But I had never been told that Calvinists were heretics and that election is only unto blessings and not unto salvation and all the rest of that kind of stuff. I had always believed in the perseverance of the saints and things like that.

And I remember as a junior in high school at Glorietta, New Mexico, just struggling with the concept of election and my own salvation and all these types of things. And so it was in the midst of really starting to try to put together my own personal faith and, again, that emphasis upon consistency and being exposed to the whole counsel of God and studying Greek and all these things that I was forced to start thinking these topics through.

And fundamentally, there comes a point in time where you encounter the reality that the Scriptures say God is God, you are not. You are his creature. He is holy. He is completely other. He is eternal.

You are time-bound. You are but a vapor. You are the creature at his hand. He is the potter. You're the clay. He can do with you as you wish, as he wishes, not as you wish, as he wishes. And there is a absolutely world-shaking, completely reorienting experience of recognizing that I am not in control.

I am merely a creature. And it was in studying Isaiah 6 and it was in, well, The Holiness of God by R .C. Sproul, just that whole concept of the otherness of God and his absolute kingship over all things that changes you as a person.

One of the ways it changed me, for example, is it was only a few years later that I ended up working as a hospital chaplain. And I had to do so much grief counseling. And almost all the grief counseling books that I found were not written by Reformed people in any way, shape, or form.

I had to work through that on my own because I had had such a soul-changing, life-changing, reorienting encounter with this idea of the sovereignty of God. And it just changes everything. And I think it's a work of the Spirit of God, obviously.

It's not like you're sitting around one day and you flip a coin and go, yeah, okay, I'm going to go with Sproul. Yeah, you know, Geisler, Sproul, I don't know, I think I'll go this way. No. And people who do do it that way tend to be very fickle and end up, I think, being Calvinists who aren't really Calvinists.

So with that in mind, here's Michael describing his time as a Calvinist and what made him a Calvinist. And I want to give as much time to callers as possible. So in a nutshell, when I got saved in 1971, I never heard of Calvinism or Arminianism, but the church in which I was saved would be strongly Arminian, if you had to classify it, although we didn't use those terms.

We respected Charles Spurgeon, but we agreed with John Wesley, if you had to break it down like that. I didn't know a lot about the issues when I studied Scripture. I saw a few verses that could point towards Calvinism, but otherwise it seemed clear to me what Scripture said.

Around 1977, 76, 77, doing a lot of theological study, reading more scholarly material, commentators, different things, I saw, wow, some of these guys are Calvinists, some of these great scholars and Bible commentaries and theologians.

Maybe there's something I'm missing. I began to look into this and went through kind of an intellectual, emotional conversion and said, yes, I accept Calvinism is true and scriptural. And that's what I held to quite dogmatically for the next five years.

When I experienced deep personal revival in my own life in 82, I questioned some of the things that I had learned through primarily intellectual theological study and not primarily getting alone with God, on my knees with the word open, seeking his face.

And that's just my experience. I'm not saying it's your experience. And when I reflected back on the word, I couldn't deny that from beginning to end, God called human beings to choose life or death, to receive his free gift or to reject it and that he held us accountable.

And I found that as much as I appreciated Calvinism's emphasis on God as king and ruler, something I hold to, to this day, I could not agree with the five points of Calvinism and have not held to it since 1982 and did not talk about it a lot or preach about it a lot or emphasize it a lot until being on radio about five years ago, I started getting lots of questions.

So it's come up more since then. Now, here's the phraseology again. I think it was right here. When I reflected back on the word, I couldn't. No, maybe it was up here. I began to look into this and went through kind of an intellectual, emotional conversion and said, yes, I accept Calvinism is true and scriptural.

And that's what I held to quite dogmatically for the next five years. When I experienced deep personal revival in my own life in 82. Now saying intellectual, emotional conversion, and then real revival is making a contrast that I think in my experience, it was that encounter with the holiness of God that was real revival for me.

And now he said, no, I'm not making this a blanket thing, but this is just my experience. Okay. My experience is just the opposite. That when you encounter the living God as he truly is, that was part and parcel of what convinces me that he is king.

I am not. And I never will be. And I cannot be. And that's one of the differences, I think. Especially with the standard objections that come up in this particular conversation are objections that I think a Reformed person, I would like to hear how Michael understood his own objections when he was a quote-unquote Calvinist.

So we'll get into those as we look at some of these particular statements. Yeah, very true. And Rick, thanks for your kind words. And my feelings, of course, were exactly the same towards Dr. White in terms of his scholarship and his graciousness in our debate at Southern Evangelical Seminary.

Folks, you can also order that if you want to watch it on DVD from our website. And from ours. And Rick, I also have no problem leaving certain things in tension. In other words, I don't have to tie together every loose knot.

I don't have to necessarily be able to say how this verse and this verse are in perfect harmony. I'd love to do that. But if I'm not able, that's certainly in keeping with first-century Jewish thought.

For example, we have a famous statement from the second century or early third century, but it probably goes back earlier, where the rabbi said that everything is foreknown and free will is given. And you say, how can those both be true?

They can't be. Tension is... I remember back when I was in seminary, I went to church with another fellow who was going to the same seminary, Fuller Seminary, their extension here in Phoenix. And I remember I was talking about this very issue with him at a Bible study get-together.

You know, Baptists have get-togethers. We look for every possible excuse to eat something. Rich is even eating in the other room right now. And I hope you don't get any crumbs on the board or anything like that.

That would be bad. But yeah, the board's far enough away. That's why you designed it that way, isn't it? OK, gotcha. Anyways, I can't do that in here and talk at the same time. It really doesn't get in the computer, and that would be bad.

Anyways, we were at one of these things, and I was sort of pressing him on this particular subject because I was really working through it. And the favorite term at Fuller was tension. There's tension in the text.

There's tension in the text. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. If God has revealed these things to us and he wants us to know these things, then don't you think that by looking at the whole counsel of God and recognizing there's a priority to certain things, like what the Bible says about God is probably a high-priority thing, and that might shed light on lesser things.

And he's like, you can't allow for tension. You're trying to figure out too much stuff, is what he said to me. I've never forgotten that particular statement that he made to me. I'm not saying that I've got everything figured out, but what I am saying is if you listen to our debate, I think I was presenting a very consistent understanding of God's relationship to time that makes sense of God's statements, and I've not found a consistency in Michael's position on the same issue.

And when we get to that point, he's like, well, you may be trying to go too far. I think you're going beyond Scripture. But the interesting thing is, a number of times during the call-in program, he would say to other people, well, the consistent testimony of Scripture is.

Well, obviously, I think the consistent testimony of Scripture is to God's sovereignty and man's responsibility, and that responsibility is underneath God's sovereignty and the result of God's sovereignty.

But it does not mean that God, therefore, has given up his sovereignty in the selection of his elect people or any of these other things. And so I don't think it's a matter of, well, you're just taking certain texts and we just need to leave tension in the text.

I think that we should interpret Scripture in such a way as to have the least quote-unquote tension in the text, because if you have massive amounts of tension in the text, then what you're saying is God really hasn't spoken with clarity.

And I think God has spoken with clarity. And I think that's an important aspect of things. And that led into, and here's a good example, that led into a discussion of quote-unquote prevenient grace, the very thing that I keep challenging my synergistic friends to show me in Scripture.

Where do you find, I'm not asking you where you find the term prevenient grace, because we all know it's not there. This is a later construction. This is a theological construct. And so we have the idea of a gracious act on God's part, evidently, from what Michael says here, it sounds like what he's saying, aimed at every single human being ever.

That every single human being receives prevenient grace, and the purpose of that prevenient grace is to enable us to have a free choice, by grace, to accept Jesus. Now, I simply say Amorite priest again.

I see no evidence whatsoever that by prevenient grace, an Amorite priest, while the children of Israel are in captivity in the land of Canaan, when God himself says their transgression is not yet full, that there is any evidence that there is some prevenient grace bringing that person to a position of being able to have salvation aside from the proclamation of God's Word.

Just, I guess, based upon some supernatural revelation? I don't know. But here's, you know, I say, you want to talk about a situation where you have something that's really unbiblical? Prevenient grace is really unbiblical.

I see no evidence that God's grace tries to save. And in fact, you want another area where this is really important? This is the issue of the Reformation. The issue of the Reformation, as I've said so many times before, was not the necessity of grace.

I recognize that my Arminian friends say that grace is necessary. The issue of the Reformation was the sufficiency of that grace. Can God's grace save without the assistance of humankind? That is not a divisive question.

That's not a, you're loading the question wrongly. That was the central issue of overthrowing the sacramental system of Rome. Interestingly enough, one of the callers was actually a Catholic. They had a Roman Catholic caller.

And tried to promote Scott Hahn and Akers and some other folks. And they're all former Calvinists too. And that was, well, I'll play that one later. But here's the prevenient grace discussion. They held to them both being true, as I do.

But Ephesians 2, For by grace you are saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God. So there is debate among Greek scholars as to what this is speaking of. Is it speaking of that salvation is through faith?

Or that, excuse me, that the gift is salvation? That the gift is faith? That the gift is grace through faith? The whole package was clear to me. The whole package is really about the only way it can be.

To be very honest with you. None of us deserve salvation. That in and of ourselves, we can't save ourselves. That in and of ourselves, that we cannot advance towards God. Nor do we want to advance towards God.

In that respect, when Martin Luther said that man has free will. If you let him go, he goes down. If you pick him up, he goes up. There's much truth in that. That being said, I do believe in what's called prevenient grace.

Which is that the call does go out. That Jesus says in John 12, 32. That if he'll be lifted up on the cross. Meaning that he'll draw all men to himself. Now, prevenient grace and a universal call are not the same thing.

Prevenient grace brings a person to a point. At least historically. At least the Wesleyan formulation of prevenient grace. Is this, well even Rome has a concept of prevenient grace. Is the idea of a grace that basically counteracts the effects of depravity.

And sort of brings you back to a moral neutral point in essence. And I would love to see, hopefully what's not being suggested is that that's what Ephesians 2 is talking about. Because Ephesians 2 is not talking about prevenient grace.

Ephesians 2 is talking about a powerful grace. For by grace you have been saved. Not for by grace you were brought to a position where you can make the decision to be saved. Grace never makes men savable.

This is one of the main issues that I raised against Norman Geisler. Norman Geisler's position is that grace makes us savable. That's Rome's position. That's the synergistic position. The dividing line is between the monergists and the synergists here.

Rome has the prevenient grace concept. The Wesleyans have the prevenient grace concept. Norman Geisler has the prevenient grace concept. The idea that grace is absolutely necessary. I'm glad that people are saying grace is necessary.

But that issue was solved and settled a long, long time ago. That is not enough. The issue is, is grace sufficient to save apart from the actions of the human will? Can God save his elect people? Or does he just try his best, give a 100 effort?

It seems just glaringly clear to me that not everybody, every pygmy in Africa, has not been knocked off his horse by blinding light from heaven. God extended special effort with Saul of Tarsus. Burning bushes and flaming chariots.

And God has used extraordinary means to save his elect people. And he doesn't do that for everybody. He just doesn't. So the idea that there's an equal 100%, we're all doing the same thing for everybody, not a possibility.

It's just not a possibility. So, whatever we're talking about when we talk about grace in Ephesians 2, that is a powerful grace. That is a grace that saves. And I'm still waiting for the grace that doesn't save.

The grace that makes, I want to, where is the verses? Where we can provide so much meaningful exegesis of texts that say that grace saves. Titus chapter 2, the grace that saves. Where is the meaningful exegesis of texts of the grace that does not save, but makes us savable?