Justin Peters & Jim Osman join to discuss Faith Healers Apologetics Live 10 11 2018 HD 720p

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The Apologetics Live with Pat Slick and Andrew Rappaport, part of the

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Christian Podcast Community. All right, well, welcome.

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We are going to have some special guests here. I know that my face is really big on screen, unfortunately, and there's reasons for that.

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But we have someone next to me that, well, you're not going to see just yet. But if you read the title, you're going to know who it is.

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Anyway, folks, if you want to join in, if you're watching on the ApologeticsLive .com,

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from there you'll get the link to join in if you want to join in and be able to dialogue with the different guests that we're going to have on.

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But our regular folks that we have, I am Andrew Rappaport from Striving Fraternity, Matt Slick from CARM .org,

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and this is Apologetics Live, live every Thursday night, 8 o 'clock Eastern Time, where we try to answer your questions.

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You can come in asking almost anything. And with that,

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I'm going to first introduce Mr. Slick. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. How are you doing? All right.

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I have next to me, none other than the man, the myth, the legend, one that Matt Slick refers to as the spiritual

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Batman. We'll get into that, I'm sure. Justin Peters. Andrew, how are you, brother?

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I'm doing well. Good. We have your pastor on the line, don't we? We do indeed. Yes, we do.

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And that would be Mr. Jim Osmond. You actually can say hi,

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Jim. Hey, buddies. How you doing? The guy's so talkative all day.

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Yeah, he's like all talkative all day. Now he goes quiet. So what we hope to cover tonight is going to be an area that I know

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Justin is an expert in, Jim Osmond is an expert in, Matt, you've done a lot of study in, but the faith healers,

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NAR. And I know, Matt, you just finished up the study and you're planning on diving into some stuff with NAR coming up soon.

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So that's something folks can look forward to. And we're going to have some dialogue amongst ourselves and we're going to add some folks later on.

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So folks want to join. So real quick, for folks who don't know your background,

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Justin, could you give your background a bit? How you got involved in this?

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And then I'm going to ask Matt to explain why you are the spiritual Batman. He has to explain that one.

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I'll let you do that. Yeah. Should I look at the?

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You can look at that. Okay. So what I'm most known for is my work in the word of faith, health and wealth, prosperity gospel.

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It's not my only interest, but that is kind of what I'm known for. But I do a seminar entitled

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Clouds Without Water that I teach around across the United States and internationally, usually a few times a year.

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And it deals with the word of faith movement. And I go into the origins of the word faith movement, the standard doctrines that they teach and point by point, correct everything, everything biblically from Scripture.

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But the way I first got exposed to this movement was as a teenager, I was born with cerebral palsy.

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And when I was 16 years old, a neighbor of mine came up to me and he said, Justin, God has spoken to me and he's told me that he's going to heal you as long as you have enough faith.

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And, of course, at age 16, I wanted to be healed. And so this really struck a chord with me.

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And he told me about a faith healer who was coming to my hometown at the time, Vicksburg, Mississippi.

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And the faith healer's name was Nora Lamb, L -A -M. And in the weeks leading up to her arrival, he was showing me a lot of Scripture.

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He would have me down to his house and show me a lot of Scripture that I now know he was taking out of context.

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But at the time, I didn't realize it. Isaiah 53, 4 and 5, by his stripes we are healed. Third John 2, beloved,

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I pray that in all things you may prosper and be in good health, even as your soul prospers. And so I was completely convinced that I would indeed be healed.

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And I thought I'd ginned up the necessary faith for that. And so I went to see

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Nora Lamb, went to see R .W. Schambach. And obviously was not healed. So that was my first exposure to it.

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But it wasn't until years later as a seminary student that I began to study it at a more academic level.

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And came to realize how thoroughly heretical the movement actually is.

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It's not just about health and wealth. It's not just about fancy suits and Rolex watches. They have a different God, a different Jesus, a different atonement, and a different gospel.

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So that's a Cliff Note version. Okay, and real quick.

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That was the short version? Yeah. So Jim, how about you give your background real quick. I'm from North Idaho.

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Back to you, Justin. You're about as quick as Matt when you expect

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Matt to go long. Are we allowed to give our church's website? That's up to you guys. Jim won't say this, but our website.

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I'll go ahead and give my background now, Justin. Okay, go ahead. I pastor a small church in Kootenai, North Idaho.

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We're up by the Idaho Panhandle next to the Canadian border. And I've been pastoring for 22 years.

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A small congregation up there. I started in 1996 when I was 24 years old. We have a great fellowship of Bible -believing, conservative,

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Christ -loving, Christ -worshiping fellowship up here. And Justin is a member of our church.

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And I got saved when I was about 15 years old at a local Bible camp. God saved me.

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And through the ministry of this church that I now pastor. So Matt, you've been studying some of these guys,

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Benny Hinn and the like, for quite a while. What got you interested? We know what got you interested in studying

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Mormonism is the quote from Joseph Smith saying that he was more godly than anyone. What got you into studying

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Benny Hinn? Stupidity. Stupidity. Just seeing some of the stupid things that they would say.

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And just go, you have got to be kidding me. So I was just entrenched by the inability of people to exegete

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Scripture properly. The way they would read stuff into the text. That's eisegesis.

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And then, of course, they were narsegesis. They would read the text in a way that was about them.

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And they just didn't know what they were doing. They couldn't argue their way out of a wet -paper heresy. So, you know, when you're dumbfounded by the idiocy of cults, and then you read that within the

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Christian camp there are people who just believe things that are just as wacko as Mormonism, God from another planet, and things like that, you start studying.

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And that's what got me into it. And then that's when shortly about that time is when my spiritual

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Tourette's started to develop. And calling names heretics and things like that and stuff.

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But I'm being nice right now. Do you know him saying that, just with the planets, jogging my memory?

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I read in a magazine, Believer's Voice of Victory, which is Kenneth Copeland's magazine. He said that the reason that the other planets are uninhabited is because God had plans to put people on all nine planets.

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Pluto included, I guess. But Adam messed everything up with the fall.

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In Copeland's words, when he ate the apple. But Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune, they're all supposed to have been inhabited, but Adam messed everything up.

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It's that kind of stuff. I believe it. Yeah, you know, well, they said there's a mother planet and things like that.

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And, you know, and you hear stuff like this, particularly as someone who takes the word of God seriously, you hear something like that.

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You ever seen a round square that's actually blue on Tuesday?

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You know, it makes no sense. And that's what I feel like when I listen to these people.

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Are you serious? And to me, I've always been intrigued by various forms of heresy.

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So that's why I started. There was Matt, you and I got to in New Jersey.

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You and I were. Justin Peters was speaking at church and evening service. And I don't

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I don't remember exactly what you said, but he was telling a story of Jesse Duplantis in a cable car.

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Do you remember that? Do you remember what you said to me? Let me say something that I've heard it all. I've been studying apologetics for 38 years.

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Someone says something to me. I just do this. But I will say that at the conference that he was speaking at, it was one of the few times in the past 15 years where my jaw actually went, what?

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We're just ratcheted down as he was saying things like, are you kidding me? Yeah. You're the only one who's been able to do that.

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So that's pretty good, actually. But that was a place. Remember, that's what the place where we had a synergist, a narcissist and a monergist speaking, wasn't it?

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There's the thing is, OK, so JustinPeters .org, you're trying to say is is is, you know, a narcissistic.

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It's about him. They strive for eternity. It's synergist, but there's nothing about Karm .org that makes it monergist.

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There's nothing in that name. It's Christian Apologetics Research Ministry. So I thought it was a great, great joke when

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I got up there. Hey, look, we have and we're all we're all three there. Look, we have a narcissist, a narcissist.

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I was talking to about. This is Justin Peters Ministry, narcissist and striving for eternity.

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Oh, he's obviously a synergist, but I'm the only monergist here. And, you know, that's better than them. It kind of went it went

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OK, I think. Well, for the record, we're all monergists. That is true.

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Or synergists or narcissists. I'm a narcissist. The irony is that Justin's probably the least narcissist person

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I could ever know. So he once told me he was proud of his humility. I agree. He's good.

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So. So let's talk about that. That account went from with the cable car because because that really is a picture of how wacky some of these guys are.

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So, Justin, could you could you go over that account with Jesse Duplantis and what happened in his cable car experience?

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Yeah. So Jesse Duplantis says that he was preaching in Magnolia, Arkansas in 1988.

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And he after the service that night, he went back to his hotel room, closed the door, and he just felt like God was impressing him to God, wanted to talk to him about something.

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And so and God just kept bugging him. And so Jesse said, Lord, what?

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And then right at that moment, he says he was sucked up out of his hotel room, found himself on a cable car traveling through space, traveling through space and time.

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And there was a blonde haired angel on the cable car traveling with him. And when the cable car finally came to a stop, the door opened and Jesse stepped down into heaven.

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And then the angel, the blonde haired angel, gave Jesse a guided tour of heaven, showed him his own personal mansion that was decorated with all of his favorite furniture that he likes on Earth.

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So, I mean, it's just it's bizarre. I mean, it's it would make a science fiction movie look like a documentary.

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I mean, it's just Looney Tunes. You really can't. It's just unbelievable.

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There was was it was it with the cable car or there was one where you had where he came in the morning to his office and God wasn't in the mood, wasn't in a good mood.

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So so after this event, Jesse says that one day he went into his office to study where he meets with Jesus on a daily basis and Jesus shows up and talks to him.

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And he said he walked into his office, but he noticed that Jesus just didn't seem like himself that day.

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He just something was off. And he said he said to Jesus, he said, Jesus is something bothering you, something bothering you,

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Jesus. And Jesus just kind of looked downcast. And he said, Jesse, my people have disobeyed me.

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And Jesse said, and I just kind of I've seen this so many times, I haven't memorized. And you can look it up. Close encounters of the

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God kind. If you don't believe me, watch it. Close encounters of the God kind. But just Jesse plans. And Jesse said,

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Lord, I'm shutting it down. I'm canceling all of my appointments today. I'm shutting it down. I'm going to sit in here and I'm just going to love on you and worship you and call your name

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Hosanna until you feel better. Direct quote, until you feel better. And then

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Jesse said he goes like this. He says, come here, come here. Like, come here.

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And so then he hugs Jesus. And and then

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Jesse said that Jesus just breathed a sigh of relief, like. Just unimaginable, unimaginable.

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I mean, Jesse Duplantis is. Yeah, he's one of the worst of the worst. And he's extraordinarily wealthy.

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I mean, if you think that people don't believe this stuff like that's too outlandish for people believe, consider that he is one of the wealthiest of all of them.

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And he's he's either currently looking for his or has already purchased a seventy five million dollar private jet.

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So you got one of those, right, Matt? You get one of the jets. Yeah.

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My fantasy land. So, I mean, that was that was the time where I mean,

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I remember when you explain that and Matt just looked at me, I was like, I don't get surprised often. Wow.

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Well, that is such a blasphemous thing. It's a reduction of God and exaltation of man comforting

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God because God is needy. It reminds me of the book The Shack and where Jesus can't even catch a trout as he's walking on water.

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This idea of the reduction of God and the majesty, not understanding who he is. I don't see how

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I'm not judging their salvation here, but I don't see how someone like that can be regenerate.

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It doesn't make sense. So it certainly is a cause for very serious concern, obviously.

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One of the if I may, one of the points that I try to make in my seminar is that one of the great theological ironies is that the word of faith in our people would look at someone like me and they say, oh, well, you don't believe in the

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Holy Spirit. You don't believe in his power and the power of the Holy Spirit. To the contrary, I am so confident in the power of the

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Holy Spirit of God that I do not believe that someone can be indwelt by him and teach the kinds of blasphemies and heresies that these people teach.

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The very first time one of these heresies crossed their lips, if they were truly indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the

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Holy Spirit of God would drop them to their knees and they would be under such heavy conviction that they just could not continue doing what they're doing.

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And yet they do with reckless abandon for years and years and years, decades, many of them.

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And so that is one of the great ironies is that the very people who claim to have such a high view of the

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Holy Spirit actually have the lowest view of the Holy Spirit of God. You know, you have what you have.

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I have I was born with Asperger's. I have a deformed bone in my back and I have 80 decibel ringing in my ears.

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I prayed for healing on all of these things. And God has not seemed fit to do that.

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And as you know, he has a way of using us in our frailties and our weaknesses in order to bring glory to him.

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You know, it reminds me, there was a friend of mine in San Diego and he was into this stuff and we were talking one day and I said, no, no, no, you understand something.

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God doesn't always do this. He doesn't heal people. And I said, I set him up. And I said, you know,

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I believe that God will make people's eyes blind and deaf. And he said, no,

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God would never do that. I said, are you sure he'd never do that? He says, yeah, he would never do that. He always wants people healthy. So I got the

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Bible and I showed him Exodus 411 where, you know, God's talking to Moses who makes the eye blind, the ear deaf, the tongue dumb.

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Is it not I, the Lord? And I showed him the verse. Now this is what is interesting is that he sat there for maybe a full minute.

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I didn't say anything. I just waited. And he stared at the text. And then he said to me, after about a minute, he goes, well,

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I don't know what it means, but it doesn't mean what it says. Yeah.

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Yeah. I've heard similar responses. Well, Jim, you have, you,

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I mean, we talk about the people going to heaven. You have a whole book on these experiences.

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I mean, Don Piper, Matt, I know you've dealt with some of these as well with these accounts of people going to heaven.

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Um, I remember my first account with it. There was a book in the, I want to say it was like the late eighties, guy who said he was shaving in the, in the mirror.

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And, and Jesus appeared in the mirror. And I've always said the reason I know that that guy did not see

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Jesus is because he kept shaving. That's not what Isaiah did on Isaiah six.

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When Isaiah saw the Lord, he fell down on his face and just said, what was me? I'm a, I'm a sinful person.

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I'm a people, I'm of a sinful people. Uh, he, he didn't keep shaving or the guy who, you know, was having a splashing fight in the

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Jordan river. Um, what? Yeah, there, there was a book about, uh, a guy who said he went, he went up to heaven and was having a splashing fight, uh, in the

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Jordan river in heaven with Jesus there. Someone sent me a, um, Martin McCurdy sent me a link.

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Apparently there's some, some, uh, person out there that has recently said that I believe as a woman, she went to heaven.

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And seriously, she said that in heaven, cows drive tractors in heaven.

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I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. She was watching cars. Jim, tell us a little bit about your, your book about like, uh, like, uh,

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I mean, I'm acting like I'm the host. Hey, this is an open kind of open forum for today for a bit.

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Since we're talking about people who go to heaven, Jim, tell us a little bit about your book. Do you happen to have a copy with you?

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Uh, no, I've got a copy there in my office where you guys are sitting. It's over there behind my desk where I'm, uh, where I normally sit in the corner.

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Okay. Selling the stairway to heaven. It's about third shelf up on the, in the corner.

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My books are laying horizontal like this. There's three of them there. Oh, okay. All right.

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So, all right. Do you find them over there? Oh, yeah. Oh, there it is. Yep. Here we go.

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Who's in charge? Okay. I'm just curious. All right. So selling, this is one of your three books thus far thus far.

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I'm two behind you. Well, Matt's got, I think Matt's got more than all of us. And he, he, he,

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Matt produced two this month. Go figure on that. He had like Sydney, he was like, oh,

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I have this done. I just got to finish it up. And they're both on atheism. So Jim, tell us about, uh, selling stairway to heaven.

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Yeah. So in selling the stairway to heaven, I did a review of three different books, uh, where the authors claimed that they went to heaven and spent some time there.

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I, I reviewed Don Piper's book, 90 minutes in heaven. I review, uh, Todd and Colton Burpo's book.

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Um, heaven is for real. And another one by even Alexander called proof of heaven. And even

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Alexander is an unbeliever. So he doesn't even try and make any claim to be a Christian or even make any claims to try and be present any kind of a biblical view of heaven.

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And, uh, I, I compare and contrast these three, these three books, and it's a very thorough review of each book.

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So, uh, in, in the chapter, for instance, that deals with Don Piper's book, I compare some of the statements that Don Piper says with other statements that Don Piper says both inside the book and outside the book to show that he's inconsistent on one occasion.

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He'll say he did not see God when he went to heaven on another occasion. He'll say that he did also in the book, there are inherent contradictions in the book.

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And then there are contradictions between these various authors. Don Piper's account of heaven contradicts

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Colton Burpo's account of heaven. And then even Alexander's account of heaven contradicts both of the other two.

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Even Alexander is a, um, you know, an ag agnostic. He kind of presents a more

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Eastern view of the afterlife. And it's just a convoluted mess.

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And so the, the purpose of that, of including an unbeliever in there is to show that, yeah, probably these experiences, there's some legitimacy to what these people are experiencing.

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If they're experiencing something, but is there a way of explaining what they are experiencing? Is there a way of explaining what

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Don Piper experienced? And I think that there is, uh, Don Piper could have been, uh, well, we know he was heavily medicated.

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Um, what he experienced or says he saw and experienced could have been a result of the medification or the extreme pain that he was in as a result of the accident or both of those things together, or Don Piper could have been deceived by a demon.

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And the same thing with Colton Burpo. Um, I'm certain that even Alexander was deceived by a demon.

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And, uh, so, you know, part of comparing all three of these books together is just to show that, uh, unbelievers say that they've seen heaven as well.

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So if you're going to embrace with open arms, Don Piper and Colton Burpo and their accounts, what makes you say that even

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Alexander's account as an unbeliever and an, and an, and an atheist, actually, when he had this experience, he was an atheist.

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Um, what makes you think that, uh, you can embrace some, but not all of them. And that shows the inconsistency of the

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Christian position on that. It seems to me that we either have to account for all of them in the same way, or we have to reject all of them.

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Right. You know, so, and you mentioned Don Piper, who I think when he started, he sounded more solid than,

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I mean, then he got involved with all the faith healers and all that. You mentioned that the shack and I, if I remember correctly, you, you actually interviewed the author of the shack when you did the first book.

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And then he came out with the second book and you had basically said that revealed that he really didn't believe in anything that was

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Orthodox theology. Yeah. He, the first book, uh, he's heretical. And the second book he's even more heretical.

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And I did reviews on them and stuff like that. I got to interview him. He thought it would be on my radio show, you know, it'd be a puff piece about,

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Hey, you're wonderful. Love the book because it made me feel so good. And then he, he, uh, he didn't know who you were.

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No, I actually told him, I said, look, I'd be glad to sit with you and teach you biblical theology. So you don't make any more errors like this.

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If you're interested. And of course he didn't like that. I meant it. I didn't try to, it wasn't trying to be arrogant, but I tried to say this as, you know, humbly as possible.

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I said, look, you're making a lot of mistakes. And, uh, I'd be willing to sit with you and go through the, you know, go through this, but he wasn't interested.

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But nevertheless, um, yeah, I forgot what goes on that one, but yeah. And the second book, you did the same kind of thing, but you know, it's just this, the same thing is, is, uh,

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I look at this out of Genesis chapter three verses one through seven. And you guys know what that is. It's deception of, um, of Eve.

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Well, the short version of it is that Satan comes in and, and doubts God's word.

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She modifies God's word, God's word. Then he contradicts God, God's word. Verse, um, in Genesis three, six,

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I'm starting to think that, uh, or suspect that Genesis three, six is, is well, far more important than we realized when the woman saw that the tree was good for food.

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This was, you know, the coveting of the, of the eye is seeing what we want and that it was a delight to the eyes, that the tree was desirable to make one wise.

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So it's an internal thing, a covetous kind of a thing. Uh, she ate the fruit. She gave her husband also.

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So she saw that she was good. It was a delight to the eyes. It was desirable to what she saw, what she desired, what she wanted, all this stuff and the fall occurred.

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And, um, this is what I see in the positive confession movement. I see this kind of, of attitude.

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What I want is my health, my wealth. And my wife just had open heart surgery. She almost died on the table.

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And the only reason she didn't die was because her chest was open and the machines were keeping her alive and seriously.

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And, you know, she's got some very serious medical problems and it's really altering our lifestyle. And we're going to have to move out of state to another state because of it for health reasons and stuff like that.

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Well, you know, she's a godly woman and a great woman and yet she's, uh, not healed.

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And I wouldn't ever say that she didn't have enough faith. Uh, just like Justin doesn't have enough faith.

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I've seen Justin. You know, Justin's a man of faith and we all, all are. And it's not how much faith it's who our faith is in.

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That is, uh, that's important. You know, a faith of a mustard seed is, you know, smallest of seeds.

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Technically it's not, but it was in that understanding of that culture at that time was the smallest of the seeds. And, you know, this is the faith that we're to have.

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And God can heal us, but he chooses not to. And we have to understand why he chooses not to, you know, and Justin's a great example.

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And, uh, you know, I feel for Justin the way he has to get around no disrespect meant Justin, but you really have to go through some stuff to just to get around and go and speak and serve, serve the

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Lord by serving people. And yet you'd never complain and you're a witness and a, you know, a testimony to the grace of God.

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Well, you know, if we're all healthy and wealthy, where are we going to be glorifying God in that kind of a sense?

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And these people who want everything now, I diaper in theology, you know, give me something to suckle and change my diapers and make me feel good.

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I'm going to a theological hammock and I need to be comforted. And they think this is what Christianity is and they don't understand.

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That's not it. Our Lord who bore chains and bore whips and bore derision and was struck and had no place to lay his head and was accused and maligned.

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How much more should we following after his lifestyle suffer as well in one form or another, rather than say,

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I need another $60 million for a second private jet so that I can go out and witness the gospel to people.

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I see the lies of the prophecies of the apostasy that is going to occur in the end times, the apostasy inside the church and here in successful America, in a comfortable gospel, we get up and everything's for us and heated cars and GPS this, that and microwaveable that we go to a nice comfortable church.

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We don't need to rely on God except to get us more money, except to get us a better insurance policy for our health.

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And it's the apostasy that's occurring now, which Justin is trying to expose and which you try and expose, which

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I'm trying to expose and which pastor James is trying to expose as well. I'll just stop talking.

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Well, let me ask you this. I'll start with Justin, then Matt, and then to pastor Jim. What do you think is the most dangerous thing about the faith healers doctrines, their teachings?

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What do you think is the most dangerous thing about it? That they have a different gospel, which is the emphasis on health and wealth is really not the core issue.

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The emphasis on health and wealth is what makes this movement so appealing to people, but health and wealth is just some of the bad, low hanging fruit off of a rotten theological tree.

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They have a different God. They have a different Jesus. They have a different atonement.

29:44

And so therefore they have a different gospel. And one of the things that I tell people it's,

29:50

I would recommend also Kosti Hinn's book entitled Defining Deception that deals with some of these

29:58

Christological heresies, their heresies about the personal work of Christ. I tell people often it's not enough to just believe in Jesus.

30:07

Mormons believe in Jesus. Jehovah's Witnesses believe in Jesus. Muslims believe in Jesus. You've got to believe in the right

30:14

Jesus. You've got to believe in the Jesus of the Bible. And if you don't, then you've got a different Jesus and therefore a different gospel.

30:24

And the Jesus of the Word Faith Movement is just as much a different Jesus as is the Jesus of Islam. So there's nothing redeemable about the movement.

30:34

It's thoroughly heretical from start to finish, origins to what they teach now. So anyway, it may have been a longer answer.

30:41

Matt, what do you think would be the most dangerous thing in their doctrines?

30:47

He's right. The issue of salvation of the false gospel that they're preaching and teaching leads people to damnation.

30:56

You know, you remind me of a story though. I used to do volunteer work at the Christian Research Institute, CRI. And one of the things we did in the evenings was try and raise funds for a new building.

31:05

And I remember having a conversation with somebody on the phone who was yelling and screaming at me because I represented

31:12

Christianity to him. And the reason he hated Christianity was because his daughter had bought into the health and wealth gospel and refused to go to the doctor so her cancer could be cured.

31:24

Instead decided to wait and it killed her and it broke my heart.

31:30

And this man hated the gospel, hated Christianity because of it. It took me a half hour to tell him that we were working against that very thing.

31:39

And that was not true Christianity. And I felt for him and things like that. Now that's not as dire as the issue of what is close to it of what

31:49

Justin just said about the false gospel because they're preaching a false Christ and a false thing. And it's causing others to stumble.

31:56

And so people are being led to damnation because of it. It's an evil thing. It is.

32:03

Jim, what do you think? Same thing about a false gospel and a false God because ultimately that's what damns people is believing in a false gospel and a false

32:12

God. I think one of the things that makes it so insidious is just how alluring the doctrines are.

32:19

If you're rich, then of course you feel like that's the blessing of God. And that's a deception in itself. And of course, if you're rich, you want more riches.

32:26

If you're poor, then of course you are, you know, you think that this spiritual train is the way to get more, more riches.

32:34

So it has this broad appeal to people of every socioeconomic class because everybody who's poor wants to get out of the poverty and everybody who's rich wants to keep it and increase it and feel like that's a mark of their spirituality.

32:46

So the insidious nature of, I think, the alluring aspect of the Word of Faith movement is just, it's hideous.

32:54

And then the lack of discernment that people have in not being able to tell what is real Christianity and what is not.

33:00

It looks so much, and people are unable to discern in today's day and age, people are unable to discern true

33:07

Christianity from that false Christianity. And that is, of course, and Justin would know more about this than I do, but that is the growth that we see all over the world in some of these countries is not biblical,

33:20

John MacArthur style, evangelical, conservative, Bible believing Christianity. It's the flashy, charismatic

33:26

Word of Faith, sensational nonsense. That is growing and people buy it up.

33:32

That's what they think Christianity is. It has all the right words, has all the right phrases. It has all the right concepts presented there.

33:40

People think it's legit, and of course it's not. It is a huge deception. I like what

33:46

James says in the comments on YouTube. He says, I'm already rich. Jesus saved me. That's the right perspective.

33:54

And I would say, tagging along with what Jim just said, I affirm that because I've been all around the world preaching and teaching on this, and it is the face of Christianity around the world today.

34:08

It is the face of Christianity. I've been in some of the poorest countries on the planet, Uganda, and it saturates every facet of quote -unquote

34:20

Christianity in most of the world. As bad as the problem is here, it's exponentially worse in Central and South America, in African countries,

34:31

Asian countries even. It's far worse. The United States has created this movement, and we have exported the theological poison to the rest of the world through TBN and Daystar and through the

34:47

Internet. And so now you've got indigenous prosperity preachers that have learned the tricks of the trade by watching

34:54

American television, TBN and largely TBN, Daystar.

35:00

And so you've got indigenous prosperity preachers fleecing their own little flock.

35:08

And I tell people too, if you want to get an idea of the state of Christianity, quote -unquote, then all you have to do is turn on your television because all television is is a function of supply and demand.

35:20

Whatever the demand is, that's what they're going to supply. And so when you turn on TBN, who do you see?

35:28

You don't see John MacArthur or Steve Lawson or Paul Washer. You see Joel Osteen.

35:34

You see Joyce Meyer. You see Beth Moore. You see Kenneth Copeland and all these others.

35:39

So it's a pretty telling state. Just turn on TBN and look and see what you see.

35:46

Are you saying Beth Moore is bad? Yes. All right, so maybe we could talk about her.

35:55

But Matt, so CARM has... There's folks working for CARM in Turkey, which deals mostly with Islam there.

36:06

But CARM has folks in South America and has someone in Africa.

36:15

They're dealing with this on a regular basis. How do you see from the stuff they're dealing with in CARM, how are you seeing this false gospel exploding in South America and Africa, like Justin was saying?

36:29

Well, we know that it's in Africa, and the concern I have is I've heard the minimum is 80 % of the churches are positive confession movements churches.

36:36

Well, my concern is, among other things, is that when those fail, Islam will come in and fill the vacuum.

36:42

And this is something I'm really worried about. We need to get that truth out. At CARM here,

36:48

I think the best way to do it is by the Internet. Bang for your buck. An article, get it out there, and it's sufficient.

36:56

Of course, we need feet on the ground as well. So that's an issue. We had a foreign exchange student here from Bogota, Colombia, about five years ago.

37:05

And so we were talking, and the church she went, I checked it out online, and sure enough, woman pastor, positive confession church.

37:14

And it's down there as well. Now, we have a guy in Bogota also, Carlos. And he is,

37:19

I'm just thinking a couple things here. He's reformed in his theology.

37:25

I think Reformation theology is a cure for this idiocy. But that means you have to submit your heart and your mind to God instead of the other way around.

37:33

But anyway, Carlos down in Bogota says it's bad down there as well, that this stuff is just exploding, and he's warring against it.

37:42

But he said the good news is more and more pastors are starting to see it, that it's bad, and seeking good biblical theology.

37:50

So question for you guys. When your average pew sitter in these different locations that have been ravaged by Word of Faith doctrine, when they jettison the

37:59

Word of Faith teaching because they see it to be morally, economically, spiritually bankrupt, do you think that they jettison all of Christianity when they do that?

38:08

Or do you think that they're jettisoning just Word of Faith theology and coming over to a more Reformed view? It seems to me that it's just a few people that say, you know,

38:16

God delivered me out of that, and I came through this, I grew out of this into a biblical understanding of truth.

38:22

That seems to me the exception, rather. Dignity is everything. That's what people are. And I don't know if people are aware of this, but I learned this at the last conference that they had on world religions.

38:32

There are minimum 50 million people in the world who are spiritists.

38:39

Now, if you think about it, spiritism and father of confession aren't that far off. A form of sorcery is name it and claim it.

38:47

You blab it and grab it. If you say certain sentences in the physical realm, then certain spiritual manifestations occur, and you get wealthy or healthy, whatever.

38:56

Well, this kind of a thing, particularly in the animistic influenced cultures of South America where spiritism is still alive and well, when the vacuum occurs because they drop, they're going to turn to something else that's going to work.

39:12

Instead of getting money and wealth, they're going to turn to something else that will serve their own flesh, and that is spiritual power.

39:21

And so that's what I'm worried about in South America, because it looks like 50 million people.

39:27

That's the lowest. The highest I've heard is 70 million people there are into spiritism. So it's a serious problem.

39:34

It's a serious problem. And so one of the solutions I think is worth trying is hijacking the

39:40

Goodyear blimp and all the way down to South America with Spanish tracks about the truth at 30 ,000 feet, just spread them out there.

39:50

That's a great idea. I wish we could do that. Yeah, I'm going to just change my name to Justin Peter and go do it.

40:00

Jim, to tag onto your question, I would say that the vast majority of these people who end up becoming disillusioned with word faith,

40:09

I think they do exactly what Matt was saying. The vast majority of them just walk away altogether.

40:16

But happily, I can say that I get emails every day now, every day, usually from different parts of the world every day, even from people whose eyes have been graciously opened by God, and they have come to see the deception they were in, and they have embraced the real gospel, the true gospel.

40:39

So God does save his own out of deception. And so it's really an encouragement to me.

40:47

I get so many of them now, it's hard for me to respond to all of them, but I do read them. But yeah,

40:53

I get emails all the time from all over the world, people being saved out of this stuff. Justin's ministry is one that does a good work for helping people see that deception.

41:02

It's one we're supporting. Amen. And I want to talk about both an individual specifically that contacted you and supporting you in a moment.

41:10

But Matt, I do want to bring up, you mentioned the word positive confession a couple of times, and not everyone may be familiar with that.

41:18

Can you define what that is, and what's the errors that we see in it? It's basically an older used term, but it means you positively confess.

41:29

Your words have creative ability because we're made in the image of God. And so therefore, since we're his children, that we can create our own reality.

41:38

Now, they don't say it in the way a new ager would say it, but there's similarities. And that you can bring about what you desire by the utterance of the positive confession.

41:49

You must confess positively this stuff. And so an illustration of this is talking to a guy at a job about this, you know, on a lunch break.

42:01

And I said, let me get this straight. If you had a broken arm, he goes, I wouldn't have a broken arm. I said, okay, so hypothetically, someone snaps your arm over their leg, you wouldn't have a broken arm.

42:14

And I just kept going, you know, and I said, so would you be able to hold on to a bar with your hand and suspend your body on that broken arm?

42:23

It's not broken. You know, so what do you do? Break his arm.

42:31

Yeah, there you go. That's a solution. Yeah. So positive confession, because what he was doing then, if he admitted that he had a broken arm, then the broken arm would become a reality.

42:43

Now, if you guys know anything about the mind sciences, that's a mind science, Christian science, unity, kind of a thing.

42:51

And in mind sciences, reality, Christian science denies the existence of physical reality where Unity School of Christianity, Charles Fillmore, affirms physical reality, but they both, the main schools, teach that as you perceive things, that's the reality.

43:08

And that your perception and desires can alter reality. And you can create your own reality.

43:13

So it's the same kind of a thing that's moved over. In fact, the precursor to the positive confession movement was, and I can't remember his name.

43:23

We got a few. You would have Essek Kenyon. Kenyon. Is that who you're thinking of?

43:29

E .W. Kenyon. E .W. Kenyon, yeah. He was the guy who, one of the main guys who started this kind of false doctrine and people just bought into it.

43:40

And they listened to the Edenic line. Quimby also, yeah. Quimby predated

43:45

Kenyon. But you have a kind of a witch's theological brew cauldron of Christian science, of new age, of Gnosticism, of new thought.

44:00

Quimby and Kenyon and all those guys. And it's kind of the bad product of that is the positive confession doctrine of the word faith movement.

44:11

Isn't this, I'm trying to remember the name of the book. Wasn't it like Chicken Soup for the

44:17

Soul? There's some book that was like a bestseller, but it was basically speaking things into existence, which is exactly what

44:24

I read in Joel Stein's book. Joel Stein believes this, that if you really picture something, then

44:32

God's going to make, it's going to call the universe in to bring that in. In fact, he's saying

44:39

Joel Osteen, Joel Osteen is actually taught that the reason that God had to shut

44:44

Zechariah's mouth in Luke's gospel is because God saw that he was making negative confessions and that would have stopped

44:55

God's plan. Zechariah's negative confessions would have stopped God's plan of redemptions.

45:01

And so in a last ditch effort to save his plan of redemption, God had to reach down and close

45:07

Zechariah's mouth, make him a... Who said that? Joel Osteen.

45:13

On multiple occasions, he said that. That's why God closed

45:18

Zechariah's mouth, because Zechariah with his negative confessions was about to wreck God's plan of redemption.

45:26

The one consistent thing that, just in listening to the three of you, the thing that seems consistent with all of them is how they lift man up on high and lower

45:36

God down. And in some cases where God is subservient to man, that God has to do with man's bidding.

45:45

It's completely reversing what Scripture says. And I think that's why, like Matt says,

45:52

Reformed theology corrects this whole thing, because it puts God in his proper place as the sovereign of the universe and puts us in our position as his creation.

46:04

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the best things I ever learned in seminary, Westminster Seminary, the fifth most difficult graduate school in the country.

46:14

These guys had more degrees than a thermometer and they'd get up to the board and they would do all this stuff and everything was great.

46:20

And one guy got up and he said, gentlemen, I'm going to teach you one of the most important things you're ever going to learn in the seminary. I'm like, whoa, yeah.

46:26

I open my book, I get my pen, I'm ready. And he wrote two sentences on the board. There is a God, you are not him.

46:34

And he put it down and he said, now let's talk. And I went, oh man, come on.

46:40

But over the years, I went, yeah, that was true. But it's true.

46:48

There's a God, you are not him. A high view of God is the kryptonite to this movement.

46:56

I mean, it really is. It really is. You cannot have a high view of God and believe this stuff.

47:02

Andrew doesn't understand kryptonite. That's a cultural reference. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the pop culture, it has something to do with Superman.

47:09

I do know that. And actually, you know, Matt, you were talking about the spiritual side of his faith.

47:18

Let's embarrass Justin a little bit and explain this. Make him explain the story. Yeah, you gotta explain the

47:24

Batman story. Yes, to explain the Batman story, why it is you call him spiritual

47:29

Batman. So you went, you had Todd Bentley in, I think it was your town. And what did you do?

47:36

A couple hours away from where I lived at the time. Okay. So what did you do? Well, there's a

47:43

YouTube video of it. But I guess this was back in 2014.

47:50

Todd Bentley, Bam Bam Bentley, if you know who Todd Bentley is. Bam Bam Bam.

47:55

Bam Bam. Yeah, because he was always called Bam. The Holy Spirit, he always refers to as Bam Bam, right?

48:02

Yeah, when he's giving someone the anointing, he's Bam Baming them. Bam Bam Bam Bam. That's his nickname.

48:11

Wait, wasn't Bam Bam some character on the Flintstones? I just want to throw in a cultural reference. Now I'm impressed.

48:18

Andrew's more cultured than he lets on. That's right. It was Wilma, and then there was Pebbles. I'm older than all you guys.

48:26

Didn't you look it too? I feel it right now. So you went and visited

48:33

Todd Bentley. He was excited, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, so he was at a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

48:42

And I went over there with Mike Miller, a friend of mine. A fellow board member along with Jim Osmond on my ministry.

48:48

And we were there. Todd Bentley was speaking at this church. And the service went on and on for over three hours.

48:56

And it was being live streamed on the internet because I saw it on TV the night before.

49:02

And I heard him make a mention that it was going to be live streamed. People in 76 different countries were watching.

49:08

And I thought, well, it's just down the road and might be a good opportunity to call out

49:14

Todd Bentley for what he is. And so I went and I was actually sitting on the front row over on the left.

49:22

And the service went on for hours, three hours minimum. And I had fully planned to go up and call him out, confront him.

49:33

And as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, am I really going to do this? Am I really going to do this? And I just about thought myself out of it, but I decided to do it.

49:41

And so I just walked up. Now, hold on.

49:46

For folks who don't know, you don't just walk up. You have cerebral palsy.

49:54

So you don't walk up. How do you walk up? Yeah, how do you walk up? Well, I do walk up. I just don't walk real quickly.

50:00

You don't walk quickly. You have to get in the picture.

50:06

Okay. So I walk up on my crutches behind him. And what?

50:12

In both hands, right? One in each hand, right? Yeah, yeah, a crutch in each hand, yeah. And so he senses that I'm there.

50:21

So he turns around and he sees I'm on crutches. And he says, well, I'm going to pray for you, meaning he'll pray for the sick later.

50:28

And I said, I have a word. And when you say I have a word in those circles, everybody wants to know, ooh, what's

50:36

God telling you? And he said, is it a good word? And then the dummy puts the microphone in front of me.

50:46

Now picture the irony of this. I'm in a room full of 400 Word Faith, NAR kind of folks, all of whom claim that God speaks to them on a regular basis.

50:57

Todd Bentley claims that God speaks to him all the time, in real time, giving him words of knowledge about everybody. But in that over three hours that we had been sitting there,

51:05

God apparently did not give him a heads up about what I was about to say to him. So God left that out.

51:17

He missed that one. Yeah, God was busy with other things, apparently. That's because he had Jesse Duplantis in his office at that time.

51:24

No, he was on a cable car talking to Jesse, yeah. Right. So Todd says, is it a good word?

51:33

And he puts the microphone in front of me. And I quote Matthew 7, 21 through 23. Many will say to me on that day,

51:40

Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And your name cast out demons, perform many miracles. And then

51:45

I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of iniquity.

51:52

And I said, this man is a worker of iniquity. And Todd Bentley asked me, he says, which man?

51:58

And I said, you. You are the man. You're Batman. That's what

52:06

I said. You're Batman. It's just, you know, as one of the and I'll say this,

52:12

I'm anybody who knows me and familiar with my teachings at all. You know, I'm not a mystical kind of person by any stretch of the imagination.

52:20

But I will say. That when I was standing next to Todd Bentley, it was the most.

52:29

Palpable, almost tangible sense of evil that I have ever experienced in my life.

52:36

He is. He is one of the darkest individuals. I've studied all of these people for so many years.

52:44

And there's only a couple of them that I think are actually demon possessed, like genuinely demon possessed.

52:50

I think Kenneth Copeland is one. And I think Todd Bentley is one. It was all

52:55

I could do to stand there. It was. The way I know best way I know, you know, when you take two magnets and you try to put the same pole together and they just repulse.

53:06

I don't know what, if anything, that guy was feeling. But I know for me, it was all I could do to stand there. It was just.

53:14

Pure evil. I mean, the guy's demon possessed. If he's not, I don't know who is. So, yeah.

53:20

And, you know, I want to. Jeff has been in here for a while. I want to bring him in so he can ask some questions.

53:27

And folks, anyone who's who wants to come in, you can go to apologeticslive .com. There's where you can get the link to join.

53:35

So, Jeff, you'll be able to unmute yourself and and ask your question of these guys. Oh, there you go.

53:41

How are you doing, gentlemen? Oh, hi, Jeff. Hi there. Hi. If my kids scream in the background, they're playing a football video game or something like that.

53:51

Just speak the word to them and they shall be quiet. Quiet. That word's usually shut up or something.

53:59

Or be quiet. Anyway, I. Matt, I really appreciate what you were saying earlier.

54:06

I when I first became I grew up nominally Roman Catholic and the person who led me to the

54:13

Lord was Pentecostal. So I first started attending like a small non -denominational

54:24

Pentecostal church. And, you know, over time, you kind of see more of what

54:29

I came to recognize as word of faith sort of tendencies. It wasn't like complete.

54:35

They weren't into the prosperity stuff. And, you know, it was damaging, especially early on.

54:43

I actually have a genetic kidney disease. And I remember people once praying for me about that.

54:52

And well, I got a kidney transplant last year. So maybe that was what was successful.

54:59

But one of the things I saw was more like when you get to passages that are like if you believe, you know, have faith and prayer that kind of how would you describe it?

55:14

I think it's also people recognize that that you can't get whatever you want in prayer if you just believe enough.

55:22

So how do you take those texts seriously? So they are truthful, but at the same time, you're not going the word of faith route.

55:32

Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. I'm trying to ask. Faith is only as good as who it is in.

55:39

And there are plenty of places that says things like if you have faith, you know, say to this mountain, be cast into the sea and it will be.

55:47

Personally, I think that it is a literal truth. And I don't have enough faith for that because you just said if you have enough faith, it'll happen.

55:55

And faith is only good as who you put it in. But the thing is, you know, we take the whole of Scripture and the issue of faith and what we can accomplish.

56:04

And 1 John 5, 14 is really an important verse because it says this is the confidence we have before him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

56:13

And so, you know, like right now and I'm dead serious. I would like a brand new car in my driveway.

56:18

My car is 115 ,000 miles on it. It's 2007.

56:24

I'd like to have a new car. OK, is it going to happen? It's not going to happen. Right. People always say you don't have enough faith. Well, my faith is in Jesus.

56:30

Can he do it? Yes, he can. It's up to him. So, you know, what are we going to do with our faith?

56:37

Are we going to say I want this or want that? Well, God may be saying, I don't want you to have that car. I don't want you to have it because I'm not going to get what

56:44

I want in spite of what God wants. He's the sovereign, not me. So what we're going to do is be recognizing that when we pray, we're going to be praying within the will of God.

56:52

And this is what is so important about prayer. We've got to pray so that we change, so that we are in the will of God, so that what he desires is what we desire, so that whatever we desire is what we get.

57:02

And what would we desire? Oh, the selfish. I want a new car. Or how about this? Lord, would you please bless so -and -so to spread that gospel?

57:13

Because that's what's important. And then we ask according to his will and it occurs. It's this kind of a thing that I think is really going on in a lot of these talks in scripture about faith.

57:23

But I do believe also there is something to this issue of faith, not just having faith in faith.

57:30

Let me make that clear. It's not faith in faith. That's mysticism. But there's something about faith in God.

57:36

And I remember once as an illustration of this, you know, I was, Karm was two years old and I was working full time and just trying to make ends meet.

57:45

And we were trusting God. My wife and I were not frivolous with our money.

57:52

And we owed $900. It was Saturday. And we owed $900 for rent on Monday.

57:58

And my wife, I still remember this. She came to me and she said, what are we going to do? And I said, I don't know. But I know this.

58:04

We're going to trust God. He'll provide one way or another. What I was asking in my trust of God was not, hey,

58:12

I get a new car. This was not that. It was I was working hard trying to provide for my family, was within the will of God, doing all those things that were godly and proper.

58:22

And I just said at that point, I'm going to trust God. My wife literally went to the mailbox, came back 20 minutes, opened up the mail, and there was a check for $500 in her hand, donation.

58:34

I couldn't believe it. The next letter she opened up, there was a check for $400. Now, that's $900.

58:42

I mean, we just stared at each other. And if God ordained that from the foundation of the world and he sent people, have people send those checks, then is it because I had that faith?

58:53

Or did God ordain that I would have the faith? I guess it's more theology. The thing is that faith, we are to have faith.

59:01

We're not to throw the baby out of the bathwater. Positive confession people say, you're supposed to have faith, you'll get what you want, and therefore it's not true.

59:07

No, we've got to be careful because we've been there in the scripture someplace.

59:16

We've got to be careful because the object of our faith is what is true. And he is the one we've got to bend our knee to.

59:23

And once we're in his will, whatever we ask will be accomplished. In fact, I would recommend that people who want to know about this read the book,

59:30

Answers to Prayer by George Mueller, The Orphan King. He's my hero.

59:37

Seriously, you should read it. You should read. He said he prayed to do something.

59:45

He prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed. Is this you, God, or is this me? Is it you or is it me?

59:51

And then when God communicated to him, that way that God does, you're reading the word sometimes and like, whoa, it's just enlightened, right?

59:58

It speaks to you. And through his word, and he said he knew that it was God who wanted him to start an orphanage.

01:00:05

And so from then on, he didn't worry about anything and he started a wood building.

01:00:15

in the 1800s, late 1800s, when the building needed to have the furnace replaced.

01:00:23

But in order to do that, they had to shut it down. But it would be like out of commission for two or three or four days or kind of a thing.

01:00:29

He didn't know. But it was during the winter in England and they didn't have electricity.

01:00:34

They had kerosene. So what are they going to do in this wood building? not safe.

01:00:46

They couldn't afford electricity, this new thing called electricity and light bulbs. What are they gonna do? So this is what he did.

01:00:53

He said, Lord, this is not my problem. This is your problem. I'm in your will.

01:00:59

Therefore, you're gonna have to take care of this. And he said, the only solution I can see, Lord, is that when they go the day to shut down the furnace, would you please cause the north wind that's cold to stop blowing and have a warm south wind blow during the time that it's down?

01:01:21

And so when they shut the furnace down, they came for that work, there was a warm south wind blowing. They shut the furnace down, they worked on it for two days, the men worked straight through the night, the whole bed got it taken, and when they turned the furnace on, the cold wind started blowing again.

01:01:35

See, Lord, would you stop the north wind? That's in the will of God. Because we're in the will of God, that's when faith works.

01:01:47

You know, one of the things that people don't know about George Mueller, and he says this in his book, in his autobiography, the reason he put his autobiography out is because there was nothing special about his faith.

01:01:58

He said he wanted to do an orphanage because of the fact that he figured that that is the greatest way for God to get glory in just him trusting in God.

01:02:10

And that really was the thing, is that he was trusting God. I think one of the things that we don't see with these faith healers is they're really not looking to trust

01:02:19

God. I mean, Justin just shared a video with us earlier today of this woman who

01:02:24

I guess goes around, and before every hurricane, she had like a bat or something, and she's smacking the

01:02:32

Hurricane Irma out to sea, and yet it still landed on shore. And she just did it with Michael, who was it?

01:02:39

Michael was the one? And she's casting it out to sea. Then why did it strike the land?

01:02:45

And yet, what I guess drives me crazy is these people still have followers.

01:02:50

I mean, time after time after time of giving these false prophecies, you know, you know, so I mean

01:03:01

Matt's asking who was it that, you know, who had the bat?

01:03:06

Yeah, my computer hit that. I didn't hear it. Yeah, what was her name? The woman with the bat that was casting out the...

01:03:12

Oh, Kat Kerr. Kat Kerr. K -E -R -R. K -A -T. Oh, I've heard that. K -E -R -R.

01:03:19

Yes, she's Looney Tunes. Just Looney Tunes. Yeah, I mean, and you have

01:03:24

Joyce Meyer and others who get on their private jets and say that they cast the storms away from them.

01:03:32

You know, I mean, these guys, it's like if they were praying all these storms away, why did they hit land?

01:03:41

I mean, at what point do we say you're a false prophet? Right. Yeah, they keep...

01:03:48

It's almost like a dog returning to its vomit. They just keep doing the same things over and over and over.

01:03:55

They keep failing spectacularly publicly, and they don't even have enough common sense to think, wow, you know,

01:04:04

I really don't have a good track record on rebuking these storms. I probably ought to stop. It's just like they keep doing it.

01:04:11

It's just unreal. Can I take a tangent just for a second?

01:04:17

Why not? Jim, a question. I get asked a lot.

01:04:26

One of the more common questions I get asked in my Q &A sessions dealing with this is, why does

01:04:32

God allow this to continue? You know, if these people are so bad, and the people asking me these questions would acknowledge it, that they are bad people, false teachers, false prophets, why does

01:04:44

God still allow this to continue? Why doesn't God do something with these people?

01:04:52

Why do wicked people seem to prosper so much? Well, I think that one of the reasons that God allows the deception to continue is because it is a judgment upon those who are being deceived.

01:05:03

Paul says that people will heap up for themselves teachers who will tell them what they want to hear, and in the case of these

01:05:09

Word of Faith teachers, that's exactly what they get. If persecution were to strike the United States, Joel Osteen's church would be empty tomorrow, the day after persecution came.

01:05:20

And it's the same thing with Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and all those false teachers. So they are offering a product that people want to consume, and that product is a self -centered, man -exalting,

01:05:33

God -denying, Christ -denying doctrine, a religious system that gives them everything that their flesh desires, and holds them accountable for nothing and for no sin, and that's what people want, and that's exactly what people is giving to them.

01:05:47

So that's exactly what God is giving to them through those false teachers. God is providing for them that judgment, and men like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland, their prosperity is not in itself a blessing of God, it is in fact a judgment upon them.

01:06:01

And that's one of the things that Psalm 73 teaches, is that sometimes the prosperity is given to the wicked for the purpose of lifting them up so that their fall may be even more catastrophic.

01:06:12

The more that they have, the more that they will lose in judgment, and their destruction will be worse because their prosperity prepared them for that judgment.

01:06:21

Their prosperity is actually a judgment. It's a curse. It blinds their eyes to the truth, it keeps them away from God without feeling any need for God, it deceives them into thinking that they are spiritual, it deceives them into thinking that they're godly, and through that prosperity,

01:06:38

God ends up judging them. He ends up blinding them through the prosperity to the judgment that is theirs. You mentioned products and Psalm 73.

01:06:47

You wrote a book on Psalm 73 right here called The Prosperity of the

01:06:53

Wicked, a study of Psalm 73, so I'll just figure out, plug a product that you had,

01:06:59

I'm in your office, access to your bookshelf. By the way,

01:07:04

I like the MacArthur commentaries up there. I will not admit to reading any of his books.

01:07:20

He said that what he's going to do is ask me to endorse his next book so that therefore

01:07:25

I have to read it, and I said my endorsement is I have not actually read this book, but I hear it's good.

01:07:32

It is an excellent book. It's a detailed exposition of Psalm 73, and again, the title is

01:07:43

Prosperity of the Wicked. So if you've ever had this question, dear ones, anyone who's watching out there in TV land, you know, why do these people seem to prosper?

01:07:53

They're so manifestly wicked. Why do the wicked seem to prosper? Why do the good guys seem to suffer?

01:08:01

It's an excellent book. It deals with Psalm 73. You can get it on Amazon in Kindle or print, but it is an exposition of Psalm 73.

01:08:09

The whole book is about, it is the text of Psalm 73 exegeted and then applied and illustrated with examples of wicked people prospering.

01:08:21

Okay, he's just left. He's tired. He's gone. Yeah, no, Matt just left. It's like Elvis. Well, I'm gone.

01:08:29

See you guys later. Yeah, so Matt can still hear us. He's got his headset on, but so Matt, do you know the name

01:08:38

Costi Hinn? Yeah, it's somebody his, what, nephew, right?

01:08:46

Yeah. Do you know much about him and his testimony? No, I've not been studying that stuff for a while.

01:08:56

So, so here, I think, I think what might be good is because I think

01:09:03

Matt, you'd get a lot out of this is maybe to have Justin tell you about a certain phone call or text message that he received some time ago from someone in the

01:09:18

Hinn family. Yeah, so this has been, this was

01:09:25

December of 2016. Yeah, December of 2016.

01:09:31

I'm in the doctor's office and just kind of waiting. So, I get my phone out and I look at my email and there's this, when people call my ministry number, it goes, if I miss the call, it transcribes, thank you, transcribes the, you know, but it doesn't always get it exactly right.

01:09:51

And so I'm looking at the transcript of this voicemail and the person appears to be thanking me for a ministry, telling me how much he's learned and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

01:10:01

And, and then the, in the transcript says, my name is Costi Hinn. And I'm looking at the transcript and I'm thinking, no way, because I know who

01:10:11

Costi Hinn is. I wrote my master's thesis on Benny Hinn. And so, I mean, even though I'm not a member of his family, and I'm thinking, no way, this has got to be, you know, it's not, it didn't transcribe right or whatever.

01:10:25

So anyway, I called this person back. Sure enough, Benny Hinn's nephew,

01:10:31

Costi's father is Henry Hinn, Henry's, Benny's brother. And Costi used to work for his uncle.

01:10:39

Benny flew all around the world with him in a private jet, stayed in $25 ,000 per night hotel rooms.

01:10:47

Costi was a catcher for Benny in the Miracle Crusades when Benny would slay people in the spirit and they would fall over.

01:10:53

Costi was there to catch them. So he was, I mean, he was in the thick of it.

01:10:58

And about six, seven years ago now, God saved

01:11:04

Costi, genuinely saved him. And now Costi is 180 degrees from where his, his, the rest of his family is, at least most of the rest of his family, 180 degrees from that.

01:11:20

And Costi is now reformed, soteriologically reformed. He's a cessationist.

01:11:26

And I tell people, if you're, if you're a cessationist and your last name is Hinn, you've come a long way.

01:11:33

And so, but he's become one of my dear friends.

01:11:38

And I just, I love the socks off of him. He's a great, great guy, very humble man, good preacher too, by the way, but he's, he's a pastor and at a church, like an associate pastor at a church in, just in the

01:11:54

LA area, name escapes me right now, Tustin, California, Tustin. So anyway.

01:12:00

So did you ever think, Matt, that there would be a Hinn that's actually going to heaven? Yeah. Because God could save people.

01:12:10

He's sovereign. I don't know if you know that yet. He could save anybody. Even a

01:12:15

Hinn. Costi and I, we later discovered, after we got to know each other a little bit more, he and I have actually been at some of the same

01:12:22

Benny Hinn crusades together on different sides of the theological spectrum.

01:12:28

He was there helping his uncle. I was there for research. He was there counting the money and you were there giving it.

01:12:35

Yeah. I don't think Justin was giving money. No, no, no. Wait a minute, back up, back up.

01:12:41

$25 ,000 a night hotel rooms? Yes, that's not an exaggeration.

01:12:47

$25 ,000 per night. And this was more than 10 years ago, so who knows what it is now.

01:12:54

Okay, you had told me an account once, I forget, I think it was Benny Hinn, of what he does in the hotel rooms where he gets there, they remove all the furniture, he brings his own furniture in.

01:13:07

Well, that's Kenneth Copeland. Kenneth Copeland. This will probably blow Matt's mind. Matt, if you don't know, if you think the $25 ,000 a night is a big deal, you got to hear what

01:13:18

Kenneth Copeland does. So another friend of mine that I met about seven, eight years ago, a guy named

01:13:26

Daniel, and I won't give his last name, but anyway, Daniel used to work at the fanciest hotel in Branson, Missouri.

01:13:33

He was the maintenance supervisor or whatever. And there's a big word of faith preacher in Branson named

01:13:43

Keith Moore. Keith Moore's good friends with Kenneth Copeland. And so once a year,

01:13:48

Keith Moore has Kenneth Copeland come in and preach at his church. And when Kenneth Copeland is there, he stays at the hotel that my friend

01:13:57

Daniel used to work at. And it's the nicest hotel in Branson. And Daniel told me, he said,

01:14:04

Justin, you would not believe the rider that Kenneth Copeland sends us. The rider, apparently,

01:14:09

I didn't know this until I met him. But apparently a rider is something that a highfalutin speaker will send to a hotel before he gets there.

01:14:18

No green M &Ms like Van Halen. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. And so just part of Kenneth Copeland's rider before he gets there and he only stays there two nights.

01:14:31

But not only does he get the presidential suite, he he rents out the entire floor that the presidential suite is on.

01:14:40

Kenneth Copeland doesn't want anybody else on the same floor with him. The bed in the presidential suite is not good enough for Kenneth.

01:14:49

So he actually has them take the bed out and he ships his own bed, his own or one of his beds, ships it ahead of him to the hotel.

01:15:01

They have to assemble the bed in the hotel room. He has security cameras placed in the corners of the entire floor.

01:15:14

His own personal driver is there and his driver has to sit or actually stand outside of the car all night long just to do it.

01:15:25

I don't know. But Daniel said he is. Kenneth and Gloria Copeland are paranoid in the extreme.

01:15:33

Gloria Copeland, every time she comes there, she makes a hotel staff cry because she's so mean. And I've heard this from multiple people.

01:15:42

Oh, Gloria Copeland is just so mean to the staff.

01:15:47

She makes she makes the cleaning ladies cry. I mean, she's just they're horrible people.

01:15:53

And I've heard this from many, many people who have been connected to the Copelands. I've talked to a number of them in the last number of years, but.

01:16:02

Yeah, I mean, it's just unbelievable. You can't even make this kind of stuff up. I mean, you ship your own bed to a hotel because the bed in the presidential suite is not good enough for you.

01:16:11

It's just unbelievable. I take my own pillow. That's close. Yeah, I do, too. I take a pillow. Yeah, well, and speaking of which, you know, we don't have underwear also.

01:16:21

Andrew brought his own pillow to my house. Yeah, well, and, you know, I'm still waiting, Matt. I got to get the number from Stu for the

01:16:30

My Pillow commercial we're supposed to play for the radio station. But you and I both,

01:16:35

I mean, I travel with my pillow. I love those things. Yeah, I do, too. I do travel with my pillow.

01:16:43

So, yeah. Hey, guys, in the Pentecostal circles, there's a lot of like, there's a demon of X.

01:16:51

There's a demon of this. Every kind of things that you can associate. I'm just wondering how the demon of apathy could get anything done.

01:16:59

What I'm saying is, fair enough. When you get anything, when you come out of that, kind of like as Martin Luther said, there's a tendency to overcorrect.

01:17:13

So maybe this would be a good question for Justin. So when you're talking to someone, how do you not go to another extreme where you discount, say, any satanic activity?

01:17:25

Now, granted, we would say the word of faith is Satan is active in that. But, you know,

01:17:32

I remember hearing a confessional Lutheran guy where he was saying there's more overt satanic activity in non -Western cultures because they don't really come from an atheistic, materialistic mindset.

01:17:47

So maybe in this culture, we see less overt things because that would give away the game.

01:17:59

But anyway, not just that topic, but just how do you prevent overcorrection from the abuses?

01:18:07

That's a good question. And one of the common misconceptions that people have about me, I hear this all the time.

01:18:12

Oh, Justin doesn't believe that God heals people today. That's not at all what I teach.

01:18:18

I believe that God not only can, but on occasion does. I don't think it's a common thing, but God can and does do whatever he wants to do, and God can heal people when it's his sovereign will to do so.

01:18:34

There is an overcorrection to it. Demons are real. Satan is real.

01:18:39

They do have some power. And since the question was raised,

01:18:45

I'm going to pass this off to Jim Osmond because,

01:18:52

Jim, it's like the Jim Osmond book night. You've written another book. You've written another book.

01:18:58

And so, Jim, title this book

01:19:04

Truth or Territory. Jim, give us a cliff note version of what this book is about. Now, related to—I'm sorry, is it

01:19:11

Jeff, right? Is it Jeff? Yeah. Yeah, Jeff's question. Because we don't want to diminish the reality of Satan and demons, so take it away.

01:19:22

Yeah. May I answer his question first? So to answer your question, we don't have to overcorrect.

01:19:29

We can have a middle -of -the -road approach where we say the demons are real, their activity is real, their influence is real, all according to the sovereign hand of God who allows that for his purposes.

01:19:39

Like Martin Luther says, that God has the devil on a leash. So we can acknowledge those influences and those effects without giving him undue credit and saying, well, my alcoholism is a result of demon possession, or my apathy is a result of demonic influence, or there's not a demon behind every bush.

01:20:01

The Pentecostal and the charismatic camp wants to give Satan credit for everything, and on the other side you have the anti -supernaturalist materialist camp that wants to deny any kind of supernatural reality.

01:20:12

And I think we've got to be right in the middle and say these things are true, they exist. Then the question becomes how do we deal with them?

01:20:18

Are we supposed to be taking back territory and binding Satan and rebuking devils and canceling generational curses?

01:20:24

Or should we be standing in the truth, proclaiming the truth, and waging a truth war?

01:20:30

And that's the difference between those two perspectives of spiritual warfare that I detail in the book. Okay, the

01:20:36

Lutheran guy, he wrote the book called I Am Not Afraid.

01:20:41

He had a four or five -part episode interview on issues, etc.

01:20:48

I'd highly recommend looking up. I think his approach was just the gospel.

01:20:54

That's how you would deal with anything from demonic possession to everything else.

01:21:03

People in the deliverance ministry would say that you've got to sort of pave the way or smooth the way for a gospel proclamation by binding

01:21:10

Satan first and canceling generational curses and taking back enough territory and rebuking the devil.

01:21:17

And you've got to loosen his grip on that person. Then you can present the gospel, and the gospel will have an effect. The gospel will come in and change the life, and then that person will be able to receive the gospel.

01:21:27

And I think it's the exact opposite. I think that the gospel comes first. The gospel, it does deliver us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

01:21:34

It delivers us from Satan's kingdom and puts us into Christ's kingdom. And the gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation.

01:21:40

We don't need to pave the way first by taking back all that territory. We simply need to present the gospel and stand in the truth.

01:21:46

And that fights back the enemy's lies and frees the captives.

01:21:51

That sets the captives free through the gospel, not through all these other spurious means. You know, and it's not just with this group.

01:21:58

I mean, you asked a question earlier about, Jim, you asked a question earlier of Matt related to some of the stuff where where do they go when they realize this stuff is wrong.

01:22:09

You know, we've dealt with this with Mormons, right? You know, the thing is, is when you see Mormons that come out of Mormonism, they don't come to Christianity most often.

01:22:19

They usually come to atheism because they've been told that the Bible is corrupt, that Christianity is corrupt.

01:22:25

Mormonism is the only truth. So when they realize that Mormonism isn't true, they give that up. And I think that's why the most important thing is to present the gospel.

01:22:35

Same with the Mormons. That's why we try to explain to Mormons what the true gospel message is.

01:22:40

Like, you know, Matt and I go down to Manti every year, and it's not enough to say that the Mormon church is wrong.

01:22:47

It's not enough to say that these faith healers are wrong. We need to say this is what the biblical gospel is.

01:22:54

This is what the Bible says. This is where you have the truth. So these guys are wrong because they disagree with the truth of Scripture.

01:23:02

I think that's a key thing that we have to do when dealing with this. I mean, we see this, Matt, all the time down in Manti.

01:23:10

People just become atheists. I've been experiencing that with a conservative Roman Catholic.

01:23:16

And I think of others have seen that with Jehovah's Witnesses when they deconvert. Like, when I talk to this conservative

01:23:22

Roman Catholic, he's open. He kind of, when I kind of explain to him his church is a lot more liberal than what's on the books, you've contradicted the pattern.

01:23:32

He's open, and then he's kind of like, oh, well, if Rome isn't the final authority and stuff, then it's like atheism.

01:23:40

And he has like an epistemological freakout. So it's kind of like, how do you,

01:23:47

I don't know what to say, I guess, is a good question. So whether it's Mormons, whether it's

01:23:53

Catholics, conservative Catholics, that is, liberal Catholics are a lot easier to talk to.

01:24:00

Jehovah's Witnesses or someone who's knee deep in a deceptive religion. Like, how do you talk to them when they can realize it's wrong, but, you know,

01:24:15

I don't know how quite to express this. I specifically think of my Catholic friend, where they were just like, oh, like everything hinges on their false belief.

01:24:27

And if that false belief goes, then they'll go atheist. Well, see, and I'll say, and I'll open up to the others, see what everyone else says.

01:24:34

But I think what you do is you share the gospel and you explain the truth of the gospel and why that conservative

01:24:40

Catholicism is still false. Because they have a message of faith plus works.

01:24:46

And when you add works to the work that God did, you're basically diminishing the work that God did on the cross.

01:24:53

And saying that wasn't enough, that you needed to do something. And that's the most disingenuous thing you can ever do.

01:25:00

And so I think that you share the truth of the difference between faith and works versus faith alone.

01:25:07

Matt, Justin, you guys, what do you think? Good. Matt, you want to? Well, I think that the scriptures are sufficiently specific in various areas to address various needs.

01:25:18

So if an authority issue comes up in Catholicism, I'm going to address the issue of authority with somebody and say, unfortunately, you put your faith in a sacerdotal system or the authority of the church.

01:25:29

And I want to address the issues of apostolic succession and authority and deal with that and really pay attention to the persons where they're at.

01:25:39

Because Jehovah's Witnesses are authoritatively driven also. As far as Roman Catholics, everything has to do with the authority of the church, the authority of the descendancy out of the apostles, the authority of the authority.

01:25:50

And so they look at life and religion and truth based on the authority of the church. The church is false, therefore authority is false.

01:25:57

They go to the scriptures and say, no, let's shift your understanding of authority away from a man's organization to God's revelation.

01:26:05

And I think it's just a procedure that needs to be done. And of course, the gospel has got to get out there. But I do believe that sometimes we have to prep the ground for the gospel.

01:26:13

Now, I'm Reformed, you know, but the thing is that God does use us, woo us. He brings people through certain circumstances, whatever way he does,

01:26:22

John 6, 44, as he draws us in order to get us to that place where then irresistibly he regenerates us.

01:26:28

So I don't know how it all works, but that's what I do with Catholics. I address the squeaky part of the engine, you know, get that going, smooth that out, go to the next issue, next issue, so that they're ready, hopefully, by God's grace to receive the true gospel.

01:26:43

It's almost like they feel like they can't know anything if their authority falls.

01:26:50

So Matt, I thought you said... Yeah, so kind of what you said there.

01:26:56

Yeah, especially with the other cults too. And this is why, you know, I don't personally, like I had a, as you may know, you know, with writing a book on world religions, right?

01:27:08

I deal with other people that deal with that stuff. And there are some people, there's a guy in my area who his whole focus is undermining the authority of Jehovah Witnesses, of the

01:27:18

Watchtower, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, to undermine their authority.

01:27:24

The problem I see with that is when you undermine their authority, what do you leave them with? Nothing, because now they just know that what they believe was wrong.

01:27:33

I think, you know, you need to give the gospel. It's okay to say, look, they're wrong, but they're wrong because this is what

01:27:39

Scripture says. So what we're doing is lifting God up on high, lifting Scripture up on high, and putting their systems in their proper place, which is faulty.

01:27:50

Out with the bad, in with the good. Say again, Matt, sorry. Out with the bad, in with the good. Explain why this is wrong, here's what's right.

01:27:57

And the reason you can say it's wrong is because you have a standard of what is right. You got to do both. Yeah, and if you don't focus on the gospel, then great.

01:28:06

So they left the Mormon church. They left, you know, Joel Steen's church. Big deal.

01:28:12

They're still going to hell without the gospel. I mean, they have to repent. That's the key message we as Christians want to deliver.

01:28:20

Amen. Get them to that gospel. So I want to play a game with you guys. Word Association.

01:28:28

Oh. Not Monopoly. Word Association. I want to throw out some names, and let Justin and Jim, who's been kind of quiet.

01:28:36

You know, maybe that's why he went in the other room. He went in the library, and he thinks he has to be quiet in there. But, you know, throw out names.

01:28:42

Now, the first thing, Matt and Jim and Justin, what do you think of when you think of these different guys?

01:28:49

So, you know, I'll start. We'll start this time with Matt, and then

01:28:55

Jim and Justin, so we don't have everyone talking over each other. So, Joelstein, Matt, what do you think?

01:29:02

Slimeball heretic. Jim? Charlatan. Justin?

01:29:10

Cream puff. Oh, can I play? I was going to say nice smile.

01:29:16

I was going to say smile. That's what I was going to say. Andrew and I are on the same page. So I'll start with Jim, and then

01:29:23

Justin, Matt. Todd Bentley. Jim? Criminal.

01:29:32

Justin? Charlatan. Hey, that was my word. Matt, what do you think of Todd Bentley?

01:29:40

Violent. Violent? Oh, yeah, violent. Okay, we didn't really talk about that.

01:29:46

Explain why you would say that for Todd Bentley, violent. Well, kicking people, get the

01:29:51

Holy Spirit, things like that, of violence. I think that's revelatory of the evil that's indwelling, so that you see what really is the truth coming out in a violent act.

01:30:07

He literally kicked a man in the stomach who had stage four colon cancer, kicked him in the gut.

01:30:15

I was there. With his biker boots, right? Yeah, I don't remember what his shoes were, but probably.

01:30:21

I mean, he claimed he kicked an elderly woman in the face with his biker boot, but I saw him kick a man with cancer in the stomach.

01:30:30

I'd like to talk to him for a little bit. Practice a little Krav Maga with him, right?

01:30:36

Yeah, spiritual Krav Maga. Okay, so we'll start with Justin and Matt and Jim.

01:30:45

Kenneth Copeland? Heretic. Matt? Unbeliever.

01:30:52

Jim? He's an evil man, an evil deceiver. All right, this time we'll start with Matt, Jim, and then

01:30:59

Justin. So, Matt, Benny Hinn? Evil deceiver.

01:31:11

Jim? I was going to say something like a clown, some sort of a clownish behavior.

01:31:16

He strikes me as somebody who just can't even be taking himself seriously, really.

01:31:24

A showman, maybe. Yeah, along the lines, I was going to say Carnival Barker.

01:31:30

Carnival Barker? Isn't that Jesse Duplantis? Can we save that one for Jesse Duplantis, Carnival Barker?

01:31:37

Yeah, it's a lot of... Okay, so I forgot. We should go with Jim first this time.

01:31:43

So, Jim. I forgot what

01:31:49

I was going to give you to start. Okay, we'll do Jesse Duplantis. Why don't we do that one? So, Jim, Jesse Duplantis. Carnival Barker, that's what

01:31:55

I would say. Justin? Oh, golly.

01:32:01

There's so many. You keep coming back to the same terms. A comedic wolf. How about that?

01:32:08

Because he's a great stand -up comedian, terrible theologian, terrible preacher. Matt? He's a gifted deceiver.

01:32:19

It's interesting, both of you guys pick up the giftedness. Part of this is the entertainment stuff, so we'll start with Justin this time.

01:32:31

Steven Furtick. I wasn't thinking of Steven Furtick. Okay, that's a great one to go with. Okay, Steven Furtick. Immature.

01:32:40

Not unqualified? I was going to go with that one, yeah. But yeah, okay, we'll save that for...

01:32:47

Immature. Okay, Matt's got unqualified. Matt, what do you think for Steven Furtick?

01:32:56

Amateur theologian. Jim? Wow, he actually used the term theologian to refer to him.

01:33:03

I'm not sure I can agree with that. He does try and do a little theology, but he doesn't know what he's doing. He does enough just to hurt himself, and he's an amateur, and he doesn't know what he's doing.

01:33:15

I need to hold a conference, a theology conference for these guys, and start at the...

01:33:21

I'm going to say it, because I get too mean. They need to learn. I love the

01:33:26

Babylon Bee, where they... I don't know if you guys follow Babylon Bee. They had one where John MacArthur spoke at a women's conference, and he locked them all into a...

01:33:37

all the women's pastors into a container and locked it up and dropped it in the bottom of the ocean.

01:33:42

You should lock them in the kitchen. Yeah, the Babylon Bee satirized me also. Oh, really?

01:33:47

I've got to go check that one out. Really? Oh, man. You've made it into the big leagues of Babylon Bee.

01:33:53

They hadn't done anything with me. Yeah, I was... Hey, Justin. Matt Schley from Carms says,

01:34:00

CrossFit's obviously a cult, and it went in like that. It was great. I was going to say the

01:34:05

Babylon Bee should do an article about Justin Peters going on running wild with Bear Grylls.

01:34:11

Two days out surviving in the wilderness, rappelling down cliffs and climbing mountains. It'd be interesting to see what

01:34:19

Babylon Bee would do with Justin. That's hilarious. So let's start with this one. I'll start this one with Matt.

01:34:26

Beth Moore. Does the word slappable work?

01:34:33

Is that okay? I just feel like... I mean, it's not a nice thing to say, but I get irritated with the ones who are the closest, who use emotions and niceties in order to make people be deceived.

01:34:45

I was like, Stop it! I'm not advocating violence like the Democrats are.

01:34:50

I'm just saying it just makes me mad. Jim? Beth Moore. Somebody who is descending and deteriorating quickly.

01:34:59

Yeah. I mean, she is not just... There was a time when, Beth Moore, you would just kind of say,

01:35:05

Well, I don't know. I guess not the best thing. Pick out the bones, eat the meat.

01:35:13

But now it's just, Man, is there any meat left on this carcass at all? She's descending and deteriorating so quickly into chaos and theological dreck.

01:35:24

I just don't even know there's anything good there at all anymore. I don't know what

01:35:29

I could add to that. I mean, he's right. The sad thing about Beth Moore is that stuff that she was putting out 15 years ago, way better than what she's doing now.

01:35:42

Now, for all intents and purposes, she is full -blown word of faith. Full -blown word of faith and egalitarian.

01:35:51

Yeah. She preaches to men. Sometimes her treatment of scripture and the way that she teaches would make you think that Joel Osteen is

01:36:00

MacArthur -like in his expository genius. I'm not saying something.

01:36:06

You know, I went to Joel Osteen's church. Yes, she did. She preached at Joel Osteen's church.

01:36:12

No, I did. I went to the church. Oh, she did too? She preached? She preached there.

01:36:18

You didn't. You just went and visited. I wanted to. Yeah. So she preached a

01:36:24

Sunday service at Joel Osteen's. I don't know if it was a Sunday service, but there was a conference there at Lakewood.

01:36:30

I don't know if it was a Sunday service. But, yeah, I've got a screenshot of her up on the platform at Lakewood Church preaching.

01:36:39

I mean, the way that Beth Moore is going at the speed at which she is deteriorating, we're probably going to get to the point where you're going to hear

01:36:49

Joel Osteen say, Now, wait a minute. Come on. That's a little too much.

01:36:56

Joel Osteen might rescind any invitations to preach at his church. When Joel Osteen starts correcting

01:37:02

Beth Moore, that would really be— And may I say, and may I say, I'm just going to say it.

01:37:10

Beth, it doesn't matter how sincere Beth Moore may be.

01:37:15

I have no doubt she probably is sincere. Sincerity is not the issue. Truth is the issue. And there is no one, there is no one in the

01:37:24

SBC, there is no prominent voice in the SBC that is brave enough to call out

01:37:30

Beth Moore for what she is and what she's teaching. No one.

01:37:35

And I do mean no one. You think of the highest of the high up in the

01:37:41

SBC, the biggest names, presidents of the biggest seminaries, hint, hint, and the

01:37:47

SBC will not say one word, will not touch Beth Moore.

01:37:53

She is untouchable. Can I segue off of that, what you said?

01:37:59

I like it. All of us sometime should do a little talk about the failure of men as biblical leaders in the church.

01:38:08

Because what I think should happen is men are the ones responsible, and they should be flying horizontally across the stage, knee -tackling her and get her off the stage.

01:38:19

That's what real spiritual men should do. What is wrong with the men in the church today?

01:38:25

That's a failure of men. I agree. Guys, if you don't mind me mentioning something. One thing

01:38:31

I noticed from my time in the Pentecostal world was that I think there's things like this kind of creep up.

01:38:38

This is my theory. There's a real fear of blaspheming the

01:38:43

Holy Spirit by saying, if I say something isn't of the

01:38:49

Holy Spirit, maybe I'm blaspheming the Holy Spirit or something like that. And it causes...

01:39:00

Yeah, there's fear to say something because they don't want to be speaking against the

01:39:06

Holy Spirit. It's sad they can't even identify the work of the Holy Spirit. Then they would know when they're speaking against Him and when they're not.

01:39:15

That's a good point. One of the things that was said at the Strange Fire Conference that was interesting was with all the nonsense that goes on, and they say that if you don't accept all this nonsense, you're blaspheming the

01:39:29

Holy Spirit, you're putting Him in a box. And the reality, I think it might have been Phil Johnson, I don't remember, that basically said no, and it could have been

01:39:35

MacArthur, that basically said no, when you attribute to God, to the

01:39:41

Holy Spirit, what He is not doing, that is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. They're actually the ones doing the blasphemy of the

01:39:48

Holy Spirit. No, no, no, you guys, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a very specific thing in Matthew 12, verses 32.

01:39:56

People get that wrong a lot. Well, blasphemy of God, I mean, the way they're using it... That's different, yeah.

01:40:02

When they say that we're blaspheming the Holy Spirit by not giving credit to the

01:40:08

Holy Spirit for things they claim He's doing, but if He's not doing those things, then that is blasphemy.

01:40:17

Jesus says all sorts of blasphemies will be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. It's a simple solution to go study that pericope of Scripture, and you can figure out that what that is, is saying that Jesus was doing

01:40:28

His miracles by the power of the evil one. And that's what it is, and it has to do with an issue against the work of Christ.

01:40:34

It ties into His baptism and some other things, but yeah. Yeah, not speaking of that specifically, I guess better is... Susan in the chat has a better...

01:40:41

it's mocking of the Holy Spirit. It makes a mockery of the Holy Spirit. They're mocking Christ. They're mocking

01:40:47

Christ, the one who bought us, and the one who is the sovereign king, and they're putting themselves on the throne.

01:40:53

It's Christ whom they are mocking. And the fact that they're going to be so worried about the Holy Spirit, which is something they should be concerned about, means that to some degree their eyes are off of Christ and on to the

01:41:02

Holy Spirit. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is to bear witness of Christ as well as the truth, and to convict the world of sin.

01:41:08

And so if they're so concerned with the Holy Spirit, there's an imbalance there. It should be that they're concerned with how they're pleasing

01:41:13

Christ. And if they can get their eyes off the Holy Spirit and on to Christ, not to belittle the third person of the

01:41:19

Godhead, but this is how it's supposed to be. The Father and the Son bear witness, and the Father and the Spirit bear witness to the Son.

01:41:25

And that's how it's supposed to be in the churches as well. Then they wouldn't have any problems. Yeah. So, you know,

01:41:32

I want to try to wrap up the show. We've got a couple more things to cover. There's something, Matt, actually that you and Justin have in common that I want to cover.

01:41:40

But before we do... We're both good looking. Well, Justin is.

01:41:47

You have a face for radio. That's right. Which we should plug.

01:41:53

I haven't plugged that one yet. By the way, this, what you end up listening to becomes a podcast that you can listen to.

01:42:02

If you go search for Apologetics Live, we have that as a podcast. But we also have...

01:42:08

If you search for Matt Slick, you can get the Matt Slick Live, which he does five days a week,

01:42:13

Monday through Friday, live radio show. And you can get that. Justin may be starting podcasting again soon.

01:42:21

We've finally got him some equipment. So, you know, let's go around and just, you know, anything that's going on with you.

01:42:29

You got a trip coming up to Israel soon. I do. Yep. I'll be going to Israel for 10 days.

01:42:36

It'll be my first trip to Israel, actually. And so I'm looking forward to that. I'm excited about it. So, yeah.

01:42:44

But next year... Are you going to bring me back something? Of course. Yeah. What do you want? Bring back one of the stones

01:42:50

I didn't try out. The ram's horn that your pastor,

01:42:56

Jim, has up here, just a nice long... Yeah, yeah. So far. Yeah, give me a nice chauffeur. He's going to make me blow it tomorrow at the conference.

01:43:03

Yeah. So, yeah. I'll be going to Israel. And next year,

01:43:11

I have a... My calendar's filling up pretty quickly. I think right now I already have five international trips planned for next year.

01:43:18

Yeah, you and I are going to the Philippines for a week and a half or two weeks or something. You're going to eat the balut?

01:43:26

No, no, no. No. Andrew's going to eat balut.

01:43:31

No, no, no. Do you know what it is, Andrew? No, but I'll see if he eats it first.

01:43:38

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, you don't? You won't eat it, but you want me to. I ain't eating no balut. What is balut?

01:43:43

Me either. It's a chicken egg where the chicken is halfway developed.

01:43:50

Oh, yeah. Not just a yolk. Then they kind of cook it in it, and then they come around and you eat this thing. It looks like a chicken in there.

01:43:57

Yeah, yeah. They have that in Cambodia. I would try. I'm cool with that.

01:44:04

Beak and all and the little claws and everything? You forget. My wife is from Hong Kong. I've already eaten strange things.

01:44:14

Jim, you got anything going on? I know you got something going on this weekend. Yeah, we've got Andrew here for a conference, an evangelism conference this weekend.

01:44:22

It starts tomorrow night. It goes through Saturday, and then he's preaching and teaching an adult Sunday school class on Sunday. And after that, man,

01:44:29

I don't know. I'm just going to be sitting around doing nothing once I'm done with Andrew. You're going to be sitting around working on a new book. I am working on a new book, yeah.

01:44:36

What's it on? These people who claim that God speaks to them through the still small voice.

01:44:41

That's right. Speaks to them through still small voice, impressions, nudgings, signs, confirmations, putting out fleeces, whether that is a biblical way of discerning the will of God and hearing

01:44:53

God speak. So it's going to be a defense. It's going to be called God Doesn't Whisper. If God wants to say something, he'll let you know.

01:44:59

He's not going to have a hard time communicating with you. Let's talk about it. You and I talk, because I'm the only charismatic guy here, which

01:45:09

I do believe God can communicate to us. I have some interesting stories. I can't exegete stories.

01:45:17

You know I'm a good theologian, or hopefully. I thought so until this moment right here.

01:45:27

Well, let me tell you, Ben. He also believes in that covenant theology stuff.

01:45:34

I'm done. I'm serious. I think it might be worth having a discussion, because I might have a little perspective that might be a little bit different.

01:45:49

Hey, Andrew. One thing

01:45:55

I'd like to say. Today is my wife's birthday, and I'm here chatting with you guys instead of spending the time with her.

01:46:00

That shows how important you guys are. Speaking of male leadership and male headship and men,

01:46:08

I feel convicted. He planned a conference on his wife's birthday. He has some making up to do,

01:46:15

I think. He'll be doing a marriage seminar pretty soon. I may have to change the topic of this from evangelism to marriage seminar.

01:46:27

He has been married for 25 years. Jim, what's the church's website?

01:46:36

Where can people find out more about? It's KootenaiChurch .org. You'll see

01:46:46

Justin's sermons linked on there, and a lot of good resources. Your sermons are linked on there.

01:46:53

I'll put that in the show notes, too. Jim's preaching through the book of Hebrews right now, and it's excellent. He preaches through books very quickly.

01:47:01

Oh, yeah. It's basically a chapter. Matt, you'll get a kick out of this.

01:47:10

I met some of the folks from the church. Basically, everybody dates when they came to the church by not just what book he was in, but what chapter.

01:47:18

Someone was like, yeah, he was in John 4. I was in John 17. He's in the book so long that they can date it by the chapter they came in on.

01:47:29

Do they measure their spiritual worth by the further back in the books that they've been in?

01:47:35

Yeah, maybe. Matt, I want to have a little bit of fun here.

01:47:41

We want to make sure we get to see Justin's reaction here. Matt, there's something that you and Justin have in common.

01:47:54

You and Justin seem to fail at contests with me. If folks go out, they can go to JustinIWin .com.

01:48:05

It's now live, and you're going to get to see Justin's face as he gets to see this for the first time.

01:48:13

There's a video that explains the history of JustinIWin .com, but it is a way to donate to Justin Peters.

01:48:23

There's a button there that says support hashtag JustinIWin. What you want to do is on Twitter and everywhere, you want to post hashtag

01:48:31

JustinIWin. Basically, what it is, there's a video of me describing how this started.

01:48:38

Basically, what we're doing is we want to support Justin. It's me getting bragging rights for you guys supporting

01:48:47

Justin. That's really what it comes down to. You support Justin Peters, and I get to brag that he gets more support than me.

01:48:59

It's kind of like Matt can't seem to manage to buy me a meal, though I offered. I offered for Matt Slick to buy me a meal.

01:49:06

November 11th, he was cordially invited to my daughter's wedding. If he wants to buy that meal for everybody,

01:49:14

I will be happy to let him pay the bill at the wedding. For some reason, he's looking for a more private dinner to pay for.

01:49:28

It's going to happen one day. It's going to happen, and you're going to have to eat a lot of crow, but it's going to happen.

01:49:34

Hey, listen, I will gladly eat the crow if you want to pay for the wedding. I'm just saying, I'll be happy.

01:49:39

That would be nice. Hey, I'd love to be able to pay for the wedding. With all the good advice I gave your daughter, it looks like I paid off.

01:49:47

Yes. We'll let you think that that's what it is. I don't know. Some places you could go, supportkarm .org,

01:49:58

great ministry, great resources. But I do strongly encourage if you're going to go to Justin Peters and support him, please go to the justiniwin .com.

01:50:10

We're trying to make it easy for you to donate to him. You see his head's down. He is too humble of a guy.

01:50:16

He hates this. He is so humble. And guess what? That's the reason you should donate to him.

01:50:24

We want to get as much to him as possible to bless him.

01:50:30

This is my way of getting bragging rights over him. I have fun. I've done none of this without his pastor's permission, by the way.

01:50:38

That's a true story. The website, all the things. We've asked his pastor the whole way, and he's approved every step of this.

01:50:50

You have anything you want to say? I'm bad.

01:50:58

I don't know. I'm very grateful to you, Andrew. I really am. Andrew's a good brother.

01:51:05

Yeah, this is very awkward for me, but I'll say this about Andrew. No, let's just end it.

01:51:11

No, no. This past January was

01:51:17

January, right? January, G3? Yeah. January, February, G3. G3 conference in Atlanta.

01:51:24

Andrew, I had two breakout sessions at the G3 conference.

01:51:31

Andrew flew down for the conference, paid his own ticket, paid his own hotel, paid his own food, paid his own conference admission, everything.

01:51:41

Just to help me. Just to help me at my table and help me get my socks and shoes on in the mornings and whatever

01:51:49

I needed. He did all that at his own expense. Yeah, Andrew's a good brother, and so I appreciate you and everything that you've done for me in the ministry.

01:52:03

Yeah, appreciate you, brother. Well, therefore, everyone should go to JustinIWin .com and donate to Justin.

01:52:13

One day, Justin will get me back. One day, Matt Slick will get me back. But that day is not today.

01:52:21

So maybe by next week, we could find out that somehow one of them out -slicked me. But until then, next

01:52:29

Thursday night, we'll be back to a regular Q &A with Matt Slick, going over apologetics questions.

01:52:36

Maybe we'll get into some of the problems or the heat that I have been in.

01:52:42

Or Matt and I both were kind of in a little bit of a battle the past couple weeks. So maybe we'll get into explaining some of that.

01:52:49

But until next week, I want to thank you guys for watching, for listening, and remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.