The Driving Line - November 28, 2022

Welcome to the driving line, which is the mobile version of the dividing line, of course. And that means I am currently trundling down the road, and I am in the state of Missouri, where I will be speaking this coming weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as normal, for the 22nd year, pretty much consecutively.

Last year was a little messed up. COVID messed things up a little bit, but we still got it done. I've just been driving the past few years. At Covenant of Grace Church, we're going to be doing Why We Believe the Trinity.

And, yes, this time we're going to be talking about Is the Trinity a Biblical Doctrine? Which, of course it is, and that's what I've been teaching every time I've covered the Trinity there for all these years.

You know, I think about it because St. Charles is really close to the world headquarters, the United Pentecostal Church International. The modalists there, we've tried to get debates set up with their leading theologians, but come close, but as they used to say, no cigar.

And it's interesting because my responses, as you can see from the debates I've done to modalists, have always been focused upon Biblical exegesis, and not well, you need to believe this because this council said this, or this theologian said that, or obviously St. Thomas Aquinas believed this, and you need to believe that.

It's always been based upon Scripture, and my belief of the fact that well, as Warfield put it, the revelation of the Doctrine took place in history. That is between the Old and the New Testament. Its evidence is primarily the Incarnation of the Son, which we're getting close to celebrating yet again this year, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which we should celebrate too, come to think of it.

And that took place in history, and it's recorded for us in inspired Scripture. It's not that we have to guess at this from some you know, other perspective, or have some great tradition to tell us these things.

I'm a Biblical Trinitarian, always have been, and I'm not joining the group that has decided that that's just not enough. And mainly because I just don't see how they can actually engage in apologetic interaction with people who don't accept their extra-Scriptural perspectives.

And so, anyway, that's where we're going to be headed this weekend, and one of the things I will be addressing, of course, will be the relationship between creeds, confessions, and what we believe, and issues like that.

So, if you're in the area, it's not going to be, I mean, I am going to cover the Biblical evidences of the Doctrine of the Trinity, but not as in-depth as we have in the past, because we're going to be dealing with these other issues along with it, so it'll be a little bit different.

Travel Plans, Upcoming Events, and Support Requests

And then, starting on the way home, we already put up on the calendar, please take a look at that, Emory, Texas, going to be in Lubbock, and, oh, I'm sorry, before Emory, Jonesboro will be the places we'll be stopping.

Those will be less formal get-togethers, because they will be, as I am traveling, I'll probably be wearing one of my coochies. I'm wearing one of my coochies right now, actually. But you can't see that, because this is audio only, so there you go.

Anyway, that's what we're doing, and I get back on 12th, 13th, something like that of December, and then we're back out in February. I tweeted or Facebooked on the two the conference I'm heading to and the debate we're going to be doing in Tennessee.

Jeffrey Rice is putting all this together, so it'd be really helpful if you could let Jeffrey know that you're coming, and, you know, just simply for making sure we've got enough support to get it all to work and things like that.

That'll be coming up in February. So, there you go. I was, oh, if you haven't seen it yet, I started, it's not so much you have to watch it, you can listen to it, and, again, this has been done really well, but the guys at Canon Press have put out, what was it, 11 things, how to save the world, how to save the world, in 11 easy steps, I think is what it says.

No, 11 simple steps, not easy, simple. That's right. And it's, I think, the best summary Doug Wilson's done a number of things like this, where he's done parts of all of this, but this is really, I think, one of the best summaries, putting all this stuff together.

And outside of the one reference to infant baptism, it was only in passing, and was not definitional to the argument. It was something, you know, that I'm just 100 on board with. And so I'd highly recommend it to you, it's on the Canon app, and I finished listening to it this morning while starting off early.

This has been a long day. It's going to be 8 hours in the truck today, but I'm not complaining. I'm so thankful, once again, to everyone who has made this possible for me to do this kind of thing. And in this particular situation, as I've mentioned, we upgraded the truck, and one particular person helped to make that possible, but then everybody else makes possible the fuel costs and everything else, and so you're not going to hear any complaints about me, even after 8 hours, and at least so far today, so far today, I haven't had the run-in with the person at the gas station.

I've had this happen a few times. Thankfully, it's rare. But the person that pulls in, and it's only relevant when it's busy. I was just at a Love's travel stop, and it was not busy at all, so nobody cared.

But sometimes you run in, you just hit it at a bad time of day, and there's lines, and you find these people that will pull in, take up a pump or two, and go in, maybe use the restroom, maybe get some food, then come out and decide to start putting gas in their car.

They, you know, I mean, you can put the gas in the car, and then go park it someplace, and then go in and do everything you want, shop to your heart's content, sit on the throne forever, it doesn't matter.

But no, no, no, they don't care about the line of people behind them. It's, oh. So at least today, I had that happen yesterday. Yep, I did. But I didn't, haven't had it happen today, so I'm thankful for that.

So you're not going to hear any complaints. So, so thankful to have this opportunity, and I will tell you, the new truck, which is a diesel, and I will say, Pastor Derek Melton, even when we first were getting the equipment to start doing this, he said, get a diesel.

And we didn't, and he was right. But he is also the one that told us to get the kind of fifth wheel that we have. To get a fifth wheel, not a pole behind, made of the kind of material that this is. So, Pastor Derek Melton, thank you, sir, once again, for being my tutor at the start.

I have now pulled many, many thousands of more miles than Pastor Derek has, so now I can return the favor. But anyway, I was hoping to see him today, by the way. I, very frequently, we will get together.

There's this awesome little restaurant outside of Pryor, it's actually in Claremore, I think. And they have, I can't remember the name of it, I'd be glad to give them advertisement, but you get breakfast at this place, and I'm going to tell you something, there's a pound of bacon on that, on that plate.

There is a pound of bacon. I mean, it is awesome. But he and his family got the flu, not COVID, there's still something called the flu out there, and so we couldn't do that today, so I missed that. I love Pastor Derek, he's an awesome guy.

And by the way, the knives he makes, I think I've shown you on the dividing line, he made me a beautiful, beautiful knife. And he forges, he forges, I mean, he makes these things, I mean, he forges the steel, he does all of it, it's incredible.

What a, what a tremendously skilled guy, and a wonderful pastor. So anyways, enough of my saying the praises of Pastor Melton. You want to see how to save the world. I wish I had seen stuff like this and understood stuff like this many, many, many years ago.

I really, really, really do. But I, you know, I was raised in a fundamentalist context, and I'm very thankful for a belief in the Bible, and its inspiration, and all these things. I just didn't have, there just wasn't that understanding of how to put all that together in how you, you know, the idea of the fact that when you get to, you go to church, we always went to church, we never missed church.

But that when you're doing that, you are fulfilling Christ's commands, you're, as Doug likes to put it, taking a sledgehammer to the gates of Hades, and you're doing it with the entire body. That's what we didn't have.

That's what we didn't have. It was all, there was a certain level of fundamentalistic piety involved, and there's, that has its place, there's a level of propriety there, but we were missing the big picture.

And I wish I hadn't been an older person once I really started to get that, that big picture. So, watch it, share it with family, friends, it's great. How to save the world, 11 simple steps, not easy steps.

And so my thanks again to folks at Canon, Doug Wilson, for putting that up. It's really, really good stuff. So, I was looking for, I used to have, and I can't find the files. I love our new computers and stuff.

By the way, if you've never, I'm just learning this folks, I'm sorry, but I'm learning to drive a diesel. And unlike some of my friends who just cut off all the emission control stuff, I don't know how they get away with it.

They've got to know people to do that kind of stuff. I'm not going to do that. I can't do that. I have to use something called DEF. I had never heard of DEF before, D-E-F, Diesel Exhaust Fluid. And when you're pulling a unit, you start really using it, and you've got to put it in every once in a while.

And, but, I have now discovered that if you touch the diesel handle, so the fuel handle, it's not like regular gas fill-up nozzles, but a diesel nozzle will always make your hands smell like diesel. It just doesn't matter.

Gas ones don't work that way. But diesel, yeah, you've either got to get gloves or stuff to wash your hands with. It's just, it's inevitable. And I just sniffed my hand and went, oh yeah, mm, yeah. And yeah, I tried to wipe my hands off, stuff like that, but it's, I wonder if there's a special hand sanitizer de-diesel center that I can find.

I bet there is. I haven't looked on Amazon yet, but there's, everything's on Amazon somewhere. Someone's come up with that idea. Someone's had the same experience I have. So I'm going to have to look.

I'll bet it's there. I'll bet it's there. Anyway, so I was looking for some files on my computer, and I've got an eight terabyte hard drive now. And so finding my Bible files that I would listen to while riding on my bike years and years and years ago really isn't easy to do, especially when you forget, well, where did I put those things?

And so I was looking for, I found an app that would allow me to listen to, I think, the ESV for free while I'm driving. And so I was just checking it out last night before I left, actually. And just for the, just for the chuckles, I went to the Old Testament and I clicked on Jeremiah chapter 5.

Not because I automatically knew it was in Jeremiah chapter 5, though I should, but I didn't. But just because I've always found Jeremiah, well, I was thinking back actually this morning when I first started out.

The first time I read through the Bible systematically as a teenager, I remember Jeremiah was just a real punch in the throat. I mean, Isaiah has all this lofty theology and apologetics in it and all sorts of neat stuff like that.

Jeremiah was just so much about the heart. It really is just fantastic and very challenging. And so I thought, OK, let's try that. And so I just clicked on Jeremiah 5 and right at the start, now again, I'm driving, so I don't have it open.

I don't even know what would happen at the recording if I tried to open my Bible app. So I'm deciding to try. But right at the beginning of the chapter, I think it's the very first verse, you have God saying, search through Jerusalem.

Go from house to house. Seek out a man who does justice and believes the truth or loves the truth. I forget which one it is. I'd have to, again, risk my life to look. And I was struck once again. I love the word of God.

I love the Bible. I love God's preservation of it. I've learned to love that He didn't give us a printer manual style thing where you just, here's the chapter on this subject. Here's the chapter on this subject.

It's written to God's people. It is written to be lived out, experienced, seen. You see how it works out over time. And so the saint city allows to have many years. I've had over the 50, coming up on 57, 56, 57 years.

56, yeah. 56, 55 and a half, whatever. Lots of years of walking with the Lord. And when you get that number of decades under your belt, you've seen how the scriptures speak to so many different situations, which they could not do if it was a printer manual type situation.

You see? Because they speak, because it's Jeremiah, because it's what Jeremiah goes through, and because Jeremiah is the weeping prophet, you can read the same text and it can minister to you in so many different ways at different times in your life.

Let's put it that way. And that's one of the evidences of its inspiration, one of the evidences of its glory and its beauty. So here you have this text and you have God's, I'll spare Jerusalem if I can just find a man who does justice, loves truth, believes truth.

And I think today about how in our dying society, and we are in a dying society, we're in a society that is secularizing as secularism itself is dying, which is going to take the culture with it. That's why we have to be investing in our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, because they're going to be rebuilding when this thing collapses and people are going, where do we go now?

What do we do now? We've lost the only foundation that we had been told would last. Well, let us tell you about the real foundation that is based upon an empty tomb. And in this situation we face, we hear justice and truth all the time.

They've become watchwords. People repeat those terms all the time, but they don't know what they mean. They don't have the foundation upon which to even understand what these things mean. And here's scripture talking about, hey, I will spare Jerusalem if I can find a single man that puts these two things together, justice and truth.

Now, I didn't look at the Hebrew, but my guess would be that maybe justice is from the Zedekah family, truth is Emeth, and they are so often related in the major and minor prophets that it's pounded into your head as you read the scriptures.

And as long as you don't suffer from hyper-red letterism, which tells you that, well, I'm reading scriptures that aren't quite as scripturally as the New Testament. No. You realize as you read the scriptures the intimate relationship that exists between justice and truth.

You cannot separate the two out. That's why you must stand for truth. You must seek truth. You must believe truth. You must defend truth. Because without truth, you will not be able to define justice.

And without that desire for justice, there will be no love for truth. There will be no place for truth. And without truth, will become an empty scholastic pursuit. And it's just right there. It's in the warp and woof of the fabric of scripture itself.

The man that God looks for, I'll spare Jerusalem. Just show me this man. But he doesn't find one. Because that's what happens when God's judgment is coming upon a people. Justice, truth are abandoned.

They're no longer loved. And I think of Paul describing judgment to the Thessalonians as they wouldn't love the truth. They wouldn't love the truth. There needs to be... If we understand that God is the definer of truth and we love God, then we will want to love truth.

It's just a necessary connection. Necessary reality. So, just happened right into that and I've been thinking about it. I had... A couple days ago, I had happened to notice that on my Apple CarPlay thing, Family Radio showed up.

Yeah. Harold Camping. Family Radio. But obviously, Family Radio isn't Harold Camping any longer. And they are completely orthodox and are doing a wonderful job. And so, I went ahead and clicked on it and I started listening and there was a program.

I think it was Family Bible Fellowship Hour or something like that. And they read through basically Psalm 90 through 99, if I recall correctly. And it was just... That's a special section of the Psalter.

I remember when I was taking Hebrew long, long ago and I took more Hebrew than Fuller offered at that time. I had to petition to take advanced Hebrew and stuff like that. And one of the things we did was we translated that particular section of the Psalter.

And somewhere in there, 95, 96, somewhere in that section is the text that speaks about the fact that God's throne is founded upon justice. And complex of words, again, all through that. You cannot escape.

You cannot escape that connected reality that in God's world, the one he's made, justice and truth, righteousness, these things are all intimately connected together. And secularism has no way to even define them, let alone connect them together in such a way that when we live in light of them, we live properly and experience the joy we're meant to have because we know God and we know his world.

So there's my thoughts as we're doing the driving line. 23 minutes at this point, that's good enough for today. I'm going to try to get to a dividing line in the RV as soon as we can. Got a few appointments got to take care of, stuff like that, but hopefully these thoughts will be useful to you.

And like I said, don't forget to go watch How to Save the World. It's well worth watching. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.