The Great Divorce, Provisionism and the God-fearers, NT Wright on Abortion

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. On the day of the great breakup, the nastiest public divorce we've seen in a while. Oh my goodness. I asked on Twitter, are there any adults in Washington?

I really, you know, because I mean, the stuff flying back and forth here. For those of you outside the United States, then again, doesn't really have, you don't have to be in the United States to know what in the world is going on here.

But you know, over the past couple of days, you know, Elon Musk leaves his position at Doge and then, you know, it's sort of quiet and people are wondering what's going on. And then he's like, you know, this big, beautiful bill adds $4 trillion to the debt.

And our interest payments on our debt right now are larger than our military budget. A lot of people don't understand that. And if something were to happen to just shot the interest rates to the ceiling, there's no way we could pay it off.

We'd have to default. And if we default, China defaults, Russia defaults, the entire, it's dominoes. The entire economic system around the world collapses in a big cloud of dust. And people die, people starve, people in the margins, you know, people living in the United States would probably, you know, survive it.

But there are a lot of third world countries that are completely dependent upon economic trading with the United States. And if that all comes apart, and of course, there's a lot of people who want just that.

I mean, you're whacked out, WEF, globalist nutballs want 500 people, 500 million people living on the entire planet. And so they're all excited about the coming demographic collapse. Economic collapse is something, you know, they've got their stores already, you know, they've got their bunkers ready to go.

And so they think it's cool. But anyway, yeah, it's getting stinky, you know, when Trump's saying, well, we just ought to cancel all the stuff we're doing with Elon Musk. It's like, how stupid is that?

Who else are you going to do it with? Remember when the United States stranded astronauts up in space forever? And who went up and got them? Um, we don't we don't really have a first world space program anymore.

Sorry, we farmed that out, everybody else, just like we farmed out manufacturing and everything else to everybody else. Um, so and then Musk comes back with, well, okay, how about this? Trump's in the Epstein files.

Mark, he said, Mark, mark this tweet. Um, you'll see. And it's like, yeah, oh, um, you know, a lot of people are sitting around going, didn't we hear a lot of promises about releasing all the Epstein files and, you know, all this stuff for a long, long time and nothing's happened.

And, uh, you know, some of these, you know, the guys at the FBI, um, the guy who always looks like he's going, um, and then Bungino or, yeah, you know, they were just all the time talking about how there needs to be transparency and all this stuff.

How long have they been in office? And what have we learned? Nothing. Um, so it's pretty obvious that there are lots of people on both sides of the. Is there, is there an aisle? I mean, okay, there is an aisle.

I've, I've been in the Senate chambers and the house chambers many, many, many moons ago. And yeah, there are aisles. Um, and that's what it's talking about. But is there really, are there really any aisles?

It seems to me you can take the most idealistic based, um, person and elect them to Congress. And somehow in two weeks they are conformed to the image, shall we say, of the corrupt politician. You know, um, they get there having been, having been making, uh, $50 ,000 a year.

And now they realize, uh, they, they do this right. And their retirement is, is, is all paid for. And it's not going to be a, a bad retirement at all. And, um, so is, is there anybody, I mean, I can think of one of two, you know, mavericks, uh, that try to go, Hey, we, we can't sustain this kind of spending and stuff like that.

But in general, you know, it just seems to me that the Democrats are united in their desire to destroy the constitution, United States and the nation as a whole. And the Republicans are cowards. Uh, they say one thing, they don't do, um, they get there and they sort of look at you like, Oh, you don't know what I know now.

And no, we can't do that. I know I got elected on the promise to do that, but no, we can't do that. Uh, and you don't know why, but we can't tell you why. And you'll never know why, or if you do know, I will kill you.

Um, yeah, it's, it's, there's this judgment everywhere. And, uh, as I said on Twitter today, I said, look, there's lots of stuff that Trump Trump's doing that I don't like. Um, once the other side takes over and they will, um, they'll use the exact same stuff and they'll come after all of us, uh, censorship.

Um, yeah, uh, it's, it's not good. And, but then I said, however, we didn't have much of a choice because the other choice was an airheaded mannequin who would just be another Joe Biden, which as we now know, and as some of us knew the whole time, and as some of us said in 2019 was a senile sock puppet.

And look, even the left had missed that. Now it was a senile sock puppet. So who was running him? So what was the choice? There really wasn't one. Oh, third party. Yeah, right. Uh, maybe I'll, after all this comes tumbling down, but, um, I don't even want to think about what that's going to look like if it does and when it does and how fast it'll happen.

I don't know. But, um, yeah, the honeymoon is definitely over. Kevin Sorbo just asked on Twitter. So will the Dems go back to buying Teslas now? And of course, Babylon Bee has a, uh, has an article with, uh, uh, Donald Trump throwing Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership.

Um, maybe, maybe, uh, maybe Donald should drive his shiny red Tesla that Elon gave him onto the front lawn of the White House and burn it. Um, I mean, Hey, that, that's the kind of thing that that's the level of really weirdness that, that we're experiencing right now, you know?

Um, so, uh, I don't know. I, I, I don't know. I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers. I mean, I can give you grand theological realities. Um, you know, if, if there was still a serious commitment to the future judgment.

Um, I don't think a lot of these guys could get away with what they get away with. They wouldn't be doing the things they're doing, but there isn't such commitment any.

Longer.

So, um, yeah, this isn't entertainment. It's, uh, it's serious. Um, you know, I don't think Elon Musk would say that Trump is implicated in the Epstein files if he wasn't. That'd be stupid. And you can say a lot of things about Elon Musk.

He's not stupid. My problems with Elon Musk is his worldview and what's driving the Neuralink stuff and transhumanism. And hey, I grew up with Mike Mars.

Anybody?

No one remembers Mike Mars. Only all the old guys in the, in the studio. Um, all the old guys in the audience are going, I remember Mike Mars. That was great. That was, you know, space and space exploration and the Apollo missions and all that fun stuff.

I grew up with all that. So, hey, if someone's talking about sending men to the men to Mars, and it seemed to me the first thing to send to Mars would be some of them there. Um, well, they call them, which what's the name of the robot there?

I was telling Kelly, I was saying, you know, okay, so Tesla is making this, uh, this robot. Um, and I forget the name of it. And I'm like, did they just like purposefully make it look almost identical to the robots in the movie?

I robot. I mean, did you watch the movie? It didn't turn out real good. You know? I mean, um, and it's just like, they, they look almost identical to what was in the film where they then tried to take over.

Uh, but, uh, you know, it, it, it would now be possible seriously to send a spacecraft. We know we can land on Mars. We, you know, we can land on Mars safely. Um, uh, Wattley did it. Uh, if you haven't seen the Martian, you know, you didn't get that one, but anyway, uh, and they don't have to breathe.

So, so, Hey, send, send them up there and have them, you know, build us a little station and then you can send the humans up and the place is already built and they can live there and then try to come back or whatever it is.

I don't know exactly how all that works, but, uh, yeah. So, so I don't think he's going to risk all that by saying something that would just be completely disprovable once the documents were released, which I don't think they ever.

Will be.

I don't think they ever will be. Um, so who knows? Who knows? Hey, I'm just sitting here with all the rest of you watching this. Chris Hanholtz, um, who, uh, got, got in trouble yesterday, um, by responding to something that I said.

Um, oh yeah, believe it or not. Um, he, he, he just, he just made a, made a comment and somebody who will remain nameless cause I don't want to help his clicks. Uh, made it, took a shot at him, but, um, I appreciate that Chris is defending me right now because some really mean lady on Twitter who I thought was my friend, but actually she's obviously a mean lady, uh, was making comments about my fashion choices.

And, um, so Chris has just said, uh, uh, that he thinks my fashion sense is perfectly fine. Love the World War II aircraft shirt. And you know, Chris is geeky enough that he recognizes that. I wonder how many people really do even recognize it.

You know, I've had a couple of comments. Yeah, I'd, I'd like to, the, the one that I'm really disappointed, I mentioned it before that there's no Corsair on the front. Uh, that was, that was such a tremendous aircraft.

Uh, but someone actually zoomed in on it once and pointed out that there's a Nazi symbol.

On your shirt.

Well, there were Nazi airplanes in there and they weren't necessarily Nazi, uh, either. Um, I've, I've talked, I've mentioned this in the past, but there were people that fought for Germany that were not Nazis and in fact, opposed Nazi ideology and that were well worth and earned the respect of their opponents.

And the, the main one that comes to my mind is Field Marshal Rommel, Erwin Rommel. Um, George S. Patton Jr. thought he was the most brilliant military mind, uh, that he ever faced. And, um, if the Germans had listened to Rommel, they would have repulsed the Normandy invasion, the anniversary of which is tomorrow.

Cause he knew where they were coming, but the generals and Hitler, uh, in Berlin rejected his analysis and didn't give him what he needed to defend Normandy. And, um, so there you go. Um, in fact, if they had supported Rommel in North Africa with more fuel, the entire war could have been completely different.

They, everything might've turned out differently. Um, the German generals were frequently overridden by Hitler to their detriment. We, it, from a, from a non God is in control perspective, uh, Germany could have won that war a number of different ways and, and almost did and almost did.

They had much better equipment, much better design. Um, they really did, but Hitler was nuts and, uh, thought himself a military genius.

And he wasn't.

Rommel was, and his opponents in North Africa, they all said the same thing. Not only was a military genius, um, but he also made sure that prisoners were as far as he could, um, treated with respect.

And, uh, you know, they were all sort of out there in the desert facing the same trials and tribulations. So it sort of created an interesting dynamic between the, uh, the Brits and the Germans. And then the Americans, we showed up.

Um, it was, uh, fascinating. It's a lot, there's lots of good books, lots of them that I haven't read on that time to read, but lots of good stuff there that if you're interested in looking at, but, uh, they had the first functional jet fighter aircraft.

Uh, was it the Messerschmitt? Was it 262?

Is that what it was?

And, um, so, you know, but if, but we were just bombing them day and night, literally the Brits at night and weeding the day. And so they, they never got enough of them up in the air to do a whole lot of, make a whole lot of difference.

Um, but, uh, you know, they had the first ballistic missile and there was, you know, Germans are amazing people as far as their ability to design and, uh, and things like that. And I've mentioned before, it was sad when I visited Germany, Germans don't know anything about that because they don't talk about World War II and public education in Germany.

And so when I started telling them, but you've never seen a Tiger tank. Uh, I mean, they were so far ahead of anything we had. Um, that's, I'm funny. If you've seen the movie Fury, the, um, the tank battle, the main, the primary tank battle between one Tiger and three or three functional, um, Germans really unbelievably well done.

And, um, that was the way it was. Anyways, how did it get under that? Oh, it's all Chris Honholz's fault. Um, but yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to get a couple others. I was looking at one fact. I may have even ordered one.

I think about it. A lot of these shirts you see on Facebook and they arrive, you know, next year, like you open this package and you go, oh, I, I completely forgotten. I didn't even order this thing. You know, it was, it, it, it came from, you know, North China, you know, by donkey.

And, uh, but I, I think, I thought I did order one. Uh, I'll have to check on that. I think I did order one that had the, uh, Corsair. It's, it's one of the most, um, best looking aircraft ever. Anyways, sorry.

I, you know, I, yep, I know. Hey, it's for me, it's a lot less depressing than talking about, you know, the fact that Doge identifies all this astonishing waste and the, and the Congress doesn't have the backbone to do anything about it.

It's, I don't know that the corruption seems so deep that the only thing that I could possibly see fixing it is from a human perspective, utter collapse. And you start over again, um, war or what I would love to see.

And that would be a massive move of the spirit of God. But that normally comes after great acts of judgment. And, um, in the face of impending doom, how many, what, what caused Israel to repent over and over and over again, being taken over by their enemies, um, having their sons carted off, their daughters carted off to another land.

That'll bring about repentance, you know? Um, and, and it did. So, so there you go. Um, so yeah, it's an amazing thing to be watching all this, but, uh, I don't think it's a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing at all though.

And for some reason, Tesla stock is crashing as a result. And I'm like, yeah, but doesn't this mean that they're not going to be being keyed and burned now? And the answer is probably no, they'll keep doing that.

Even though Musk is firing missiles, literally, um, at, at Trump and back and forth. Uh, all the rest of that stuff. Um, oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Wait, wait, wait. What, what? National Geographic? The earth's axis is shifting and our water consumption is to blame.

Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. This, seriously, this is what happens when you apply a secular mindset to scientific inquiry, what you get is absolute absurdity. But there you go. So did you see the poll I put on Twitter?

I honestly don't recall ever having done a poll before. I've seen them, but I don't remember ever having done a poll before. So I don't know what. I was just sitting there thinking, oh, you know, well, I think I've just been seeing some responses to some of the comments I've made, where, again, being perfectly consistent, everything that I've taught on this program about church history for decades has been perfectly consistent on this subject.

And I think it came out because there have been, we've gone back and forth a couple of times. Various online debate format people who would very much like to have me debating someone on their thing, because that gives them exposure, have tried to arrange a debate with Stephen Wolff.

And I'm always like, about what? Would you debate Stephen Wolff? About what? And I'm always like, if it was something that would be worthwhile, I'd really rather do it in person. It's not that online debates aren't totally, it's not that they're utterly worthless.

I think the Mahler debate was useful, but that was primarily due to its context. But yeah, if it worked out to where it had to be done digitally, I think that's a strike against it. But that doesn't mean that it's not the only way to have it actually happen.

I think there's something about the personal interaction, about being there, having to look somebody in the eye, that changes the dynamic in a positive way, normally, for a debate. But the issue has always been topic, topic, topic, topic,.

Topic.

So he always comes up with these bland topics. I think the first one that he suggested to somebody was some long lines of, would a majority regenerate populace be enough to build a government, or something along those lines.

It was some demonstration that, again, he does not understand our concern and where I'm coming from. This is his criticism of what he calls revivalism, the idea that to truly have a Christian nation requires the work of the Spirit of God to make Christians, real ones, not the nominal, I'm still a pagan, but I've just renamed all my idols to saints-type nominalism, that kind of thing, but actual, real Christians, that you have to fulfill scripture.

You have to fulfill Isaiah's prophecy about the coastlands seeking after the Torah of God. And fulfill the promise, the father speaking to the son, ask, and I'll give the nations as your inheritance. And the last enemy to be put under Christ's feet, death.

But all the other enemies have to be subjugated first, and he must reign until that happens, all that kind of stuff. This he identifies as revivalism, because he's a sacralist, and because he believes that you can have Christian princes.

And so we can go back to the medieval situation. We can go back to the Reformation. And I've said over and over again, the reformers were sacralists. They imbibed that from their predecessors. And this is really weird.

I don't see your truck.

Well, I understand that. When I pulled it, I noticed. But from what you've got here, I can't see it. So I can't keep an eye on it. And you can see that. That'd be really, really nice to be able to see these cameras on my phone, but that doesn't work for me, because no one loves me.

So anyway, just wanted you to know that I cannot see your truck. I can see my truck, but I cannot see your truck. So there you go. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. And then I think the most recent one that he suggested was the state can or should enforce the first table, which in other words, the first table of the law, that is the first three commandments, specifically, in regards to true worship.

So the state should suppress heresy, false religions, things like that. And my response was, well, that boils down to an aumil versus postmill argument. Well, why? Because the postmillennialist would say, yes, after the work of the spirit in drawing the nations to Christ, then that's exactly what they will do.

But that's after. We're not there. We're not even close to there right now. So that just becomes an aumil versus postmill argument, and it doesn't actually get to the reality of the topic. So what I had suggested was sacralism.

What was the specific? I need to give the exact thing here. Who did I?

Here we go.

All right. Sacralism has damaged the witness of the church and the gospel. Now, I don't know how anybody could actually debate that, because it's so obvious that it's true. I could just spend all my time giving example after example after example of the state inserting itself into the church and into theology in contradictory ways.

We wouldn't even have to necessarily deal with Nicaea, though we could, because it's the greatest example, because Constantine weighed in on two different sides. So he's here at first, and then 15 years later, he's over here, and now everything changes.

And what Athanasius was like to get kicked out of your church five times. Why was he kicked out of his church five times? Because of sacralism. It was a sacral action because of the, and certainly Nicaea wasn't anywhere near what it would eventually be.

I mean, eventually in the medieval period, the church could turn people over to the state for punishment of theological issues. But the state didn't have any choice, because if the magistrate refused to punish, then they could be considered a heretic as well.

Or even at the higher levels, where you've got the times where the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, or various kings of powerful kingdoms, are fighting with one another. And the pope would use the interdict, where he would tell all the clergy in a nation that they could no longer perform sacraments.

So your baby's born and isn't looking good, and so you want to get him baptized and get last rites, but, oh, I can't, because your king is in rebellion against the pope. Well, that brings some pretty serious pressure.

It really does. But then again, there are times when those emperors then invaded Rome and took the pope captive. Till he changed his mind. And so this fighting back and forth with the church involved in stuff that she is not qualified to be involved with, and the state involved with stuff that the state is not qualified to be involved with.

And we got nothing in scripture about how this is supposed to. What are the qualifications? We've got qualifications for elders,.

We've got qualifications for deacons.

We've got no qualifications for any of this stuff. How it's supposed to be done, what's the standards, and you go, well, isn't that true way down in the future? Yeah, but from my perspective, look, from my perspective, there will not be arguments about this stuff.

There won't be stupid memes and Anon armies that rush to vote in a poll to make sure that, what was it, 54 of all the people who voted think that it was good that you took a German peasant, in essence, a German farmer, and who read the New Testament, thanks to Martin Luther having translated it at the Wartburg Castle as Junker Jorg, hiding from the state, and he reads the New Testament and comes to the conclusion that a lot of the rest of us have come to as well, that baptism is for believers in Jesus Christ.

And so he refuses to have his children baptized when they're born, so he's arrested, and he's put in prison, so he starts preaching out the window of his prison and converting people, and so they take him up to the Wartburg Castle, and they drop him in a 40-foot-deep hole with no windows or doors for seven years until he dies.

And the Anon army thought it was really funny to get everybody to go online and vote for the execution of Fritz Erba. That was cool. Not a one of these children could make a meaningful biblical argument that would actually go, well, here's where the Bible says that it was appropriate to separate Fritz Erba from his family and to imprison him in a hole, 40-foot-deep hole, with no windows and no doors.

There's this thing up at the top.

Until he died, over the issue of baptism and who is to receive baptism, and that's perfectly fine. So the vast majority of the people who voted for that had never heard of Fritz Erba before. They've read nothing about the Reformation, and so their opinion is utterly and completely worthless, has no value whatsoever.

What we should be concerned about is about the maybe 10 that actually do know the context and know the background, and they still go, yep, that's what should have happened.

That's what needs to happen.

That's what needs to be happening today. Now, Cory Mahler, of course, responded to some Baptist who said something about paedobaptism, saying these people need to be given their third baptism. And again, most people don't know what the third baptism is, but third baptism was the mechanism whereby you executed Baptists back in the early period of the Reformation.

So they had been baptized as an infant, and then they are re-baptized, anabaptists, baptized again upon profession of faith. And so the third baptism would be where you take them and you tie them up and you drown them as the means of execution.

Normally, you didn't do it, just plunk and leave them down there 20 minutes and pull them up. They had more fun than that. They would drop them down and pull them up and let them spit and sputter and gasp and everything else, and then just do it until they became so exhausted that they drowned and died.

It was great, and so I even posted a picture that I myself had taken on the bridge in Zurich where that kind of execution took place. And immediately, people go,.

Oh, those anabaptists, they were...

And they start talking about Munster and all the rest of this stuff. And I even had one guy go, hey, have you ever heard about what happened in Munster? And stuff like that, and I was like, yeah, yeah, I teach church history, and yeah, it's an amazing story.

And yeah, actually, I went on my daughter's webcast, Theologians, and did a two-part series about the bloody streets of Munster just to let everybody know what actually happened back then. But so they're going after all that stuff, but the fact of the matter is there were...

Fritz Erba was not a militant. Fritz Erba was not trying to overthrow governments. He just wanted to live his life in peace and follow his faith, and the government decided that they knew what that faith should be, and therefore executed him for disagreeing with the governmentally-approved perspective.

And if there's anybody listening to me that thinks that it'd be a good idea for us to have government-approved Christianity, then I just don't think you know anything about history at all. And it's really easy.

We can sit here and go, well, you know how the Chinese have talked about, no, you have the approved Chinese church, and then you have the underground Chinese church. And if you want a church that can actually proclaim the whole counsel of God, you're not gonna get that from almost any, from almost any government that exists today.

And what if Trump were to go that direction and turn to his White House Office of Faith to determine the standards of the enforcement of this sacral state? You want Paula White running stuff? You want Bible translations that need to be approved by the government?

Because that's, why do you think, why did Erasmus have to dedicate the first edition of his Novum Instrumentum in 1516 to Pope Leo X? Why? Because back in those days, if you're going to publish anything that had to do with religion in essence, it had to go through all this bureaucratic red tape.

And he wanted to beat Cardinal Jimenez and the Completentian Polyglot to the market. And so he skipped the tape and just dedicated it to the Pope, hoping that would keep him from being tied to a stake and turned into a firecracker, and it did.

But that's what you've got. You wouldn't have, you wouldn't have the free access to Christian literature and Bible translations and things like that. You've got to control that stuff. That's what sacralism is.

And it was bad enough back then. Can you imagine how bad it would be now with digital control? I have a large Kindle library and I know they could do this right now. They can go in and they can edit those books that I have sitting on my computer.

It's a part of what you agreed to, what I agreed to, to have the convenience of having that tiny little device, which is truly is convenient, but there's a price that comes with it. And so do you want your theology books to be edited by government censors?

Do you want the government to be determining Bible translations that you have access to? I mean, we live in a digital age now. It was one thing. And what was one of the main things that cracked the foundation of sacralism?

Same thing that helped the Reformation to take place, printing press. We're way beyond the printing press now. So anyway, so this is the topic. You know, I'm like, how about we debate that? He won't do it.

So it's like, well, what are we gonna debate? And I also said, I'd be happy to debate whether presuppositionalism is the necessary application of biblical and reformed epistemology, especially Calvin's epistemology and worldview in our modern day, because Calvin wasn't dealing with the secular world.

We're dealing with.

Now that's where we are. And so we have to make application. And I believe that presuppositionalism is the way to do that. No interest in that either. That's not his field. And I've also mentioned Jeff Durbin, be happy to debate John Theonomy.

That'll never happen. He's not gonna do that. So all he's ever suggested are these sort of vague stuff about political theories. And that's his thing. He's not a theologian. He's not an exegete. He's not, you know, that's not his stuff.

So that's where all that stuff is coming from. And there you go. All right. Just looked at the clock and went, oh, okay. I did want to look at this. And again, it's just that this stuff illustrates, we're shifting gears here.

We're not talking about Elon Musk or governmental stuff or sacralism or anything else at this particular point in time. Leighton Flowers posted a tweet today this morning, in fact. It says, the forgotten people of the New Testament, many modern Bible students seem to forget about a very significant category of individuals who existed when Jesus came to accomplish his mission on earth.

God-fearing believers who generally trusted in Yahweh, but who had not yet heard the specific news about Jesus and his mission. Simeon, Cornelius, and Lydia are examples. These people of both the Jews and Gentiles would have belonged to God, been set apart, appointed by God to believe the gospel, favored by God, et cetera.

Many mistakenly read passages with this category of people in mind and interpret it as if it supports unconditional election and irresistible grace. And the fact is the condition of faith was already met.

And the irresistible means of their coming to Christ is merely the father drawing believers in him to also believe his son because they are one. So again, this is not something new. This came out in the debate last year.

This is the provisionist idea that the reason the father can give a people to the son is that those people have already given themselves to the father. And so now he's talking about the God-fearers. And again, if you went to seminary Bible college and had a good seminary Bible college education, this has already been a topic that you have heard lectures on and there are articles about it and probably entire books, though I'm not exactly sure.

And wow, I hope that doesn't mean that somebody was in a car accident. Looks like someone was in a car accident. Well, we'll find out more about that. Anyways, and so you know about the God-fearers and there's a lot of discussion as to the spiritual relationship, subject of regeneration, things like that in the articles and books that have been published.

So it's not anything new. But I just want to, he mentioned Simeon, Cornelius and Lydia are examples. Simeon clearly had had a promise that he was going to see the Lord's anointed before he died. Cornelius is a good example of a God-fearer and Lydia is specifically identified as a sebamene, a worshiper of God.

And so does it not follow that what you have going on here is that these are individuals who in and of their own free will, their autonomous will, outside of the provision of any kind of holy spirit produced miraculous work?

Because that's the whole thing of provisionism. They reject the historic Arminian perspective.

I'm sorry, okay.

Well, when someone's kneeling right next to your truck, you just sort of start wondering what's going on. But it's homeschoolers packing up books that I assume they're probably bringing back to sell to get next year's books, but they're awfully close to the truck there.

And I think that one kid's actually up against it, but let's just hope when they start pushing the cart that it doesn't go right down the side.

Of the truck in the front.

Sorry, we live in Phoenix, folks. And it's been a while, but these cameras, not these cameras, these are really, really, really fancy cameras. We had old, old, old cameras years ago that still allowed me to see that guy trying to break into your car.

And, oh yeah, pop the lock. And I looked up there and saw that. And I got on, we had this loudspeaker. It sounded like a police helicopter, it really did. Step away from the car. And this guy dives headfirst into the van that they had.

And they took off with his feet hanging out the door. That was great. So we have to keep an eye on things. It's not the best neighborhood and there aren't a whole lot of really good neighborhoods anymore, at least in the city.

That's just how it goes. So anyway, what were we talking about here? So she is a worshiper of God, Lydia. So upon the provisionist perspective, she does not need to be raised to spiritual life to be a worshiper of God.

She has freely chosen without any electing on God's part to believe in the one true God. And so all she needs is further information, more data than she currently has. And that's what the proclamation of the gospel does.

And so you can't have anything that would differentiate the elect from the non-elect or those who believe from those who don't believe. Everybody has the ability to believe. Nobody's dead in sin in the sense of not having the ability to believe.

You can evidently be dead in sin and still do spiritually good things. And so these God-fearers then, by their free embracing of God the Father, become those that are given by the Father to the Son because the reason he has the authority to do that is because they've already given him that authority by believing in him.

So they are the ones that are believing in him. Now, I got the feeling that they haven't really thought through exactly how this works down the road because a lot of times it's tied in with blinding the eyes of the Jews so as to bring about the crucifixion.