Psalm 33 and Tyson James

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00:32

Well, greetings and welcome back. This is The Dividing Line Part 2 of the program today.

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We just interviewed Dr. Joe Boot of Ezra Institute on what's going on up in Canada and about his new book that will be coming out at the end of January, a book

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I read last year. Well, this year. It's not 2022 yet, so I read it this year.

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Anyway, it's a great book and helped me a lot. Very, very useful. It will help you a lot too.

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I'm looking forward to having it available to everybody. Now, I was thinking about doing two topics.

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We are actually going to be doing the program on Thursday in the morning, 11 o 'clock our time, which is 1 p .m.

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Eastern Standard Time on Thursday to work out my having appointments, stuff like that.

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Um, and so I'm going to hold off on, I've got a bunch of just all sorts of stuff over here, reading.

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I'll give you a hint as to what we'll be talking about. If you want to go read, it's fairly short.

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St. Basil's Letter 234, St. Basil's Letter 234. I'll give you a hint as to what we'll be talking about on Thursday together.

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But as most of you know, since the dialogue with William Lane Craig, there's been a lot of discussion going on.

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I think the Molinists love this. Molinists are a small little group, and I think they're just enjoying their moment in the sun, to be honest with you.

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Molinism is a very abstract philosophical position that doesn't commend itself to a whole lot of people.

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And so I think most of the Molinists are excited that people are actually mentioning them.

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They're trending on Twitter. There you go. Anyway, you're probably aware there's been some going back and forth.

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Both sides feel the other side's ignoring most of what they're saying. That's sort of the nature of things. Anyway, and interestingly enough,

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I was listening to a part of Dr. Stratton's responding to a video that I did, and he couldn't understand why

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I was talking about Aquinas. And so I tweeted to him, just to let him know,

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Molinism isn't the only thing that we talk about. In fact, over the years, it probably hasn't accounted for 2%, 1 % of what we've done on this program.

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So we deal with other issues. And right now, one of the issues amongst Reformed Baptists is the doctrine of simplicity and what it biblically means and what it means metaphysically, and really how far can you push the concept?

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What can you say? There are certain people saying that you must affirm the entirety of what

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Thomas Aquinas said, the doctrine of simplicity, to be an Orthodox Reformed Baptist.

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Okay, so that's one of the assertions that is being made. And so we are discussing issues related to that, and especially issues related to how sufficient are the scriptures, and what should the role of...

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What role should Thomas Aquinas have in the interpretation of Reformed Confessions?

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Well, what role did he have in the writing of Reformed Confessions? And should

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Reformed Confessions be able to, I don't know, be subject to the Word of God? We always say they are, but what does that look like?

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How does that even happen? Are there people who hold positions regarding confessions that would not allow the confession to ever be analyzed or even modified?

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Well, anyway, some of the issues dealing with that do have connections to the field of metaphysics and philosophy and the role this has in regards to biblical sufficiency.

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So there is a connection to the same stuff that we're talking about in regards to Molinism, but it is a very different subject.

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I think, I forgot to look at it, but well, wait a minute. Let me double check this here.

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Just expand this window out and it should tell me. Yeah. All the way back in 2014.

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So seven years ago, I found this fascinating because I followed some links and I went back and I started listening to an old dividing line.

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I don't go back and listen to old dividing lines, but I did in this instance. And on May 29th of 2014,

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I was getting ready to go to Kiev.

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Again, doing all the world traveling that I've been doing for years and years and years.

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It's come to a screeching halt. And one of the segments of the program that day, later,

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I talked about Peter Lumpkins, Tim Rogers, and Ergin Kanner. That's how long ago this was. All right. For those of you who have been around for a long time, most of you have no idea who any of those people are.

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But in the midst of all that, I discussed Psalm 33 in reference to Molinism.

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And I was a little nervous listening back. But as I listened to my objections to Molinism, those same objections

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I make today, I was a little nervous because, well, where was my reading at that point?

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No, it was pretty much the same things that I said. Now that was 2014.

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So that was in May. So it was that December that Paul Helm had the dialogue with William Lane Craig.

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So I didn't have that specific quotation to use of the truth value of certain subjunctive conditionals and where it's him saying, this is where our difference is.

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So that wasn't there. But so I went back and I listened to it. And the reason

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I listened to it is I started listening to another video. And some of these videos are two and a half hours long.

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And when you're dealing with the simplicity issue and all the reading in that area, and then

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Molinism, and you've got the holidays, and you're dealing with well, with your very elderly parents and taking care of them, and there's only so much time in the day.

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And so I started listening to a response that Timothy Stratton recorded with Tyson James.

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Now, I need to say something. I evidently, in 2015, made one reference to Tim Stratton.

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And then after and I made no connection. When I started preparing for the dialogue with William Lane Craig, that's when

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I started listening to some of Dr. Stratton stuff, because he's only been writing on this subject for a certain number of years.

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Less than 10 years, I'm sure. And just didn't know the name had never made the connection to whatever it was he had said back then.

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I never went back to bother to find out what that was about. And I had never heard of Tyson James until a few weeks ago.

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Sorry. I'm not sure if the

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Molinists think that I stalk them. I don't think about Molinism.

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I have thought more about Molinism over the past two months than in the entirety of my preceding lifetime.

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You read a few books, you sort of get the idea down. And this isn't something that is at all consistent with my understanding of Scripture and biblical

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Christianity. I see zero benefit to it apologetically. And so you just don't spend much time thinking about it.

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And so lo and behold, I find out that people like Tim Stratton have been writing against me for a long, long time.

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No one bothered to tell me that. Maybe they said something to Rich or something, and Rich didn't think it was important enough to pass on to me.

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I don't know. It was a different non -feasible world.

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Anyway, so I hadn't seen these things.

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And so I'm listening to the beginning of this video, and Tyson James goes through all these things

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I've not responded to. And one of the things he says was,

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I have not responded to his refutation of my comments on Psalm 33.

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Now that catches my attention. That catches my attention.

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Yeah, okay. Now it sounds like someone has actually attempted to respond with exegesis on a biblical text.

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Finally, something to do. Finally, something to really engage in. Because I find that there's...

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I know that there are people who get up in the morning, and their greatest joy in life is to engage in philosophical debate with other philosophers.

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I know these people exist because the Bible tells me they do. Because Paul went and spoke to them on Mars Hill.

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Okay? And so these are guys that this is their thing, and they're just always looking for something new.

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They're just always looking for some new argument, and some new perspective, and some new thing to think about.

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And I don't think that the Bible's description of them in that way is a positive thing, but there you go.

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So there are people like that, and I am not one of them. I am not one of them in any way, shape, or form.

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So I'm looking for something that we can actually have a common ground in, and that's in the scriptures.

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So I was listening on a ride, and so when I got done with the ride, I immediately jumped into DuckDuckGo, and boom!

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First article up. I came up with good search parameters. First article up came...

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It's on freethinkingministries .com's website. That's Tim Stratton's website. April 13th, 2018.

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So it was almost four years after I did that program that maybe someone heard it and sent it in and asked a question or something.

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I don't know. But it's titled, Libertarian Free Will, Did James White Unknowingly Provide Biblical Support?

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By Tyson James. April 13th, 2018. Summary. In the

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May 2014 episode of the Dividing Line, James White attempts to refute the Molinus position on libertarian free will by using

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Psalm 33 as a proof text. However, I demonstrate the selected text provides the horns of a dilemma that undermines

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White's own position. Now, I listened back to the original

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Dividing Line, and I walked through Psalm 33 and then made application.

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So I was hoping when I first saw this that we'd get the same thing here, where you walk through Psalm 33, you exegete in context, you exegete using the same rules of hermeneutics and exegesis that we use to defend the deity of Christ and all the other important things that we do in Christian theology, and then make application positively in demonstrating

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Molinism and the existence of the key elements of middle knowledge and things like that.

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Well, as you can imagine, that's not what you got. Rather than an exegesis of Psalm 33, you have certain portions of my application that are questioned, and there's a couple of places that you get into the text a little bit.

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But once again, you do not have any attempt to start at the beginning of a text, walk through a text and say, look, it's presenting what

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I believe. Look, here is a consensus from the text. That's not what you get.

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So let me read from the thing here.

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The dilemma of Psalm 33. You know what? I think it's important.

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I had it up here. Let's remind everybody. Let's look at it.

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I think it's important. Very, very important. So often, comments on biblical texts, we don't even dig into it enough to be able to really know what's being said.

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Psalm 33 is a song that starts off calling for people to sing for joy in Yahweh.

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Oh, you righteous ones, the zedekim. It's calling for praise in the first five verses.

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But you also have the assertion in verse four, the word of Yahweh is upright.

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All his work is done in faithfulness. So there is an assertion of the propriety, the uprightness, the faithfulness.

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In other words, the consistency of the word and works of Yahweh is asserted in verse four.

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He loves righteousness. He loves tzedekah.

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And he loves mishpat, judgment, righteousness, cutting the line straight.

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The earth is full of the chesed of Yahweh, the loving kindness, the covenant faithfulness of Yahweh.

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The earth is full of this, which can't just mean the covenant faithfulness to the people of Israel, because Israel is not in all the earth.

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But it is the creative consistency. God's holding up his creation is an act of chesed.

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And that chesed is one of the most beautiful words, easiest to pronounce, but, and you have to be careful if someone's standing right in front of you, if you pronounce correctly.

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But chesed is one of the most beautiful words in the Hebrew language because it is the Old Testament equivalent of charis and agape and eleos.

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It's grace and mercy and love and pistos and alethia.

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All these New Testament terms that you have so many, so much application, they're all rolled into the chesed of Yahweh.

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And the earth is full of the chesed of Yahweh, Psalm 33, 5.

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So, incredibly important. Then we get into the important, well, the relevant stuff to our particular discussion.

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B'divar Yahweh, by the word of Yahweh, the heavens were made, shemayim,

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I'm purposefully echoing Genesis 1 .1, the heavens and the earth.

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By the word of Yahweh, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth, all their host.

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Extensive, exhaustive creation. God creates all things.

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He gathers the waters, the sea, heap. He lays up the deeps in the storehouses.

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Now, I'm not making it big enough to, because if I make it big enough for display, then I can't put both the septuagint and the rest of the stuff on there.

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So, that didn't work too well. He gathers the waters, the sea together as a heap. He lays up the deeps in storehouses.

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That is, God is providentially involved in the operations of the world. As a result, let all the earth fear

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Yahweh. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. By the way, just so you know, those of you that are reading along, if you're new to the program,

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I am not reading from the Legacy Standard Bible when

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I say Yahweh. That is the reading of the new version of the

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NASB put out by John MacArthur's group there at the Master's Seminary.

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I'm not reading from that yet. To my knowledge, it's not yet available for accordance. If I'm wrong about that,

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I'd like to be informed of that. But I have, for decades, when reading the

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Old Testament, read the Tetragrammaton as Yahweh. In your

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Bible, it says LORD in all capitals, but that's Tetragrammaton. And so, that's just a tradition.

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I think it's an important one. And I think it's an excellent, positive thing about that new translation is that it uses

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Yahweh in that way. So, in case you're wondering, what are you reading? Let all the earth fear

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Yahweh. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it was done.

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There, instead of using Devar, he uses Amar. He spoke. He spoke the words and Yahweh, it happened.

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His speech is creative. He spoke, and it was done.

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He commanded, and it stood fast. He commanded, and it stood fast.

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There is no question of God's power and ability in creation. It is that context, then, of God's creative sovereignty over his world that the very next line is, the very next section of the poem, of the song, is what we call verse 10.

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Yahweh nullifies the counsel of the nations.

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He frustrates the plans of the peoples. So, obviously, two parallel lines in Hebrew poetry, very, very common throughout the

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Psalter. And so, your subject is the same,

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Yahweh. The action is nullify, frustrate. So, that way, you can use two words to sort of give a broader semantic picture, a broader picture of the verb that you're trying to communicate.

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So, the Lord nullifies, he frustrates. What? The counsel of the nations, the plans of the peoples.

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The counsel of the nation, the plans of the peoples. So, these are human actions.

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They are the actions of human beings. They are their counsel, their plans, their purposes, and God nullifies them.

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He makes them nothing. He ends them. He destroys them. He frustrates the plans of the peoples.

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And we should be very grateful for this when you think of Psalm 2,

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Psalm 110, the fact that God rules over his creation, and he laughs when the nations gather together to try to throw off his authority.

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He has absolute authority in the matter of human action, in the matter of human action.

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But then notice verse 11 continues that parallelism.

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Why? Because he uses the same terms. The counsel of Yahweh, which is the same terminology as used at the first part of verse 10, the counsel of Yahweh stands forever.

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So, instead of being nullified, the counsel of Yahweh stands forever, and the plans of his heart from generation to generation.

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And so, it stands forever from generation to generation. There's your parallel. Counsel and plans parallel to verse 10.

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But these are Yahweh's counsel. These are Yahweh's plans, and they stand forever.

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So, the contrast is between the nullifiability and the frustratability of the actions of men in contrast to Yahweh's purposes.

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His purposes, his counsel cannot be done away with. But please note the plans of his heart.

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The plans of his heart. Why is this important? Because it's going to come up later on. Throughout Scripture, you'll see over and over and over again the use of heart in regards to man.

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And you will find, for example, the hardening of the heart.

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Or in the New Testament, you have the softening of a heart. You have the taking out of a heart of stone and the giving of a heart of flesh.

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There are a lot of different ways in which the term heart is used. But in this context, notice it is the plans of his heart.

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That is what Yahweh plans, determines that he is going to do.

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His counsel stands forever. He is the one who will accomplish his purpose, and this is a purpose that he has decided on in his heart.

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That's the key in his heart. Keep that in mind. Then we have the

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K -O -O -L channel ID from long ago in Phoenix. Blessed is the nation whose

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God is Yahweh, the people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance.

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Notice he chooses them. They don't choose him, and he doesn't choose them because of what they've done.

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But anyway, the people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance. Yahweh looks from heaven.

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He sees all the sons of men. God is not just out there someplace, and he's spun this world up, and now it's going to do its thing, and he'll come back later to see how the cooking went or something like that.

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No. Yahweh looks from heaven. He sees all the sons of men. Remember, this is a radical thing in this day.

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There is an apologetic for Yahweh here because the people around Israel believe that the gods are limited in their scope.

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They're limited in their ability. They're limited in where they can go. They only have authority within geopolitical boundaries.

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The psalmist says no. Yahweh looks from heaven. He sees all the sons of men. From his dwelling place, he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth.

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Everybody because he created all of it. He spoke and it stood firm. He who fashions the hearts of them all, he who understands all their works.

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Now, this is very, very important. Verse 15. 15. The term that is used, yatser, the one who forms.

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This is the same term that is used of a potter, forming pottery.

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And so, the fashioning of the heart is this terminology, he who fashions the hearts of them all, who understands all of their works.

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So, God is called the fashioner using a participial form.

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He is the one forming and making. In fact, in Psalm 139, he fashions us.

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He forms us in our mother's wombs. This is connected to and frequently in poetic passages paralleled with creating, making.

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There's a group of roots in Semitic languages that refer to this activity.

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But in Hebrew, they're very special because only in Hebrew do you have the monotheistic God who is the creator, the fashioner of all these things.

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He who fashions the hearts of them all. So, who is them all? All the inhabitants of the earth, all the sons of men.

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So, looking from heaven, from his dwelling place, he looks out, and he, the fashioner of the hearts of them all, understands all their works.

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Not because he's just, well, I wonder what's going on down here.

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Oh, I'm going to watch for a while, and I'm going to learn about these strange creatures. No.

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He understands all their works because he fashions the hearts of them all. If the heart of Yahweh, which we saw earlier in Psalm 33, is the origin and source of his plans and his purposes, then the heart that is fashioned by God is the very essence of mankind where he makes his decisions, the seat of the will.

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And he fashions that. That's why he understands, has knowledge of all of their works because they are his creation, including their hearts, upon which they make their decisions, out of which flow their will and their decision.

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He fashions all of that. It is a part of his decree. We are the potters.

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We are the pots in the potter's hands. He makes us. And everything that goes into my decisions and how

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I will react in any given context, I confess, thank God, comes from his wisdom and his decree.

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He made me as I am. He put me in the context in which

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I live, in the time which I live, with the body that I have and the abilities

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I have and do not have. There would be no me without the decree.

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There would be no me to be known truly, falsely, subjunctively, or in any other way.

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He fashioned my heart out of which flow my decisions.

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This is the God of the people. So there's so much more that we could do in Psalm 33, but that is the key portion of the psalm that we need to be looking at.

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So he quotes from me the dilemma of Psalm 33.

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Yahweh brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. If it is not in line with his sovereign decree, then it's brought to nothing.

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He frustrates the plans of the people, but the counsel of Yahweh stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. So a specific contrast is being drawn here.

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You'll notice the thoughts of the people, he frustrates those, and then his thoughts, his counsel is firm.

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And then the same contrast is brought about in regards to the plans of the people and the plans of his heart. So you have a specific parallelism in the text itself when

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Yahweh frustrates the counsel of the people, frustrates the plans of the people, but no one can frustrate the counsel of Yahweh.

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It stands forever, the plans to all generations. The idea of libertarian free will is right there in the text, and it's

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God in all things. God has libertarian free will. It seems to me that Yahweh's libertarian free will in Molinism is limited to choosing to actuate a world or not.

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Okay, there's the end of the quote. Is that untrue? What is not

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Yahweh in Molinism examining feasible worlds?

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Why would they be feasible? Because of the content of middle knowledge, the true subjunctive conditionals.

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And so he's not forming these creatures to fit into a plan.

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What they will do is already a fixed reality. Now, where that comes from? That's one of the things that, boy, the more we're pushing, the wider the range of answers we're getting.

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We're getting a lot of different answers all of a sudden. But looking at William Lane Craig, okay?

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If Craig is the modern definer of Molinism, his point was

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God's will does not determine that. So his freedom is delimited as to what world he will actuate, what's feasible, given something outside of himself that does not come from his will.

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Now, Tim Stratton even said today, well, it's a part of, how do you put it here?

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Oh, it comes from God's nature. It is based on the fact that an omniscient God knows all that would happen based upon all an omnipotent

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God could create. Quote, unquote. That was, I don't know, 24 hours ago, something like that.

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So middle knowledge comes from God's nature, but not from God's will. Think about that for a second.

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Comes from his nature, but not from his So it's almost like God is forced to know because he's omniscient what creatures he has not created would do, but he can't change what they would do.

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And that's the stuff that then determines how all the blocks can go together.

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And so God's freedom is how to put the blocks together. And like I said before, if you've got a

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Lego set, you can take a Lego set and you can build lots of different things. And so what is God's purposes?

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Is it maximal people saved, minimum amount of sin, maybe doing it in a certain amount of time?

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Who knows? We don't know because no one in the Bible ever thought of any of this stuff. We're not told, but evidently he gets to at least choose whatever his parameters are.

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And then with that, you put the Legos together, but the Legos are not designed by him.

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They are not a function of his will. They're a function of his nature.

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Now, I haven't seen Craig say that, but that's what Stratton's saying.

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So I don't know. Like I said, we're getting a lot of different stuff all of a sudden as to what these things are or are not.

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All right. Response. Finally get to the response here. Tyson James response. Unknowingly, White's exegesis has placed him in a dilemma.

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Look at the two sets of plans found in Psalm 33, 10 through 11. In verse 10, God frustrates the plans of the people.

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In verse 11, the counsel of Yahweh stands forever. White admits there is parallelism in these verses, then states that God's plans are made via his libertarian free will.

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Yet he concludes the plans of the peoples are not made via libertarian free will. This seems ad hoc, since the parallelism seems to be dropped when it comes to the way the human plans are made in order to avoid the conclusion that they have libertarian freedom.

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Now, what did I actually say? I actually said there is only one libertarian free will.

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There is only one with autonomy, and that's God. So the point is that there is only one free will.

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There can only be one autonomous will, because to create a second autonomous will is to create another

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God, because you're creating something that's no longer dependent upon God. So we all agree

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God can't make another God. The Trinity can't become the Quadrinity, because these are necessary statements of the existence of God, and he does not change.

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So to create an autonomous will is to make a new creation that it does not flow from what

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God has created in Scripture. Now, it's going to be interesting. I'm not going to do it today. I don't have time to, but I was reading.

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I want to go back and look at what Craig has said on Colossians 1. I'm going to have to spend a little more time with it, but it certainly sounded like he was saying what

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I've said about Colossians 1, and not what James and Stratton have said about Colossians 1.

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But we'll get into that another point. Really extensively, it recognizes and quotes from lots of people that agree that Colossians 1 is pretty exhaustive in what it says, and that was my point.

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But anyways, there can't be anything that Jesus did not create, and so God has autonomous will.

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God is free, and the nature of his autonomy, and if we want to use the term libertarian free will, yes, is completely different than any human will.

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The pot is not like the potter, gentlemen. There is a fundamental difference between the potter and the pot.

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There's a fundamental difference between God's knowledge and man's knowledge, for example, which I don't believe is something that actually

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Dr. Craig does believe. I don't know where they stand on that, but I would assume they probably do have a, you know, local view of God's knowledge rather than other perspectives.

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But anyway, the pot is different than the potter, and that is in the context of Psalm 33.

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I mentioned to you he uses the very Hebrew term that is used of forming by a potter.

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The beginning of the Psalm begins with God's creation of all things, which includes mankind.

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So it is a given in the text. It's not ad hoc. If you had started at the beginning and worked your way through it, you would see it's not ad hoc.

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Man is made by God. He is the one who forms mankind.

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He spoke and it stood firm, and he is the creator of mankind. So my question to White is, how else are the plans of the people made?

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Either they were made freely by the people or they were made by God, parentheses, determinism, parentheses closed.

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If they were made by the people, then the text would support human libertarian free will. If they were made by God, then we have

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God frustrating his own plans, which I'm sure White himself would find theologically abhorrent. Now, how many people do you think who first read the 33rd

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Psalm thought of this type of objection? I would say not a single one.

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I really, really doubt the psalmist never sat back and went, I wonder what they're going to think about libertarian free will.

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No, I don't think so. How else are the plans of the people made?

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So in the Molinist world, you either have autonomy or you have puppets, either autonomy or puppets.

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That's it. That is all there. All you've got is a two -dimensional thin piece of paper and all the richness of the biblical teaching.

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And you're going to get tired of me saying this, but I haven't heard anybody even try to touch it yet. Not even acknowledge it.

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It's just sort of like, I don't even know what he's talking about. All the biblical richness of the fact that the eternal

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God creates time as the theater in which he reveals his attributes to his people is wiped away.

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It's either all those people are little autonomous gods themselves, or they are just puppets on strings.

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There can be nothing in between. God is not big enough. He does not have the power to create the temporal creation as the sphere of the drama of redemption.

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No, no, no. We can't have that. And of course, as I've said over and over again, he then enters into his own creation.

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The second person in the Trinity subjects himself to time. He grows.

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There is a time when the body that he has assumed as part of that perfect human nature is only two feet tall.

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And it takes time to become three feet tall and then to become four feet tall.

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I wonder, in Joseph's house, did they have the little marks on the doorway that are in everybody's house?

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He subjected himself to time. That means time's real. We're not puppets. And if you guys don't stop thinking about determinism as some simplistic puppet,

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God just simply pulling the strings and inserting thoughts in the heart, you will never get close to providing a meaningful argument against what we believe because you're not listening.

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You are not listening. If you can look at Acts 4, 27 to 28 and look at the centrality in the drama of redemption of Pilate and Herod and the

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Romans and the Jews and just go, oh, well, you know, if that's determinism, then it was just simply they're being forced to do what they did.

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No, there doesn't have to be any force. God's sovereignty is so beautiful and so powerful and so righteous and so glorious that not only did

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Pilate do what his nature led him to do.

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Now, God's restraining because he's a fallen man. He fell on Adam. He has a corrupt heart.

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He has a heart of stone. So God will restrain that heart of stone from doing things that he doesn't want to have accomplished.

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Got a problem with that? I don't. I'm awfully glad that God restrains evil.

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But then you get crazy Herod. I'm sorry if anyone proves that the idea, the functional idea of middle knowledge is foolishness,

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Herod does. You really telling me that there is a Herod floating around out there that would always do the same thing in every circumstance you put him in?

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Herod was a nut. He was crazier than a hoot owl. And you put

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Herod in the same circumstance on the same day, he's going to do 27 different things.

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And nobody's going to know what it is. But God is sovereign even over a crazy man like Herod.

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And the beauty of the fact that he has created time as the theater in which he demonstrates all these things.

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You guys take that and down into a flat little piece of paper. Determinism. How did they make these plans?

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They made those plans as creatures. And given that he's talking about in general, the nations around Israel.

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They made those plans as idolaters, as fallen sons and daughters of Adam.

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They made those plans out of hearts of stone to aggrandize themselves.

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Like Nebuchadnezzar. Right? Look at all that I have done.

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God puts him down and when he raises him back up, what does Nebuchadnezzar do? I'm a creature. Nobody thwarts

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God. Right? So, how did they make these plans? Out of a sinful heart.

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Out of a sinful heart because they can do that. It does not make them autonomous. It makes them creatures.

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It does not make them puppets because God will judge them,

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Isaiah chapter 10, for acting on the desires of their heart. So, when you take biblical evidence as your foundation, then you can answer this.

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No dilemma. The dilemma was created falsely by Tyson James by saying it's one of these two possibilities, only two possibilities, and neither one of them are biblical possibilities.

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There's no such thing as a determined puppet and there's no such thing as an autonomous pot.

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So, the two horns your dilemma disappeared as quickly as Thanos did.

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Gone. Okay. Notice also that White has committed himself.

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Let me go up here. Man, I should have almost have to get the glasses out.

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I didn't get my... Once I have it open like this, it's hard to find the font thingy, but oh well.

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I wonder if it's up here. Let's just... Nope. Sometimes when you see three dots, you press it and good things happen.

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Sometimes not. Notice also that White has committed himself to logical coherence.

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Do you have to... Am I making you late? Okay. All right. All of a sudden,

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I looked at the clock and went, oh, huh? Okay. You're all right for now.

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Okay. All right. Okay. Had me worried. Notice also that White has committed himself to logical...

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See how nice I am to Rich. I just want people to realize that. When I travel around, people all tell me how

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I'm actually... I was concerned that Rich needed to get home at a certain time, so I just... We got to do it.

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We got to do it. All right. Where was I? Notice also White has committed himself to logical coherence of libertarian freedom by saying that God himself has this type of freedom.

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I say that I've said that forever and that God is absolutely free to act according to his nature.

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He is autonomous in that sense. He is not a creature. To parallel God and to say, ah, if God has this, then man must too.

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Well, God is timeless. I am not. My being made in the image of God does not mean that I have all the attributes of God in any way, shape, or form.

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I am dependent upon scripture to tell me what the parameters of what God's creative gifting to mankind is.

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I don't just simply look at God and then go, well, if God can do this, the man can do this. No. I allow scripture to define these things.

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But if there is nothing in the concept that suggests it is a God -only property, like omniscience or omnipotence, but what was the context?

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What was the context? Yahweh spoke and has stood firm. You've never done that.

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Tyson James, you've never spoken and stood firm. You cannot create ex nihilo and neither can

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I. You forgot the context. This whole psalm starts, praise

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Yahweh, all the creation. Everyone stand in awe of Him.

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No one is ever to be called to stand in awe of us. So yes, notice it says right there in the context.

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There is nothing in the concept that suggests it is a God -only property, like omniscience or omnipotence, and it follows

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God is able to create creatures which possess libertarian freedom. Stop. This is, okay, we know we're not going to get any exegesis here, but we are going to get to a point where He tries.

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So hold on. But notice the insertion of claims that just simply have no basis from a

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Christian perspective. So there's nothing in the concept that suggests it's a

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God -only property. I say there is. God is the only autonomous will in creation because He is the only

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God in creation. Yep, so yeah, it's right there. Then it follows that God is able to create creatures which possess libertarian freedom.

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No, He creates creatures that possess creaturely freedom, but it's not the parallel of His freedom. Wrong. And if God can create such creatures, then

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He must know prior to the creative decree what each such creature would freely do in any freedom -permitting circumstance, also called middle knowledge.

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So this is the standard argument they've been using for years that if God can create free creatures, then

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He would know what they would do. That does not even follow. Oh, but you're denying omniscience. No, you are inserting an unstated assertion that at least

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Bill Craig is honest enough to assert openly. Because this, well, if God can create free creatures, and of course,

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I would say that doesn't mean libertarianly free in the sense of autonomous. That means creaturely free, responsible in the creaturely realm.

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That's all God holds us accountable for. That's very different than God's freedom, which is absolutely divine and based upon His nature, which is unlimited versus our nature, which is derivative.

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All these things are, I thought, basic. But anyway, the point here is there is an assertion being made.

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I respect Bill Craig's approach to this. I strongly disagree with it.

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I think it's extremely damaging, but I respect it because he's at least coming out and saying, there are these subjunctive conditionals that are true that delimit.

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They do not come from God's will, but they delimit God's decree. That's different than saying, well, actually the best proof of middle knowledge is that God has to be capable of making libertarianly free creatures, and therefore,

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He must know since He's omniscient what they would do in any given circumstance.

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That may impress a lot of folks until you go, why? Why? If they have libertarian freedom, then how can it be known what they would do in any given circumstance?

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Because if it is known, then they're not free. And if you then place them in that situation knowing what they're going to do, do you not share part of the responsibility of so doing?

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But the point is, where did that knowledge come from? Well, it's because God is omniscient. That's not an answer.

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God is omniscient is a statement. What we're arguing about is what is the logical, given biblical parameters, not philosophical parameters.

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That's where we end up on different parts here. Because one of us says, this is actually wide enough for me to stand on to answer these questions.

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I don't have to jump over here. I'm going to go here, and I'm going to let it determine what my answers are to these questions.

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And so, when you talk about what omniscience means, I go here.

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It's not omniscience of stuff that God has not created. It's not omniscience of stuff that does not flow from His will.

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And every time you guys try to say, and I've listened to you, you guys try to say, well, there's lots of things that God doesn't determine.

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Did God determine His own eternity? Does God determine His own omniscience? You're always talking about the attributes of God, which means you end up, and this is frightening, making middle knowledge one of the attributes of God.

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That's not what Bill Craig says. He doesn't say it's an attribute of God. So, we're getting all these different takes.

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Because when you push, it's like jello. It just keeps moving, but you just didn't understand it. Okay, fine, whatever.

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Ah, I'll never get this done if I don't stick with it a little bit more. Sorry about that. That's interesting.

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I hadn't noticed something I'll bring up here. So, and if God could create such creatures, then

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He must know prior to the creative decree what each such creature would freely do in any freedom -permitting circumstance.

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I say that is irrational. It is illogical, because the decisions of free creatures are dependent upon their created nature, which comes from the decree.

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You cannot have a creature before the decree to form the creature in the way that allows him to make decisions.

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That's biblical. That's biblical. I'm not, you know, if you want to play philosophy, but you tell me where scripture tells you that mankind makes decisions separate from the influences of God upon his life in his relationship to Adam, in his fallen state, in how he's created, in how he's going to interact with the creatures around him.

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These are all a part of God's decree. They are not something you say, well, that all comes from what's feasible for God.

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Again, your Legos are still being made by someone other than God. So that's not an attribute of God.

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You still have to answer where it comes from, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many back doors you run through and say, well, it's just a function of omniscience.

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It's just a function of omnipotence. That's all you've got. And once somebody turns the light on it and says, yeah, but that doesn't mean anything, that doesn't actually answer the question, does it?

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No, it doesn't. It doesn't. Mental knowledge, an essential component of monism.

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If God only knows these truths after his decision to create, then he would have no way of knowing in advance what their free choices would be, which significantly weakens rather than strengthens the doctrine of divine providence.

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Again, utterly reject that as well. It's a regular part of Stratton's argumentation as well.

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Most people don't understand that. If God only knows these truths after his decision to create.

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Now, these are logical moments. They're not temporal moments. But what's missing here, of course, is the idea that the fabric of time, that God works all things according to his will, that he is actually involved in that, that he does what he pleases.

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So he knows what the result of the exercise of his divine power to create all of time and the events in time is going to be.

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Only by introducing the idea of autonomous creatures would you get any, well, we don't know what's going to happen.

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Which, of course, biblically, Christianity is based upon fulfilled prophecies in the life of Jesus.

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We have to affirm the utter sovereignty of God in time. They say they do that by knowledge.

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I say there is no middle knowledge. God does it by his eudachia, the freedom of his will, the demonstration of his attributes to his people.

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That's what time is, is the realm in which that takes place, glorious realm in which that takes place.

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The final sentence is strange. White seems to think that God's ability to incorporate the free choices of every free creature into his providential plan, in White's terms, his ability to actuate a world.

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He puts the S -I -C after actuate. This is a transcript. I didn't misspell anything.

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And actuating a world is common Molinistic terminology. I don't even know why it's put in there. His ability to actuate a world is a limitation.

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Yes, it's a limitation. He does not get to freely choose the world. There are worlds that are not feasible to him because of the content of middle knowledge, which

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Dr. Statton will say, well, the only reason that is, is because you can't force somebody to love somebody. I just lost

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Rich. I'm sorry. But the idea being, well, God cannot force people to act.

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So in other words, you can't have divine determinism. And so since that is making married bachelors, then

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God can't do that. And that's not a limitation because that's just a logical thing. See? So you take out potter and pot.

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You take out the difference between God and man, man, creature, and then you just put it on a philosophical level.

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And now love has to be determined, not biblically, not the fact that the only way we can love

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God, the only way we can love God is if he changes our hearts.

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That's not a philosophical, that doesn't fit into a philosophical syllogism. You can't go there.

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So that's where you have the problem. Consider Dr.

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William McRae's description of a possible world. Quote, by a possible world, one doesn't mean a planet or even universe, but rather a complete description of reality or a way reality might be.

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End quote. I think exactly the opposite of White's claim is true. God's ability to incorporate free choices into his selection of a complete description of reality is an indication of his perfect power and knowledge, which is more powerful, a being which can incorporate free choices into its exhaustive providential planning or one which cannot.

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Again, see how far out of Psalm 33 we've gone. See how far out of the exhaustive creation that is described in Psalm 33 we've gone.

01:00:08

And so now the argument is, well, I think it's just, I think it just makes God really big that he can, he can take this stuff that we cannot ground.

01:00:15

We cannot explain where it comes from. And sometimes we say it's part of God's nature and sometimes we say it's an attribute and sometimes we say whatever.

01:00:22

He can take all that stuff and he can bring that in. That makes him greater than a God just forces people to do stuff.

01:00:29

Where's the problem there? Forces people to do stuff. That's just simply a straw man argument.

01:00:37

Jesus was a true man. Was he a puppet? Was he forced to do certain things? Did God have middle knowledge of what the

01:00:43

God -man Jesus Christ would do based upon middle knowledge? These are big questions that betray the shallowness of the categories of the

01:00:53

Molinistic apologist in making his argumentation. Man, it's 12 minutes after five.

01:01:02

All right. All right. All right. All right. So I will make a mark here.

01:01:11

I will underline that section there. Okay. So that will be my starting point.

01:01:18

I'm sorry. I should have known that I was even thinking about doing this and then doing all the stuff on reading from Basil.

01:01:30

We would have been here forever. Yeah. I'm not really good at this thinking about how long it's going to take me stuff,

01:01:40

I guess. So I apologize for that. So we will continue on Thursday with looking at Psalm 33 and Tyson James 2018 response to my 2014 comments.

01:01:55

There's probably something about time that could be learned from something in there here in 2021.

01:02:01

But anyway, and then we will, I will probably start off with St.

01:02:10

Basil's letter 234. So why don't you look it up? It's available online. Easy to find.

01:02:16

Just put in Basil letter 234 pops up less than five minutes to 10 minutes to read.

01:02:23

And that will give you all you need to know about where we're going to be going on Thursday. So there you go.

01:02:29

All right. That was a long, a long program. We covered a lot today. Again, the dividing line truck drivers are rejoicing and everybody else is listening at 1 .8.

01:02:41

So there you go. All right, folks, pray for us that we will be able to continue doing this into the future into Thursday, at least as we continue seeking to edify you and to glorify the name of Jesus Christ.