Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 2A

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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A Greek scholar, who at the end of the 18th century, identified a rule of Greek grammar.

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Basically what that rule is, is if you have a noun that is not a proper name, and it is preceded by the definite article, so we have the word

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God right here, and it is preceded by the definite article the, it is connected by the word chi, which means and, right here, with another noun that does not have an article, both of them are describing the same person.

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And hence what you have in modern translations by the righteousness of our God and Savior, both terms,

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God and Savior, are in reference to Jesus Christ. Now, I printed this tie so that you can see the entirety of the

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Granville -Sharp construction on it. One of the reasons I did so is that you can see it, it is actually readable in this graphic.

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You see those little lines right there? You see a line there, a line there? In the ancient papyri manuscripts, the early

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Christians would abbreviate divine names, God, Jesus, Spirit, Lord, and they would abbreviate them and put a line over top of them.

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In fact, if you are looking closely, I know it is not uber clear, but you may notice there are no spaces between words, it is all capital letters, there is no punctuation.

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That is, of course, to form the original form of the Greek New Testament. This is called majuscule, or unsealed text.

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And the earliest manuscripts up through the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries have this unsealed form of writing.

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And so you can actually read the Granville -Sharp construction on this page.

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Now, I saw this page, this actual page, with my own two eyes underneath a glass box in 1993 in Denver, Colorado.

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What was it doing there? Well, some of you may recall that in 1993, World Youth Day was held in Denver, Colorado, which is going on right now down in Australia, actually.

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And Pope John Paul II came to Denver during that period of time.

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And I and Richard Pierce, who is still my partner in crime with Alpha Omega Ministries, drove up to Colorado and we did two things.

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We did street witnessing. We were there amongst the hundreds of thousands of young Roman Catholic folks passing out literature, and I can tell you some fascinating stories about that.

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And we also did two debates, which are still available today. I debated a man by the name of Jerry Matitix, the first PCA minister to convert to Roman Catholicism.

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He was a doctoral student at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia when he did so. And Jerry and I have debated at least a dozen times.

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And we did over two nights about seven, seven and a half hours worth of debate on the subject of the papacy.

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And so while we were up there, I saw a story in a newspaper about the Papal Treasures exhibit.

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And I'll be perfectly honest with you, not only in that exhibit, but when I was in Rome just a few years ago at the

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Vatican, I am not impressed by tiaras. I am not impressed by diamonds.

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I am not impressed by gold statues or anything else. I don't find that to be overly exciting, but I saw that there would be a page of P72 there and I said,

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Rich, we're going. And so we got our tickets. You'd have to get your tickets ahead of time. There was a certain time that you were supposed to show up.

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And it was one of the first things on the exhibit. And I remember walking up to this and looking at this image and starting to translate it.

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Now, you've got to picture what was going on in this particular situation. There's all sorts of security all over the place, but they're not really around that funny -looking piece of paper.

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They're around the tiaras and the expensive pieces of art and things like that. And so I'm looking down at this thing and I'm going, look, look, there's the

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Granville Show construction right there. And I'm going along. And people would come up and they'd look down at the thing, they'd look up at the description, they'd look over at me, and they'd lean over and look at Rich and go, can he read that?

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He's going, yeah, he's reading it. Look at this, Harold, this man's reading this. And so a crowd starts gathering.

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And so Rich, watching this and noticing the security is getting close, he'll drag me off to go look at a crown for a while.

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And then I'd go back. And you're supposed to keep going. I didn't want to keep going, but I knew they'd kick me out if they didn't.

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Because what you're looking at is the writing of someone who risked their lives to possess what everyone in this room probably possesses in multiple copies.

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You see, in the year 200, being a Christian was not a legal thing in the Roman Empire. We can't get people to come out to go to Sunday school on a

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Sunday morning because it's too early. And here you have someone who clearly was not a professional scribe.

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Any first or second grade teachers in here? Look at that handwriting. Didn't do well.

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This was not a professional scribe. This was probably a businessman, maybe even a member of the

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Roman army. There were Christians amongst them. Someone who probably came into a local assembly of Christians.

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You had to be very careful. But you come in and someone stood up and started reading something and they went,

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I've not heard that. What is that? These are epistles from Jude and from Peter.

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Really, we don't have that in my assembly back home. Can I copy that?

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So here's someone at the risk of their life, finds papyri, and this is not the smoothest writing service that you would ever want to be writing.

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That's one of the reasons it doesn't look quite as good. Who took the time to hand write these epistles and probably carried them back to the church that they originally came from so that everyone would be able to hear the words that Peter wrote at this time.

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And so here is someone 1 ,800 years ago that had the same faith

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I have and the same love for the scriptures and had to write out that ramble -sharp construction that describes

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Jesus Christ as my God and Savior. And by the way, if you notice, that verse also describes faith as something that is a gift of God, by the way.

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And so I've had an opportunity to see a few really ancient manuscripts.

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P72, I saw that in 1993 a few years ago. I was at the British Library in London and stood in front of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus and wept to think about God's grace in preserving his word for us and the great treasures that we have.

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But here is just one of the many treasures that we possess as Christian people, a testimony, a monument to God's preservation of his word over time as well as to the teaching that is found in that.

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In much of my work with Islam, we are being told that all this stuff about Jesus being

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God and all the rest of this stuff came much later. It was a development. It was evolution over time.

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Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here in the earliest manuscripts we have of the

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New Testament you have plain testimony to the deity of Christ. It's not something that comes along after the

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Council of Nicaea and where Constantine made everything up. At least that's what

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Hollywood would like you to believe in the Da Vinci Code and all the rest of that kind of stuff. Here, long before that ever happened, you have a simple

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Christian writing out the scriptures and those scriptures testify to the deity of Christ.

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And so I wanted to share that with you. You hear so much about the alleged corruption of the scriptures and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

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It's nice every once in a while to see something that demonstrates that that stuff just simply isn't true. There's a lot of it out there, but it doesn't get nearly the price that everything that's negative toward the

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Christian faith does, unfortunately. This evening we will be looking at challenges, ancient and modern, to the doctrine of the

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Trinity. And immediately I am going to tell you that we are probably some of the only people in the

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United States today addressing this particular subject on this particular night because, let's face it, outside of a seminary classroom there is a tremendous dearth of meaningful discussion about the subject of the doctrine of the

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Trinity. I don't know about you, but I find that so odd. We claim that it is the central doctrine of the faith and we claim that we cannot have fellowship with those who deny this doctrine.

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I mean, when was the last time any of you opened your door and said to those folks who just woke you up on a

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Saturday morning and you stand there not overly well dressed, with bad breath, going, Brother, come in!

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Let's read the Watchtower together. Probably doesn't happen. In fact, you're probably just a tad bit annoyed when they wake you up.

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And you don't have fellowship with those Jehovah's Witnesses because you may not know exactly what they believe, but you know that on this subject they don't believe what you believe.

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Just a warning, they probably pride best that you not invite them in despite the bad breath if you're not awake and not ready to be dealing with them.

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And when you see those two young men in their white shirts and dark pants and they've got the little thing on their legs to keep their pants from getting caught in the chain of the bicycle pedaling down the road in your neighborhood,

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Elder Smith and Elder Young, and they don't look very elderly to you, but that's what it says on the name tag, and they come to your door and start talking about how families are forever and so on and so forth.

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Back in the back of your mind, you know that one of the fundamental issues you have is that they don't believe in the doctrine of the

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Trinity. And yet, if we were to, in honesty, aside from those of you who have been juniors in the pastor's class here at the school, for all the rest of us, if you were to really be honest with me right now, and if there wasn't a definition hanging on the wall right now, would you feel overly confident that you could pass even a basic test on the fundamental elements of what's supposed to be the central doctrine of our day?

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In that book that was mentioned this evening, I started off with a statement that caught a lot of people by surprise.

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I said, I love the Trinity. And then I said, how many times have you heard anyone say that?

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Within the Christian church, we hear about loving Jesus, and we hear about loving justification, we hear about loving prophecy, and loving all the rest of this stuff, but the

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Trinity? When's the last time you heard somebody say that? And I think one of the reasons you don't hear that almost ever is because we rarely express our passion for and our love for something that in our honest moments we'll admit we don't understand.

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We really don't know why we believe what we believe on the subject. And what's worse is we're very afraid of engaging anyone in conversation on the subject because we know they're going to ask us questions and we just don't know how to answer the questions.

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And we recognize we're not exactly sure why is it so important. A few years ago, actually a number of years ago, interestingly enough,

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I was in Chicago speaking at a conference with Morgan Geisler. And this was obviously before about 2000, 2001 or so.

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And I was writing an article for the CRI journal called Loving the

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Trinity. And I was reading some documentation that a friend of mine at CRI had sent to me.

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And I'm sitting here thumbing through some of the articles that he had sent me that were relevant, and I came across one that started talking about the very popular singing group

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Phillips, Craig, and Dean. And it just so happened that in the

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CD drive of my laptop computer I had a CD of Phillips, Craig, and Dean playing.

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And there I sat as I read an article about how the fact that everybody at Phillips, Craig, and Dean is not a

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Trinitarian. And in fact they come from Oneness churches and do not affirm the doctrine of the

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Trinity. And I hit that little button and kicked that thing open and sat there and looked at what was on the screen and looked at that CD and pondered the situation that we face in modern

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Christianity. One of the earliest errors concerning the nature of God condemned within the

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Christian church was the same error that is promoted in Oneness Pentecostalism and the

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Oneness movement, UPCI, and all the various offshoots of that. I had an article just last week about Joel Hemphill, a well -known southern gospel singer, who is not

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Oneness, he's a direct Aryan who denies the deity of Christ. Lucifer has even written a book on the subject and is promoting it.

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And yet there would be many who would go, Oh, but I just love that music. It gets my toes attacking.

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Now of course we could have a long discussion this evening about what worship is and whether a person wants to be led in worship of the

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Triune God by someone who doesn't believe the Triune God exists, but we won't get into that this evening. But let's face it, one of the main reasons that most people do not engage this subject, do not find it to be something that stirs their heart, they don't have any particular desire to be accurate in their knowledge of this, is because they don't see they first of all do not understand the doctrine itself, they don't understand the difference between being and person and it seems confusing to them, and then they don't see how this relates to us, to the gospel, and to worship.

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And as a result, I would suggest to you that one of the reasons that worship, whatever name it goes under these days, what's called worship in various Sunday churches, has become more and more centered upon man, more and more centered upon meeting our perceived needs, more and more designed to appeal to the emotions, and has become absolutely vacant, a vacuum of doctrinal truth, has to do with the fact that in essence, a lot of Christianity has become paganism, because the essence of paganism is the worship of a god you don't really know.

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And you can't, God has not dated it properly for us to worship him in ignorance.

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He has made revelation of who he is and how he desires to be worshipped.

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It's the pagans who get into the worship of the unknown god. And unfortunately that has snuck into a lot of churches where in reality, if we were to have a quiz after next

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Sunday morning service, how many Christians do you think would be able to give even a definition as brief as the one that I have on the screen right now?

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The reality is, even when I as a young person, I was on an outreach visit for a large

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Southern Baptist church and I ran into a Mormon lady and talked about the blind leading the blind.

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I was a junior in high school and she and I went at it and I look back on it now and it was the two people falling into the pit together.

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I mean, it was ugly. Accomplished absolutely positively nothing other than challenging me and making me go, wow,

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I really need to know what I believe a whole lot better. But even when I started asking questions of the leaders around me, the answers

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I was given were not even Orthodox answers. Many of the illustrations in the

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Doctrine of the Trinity are not even semi -Orthodox in their origination and yet I hear them repeated over and over and over again and this is supposed to be the doctrine that separates us from everybody.

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And of course the cults know that we are ignorant of this and so they know it's our

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Achilles heel and they are trained to go after it.

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They are trained to ask the difficult questions even if they themselves can't provide meaningful answers in reverse but they're trained to ask them, to take the offensive.

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And many of those people who sit in kingdom halls today and Mormon war chapels today were raised within Orthodox Christian churches but they're raised in such a way that no one ever said, you know what, it might be a good idea if you spend some time exercising the gray matter and finding out what you believe and who you're worshiping.

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And of course it seems rather logical to me that we want to know this because is there anyone else in this room who has at one point in time in your past gone, you know when

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I pray how is prayer working? Who am I addressing?

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How does this, when I address the Father and the name of the Son, can I pray to the

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Son? And what about the Spirit? And how does all of that work?

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And what do we mean when we say we believe in only one true God and yet we can address three persons and what does all of this mean?

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Does it really mean anything? I mean, can't a one that's Pentecostal preach the gospel just as well as a

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Trinitarian? If I stopped right now and asked you called you out right now and pointed at you and said, where is the difference?

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In the gospel presentation of a Trinitarian and that of a one that's Pentecostal? Would you not answer?

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Or would you at least agree with me you should know how to answer? This isn't just about theologians folks. One of the fundamental issues of the process of Reformation was the emphasis upon the individual responsibility of the person before God.

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God has given to us His Word. And it's amazing to me how many Christians have jobs where you have to bring home a computer manual this thick and master that thing.

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And yet when it comes to the Bible and to fundamental issues like this we're like, oh, well, you know there's such a deep stream of anti -intellectualism within evangelicalism that basically you just get zapped by the

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Spirit, see? And you're not being very spiritual to study stuff. And that really sells.

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I remember flying down to Dallas when I was... I might have been 20.

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Might have still been 19. Does anyone remember a guy named Milt Green? Milton Green.

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Does anyone remember that name? He was a splash for a while among Southern Baptists sort of introducing some charismatic tendencies among Southern Baptists.

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And he was doing seminars down here. And so I was actually sent down here to sort of report on him for the church.

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I was a member of it at the time. And he was a carpet cleaner from Memphis. And that was what he considered to be his greatest qualification to address these issues was that he was a carpet cleaner from Memphis.

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And don't get me wrong. You can be a very godly carpet cleaner. And there are some carpet cleaners who know more about church history and theology than some people standing behind bullets.

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But when you make that your claim to fame, in essence, and stand in front of people and hold up systematic theologies and say,

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Don't give me theology. Give me Jesus. That sounds so spiritual.

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But what on earth does it mean? Wednesday night we're going to hear someone here locally who made the assertion,

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Salvation awes us. Doctrine confuses us. Well, how can you say

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Jesus without making a theological statement? What Jesus? Who's Jesus?

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Who is Jesus? Why is He important? As soon as you answer any of those questions, guess what you're doing? You're giving theology.

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And when you say salvation awes us and doctrine confuses us, what's salvation? Why is it awe you?

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What is awesome about salvation? As soon as you open your mouth to answer, what are you doing? You're giving doctrine.

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And so it's an amazing claim that gets a lot of mileage, but it doesn't make any sense.

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And so especially the doctrine of the trade has come under this attack.

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And when you start dealing with issues like being in person, people's eyes glaze over and it's like, well,

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I just, I can't be bothered with that level, so I'll leave that to the pastor. That's a good medieval

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Roman Catholic attitude, but it shouldn't be the attitude of someone who believes the Bible is the way to go. And so we need to know what we're talking about this evening.

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And so before I jump into ancient heresies that have long names that may not stick with you through the door unless you write them down,

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I think it's far more important that we start to make sure that we're all on the same page as to what the doctrine of the

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Trinity is. I've been informed that this is an area where there's a lot of oneness Pentecostals. There's a lot of Jesus -only folks that say we should be baptized only in the name of Jesus.

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And this idea of the Trinity is some pagan idea that came along to Council of Messiaen, Constantine, 4th son, everybody, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And so we need to be ready to give an answer for the hope that's within us. Is that true? Why do we say that the

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Son has eternally existed as the Son, as a divine person who became in flesh in the person of Jesus Christ?

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And that that is not the Father. That the Father and the Son have communication with one another.

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That they are distinguishable individuals that use personal pronouns of one another.

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And that the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. Why is it wrong to say, well, you know, the

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Trinity is sort of like an actor on a stage. And I was actually told this when I first started asking my leaders about, well, what is the doctrine of the

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Trinity? How do I understand this? Well, sometimes it's like an actor on a stage. And sometimes he has the mask of the

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Father on, and then sometimes he has the mask of the Son on, and then sometimes he has the mask of the

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Spirit. It's just one person and three different manifestations. That's modalism.

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That's the oneness doctrine being presented to us and in one of its earliest forms.

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And that's not the doctrine of the Trinity in any way, shape, or form. So we need to know what we're talking about.

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So let's look at this. Now, for those of you gentlemen who are colorblind, many of my presentations can be very boring, too,

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I would imagine. But I sort of like color, as you can notice. And so please notice that there are two words here that are a different color than the others.

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I will note them. Within the one being, that is God, there exist eternally three co -equal and co -eternal persons, namely the

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Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The words be and person are highlighted so that we may be able to differentiate between them.

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We say that there is one being, that is God, and within that one being there exists eternally, not just for a period of time, not just a manifestation during creation, there exists eternally three co -equal and co -eternal persons, namely the

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Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Being and person are different things.

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Being is what makes something what it is. Person is what makes someone who they are.

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This is a distinction we use every day. We recognize that there are things that have being, but they're not personal.

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I happen to note over in the corner, for some reason it's distracting to me and I'm not sure why, there's a basketball just sitting there.

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I don't know, maybe it's a sensational desire to go get it and shoot it, I'm not sure, but there is a basketball sitting over there.

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And if you question that that basketball has being, I would just suggest you get into a pickup game and not keep your eye on the ball.

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And as it comes sailing into your nose, you will discover that the basketball has being.

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Now, some of you may speak to basketballs, but I assure you, speaking to the basketball has no effect.

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You may insult it, you may compliment it, you may ask it to go in, or you may curse its name, it matters not.

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You could be Tom Hanks and call it Wilson. It does not matter. Because the basketball, while it has being, lacks personhood.

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It is not personal enough. Despite the craze back in the 1970s when we had pet rocks.

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Remember those? They're actually people selling pet rocks. And you would name your pet rock and you would take care of your pet rock.

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It's a low -maintenance pet anyways. Now, again, it has being.

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It might be a good thing in the middle of the night if someone's coming through the window to utilize your pet rock in a certain fashion as a projectile.

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But it had being and would function that way, but it didn't really matter how much care, how much caressing, how much speaking you did to your pet rock.

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They would not grow. And they would not respond to you because they are not a person. We recognize this and we recognize that we are human beings.

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We share the same kind of being and yet each one of us is individual.

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My human being is shared by one person and if you try to share that by multiple people and they put you into the room with those patent walls all the way around, it is unnatural because my being is finite and limited.

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It is limited to one place, one time. As much as that sometimes I wish I could bi -locate, get more work done.

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It doesn't work that way. I am limited. I am finite in my being. My being came into existence at a point in time and is not eternal in any way, shape, or form and is shared by one person.

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That is me, myself, and I. We share our community but we are distinguished on the level of personhood.

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Now, the danger of course is when we take human language and we try to project this upon God.

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We share with historic Orthodox Judaism and with historic Orthodox Islam the belief that there is only one true

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God who is not in need of anything else, who is the creator of all things and that this being of God is not limited by time and space.

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Now, at that point I am only speaking of Christianity because at that point you start getting all sorts of different viewpoints amongst the other religions but in Christianity we believe that God is not limited by His creation.

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He is not limited by time and space. In fact, time and space are a part of His creative activity.

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He brought them into existence. There is nothing that exists outside of God. Everything else is dependent upon Him for its existence.

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And that being of God, being unlimited is shared by three divine persons according to biblical revelation.

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Not simply according to sitting around doing philosophical diagrams and examining this idea and that idea.

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I believe the doctrine of the Trinity because the Bible forces me to. I will show you why that is in just a moment.

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I call myself a biblical Trinitarian. If you believe in Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura.

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Sola Scriptura, the scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith in the church.

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Tota Scriptura, you must believe all that the scriptures said. You cannot pick and choose.

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You cannot decide that well there are some things in scriptures I'm not going to believe. If you believe in Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura you will be a biblical

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Trinitarian. Anyone who denies the doctrine of the Trinity I can show you which passages of scripture they are simply rejecting.

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And often, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses mistranslate it in the process as well. But I come to that from the scriptures.

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I'll show that to you in a moment. But it is important to recognize that we distinguish between being and person.

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How many times I have heard a person objecting to the doctrine of the

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Trinity saying you think there are three beings that are one being. No we don't. You think one plus one plus one equals one.

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No we don't. One being, three persons. One plus one plus one doesn't equal three.

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No one's ever said that it does. And almost all the alleged illustrations you know, the shamrock and well

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I'm a father and I'm a brother and I'm a son. I rightly saw a

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Muslim sort of mocking that going yes but I'm also a cousin and a nephew too so I guess that makes five.

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Most of these just they're not really necessary if we were actually starting where we need to start that is within the pages of scripture as we'll show in a moment.

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But one being being is what makes something what it is.

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Three persons or as Pancanagraph has rightly said one what and three who's.

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One what and three who's. Now when

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Jehovah's Witnesses and I get together when I have that opportunity the way that I present the

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Trinity to them is I present them texts and we'll see if we have enough time for me to get into this this evening it might be of some use to some of you but time is always our enemy.

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I present them texts that demonstrate that the name Jehovah and at least when

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I'm talking about Jehovah's Witnesses I don't spend too much time arguing with the fact that it's better to say Yahweh that's much more likely the pronunciation of the divine name, the tetragrammaton

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Yod -Heh -Wau -Heh in the Old Testament than Jehovah is. But that's only rarely something that I get into what

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Jehovah's Witnesses is about. But I demonstrate to them that that one divine name and believe me, once you say

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Jehovah to a Jehovah's Witness you've got their attention because they're not accustomed to Christians utilizing that and many of them think they're the only ones who know it.

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And so when you use the name they're like, are you a former Jehovah's Witness? No, I am not

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I've never been associated with Osharo, Traksai in any way, shape, or form. But even though I did have

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Witnesses one storm out of the house because it has absolutely existed that I was some apostate Jehovah's Witness named

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Chuck Love. Chuck Love sounds like somebody from the 70's and Bill Biles Not me, you want to see my driver's license?

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You had that faked, you know I was like, wow, okay, that's an amazing thing but anyways, what I do is

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I demonstrate to them that that one divine name is used of three persons in the

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New Testament and when they see that for a Jehovah's Witness especially they can argue until the cows come home whether Jesus is called

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God or Agon if Jesus identifies as Jehovah, that's it. And I cannot tell you how many times

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I've had elders of the Watchtower Society just sitting there staring at their Bibles going, where did this come from?

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I never saw this before. That is one of the mechanisms one of the means by which you can demonstrate to them this wonderful truth.

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One divine name used of three persons in the New Testament clearly the

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Father is identified as Jehovah. That's a shock to Mormons who by the way believe that the

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Father is Elohim and Jesus is Jehovah. I got kicked out of the Mesa Visitor's Center of the Mormon Temple back when

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I had lots of hair and a skinny many many moons ago because I kept showing them verses

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I did around 435 to show that you might know that Jehovah, he is Elohim besides him there is none else and I was shown the door rather quickly by large missionaries very large missionaries they were from the

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BYU front line One, the

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Father is identified as Jehovah the Son then is identified as Jehovah you really need to know which text to use to demonstrate that there are some excellent ones to do that and of course the

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Spirit is the Spirit of Jehovah and so if you have one divine name who is the one true

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God creator of all things in the Old Testament being used of three divine persons who are clearly distinguished from one another and that's where you get into the one that's been cosponsored

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Here you have some of the biblical evidence that has forced, literally forced the church to recognize that this is divine revelation

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Now, biblically let me please exhort you even though I haven't done it this way this evening it's because it's the topic of our conference

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I have always found that the most effective means of presenting this doctrine to someone, to a believing

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Christian is to appeal to our common belief in the Lord God Go to the scriptures for so many

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Christians they think this is just something that you know, sort of deep philosophical stuff that's way beyond them, no this is what the scriptures teach and these scriptures are accessible to all of us

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There are three biblical foundations of the doctrine of the trinity and if you recognize what these foundations are, in a conversation with someone you will be able to very quickly identify where their understanding of the scriptures is wrong and be able to focus upon those things.

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Most Christians when they have a discussion on this subject are always off in philosophical considerations and never really get anywhere.

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I think it's the word of God that's alive and sharper than a two -edged sword and that really accomplishes changes in people's hearts and so I like to be presenting what the scriptures say on these particular subjects because of the authority that comes with that The first foundation and it's first not just because I address it first but it's first because it's the first thing

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God reveals about himself is absolute monotheism absolute monotheism

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There is only one true God and while that is clearly the battleground with the

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Mormons because as I mentioned last evening Joseph Smith said in 1844 when you imagine suppose that God was

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God from all eternity I'll refute that idea and take away the veil such as you may see and likewise early

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Mormon prophets and teachers said that if you would take a thousand worlds like this world and number the particles of matter in those worlds you'll find there are more gods than there are particles of matter in those worlds.

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That's a lot of gods Mormonism is the most polytheistic religion that I know of in the history of mankind because they literally posit an unlimited and infinite number of divine beings and Elohim the

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God of this planet is just one of those many many gods and literally infinite universes as well is their perspective so while that is the battleground with Mormonism you need to realize that our

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Muslim friends reject that we actually believe this while they may recognize we claim it they reject that we actually believe it and primarily because the

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Quran expresses its rejection of the trinity in language that would lead you to believe that we are polytheists and so rather than letting us define our doctrine in Islam the

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Quran gets to define our doctrine and to misdefine our doctrine and so one of the greatest challenges you have is constantly pointing out that what they think we believe is not actually what we believe that can become exceptionally frustrating at times we are monotheists we believe in one true

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God when we go out and witness to Mormons we encourage in fact it's old, it's very old now but still very useful

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I have an article on our website called the hundred verse memorization system wrote it, oh man

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I wrote it on a compact portable compact portable that weighed 45 pounds had a 6 inch green screen and two floppy drives and no hard drive that would tell you how long ago that was and how laughable the term portable was when it first came out but I wrote that many many many moons ago and it's a hundred verses to memorize to be ready to witness to Mormons and a fairly large portion of it are the key texts to testify to this fact of monotheism, now if I was just doing a training tonight

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I'd have a whole list of these and you'd be going through them, Isaiah 43 10 and 44 6 and 8, 44 24 and I'd go through all of them but that's not the subject for this evening but those are available of course in the forgotten training,

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I develop those as well as I do in my books on Mormonism such as letters to a

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Mormon elder and is the Mormon my brother absolute monotheism, there is only one true God, he is eternally existent foundation number two, the existence of three divine persons we distinguish between the father the son and the holy spirit this is probably the biggest area of confusion for Christians and therefore if I have time within the next hour or so,

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I want to go through a presentation that I have on this very issue so that we can emphasize the texts that clearly distinguish between the father, the son and the spirit and demonstrate that that distinction is an eternal one that the son existed as a divine person before the incarnation that is what you need to demonstrate when

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I did a radio debate a number of years ago with the leading theologian of the UPCI Dr.

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Bernard that's who I presented, I was amazed at the uttering capacity he had to respond to that,

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I have told Dr. Bernard that I will go to St. Louis and I will appear at the Irshon Graduate School on the campus of their main school in front of their students to debate on that subject and he has not taken me up on that challenge that is the foundation, the fact that the

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New Testament clearly distinguishes between these three divine persons, the father speaks to the son, the son speaks to the father the father and the son send the spirit the spirit is a person he speaks, he uses personal pronouns he is not merely an impersonal active force as Jehovah's Witnesses would tell you, like the electricity running through the lights above our head that's what they believe the

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Holy Spirit is that's why the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses never capitalizes Holy Spirit, it's always small h small s and they speak of being baptized in Holy Spirit rather than being baptized with the

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Holy Spirit because to them the spirit is just like running water it is an impersonal active force that exerts power that's what the

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Holy Spirit is to Jehovah's Witnesses finally foundation three is the one that most

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Christians at least have some knowledge of and that is the text to demonstrate the co -equality and co -eternality of the person specifically the deity of Christ at least the

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Jehovah's Witnesses have done one thing for us and that means at least we know a few verses that we think hopefully demonstrate the deity of Christ, hopefully something more than just John 1 .1

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I think I mentioned was it in this context? I speak so much sometimes I forget, Colossians 2 .9

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if I didn't, Colossians 2 .9 is one of my favorite texts to look at as I did in the context of Gnosticism for in him all the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form the gravel shark construction on my tie

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God and Savior Jesus Christ it's also about Titus 2 .13 all the texts that demonstrate that Jesus Christ is the creator of all things,

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Colossians 1 .15 through 18, things like that those texts that demonstrate the co -equality that is theirs and the personality that is the

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Spirit, it's the Spirit speaking the Spirit using personal pronouns and things like that these are the three foundations now what happens when we deny one of these foundations, well, here is a triangle and immediately some people are going woah, triangles are bad pagans have used triangles

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I feel like going, show me one shape one geometric shape they haven't used

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I just love when people go, I saw a witch, she was at a luncheon so we have as our foundational truth, the bottom of the triangle, we have monotheism, there is one true

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God, and then over here we have the existence of the three divine persons and then here we have the equality of the persons the three foundations of the doctrinal trinity forming one whole, now what happens when we deny one of these, this little diagram is useful for remembering the errors that come forth when we deny one element of these truths, for example if we were to deny monotheism, then you have three divine persons who are equal with one another but if you don't have the foundation of monotheism the result is what the other two sides then point to and that is polytheism a belief in more than one

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God, now polytheism would just be any two Gods would be polytheism a million

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Gods is polytheism there is a sub category of polytheism you might want to be aware of called henotheism h -e -n -o, henotheism is where you believe there is one major God but you also accept the idea of minor

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Gods that was a major problem for Israel during the course of its religious history is that that was the constant temptation they were faced with was to maintain their worship of Yahweh but add to it the worship of other

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Gods that's called henotheism but if you deny monotheism then the other two sides come together to point to the result of error and that is polytheism which you see in the

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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon Church if you deny the existence of three divine persons then you have monotheism and you have equality of the persons but without the existence of distinct persons that comes together to result in modalism or oneness modalism is the idea that God exists in different modes, that sometimes

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He exists as the Father, sometimes He exists as the Son the classical modern

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UPCI doctrine is the idea that the Son actually came into existence in Bethlehem, that's the human nature of Christ and He is indwelt by the divine nature which is the

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Father so that Jesus is actually two persons in classical

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UPCI theology when Jesus is praying to the Father Jesus is actually since He's two persons it's a schizophrenic discussion it's

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His human nature addressing His divine nature and sadly that's also what a lot of evangelical

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Christians think Jesus is doing too because they don't realize that the Son is an eternal person and that it's the

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Son who became incarnate, not the Father who became incarnate so that's where you get modalism and oneness and there's a number of different forms, we'll look a little more at that in just a moment and if you deny the equality of the persons you have three persons and monotheism, but if they're not equal then you have to put them in some kind of order, resulting in a subordination of one person to another person generally, the assertion that the

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Father is the one true deity and then the Son is a lesser individual for Jehovah's Witnesses and Aryans the

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Aryans are actually more orthodox than Jehovah's Witnesses because the Aryans did not deny the personality of the

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Holy Spirit Jehovah's Witnesses do but Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus is

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Michael the Archangel the first and greatest of all of God's creations, the only thing that Jehovah created directly is

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Jesus and then through Michael he creates all other things intriguingly at least historically,

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Watchtower theology, their belief has been that Jesus that Michael ceased to exist he was a spirit being he ceased to exist when

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Jesus came into existence they do not believe that we have a spiritual nature so Jesus is merely a physical human being when he dies

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Jesus ceases to exist and Jehovah recreates Michael in heaven as a spirit being there really isn't a connection in fact, one of the tragedies from my perspective of Watchtower theology as a whole is that the individual

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Jehovah's Witness their only hope that they are given, and this is one of the reasons that I do like to spend time witnessing to them when they are open to my doing so because it's such a joyless religion and there is so little hope in it not only are there only about 7 ,000 people on earth who claim to be of the anointed class will actually go to heaven that means 99 .97

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% of all Jehovah's Witnesses get to look forward to living forever in paradise on earth but the problem is if you die as one of Jehovah's Witnesses what you are taught is you cease to exist and then at the resurrection and the millennium you are recreated based upon God's memory of you

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I don't know about you that means that's not really me that's just something that looks like me it's based on God's memory of me but it's a new creation that's not exactly the most comforting kind of theology that you have out there and the same thing is true with their doctrine of Jesus basically

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Michael exists and Jesus exists and now Michael exists again and that's what they call resurrection and that's not biblically what resurrection is in any way shape or form so hopefully this graphic is somewhat helpful to you in understanding how a denial of any one of those biblical foundations results in a real problem now here's the part where you've got to get a deeper seat in the saddle

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I'm not going to I'm going to sort of keep an eye on you and I already know about how many people as I'm scanning through here are very close to unconsciousness and so as the number increases one of two things happen either

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I have an eye -burning laser it is an eye -burning laser it is a bright one if especially this happened to me once at a conference

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I had a man sitting right there where my camera is he was a very large man and I have never heard anyone snore that loud in my life and he would only stop when

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I got real close to him so I had to be the most peripatetic creature I'd ever been walking back and forth they talk about ruining the entire thing but if your mouth flops open

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I will shoot this in it so that makes your whole face glow and it's really weird

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I'll catch it on camera and put it on YouTube so stay away and that'll help you a lot let me at least briefly go over some of the terminology so you at least have a very basic idea of what the categories of discussion were and then

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I'll try to make sure to find some time to go over especially the biblical evidence concerning the existence of the three divine persons, we'll take the opportunity to do that now obviously we know from last evening that the

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Gnostics, the early enemies of the church denied monotheism in the sense that they had all these eons, the

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Pleroma they had the emanations coming down from God, they had a Demiurge that created the world that was an evil

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God and so they weren't exactly coming from the same perspective Docetism, denying that Jesus had a physical body, all of these individuals would have rejected the biblical revelation concerning how