Misconceptions about Calvinism (LIVE PODCAST)

Opening Remarks and the Panel’s Different Calvinist Positions

Welcome to Conversations with a Calvinist, live edition. And tonight we're going to be talking about misconceptions about Calvinism. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am your Calvinist. I'm joined tonight by two good friends, friends of the show.

Repeat, even though one has been repeating more than the other. All right. Repeat participants on Conversations with a Calvinist. I have Jake Corn and Matthew Henson. Good evening, gentlemen.

It's good to see you. Hey, to be fair, since you started the show, I've been on three other continents. OK, I'm kind of busy. It is true.

I mean, he does have that going on. I understand. I understand. I'm just not as important as the United States. Well, gentlemen, I am thankful for your participation in the show. And tonight is live. So I do want to tell the audience that we are going to be we're not going to edit anything.

We're just going to go straight in. And because it is live, you're going to be hearing it exactly as it's coming. And tonight we're talking about the question of misconceptions about Calvinism. And what I want to begin doing is I want to kind of give all of our positions, because each of us is slightly different.

I would say Jake and I are probably closer than is Matthew, as we always reference. Matthew is our not yet Calvinist friend. And you'll notice the description of tonight's show is misconceptions about Calvinism with two and a half Calvinists.

That's what it says on the description, a conversation with two and a half Calvinists. So tonight we are going to just take a couple of minutes each to give our own convictions on this subject. I'm going to let Jake go first, then Matthew's going to go.

And then I'm going to come in at the end. And most of you know me, but I'll just kind of tell my story for a couple minutes as well. Go ahead. You've got to hit clean up there.

All right. So, one, I did not start as a Christian who was a Calvinist all through seminary. I would have called myself a hard nosed fighting Armenian. I sat through seminary classes for three years with professors and students who were mostly reformed.

And I fought them and debated them constantly. So I grew up, you know, kind of soft evangelical, but really believed in this whole free will principle. In fact, I would say the things like, you know, the only love that God really values is love that's given freely or whatever.

It was seminary, however, that really opened my eyes to the doctrines of grace. And it was two things. One, it was exegesis. I know that sounds arrogant, but like learning how to study an original language changed my mind.

And then two, seeing the depth and breadth of church history and how much had been written on topics I agreed with and didn't agree with. And seeing like, oh, here I am with my opinions on having read the Bible a little bit.

Meanwhile, there's a couple thousand years of writing on this subject and many other subjects. I should probably inform myself as to which of these arguments have been brought to the table and already dismissed for good reasons.

And so a constant theme I think you're going to hear from me tonight is like this has been covered. If you read this and consider X, Y, and Z like these other guys have, you'll see why that argument actually is a dead end.

So it's really going back to the ancient languages and then seeing where brothers and sisters in the past have already kind of stamped out the ground for us.

Wonderful. Thank you. And so, Matthew, again, we know you're not yet a Calvinist. And so tell everybody a little bit about where you are in this journey of faith. And I'm not saying that you're on your way to Calvinism.

I'm not saying that. You're not saying that, right? But as Jake just said, he wasn't always a Calvinist, and now he is able to identify himself that way. How do you identify yourself if somebody says, hey, are you Reformed or whatever?

First, what I would say is that I have, there's no contempt for Reformed theology, as you often find out on the Internet, in my heart at all. Most of the things, maybe not most, but many of the things we're going to be talking about tonight are very bad argumentations against Calvinism.

I'm not going to support those. And luckily, these two men here aren't going to put those on me. They're asking, what do you believe? Don't let me caricature you with this. And I'm going to give you guys the same grace and the grace I would give to every person who professes Reformed theology.

You guys know some folks that profess to be Calvinist that you would want nothing to do with because of the way that they overemphasize or they take some other part of ecclesiology and they make a mess of it.

And so you wouldn't want to be any part of that. So what am I? Well, I was raised in a nondenominational church that leaned on its eschatology, very dispensationalist. And its soteriology wasn't specifically defined as we are Calvinist, we are Arminian, we're this, we're this, we're this.

I will say that when the topic of things like predestination and election came up, people got very nervous. And by nervous, I literally mean it was all predestination was almost whispered under your breath.

It wasn't something people wanted to talk about. And so I didn't have a fear of it. But it just always was, well, that's not what I was raised with. So it can't be right. And all of us as baby Christians, that's kind of how we are for a while.

Well, as time goes on, I go to college and I went to a church that was on that, on soteriology, a direct opposite. They were a five point affirming Calvinist reformed Baptist church, plurality of eldership model.

I mean, just a bunch of different changes that that I hadn't seen before in a church on the ecclesiology and the soteriology.

Is this the church you met Aaron in?

Yes, this is where I met Aaron. So this is up in Rome, Georgia, when I was there for college. And I attended there for four years. It's kind of a God thing how I got there, but it's beyond the scope of the show.

Anyway, as a Calvinist, as a Calvinist, we affirm everything is a God thing. But that's right. We call that Providence.

So but I was I was challenged on a lot of the stuff. And like, you know, there would be a sermon through some of your cornerstone passages, your Ephesians ones, your Romans nines, your your John sixes, maybe maybe a little bit of, I guess, first John on on people leaving the faith and Hebrews and stuff like that.

And it's not that they were the thing I respected is they were not specifically at the time. They were not specifically trying to preach Calvinism. They were just exegeting the Bible and saying, here's how we came out on these passages.

And I respected that a lot. And I didn't always share their conclusions, but I respected it a lot. Unfortunately, as I left in the past last couple of months, and then after that, they went in a more I'm going to call it obnoxiously reformed track.

It became a lot more if you don't hold to this, then you don't believe your Bible. If you don't hold to this, then you clearly don't know how to exegete. And our church believes this. And it wasn't if you don't believe this, get out.

But it was like you are you're a second tier member if you can't get on board with the doctrines of grace as we're defining them. And that was a huge like, oh, no, honey, that's not a thing. So in a sense, I was sort of.

I sort of learned to live in the middle a little bit, and I don't mean to be like, oh, no, I'm a Minion or Calvinist. I think that's really irritating. But but what I learned to do was to say, all right, well, John Calvin had a particular soteriology that he espoused, and maybe Calvin didn't get it right on every point.

Or maybe he got it. He stated his conclusion to an extent that I wouldn't go as far as I don't want to throw Calvin out. I don't want to throw I mean, I've got you know, I've read some reformed theology here and there.

I don't want to throw all of these guys out and say they're not exegeting the Bible correctly. It's just I wouldn't take their conclusions quite as far. And I'll close with this, Keith. At dinner one time, your wife asked me about, you know, why aren't you a Calvinist yet or whatever?

And so she's like, let's start at the T. What do you think about total depravity? And I said, well, you know, I said. Does the Bible teach that that there is a deadness and inability, all of these things, of course it does.

But then what are the conclusions drawn from that when we get to that all crucial application phase of the sermon? How far are you going to go there? Because that is where me and John Calvin and and and I keep going back to him because it's a conversation with Calvinist.

That's where we would probably differ. So Jake calls me a three and a half point Calvinist. You know, maybe I'm half T, half U, half L, half I, half P. I'm not sure how you would exactly break it down.

But I'm someone with a deep admiration for the exegetical methods that that reformed theology comes to. I have no disrespect whatsoever for gentlemen like yourselves that hold fully to it. I don't think it's some doctrine of demons or any nonsense like that.

I'm comfortable with it. It's just not something I quite hold to yet. Yet I did say yet just for you.

Oh, how good that feels to hear him say the qualifying word of yet. That's a nice thing to hear. Well, I will. I'll jump in for a minute. And just as I said, I've told my story on the show before, so I won't take too long.

But I went to seminary, went to a Southern Baptist seminary that was not Calvinistic. So I was not taught Calvinism in seminary. But while I was in seminary, I was the guest speaker at a youth camp. And the man who was leading the youth camp one year before had been challenged by some reformed teaching.

And so for a whole year, he studied it. And then he challenged me with it. And for a whole year, I studied it. And then another year. And so it took me a while. The first time I remember ever really being comfortable was I went to a Founders Ministries conference in 2005.

I think it was 2006, somewhere in there. And met Tom Askell. I met a man who I loved, Roy Hargrave, who is now with the Lord. And these were men who answered a lot of questions that I had. A lot of the questions we're going to talk about tonight, they answered them in a way that I thought was reasonable, biblical, and helpful.

And so it took a little while for me to start calling myself a Calvinist. In fact, the only reason for people who want to know why I call myself a Calvinist, it was almost thrust upon me. Because there were people in the church who wanted to remove me for being a Calvinist.

And I remember walking into a restaurant. I've told this story before. I walked into a restaurant, and a local Southern Baptist pastor who didn't like Calvinism saw me. And I didn't even know he knew who I was.

And he said, that guy's a Calvinist. And I said, well, I guess the label has preceded me. I guess my reputation has preceded me. So ever since then, I just say, I'm Keith Foskey, and I'm a Calvinist. And that's sort of how this show and all the monikers and everything that go with the show, that's how it all came about.

For me, it's almost like a joke. Because, yeah, I am. I believe it. I don't think it's the only thing that matters. But I'm not unwilling to say that that's who I am. I do want to stop real quick before we go on.

And I want to say this. For those of you who are listening live and you're interested in sending in questions, there are a couple ways for you to do that. The first way is you can do it at Conversations with a Calvinist group page.

You can just go onto the group page. You don't have to be a member to actually comment. It's an open group. You can go in, leave a comment, and ask a question right on this video. If you do that on Just Say, which is Jake's page, he'll see it, and he'll be able to engage with it.

And I also have my email open. And by the way, I just want you to know, while these men are talking, if you see my eyes moving around, I'm not ignoring what they're saying. I'm engaging with the rest of what's going on.

I had a guy one time say, it looks like you're not paying attention. I am. I really am. But I'm having to do other things while I do this. So I'm watching my email. I do have one email that I'm going to bring out later addressed specifically to Matthew Henson.

So that'll come up later. All right. I'm getting fan mail.

Let's go. Yeah. People knew you were coming. Okay. We also have a list of misconceptions that we've gathered on Just Say. So if we run out of material, we can start going through some of that list.

Real quick, explain what Just Say is, because I know not everybody knows what that is.

So I talk about Calvinism a lot on the Internet. And I just started to notice that people would misstate reformed positions often, generally in their criticisms. So I invented a tag group. So on Facebook, a tag group is one of those short sentences in all blue letters.

And the tag group is just say you don't understand reformed theology and move along. Because I was just I exited my cage stage. I no longer wanted to argue on the Internet. And so instead of going back and forth with this person's misconception, arguing a straw man that I don't have time for, just say you don't understand it.

It's just faster that way. So I just started dropping that for fun. The tag group has grown to almost 2 ,800 people by this point. Mostly Calvinists, but a lot of people just trying to learn. And what they'll do is they'll share the tag out there in the wilderness with somebody else and then screenshot the instance.

And we'll learn and have a good laugh. So please come visit us. Please join the group as long as you're there for good reasons. We'd love to have you. Absolutely.

So join that group. And just on an out there, Matthew, you have another group, something about Roman Catholicism. I do.

I have a group that is entitled. I regret to inform you that the papists are indeed at it again because Rome does not sleep and they continue to they continue to do silly things. And it is my it is my group for poking gentle fun at Roman Catholics.

We do want to see them. The Orthodox Council of Trent Roman Catholics. We want to see them know the Lord and we want to see them, you know, in a fellowship that that teaches the Bible and all that. And so it's for it's for gentle fun.

I don't want people to be again. I don't you'll find a theme this night. I'm not interested in in that's the demons or they're the devil or I just there's a time and a place for that. And ninety nine point eight percent of the time, it's not what it's not the time or place for that.

And so it's it's a fun group that we get to do things like that with. And Jake and I are cross admins of each other's group. So I'm the I'm the secret. Let me use the correct terminology. Not yet Calvinist.

That is that is an admin over at a reformed group. So what do you know?

And I think that that is so ironic because one dude didn't know that. And he posted it. He goes, wait a minute. There's a super non-Calvinist non-Calvinist moderator on the. And what we'll get.

I'm sure we will. We will get into some some echo chamber discussion, like on what that can do to your to your thinking later on, I'm sure. But anyway, without I don't want to soak up any more time.

The Will, Compatibilism, and the “Puppet Master” Objection

All right. Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to throw out one initial, almost immediate objection that almost I get from everyone. And this will be this will be this the one that kicks us off.

I didn't plan the guys. I didn't tell the guys, hey, this is what we're going to do first. I just this is the one that was on my mind after this. We'll start asking you guys which ones you want to talk about and then we'll go to the list from just say.

But the one that is so common. And I hear this. I get this in emails. I get this in text messages and things when people are engaging me from the show is that is the idea that if you believe that God predestines men and women to to eternal life.

Then you have to believe that men and women have no freedom in their will. And the and the argument usually comes about in the the argument usually is is is is poised in such a way that they would say you believe men are puppets and God is pulling all the strings.

And so I'm going to let Jake be the first to respond. And then I'm going to see if Matthew agrees or disagrees with his response. And Matthew again you have you have the benefit tonight of being able to challenge us at any sure sure I may hop in at times but I'm gonna let you guys do most of the talking when it comes to the answering.

Unless I just feel like I want to say something.

So JK, you say to the puppet question. So, I want to start off by saying I am not an expert at systematics, like by any stretch. If I had to say I have a theology specialty I lean toward biblical theology not systematics.

That being said, one, this is another one that has been well trod and has been well trod since before Calvin, like the the sheer determinism has been around in many forms, since like the church started arguing at all.

So, to kind of side branch and another argument you'll get a lot of times people will say, well you know determinism didn't exist until john Calvin in the church nobody taught that in the church. Automatically I know you've done no reading, you've done no reading because that is historically, that is not true.

So, so one, I would say, humans are absolutely completely free in their will to act in the way that humans born of Adam will always act. We are completely free as creatures to act with our creaturely will this is a historic position known as compatibilism, that our will is compatible with God's decreed of will the will of his, his ultimate decree when God says something will happen.

It will in fact happen. So what does that mean we are free to choose salvation, and we will never choose salvation on our own. We won't. Humans are free to choose salvation in the same way that that fish are free to fly.

It is not a thing that our nature will allow for, we need a supernatural intervention from from the Holy Spirit to be able to do that. And I think that's supported by, you know, the, the statement of the New Covenant in Ezekiel the idea of the heart of stone being replaced with the heart of flesh and then does the law being written upon our, our hearts.

And more than that, all of these arguments would come down to, if you've done the homework of having a good ordo salutis, which means, what is the order of salvation when a human being is saved. How does the order of those events happen.

When were you because you have to deal with the fact that the word predestined and the word elector in the Bible. When were you predestined, when were you elected, when were you called, when were you justified, when will you be glorified.

And if you look, and you do a thorough study of the Bible, when these things were stated to have occurred. Right. Your predestination happened at the laying of the foundation of the earth before you were born before the earth this is part is key before the earth was formed, which means before Adam had his alleged choice, one way or the other, those who were predestined were predestined.

So you follow that Romans eight, right, which says that the predestined are the ones who are ultimately glorified and that golden chain. There's not a, an option in that chain, the ones who were predestined will be the ones who were glorified.

So, with a solid ordo salutis, you see the fact that it doesn't, it doesn't matter how you view it, you are a creature and some creatures have been selected for salvation.

All right, Mr. Matthew, you have a couple of minutes to challenge Mr and again I do want to say this is not a formal debate but we do have differing opinions here and we have different ways that these questions would be answered.

And that's why we're doing this, it would be, it would be not pointless but it wouldn't, it wouldn't get us very far if we all just gave the same answers, it's good to be able to challenge one another, iron sharpening iron, as it were.

So, Matthew, go ahead.

Sure. So I'll start with the original question you said what do you do with, with an objection that someone brings and says, well, that would make God some sort of puppet master or whatever and I think if you're if you're a confessional Calvinist as Jake would be a 1689 and then there's Westminster that's similar but not identical to the London Baptist Convention.

You know, and I'll quote it, I'll paraphrase it badly from memory you know God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass but at the same time not leaving humans. What's the exculpable, is that the word for it or something.

Basically, but that he's decreed whatever's come to pass but humans are still responsible for their, for their actions that's kind of, I think that's like one of the opening statements of the Westminster confession if I'm correct.

It does not eliminate this, the, the participation of secondary causes. Okay. Secondary causes being that God has decreed all things but that he himself is not responsible for sin because of the, because of secondary cause.

We're going to get to secondary causation later. That's what it refers to.

Yeah, so, um, so the idea of where people have a problem in thinking about this is that in the sense in the objection. Okay, well if God is decreeing all of these things then he's the divine puppet master and humans don't have any, any actual free will.

I think that is a misconception of what Calvinists are saying and I think Jake did a pretty good job at it he's saying that. No, you can listen man you can choose to run in this track this track this track this track this track but one thing you can't do is repent and believe without a work of the Holy Spirit that that.

And, and so then the, the, the question comes down to right. What is in the order of solidity was talking about at what phase does that work of Holy Spirit come in is that a monergistic work or a synergistic work and for the listener who may never have heard those terms monosingle single act single work synergism together or with one another work.

And so the the linchpin question is, is it monergism or synergism as I've heard Jake explain it before. Is this act, which enables you to repent and believe solely the act of the Holy Spirit of God, or is there some sort of cooperation that goes on, and that sort of synergism monergism question is really the linchpin.

Now Rome would have an answer that says there's a sacramental system and you got to work the levers and the gears and you got to do all the things. And then I guess you would say more classical Arminian ism which would not have it like that, but there would be some action or some acceptance or some, some kind of initiating factor required on the part of the human.

And so I guess the, the compatibilism, the, the problem I have with the way compatibilism is stated as, as it sort of solves the problem is to say, okay, so God is decreeing whatever comes to pass over here, and yet humans are responsible.

Most people on, on first blush, see that as a contradiction. Now we can say, well, that's what the Bible teaches. So we have to accept it. And, and perhaps that's true. And if it is, that's true. But to just say, well, compatibilism solves that because it holds these two things at the same time.

That to me, that's an insufficient answer. It, you know, I'm going to be inside and outside the house at the same time. And these two are okay because of compatibilism. What, how, how, how is that brought together?

I don't understand. Um, and, and I have, I have read a book, like I, I have. And, and, and, um, and that's, that's something I think if I can represent the objector saying that that's something I would say would, would probably be what is stated.

And eventually, and when John MacArthur was asked this, he actually preached it from the pulpit. He said, I have no, I have no idea how it works beats me.

No clue. Well, we accept the Trinity on the same premise. Don't we? Like, like I can tell you all day long that God is infinite in his being. Therefore he is able to have three persons. We as finite beings can only have one person and the Orthodox position goes.

Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense. Now, now there's a range of determinist thought within Calvinism. Yes. And we have to, we have to deal with that. And that's hard on the internet when you're arguing with people who don't read, sorry.

Um, right. Because they, they want to like force everybody into one box. I tend to lean more toward a hard determinist edge. Like R .C. Sproul once said something along the lines of there's one rogue molecule in the universe doing its own thing, then God is not in fact sovereign.

And I tend to agree. And for me, it comes down to this. What if God was a puppet master? What if he was? Yeah. Created the universe. When you create a universe, you can make the rules, right? You're going to get the answer that Job got, which was, Hey Bubba, where were you when I laid down the foundations of the earth, right?

Like he created all of this for his glory to display the grand drama of the cross to glorify Christ. So like, who says you even should get a will? You're the creature. You're the, you are the clay. Should you look up to the potter and say, Hey, why have you made me such as this?

Yeah. And you know, people don't like that, but that's because we hate sovereignty. That's our flesh. Our flesh was designed to hate God's sovereignty. And people don't like that answer either. Cause it says it's also a sin for you to make, ask that question.

I actually have, I have no problem with that. I've, so I've said this before too. You know, you hear, you hear about some sort of tragedy or something like that, a natural disaster or whatever. And it's like, yeah, that was, that's horrible.

That's awful. I hate that that happened. Um, if God had chosen to just obliterate those people by giant flaming meteor, would he have been just in doing so? Yes. Yes, he would have, you know, people, people read the old Testament and they get all bent out of shape.

Well, God was commanding them to do genocide. Okay. But again, if this was a Sodom and Gomorrah situation, if God opened up a pit or sent snakes among them or dropped fire from heaven and just burn them all up as sovereign creator of the universe and dealing with, with sinful human beings, would he have been unjust in doing so?

No, he would not have been unjust in doing so. And that is hard. And that took me years to get to that point of being able to say that, but it is, it is the truth. And so, um, to your point, Jake, if, if we're just going to say, yeah, he could be the puppet master, fine.

I will accept your mischaracterization and I, and I will sit in it. I would agree that, yeah, that is, I don't think that's what scripture teaches, but I do think that that wouldn't be a, um, that's not out of the realm of possibilities, you know?

And on, you know, on the subject of salvation itself, it's like, well, is it a synergistic work? Is it a monogistic work? I think pigeonholing positions can be a bit harmful. And here's what I mean. Um, you know, when, when you pick out specific cases in scripture, you know, could Judas have done differently?

Could Joseph's brothers have done differently in, in Genesis 50 or leading up to, and the events thereof, you know, could, could these people have done differently? In a lot of cases, I'm perfectly fine with, with saying no, they could not have God specifically for his purposes, had it happened in that way.

But I wouldn't, I would not say that that's the case in all human action of, of all time. That's where I would, I would differ a little bit.

Yeah. Keith, what's your stance on, on determinism?

Well, I think that what I'm going to really challenge what Matthew just said, um, because Matthew just said something that I think is, um, demonstrably untrue. And I don't mean that to be a challenge that's too harsh.

No offense, man. Um, you just said that God can have this sovereign act where he works out his will in the life of Joseph's brothers or in the life of all of these other things, but you don't think that's the way it has to be all the time.

Remember years ago, sitting, uh, at a Boston's pizza with a group of men that were having a Bible study. And there was a man there who basically said the same thing. He said, I, he said, I, yeah, I know it happened with Joseph's brothers.

I know it happened in this, this case or that case. Uh, I'm sorry. I'm there's this guy who's a, uh, a couple, a couple of people who are, who are, uh, a couple of people are saying some things and it's getting my attention.

I'm sorry. I'll, I'll, I'll stop. We got one guy who wrote a book. So we're gonna have to respond to his very long comment there, uh, in, in CWAC there. So, but, um, what I am convinced of is that if there's anything that in what is, is, is outside of the realm of God's sovereignty, that could be the one thing that would destroy all the rest.

And that's what Sproul meant when he said, if there were one rogue molecule in the universe, that could be the one that would take away everything else. And here's, here's how that works. And you've, you've both heard this, but maybe there's a listener who hasn't.

And it's the, it's the, for want of a nail analogy. Um, you're, you're familiar with this, Matthew?

Uh, I believe so. But would you just, just for my own edification, go ahead and.

The, the, the argument that Sproul made was, um, or, or the, or it was, it was all, it was almost like a poem, but it wasn't a poem. It was a way he said it. He said, um, for one of a nail, the, the shoe was thrown.

And for one of a shoe, the horse fell in battle. And for one of a horse, the, the battle was lost. And for, for want of the battle, the nation fell. And for want of the nation, uh, the, the people were enslaved.

So the people were enslaved because of one nail and one shoe and one horse. And so the argument there is that when you begin to give away the farm, and that's what I would say we would be doing by saying there are things that God doesn't determine is we are saying that, yeah, there are things that just happen, or there are things that are up to us or whatever.

And in that sense, we have given away the farm because that, that would be the thing that would, um, you know, cause again, I think of all the, I think of all the moving pieces that brought about the crucifixion of Christ, every single thing that, uh, brought about, uh, oh, I get a little, get a little, get a little upset in the, in the comments.

I was just kidding, dude, about the book, man. Don't, don't get too upset. I was just saying it's, you know, I need to drop a tag group on this, bro. No, no, no, no. He just, he, you know, it's just like, you know, Hey, I was invited.

I'm not on a high horse. I was just kind of joking, but you know, that's me anyway. So the point of the matter is when we look at the issue of determinism and, and the, and the question of compatibilism, I, I would call myself a compatibilist, um, in that I do believe people's decisions in, in the realm of their own, in the realm of their own consciousness are, are their decisions.

Like, like if someone, someone came up, put a gun in my face, give me all your money. Well, he's taken away my options in one sense. I either have to give him my money or die. But at that point, I'm going to have to make a decision.

And it's probably going to, it's probably going to be determined in my mind by several factors. How angry am I? How willing am I to give up my life? How willing am I to take a bullet in the chest? All of these things are going to be in my mind.

The factors that make this happen, but is my death ordained by God or not? Did God fashion my days before me before the foundation of the world or did he not? And so I have to look at that and say, yeah, from my perspective, I'm going to have all these things.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. You put a gun in my chest. I'm going to take it away from you and feed it to you. That's the attitude I got. Probably going to die because I'm an idiot. But in that moment, that's how I see God has still determined the day of my death.

And the date of our birth and the date of our death, according to scripture, is fixed by God. And those two things alone are part of so many decisions. It's often pointed out to me that I can lose a few pounds.