Jonathan Leeman’s Response to Grace Church, More on the Fradd/Bertuzzi Ecumenical Discussion

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Greetings, welcome to The Vowing Lion. My name is James White, and we have had quite the interesting weekend.

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Have we not? We indeed have. I'm not really referring to myself that much.

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Did have an interesting night last night at church. We've linked to at least

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Facebook version of that particular sermon on compatibility. For those of you who are interested in those particular issues, we're in the middle of a series on the

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Doctrines of Grace. So not like it's something we haven't discussed on the program before, because we have, but we really went into some level of depth on that particular subject.

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And so we'll let you know about that and maybe I'll try to remember to link to it when it's put on YouTube later in the week.

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But, as most of you know, as we went into the weekend, a statement was released by the elders of Grace Community Church in Southern California.

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Now, as far as large churches go, yes,

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Grace is a large church. It's not a really mega church in the sense of some of the massive churches out there.

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It's very large, but it's moderately very large. Let's put it that way. Its influence, of course, is due to John MacArthur and due to the

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Master's Seminary and to Master's grads around the world. That's really where the popularity, not popularity, but influence comes from.

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And as most people know, back in March, when the government took the unprecedented step, and it has been unprecedented, just think, can you think of any disease?

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Can you think of anything since 1918? So in the last century and the global pandemic 1918, multiple times more deadly than what we're facing now.

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But can you think of anything that has ever been treated the way it's been treated? I remember I was in college when

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AIDS hit, and I was biology major, biology and Bible major, which was interesting when

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AIDS hit, because interesting conjunction there. But even then, when you have something that at that time, once you got it, that was it.

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There's death sentence. There's no recovery from that. 100%. I mean, you're gonna go.

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It may take you a while, but you're gonna go. They've got treatments for it now, but they certainly did not at the time.

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Even then, that was not treated in the same way that this has been treated in our, globally.

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So when the government started taking these unprecedented steps, and in essence, we were being told that millions of people would be dead in a matter of weeks.

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The computer models, now we know, designed by British people who should never be allowed near a computer again, were rather dire in what they were saying, and then started the panic plague, where, no matter where you go and what you do, if you pick up your phone, your phone buzzes, and you look, and it's

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COVID -19, and it's death numbers, and it's projections, and every website you go to, it's

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COVID this and COVID that, and every news channel, including

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Fox, it's got a constant running tally of cases and deaths and everything else.

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And so, the large majority of churches, not all, but those of us who didn't close could count the other churches didn't close, with a few fingers left over, decided to embrace the love -your -neighbor mantra, and the interpretation that came along with that, that wasn't really explicitly stated, but it was there, the interpretation that went along with that, which was you love your neighbor by going to online services.

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You don't necessarily show any concern for the members of your church who have a conviction that they that they need the

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Fellowship of the Saints in a fashion other than being online. But at the time, again, there were very dire, dire predictions being made.

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We could not know at the time that this disease was not nearly as serious for most people.

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Again, what's the average age been? Upper 70s, 80, somewhere around there.

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It does function very much as pneumonia, has functioned throughout the history of mankind as the mechanism of bringing elderly people to the point of eternity.

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It does do that. There's no question about that. But it was especially strange because it basically has no impact upon children at all, which is when you think there has never been a time in American history where American education has ground a complete halt for something that has absolutely no impact on children at all.

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It just doesn't affect them. So anyway, many churches went online, as did

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Grace Community, and were there were there some of us who went, okay, yeah, sure, but most of us weren't in California.

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As I referred to California yesterday in my sermon, the Soviet Socialist Republic of California. Really shouldn't be

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Soviet, should be Chinese Communist Republic of California. They're much more relevant today than the Russians.

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Yeah, and you can get a bunch of K's that way if you want, or C's. C's, K's, whatever. Well, see,

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I like the Russian, the California comrade, you know, yeah, whatever. We're not over there.

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And so my church, we didn't close down, but we live in a state where we read the governor's stuff and said, nope, he realizes that that's beyond his pale at this point, and the numbers substantiate that.

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Anyway, it has become plainly obvious to many of us and to the elders at Grace Community as well, as Dr.

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MacArthur explained yesterday, that this situation is being utilized in a completely inappropriate fashion by political forces.

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It has been politicized. That is, I don't think beyond, I think it's beyond dispute, but there are many people there's a lot of things that are beyond dispute today that will be disputed by anyone.

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So that's just the nature of our society right now. So as the death totals go down and down and down, and the response of government is to become crazier and crazier and crazier, it becomes very obvious this is due to the fact that this is an election year, and that those who have a very vested interest in making sure that this is the last contested election in the

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United States. I firmly believe that. Given that the left has plainly stated that it is their intention to pack the

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Supreme Court, to open the borders, to grant citizenship to anybody and everybody within the borders of the

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United States, even if they're here illegally, it is their intention, and by changing the methodology of voting, it is their intention to make sure this is the last time that 2016 could ever happen.

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So they were willing to do anything. They're burning cities down right now. There are federal buildings under constant assault every night right now, and we've never seen the extent of this type of...

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Well, I'll take that back. We didn't have video camera back then. I would imagine that there were a couple times during the

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Civil War there were riots in New York and places like that that may have rivaled what's going on right now, but we were pretty close to coming...

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Well, we already had come apart at the seams, and we were pretty close to coming apart at the seams in even greater ways at that point in time, but certainly in our lifetimes, we've never seen anything like what we're seeing right now.

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Even the riots of the 60s don't... The purposefulness, organization, longevity, no.

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This year is going to continue to set new records for all of that kind of stuff if we survive that long.

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So anyway, as a result of that, the elders of Grace Community came to the conclusion that what was going on in California in prohibiting churches from meeting, indoors, from singing, etc.

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etc. were obvious corruptions. They were not just... It wasn't just Caesar coming out of his lane.

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It's Caesar driving a semi -truck over the church's lane, and that there was no meaningful foundation any longer that had existed in the minds of many before, including their own, that this is how you love neighbor, and this is all the rest of this kind of stuff.

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Now, it's just simply how you bow to Caesar and say, yes, Caesar, whatever you say,

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Caesar. Yes. Yes. Yes, Lord Caesar. And they weren't going to do it anymore. So the sermon yesterday, which one advantage of There are lots of disadvantages, but one advantage of being in a church that meets at 4 o 'clock on Sunday afternoons is you sort of get to find out what our bells doing.

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Yes. Never really thought about that before, but so I got to listen to most of the sermon yesterday, and it was it was vintage Johnny Mac in the sense of you know, when you're basically addressing the governor of your state, and one of the examples he uses is when

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God struck Herod, and he was eaten with worms and died. Yeah.

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Yeah, there you go. Pretty good example, actually.

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I don't have any problem with that, but I just couldn't help but chuckling. Anyway, it was incredible.

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It's now posted on the Grace Church website. It was available afterwards, of course, on Facebook.

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That's how I was watching it. It's really amazing that Facebook allowed that to happen.

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There were 4 .3 thousand people. It said 4 .3k watching, and when we've tried to watch, like one week we missed church, and we tried to watch our own live stream from Apologia, and we had three or four hundred, and we couldn't watch it.

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It was a stop, start, stop, start. It was just terrible. That may have just been that one because my dad texted me after last night's sermon, so I guess he was able to watch it fairly fairly easily.

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I guess it worked pretty well. Anyway, there were a lot of people watching, and it was a great sermon. It was well -crafted.

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It was straightforward. It proclaimed the Lordship of Christ over the church. I don't get the feeling that John MacArthur meant to do this.

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I get the feeling this was an off -the -cuff remark that just sort of popped into his mind, and he's probably today going, man,

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I wish I hadn't done that, but now, forevermore, the world is going to be filled with memes that say, hold my

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Fresca. I was one of the first people on Twitter to say, if the people who make

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Fresca do not have three cases sitting on John MacArthur's desk Monday morning, they're nuts.

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That was the best advertisement. I honestly, I will admit, I didn't know

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Fresca was still even on the market. I mean, as soon as he said it,

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I was like, I remember that stuff back in the 70s.

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I remember, yeah, Fresca. Yeah, you bet. It's basically lime -flavored soda water.

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Basically, I think. Huh? Sugar -free. Well, there you go. I've sort of been making

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Fresca recently. I mean, I do the club soda with lemon flavoring it, and that's pretty much the same thing.

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But he uses an illustration that he was not able to get his Fresca in a can anymore because the aluminum cans were being used by the beer manufacturers who are just going crazy because the shutdowns, everybody who is chugging beer.

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So that was, that was, it was in passing, but now that is, has, oh goodness,

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Fresca owes him like big time. They really, really do. So anyway, it was a great sermon despite the

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Fresca references, and it was fascinating to immediately see the pushback from many, many people.

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People, some people were just, one person commented on Phil Johnson's tweet of the picture of the full crowd that these must be the snake handlers.

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And our Scott Clarke from Westminster, I was really surprised.

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Really, really surprised. He was all over, where's the social distancing?

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Why isn't anyone wearing masks? And I'm just like, I just didn't see him as one of the masked up subservient ones, but there you go.

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That's, that's the way it works. So anyway,

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I think, yeah, before the sermon, Jonathan Lehman from, you know, he's part of the

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Capitol Hill Nine Marks Beltway Big Eva, I guess you might say.

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He deeply influenced by critical theory, woke theology, been involved in some of the protests, etc, etc.

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But one of those people, like Mark Dever with, you know, you go back to the old

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TGC days before everything went different directions, T4G, TGC, etc, etc.

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That's where the connections, you know, still exist. And so there's still communication there, even though obviously there's been people going different directions.

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He had written a response to the elders of Grace Church, and I wanted to look at it.

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You may recall that a few months ago, I was away for a week and another

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Jonathan Lehman article got responded to from this chair on sort of a similarly related topic as far as the meeting of the church and things like that is concerned.

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So obviously we've been on different sides of this, but I want to make some comments in regards to some of the things that were said by Jonathan Lehman.

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He says, four additional things are worth mentioning in case you did read his piece. First, it's true that MacArthur's church cannot meet, but Christ's church can meet.

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Right now, members of his church can meet outdoors. There is nothing sacrosanct about the particular and present forms of our congregations.

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Well, all the way through this, there was no recognition on Lehman's part of the nature of the thought process and perspectives of the

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California State Government. It is a one -party government. It is a corrupt government.

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It's a bankrupt government. It is a government that is actively dedicated to the promulgation of godlessness.

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This is the government that requires schoolchildren in the state of California to celebrate

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Harvey Milk Day. Harvey Milk was not just a homosexual. He was a pedophile, which seems to be okay with a lot of people in government these days, hoping that a certain woman who has been arrested will live long enough to spill the beans on a lot of that stuff, though the chances of that aren't all that good, as we've already discovered in other cases.

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This is a government that is owned by Planned Parenthood.

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It's as anti -christian as you can get. The socialist communists who run

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Sacramento, can we just be honest as to who they are? Can we take off the blinders and just admit, okay, the

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Cold War went into remission, but it didn't end, and they invaded, and now they've taken over major portions of our government.

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The question is, will they bring it down? That's what they want to do. And the Sacramento government is owned by Planned Parenthood, promotes abortion, murders babies right, left, and center, promotes homosexuality, the profaning of marriage.

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So, can we really honestly look at this? The whole Lehman article is, well, you know, the government,

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Caesar may just be, you know, very concerned about our health. No, he's not. I'm sorry, there's a level of naivete here that is extremely hard to understand, given the track record of who we're dealing with here.

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So, the idea is, well, you know, you could meet outdoors. I guarantee you one thing, not an option in Death Valley, or Palm Springs, or here in Phoenix, Arizona.

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We cannot meet outdoors right now. It would not be possible. We're in that time of year where, well, last night wasn't too bad.

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It got down to 85 is the low at sunrise. But once the sun's been up for an hour, it's going to be into the 90s, and then, you know, 110, 112 degrees in the shade, and that doesn't, that's not going to work.

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Not possible. Well, have you seen the your thermometer? Do you have a time in the morning where the thermometer actually hits your, the sun actually hits your thermometer?

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No, I put my thermometers where they're supposed to be. Well, I don't, thank you very much.

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You're wonderful. I read the instructions. Yes, okay. Well, mine, about six o 'clock in the morning, the sun coming over the horizon, hits that thing head -on, and it's on average 110 to 115.

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Heat coming off the sun at six o 'clock in the morning. So go ahead and stick people out.

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Yeah, not gonna happen. Yeah, not gonna happen, unless you have a lot of EMTs handy. Yeah, so in our, in our situation, and, and certainly in northern climes, in the winters, you can't meet outdoors.

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The, the, the period of time during the year where you could meet outdoors is very limited. So that first one is like, really?

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What, what's that about? And then, well, you can, you can plant churches, right?

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Well, I suppose, but, are you saying that that's what should be done, rather than the fact that this church exists?

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This is, are you questioning that God has made Grace Community Church, Grace Community Church? That, that it's, it's

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God's intention to have churches of such size as they can do certain things? Likewise, quote, is, quote, likewise, is there any biblical reason why your church or mine cannot split into several churches, or take some other form?

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And it's like, if the elders of the church decide that's best for the future ministry of the church, but that is not the government's role.

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And if the elders recognize that the only reason this pressure is being put, placed upon the church is illegitimate, it's political, it is

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Caesar being Caesar, then the question has to be asked, are we in, are we already in the same situation as the persecuted church in China?

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Is that where we are? Is there a difference in how a free church responds to Caesar feeling his oats, and a church that is under persecution?

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If we have the freedom to stand up and to fight for liberty, and to fight for freedom, should we do that?

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I really get the feeling that a large portion of modern -day evangelicalism would have stuck with King George.

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And would never have thought that there should be an independent nation on this continent.

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I just don't think they would have done it the way they're doing things. So, then it says, also one possibility being discussed by the

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Capitol Hill Baptist Church elders is whether they should turn their church into several autonomous congregations should

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DC restrictions eventually make sufficient indoor room for doing so. So, trust me, if you've not been in church leadership, let me clue you into something here.

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Every eldership that I know of, and it's not like I've been having to call any of them,

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I have pastor friends, and we chat once in a while, and we've all done the same thing, and we all started at the very beginning, and that is we need to have contingency plans.

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We need to, if the government says no more, what are we going to do?

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And we were committed from the start. We're still doing church. So, we're gonna have to find innovative ways of doing this if the doors are locked on the church building, if there are cop cars sitting outside, which

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I would really hope that the cops wouldn't do that. I would really hope that the cops would go, oh, wait a minute.

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I happen to have read that Constitution somewhere before, and I'm not going to. I'm not going to enforce that kind of thing.

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But anyway, if there were, we've all thought about this. We've all got plans to do what we have to do in these situations, but they're all the same plans that we've gotten from reading material about how

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China is surviving, how the underground church in China is surviving. Are we really admitting that that's what we're up against now?

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I mean, I'm saying that's exactly what's coming. I just don't think we're there yet. It's coming fast.

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But are we just gonna roll over and go, okay, here we go. Let's go ahead and go straight into that.

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Or do you, when you can, push back and make these individuals make their case.

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There are still going to be, I'm not sure, I would hesitate honestly to call what's coming up a free election.

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I need to find it. It's on Twitter someplace. Maybe somebody can find it. I just don't know how in the world people go back through Twitter and find stuff from months ago.

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Evidently, there's some way of doing it. I don't know how to do it. But I put on Twitter early

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March, I said, I will not accept as valid the results of any mail -in election.

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Because we already know. They've already got a phrase for it. Ballot harvesting.

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The corruption is not even, in my mind, questionable at that point.

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Like I said, they want it to be the last free election one way or the other. But do we push back and do we try to make changes while we still can before it's too late?

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There's nothing left to rescue? Is that an appropriate thing to do? Think about the destruction of human life under communism.

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Do you think it might be good to resist that? Maybe? You think that'd be a righteous thing to do? Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer a little bit about that, just for a second, if you've ever thought about that.

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Quote, I am saying that at least in this moment a church could decide to do something besides all gathering together without selling out to Caesar.

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Well, it really depends when you say, in this moment, there is clearly, and he's gonna say this later on, there's very clearly a different conclusion.

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It really seems that the more woke people are, the less concerned they are about the motivations of the leftist swing of the

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United States government. It's almost like they've never read a book about the Iron Curtain, about the

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Soviet Union, about life in China right now, about life in North Korea. The failed, the long history of failed socialist states.

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And so it's like, well, the moral and ethical element of corrupted governments that are no longer, that no longer fall under the

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Romans 13 rubric. You do realize there's a rubric in Romans 13, right? When Paul describes government there was, how does he describe them?

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Punish evildoers, reward those who do good. What happens when a government punishes good doers and rewards those who do evil?

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Is that a government that is now covered under Romans 13? Because that's the description

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Paul gives. And I say, well, the Roman government was terrible. But the

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Roman government, you read Pliny and Suetonius and others, you read the legal code and the code did not codify what we're codifying today.

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Oh, they had wacko crazy nut balls like Nero, but they knew there were wacko crazy nut balls and they didn't call it good.

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Keep that in mind when someone just starts saying, well, Romans 13 means that you should never fight against any oppressive government at all.

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That's not what it says. So when it says, at least in this moment, okay, what will be next?

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What can Caesar tell Jonathan Lehman to do next? Evidently, Caesar can tell

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Jonathan Lehman that you can't meet, you can't sing, you can't have the

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Lord's Supper, you have to wear a face diaper. And all of this were to do out of love for neighbor.

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So clearly stage three testing, Donald Trump at a medical facility just today, stage three testing 40 ,000 volunteers of vaccine for COVID -19.

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There's like four or five others in production at the same time, which makes you wonder why would you have so many different ones, but they're going for it.

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And if they come up with it, it'll be one of the very first that's ever been developed for a coronavirus, and certainly at this speed.

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And everybody's been warning it may not produce sufficient antibodies, may require multiple vaccinations.

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Somebody's gonna be getting really rich off of this. That's all I can tell you. And their names will probably never be revealed or known other than Bill Gates.

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Coming soon to you, forced vaccination. Is that the next step in loving neighbor?

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How about contact tracing? Is this gonna be loving neighbor as well?

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Where do you draw the line? From a government that wants your children, wants to redefine male and female, wants to redefine marriage, wants to, you know, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics.

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Wow, I mean, where do we finally wake up one day and realize since we never ever got around to drawing the line, there are no lines left to be drawn?

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He says, Christians have long worked to accommodate government restrictions on gatherings, both when those requirements have seemed fair and when they don't.

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But then the illustration he gives, churches in coastal cities during World War II accommodated evening blackout requirements in case enemy planes hit the coasts.

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Is that the same thing here? Was there a government specifically seeking to silence critics of its leftward lurching?

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No, there was a... Believe me, the threat of the

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Imperial Japanese Navy was significantly more real than the 99 .9

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% survivable coronavirus. A 500 -pound bomb from Mitsubishi Zero is not survivable.

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No, there's no 99 % chance surviving that, baby. Mm -mm. No, you just are obliterated.

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So, I find this... Yes, that is a perfectly valid, quote -unquote, restriction, but it wasn't a restriction.

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It was just everybody had to have blackout curtains. That was basic.

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It had nothing to do with, you can't have the sacrament, you can't sing.

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It had nothing to do with any of that. So there's no parallel. It says, those churches didn't insist the government had no right to restrict our worship.

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I'm sorry, that's probably the worst part of the article. That's really bad. It was bad, bad, bad argumentation.

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Really bad argumentation. Now, let's go to more bad argumentation.

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Quote, churches in China today sometimes do well to disobey the government and gather underground, but sometimes they're wise to comply with government restrictions or at least government enforcement measures, such as keeping their non -state sanctioned congregations relatively small.

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Now, the situation in China is extremely complicated, but let's just be honest.

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The Chinese government wants the Chinese people to worship the Chinese government. This is an anti -christian, communist, murderous, destructive of human life government.

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It's satanic to its core. That's got to be the overriding situation here, and I was reading an article from someone from the state sanctioned church coming to realize we can't continue doing this.

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We're no longer a church, right? Right, exactly. The Chinese Communist Party, the

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CCP, is literally telling those churches to replace any images with pictures of Xi Jinping and to sing songs about the revolution and how wonderful the government is.

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They want the government to be worshipped. So, but sometimes they're wise to comply with government restrictions.

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They're blowing the churches up. They're, what, or at least government enforcement measures such as keeping their non -state sanctioned congregations relatively small.

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He tells a story that, well, some of the people he's talked to in China say as long as you stay under 200 that you'll be okay.

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So, is that where we are? It isn't even using this illustration, a tacit admission that what we're facing are communists and the

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California state government. I mean, if there's going to be a parallel, doesn't that say something really, really, really bad about our situation here?

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Don't we still have, let's put it this way, if Grace Community Church was in China, what would have happened on Sunday?

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Ask the people of Hong Kong. Ask the people of Hong Kong. He says, my point here is not that the

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Chinese Communist Party has a right to limit the church to 100. They don't. Well, in whose eyes?

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The Chinese Communist Party certainly thinks that it does. So now all of a sudden it's, oh, the

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Chinese Communist Party is really under the lordship of Christ and doesn't have that right. That's exactly right.

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And neither does Governor Newsom have the right to do what he's doing. Since he's doing it for political purposes, this isn't to save lives.

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This isn't, no, it's not about that anymore. It's so obvious it's not about that anymore. When you can have 20 ,000 people rioting and marching for BLM, a

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Marxist organization, and the government says, you do it, and then you have 3 ,000 people meeting to worship

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Jesus Christ, don't you dare do it. If you can't see the difference there,

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I can't help you. And there are people, there are people on Twitter, I cannot believe the number of Christians on Twitter who are just like, oh, it's just, you know, anyway, we shouldn't have any, we shouldn't make any problems and trouble.

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He says, in other words, just because you think God will ultimately vindicate your decision to disobey the government on the last day doesn't mean it's wise.

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You might have other options that have, that avoid undue attention.

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Undue attention. Well, if your 50 -member church does something, you can avoid undue attention.

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Grace Community Church cannot avoid attention. They've been given a wonderful, awesome opportunity for decades.

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How many times we watched Johnny Mac on Larry King Live? Well, that comes with a price.

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But that price is not capitulation to Caesar. And if Caesar says, stop, you don't just go, well, we don't want undue attention.

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He says, I personally wonder if defying government orders for the sake of a pandemic is the most judicious opportunity to exercise those muscles.

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The politics of LGBT tells me our churches have, may have more occasions to defy government requirements in years to come.

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Well, that's true. But I just can't believe that Jonathan Lehman can't see it's all of one thing.

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It's all of one movement. It's all the same. The same government that is promoting

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LGBTQ and demanding our celebration of it, especially in California, is the government using

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COVID -19 as an excuse at the very point in time when the number of deaths are way, way, way down here, after the spike, all the way down here, and now they're trying to milk the very last out of it that they can possibly get.

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I think that's the conclusion that the elders have come to as well, and that's why they have taken the viewpoint that they have.

41:21

And so, as he's gonna point out, he recognizes that obviously they're taking a different view of the current danger of the pandemic.

41:31

And it is interesting, Dr. MacArthur made that plain in the sermon.

41:37

He went through the numbers and it was a part of the decisions that remained. And then he talks about, as those restaurant and gym owners cast a glance over at our churches, will our refusal to abide by the same restrictions which are causing them financial distress help the witness of the gospel, especially if we could find other ways to comply, such as meeting outdoors?

41:57

Well, aside from the fact that many of us can't do that, there is no parallel between a profit -making business and the demand of Jesus to worship

42:08

Him. Okay, so I'm really tired of this. Well, as long as we're all being treated the same, this is the whole point that seems to be being missed on the part of a lot of people, is your workout, your local gym, and our gathering to celebrate the

42:29

Lord's Supper are not the same things. One was commanded by the risen Lord and one was not.

42:37

Now, I don't think that the government really has any business closing, you know, just arrested those two gym owners in New Jersey yesterday, or today, last night,

42:47

I think, maybe. I think that's all abusive and everything else, and if there's ever any justice, that'll be taken care of then, but there probably won't be, be it as it may.

42:57

The point is, Jesus didn't command us to work out at the gym, but He did command us to participate in the

43:03

Supper, and so there is a transcendent value that, obviously, in our secular society, no one seems to really be concerned too much about any longer.

43:18

He does talk about the jurisdictions. Sphere sovereignty is not the term that he uses, but that's the term that a lot of people use, sphere sovereignty.

43:29

And he says, those jurisdictional circles, to some extent, overlap whenever it's the same people who are bound by those distinct jurisdictions.

43:36

After all, each of those authorities can possess a claim on a person, no matter what building the person is standing in.

43:43

Well, that's true, and our claim is that the ultimate authority, then, in all spiritual matters, which is what worship is, is

43:53

Christ, not the socialist government. Is there really any argument about that?

44:01

There shouldn't be any argument about that, but that's, he then spends a great deal of time talking about abusive parents and issues like that, and building codes and so on and so forth.

44:17

All that to say, it's not immediately evident to me that the government's original orders back in March, and now again in July, are, in MacArthur's words, an illegitimate intrusion of state authority into ecclesiastical matters.

44:28

One could argue they're doing their job by seeking to maintain peace, order, and the preservation of life, as hundreds of people gather, potentially infect one another, and then scatter into the wider community.

44:38

Well, it certainly seems that Lehman consent continues to buy that particular narrative, and as the evidence mounts of the abuse of that narrative, as motorcyclists dying are listed as COVID deaths, as many more people are reporting the fact that they've received positive tests when they didn't get the test, as you've had people in charge in government standing in front of cameras saying, as long as you die with COVID, you're a

45:19

COVID death. Doesn't matter whether you were, in fact, there, I've mentioned on this program, and now

45:28

I've heard experts saying the same thing. Remember, I don't know, a month and a half or so ago, we were talking about some of the numbers, and I point out that someone had pointed out to me that we were like a hundred thousand deaths ahead of where we would project it to have been in 2020 if it hadn't been for COVID.

45:53

No, we were 66 ,000, was it 66 ,000? Something like that, ahead, and yet we had had a hundred thousand

46:00

COVID deaths. So that meant that a full third would have died by this point in time anyways, and I saw an expert just two weeks ago saying, in reality, the vast majority of people who've died of COVID would not have lived through 2020 one way or the other.

46:16

In other words, they had the the presence of comorbidity factors. That's why you have such an emphasis now in the pandemic porn, which is what you're now seeing.

46:28

If you sit back and just listen, what's being done now in the media is you're trying to come up with the worst case scenario stories to tell to continue the panic, because it's working.

46:41

But panic wears off. You can only have so much adrenaline going in your system.

46:48

You need something even more to keep it going. So you've got to come up with more and more and more and more.

46:53

It's like pornography addiction. You got to keep getting more and more and more and more. And what you got three years ago ain't gonna help you now, because you got to get more stuff, and same thing.

47:05

So you get more and more. Just watch. You're listening to it right now, people telling these horrific stories that they never tell about any other disease, even though you could tell them about all these other diseases.

47:17

But that's not useful to us right now, so we won't go into that. So with all these numbers, and the inflation of the numbers, and motorcyclists, and the skydivers dying of COVID, and the parachutes don't open, and everything else, this is really the issue.

47:42

This isn't legitimate. This isn't the plague. I don't think Grace Community, or our church, my church, would be open and meeting if we had reasoned evidence that by so doing, we were going to kill half our congregation.

48:02

We wouldn't be there, obviously. So when you look back at what happened during the

48:09

Great Mortality, 1347 -1351, they didn't know, and they kept meeting.

48:18

That wasn't a good idea. And people died, right, left, and center.

48:25

Massive casualties. But this ain't the plague, by any stretch of the imagination.

48:33

99 .9 % versus a mortality rate of 70%.

48:40

There's no comparison here. But we're treating it as if it is. We're literally treating it as if it is the same as the plague itself.

48:51

So is there a line? Is there? Look, let's just be honest.

48:57

Meeting together in a congregation is not completely safe.

49:05

Does anyone remember 2019? Does anyone remember a church? Was it 2019 or 2018?

49:13

Anyone remember a church in Texas where a guy stands up in the middle of service and starts shooting?

49:21

And an eagle -eyed defense instructor from 30 feet away drops him with one shot to the head?

49:34

Churches attract insane people, and people die.

49:42

So obviously we should stop meeting. Because to save one life, that's worth it, right?

49:51

Though we don't track it in the same way because it wouldn't have the media impact.

49:59

We all know, every church I know of talks to parents and says, hey, there's something going around amongst the kids right now.

50:10

If your kids have got the sniffles and the coughs and stuff, please don't come this

50:16

Sunday. Because we all know it happens. It's not.

50:22

That's not the issue here. The kids are fine. All the kids go to church all they want to right now. It wouldn't make any difference.

50:28

But we all do that. But it's not 100 % safe to ever go to church.

50:39

So safism is the new religion of our land. It really is. Safism. It's got to be perfectly safe.

50:46

There's never going to be a time when it's going to be perfectly safe. So where do you draw the line? Now, if all

50:53

Jonathan Lehman is saying is, well, every congregation needs to be left to draw that line for themselves. Okay, fine.

51:02

But what that means is Grace Community has looked at the numbers and has especially looked at the motivations of the socialist communist state government of California and has recognized you people are, you're abusing us and we're not going to be abused anymore.

51:29

So he says, for example, still, if the state does have the authority to tell church leaders, if you try to bind the consciences of church members by telling them they should attend a gathering that could physically harm them, we will intervene.

51:41

Then we should be patient, even as that time extends for a while. Think about it for a second, folks. The mechanisms are already written into the positions of the left to use that very argumentation to shut every church down that will not affirm and celebrate homosexual marriage.

52:05

Every single thing about it. If the state does have the authority to tell church leaders, if you try to bind the consciences of church members by telling them they should attend a gathering that could, instead of physically harm them, cause them to imbibe hate speech and become hateful themselves with the result that LGBTQ members in the society will be harmed, we will intervene.

52:38

That's already what they want to do. That's already what they want to do.

52:45

So we should demand the absolute highest level of truthful accuracy in their assertion of this physical harm.

52:58

And when we do, we find out these folks are fudging the numbers big time. Big time.

53:06

He says, what's implied in MacArthur's statement is that his elders don't believe there is a real threat with COVID -19.

53:11

That's not fair. They did not say that. They do recognize that COVID -19 can be a deadly disease, especially for certain people, but it's not what it was told to us from the start.

53:26

It continues to not be that. It is plain beyond all question that if there was any semblance of fairness and balance in the coverage of this disease, it would be constantly put into the context of other diseases as well.

53:46

It never is. This is the only disease you even hear about anymore. It's the only one.

53:55

You don't hear about anybody dying from anything anymore other than COVID. And there's a reason for that.

54:02

It's a political reason. It's a social reason. So it's not fair at all to say that they don't believe there is a real threat with COVID -19.

54:11

They do. But they believe it's manageable, and they believe it's targeted, and that it is being used.

54:21

And I think all those are really indisputable realities. I said yesterday, as people were applauding and everything else at the end of the sermon, and for good reason, it was very well done.

54:43

I said, okay, we're all rah -rah, but this is just the first shot.

54:52

There's going to be pushback. The threat of the mayor of Los Angeles had initially been any business or anything like that that does not comply will shut the power off to him.

55:13

So that takes time to do. So I wasn't overly surprised that the light stayed on last week.

55:22

But I can see the mayor of Los Angeles going to the courts, and I can see the wild -eyed leftist judges granting the right to shut down Grace Church and anybody else.

55:41

Board the doors. Arrest the board. They'd do it. They'd do it.

55:48

Man, it would make a stink for now, but they'd do it. So we'll see.

55:54

We'll see. The question really is, has God already given this nation over to its own self -destruction?

56:04

As John MacArthur said in the sermon, we have this massive uptick in suicides and depressions and everything else going on because of the lockdowns.

56:22

And so they keep the liquor stores open, which can never solve any of that, only make it worse, and close the one place that could solve it, the churches.

56:38

That was part of his polemic that, no, they're not being fair, and no, they're not being consistent.

56:46

And at least the four Supreme Court justices who still have a conscience and are still conscious of the nature and history of the

56:58

Constitution itself said as much in regards to the fact that last week the

57:08

Supreme Court refused to take the petition from the church in Nevada, where you can go gamble, you just can't go to church.

57:17

Yeah, it's great. It's great. Anyway, okay, how far did

57:24

I take that? Wow, really? I didn't realize that.

57:35

Well, I had said we were going to continue. I want to make a few more comments on the

57:41

Seven Catholic Things video with Matt Fradd and Cameron Bertuzzi.

57:48

There was a portion, it was continuing in the purgatory question.

57:59

We didn't get to this, and I felt it was really, really important. And Matt Fradd did a video,

58:06

I think yesterday or day four, with Patrick Madrid on solo scriptura that I'll probably take a look at as well.

58:13

That remains key and central in, well, it is the key central issue in really everything when you think about it.

58:24

If scripture is by its nature completely different than anything else, then, and it teaches its own sufficiency, then that means that anything called tradition or anything else you want to call it, as Jesus taught us, needs to be tested by scripture.

58:44

That's what Jesus did with allegedly divine tradition. The Corban rule, the rule that the

58:54

Jews made reference to, and they claimed it came from God. They claimed it had been given to Moses and passed down through the rabbis orally.

59:02

And Jesus condemned them for this and said, you should have tested by the scriptures. And that's what we do.

59:09

And we do that with Rome's dogmas. We find Rome's dogmas to be non -apostolic.

59:16

And the farther down in history, interestingly enough, that you get as far as the definition of these dogmas, the more obvious it becomes that they, that the apostles wouldn't have ever even, papal infallibility, really?

59:30

Bodily assumption of Mary, really? But you're talking so far down in church history there that it's amazing.

59:38

Anyway, but I wanted to, the purgatory issue, remember last time I mentioned to you the fact that the debate we did on Long Island with Peter Stravinskas, that's what we closed the last program off with, was some of the

59:51

Q &A between myself and Stravinskas. And by the way, I should go ahead and tell the story just real quick.

59:57

It was at that debate, remember, you know, last program, last seven minutes or so, we just played the cross, part of the cross -examination between myself and Peter Stravinskas.

01:00:08

And people really enjoy that in debates. I learned fairly early on that cross -ex is where it happens.

01:00:15

Cross -examination is where you're either going to demonstrate the consistency of your position or your, the wheels are going to fall off.

01:00:23

And the wheels fell off for Peter Stravinskas at that particular point in time, just like Tim Staples when we did the debate here.

01:00:29

The wheels will fall off of anybody doing a purgatory debate at that point, unless they start fudging on what purgatory actually is, what its actual dogmatic definition from the

01:00:42

Council of Florence was in the context of the Council of Florence. Now, again, I doubt fully, and this is what has changed the nature of doing

01:00:52

Roman Catholic apologetics today. I doubt fully that Pope Francis believes in purgatory.

01:00:59

I can't imagine that he believes in the thesaurus meritorium. And in the same context, as it was defined within Roman Catholic theology,

01:01:09

I think he's minimally an inclusivist, in all probability a universalist, and hence how you'd even understand things like thesaurus meritorium and satis passio.

01:01:23

That changes the context of everything, at least at the Reformation, at least in the debates

01:01:30

I've done with Roman Catholic apologists. In decades past, there was a fairly sharply definable line of demarcation.

01:01:44

With Pope Francis, it's a different situation, very, very much so. Anyway, so I want to pick back up with the continuation of the...

01:01:55

Cameron was saying, I'm quite open to this sanctification thing and so on and so forth, and Matt, of course, is doing the, you know, it could just be that rush of sanctification thing, just totally dodging the reality of what indulgences meant.

01:02:19

I mean, the very fact that you would get a hundred days indulgence, are you really telling me that days was just like saying cents, dollars, lira, something like that?

01:02:32

It's obvious what it meant, and it's obvious when you read the stories of saints and mystics at that time.

01:02:42

They have visions of people bathed in flames who have been in purgatory.

01:02:50

They see popes in purgatory who died a hundred years earlier. The whole promise of the brown scapular was that Mary would descend on the

01:03:05

Saturday after your death if you were wearing the brown scapular, and Jason Wallace sent me a video on Facebook after I heard the last program,

01:03:14

I guess. I should have cued this up, but it was a guy selling brown scapulars, but it starts off basically him saying, are you tired of really uncomfortable brown scapulars that are made cheaply and break too easily?

01:03:32

Well, look at our brown scapular, and it's made of high quality wool with special...

01:03:39

and he's pulling on it and it's not breaking and all this stuff. The super comfortable, and it's not meant to be like a hair shirt.

01:03:47

The brown scapular is meant to be worn outside, so it wasn't meant to be rough and cause penitential suffering and things.

01:03:56

It's got a special pocket for your special medals of other saints and all this stuff, and it's still going on, man.

01:04:04

The promise was the Saturday after they put your body in the grave,

01:04:09

Mary comes and releases you. That doesn't make any sense if there aren't any

01:04:16

Saturdays, okay? And if you want to sit there and go, well, you just obviously, even if you're buried on Monday, you just rush through the

01:04:24

Saturday. No! It's so painfully obvious that they understood.

01:04:32

Look, Johann Tetzel could not have made a dime if indulgences had been understood in any other way.

01:04:43

You have to tell me that all those popes collected all that money that built

01:04:50

St. Peter's Basilica, knowing that the poor suckers there are ripping off.

01:04:56

Well, we don't really know anything about time, but we'll let them think so as long as the money keeps coming.

01:05:02

Is that what you're telling me? I don't think that's what you want to tell me. I don't think that's what you want to tell me. No, but poor

01:05:09

Cameron, this doesn't even push back. It's just, there's nothing about, well, wait a minute. What about the impudent righteousness of Christ? What about union with Christ?

01:05:17

It's just like, oh, that sounds interesting. I'm just like, oh, Cameron. Cameron really is the picture to me of mere

01:05:30

Christianity. We've got our real tight basic core here and all the rest of this stuff out here.

01:05:37

Who knows? When it comes to Rome, he's out there in the middle of the

01:05:42

Tiber paddling around with Norm Geisler and all the rest of them, to be perfectly honest with you. Well, Norm Geisler's not paddling around out there.

01:05:48

He knows which side of the river to land on now.

01:05:56

It's this general classical theism. Let's not worry about what actually produced the

01:06:04

Reformation type thing. And it comes out. So let's listen to a section here because I think this is important.

01:06:14

Here we go. Just sort of happens right when you die. Or yeah, if you're a

01:06:20

Christian and you die and you're immediately sanctified, Jerry just says, do you think that sanctification is a blip or is like an instant?

01:06:28

Or do you think it's a process that happens over a period of time? And if you think that it's a process, then that's all that purgatory is.

01:06:35

In fact, if you think it's a blip, that can be consistent with the Catholic church. Which is interesting. It's interesting that you mentioned that.

01:06:41

Yeah. So I think that, I mean, if by purgatory, you just mean that you're sanctified.

01:06:47

The final rush of our sanctification. Remember, nothing has been said. Matt hasn't said a word about satisfaccio.

01:06:54

He hasn't said anything that Florence said. And again, maybe he doesn't believe what

01:07:01

Florence said. But silly me, I still read dogmatic cans and decrees and canon law and stuff like that.

01:07:09

And I know what purgatory meant at the time of the reformation, what it meant to Trent and all the way up until the modern period, especially pre -Vatican

01:07:25

II. In Vatican II, there's nothing in the documents of Vatican II that does away with any of that.

01:07:31

But some might argue it's the de -emphasis from Vatican II onward that has led to a diminished understanding of what the historical ramifications of purgatory actually were.

01:07:45

But there's been no discussion of satisfaccio, the suffering of atonement, the nature of the thesaurus meritorium, none of the actual dogmatic aspects, which

01:07:56

I know Matt knows. I don't think Cameron does, so he can't push him on this.

01:08:02

And so this just becomes sort of a free ad for Roman Catholicism to a

01:08:07

Protestant, well, to a non -Catholic. I'm not going to call him a

01:08:13

Protestant because he doesn't know or defend what created the

01:08:19

Reformation. So that's how Jimmy Akin puts it. I really like that. Yeah.

01:08:24

Then I can't see really anything wrong with that. But I'm very sympathetic to the view that sanctification is a process.

01:08:32

That seems very plausible to me, that we're not just immediately aware of everything and entered into the final state of the kind of virtuous people that we will be.

01:08:45

So I find it plausible that there is a process. So let's remember that the distinction between positional and experiential sanctification is sort of important.

01:08:57

And this is the fundamental issue with Rome. Since Rome conflates sanctification and justification, this is where all the problem is.

01:09:07

Cameron's not making any distinction there. He doesn't even bring that up. He doesn't say, well, according to the book of Hebrews, we have been sanctified by the once -for -all offering of the body of Jesus Christ.

01:09:19

Hoppocks. That's over against the repeated perpetuatory sacrifice of Rome.

01:09:27

They don't have a finished sacrifice. That's one of the other key issues as well. It doesn't come up.

01:09:33

So there's no pushback to say, well, once we die, we have the imputed righteousness of Christ.

01:09:43

That is our standing before God. And so the idea of the

01:09:50

Roman Catholic idea is attachment to sin. Temporal punishment of sin.

01:09:58

Satispatio. That shouldn't be Cameron's idea. So there's no reason for him to even give it a second thought.

01:10:07

The reason that Jerry Walls is going to go that direction is he's anti -reformed.

01:10:13

And so he also, substitutionary, penal substitutionary atonement is a reformed concept.

01:10:20

It's the only system that it can be consistent in. So when people borrow it and stick it into an

01:10:25

Arminian system, it doesn't work and will be easily abandoned. Now somebody is sort of accusing us of not using scripture.

01:10:33

And I think so. I'll accuse you of not using the dogmatic canons and decrees of the Roman Catholic church while we're at it.

01:10:40

That's a fair criticism. We want to be obedient to the word of God. But I would say there are two premises that are spelled out over and over and over again within the scriptures.

01:10:51

Number one, that we sin and that we sin in many ways. You know, 1 John chapter 1, 8 talks about this.

01:10:57

Another thing that we know from sacred scripture coming from Revelation 21, 27 is that nothing unclean shall enter heaven.

01:11:04

And I think if you accept those two premises and if you accept that people on their deathbeds or at the moment of their death are sinning or attached to sin, and since they won't be in heaven, unless you want to say that they will be in heaven, you might want to allow for something that happens.

01:11:20

And this, I think, is sort of a basic kind of view of what Catholics mean when they talk about it.

01:11:26

Now, do you see what's missing there? Man, I hope every believer is sitting in the audience going, what about Jesus?

01:11:36

What about union with Christ? What about his righteousness? What about having been adopted as the sons of God?

01:11:44

What about forgiveness of sins? Because see, once the Roman Catholic sacramental system gets in the way of all that, all that gets redefined.

01:11:53

And the only way to redefine all that is to deny sola scriptura. So you don't have that defined on a harmonious scriptural basis.

01:12:00

You have it based upon the development of theology within Roman Catholicism, you see. It's all of a piece.

01:12:09

That's how you go there. And so there's nothing about the imputed righteousness of Christ. There's nothing about the grounds by which you have peace with God.

01:12:18

Because if you are still quote -unquote attached to sin in the sense that he's using this, that is temple punishments, therefore you cannot, he has said, you cannot enter into the presence of God.

01:12:28

Because that which is unclean. So you die unclean. Oh, you're a saint of grace. But you die unclean.

01:12:35

So you have to be cleansed. That's what purgatory is all about. You see why if you understand justification, if you understand the imputed righteousness of Christ, which is denied by Roman Catholicism, this is what the

01:12:46

Reformation was about. If you deny those things, then yeah, you guys have some way of getting yourself cleaned up.

01:12:54

Which means you don't have peace with God now. Which is why when you ask a

01:12:59

Roman Catholic, are you the blessed man of Romans chapter four?

01:13:08

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Are you the blessed man?

01:13:14

The Roman Catholic has no answer. Because if you commit a mortal sin in Roman Catholicism, it's imputed to you.

01:13:22

You lose the grace of justification. You commit a venial sin, you don't lose the grace of justification, but temporal punishment of sin, which then has to be paid for in purgatory.

01:13:33

In this life or in purgatory. There's no non -imputation of sin within Roman Catholic, historic

01:13:40

Roman Catholic theology. Again, the current Pope, probably on a different planet of all of this stuff.

01:13:45

But within historic Roman Catholic theology, there is no non -imputation of sin. Because they do not have the great exchange.

01:13:53

Our sins imputed to our sin bearer, his righteousness imputed to us. That was what the

01:13:59

Reformation was about. So there are a lot of folks today that are technically called

01:14:05

Protestants who are not Protestants. They have no commitment to what was actually definitional of what the

01:14:11

Protestant Reformation was about. And even then, I wonder if half of 1 % of people call themselves

01:14:21

Protestants understand where the term came from. I hear it being misused over and over and over again.

01:14:28

It had nothing to do with protesting Rome or anything else. That's not where the term came from.

01:14:34

It's from the diet in 1529, where the minority of electors in the

01:14:39

Holy Roman Empire protested the action of the majority in shutting down their freedom of religion under Charles.

01:14:48

Sorry to have to tell you the gruesome historical reality of it, but that's where it came from.

01:14:54

It wasn't protesting Rome. It was a legal element of the constituting documents of the

01:15:04

Holy Roman Empire that allowed those who had become reformed, those who were following the

01:15:11

Reformation, to protest Charles's actions. It was a political word.

01:15:17

That's where it came from. Anyway. Okay. So we'll try to go a little bit quicker with the next one. You got it. Yeah. Okay. And so what were the next ones, speaking of going quicker?

01:15:27

They did two more, celibacy in the priesthood and images and icons. And so let me just very briefly comment on that rather than playing it and going through all of that.

01:15:42

The first Corinthians 7 stuff and virgins and not marrying and so on and so forth.

01:15:52

What I didn't hear in the conversation, and they said they were going briefly, so we'll mention that in passing.

01:16:00

Again, the qualifications. First of all, we are warned against those who would prohibit marriage.

01:16:10

The qualifications for eldership do not, I do not believe, require marriage, but assume the normative status of marriage.

01:16:23

That's what you have in the pastoral epistles. Some people read them, has to be the husband, you've got to be married.

01:16:29

Okay. I think that's going too far, but what's absolutely obvious, and this is what

01:16:36

Cameron should know, there are no sacramental priests in the

01:16:41

New Testament. Nowhere. We have one high priest. We have a royal priesthood, which is all believers, but the idea of a sacramental priest who is called an alter

01:16:53

Christus in his ordination within Roman Catholicism, ask any priest, he'll admit it to you, that when he was ordained, he was called an alter

01:17:01

Christus, another Christ. The New Testament knows nothing of such an office.

01:17:08

The early church knows nothing of such an office. It develops over time. It is a development just like anything else within Roman Catholicism, almost anything else.

01:17:18

So the issue of celibacy within an office that is not apostolic is what we're talking about here.

01:17:32

Not the fact that there are people that God calls into service, radical service to himself, that means that they will never marry or have children.

01:17:43

That's perfectly appropriate. There are people to do that. That's fine. But that has nothing to do with an unbiblical office called the priesthood.

01:17:55

And if Cameron would like to hear a debate on that subject, I would recommend my debate with Mitch Pacwa on that very subject because I think it was very clear.

01:18:05

And what I appreciate about all the debates I did with Mitch Pacwa is we actually simply debated the issue rather than smoke machines and laser lights and everything else.

01:18:18

And then images and icons. And again, the big issue here, Matt leaned back and got a icon of Jesus.

01:18:30

Well, okay, now you've got all the people that are going to jump up and down about second commandment violations in regards to the person of Christ.

01:18:41

Let's leave that off for a moment and talk about, say, a icon of Athanasius.

01:18:50

Or this would be interesting. I know, by the way, I've got to get back to the Wilson stuff. It's just been hard to dive back into that stuff.

01:19:02

It's consuming, and it's not as enjoyable as it could be. But I can't leave it just hanging there.

01:19:09

We've got to get that presentation put together. And it's bothering me, so I'm going to get back to it. But one of the things that we'll include in that presentation, in light of Wilson's statement that Augustine is utterly rejected by the

01:19:26

East, I was sent an icon, an Eastern Orthodox icon of Augustine.

01:19:33

I've got it. I'll include that. What? Yeah, yeah.

01:19:43

But the real issue regarding icons and hagiolatry, all of it goes back to what we already mentioned beforehand, which was in regards to Mary.

01:20:01

And it is the false, unbiblical, and untenable distinction within Roman Catholic theology of Latruo and Duluo, the

01:20:09

Greek terms, Latria and Dulia, the Latin terms. So that you only give to God Latria, you give to the saints

01:20:20

Dulia, and you give to Mary hyper -Dulia. Now, when you see a faithful Roman Catholic rocking back and forth on their knees in front of a candle with a picture of a saint, you'll be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between Latria, hyper -Dulia, and Dulia, because there isn't any difference.

01:20:51

Latruo and Duluo are both Greek terms that are used to translate the

01:20:59

Hebrew term ahav to worship or serve. They both point to aspects of a broader concept.

01:21:12

And so, the idea that you can make this fine distinction that allows you to serve – remember,

01:21:19

Paul said you served those which were by nature not gods – to serve

01:21:25

Mary or to serve saints or angels without worshiping them, even though you're bowing down before them, even though you're lighting candles to them, even though you're praying to them, all the rest of that stuff, is a distinction without meaning.

01:21:44

It becomes very plain when you read, as I mentioned when we first talked about this, when you read someone like Liguri that, for many people, it goes far past the issue of worship in its application.

01:22:04

So, the same thing in regards to images and icons and issues related to that.

01:22:11

But I especially wanted to emphasize – you can go ahead and take that the interconnectedness of Christian theology and the importance of the

01:22:28

Reformation at this point. It is not surprising to me at all that the – but here's the danger.

01:22:39

I think Cameron represents a lot of young, zealous apologists in the

01:22:52

William Lane Craig sphere who have heard him – he was at a conference a number of years ago.

01:23:01

Oh, man, I wonder how long this was. I'll have to ask my friend who told me about this. But this friend of mine was standing nearby

01:23:13

William Lane Craig when he was asked a question about theology and apologetics – theology and philosophy, and his statement to the young man was, you do not need to read books on theology.

01:23:33

You need to read books on philosophy. You need to have – philosophy is the key issue, not theological resources.

01:23:41

And very plainly, that has been his emphasis. The result of that is people like Cameron get into apologetics, but they don't have the solid theological foundation, either in scripture, original languages, exegesis, or church history, to know what the

01:24:06

Reformation was about. And so, you run into all these philosophically -minded Roman Catholics, and they end up –

01:24:12

I can't tell you how many of these young men have ended up Roman Catholics because they didn't have the theology.

01:24:20

So, they weren't on the far side of the Tiber River calling for people to come out. They're paddling around in the middle, and they run into other people paddling around the middle who actually live in Rome.

01:24:32

Come on over. Let me tell you about some stuff. And since they don't know, then it can be very, very attractive, very, very attractive indeed.

01:24:43

And there's just a huge number, huge number over the years that I've seen that happen to.

01:24:51

And of course, when I talked to them and I asked them, so, back when you claim you were a

01:24:57

Protestant, you claimed that your true source of peace was the imputed righteousness of Christ.

01:25:11

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So, you understood that the reason that the wrath of God has no place in you is not because of anything you've done.

01:25:23

It's not because of your sacramental cleanness. It's not because of your current state of sanctification, experiential sanctification.

01:25:33

But you actually believed and lived in light of the reality that if Jesus's death was not sufficient for you, you would not be saved, that his righteousness is your whole plea before a holy

01:25:52

God. But now, now you go to a man who calls himself an alter

01:25:59

Christus, who in the place of Christ, in the place of Christ, what happened there?

01:26:10

Rich? There was flash on the screen and everything, and you're looking over there, and I'm going, what's going on?

01:26:18

We're fine? Okay. We're fine here. Okay. All right. You did something. I'll find out later.

01:26:23

I can see by the grin on your face that you, oh, okay. All right.

01:26:29

All right. Fine. Here I am doing this, this important thing and see what happens. I, I can't not look through the window.

01:26:36

So, when the screens are flashing and stuff's going on, I, you know, but tune back in for a second.

01:26:43

So, you claimed when you were Protestant that Christ was enough, but now you go to a priest who grants you sacramental forgiveness, but you still have temporal punishments on your soul that you need to then, he has, he gives you penances and by saying a certain number of Hail Marys or climbing stairs on your knees or this type of thing, you somehow are removing the temporal punishments of sins that the righteousness of Christ does not remove from you.

01:27:15

And you believe that when you die, you're going to have to go to a place called purgatory where you undergo satis pastio, the suffering of atonement to remove the temporal punishments of those sins.

01:27:27

And if you receive indulgences while you're in purgatory, they're made up of the righteousness of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, a mixed righteousness.

01:27:38

What, what caused you to all of a sudden change up? They never have an answer to that. They never have an answer for that.

01:27:47

They, all they want to do is, well, I just, I just came to realize you can't, you can't substantiate sola scriptura.

01:27:55

So, my entire claimed relationship to God turned into something completely different.

01:28:03

I discovered there was great evidence for the papacy or I discovered this, that, or the other thing, but I've, you look them in the eye and they're not going to look back.

01:28:15

And I'm thinking of one guy who actually came to this office, sat 15 feet that direction from where I am right now.

01:28:24

And I knew he was going to Rome, ordained Presbyterian minister. I knew he was going to Rome.

01:28:31

And he wanted to do all this fancy schmancy stuff about, well, how could you do a sola scriptura about the year 110 and all the rest of that type of stuff.

01:28:41

And I just told him straight, we talked for hours, but I told him straight. I told him straight, you know what you're doing.

01:28:51

And you know, there is, there's no way to have peace in the system you're talking about entering into.

01:28:56

You know that. Don't play games. You know, it's true. Anyway, important stuff.

01:29:06

Very, very, very important stuff to be thinking about, even in our day.

01:29:12

And the reason it's important now, we are being pushed into more and more contact with Roman Catholics and they can be great folks.

01:29:22

This Matt guy seems like a really nice guy. It may just be because he's Australian and all

01:29:28

Australians seem friendly to us until you go to Australia. Then you discover that not all

01:29:37

Australians are actually very nice. In fact, there's some pretty unnice

01:29:43

Australians I've run into. But anyway, majority of them are great, great, great blokes.

01:29:49

Great folks. Mates, great mates. That's how you put it. Blokes are the other side. Anyway, some real nice folks.

01:29:58

And I wish, I wish we could embrace as brothers, but we have different gospels.

01:30:05

We have different gospels. And that's why the debates have to continue. And you continue to pray and say to them, appreciate what you're saying, but you don't have the gospel.

01:30:19

And then I, let me tell you about real peace with God, real peace with God. So that's what we got to do.