Steve Gregg Earns a Radio Free Geneva

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You ready? And five, four, three...

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A mighty fortress is our God. A bulwark never failing.

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I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them.

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They're following men instead of the Word of God. Our Helper He amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

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On top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out, He died for all.

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Those who were elected were selected. For still our ancient foe does seek to work us woe.

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His craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate.

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Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the Reformers. On earth is not

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His equal. I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves

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Calvinists. Did we in our own strength confide our striving would be losing?

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But God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever...

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Were not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing?

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Doomed before the womb? You ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is

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He. Lord saw both His name. Read my book. From age to age the same.

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And He must win the battle. And now, from our underground bunker, hidden deep beneath Liberty University, where no one would think to look, safe from those moderate

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Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and re -read George Bryson's book, we are

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Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say, to His own eternal glory.

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And welcome to a special edition of Radio Free Geneva. I was writing this morning and listening once again to Steve Gregg as he was lecturing on the subject of Calvinism.

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And given that I'm going to be traveling, I just simply could not allow this opportunity to pass without providing a response to the things

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I listened to this morning while they were fresh upon my mind. It seemed to me to be an excellent section of Mr.

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Gregg's presentation to focus upon, to illustrate the fact that I honestly believe there are some fundamental misunderstandings on Mr.

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Gregg's part. And he also addresses some, I think, important issues. And so today on Radio Free Geneva, I am going to address those issues.

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And then the next time we have the opportunity of getting together, we will take the time to look at his assertions.

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I would say his turning upside down the entirety of Romans chapter 9.

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And we'll have the opportunity of doing that a little later time period. But first, it seems that I was riding along and Mr.

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Gregg's talking about his experience with Arminians and Calvinists. And it seems that we have had exactly opposite experiences.

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Mr. Gregg tells us that he finds that Calvinists misrepresent Arminians more than Arminians misrepresent

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Calvinists. And of course, my experience is exactly opposite of that. And he likewise suggested that it was the

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Arminians who follow solo scriptura, while Calvinists are referring to other sources of authority.

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And of course, my experience has been exactly opposite of that. And then he actually got to the point of saying that Arminians can engage in meaningful exegesis of all the

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Calvinistic passages, but Calvinists are desperate in their eisegesis of texts that Arminians raise.

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And at that point, I would like to say I have much wider experience

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Mr. Gregg has in this particular area. I've written four books specifically on this subject. I've done debates with a number of people.

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And it's difficult to understand how my experience could be a mirror opposite of that which

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Mr. Gregg has. But that's what he said. And when he got to the issue of exegesis, I want to play that section, and then we'll go back and talk about the section about the love of God and assurance and things like that, because that's what

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I want to address in today's program. But I wanted to make sure we caught this section first.

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I often quote all the scriptures that sound Arminian and say, well, there you have it. The question is, what does the Arminian do to exposit on the scriptures that the

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Calvinist quotes? And what does the Calvinist do with those scriptures that the Arminian quotes?

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And that's exactly right. That, to me, is the reason why I've seen many people become

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Reformed is for that very issue. How does the Reformed side deal with the text that the

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Arminians feel present the heart of their argument and vice versa? And I can honestly say

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I have never seen a convincing exegesis of John chapter 6. I certainly did not find Mr.

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Gregg's presentation to be convincing on that. Romans 9, Ephesians 1, when you get into the text, you get into the grammar, you get into the languages, that's the strength of the

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Reformed position is its ability to do meaningful exegesis. And so it was interesting to me.

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Now, I think I can understand some of this because I honestly and again, this is not meant as an argument in of itself, but I have yet to hear

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Mr. Gregg show a real knowledge of Reformed exegesis. And so when he says, well, you know, they just put elect in here and they just say it's the world of the elect.

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He hasn't clearly read much of Owen's death of death. He hasn't read Piper. He admits he hasn't read my materials.

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And so, you know, with all of this, I just simply say maybe he's just not been exposed to meaningful, solid

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Reformed exegesis. And that might explain why there's such a complete difference of viewpoint.

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But what he says here gets pretty interesting. If you would like to know in this particular case, the answer to that question,

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I'd recommend that you get, for example, one of the great books supporting

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Calvinism by one of the great Calvinist authors, whether it's Calvin himself or whether it is some of the

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Puritan writers. Not many of them wrote books defending Calvinism per se, but they all came from a Calvinist perspective.

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But the ones that really sought to deal with the Arminian proof texts, the

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Calvinists that were principally that I know of, John Owen in his book, A Display of Arminianism, and Christopher Ness in his book,

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An Antidote Against Arminianism. These men specifically tried to address the issues that the

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Arminians brought up, the scriptures that are used to support Arminianism. These Calvinists tried to explain those scriptures.

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If you get those books, and they're short ones, they basically will tell you how well

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Calvinists can answer these Arminian texts. Now, there's a whole lot more than that.

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I just don't get the feeling that Mr. Griggs is familiar with Edwards, with Piper, with the fact that Calvinists tend to write a lot of these things in scholarly journals, and so the journal articles on such texts and things like that,

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I can see that his exposure to these things is very minimal, and so that somewhat ameliorates what he's going to say here in a moment or two, but still, it took me completely by surprise.

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If you want to check the other side out, I'd recommend that you take any good Arminian book, but one that I think is just marvelous is

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Robert Shank's book, Life in the Sun. Life in the Sun is about the doctrine of perseverance, but it ends up dealing with most of the

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Calvinist points in Prospect, and it deals with virtually every major Calvinist proof text, and basically expounds them.

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Now, I'll tell you this. I was not born an Arminian, nor was

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I born a Calvinist, but I was raised a Baptist, and although I didn't know what all the points of Calvinism were, I was largely disposed toward Calvinism as I understood it.

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I did not make it my goal to debunk Calvinism or to become something other than a

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Calvinist, and as I said earlier, I once identified as a Calvinist in a debate against a

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Pelagian. I'm not a person who's got an agenda out to destroy

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Calvinism or has looked for every reason to reject it. I can remember making Calvinists very upset with me, and Arminians too, when they'd say, what do you believe about eternal security?

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I'd say, well, I don't think about it much. If I'm reading Romans, I kind of lean Calvinistic.

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If I read Hebrews, I kind of lean Arminian. I just didn't care to settle it. I had no axe to grind, and I even now, believe it or not, don't have an axe to grind.

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I'm just trying to dull an axe that's been hurled from the other side, you know? But the fact is...

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I guess it's the Calvinists who've hurled the axe. Earlier he was talking about this resurgence of Calvinism, etc.,

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etc., but, you know, Mr. Gregg's on the other side. He is a synergist. He is not a monergist of any form.

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He is a semi -Pelagian. And so, you know, I think he'd admit his bias at that point, but it's certainly there.

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That when I have read how the Calvinists address the so -called Arminian proof texts, and I've read how the

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Arminians address the so -called Calvinist proof texts, there's no contest. There's absolutely no contest.

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The Arminians have no difficulty whatsoever accommodating every scripture that a

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Calvinist brings. He doesn't have to... Arminians don't have to resort to contortions and twisting and importing words that aren't there, and so forth.

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The Arminian theology, or at least some form of non -Calvinistic theology, is entirely capable of embracing the whole

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Council of Scripture. Not only those that are plainly Arminian in their sound, but even those that the Calvinists like to use.

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They fit very nicely. All you have to do is shift the paradigm a little bit over to a little more non -Calvinistic way, and everything fits very nicely.

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Now, the sound of rushing wind is all the Calvinists in the audience, their mouths hanging open at this point.

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I mean, a quick search of my blog would find article after article after article where we've...

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I've gone through... I've dealt with Schenck on John 6 and just demonstrated the utter eisegetical nature of the comments that are made.

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We go into the original languages, we deal with the context, and things like that. And so, you know,

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I listened to this, and I... Unfortunately, this was at the steepest part of my ascent today.

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So my heart rate was 174 beats per minute, and I'm standing on the pedals to get up a...

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It actually reaches a 16 -degree grade at one point, right when he's doing this.

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So it was tough getting up this hill while gasping for breath for two different reasons. It was pretty rough at that particular point in time.

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But I'm just listening to this going, he can't have read almost anything to be saying this, or there's a tremendous bias going on here.

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And I would just love to hear the responses to the exegesis that, so far, he's just shown no familiarity with.

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So if he's not familiar with it, then, you know, maybe he really does believe that.

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I mean, if he thinks Schenck's the best thing out there, and I know that almost any meaningful reformed work is light years beyond the level that Schenck goes to, if he's not seen that stuff, then he just might not know, and so we're dealing with ignorance at that point.

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But still, you're just left going, wow, really? That's something.

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I can't show you this in completion right now, although what I will do in our next two classes, I'm going to be taking some of the major arguments and major scriptures of the

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Calvinists and talk about them from the perspective that I believe is biblical, and you'll have at least a sampling of what

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I'm talking about. Which means it may be very dangerous for me to listen to these while writing, because if he's not dealing with the best that's been put forward, then it's going to be extremely frustrating to listen to that.

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But you can get a book like Life in the Sun by Robert Schenck, and he leaves no stone unturned. I mean, he takes them all, and you'll never find some unnaturalness, some twistedness, some desperation of exegesis in an intelligent

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Arminian approach to the Calvinist texts. But I have yet to find a single

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Calvinist writer who can handle the Arminian sounding text without resorting to, you know, fathomless mysteries and contradictions we just have to accept because it's biblical, and import the word elect here in about 40 ,000 verses where it isn't found, because only by importing the word elect do you get a

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Calvinist reading of this verse. I mean, the twisting and contortions are astonishing. And I say this, again, as one who is not particularly one who has set himself to destroy

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Calvinism. I don't care if a person is a Calvinist. I'm simply speaking as an objective viewer looking at the evidence.

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Objective. If you ask which side of this debate can more readily and naturally accommodate the scriptures of his opponent into his own theology, just read it.

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Just consult them. There will be no question. I don't have to tell you the answer. It's obvious. Yeah, I believe it is obvious.

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There's no question about it. It's obvious. Pick up the Arminians, and that's the whole reason

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I wrote The Potter's Freedom, which Mr. Gregg admits he has not read, to demonstrate the fact that when someone like Norman Geisler addressed this issue, it's an exegetical issue.

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When you get to the text from the original languages in the original context, you allow all of the word of God to speak, there is no question.

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I agree. We just are in complete contradiction to one another. But I think that I have a whole lot more experience in this area than Mr.

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Gregg does and have certainly interacted far more with his side than he has with ours.

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The Calvinist has to twist, contort, import, isagit, right and left.

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He's got his several handfuls of texts that sound Calvinistic to him, and as he imposes a certain paradigm, they fit well into a distinctively

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Calvinistic viewpoint. But what the Calvinist has seldom done is figure, is it possible that all the scriptures in the

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Bible, not just these ones, but all the scriptures in the Bible could fit a single paradigm? Yeah, the

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Calvinist has never thought about that. I'm sorry, but Machen, Warfield, Hodge, Spurgeon, Edwards, the

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Westminster Vines, the Puritans, Sproul, MacArthur, Piper, I mean, hello? Someone's living in a cave here when you say they've just never thought about whether you can put them all in there.

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And I'm sorry, but that's just silly. That's not the case. I mean, go listen to the debates that I've had on this subject, and my experience has not borne this out in any way, shape, or form.

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And we arrange a debate with Mr. Gregg, and something tells me that's going to bear it out in the same way, because I just don't see any evidence at this point that Mr.

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Gregg really knows the other side well enough to be making these kinds of very broad pronouncements, very, very broad pronouncements.

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I mean, and I think he'd admit, you know, sometimes when he starts talking about isogeeting and sticking elect in there,

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I admit, if what he has viewed as our exegesis was our exegesis, then he'd be right.

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But the vast majority of the time he says, well, the Calvinists just say it's the world of the elect. No, they don't.

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Show me someone who does. You know, 1 John 2, 2, 2, you just say it's the world.

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How about we deal with propitiation? How about we deal with the actual nature of the atonement? He just doesn't show any familiarity with these things.

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And as he himself says, hey, I'm not trying to start some war here. So maybe that'll explain it.

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But still, if you're going to make those broad type of assertions, you need to sort of back them up.

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If so, it's not going to be a Calvinist one. And that is demonstrated by the desperate attempts of Calvinist writers to try to explain why these

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Arminian -sounding texts aren't really Arminian in their meaning. It's almost funny if people didn't take it so seriously.

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Yeah, it's almost funny. Well, you know, from my perspective, it's almost funny what's being said here, because it's just so opposite of the actual reality.

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But again, I don't know what else to say about that. So there's some assertions made for you about exegesis.

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And I just wanted to play it at the beginning. So once again, we have it laid out for us that Mr. Craig makes some strong statements, really does.

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And I think he's willing to stand up to his statements. And I'd like to believe that he'd be willing to go, yep, probably need to change my viewpoint on that.

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We'll find out as we do more interaction. Going back then, this is in the seventh of the series.

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That was toward about two -thirds through that.

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Going back to the beginning of that, this is before those comments were made, there was a discussion of the love of God and assurance.

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And I think one of the reasons that I wanted to come in here and do this, you know, right off the bat, before I head out of town for a brief trip, was it was fresh on my mind.

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And it seemed to me to be an area where there was so much misrepresentation of the

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Reformed understanding. And yet there are a lot of people who are Reformed who struggle with these issues. So I thought maybe by clearing up the misconceptions that Mr.

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Craig has could also edify Reformed folks at this point as well. Because these are common objections that are made, but they are, in general, objections to a straw man.

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And so you'll be playing a good portion of what he says here, but I want to interact with it as well.

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Because the essential points, the most essential points about who God is and what kind of a God he is, are largely agreed upon by all

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Christians, Calvinist or otherwise. But there are some rather important issues, like whether God wants all people to be saved, or whether God controls all things and is therefore in some unavoidable sense the author of sin as well as the author of righteousness.

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These issues do have something to say about the character of God. Just very briefly, yes, obviously these are important issues.

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They do speak much to the issue of the character of God. We reject the assertion that God is the author of sin because we recognize the difference between being the author of something, as in the primary mover, the primary actor, and the decree of secondary people who act, and they act according to their nature.

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These are issues that, for some reason, Mr. Craig just simply refuses to allow for the distinction of terms.

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It comes from exegesis, and maybe it's because he's not familiar with the exegesis, I don't know. But we certainly agree at this point, and that is that these are important issues that come out of the difference between being

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Reformed in your theology and being non -Reformed. It does impact how you view God, how you view the Gospel, how you view yourself, how you view the

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Church, how you view apologetics. It's vitally important in all those areas. And therefore they are not matters so light as to say, well, why bother with this information?

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This is important information. And therefore we should employ every reasonable rule of interpretation that makes sense for reasoning from the

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Scriptures to know which is the correct way of understanding God. Now, I asked a question.

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I don't know if I gave a thorough enough answer. At the bottom of page three of your notes, what is at stake here?

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What really is affected by your adopting a

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Calvinist view that would be affected differently if you did not adopt a Calvinist view? Well, there might be any number of things.

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But not all the things that Calvinism can be accused of are valid criticisms. For example, some people say if you believe in eternal security that you'll just go out and live in sin.

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Well, this is not a valid criticism. It may be a valid criticism of one form of the doctrine of eternal security that is taught in some circles today.

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But it is certainly not a criticism of Calvinism because Calvinism in no way makes it okay to live in sin.

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Calvinism does not teach a doctrine of eternal security that says you can sin and still be saved. Calvinism teaches a doctrine of perseverance of the saints which says if you go ahead and live in sin, you aren't saved.

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You show whether you are elect or not by not going out and living in sin. By living for God, that's the only way you know for sure if you are elect.

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Let me just stop right there because this is going to come up later on. He really seems to have the feeling that we spend all day contemplating our navels and the issue of our election.

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That has not been my experience in any way, shape, or form. The assurance that I have of my salvation comes from the fact that I believe that God is sovereign, that the gospel is perfect, that there is nothing

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I can do to add to the work of Jesus Christ in my place, and that I recognize that the faith that I have in that, which is an ongoing faith, it's not just a one -time faith, which is why

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I consider the Zane Hodges -Wilkin viewpoint such a heresy. It is an ongoing faith, just as it is in John 6, that present tense participle, the one believing, the one coming, that that is the work of the

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Spirit of God within me, and that it is God who is glorifying himself in bringing about my redemption.

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It's not a matter of my somehow being able to determine my election. We don't know who the elect are.

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So many of the objections, both from Mr. Gregg and many others, are based upon the idea that somehow we have been given the identities of the elect.

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We have not. But my, you know, he'll say that his assurance is based upon his faith in Jesus Christ and his finished work on the cross.

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Well, that's my assurance. The difference being that I believe that my faith, which is born by the

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Spirit of God, is to God's glory, and therefore it's not going to fail, that Christ is not going to fail to save his own, and I believe in a

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God who is not going to fail in glorifying himself in the salvation of his people. That's where the difference between us lies, but it's not the idea of faith, as if we're just sitting around going,

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I wonder if I'm elect, I wonder if I'm elect, I wonder if I'm elect. No, that's, again, I don't know where this stuff comes from.

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It certainly hasn't been my experience, but that's where it's going to be the argument that's going to come out.

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Therefore, it is a cheap shot, and not a legitimate criticism, to criticize

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Calvinism this way. On the other hand, if somebody says, well, if you're not a Calvinist, then you have eternal insecurity.

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It's a term I've used, because obviously, if you're going to make the assertion that a person can be lost, then when do you make the division to where he can stop not being lost anymore?

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I mean, if free will, autonomous free will, is definitional to the human being, will there not be autonomous free will in heaven?

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Does that not mean that there's always the possibility of evil? There's always the possibility of rebellion?

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There's always the possibility of a person being lost? Is that not eternal insecurity? He's going to say this is not an accurate representation, but I don't think that his theology is consistent enough or robust enough to avoid the conclusion that it comes to at this particular point in time.

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This is a humorous term that Calvinists sometimes use for people who are non -Calvinists. We, they say, believe in eternal security.

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You must believe in eternal insecurity. But this is not the case either. This is not a correct representation.

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It is not so that a denial of Calvinism must necessarily lead to insecurity about one's salvation.

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As a matter of fact, it seems to me the tendency would be the other way, and I'll tell you why. There are, I think, if a person takes his theological system to its logical conclusion, there are two unavoidable issues that are affected by this theology, both of which are important issues.

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One, of course, is our view of God. Someone was telling me the other day that they were talking to an unbeliever.

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In fact, they talked to quite a few unbelievers recently, and they noticed that almost all the objections to Christianity that the unbeliever was bringing up were actually not objections to Christianity.

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They were objections to Calvinism. The unbeliever didn't know this. The unbeliever didn't know what

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Calvinism is. It's just that predestination and some of these issues and God controlling everything were issues that these people had heard only from the

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Calvinist side, and they found reason to criticize Christianity, whereas if they had actually known what the Bible teaches rather than what

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Calvinism teaches, they might not have criticized God. Our view of God can be impugned this way. Of course, it's interesting.

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I remember many years ago doing a radio program with an atheist who recognized.

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He said around the air, in fact, this was on the Tom Likas show, if any of you know who Tom Likas is or was, and he still is.

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In fact, didn't he come back here to Phoenix? I think he's back here in Phoenix now or something like that. Anyway, this atheist was saying, well, anybody who reads the

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Bible knows that it teaches that God's sovereign over all things, and he goes through the verses. I mean, he, as an atheist, as an outsider, was going, well, this is obvious.

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This is not even an argument. So I wouldn't use that as an argument that the atheist was right, but it does seem a little bit contrary to what was just being said.

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The Calvinist believes that they alone sustain the high view of God because they impute to God a degree of sovereignty much more absolute.

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Actually, we impute to God absolute freedom and autonomy. We believe that God has the only autonomous free will and that creatures have creaturely will.

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And so to create a God who wants to do things but can't or who creates the universe and then later has to come up with a reason why the evil was there because he didn't really have any purpose for it in the first place, yes, we consider that to be a lesser view of God than the view that is provided in Scripture, yes.

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One might even say more extreme, although they would not use that term, but more absolute view of sovereignty than the non -Calvinist does.

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After all, God gets all the credit for everything that happens. Because he makes it all happen.

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His decree determines that it's going to happen, yes. When you use terms like makes, it's like you've got some innocent person and God's behind them making them evil or something like that, which again would be a straw man misrepresentation because the vast majority of God's activity is actually in restraining the evil of man, not in ever causing anyone to be evil, which doesn't really come out too much in Mr.

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Gregg's presentations. The problem with this is that not everything that happens is good. And therefore this cuts two ways.

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If we wish to give God all the credit for the good things that happen because he makes everything happen, then he must also take the responsibility, one might even say blame.

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Yes, and that is to his glory because he has a purpose in those evil events. If he doesn't have a purpose in those evil events, then there would be no reason for him to be glorified in them, in the judgment of evil men, anything like that, which again is the problem that actually goes to Mr.

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Gregg's doorstep because he is the one who wants to say that God knows future events, but doesn't really have a purpose in why they happen the way that they do because there is no eternal decree that is being worked out.

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All of God's purpose is just the big macro stuff, just the big macro stuff, not how it happens, but just this nation, that nation, and I don't see it as a coherent view of God.

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For things bad that happen, now I would not use the word blame in this case because even if God were responsible for the bad things that happen, rather than blame him,

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I'd say, well, that's his business. If he wants to make bad things, he can make bad things. He's God. But the problem is the Bible does not reveal such a

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God. If God is such a God as ordains bad things to happen, if God has in fact chosen by a unilateral, totally sovereign, unaffected by any other circumstances than his own sovereign good pleasure, if he has chosen that millions of people should be damned without ever a hope of salvation, even if they hear the gospel, they don't have any hope of acceptance because they don't happen to be elect.

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They don't happen to be elect. How about they happen to be rebel sinners who love their sin and hate

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God and God's under absolutely no compulsion whatsoever to place his grace and mercy upon them.

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How about that much more accurate presentation rather than this sort of straw man presentation that unfortunately is quite common in Armenian circles?

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Then this is definitely a kind of God that differs from the

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God believed in by the Armenian or the non -Calvinist and arguably it differs from the

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God that expresses himself and reveals himself in the Bible. Arguably. And therefore, one's view of God, to say we have a high view of the sovereignty of God, which means that we extend the sovereignty of God to every decision, every act, everything that happens.

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It's all what he ordains, including all your decisions, including your decision to go to hell. He ordained that you make that decision.

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He ordained that all sinners are going to go to hell and that all sinners outside of his grace are going to remain as enemies of God.

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Remember, unfortunately Mr. Gregg makes the same mistake that most people do, is he attempts to paint double predestination as if they are equal actions on the part of God.

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That the extension of undeserved grace and salvation is equal to, big old equal sign, between that and predestination to hell.

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As if you've got just a bunch of neutral people and he takes some and makes them positive, some makes them evil, which of course again is another one of the straw man misrepresentations that really mar

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Mr. Gregg's attempt to address this particular issue and it comes up over and over again.

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Well that makes him, well we've got a very lofty God. We've got a very powerful God. We've got the biggest

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God in all theology. Well no, not any bigger than the God of the Muslims. They've got an

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Allah that does all that too. Allah wills it, Allah wills it. You know, people killed and get murdered, Allah wills it.

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Everything's got the will of Allah. Actually the God of Calvinism is not the loftiest God in the pantheon.

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I am so thankful that you can go to our blog right now and you can search for example on Colin Smith's name and there is an excellent series of articles on that very issue just about three weeks ago demonstrating the vast difference between the

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Islamic view of the quote unquote sovereignty or providence of God and the Christian perspective and so I would recommend that you take a look at those and I would recommend that Mr.

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Gregg take a look at those as well. There are available gods in religions of the world. The Muslims have a

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God every bit as big, just not as biblical, you know, because the

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God of the Calvinists certainly has more biblical traits than the God of Islam does. That's good to hear. But the fact that they make him totally sovereign in an absolutist sense does not necessarily elevate him to the most admirable status because as I said there is the flip side of that.

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There's the dark side of that view which is that the reason people go to hell is because God wanted them to.

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Now again, God wanted them to. In other words, if God's decree includes all events in time and someone goes to hell then that means

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God wanted them to go to hell and of course what that conjures up in the person's mind is you've got these neutral folks, these innocent folks and it is

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God's pleasure to make them evil and to force them to be evil. If you have a truly biblical understanding and you recognize the depths of the depravity of man and the fact that every single person in hell wants to be there and hates

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God and continues to hate God, well, that sort of messes up the whole problem, the whole thing here because now you're starting to see the fullness of the biblical revelation rather than just hammering away as these folks tend to do on turning

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God basically into a big creature and judging him in a temporal fashion and he wanted this to happen, he wanted that to happen instead of seeing the full scope of the decree of God and its interaction in time.

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Now again, if God wants to make people for the express purpose of sending them to hell, he's entitled to do it but he's not the

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God of the Bible. He's not the God that God said he is in the

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Bible. Such a concept of God can be entertained without injustice but it can't be entertained and do justice to scripture because the

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God of scripture is not willing that they should perish, he rather that all men would repent. He is sad at the loss of any human soul.

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Now of course, Mr. Gregg, it's frustrating for me because again, he's shown no familiarity with the response that has been offered by individuals such as myself to 2

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Peter 3 .9, 1 Timothy 2 .4. He takes these as being just clear passages that have no possible other way of understanding.

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He doesn't follow the exegesis of 2 Peter 3 .9. He doesn't see that to assume what he's saying is assuming certain things about what this pronoun is referring to and that pronoun is referring to and ignoring the context.

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He doesn't see that in 1 Timothy 2 he's playing with universalism, the intercessory work of Christ, introducing distinctions and disturbances into the

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Godhead and all the rest of that stuff that we've discussed many times before and is in the Potter's Freedom and things like that. He doesn't address those things.

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Sometimes I say, yeah, he did this in 1999 and the Potter's Freedom came out later. I'd actually addressed these things in God's Sovereign Grace and Drawn by the

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Father at times prior to this and many other people had addressed these things long before that.

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John Piper had written The Justification of God before he did this and dealing with Romans 9 and things like that.

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So it's a little bit frustrating but again, it comes into the argumentation over and over again as the

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Bible declares. And so this I take to be one of the issues at stake here. What kind of a

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God governs the universe? What kind of a God do we worship? And you know, the God of the Calvinists certainly gives us grounds for fear and respect.

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Any sovereign that powerful and that mighty and that involved and that arbitrary certainly is something to be feared and in awe of.

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You know, it's funny. He had accurately recognized that arbitrary is an improper term a couple tapes ago, a couple sessions ago.

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But now has seemingly forgotten that that's an improper type of term. You know, when it says,

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God unilaterally did all this stuff. Well, before creation, what else was there to consult?

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Of course, would be my question. There wasn't anything else! Before creation was there, in that sense.

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So arbitrary, if he's supreme, how could it be any other? But loved?

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That's a little harder. Yeah. You know what? You know what? He's basically saying, you can't love the

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Calvinist God. And you know what? The natural man can't. The natural man cannot love the

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Calvinist God. The natural man cannot love the holy God of Isaiah chapter 6. The natural man detests that God that calls

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Isaiah. And what does he call Isaiah to do? To proclaim a message of judgment. Which includes the fact that God is going to make their hearing deaf, their eyes blind, so he can bring judgment upon the nation.

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The natural man does not love that God. The natural man does not love a holy God. There's no question about that.

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And I'm reminded, again, of the wisdom of Jonathan Edwards at this point. Because he said, one of the greatest indications, if you want to examine yourself, as Paul says, to examine yourself, to see whether you're in the faith.

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One of the greatest indications of regeneration is that the regenerate heart loves the very aspects of God's character that are the most hateful to the natural man.

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If you don't want your God edited down to look like you, then that's a good indication that you want to worship the one true

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God. And so, yeah, you're right. It takes a supernatural work of the

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Spirit of God to cause a God -hater to become a God -lover and to love

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God as God is. No question about it. We love more readily those things and persons that are lovely.

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And a God who has ordained that many millions should live just so that they could die and go to hell and he had no better purpose for them than that.

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That is, again, gross straw man. Gross straw man. Gross, gross, gross, gross straw man.

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Unworthy of Mr. Gregg's own stated goals in this presentation. That is not why

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God created them. Again, you're going to the end. Well, that's just the whole reason. There is a huge drama that God is working out to his own glory in this creation.

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And those who will experience his wrath, those

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God -haters who have never repented and never will repent and don't desire to repent, that's those who will be in hell, those individuals are not just there to go to hell.

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There is clearly in this world at this time a purpose that is being worked out.

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Part of that purpose is in the creation of the church. And believe it or not, part of the way in which

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God has glorified himself is in how he has sustained the church in the face of the hatred of the world. And so to say that, well, the only reason they're there is that they're just going to go to hell.

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There are these innocent people and God just wants to torture them in hell. Again, pure straw man, there's no reason to do this.

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And the interesting thing is, Mr. Gregg, later on, is going to say, well, you know, part of the way that we can evaluate whether you have the best argument is whether you accurately represent the strongest argument the other side has.

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So what's this all about? That's what I don't understand. There's so many times where he violates his own stated purposes in these particular presentations.

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Maybe a God to be feared but not easily one to be loved. And those who do love him may love him only because of their fear.

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No. Well, because the spirit of God works enough to delight in the fact that they count themselves among those that he pleasantly chose to be saved but they don't care a great deal.

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They don't have any biblical grounds for sympathy for those that end up in hell.

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Sympathy? In the sense that, oh boy, I wish God had done things differently? Or has

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Mr. Gregg not heard Calvinists so many times say, but for the grace of God, there go

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I. I have no ground of boasting within myself because the only thing that differentiates between those who stand upon the parapets of hell screaming their hatred for God for eternity and those who bow before the throne is that single word grace.

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That's why it is all of him and none of us. Frankly, God wants to be feared and loved and I believe that his nature is such that if correctly understood, he can be feared and loved.

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On page 16 of the notes I've given you, I have a little poem here called

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The Minister's Daughter from John Greenleaf Whittier. Listen closely to this one, folks.

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It's about a little girl and her father who is a Calvinist minister and she had just heard him preach a sermon about predestination, how

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God predestined some to be good and some to be evil and God predestined that man would sin and all this other stuff and that man would fall in the garden.

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And here's how the poem goes. I think it's very profound. It says, Then up spoke the little maiden treading on snow and pink out in the garden where the snow was.

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O father, these pretty blossoms are very wicked, I think. Had there been no garden of Eden, there never had been a fall.

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And if never a tree had blossomed, God would have loved us all. Says the little girl responding to what seems like the reasonable upshot of the

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Calvinist theology and her father rebukes her. Hush, child, the father answered. By his decree, man fell.

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His ways are in clouds and darkness, but he doeth all things well. And whether by his ordaining to us cometh good or ill, joy or pain or light or shadow, we must fear and love him still.

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Oh, I fear him, said the daughter, and I try to love him too, but I wish he was as good and gentle, kind and loving as you.

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This is so profound. I don't know if it hits you the way it hits me. What this is saying is the

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God of the Calvinist is not even as good as the Calvinist himself. Because the

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Calvinist does not bring children into being with an intention of destroying them. Jesus said, even you fathers being evil know how to give good gifts to your children.

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But he didn't say that God doesn't do that to all of his creation. He says, know how much more shall your heavenly

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Father give good things to those who ask him. Jesus indicated that God is more merciful, more gracious, more loving to those that he has brought into existence than an earthly father, even an evil earthly father is.

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But the Calvinist theology makes God out to be less kind, less generous, less eager to save and to benefit all that he can than even, frankly, even a philanthropic heathen.

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So there you go. How do you respond to that? I mean, aside from the fact that it's sort of designed to go for the emotions rather than for the mind, it sure sounds like he's got a point there, doesn't it?

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I mean, that's a mean Calvinist God. Now, of course, it did seem to assume that the father -child relationship was appropriately to be described of God in all of creation.

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Of course, we are only adopted into the family of God by faith in Jesus Christ, and the few places where God is described as father in a creative sense is just that, not in the creative sense, the creator of all men, but not in the relational sense that we have in Jesus Christ.

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So God does not actually bring children into existence and destroy them. That would not be an accurate representation, but God does bring men into existence who are going to be destroyed.

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And so, oh, well, wait a minute. Mr. Gregg's God does that too. In fact, unless Mr.

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Gregg is an open theist, then Mr. Gregg's God knew when he created that evidently,

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I would assume, knew the identity of every single person who would come into existence who would eventually end up under his wrath, and yet he still created.

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The problem is he didn't do so for any particular purpose that we can find. I mean, Mr. Gregg asserts, never really proves in scripture, even tries to prove in scripture, that God wanted fellowship and things like this.

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You know, it's the standard argument. You never find anyone actually exegeting any text that tells you that, but God wanted to have fellowship and he couldn't do that without the autonomous free will and these traditions that men have, are presented.

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But the fact remains, this is actually an objection against Mr. Gregg's God as well, and even more so.

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Why do I say more so? Well, unless he's going to say, well, my God tries to save all these people and fails, and that that's better.

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It's better to have a God who tries and fails than to have the Calvinist God. Maybe that's the argument.

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You know, I'd rather have a God who tries and tries and tries and at least when he sends them to hell, he can cry for eternity because he didn't accomplish his purposes and he's very sad about that.

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But again, if he had knowledge of all these things before he created, how does that actually rescue him from the idea of blame here?

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I'm going to try to save these people, but I know in the end I'm not going to. That's why open theists believe what open theists believe.

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They go, no, you need to understand when God created, he didn't know this was going to happen. And so you can't blame him.

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He's trying to save everybody he can. And you know, he's just totally bummed out by what's going on.

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And like I said, if you want to worship a God who was just as shocked as all the rest of us on the morning of September 11th, and oh man,

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I knew this was a possibility, but oh, and people died in that tower that I wanted to use, but oh man,

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I'm going to have to drop back 10 and punt here. If that's the kind of a God that you want, okay, open theism, that's another issue.

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We'll be dealing with that too. But I consider that pure heresy. If you want to have a

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God like that, fine, just don't identify that with the God of the Bible. I mean, Nebuchadnezzar knew better than that.

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Daniel 4, did he not? Did he not? Didn't Daniel 4, 34, 35, did he not clearly, this pagan king, once his reason returned him, did he not see that God is the king of all the universe, and no one can hold back his hand?

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Yeah, he saw that, and the psalmist understood that God works all things out of the counsel of his will in the sense that he does what pleases him.

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Mr. Gregg thinks that just simply means, well, yeah, he's been pleased to give people free will, but that really wouldn't answer to the text at all, but if you want to have a

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God like that, fine, but the problem is, in my understanding anyways, Mr. Gregg doesn't embrace that, and if he doesn't embrace open theism, then where's the consistency here?

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There isn't any consistency. The objections he's raising are just as valid to his own perspective, and I would say more so, because at least when he raises these issues,

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I can say, look, God, in his decree, has determined to bring about his own self -glorification through all of his creation, and that moral agents, mankind, made in the image of God, those who love their sin, those who

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God is under no obligation, I mean, again, fallen in Adam, they have a corrupt nature,

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I don't know whether Mr. Gregg really believes in original sin or really believes in Romans 5 and really believes, a lot of people don't,

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I'd say a vast majority of people actually don't really believe that it's right for God to treat us as the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and to impute his sin to us.

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I don't think they really honestly believe that very much. They want to believe that he can impute Christ's righteousness to us, but they don't want the flip side of that.

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They don't want the rest of Romans 5 at that point. But the point being that God, in his sovereign decree, chooses to exemplify all of his attributes in his creation.

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He chooses to exemplify, to give evidence of his power and his might and his holiness and his justice and his wrath and whether people see his wrath at all times or not, that's not the point.

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Whether people are blind to his wrath, that may be part of his judgment upon a nation. That's certainly the case with our nation.

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We don't even, we see God's wrath happening all around us and we don't even, I wonder why it's happening, don't know.

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It's a terrible thing. But he has demonstrated to anyone who's watching, and maybe that's some of the

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Ephesians and Colossians, the heavenly authorities and powers that are observing all these things, the angelic host possibly, but he is demonstrating his attributes in his creation in his own way and its power and its justice and its might, yes, and the destruction of the gods of Egypt, for example, and the destruction of Pharaoh and so many other pagan nations that have fallen in such horrible ways.

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God's wrath comes upon him. His justice is done. But then he likewise demonstrates his great love and he demonstrates his mercy and his grace and his patience.

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He demonstrates his patience upon vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.

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The fact that he does not destroy them the first instant that their stench of existence reaches his nostrils is an extension of grace toward them.

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Whether the Armenian wants to admit that or not or I don't think that's grace, well, the fact that God's wrath is withheld.

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The fact that there is long suffering on the part of God is not an arguable issue.

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It is true. It is plain in the writings of the prophets. And so God demonstrates the whole orb of his attributes in his creation.

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Now, I say, the Calvinist says, that he does so in such a way as to demonstrate his love.

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And his love is far richer and far deeper than even that which human beings experience.

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Unfortunately, Mr. Gregg is going to fall into the same trap here in a moment that so many other

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Armenians do. And that is to present God as either having one kind of love redemptive love for all men.

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It has to be undifferentiated. This is the Dave Hunt error. God cannot have the same level of personality that even you and I have.

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You and I can express different kinds of love. We have a different kind of love for our wife than anyone else's wife.

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We have a different kind of love for our children than someone else's children. And we can demonstrate the ability to differentiate between individuals while God can't.

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God's love has to be peanut butter and vanilla. I mean, it's peanut butter because it's spread all over the place. It's vanilla because it's just plain.

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You can't have any different kinds of it. You can't have a redemptive love. You can't have common grace over saving grace.

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No, no, no, no. It's all got to be the same kind, you see. Or then he's just not being fair.

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And he's going to fall into that trap. God demonstrates his love.

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But he does so in different ways. He does so to different levels, just as we do, but even more so.

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But for some reason, we can't allow that in Mr. Gregg's perspective. But I just point out that the little girl, we could write little poems like that too.

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We could write little poems about little girls who ask daddy after he's just preached a sermon about how

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God created, but he didn't want any of this to happen. And yet he's going to do the best to try to pick up the pieces about how the little girl wonders how it is that we can worship a

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God who knew all this was going to happen, didn't have any purpose for it, but brought it into existence anyways. You know, we can write little poems like that too and tug at the heartstrings.

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I'd rather just direct people to the Word of God, personally. It is this very nature of the

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God of Calvinism that offends not only Christians, but non -Christians alike. Because non -Christians themselves care more, in many cases, for the lost, for the plight of the starving and the disenfranchised.

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Many, certainly not all, but many non -Christians care more about those people than the Calvinist God does.

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Because the Calvinist God could save, but doesn't. So, if God has the power to save, but he doesn't, what does that mean?

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That means grace can be demanded. Grace can be demanded. Now I say to you, unless grace is free, it's not grace.

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But in this system, what you just heard is, if God could save, and he doesn't save everybody, then he's not even as good as human beings.

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Because human beings would save everybody they could. So God can't have any purpose. God must save if he can save.

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I've said many times before, there's three possibilities. I remember the day, when

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I was in Bible college, I listened real carefully. I've met with some of my old professors, and I've quoted them to themselves.

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I said, I said that? Yes, you did say that. And I remember it to this day. And I had a dear professor in Bible college, he's gone now,

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Dr. D .C. Martin. And in Christian doctrine class one day, he said, look, God has three, there's three options here.

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And he wrote them up on the board. And this was back in the day of chalk, so I can still hear them. I know those of you who are young don't know what chalk is, but that's okay.

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Just translate into whiteboard, and the squeaky thing, and you'll have pretty much same impact. But God could save no one.

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God could save everyone. God could save some. God could save no one.

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God could save everyone. God could save some. Those are the three logical choices. Either everybody's gonna get saved, nobody's gonna get saved, or some are gonna get saved.

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In which one does God have freedom? Only when he saves some. He can only make a choice.

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He can only demonstrate his own personhood when he saves some.

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Not universalism. Not no -salvationism. He saves some.

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Now the Armenian says, oh yeah, sure he does. He saves those who believe. Well, okay, we can then now address that issue about the nature of salvation, whether you put it in man's hands or God's hands, or if you're a synergist and God does his best but man has to do the rest, whatever.

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But the point is, this assertion that since God has the ability to save everyone and doesn't, this makes

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God evil, that's Dave Hunt's viewpoint. That's exactly what Mr. Gregg said. It's irrational. No foundation is given for this.

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It makes no sense. It's been pointed out that the God of Calvinism, if we would take an illustration from the

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Good Samaritan parable, the God of Calvinism is more like the Levite and the priest who saw a man in need and passed by than he is like the

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Samaritan. Wow. This is where it started getting just a little bit difficult to listen to because that's absurd.

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I'm sorry, but that... Because he sees people dying and in need, sinners all the time, beaten up by sin and by the devil and left in a helpless state.

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Yeah, those poor innocent folks just beaten up by the devil. They love their sin.

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They're rebels. They're God -haters. They're rightfully under the wrath of God. How can even semi -rational parallel be drawn here?

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You can't. But he passes by many when he could have helped them. Yep, his grace can be demanded.

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I mean, if he just doesn't give his grace to everybody... But we need to make sure that grace isn't powerful enough to save because then man doesn't have anything to boast in.

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A good quote of some sort on that, it seems to me, here. I don't remember where it is in here, but...

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I can't find it instantly, so I won't belabor it too much. But the

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God that we have here... Let me see here. Yeah, here it is.

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It's on page 14 of the notes I gave you, on the page about double predestination. The Calvinist doctrine is that God predestined some to be elected in the same act of his good pleasure and lofty, sovereign purpose.

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He predestined that some should be born to go to hell just because it pleased him to do so, according to Calvin, according to the logical conclusions that one must come to if they accept any of Calvin's points.

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Nothing about the glory of God, nothing about the consistency of creation and the harmony of all these... No, no, no, he just likes to beat up on people.

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And Robert Shank, in a wonderful book called Elect in the Son, which got him kicked out of the

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Baptist denomination where he was a preacher because it was not a Calvinist book. On page 193,

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Robert Shank said this, but we must... We'd kick him out of our church too. ...protest that a God who, while rescuing some, simply passes by others in the same lost circumstance is so little like the good

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Samaritan in our Lord's parable. Did you see how the doctrine of depravity and God's holiness is completely lost here?

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Are you seeing that? I hope you're seeing that. Because these are just poor people. And they're innocent.

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They're not rebels. No, no, no, they're not offensive to God. I mean, God's holiness thing, you can have some sermons on that once in a while, but don't take it overly seriously.

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You see that? If you don't have a biblical doctrine of sin, you're never going to understand any of this stuff.

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And you're always going to be making this kind of error. And so much like the priest and the Levite, that he cannot be the

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God who desires all men... who desires to have all men saved and none to perish.

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The priest and the Levite were bigots. If you don't know anything about Jews and Samaritans, are you saying

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God is bigoted when he doesn't extend saving grace to a rebel sinner? Don't you see what that means about grace?

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Don't you see what that means about mercy? I mean, I know that Mr.

01:00:04

Gregg has a completely different... you know, he does the nations thing in Romans 9. But like all Arminians, they can't figure out where it shifts over.

01:00:12

Because when he talks about 9, 19, and 20, now it's individuals, but earlier it's all nations. And exactly where it shifts, they can't find out because they missed the whole point of 9 -5.

01:00:21

And if they had struggled through Piper's work, they would see that they needed to address that, but they're not aware of that.

01:00:26

So, but the point is, he doesn't really deal with the statement of Paul.

01:00:33

It's not of the one running or the one willing, but of the God mercying. That's a verb.

01:00:40

He mercies. He hardens. Not just nations. These are terms that are only used of individuals.

01:00:45

And so that mercying has to be free if it is going to be gracious.

01:00:52

To make it something you can demand is to completely undercut the very nature of grace itself.

01:00:58

Such a God constitutes a total contradiction to the spirit of the words of James. To him who knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin.

01:01:06

See, putting God into the human categories of temporality and trying to judge him in that context rather than recognizing we're talking about eternal things here and there's no parallel between the two.

01:01:17

James 4, 17. A God so heartless and so arbitrary cannot be the God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to exile, sorrow, suffering, and shame and death.

01:01:28

That's not what John 3, 16 says. That is not what John 3, 16 says, is it?

01:01:35

Is it? You want to see tradition? You want to see eisegesis? There it is. Glowing in neon colors.

01:01:44

John 3, 16 says for God so loved the world that he gave his unique or only begotten son. For what?

01:01:50

So that everyone believing in him. Everyone believing in him.

01:01:57

There is a distinction made. Those who do not believe do not receive these benefits. It's not so he can banish this, that.

01:02:06

Everyone. At least if you're going to quote John 3, 16. You know what? Even Calvinists know

01:02:11

John 3, 16. They just happen to know it in context. He cannot be the God who cries with sorrowing heart and infinite compassion.

01:02:18

Look to me and be saved. All the ends of the earth. For I am God and there is none other. Isaiah 45, 22.

01:02:24

He cannot be the God whose grace has appeared for the salvation of all men. Titus 2, 11. And I just mentioned in passing that Mr.

01:02:32

Gregg is wrong about Titus 2, 11 as well. He seems to take that text, and I'll expand upon this at some other point as time allows, but he takes that text and again, he says right here, the grace that brings salvation to all men has appeared.

01:02:47

And so he takes that as a theoretical thing. That brings the possibility of salvation.

01:02:52

I would argue no. The grace that teaches us to avoid worldliness and ungodliness is the grace that actually saves.

01:03:02

I take a much stronger view of that grace than Mr. Gregg does. And he doesn't even attempt to substantiate the exegetical comments that he makes in that, but I think he's completely missed the point on that one as well.

01:03:15

Such an arbitrary God is not the God we worship and adore, the God in whom we trust.

01:03:22

Why would you trust him when he continually tries but fails to save, to fulfill the purposes of his own heart?

01:03:28

That's what I, this trust issue comes up, and it's come up in the assurance thing that we're about to address. I think that's a pretty powerful statement, and it's absolutely true.

01:03:40

I don't see how anyone could argue against it. We just did. The God who has power to save all but chooses only to save some and leave the others who are in the same misery, in the same helplessness, in the same culpable, guilty state of rebel sinners who hate

01:03:56

God, and leaves them without aid, though he had plenty of aid to give. Common grace?

01:04:03

Without excuse? Suppressing the knowledge of God? Remember those things in Romans 1? That's why they come at the beginning?

01:04:09

The bad news comes first? He's not like the good Samaritan. He's like those who refuse to help the man at the side of the road.

01:04:16

Why? Well, the Calvinists say, no, no, no, no, no. He's more like the good Samaritan if the man at the side of the road is one of the elect.

01:04:24

Yeah, but the story of the good Samaritan was that the Samaritan was not one of the friends of the

01:04:30

Jew who helped him. The Samaritan was the helper. The Jew was the hurting man. These people were not friends by nature.

01:04:38

The entire application of that parable to this whole subject is absurd. I'm sorry, but it's absurd.

01:04:45

The categories are completely different. The point's completely different. To be honest with you, total waste of time.

01:04:51

These were people by nature enemies. We do not have here a picture of a man stopping to help his friend.

01:04:58

In fact, that's the whole point. Jesus told the story because he said, you must love your neighbor as you love yourself. Critics said, who's my neighbor then?

01:05:05

And Jesus gave this story to show that everyone in need is your neighbor, therefore you must love every man.

01:05:12

Calvinism suggests that God commands us to love all men and to want them saved, but God himself doesn't love all men.

01:05:21

Notice the little insert there. God commands us to love all men and want them saved, but God doesn't love all men.

01:05:31

Again, as we preemptively mentioned this, God can't have particular kinds of love.

01:05:38

He can't have redemptive love and extend common grace and mercy to individuals, and that can't be love unless it's redemptive love.

01:05:45

So God's love has to be vanilla. It has to be all the same, but we're allowed to do that, so we're actually more personal than God is at that point.

01:05:52

But that's the argumentation that's being put forward at this point. Calvinists say that God doesn't love men. What he means by that,

01:05:58

I hope, is that Calvinists say that God has a special redemptive love that is not based upon anything in the creature.

01:06:06

That is quite true, but it is improper in the application being made. We are commanded to be more loving than God, more universal in our generosity than God.

01:06:17

Of course. Again, notice one of the other errors being made here, and that is we don't know what

01:06:23

God knows. Okay? We don't know who the elect are, and yet isn't it interesting there are those passages that say, you know, do good, especially those who are the household of faith.

01:06:31

No, no, you shouldn't do that. If we're going to be like God, then you just do equally good to everybody. You don't want to just limit it to the household of faith in that way.

01:06:41

Again, this was, I felt, some of the poorest argumentation, because it just... I think what was useful about listening to this portion is because it really showed whether the critic really understands the system that he's criticizing and is applying the same standards to his own position that he's applying to the other.

01:07:03

That's where... And he's going to say, this is what you need to do. He recognizes you do that, but I just don't think that he's done so.

01:07:08

We are to love those that God hates by this view, because God hates sinners. And we don't know who they elect are.

01:07:17

Makes it very difficult to find motivations for evangelism, although we are commanded to do it, and we should. Even if Calvinism was true, we should obey

01:07:23

God, but it's very hard to find incentive when, in fact, the person that we feel so much compassion for might, for all we know, be one that God hates.

01:07:32

And exactly how is that relevant? I mean, since you're proclaiming the call of God to all men to repent, and it's not up to me to determine who the elect are, and I am a sinner saved by grace,

01:07:46

I have found the means of regaining my sight. I have found the means of redemption.

01:07:52

Isn't that enough motivation right there? I'm glorifying God. I'm obeying His command.

01:07:58

And as a sinner, I'm pointing other sinners to that. And so why is it that I have to know what only

01:08:03

God knows again? Remember I said earlier, one of the most common objections that people make assumes, it goes on the assumption, we somehow know the identity of the elect.

01:08:12

We don't. That's why we proclaim the gospel to everyone. We don't look around for the elect and go, well, that guy over there looks a little bit elect, so I'll go give him a tract.

01:08:23

I'll go witness to him. It's sort of like the mockery of the street screechers last week in Mesa, the week before last in Mesa, where they were yelling at me, don't give that one a tract,

01:08:33

James. He's not elect. They're mocking God. They're going to answer for that. But we don't know who the elect are.

01:08:39

And so we evangelize everybody. And we're not held accountable for having knowledge of God's secret will.

01:08:50

It's His. The things that have been revealed belong to us, to our children. The secret things of God belong to Him.

01:08:56

We're not to pry into those things. And we're not held accountable for trying to act on that knowledge that we're not given.

01:09:03

And yet, so much of this type of argumentation is based upon that. Has no love for. Has no interest in.

01:09:09

How can we, with any degree of confidence, persuade that person that God loves him and would want him saved?

01:09:18

That's not our job. What's the proclamation? Repent and believe. Those who believe, the promises of God are given to them.

01:09:26

Part of the big problem with the kind of evangelism people do is that they will give the promises of God to people who will not repent and believe.

01:09:33

Which includes God's love and acceptance. See, there's a difference.

01:09:40

Here's another really glowing area where there's a vast difference between being reformed and non -reformed. And even how you present the

01:09:46

Gospel and understand it. Maybe we're dealing with a person and we never know until they persevere to the end and die and save.

01:09:51

We never know if the person we're looking at is someone who God loves. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the proclamation.

01:09:59

Because it's not based upon that. You know, J. Adams, who wrote the book Competent to Counsel and many other good books on counseling, apart from being a good writer on counseling, is a five -point

01:10:09

Calvinist. Yes, he is. And very strongly so. Mm -hmm. Adamantly so. And one of the things that I would have to take issue with him on in his book

01:10:16

Competent to Counsel, a book which, in general, I recommend heartily, is that he says when you're counseling a person, you should never tell them that Jesus died for them.

01:10:27

I'll respond to that in just a moment, but I've at least got to give Mr. Gregg props at this point that he would recommend a book.

01:10:33

There are many Arminians. And Mr. Gregg says he doesn't know Arminians like this. I hardly know any that aren't.

01:10:38

But there are many Arminians who would never recommend such a book because of one statement like that.

01:10:44

Many, many, many, many. So give him credit where credit's due. Because we don't know if the person you're counseling is one of the elect or not.

01:10:54

And if they are not of the elect, it would be untrue to tell them that Christ died for them. I agree a thousand percent.

01:11:01

And I know all about the traditions that men bring to this. And, oh, I'd have to be able to tell them that.

01:11:09

Why? So that they can mock the death of Christ? So that they can turn the death of Christ into something that only makes salvation possible, theoretically possible, rather than actually saves?

01:11:20

I mean, where are our priorities here? Well, I don't want to offend somebody. How about offending

01:11:25

God? How about being concerned about offending God and presenting a view of the death of His Son that substantially diminishes the glory of that work?

01:11:34

Now, this is where Calvinism brings you. Yes, it is. Today, Adams is 100 % correct.

01:11:39

Yep. If Calvinism is correct. That's right. You could never tell anyone with certainty God loves you.

01:11:45

Jesus died for you. Now, notice, unfortunately, Mr. Gregg seems to, at this point, especially when you get into the assurance stuff, and he's going to buy into some of the

01:11:53

Wilkins stuff, at least as far as arguing against Calvinism. Maybe he doesn't buy into it entirely in his viewpoint, thankfully.

01:12:01

But here's where you get the idea that assurance, knowledge, all these things, it either has to be complete and infallible or it doesn't exist.

01:12:10

He's going to say Calvinists can have no assurance. Now, if he hadn't gotten quite so wound up, then he might have said something along the lines of,

01:12:20

Calvinists have a lesser level of assurance than I claim that I can have, or something like that.

01:12:26

When you say that, no assurance. You can't tell them God loves them. What you tell them is

01:12:31

God loves those who repent and have faith in Jesus, and that that is an absolute promise without qualification.

01:12:40

That's what you tell them. And see, the problem is, you're trying to, when you have the wrong view of man's will, when you don't view him as the enemy of God, when you don't view the work of salvation as the work of the

01:12:52

Spirit of God, when the Spirit of God comes and brings regeneration, and when you're trying to get an enemy of God to believe and repent on their own, which is what the semi -plagian is stuck doing, which is what the synergist is stuck doing, then, yeah, you want to, it's like you're selling a car.

01:13:09

You want to talk about all the good things about the car, you know, and get them interested right from the start.

01:13:16

That's why it sounds so different today in evangelical churches than what you read in Acts and what you read in the

01:13:24

Scriptures. God has a wonderful plan for your life. God wants you to share eternity with him.

01:13:31

God has a wonderful plan for your life, unless you repent and believe it's in hell. I mean, is that not what the

01:13:37

Scriptures teach? It is! You know, God wants you to be with him. It's like this

01:13:42

God who has all these unfulfilled desires, and you're the key to the fulfillment of God's desires.

01:13:47

That's not biblical. Show me where the apostles preached that one to a bunch of reparate sinners.

01:13:56

I'd like to find that, but they don't realize there is no place to find that. God wants you to repent, because, in fact, if God wanted to,

01:14:03

God would simply make sure it happened. And the person you witness to might turn out to be one of those people that God doesn't make it happen to.

01:14:11

And you are not accountable there, too. That's not the point. Those people who doesn't repent or doesn't persevere, therefore they turn out to, in fact, not be of the elect, and that gives the lie to all the promises and all the good things you said about God's intention toward them.

01:14:26

Well, if you'd just been biblical in your presentations, that wouldn't have been an issue. You could never say those things with conviction if you're really a

01:14:32

Calvinist. All you could say is, if you happen to be lucky enough to be one of the elect, then Jesus died for you.

01:14:38

Of course, I can't tell you whether you're one of the elect or not. In fact, you can't even know for sure right now if you're one of the elect. So neither you nor I can know whether Jesus died for you or not.

01:14:45

But maybe he did. But if you repent and believe, the promises are for you.

01:14:52

There's a chance of it. Maybe you could try it out and see if it works. And if it works, then you're one of the elect.

01:14:57

And this just is not the way the Gospel is presented in Scripture. Try it? You are exactly right. That is not the way that the

01:15:04

Gospel is ever presented in Scripture. No two ways about it. It's not a matter of trying things out.

01:15:10

The command is to all men everywhere, repent and believe. It is not presented to us in the epistles that way or in Christ's teaching that way.

01:15:18

I agree. Nor is it ever presented that way in the book of Acts. That is simply not the Gospel of Scripture. Right.

01:15:24

And yet it is of necessity the Gospel of Calvinism. There's no way to believe in Calvinism without coming to that conclusion.

01:15:31

Completely and totally wrong. Only a demonstration that Mr. Gregg really doesn't understand the issues addressed.

01:15:37

Yes, you could say we must evangelize because we're commanded to. But what can we say? You can say, repent and believe.

01:15:45

And all of God's promises and all of God's grace and all of the perfection of the work of Christ is a possession of those, promise to those.

01:15:56

Repent and believe. What's so difficult about that? What is our message? What can we say to the unbeliever who has not yet demonstrated himself to be elect?

01:16:07

And what is... I turn this around to Mr. Gregg. What good is it to present the idea

01:16:13

Jesus has died for you. He's made you savable. Now, he wants to save you, but he might fail.

01:16:21

But once he does save you, you can trust him, maybe, but still might fail because you've got the ability to stop.

01:16:29

Is that really what the presentation is? He didn't make any promises of any kind? I don't see how anyone could.

01:16:41

There is a statement of Clark Pinnock, not a loved man, in the

01:16:46

Calvinist camp, and some Armenians want to distance themselves from him too, but I like him, frankly.

01:16:51

I don't agree with everything he says, but I believe he says some very profound things. Yeah, okay.

01:16:57

So he's the open theist, a non -inherentist who likewise believes in post -mortem evangelism and denies the...

01:17:10

He's in the conditional mortality and there's no hell and... Okay.

01:17:17

I'll be straightforward here, being the unloving Calvinist I am. Clark Pinnock is a heretic.

01:17:23

He's an apostate. That's all there is to it. I mean, if those words have meaning and we honor

01:17:28

God's truth, then anyone who says, well, you should never say anything of that, you're concerned more about man's feelings than you are

01:17:35

God's truth. That's the only way that we can understand the direction you're going there.

01:17:41

And Clark Pinnock is someone who opposes the gospel of grace, the gospel as a whole.

01:17:46

Which the evangelical community is made uncomfortable by. But on page 21 of the notes

01:17:52

I've given you, on the non -Calvinist column, there are two quotes. The second one is by Clark Pinnock, comes from the book

01:18:00

Grace Unlimited, which he edited and wrote some up. In that place, on page 11,

01:18:07

Pinnock wrote, We consent to Paul's judgment that God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and to Peter's conviction that God is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to...

01:18:20

should reach repentance. If it seems controversial to assert this conviction boldly and unashamedly, then it ought at least to be admitted that here is a truth far more deserving of controversy than many which are debated.

01:18:34

On it hangs, we believe, the validity of the universal offer of the gospel and the possibility of Christian assurance.

01:18:42

And I agree in the sense that these are vital issues.

01:18:48

And I agree that both those issues are touched upon by the a -contextual citations that were just given and the applications, the a -contextual applications made that go along with them.

01:19:00

No question about it. The free and universal call of the gospel evidently depends upon God not having a purpose and God having basically human limitations.

01:19:13

And then the assurance issue, well, we'll get into the assurance issue in just a moment. We'll talk about that in a moment. If we do not know that God loves all sinners, we do not know that God loves us.

01:19:25

If we do not know that God loves all sinners, we do not know that God loves us. False. False.

01:19:31

Why? Because the promise of God is for those who repent and believe. It's not just, well, there's this peanut butter type of love of God.

01:19:41

It's just spread all over the place. And how can, and you want to talk about assurance? You know,

01:19:47

God's love for those who are in hell, of course, Pinnock doesn't believe in hell, but God's love for those in hell is equal to those in heaven, right?

01:19:53

Wrong. Wrong. And how could that, how would that affect your assurance if God loved the people in hell as much as he does the ones in heaven?

01:20:03

In the exact same way, this peanut butter type prayer, this peanut butter type of love. How would that affect your assurance?

01:20:11

You better believe it would affect your assurance. It would affect the whole grounds upon which you believe that God could keep you, keep you from falling.

01:20:19

So, yeah, he's right. Those are very important, but the answers he comes up with are heretical. I'm not talking about Greg.

01:20:24

I'm talking about Clark Pinnock at that point. And we do not know that he loves those to whom we take the gospel.

01:20:32

Can anyone find a fault in this seamless reasoning? Um, yes. It's obvious, clear, and devastating.

01:20:40

If we don't know that God loves all sinners, then we have no way of being sure that he loves us.

01:20:47

Not true. Because we too are sinners. Yes, we are. And we have no way of knowing that he loves the people that we're preaching to.

01:20:53

That's not part of the need for me to know. I leave that in God's hands. That's why we, that's why the parable of the sower, you know, you sow the seed wherever, and it's up to God to give the increase and the different kinds of soils and things like that, remember?

01:21:08

Does that not emasculate the evangelist? Doesn't that cut his hands off?

01:21:14

Um, just the opposite. Just the opposite. It emboldens the evangelist, because I can preach the gospel to anybody and leave it in God's hands knowing that there is absolutely no power in heaven and earth that can stop the

01:21:25

Holy Spirit of God from bringing his elect unto himself. Just the opposite. And his tongue out and say, sorry, you must evangelize, but you can't offer anything with any assurance to anyone.

01:21:36

It's not a matter of offering. It's a matter of commanding. The gospel is a command, not an offer. The offer is those who repent and believe.

01:21:44

But the command is to repent and believe. If you don't understand the difference between those two things, you're going to be very, very confused.

01:21:51

And your audience is going to be very, very confused as well. You can just hold out possibilities, potentialities, and then...

01:21:57

Yeah, possibilities and potentialities. Christ might have made you savable, but, you know, we don't know. That's where the potentiality comes in here.

01:22:04

Of course, if the person is really elect, then it'll happen with them. Well, what will happen? In response to what message?

01:22:11

That's the question. What is the message? Well, the message of Calvinism is not logically consistent with the message as preached and exhibited and explained in Scripture, as I understand it.

01:22:23

And as we have seen, that is not the case. And it is quite true. Now, some are going to object.

01:22:29

A Calvinist would object, of course, to him saying that if we don't know that God loves all sinners, we can't know that he loves us.

01:22:36

And yet the Calvinists say, well, sure, we can know that he loves us because we're the elect. No, that is not what a Calvinist would say.

01:22:41

I'm sorry. That is not what a Calvinist would say. Calvinists don't go, I know I'm elect. How about you? Yeah, I'm elect too.

01:22:47

Do you have your elect card with you? I've got a new one. In fact, I got a better picture of my electness on my elect card today.

01:22:53

Did you see my... I'm going to have to get another one of those. That's not what we do. God has commanded us to repent and believe.

01:22:59

We've repented and believed. And we are still repenting and believing. And that is the sign of the Spirit's work in our hearts. Calvinism doesn't teach that God loves no one.

01:23:08

Calvinism teaches that God loves the elect. He loves his sons, redemptively. Those that he has chosen to be adopted in his family.

01:23:15

He loves them. And we know that we are them. But the next question...

01:23:21

Again, the frustration is that because of such a narrow exposure to Reformed literature, that I...

01:23:30

Obviously, Mr. Gregg actually believes that he's accurately representing the Reformed perspective at this point.

01:23:35

He's not, but he does believe he is. Calvinists must deal with, and they can never do so very well. Here's something.

01:23:40

We can never do so... We can never do very well. Notice the term, never. I've exposed myself to a very narrow spectrum of this writing, but I will expand that to never.

01:23:51

They can never address this well. Well, what is it that we can never do well? Without making a few skips in logic and reasoning, how do we know we are them?

01:24:02

Ah, assurance. How do we know that we are them? Of course, we're not claiming that we are them in the sense of going around looking for the elect cards, but what is the grounds of assurance?

01:24:15

And here's where really... I mean, we've seen it before, but here's another area where the rubber really meets the road here.

01:24:20

This is why you see this is so important. How do I know I am elect?

01:24:26

Now, you know what? I've sometimes asked Calvinists why they're so adamant to make me into a

01:24:32

Calvinist. I don't spend very much effort, or I don't have much incentive to turn them into an Arminian. I don't care if a man's a

01:24:39

Calvinist. Some of my very favorite authors who lived a godly life and are going to be higher than I am in heaven, they were

01:24:45

Calvinists. I do not think Calvinism is going to damn a man. I'm glad to hear that.

01:24:50

As long as he doesn't live consistently with it. I'm not glad to hear that. That sounds like how

01:24:56

I respond to Rome. Yeah, a person can be saved in the Roman Catholic Church, but they're not saved by the Roman Catholic Gospel.

01:25:03

If they're consistent with the Roman Catholic Gospel, then, yeah, they're not saved. And here you just said, well, if you're really consistent with Calvinism, then you've got a real problem.

01:25:12

Not sure that that's much of a positive thing to say. The fact that Calvinists can be good

01:25:18

Christians is only true because people are inconsistent creatures. Wow. Again, you think about how consistent people like Spurgeon were, and Warfield, and Machen, and Hodge, and you think about all these people, and you realize that this man doesn't really know anything about them.

01:25:33

He calls Spurgeon his hero, but he clearly doesn't understand Spurgeon, clearly has no concept of the sovereignty of God in evangelism that Spurgeon...

01:25:43

I mean, he could not say the things he said if he really has any idea of Spurgeon's dedication to these issues and how they influence the consistency of his preaching at that point.

01:25:53

But still, to say that they were inconsistent and that their godliness,

01:26:00

I guess, was inconsistent with their Calvinism, and yet they would say, that's where it came from.

01:26:07

That's tough. They can believe one thing, or profess to believe one thing, and actually do another thing. Calvinists all act like Arminians in some areas.

01:26:16

I beg to differ. Because they do pray as if something could change. They pray as if something could change.

01:26:24

So Calvinists, if they pray, are acting like Arminians. Of course, the Calvinists would say, why does the Arminian pray in the first place?

01:26:30

Because his god can't change anything. Anyhow, because man is the sovereign will in these things, and God's isn't. So if you pray that God would change you, and if you pray that God's will would be done, and if you let your requests be known to God, even if you recognize the fact that God's will is eternal, his decreed will is eternal, that means you're acting like an

01:26:51

Arminian. I'm just trying to get all these things straight. They do make decisions. They do preach the gospel.

01:26:58

Decisions? Oh yes, that's right. Mr. Gregg thinks we don't make decisions. He does not understand compatibilism, does not even accurately represent anything close to compatibilism, actually says that we believe that God makes decisions for us, which of course is not true, but that's part of the strawman foundation of this response.

01:27:18

They do believe they must persevere, and they do act as if they have free choice, but in the back of their minds, they don't believe that any of those things are true, because they don't have a real free choice, and they don't really change.

01:27:28

Real free choice. You're probably used to this by now, because this isn't the only person who says that real free choice means, free choice can only exist if, well,

01:27:41

God doesn't have it. That's what they're saying. Don't miss the point.

01:27:46

Those who believe in an autonomous free will, that the creature is autonomous, there is no decree. He can do whatever he wants, and God can't change it.

01:27:55

God can't do anything he wants, but the creature can. Don't miss the fact that that's the only real freedom there is.

01:28:03

The idea that God could define, circumscribe an area in which man is free and morally accountable without abandoning his own nature and his own purpose.

01:28:14

No, no, no, no, no. God can't do that, because a man couldn't, see. Oh, so God can only do what men can do.

01:28:22

The eternal God can only do what temporal creatures can do. Okay, I can't say that. I'm just getting these things straight.

01:28:28

My prayer's all been determined. But they can act like Arminians. A .W.

01:28:33

Tozer, who was an Arminian, I mean, A .W. Tozer was not a Calvinist, when he was asked whether he was

01:28:39

Calvinist or Arminian, he said, well, I'm a Calvinist when I pray, and I'm an Arminian when I preach.

01:28:46

And that's really how an awful lot of Calvinists are, too, or a lot of Christians in general.

01:28:51

You pray as if everything was up to God. That's sort of a Calvinist inclination. But you preach as if everything is up to your hearer.

01:28:58

He has to respond. That's an Arminian kind of an inclination. And that's one of the main problems here, is that Mr.

01:29:06

Gregg just does not seem to understand or accept the reality of the fact that you can have man making decisions and man's will being active without overthrowing the decree of God, which we see in Genesis 50, which we see in Isaiah 10, which we see in Acts 4.

01:29:23

It's right there, but I see no evidence that he is aware of those particular things.

01:29:31

And insofar as most Calvinists, who are true Christians, end up acting like Arminians anyway and talking like Arminians, unless they're talking about the five points specifically, they say all other things the same way

01:29:42

Arminians do, unless they're trying to defend this particular structure and paradigm. Of course,

01:29:48

Calvinists can be very good Christians, and most of them that I've known have been, and certainly some of the very best

01:29:54

Christians I've known have been Calvinists. So I have no campaign to turn Calvinists into Arminians.

01:30:00

Now, of course, I simply have to point out to Mr. Gregg, Calvinists want to be consistent in their theology.

01:30:09

They want to be consistent in applying God's truth across the spectrum of their lives.

01:30:15

So they would not consider this to be a compliment in any way, shape, or form to say that they're inconsistent with their

01:30:24

Calvinism and that's what makes them a good Christian. I think he needs to realize how rather upsetting that would be.

01:30:30

The only reason I'm even teaching on it now, and I didn't for years, is because there's such a move on the Calvinist side to turn everyone into Calvinists these days.

01:30:38

I mean, it's a fairly fresh and new thrust. And I'm only speaking up because I think that thrust could succeed if there's not a voice of biblical reason brought into the debate.

01:30:48

And I'm trying to do my best to be as close to that ideal as possible.

01:30:56

But... Biblical reason. You know, it's obviously...

01:31:02

I'm sure that's exactly how Mr. Gregg views himself and, you know, I understand his motivations.

01:31:08

I think he needs to understand just how very biblical Calvinists believe that they are.

01:31:15

And Calvinists who know Arminianism very well believe that they are.

01:31:33

You know, I don't know, Mr. Gregg, so I can't comment on that.

01:31:39

But the reason that I have sought to present Reformed theology is because I believe it's the biblical truth and God is honored when his truth is proclaimed.

01:31:50

Basically, I mean, that's the simplest way to put it, is that God is honored when his truth is proclaimed. God is not honored by fuzzy, muddled thinking about his truth.

01:32:01

That's the primary reason I believe it's true and that Christians should honor God's truth.

01:32:06

What would change in my life? Well, they said, well... They always say this. They say

01:32:12

Calvinism brings more glory to God because it describes a higher degree of sovereignty. We've already discussed that. But the other point is always this.

01:32:19

It gives a basis for assurance of salvation. Well, yeah. In the sense that it glorifies

01:32:25

God in the Gospel. You have an atonement that actually saves. You have a God who actually saves.

01:32:31

You do not have the Trinity. You don't have the Father decreeing salvation, the Son dying to procure salvation, the Spirit coming to apply salvation.

01:32:37

And the entire triune God can be frustrated by the almighty creature. So on that level, yeah.

01:32:45

That is what provides the foundation of assurance is that the faith that I have in this

01:32:52

God is faith in a God who does not fail. Faith in a God who can promise that I will never perish.

01:33:01

Mr. Gregg's position is, well, God won't throw you out. And nobody else can drag you out, but you can get yourself out.

01:33:06

Well, that means I will perish. So, yeah. Assurance and the nature of the

01:33:13

Gospel do tend to go together. Because it believes in the perseverance of the saints, that if you're one of the elect, you will never fall away.

01:33:19

And if you don't have this doctrine... If you're one of the elect, no. If you are one that has been changed by the

01:33:27

Spirit of God and that your purpose for being changed is the glory of God and the means by which you've been changed is through the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf and it's been applied to you by the

01:33:40

Spirit of God, then, yeah, that's the basis of assurance, is that the reason

01:33:45

God has done this in you is not because he just happens to be able to get you to do what he wants you to do.

01:33:54

The terminology Mr. Gregg is using to pass is that God can put your arm behind your back. It doesn't mean he can necessarily make it work.

01:34:01

He can't necessarily convert you, but he can put the arm behind the back and really put pressure on you and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

01:34:07

Well, that's not the grounds of assurance. That is certainly not the grounds of Christian assurance.

01:34:16

How could you be sure that you will die saved? If it is possible for the elect to fall away, then maybe you will fall away.

01:34:25

You could have no assurance. Without the Calvinist doctrine, you could have no assurance that you will die saved and end up in heaven after all.

01:34:33

It's not just Calvinist doctrine of election, but the whole concept of the fact of a difference between a

01:34:39

God -centered salvation, where God is glorifying himself by the salvation of a specific people, not by anything that they do, not in a synergistic sense, but a monergistic sense, and the synergistic concept, which always introduces the concept that since man's free will is the ultimate good, in essence, in that system, that it must be allowed to exercise itself to the point where, well, maybe evil will exist in heaven.

01:35:07

Maybe the person who is truly united with Christ can still be lost because of the almighty creaturely will.

01:35:14

My response is, maybe it is so that by not being a

01:35:20

Calvinist, I could not be sure whether I will die saved. But by being a

01:35:25

Calvinist, I could not be sure that I am saved now. This is where some real confusion is demonstrated.

01:35:34

It really, really, really is. And this is a fact. And here's how I reason. And there's no arguing against this in Calvinism.

01:35:41

There's no arguing against this. When I will talk about the syntax of a participle or the grammar of a perfect tense verb or something like that,

01:35:58

I might slip into, there's no arguing this. But this is where I just have to wonder, and I know

01:36:05

Mr. Gregg's going to listen to this, why say that? Just because you have not exposed yourself to a whole lot of Reformed theology, why does it follow that there is no argument about this matter?

01:36:16

That I just don't understand. Because there clearly is. I mean, we're providing it right here. And we're not the only ones.

01:36:22

Anyone who's listened to this from a Reformed perspective who knows their faith would be arguing the same way that I am.

01:36:28

So why say that? ...have sputtered and never been able to answer effectively. Because there is, to my mind, no answer to this fact.

01:36:35

Sputtered? If indeed, the only way that a person proves himself to be elect is by enduring to the end.

01:36:42

And this is, of course, the case because it's not a matter of feeling good about God right now or living a holy life now.

01:36:47

That's not it. Because a lot of people have done that before and fallen away. Fortunately, not as many as could be imagined.

01:36:54

But there have been some. I've known some. Some of you have known some. I know people who were zealously evangelistic, rejoicing in the

01:37:01

Lord, delivered from sin and drugs in their life, and serving God for years. Backslid. Went back into drugs.

01:37:07

Died of an overdose. My assurance is not, right now, based upon something that I cannot look forward to in the future.

01:37:19

I mean, again, we have a confusion, evidently, between having infallible certainty and having biblical assurance.

01:37:27

Biblical assurance in 1 John 5 refers us back to everything that preceded it in 1

01:37:34

John. By these things, we know that we have eternal life. But what are those things?

01:37:41

Well, love the brethren, not loving the world. There is the ability to grow in the grace and knowledge of the

01:37:46

Lord Jesus Christ. And I believe growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ means that you're going to be growing in your assurance. You're going to be growing in your knowledge of God and your relationship with Him.

01:37:53

And all these things are related to one another. And so, there's a growing assurance that comes as you walk with God through your life, as you experience sanctification.

01:38:04

So, if He's saying, well, you need to be able to say you have an absolute assurance. You need to claim infallibility. You know, it sounds like I'm debating with Roman Catholics again about having an infallible canon and we have to be infallible and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

01:38:16

If we just avoid the excess terminology and allow the right terminology to be used, real assurance, spirit -born assurance, assurance that flows from sanctification, we wouldn't be having most of this conversation.

01:38:29

One man in particular who led many people to the Lord, loved God, died of AIDS because of sins that he fell back into.

01:38:37

These people had such evidences of true salvation in their lives, both in their hearts, in which they greatly rejoiced in salvation and loved

01:38:46

God and their fervency was evident to all. How do you know that? I'm sorry, but, you know,

01:38:52

I can talk about my heart. I can't talk about somebody else's. All you can do is say, this is what I saw from the outward view.

01:39:01

But you can't say they rejoiced in their heart. You don't know that. They said that. What was the nature of that?

01:39:06

You don't know. And yet they fell away. I mean, what I can say is this. On Calvinist premises, these persons were not saved when they seemed to be because if they had been, they would have stayed saved.

01:39:18

You know, if you fall away, it only shows you never were elect because the elect never fall away. If by that what is being said is that in the final analysis there is the fact that Jesus Christ will never ever lose his elect people, that is quite true.

01:39:39

But the tendency of critics of Reformed theology is to conflate and to collapse our experience of God's eternal decrees and our experience of knowing what the end is.

01:39:54

I mean, the Bible tells us what the end is. You know, we see in Ephesians chapter 2, you know, seated in heavenly places. We know what the end is.

01:40:00

They tend to collapse all that into a very thin layer and forget that we still have to experience

01:40:08

God's work in our lives. We still have this ongoing situation. So yes, we know that in the final analysis these are the things that are true.

01:40:15

And if someone denies the faith and is clearly, you know, denies

01:40:22

Christ, etc., etc., okay, that would be true. But we can't see the heart. We don't know, you know,

01:40:28

I certainly pray to finish my life in a way that glorifies God. I certainly pray that I will not be like Solomon, that I would not experience that, you know, because the older you get, you know, people seem to think it gets easier.

01:40:42

It doesn't. It actually only gets harder, to be perfectly honest with you. And that's why we're to continue growing in the grace and knowledge of the

01:40:49

Lord Jesus Christ. We get apathetic, and old age brings all sorts of problems and a hardness of heart and things like that.

01:40:56

So I pray that I will glorify God in my final days.

01:41:02

That is the desire of my heart. That's what I want to see happen, no matter what difficulties come my way, no matter what tragedies, no matter what betrayals

01:41:11

I experience in life, whatever it might be, that I will glorify God in what I experience.

01:41:17

But that does not, it does not follow that all of us have an equally glorious ending.

01:41:24

The point, of course, would be a person who denies Christ, yes, that would be true from the eternal perspective they were not elect.

01:41:31

But we cannot look into people's hearts. That's one of the reasons there are warnings in Scripture.

01:41:37

As I stand before the congregation of God, I can't look into people's hearts. And as I've been a

01:41:42

Christian for a number of decades now, I know of apostates. I know of people who, at one point in my life, would have said that, as far as I can tell, yes, that person's a

01:41:52

Christian. That's my brother. I rejoice that person. And then five years later, they're not in the faith anymore.

01:41:58

And I think that's what the parable of the soil is all about. Don't be surprised that there are going to be those who are going to flourish for a while.

01:42:05

But it's that fruit, abiding to eternal life, that really, really determines the work of God.

01:42:12

Now, if that is true, then these people I'm describing, who did fall away and died in that state of fallenness, they were not saved earlier, despite all the evidences that they were.

01:42:23

Now, I can allow this, if such a thing were biblically possible to sustain, which I don't believe it is, but I could allow for this to be true.

01:42:30

The only problem is, if it is true, I can't be sure that I'm saved. Because these people whose later history showed that they weren't saved, according to Calvinist views, gave so many evidences of being saved that I'm not sure that I have more evidence than they have.

01:42:44

Now, again, he's looking at the outward man and confusing that with his own inward testimony.

01:42:50

It's the spirit who gives testimony to our spirits that we are the children of God. Enduring faith is the work of the

01:42:56

Holy Spirit within us. I do not look to myself. I look to the Holy Spirit of God to keep me and to preserve me.

01:43:02

And the whole idea that, well, if there's apostasy, then that means I can never know I'm saved.

01:43:08

And because I can't know whether I'm one of the elect, because, you know, these other people look like they were elect.

01:43:14

Well, what is that saying? All of this, this entire conversation is totally based upon our observations and our human actions.

01:43:21

That's one of the main differences, is that a person who believes in theocentric salvation, salvation to God's glory alone, and by his power alone, just doesn't think along these lines.

01:43:33

This isn't part of the experience that it's me, me, me, me, me.

01:43:38

I mean, yes, there are. I've counseled with people in a pastoral situation where they, and this is the unusual group, it's not the majority group, where they become overbalanced in self -examination.

01:43:54

And they don't experience the joy of God and they don't experience the joy of their salvation because they are contemplating things too closely.

01:44:04

They don't embrace the promises of God in Christ and have the balance that we should have in the

01:44:11

Christian life, where you have both self -examination and sober examination and acknowledgement of one's sin, along with the rejoicing that comes in acknowledging that my salvation is not found in myself but in Jesus Christ.

01:44:23

But this is not just an Arminian Calvinist issue in any sense.

01:44:28

And given what he's going to say about his own source of assurance later on, again, I think the vast majority of these objections, other than the one of, well, knowing whether you're elect or not, which isn't the issue anyways, would come back on Mr.

01:44:41

Gregg's position, too. But I'm sick. I hate to tell this story because it is so grieving to my own heart.

01:44:47

Now, let me stop here. He's about to tell the story. He's going to, unfortunately, he doesn't know the story very well.

01:44:54

He's talking about Horatio Spafford, who wrote It Is Well With My Soul, a beautiful hymn.

01:45:01

And, of course, most people know that, at least according to his daughter, anyway, that he had written this poem that became a hymn when the ship he was on passed the point where the ship that his wife and daughters had been on, that had sunk and his daughters were killed, had gone down.

01:45:19

And so most people know that part of the story. What most people don't know is that Spafford and his wife later had more children, but some of them died, too.

01:45:30

And they eventually went to Jerusalem and started the Christian colony or the

01:45:36

American colony, I believe is what it's called, in Jerusalem, which was basically based on premillennial speculations.

01:45:45

And some sources, not all sources, say that he made some kind of delusional claim to being a messiah.

01:45:51

Now, other sources don't even make a reference to it, and I did not find any first -hand references to substantiate this.

01:45:59

But let's say just for the story that Horatio Spafford did in fact have some type of a...

01:46:10

it spoke of his dying of malaria and delusional things toward the end of his life, in other words, is what's being presented.

01:46:17

He goes to this story, and what I'd like to do is just sort of skip past some of that and get to his application here, if I can.

01:46:22

In his later years, sadly, he went to Israel, proclaimed himself the second messiah, and suffered in a delusion by himself.

01:46:31

Now, we either have to say that the man was mentally incompetent and he was saved. God saved him anyway, even though he had kind of a flaky close to his life and poor testimony.

01:46:41

Or we have to say that he didn't persevere. And in a sense, if a person didn't persevere in a sound mind, became a heretic and so forth, in Calvinist terms, that's defection.

01:46:51

That's not perseverance. Actually, I'd have a hard time, given the malaria and given the disease aspect, to connect the two together and say, oh yeah, he died as a heretic, and hence he didn't persevere and so on and so forth.

01:47:03

The application he's going to make here is, well, here's this beautiful hymn. If he experienced these things, and yet he was lost, this is a contradiction.

01:47:08

Calvinism is basically the argument that's being made. Now, here's the problem. If this man did not persevere...

01:47:17

I'm sorry. I cut out the part where he said that was Ira Sankey, but I skipped over it. It doesn't matter. It was a different individual.

01:47:23

He just got the name wrong. No big deal. As Calvinism suggests, he was not elect. That means he was never saved.

01:47:29

How does one account for the incredible grace of God upon him? I'm sorry. Speculations about people's hearts like this, given especially the lack of exegesis so far, rigorous exegesis and a knowledge of reformed exegesis, doesn't impress me with its weight in any way.

01:47:47

To suffer the loss of his entire financial holdings and the loss of four daughters and still give glory to God.

01:47:54

Sincerely, it would appear. And to be a close associate with D .L. Moody, and Moody never noticed the guy's not really saved.

01:48:00

So? The apostles didn't catch on to Judas right off the bat either.

01:48:06

Paul mentions all sorts of people who defected from him who were a part of his ministry and their defection hurt him.

01:48:13

Anyone who's been in ministry for any period of time at all knows exactly what this is about. We can't see into people's hearts.

01:48:18

None of this has to do with whether God is sovereign in the matter of salvation or not. This is not a real good argument in regards to monergism or synergism, nor is it much of an argument in regards to assurance, which we'll get to the heart of it here in a moment.

01:48:32

Let's face it. The guy gave incredible evidence of really knowing God. But by Calvinist suggestions, he really didn't know

01:48:39

God. It was a delusion. Well, then maybe my knowing God is a delusion. Maybe I don't know

01:48:45

God. So the existence of apostasy means that on Calvinist principles we can't really know that we're saved.

01:48:54

And on other principles it doesn't mean that? Do I have as much evidence that I'm a real

01:49:01

Christian as some of these people who fell away had at one time in their life?

01:49:07

How can I know for sure? You see, the theology itself deprives me of any assurance of my salvation.

01:49:14

Only if you think the assurance of salvation for a Calvinist comes from some self -proclaimed knowledge of one's status of election rather than faith and repentance toward God, faith in the promises of Jesus Christ, and the perfection of his redemption.

01:49:30

And again, that's what Calvinists believe. And if Mr. Gregg is not familiar with that, then

01:49:36

I would invite him to do significantly more reading than he's done. Because the only way I will ever know if I'm saved now, and I can't know it now,

01:49:43

I'll only know it if on my deathbed with my dying breath I say, it is well with my soul. I'm still saved.

01:49:49

I'm going to see Jesus. I've fought the good fight. I've not defected. Now I know

01:49:54

I'm saved because I'm going to take my last breath. I won't have time to backslide again. That's supposed to be what

01:50:00

Calvinists believe? I sure hope not. I sure hope this is just a bad day or something. Because again, most

01:50:06

Calvinists sitting in the audience right now are going, excuse me, what? But see, you see, Calvinism doesn't guarantee that people won't backslide.

01:50:14

It only says if they did, they never were saved. It doesn't guarantee that people won't backslide. Therefore, it doesn't provide any conviction or any grounds for any person to have conviction that they're saved.

01:50:27

Now, excuse me? How about the perfect work of Jesus Christ who is now the high priest who intercedes in my behalf?

01:50:36

In fact, isn't that a much greater ground? I mean, again, I'm sorry Mr. Gregg did not bother to read the sources that he's criticizing, but isn't the real ground found in the fact that my high priest is interceding for me in the presence of God and there is no disruption in the

01:50:50

Godhead and if the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit determined to save a people in Jesus Christ, they are not going to fail.

01:50:55

They cannot be thwarted by the almighty will of the creature fallen man and that the fact that he intercedes on my behalf means that I cannot possibly be lost and that my faith is in that.

01:51:09

Isn't that the grounds of my assurance? Yeah, that's the grounds of assurance for Reformed folks and Mr.

01:51:16

Gregg, I think, just needs to, you know, probably pull these things and redo them. He doesn't have to, you know, become a

01:51:23

Calvinist, but it would be good if he accurately represented. I've had Calvinists say, oh, you just don't understand what

01:51:30

God does that gives me assurance in my election. Assurance in my election or how about the testament of the

01:51:36

Holy Spirit that testifies to our spirits that we are the sons and daughters of God, I think. Well, I think

01:51:43

I do. I think I do and I think that some of these people I've known personally and whose biography I've heard, I think they knew too.

01:51:49

They knew exactly what the modern Calvinist means when he says, I know I'm elect. I know that I know

01:51:55

God. I know that I'm born again. I have X, Y, Z evidence. I have this total assurance in my heart.

01:52:00

Well, are you saying that these people didn't have those things? I dare say you'd better meet them because I have known such people rather closely and intimately and I dare say they had as much assurance as any modern

01:52:14

Calvinist has ever been as much assurance as I have today and I have total assurance, by the way. I have not one doubt in my mind that I'm saved.

01:52:22

You know why? Because the Bible says I'm saved by faith and you know what? I believe God. Are there any

01:52:28

Calvinists in the audience that do not believe they're saved by faith in the promises of God in Jesus Christ?

01:52:35

Any Calvinists in the audience that don't believe? Oh, I didn't. No hands went up. Hmm. Okay. Well, we've got

01:52:40

St. Brown then. What's more, I also believe that it's not a crapshoot whether I'm going to believe

01:52:45

God on my deathbed. I can choose that too. Hmm. By the grace of God.

01:52:53

By the grace of God you're going to try to? Or you're infallibly assured of? How does...

01:52:59

How exactly... Let's put this shoe on the other foot now and see how it fits. I don't sustain myself by my strength but the

01:53:06

Bible says I'm kept by the power of God through faith. A human faith that you can abandon or a divine faith that has as its author and finisher

01:53:19

Jesus Christ. Hebrews chapter 12. The salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. That is the most significant balance of this concept in the scripture and where assurance of salvation hinges.

01:53:31

It's 1 Peter 1 .2. No, 1 Peter 1 .5. Excuse me. 1 Peter 1 .5 says we are kept that is guarded by the power of God.

01:53:41

I don't have to trust in my own strength. It's the power of God that I put my trust in.

01:53:47

I know I won't fall away because of the power of God but I'm kept by the power of God through faith. Everywhere faith is my responsibility.

01:53:56

God gives me incentives for faith. God gives me encouragement in faith but it is my decision and my responsibility and mine to be blamed if I don't have faith.

01:54:05

Faith is what I do. Faith is just believing. True. And I think he seems to have the feeling that Calvinists believe that God believes for us which of course it does not.

01:54:17

And yes, faith is what I do. But the question is can

01:54:22

God change a nature such that that nature will never stop believing?

01:54:30

One of the passages that I've not heard once and I'm up to 10 .5 hours now of Steve Gregg's lectures.

01:54:38

One of the verses I've not heard once that any of you who are familiar with me know that I repeat all the time is the text where the prophet speaks of God taking out the heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh.

01:54:49

It's regeneration. Unfortunately, Mr. Gregg has sort of mocked that. He talks about a tractor beam and a computer at one point.

01:54:56

I've never understood, you know, Norman Geisler talks about rewiring us and they're all mocking the idea that God has to change our hearts.

01:55:04

But you know, it's very scriptural. Takes out a heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh. Now, if someone likes to try to argue that a heart of stone wants to be taken out and turn into a heart of flesh, please do so.

01:55:13

I'm sure Pelagius did. But clearly, the heart of stone is a rebellious heart and there is something supernatural and supernaturally powerful in the work of God in taking out a heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh.

01:55:25

And that's regeneration. And it is the nature of the new man, the new creation in Christ Jesus, to believe.

01:55:34

And that's where supernatural faith comes from. That's why that faith continues. It's not because I am better than somebody else.

01:55:41

I mean, I would like to ask Mr. Gregg, if you believe that there is someone who can be truly united with Christ, has true saving faith in Christ, and they fall away, and you do not, doesn't that mean that since you kept your faith going and they didn't, that you're better than they are?

01:55:57

You were more sensitive. There was something better inside you because you kept producing that faith than in someone else.

01:56:07

Doesn't that follow rather inevitably? And if not, why not? And if I will believe

01:56:13

God, His power will be an unbroken supply of strength and security for me.

01:56:19

I do not experience what anyone could call eternal insecurity because I don't have a moment of insecurity. Not only do

01:56:25

I have not eternal insecurity, I don't have so much as a second of insecurity. I am secure.

01:56:31

Now, does this mean I don't believe I could fall away? Of course I believe I could fall away. If you can hold those two sides together, great, fine, wonderful.

01:56:39

I haven't heard any scriptural basis for it, but I find those to be somewhat difficult to see how the two of them relate to each other.

01:56:46

I can't just imagine why I would want to. And if I begin to trust, if I begin to change my doctrine and think that, well, you know,

01:56:54

I need to save myself, I could imagine that God would allow something to happen to me. You know, you begin to trust in yourself.

01:57:02

You begin to congratulate yourself. The Bible says, if any man thinks he stands, let him take heed lest he fall.

01:57:08

Man, as soon as you start talking about I'm standing in my own strength and you take any confidence in it, you're just waiting, looking, you're asking

01:57:15

God to knock you down. I just read yesterday about the Titanic. You know, everyone knows that the Titanic was this great technological marvel in its day.

01:57:23

It was argued that nothing could sink it. I didn't realize until yesterday I read that the builder of the

01:57:28

Titanic, the designer of it, he said, not even God could sink this ship. But I'll tell you something, if I was going to take a cruise and I found out that the builder of the ship said not even

01:57:38

God could sink this ship, I'd take a different ship. If anyone thinks he stands, he's asking for it.

01:57:46

Man, he's just inviting God. Try me. Try to sink this ship, God. I defy you.

01:57:52

Well, God takes challenges up. And if you think you can stand on your own, take heed.

01:58:00

God may just knock you down to show you can't. And people do fall away. But I don't think anyone has ever yet fallen away while trusting

01:58:07

God. People fall away because they stop trusting God and start trusting themselves and start thinking that they can do it and that they're pretty sanctified by now and they can pretty well pull this off themselves.

01:58:17

And if people fall away, that's the mistake they're making because no one ever falls away while trusting God. And of course, from a foreign perspective, you would never, ever, ever have any reason to stop trusting

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God and start trusting in yourself because it's not a synergistic cooperation. It is all of God.

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Kept by the power of God through our faith. Unto salvation. I am secure only because I fully believe that I can never trust in myself.

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God has graciously broken me of all self -confidence so that I know that I have only hope in Jesus.

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But, from his perspective, he might develop that over time, you know, and might fall away.

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The possibility is there. And then God would not be glorified in him.

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And that's the difference between anthropocentric gospel and a theocentric gospel.

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And I can't imagine ever being persuaded otherwise. If I were to be persuaded otherwise, I do believe

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I could fall away. But I have no expectation of that whatsoever. I have as much security, more security than a

01:59:23

Calvinist has any grounds to have. Why? We have been given no answer to that. None. Nothing logical or rational.

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Nothing that shows any knowledge of what we believe or the grounds of our assurance is. So, why?

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My assurance, to contrast the two, we're both believing, but I believe that my faith is born within me by the work of the

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Spirit of God. It changed nature. And God's glorifying himself in me. And so, that's the perfect work of Christ, the work of the

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Holy Spirit. It's the triune God that is at work and not dependent upon the actions of a synergistic cooperation of my will.

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If my will's involved, then yeah, I can't have any type of great assurance.

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I can have some level of assurance, but not much of one, because I know my own heart. And I know how easily

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I can be led astray. So, why? We haven't been given that answer.

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Because the Calvinist can only say, if I am elect, and I hope

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I am, and I believe I am, then I will never fall away. That's not what the

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Calvinist says. Period. End of discussion. I'm a Calvinist. I say so. And I know many more than Mr.

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Gregg does. And I've read many more than Mr. Gregg does. And I'm sorry. This is just one of those places where he's completely missed the boat.

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And he needs to go, sorry, need to do some more homework on that one. Apologize.

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We'll fix that. However, too many people who believe they were elect did fall away. So, the Calvinist must always think in the back of his mind, am

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I any better than they are? Do I have more grounds to believe I'm elect than that person believed he had?

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Maybe not. If I'm not elect, then I might fall away. In which case, it not only tells me that I won't necessarily die saved,

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I may not be saved at the moment. At least the biblical doctrine, which is the non -Calvinist view, as I understand it, teaches that I can know

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I'm saved now. I can know that I'll be saved tomorrow, the next day, and forever. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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And as long as my trust is in Him, His power will keep me, and I don't ever have to worry about being too weak, or being overpowered by temptation, so long as I'm looking to Jesus.

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Which, of course, is what every Calvinist does, and Mr. Gregg should know that. So long as I set my gaze.

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That's not a virtuous thing. I don't get some kind of credits or brownie points or gold sticky stars in heaven for looking at Jesus.

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I do that largely because I'm desperate. It's an act of desperation.

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And I do that because Jesus Christ is the author and finisher of my faith. But the desperation is what...

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And the fact that I know myself desperate means I'm going to keep looking, and I will keep receiving grace to help in time of need.

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And the reason I keep looking is because God is glorifying Himself. He's changed my heart. He's made me a new creature in Christ, and it is natural for me to look to Christ and to trust in Christ because that's what the new creature, the new creation does in the sovereign providence of God.

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Well, that is it for this very lengthy edition of Radio Free Geneva.

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We will continue, as I said, next time looking specifically at Mr. Gregg's understanding of Romans chapter 9 and its particular application to this.

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Hope you'll join us then here on Radio Free Geneva on The Dividing Line. Thank you.