Galatians 6

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. Good morning, good afternoon, welcome to the Dividing Line on a Tuesday.

Today we're here in Phoenix, Arizona, believe it or not. We have in the forecast for Thursday, I was just listening to the radio and they confirmed it.

We have in the forecast for Thursday, snow. Let it snow, let it snow, snow, now of course we live in the desert in Phoenix and the ground is always so hot here that it's a, it'll, it'll, it's the ground, it ain't gonna stick.

But they say, they say even Camelback might have snow on it Thursday morning.

In fact, they're saying all the mountains around the valley here will have snow. Man, it's gonna be really hard for me to resist riding up South Mountain to see that.

That would be interesting, right? Yes. You could borrow my mountain bike. But the roads, the roads wouldn't have any.

Well, man, they might be a little slick, might even be frozen. Oh, that'd be cool. A little black ice. Oh, now that would be fun coming down South Mountain.

Woo hoo! There we go! Couple, couple of those turns, you wouldn't, you wouldn't hit a boulder for 400 feet till uh, smack.

Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I've, I only, what did you say, it was 1990?

I believe the last recollection I have of a snow where it actually in Phoenix snowed in downtown

Phoenix and actually stuck a little. Stuck a little. Define stuck a little.

The ground turned white for a bit. How long's a bit? Half an hour? Like about 20 minutes? 45 minutes? Yes. An hour maybe.

Uh, but I believe it was like December 22nd, 1990, the company I was working for at the time, a bunch of guys went out, you know, all these salesmen, they got to be entrepreneurs.

So they had a whole bunch of t -shirts printed up and brought them back in. Yes. And the teacher's t -shirt said, I survived the blizzard of Phoenix in a day.

Right, right. Yeah, I remember, I remember driving up someone's house on New Year's Eve, uh, at some point in the past, uh, 30 years and, uh, there were, there was snow in my headlights.

I remember seeing the snow coming across the headlights, which is for us, an amazing thing for many people listening to this are going,

Oh boy, you people really don't get out much, but that's just, you know, you live in a desert. That's what other way. I mean, it's 74 and Christmas, it was 74 stinging degrees.

Went outside and it was, you know, if, if you had stuck one of those horrible Christmas sweaters on, you almost died.

So yeah, it's going to be a, it's going to be a big one. And my concern is where's this storm going?

Because a few days later I have to fly to Kentucky via Chicago and I'm just sort of wondering if I'm going to get anywhere.

I don't know that they can predict that with, with this one. It's doing this weird turn and it's like coming out of the, uh, the

Pacific, but all comes out of the Gulf of Alaska. Well, yeah, but this one's kind of dipped low and then it's doing this kind of a, an arch over California and then it's dipping right down dead on for Phoenix.

Who knows what it's going to do after that? I've never seen a storm that I can recollect do that. I just hope

I make it to the Plymouth class. That's all it, because, uh, they, they did, they did it the cheapest way possible via American and it goes through Chicago.

I'm worried about that. I don't want to sleep in the Chicago airport or get snowed into the

Chicago airport or anything else like that. That would really be, uh, unfun. So anyhow, uh,

I really wasn't going to start the program off with that, but it's a pretty unusual weather event for us and I'm sort of looking forward to seeing snow on the peaks around, uh, we do live in a

Valley, so it will be rather visible. Galatians chapter six, by the way, the phone number is 877 -753 -3341, dividing dot line via Skype, dividing dot line, uh, 877 -753 -3341, the standard old phone line way if you want to go that direction.

Galatians chapter six, Paul having completed writing to the churches in Galatia in the strongest language possible, uh, in a way that communicates certainly to me, uh,

I, I can read Galatians and compare it with Ephesians or Romans and the person who wrote

Galatians is, is in a hurry, is, is emotional, is, is involved in his topic, uh, in a very strong way.

Having gone through all of that, uh, Paul says in Galatians chapter six, see with what large letters I'm writing to you with my own hand, which, um, some people have interpreted that, uh, like the

King James says, see how large a letter I've written unto you with my own hand. So, uh, but some feel that he did not use an amanuensis for Galatians.

That is, he did not dictate this. He wrote with his own hand because it was so important or maybe, maybe, maybe you couldn't wait for somebody that could do it properly.

I don't know what the reasons would be, but, uh, that's how they interpret that. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.

For even, and it's, that's such a strong, strong language that is used there.

It's amazing to me. Um, in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross. These are people who claim to be

Christians. These are people who were, who were perverting the gospel, who would force the believers to be circumcised so that they would not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.

For even those who are circumcised about themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh.

But Paul then gives the proper apostolic balance to this. He says, but far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our

Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Galatians 6 .14

is a verse that as we would stand outside the Mormon temple in Mesa or in Salt Lake City back when we did that outreach every six months to the, well, it was every year in Mesa, but every six months in Salt Lake City.

Many times the young Mormon people would come up to us and we might have a cross on our lapel or around our neck, or there might be a cross on the track we were passing out or something like that.

And you may have noticed that Mormon ward chapels and temples don't have crosses on them. And you'd get the same sort of pat answer, but it was an objection that they all really felt seriously about.

And that was, you know, if your son was killed by someone who murdered him with a knife, would you have a knife around your neck?

If your son was executed in an electric chair, would you have an electric chair around your neck? And they really did not understand the role of the cross because the cross is not central in Mormon theology, even the fact that they begin the atonement in the

Garden of Gethsemane, the fact that Joseph Smith taught that animal sacrifices would be reinstituted during the millennial period, and the priesthood concepts, and of course

Mormonism's just utter collapse on the doctrine of sin leads to, well, you know, that theology thing really matters, and it leads to certain ramifications.

And this would be the text that we would often respond with. Galatians 6 .14,

but far be it from me, or as the King James says, but God forbid, even though it's hardly a, may it never be, may genoita is the

Greek term. May it never be that I should boast except in the cross of our

Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Now why do

I start the program off this way? Well, since I will be gone next week and I'm gone most of the week after that at the

Southern Founders Conference, which by the way will include a debate at the

Southern Founders Conference on the free will of man, specifically the bondage of the will or the freedom of the will.

We're going to redo the Luther -Erasmus debate, I guess. But since I'm going to be gone a lot,

I'm really trying to, you know, pile on the miles this week to sort of make up for that so that I don't get too far behind in my goals and things like that.

So this morning I was writing, I was listening to this lengthy series, 18 -hour series.

I'm a little over halfway through it. I am listening to it at high speed, helps some, but an 18 -hour series,

Guiding to Allah, which is a seminar by Mohammad Al -Sharif from the

Al -Maghrib Institute on the subject of Dawah, the understanding of how to call people to Islam.

And so far it's primarily, not totally, it's starting to change now, but the first number of CDs was all on marketing.

What colors to use in your flyers and how to name things. And it was very much like what you would expect to see in seeker -friendly churches and things like that, though there's a theological reason here as well that is interesting that hopefully

I'll expand upon sometime in the future. But today, at a certain point in the ride, and this morning because we have the dividing line in the morning,

I had to keep it a fairly short ride, just a 25 -miler. At one point, and I don't think I'll ever forget where this was, he was talking about how

Muslims should not attack other Muslims, even if they think that the other Muslims are doing things that are wrong, in the sense of innovation or heresy, or what's called bid 'ah.

Bid 'ah in Arabic is innovation, is something that is not found in the

Sunnah. It is something that you shouldn't do because the companions of the

Prophet or the Prophet himself in the Hadith did not command you to do these things.

And he was talking about how these Imams in Saudi Arabia, where he studied in Medina, would not condemn various groups in the

West. They would, you know, people come to them, well, they're doing this bid 'ah, they're doing that bid 'ah.

Should we boycott them? And he would go, no, you shouldn't. Oh, but Imam, they're doing this, but Sheikh, they're doing this.

No, you shouldn't. And he was saying, well, think about it. I mean, the

West is a place of dawah. The West is a place where you're calling to Islam. It's not like Saudi Arabia, which is an

Islamic state. And so if you have two groups doing dawah, and one is calling to Sunni Islam, and one has bid 'ah in it, but it's still calling you to say la ilaha illallah, then don't attack them.

And here is the argument. Here's what he said. This is what I think I will probably always remember, because it really struck me.

He said, because if you attack that other group, at least if they're calling to Islam, a person who is guided by them will have la ilaha illallah and bid 'ah.

But if you destroy their dawah work and people are not called to Islam, then they will die with a cross around their neck.

And I heard that, and I did not immediately think, some of you saw the article that I put up on the blog sometime around Christmas, before Christmas, I think, from Toronto Muslim.

It's interesting. Muhammad al -Sharif is from that, I think, the very same mosque. Yeah, he's still calling you.

And his Gmail address was crosshater, and refers to Christians as cross -worshippers.

Now you've never seen me and will never see me kissing a cross or bowing before a cross or worshiping a cross.

Unlike seeing Muslims kissing a black stone at the Kaaba in Mecca.

But you hear this type of terminology, and you read the

Hadith where Jesus is going to return, he's going to destroy the cross. He's going to destroy the cross. And you think about, as I've been listening to this particular series, and I've been listening to other audio series from this particular company, this

Al -Maghrib Institute and Iman Rush Audio and stuff like that. Over and over again, you get this same indication from listening to Muslims speak, and it really bothers me tremendously.

And that is, when they talk about Christians doing Dawah, now Dawah for Muslims is a combination of apologetics and evangelism.

It's a much wider term. We tend to limit evangelism to just the proclamation of the

Gospel, and yet when you live in Western countries it's sort of hard to do that without doing apologetics because there's so many objections and so on and so forth.

But we've made lots of subcategories and things like that. It's just one big thing of Dawah. If you do a soccer camp and then talk about Islam, that's

Dawah. We call those evangelism projects. Things like that. And when they talk about Christians and how

Christians do Dawah, I've never heard a

Muslim say that the Christians proclaim the

Lordship of Christ over all things and call you to obey

Christ as Lord. I've never heard them say that. Not once. Nobody. Ever. Now, I haven't listened to everybody, so maybe there's somebody out there.

But you know what they normally, how they normally put it? How they normally put it is, well, the

Christians will invite you to accept Jesus. The Christians will invite you to accept

Jesus. And though they don't always bring this up, you can just sense that for the vast majority of them, it is such a, not only have they interpreted it, but I think they've probably interpreted it correctly in most situations.

It is such a weak thing. It's not a proclamation of power.

It's not a proclamation that the gospel is true, that Jesus Christ is

Lord, and that every knee will bow. It's all about, well, you know, it's all up to you.

And it's just struck me over and over and over again that theology matters, and here you hear it.

You hear the difference between proclaiming a sovereign God, a sovereign

Lord, a powerful Savior who saves to the uttermost, the difference between that and the man -centered

Jesus standing at the noblest door, meekly knocking message.

And what do the Muslims hear? They hear the one and not the other, and they interpret it in that way.

And so it was in that same context then that I'm thinking, you know, die with a cross around your neck.

And I immediately started thinking of Paul's words. May it never be that I should boast except in the cross of our

Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. I wonder if one of the problems, my friends, is that so many people have a cross around their neck, but they live like the world, and hence make a mockery of that cross.

Because we can talk all we want to about the cross, but unless the world has been crucified to me on that cross, unless I have been crucified to the world on that cross, then it means nothing.

It's just a religious symbol. But if that cross, if you understand what that cross really meant, if you understand what that cross really was, if you understand what really happened there, if you understand the demonstration of God's wrath against sin, the absolute demonstration of his holiness, and then the depth of his self -giving, loving -kindness that is demonstrated in that cross, none of us can ever begin to plumb the depths of that.

But I think the world can tell when we're at least trying. The world can tell when we are really dedicated to something.

The world can tell when we really love something, when we are passionate about something, and when something has impacted our lives.

And if you're going to boast in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, then follow the entire verse, by which the world has been crucified to me.

And that's, honestly, that's where Western Christianity struggles most, because we still have so much love of the world.

We still have so much love of the world. It takes a tremendous amount of maturity to be greatly blessed physically and to not have those physical blessings become an idol in your life, something that takes the passion, the central place of passion in your thinking.

That is a lifelong struggle that a lot of people have just given up on.

But there is, you know, it's that time of year where everyone's thinking about the new year and the new years go by so fast now that they all start blurring together.

And people are talking about, you know, how to be successful in the new year. And I made the mistake of having talk radio on in the way down in the car, and I was about ready to shoot myself by the time

I got here. Doom and gloom and 2011 is going to be the end of everything. And they weren't even talking about Harold Camping, for crying out loud.

That was the Rush Limbaugh show. Oh, it's just depressing. And you can just get caught up in all that stuff.

But honestly, the issue really is for Christians, for believers, how will

I be pleasing to God in this coming year? What can I do? Do I have a desire to be pleasing to God?

And if I do, how do I fit into this verse by which the world has been crucified to me?

How can I experience that and I to the world? And remember these words, oh, how they don't strike us with near the dissonance that they did the original audience.

They don't. We are so accustomed to the cross. We are so accustomed to the term crucify.

It has such a theological pedigree for us that the jarring nature of these words, we don't pick it up, at least not as we should.

When you remember, when you remember that this was the worst way to die, there were people in the ancient world who would not even use this language because it would not be considered polite in public places to even talk about this.

It was the unmentionable way of death. And yet Paul actually presents it by saying he boasts.

He boasts in that which to the world showed Jesus to be weak. And we certainly see that in the hatred expressed toward the cross by the world and by false religions, by the

Muslims, either in gross and open ways by the radicals or in less open ways but still quite discernible by Muslims in general.

And so it's a time of year where we can think about the future and we can think about how we as believers can prepare ourselves to walk in a way that is pleasing to God and to do so as people who have been crucified to the world and the world crucified to us and boast in the cross for our

Lord Jesus Christ. The only way to boast in that is to see that I had nothing to do with it other than it was my sin that put him there.

There can be no boasting in the sense of being better than anyone else. The only boasting we can do is boasting in the

Lord. 877 -753 -3341, dividing dot line is the phone number.

Let's start off and talk to John Marr.

Hello, John. Hey, how you doing, Dr. White? Good. Quick question. I'm conversing with a friend who doesn't believe in perseverance of the saints and I gently exegeted with him

John 6, 37, 40, and 10, 27 through 28, and here's what he wrote back.

He said, an important detail that's often overlooked when approaching these two texts is some of the key verbs are in the present tense in the

Greek, meaning the action is being done continuously, and then he goes on to say John 6, 40 is an example of that, and he says, this might sound as if the looking and believing are one -time acts that happened in the past, but that's not accurate in actuality.

These verbs in the present tense mean they are continuous actions, so John 6, 40 should be understood as everyone who continues to look upon the sun and continues to believe in him should continue to have eternal life, and he said the same thing with John 10, and he says, what emerges is a theme of security by perseverance and not one of single moment in time, eternal security.

I know that's overlooked. Your friend is very, very focused upon man. That's a shame. Because he's right, and that's a point that if you've read any of my books on the subject,

I've raised. That's Potter's freedom. Yeah, Potter's freedom. John 6, I emphasize over and over again in my exegesis of the text, present tense, participles, the one looking, the one believing.

That's how John differentiates between false faith, which is in the aorist, like in John 8.

So what you're saying, false faith is always in the aorist? In John. That's just something

John uses. It's not something that's all across the New Testament. But in John 2, he uses the aorist of those who had believed in Jesus, and yet Jesus did not believe himself to them.

He did not entrust himself to them because he knew it was in their hearts. True saving faith in the Gospel of John is present tense.

It is ongoing. But again, that's exactly the whole point, and that is true saving faith is ongoing.

Where does that come from? It's the gift of God. It's the work of the Holy Spirit in the person's heart. So perseverance, you know, if you are, it sounds like your friend just doesn't believe that God can actually save the uttermost, that somehow it's up to God to make us cooperate with him, and he tries and fails and tries and succeeds, and it's all dependent upon us.

No. The fact of the matter is, the only way to deal with all of what

Scripture says in this matter is to avoid the two extremes. On the one extreme, you have those people who see faith, and the entire work of salvation is something that comes from mankind.

It comes up out of ourselves. And every person has the ability to have saving faith, and sin's really not all that big of a deal.

You're not really dead in sin, blah, blah, blah. But since that saving faith comes up from within them, they have no ground upon which to believe in perseverance of the saints.

Because if you're the one who has to, you know, sort of get that faith going, well, you might fall apart.

You might not make it. Is there really any other way John could have even said it, because,

I mean, he's going to have to say they're continuing to believe. Is there really another way he could have said it for my friend to be satisfied, or isn't that just what

God would have him say? Well, your friend's problem isn't with Greek tenses. Your friend's problem is with his own heart. I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks that—who reads the

New Testament in an anthropocentric way rather than a theocentric way, focused upon man and man's capacities rather than what

God is doing. If you can look at John 6 and think that that's all run by man, based upon the verb tenses, and miss the fact that it is the

Father who gives, and the result of the Father's giving is our coming. It is the

Father's will for the Son that the Son lose none of those. The Son raised them all upon the last day. All these things, and our coming, our present tense coming, our present tense believing, are all the results of divine actions.

If a person can't see that, well, that's something that's spiritually brought to someone.

You can't force anybody to see it. You can point out to them that that's the only consistent way to see it all through Scripture, but you can't shove that down somebody's throat.

You can point it out. You can preach it. You can emphasize it. You can say, without this, you're going to be stuck with work salvation.

You're going to have no consistent message. You're going to have the conflict between the concept of—okay,

I'm getting stuff in a window here that's confusing me, but anyway, you're going to have all that kind of stuff over on the one side, or on the other side, then you're going to have the libertarians and the people who have a cheap gospel that say, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't have to do anything at all.

I mean, all you've got to do is believe in Jesus, and then you can go and do whatever you want, and you've got your ticket punched, you go into heaven, there's no repentance, there's no

Lordship of Christ. The only way to hold all this together and believe in Sola Gratia and Sola Fide and believe

Romans 328 as well as James Chapter 2, believe it all, is if you read the

New Testament in a theocentric way rather than anthropocentric way. If you read it from a man -centered perspective, it's a mishmash of incomprehensible silliness.

But if you read it and recognize the gospel is what God is doing, then it makes perfect sense.

It all fits together. And so if you're reading something, in one way, it's a mishmash of contradiction, which is how most liberals and others read it, another way you read it and it's this harmonious, interwoven, consistent, beautiful testimony, it's sort of obvious which one you should be reading it as, but that's not how people read it.

It has to do with our presuppositions, but similarly, he says that eternal life in John doesn't mean legally worthy of entering heaven, quote, but rather being in a current relationship with the

Trinity, God dwelling in your soul presently. I know that's not right either, but— Well, why would anyone define eternal life as legally ready to enter heaven or something like that?

The point is, what is Jesus' own teaching in John chapter 5? We have already passed out of death into life.

We shall not come into judgment. We've already been judged in Christ Jesus, and we already possess the present possession of eternal life.

Yes, it is having fellowship with the triune God, that's part of eternal life, but having already passed out of death into life and the wrath of God no longer abiding upon us.

Well, how can the wrath of God no longer abide upon us? Well, because of Christ's crosswork, obviously. So I mean, again, you can tear things into shreds, and it sounds like your friend is trying to do that and trying to set certain parts of Scripture against other parts of Scripture, but it also sounds like he's only hearing parts of what the text says and trying to force some text to address things that they were never intended to address in the first place.

So there's obviously some kind of presupposition operating in your friend's theological system that's overriding biblical exegesis.

Well, I agree. Thank you. Okay. Thanks for calling in today. All right. God bless. Bye -bye.

All right. 877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.

It's the bottom of the hour, and I think we have Christopher calling in. We'll get to him in just a moment, but we would like to have your phone calls as well at 877 -753 -3341, dividing dot line on Skype.

We're going to take a break, and we'll be right back. Answering those who claim that only the King James Version is the word of God, James White in his book,

The King James Only Controversy, examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt scripture and lead believers away from true

Christian faith. In a readable and responsible style, author James White traces the development of Bible translations, old and new, and investigates the differences between new versions and the authorized version of 1611.

You can order your copy of James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, by going to our website at www .aomin

.org. What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen But Free?

A New Cult? Secularism? False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called

Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant.

In his book, The Potter's Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler, but The Potter's Freedom is much more than just a reply.

It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself.

In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme

Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the

Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of scripture. The Potter's Freedom, a defense of the

Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen but Free, you'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at AOMN .org.

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And welcome back to the Dividing Line on a Tuesday. Getting ready to wrap up 2010 and launch into 2011 which promises to be quite the year on every front.

I don't know about you, but I'm awful glad I can trust that, like I said on Twitter yesterday I'm awful glad I'm not an open theist.

God knows exactly what's going to be going on in 2011. If he didn't, anyway.

Let's talk to Christopher. Hi Christopher. Hi. I saw something on Facebook about the

ISSA movement where you have Muslims who are claiming that they're Christians and Muslims at the same time.

I don't know anything about it. I've heard a few people that have made reference to a kind of movement where people are teaching people to just join

Jesus to Islam and when you do your prayers, instead of praying to Allah, you're praying to Jesus and maintain your external involvement in the

Muslim community and things like that. If that's what you're referring to, I hadn't seen it referred to as the

ISSA movement, but if it is, then there's been a lot that has been written on that and it's not really a big area

I get into because certainly none of the Muslims I would be debating would be presenting anything like that and certainly none of the

Christians who would be supporting my work in evangelizing Muslims would be supporting anything like that.

But obviously from either perspective, from either a

Muslim or Christian perspective, such a movement is just nothing less than reprehensible.

I mean it's reprehensible from the Islamic perspective because it's pure hypocrisy and it's reprehensible from the

Christian perspective because it's also pure hypocrisy. I mean it's so unbiblical, so far removed from what you see in the

New Testament that my understanding is that movements similar to that, which seek to allow new believers to not be open about their profession of faith in Christ, are almost always linked with exceptionally liberal quote -unquote

Christian groups. You'd have to because you could not take the Bible as a standard in that situation because when you look at the early

Church, they likewise faced persecution for their profession of faith in Christ. And what did they do?

Did they pretend to be Jews? Did they pretend to be something else? No. They were open about their profession.

Even Paul's words, and I can just hear a few people in the audience, but didn't Paul say I become all things to all men? He was talking about voluntarily limiting the expressions of his freedom so as to not cause stumbling to others.

He was not talking about pretending to be something that he wasn't. So I don't know much more about it than that other than I have heard of movements similar to that and it's just so far removed from the

New Testament that it's hard to even identify it as a Christian movement. I'm wondering if that's coming out of the syncretism that would allow people to go to say the

Glenn Beck rally and pray with Mormons and Muslims and Christians and still say they're

Christians. Yeah. I think it really does find a lot of its origin in a postmodern way of thought where there isn't really any objective truth and therefore you have your own truth and as long as you're being true to your own truth in your heart, your external actions aren't overly relevant.

So yeah, there is a lot of that I think out there and we do see a lot of that in quote unquote evangelicalism day such as the

Glenn Beck phenomena which is in and of itself rather interesting.

Okay. Well, thank you for the call. I just wanted you to clarify because when somebody said

I was a Muslim and a Christian, it's like something doesn't compute here.

No. No. And it wouldn't for an orthodox Muslim either. I mean, the

Muslims that I enjoy having interaction with are the ones that would be 100 % on board with me on this one and we'd all agree.

That's just not a possibility. That's not possible. But at least with them, we have a foundation upon which to speak.

Once people get into that mushy middle where there is no foundation left, there is no truth that you can really discuss either on the

Islamic or Christian side of things, that's where I just throw my hands up and say, hey, this is for somebody else because God did not give me the patience to deal with people that are like nailing jello to a wall.

It just doesn't work. All righty. Thank you. Thanks, Christopher. All right.

God bless. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number for you to call or dividing .line,

dividing .line on Skype. You may have thought that Christopher was sitting right next to me.

You could hear him tapping on his computer. You could hear everything. And it's not because Christopher was sitting across from me in the studio here.

It's because he was on Skype. And so that's the question.

That's the way that you can get in touch with us. 877 -753 -3341.

Please make your questions apologetically oriented, if at all possible.

The next question, I'm not sure, is one that I'm going to be really in a position to handle.

But let's go ahead and try it anyways and talk with Dimitri. Hi, Dimitri. Hi, James.

I just want to say thank you for your ministry. And I had the privilege of watching your debate with Robertson, Jenison, Oregon, and got to meet you and got a book signed even.

But anyway, thank you for your ministry. I'm looking forward to seeing those tapes myself. We haven't seen them.

Yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah, we've been told that they were sent to our post office box. And we haven't seen hide nor hair of them.

So we're trying to find out where in the world they went, because we'd like to make that available. Yeah, we'll hopefully get those.

Yeah, my question has to do, I think it's Romans chapter 11. I'm pretty sure that's the chapter where with the olive branches, as far as I remember, because it's kind of been a while since I read it, but that were grafted in.

And then it says, be careful, or I'm paraphrasing it, or in my own words, don't boast unless you also be cut off.

And so this is kind of a Reformed theology kind of thing. Does that mean that, you know, that you have these people who are

Christians and who are believers, and then they have a chance of getting cut off by boasting?

That's really the... Well, I think you have to look at the fact this is being addressed to groups.

And the point of what's being said is that while the Jews boasted about their covenant position, and we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over again, we are the children of Abraham.

Well, what is Jesus' response when they say we are the children of Abraham? Well, if you were the children of Abraham, then you would do what

Abraham did. And you would not be seeking to kill me. A man has told you the truth, and you would believe as Abraham believed.

When promises and privileges, blessings, are announced, the natural tendency of mankind is to take advantage of those things, and to become apathetic about those things, and to boast about those things, and to start looking at oneself as being better than others in light of that.

And so the Jews had been cut off, not in toto.

Obviously, there is a remnant that, you know, Paul himself represents, who are the heirs of grace.

There had always been that remnant. God always preserved that remnant down through history. But the point is that just as the

Gentiles had now been engrafted in, they had received privileges that were not naturally theirs as the children of the promise to Abraham.

Now by faith, those promises could be theirs. And so you have, interestingly enough, a warning in Romans 11 that was pretty much completely ignored by the

Church over the next, well, in many ways, almost 2 ,000 years. Because, and when

I say the Church, I don't necessarily mean the true Church, but I mean the external Church. Because, let's face it,

I mean, stuff that happened during the Crusades, a lot of people don't know what happened during the

Crusades, or the fact that that crusading spirit in the Inquisition, so on and so forth, was very frequently aimed internally, not just at heretics that we would call true believers, but also against the

Jews. And there was a tremendous amount of boasting, in essence, that, you know, we're the true

Church, and you're Christ killers, and so, you know, Matthew records your forefathers as saying, his blood be upon us and upon our children forever, and so therefore we're going to behave in this fashion.

And this whole idea of boasting was just completely ignored.

And so, the point of saying, lest you be cut off as well, is that a person who is, or I should say, a people, who, like the

Jews, as a people, presumed upon God's grace and upon God's blessing and upon God's covenant mercies, the way that the

Jews had an experience of being cut off, like themselves, will find themselves in the same situation.

And you look at all the dead churches and the dead ends that litter history, where people became complacent.

I mean, I've got a map over here on my wall. You can't normally see it because the door is normally open, but when the door is closed during the program, it's an old map.

This is from, like, 1991. It's still got the USSR and all that kind of stuff.

But the land masses haven't changed much, and it's pretty much Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and part of Russia, and all the way up to Denmark and Sweden and stuff like that.

And it's all out of date now, but it's on the wall, and I just don't want to take it down. I paid a lot of money to have that thing made a long time ago.

So anyways, I look over at that every once in a while during the program, and I think about Europe, and I think about the hodgepodge of religiosity that Europe represents.

But I think about how there were times that if you were orbiting this planet, and what you could see from space was spiritual light, that there was a time when there were great swaths of light across that part of the world.

There really were. But if we had the same satellite in orbit now, oh how dark so many of those places would be.

And I think that's what you've got going on in Romans chapter 11, is do not presume, do not think that, well, you know, we are the offspring of Spurgeon.

We are the offspring of Luther. We are the offspring of Calvin. Do not think in such a fashion, for the very ones who think that way will find themselves without the blessing of God's Spirit, keeping them in the truth and giving them a passion for truth.

And as soon as God withdraws that passion for truth, the insatiable desire of man will be for that which is innovation and new.

And isn't that what's happened in so many of those places? Either there is no longer any interest in religion at all, just secularism in France, for example.

Or the soul -destroying liberalism that constantly flows out of Germany and many of the higher critical schools in Germany.

And what's going on in, well, even Holland in places that once were so extremely conservative.

The liberalism of the society now is just absolutely amazing.

So, I think that's what's going on there. It's not addressed to individuals so much as it is to entire peoples, as it was to the

Jews, as well as the word of the Gentiles. Do not look at the hardening that has taken place to the

Jews and boast against them. And that's what, when reading that, that's the interpretation that I got from.

And I more understood, I mean, yet it still kind of seems, you know, well, you could still maybe have this one person who would, but that's kind of the other side.

I'm trying to think of, oh man, I hate when this happens.

I had, in fact, I was reading it, sitting right where I'm sitting right now in this studio, not six months ago, of a book.

Maybe somebody in the channel will know which one I'm talking about. I was reading a book and the last chapter was an exegesis of Romans chapter 11 that has been identified as one of the best around.

And I can't remember what it was. I'm going to have to look around.

If I can remember, if I can track it down before I blog today's program,

I'll put it into the blog entry because I did read that chapter and it was excellent.

It was very, very good. So if I can remember what it was and I'll try to make that notation.

Okay? Yeah. That'd be great. And it's kind of interesting, too, that Romans chapter 9, where you have the talk about Esau and Jacob, and when it's talking about specific people, people will say, well, this is about nations.

And then you go to chapter 11 and then the Armenian side of notice that, you know, which was my position, too, at one point.

But you kind of say, well, this is talking about specific people, even though the context is more to a body of people.

Interesting. All righty, man. Thanks for your call today. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for calling. I appreciate it.

Okay. Thank you. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341. I never got to these.

I've got something to take us right up to the, was it the Israel of God by O.

Palmer Robertson? I'm going to have to look. It might be. It might be. Johnny Mac might be right about that.

I'm going to have to look at that. I think he might be right about that. But I'll scan through my books and see if I can find it, because it was a very good exegesis.

I do have something to get to here real quick. I totally forgot about doing this. I had a few more Bessam Zawadi clips to throw in, and we've got about eight, nine minutes, and that's about right, too.

So I'm going to have to look at that. Let's cue this back up over there, and going back to, again, this is a presentation from 2008,

Bessam Zawadi was making on Christianity and responding to Christians, and this section was primarily interesting because it dealt with textual criticism, inspiration, things like that.

Let's listen to just a couple more clips here as we have time. If you get the new international version, if you go to these verses, they'll put a footnote, and on the footnote below, they'll say, these verses are doubtful.

These verses are not found in the earliest manuscripts. So imagine you grab a Quran, and next to Surah 2, 82, it says, yeah, that verse is doubtful.

You'll be like, what's going on here? But they're perfectly okay with that, so that doesn't really bother them.

So but the thing is, it'll bother people like us. Well, actually, it bothers lots of people.

That's why there's an entire King James Only movement, and it's not just an international version.

The King James itself had many thousands of textual notes in it as well when it was initially published.

It's not something that, as Bessam had said before, was just something that had been discovered 60 years ago or something like that. This has been going on all along.

But I did want to, what I found interesting about that was, the fact of the matter is, the Corpus Chronicum project is working on producing a

Quran that will have exactly that. It'll have exactly those notes. When it gets to Surah 2, 222, it will give the variant readings that are found there, and the fact that the

Ibn Masud reading is completely different in the sense that it is not just a synonym or something, but it is different word order and different forms of verbs and the whole nine yards, and it's going to have to be there in the margins.

There's going to have to be a critical apparatus, just as we have a critical apparatus in the

Ness Yoland 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, the United Bible Society's edition, or the

CNTTS, or whatever you might have access to. And so, what's going to happen then?

Don't you want to have that information? You see, I fully understand the mindset of people like Bessam Zawadi at this point.

But he knows that there are variants there. If you've heard his debate with Nabeel Qureshi, he knows that they're there, and so he knows that you could create a critical edition of the

Quran if people just get around to doing it. So, I'm not sure why he makes that exact comment.

All right, so, you know, for example, what would they say to you? They would say, okay, Mark 16, 9 through 20, what does it talk about anyways?

It talks about Jesus resurrecting from the dead, which is an important thing. So they would say, we don't need

Mark 16, we already have the other three Gospels which talk about that. It's kind of like me saying, who cares about Ayatul Kursi?

It talks about the oneness of God. I also have Qur 'an which talks about the oneness of God. So we don't really need

Ayatul Kursi, so who cares if it's doubtful? So that's the same logic that they're using. But the point you're trying to make is this.

The point is, these verses have been in your Bible for centuries, and they've gone undetected by the whole

Christian society as being forgeries, and yet today you're finding out that they are false verses.

So how do we know that there are not other verses there which you have not detected yet? Now, again, this seems to be based upon Bassam's faulty thinking.

That textual criticism just developed over the past 60 years, and again, that takes us back to 1948, which

Dead Sea Scrolls, I guess, I don't know. It doesn't really make any sense to me. There certainly has been an explosion of study in the textual critical areas over the past 200 years, and they discovered the papyri in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century.

Very, very important along those lines, too. But none of that—I don't think the discovery of the papyri really introduced any textual variant we didn't already know about.

It may have changed what we thought about textual variants by demonstrating that the earlier unsealed manuscripts were indeed representing an earlier form of the text.

But this idea that these verses have been running around, and at least Christian scholars were completely ignorant of it, just shows a great ignorance of the history of the

New Testament text, which would not only afflict Bassam, but the vast majority of evangelicals as well, sadly.

That's why, again, I can at least on this level say, I've been beating this drum for a long time.

We were talking about unpopular stuff like this way, way, way, way, way back, a long time ago.

This is a fairly long clip, and it should pretty much run us out of time. Just not so much to refute this, but just to give you a little bit of the taste of mindset.

Well, I wasn't really comparing—I was just trying to let you guys understand the point I was trying to make. But definitely, they don't believe in the inspiration of the

Bible like they'll believe in the inspiration of the Qur 'an. We believe that the Qur 'an, verbatim, word by word, is from God.

They don't believe that. And the thing is that Christians differ on the meaning of inspiration of Scripture.

Now, for example, some Christians will believe—now, all Christians will tell you, human beings wrote the

Bible. They're not going to dispute that, but they will dispute how it was done. Some of them would say, as the human beings were writing the books,

God was communicating to them and dictating to them what to write. Some of them would say, no, that didn't happen.

It was only God inspiring the human beings in a way in which they were able to write with accuracy.

Some of them would say, no, He's only inspiring them to communicate the main message.

So there could be mistakes in the Bible, but God was inspiring me to communicate the main message, which is

Jesus got crucified, Jesus got resurrected, etc. So you have Christians that believe in biblical inerrancy, meaning there is no mistake in the

Bible. And you have Christians who don't believe in that. They'll tell you, yeah, I know that there's contradictions in the

Bible. There's several well -respected Bible commentators. They would say, yeah, over here,

Jesus' story of the parable in Mark, it's contradicting with Matthew.

These are Christians. These are not non -Christians. But they don't believe that the Bible is inerrant.

Some Christians would say, we only believe that the original copy has no mistakes.

But then when the scribes took the originals and made copies out of them, they made mistakes. But that's a very weak argument.

That's a very weak argument. That argument might work on that example I gave. Besides putting 4 ,000, you might put an extra zero, 40 ,000.

But there's other clear examples where it's not a scribal mistake. It's clearly a deliberate.

And you can see the motive behind why the person changed it. But we're not going to go into detail on contradictions now.

So just simply to give you an idea, you know, the apologetic task would be a whole lot easier if all

Christians were actually, you know, actually believed what the Bible had to say. You know, poor

Bassam has to go through this whole long thing because, yeah, you're going to, especially over in England and places like that, you're going to end here.

I mean, if you run into some, you know, United Methodist guy, you know, down at the bus stop who, you know, goes to that United Methodist church down on Indian School, you know, with goddess worship and everything else, yeah, you're going to run into some pretty wild stuff and some real weird views of the

Bible. I just don't think that most Muslims, however, are overly consistent at this point. I mean, if people had a view of the

Quran, that Muhammad was not a, was just one, just had some enlightened ideas, wasn't truly called by God as a prophet, that the

Quran really isn't, would you really call them a Muslim? And so why are they so quick to identify as Christians people who compromise on those very foundational issues?

That really is a question that I often bring up to them. We are going to do,

I guess, haven't been told why, oh, okay. We are going to do an early dividing line on Thursday again.

I guess it's just the holiday season. So we'll be back at this time Thursday morning. I'll make sure to blog that.

We'll see you then. God bless. It's a sign of the times.

The truth is being trampled in and doing paradigms. Won't you lift up your voice?

Are you tired of playing religion? It's time to make some noise. I don't remember.

I don't remember. I don't remember. I stand up for the truth.

Won't you live for the Lord? Because we're pounding, pounding on Wittenberg.

The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

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