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Alpha & Omega Ministries

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

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

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

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

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

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James White. Well, thank you very much, Vicki -Anne, I just, I can always trust

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Vicki -Anne to put the Dividing Line live. All I've got to do is retweet it and then everybody knows, oh, there's a

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Dividing Line going on. So I just retweeted that. Welcome to the Dividing Line on a Tuesday afternoon, not a

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Tuesday morning, because at our normal time, I forget where I was, somewhere,

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I don't know, let's see, my time, I left Albuquerque at what was that?

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It was 2 a .m. my time. So wherever I would have been at that point, 11 o 'clock, oh, wait a minute,

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I was already here at 11 o 'clock. I just arrived. Anyways, I don't know. I have completely and totally lost track of time and probably will not be good at keeping time all day and may not even get done at the right time and may do so early or late.

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I don't know, because time is very, very relative to me today. But it's good to be with you back from the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful state of Colorado and New Mexico.

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I did a live, I did live Dividing Lines last week, one from Santa Fe and one from Colorado.

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And in the process, rode my bike around a little bit last week.

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As some of you on Twitter know, it was insane. It was a level of insanity never done before.

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But here we're back in Phoenix, where it's not all that super, super, super, super hot today. I saw a lot of moisture up there, and I think it's heading our direction.

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We might get some more. Did we get some rain while I was gone? I heard something about a dust storm. The world goes crazy when we have dust storms.

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More dust than storm? Okay, yeah. Yeah. And people were asking me about that. And I'm like, well, it used to happen a whole lot more when

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I was younger than it does now. But it's still very interesting to see that dust storm coming across the valley.

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And I guess national media loves to pick it up. I guess anything weird in weather now, oh, man, must have caused that.

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Well, actually, no. But anyway, it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about today at all. I do want to thank everyone who made last week a possibility for me.

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You all know who you are. And now I just have to recover from that.

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Serious, serious subject to start off the program today. This morning, I get up. Like I said, I just sort of viewed stopping in Albuquerque yesterday as a way of breaking up a 13 -hour drive.

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Some of you out there, I realize, can do 13 -hour drives. I did a 10 -and -a -half -hour bike ride over the weekend and a nine -hour bike ride.

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But that's different. Sitting in a car is just tough. So I used that as sort of a break on my way back here.

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And two different people had sent me notes. One of them might have been a tweet.

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One of them might have been email. Maybe they're both emails. I don't even remember now. When you wake up at 1 .30

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in the morning, can you really be expected to remember which one was which? But a number of people sent me the link to an article that had just been posted.

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And as soon as I saw it and I started looking through it, I said, all right, well, there's no way.

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To avoid this is actually to say more about it than to actually not avoid it. And it was a link—in fact,

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I'm going to go ahead and go to the original here so I've got the actual site up. This is from patheos .com

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under the Friendly Atheist section for yesterday,

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July 15, 2013. The atheist daughter of a notable Christian apologist shares her story.

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And this was a guest post by Rachel Slick. Now, this has been all over the place already, and I know

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I'm a little bit behind the curve, but I, as I said, only heard about it early this morning.

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And as I looked through this, a lot of thoughts came to mind.

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Obviously, as a Christian father, I guess Rachel was born 1992, my daughter was born 1989, hence very similar ages.

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And as I read through it, I could not help but see a lot of parallels, a lot of, you know, a lot of things that just immediately touched my heart.

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Obviously, Matt and I are not identical in any way. We do things a little bit differently in certain areas, and we're individuals and so on and so forth.

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But we both have families, we both have kids, and I could not help but feel his pain, but also recognize a lot of other things that, hopefully, as we look at them and provide somewhat of a response, will be useful to everyone, even if you're not involved directly in Christian apologetics, as Matt and I are.

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But just at the beginning, one of my earliest memories is my dad's gigantic old

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Bible. Its pages were falling out. See, and I never did that. I always do the too -many -Bibles thing.

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I think if Summer were to be thinking along these lines, it would be my dad's 47 ,000 different Bibles.

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Its margins are scrawled over with notes. I never did that. And the leather cover was unraveled in places of being so worn out.

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I know somebody at church has one of these. We call it Codex Ricotonius, but that's another story. Every night after he stacked the dishes after our family dinner, he would bring it down to read a passage.

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I always requested something from the Book of Revelation or Genesis, because that's where most of the interesting stories happen. After he was done, he'd close the

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Bible with a big whomp and turn to me. Now Rachel, he would ask, what is the hypostatic union? And I would pipe back, the two natures of Jesus.

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What is pneumatology? The study of the Holy Spirit. What is the communicatio idiomatum? The communication of the properties in which the attributes of the two natures are ascribed to the single person.

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Occasionally, he would go to speak at churches about the value of apologetics, and the times I went along, he would call on me from the crowd and have me recite the answers to questions about theology.

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After I sat down, he would say, my daughter knows more about theology than you do. You are not doing your jobs as Christians to stay educated and sharpen the faith.

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Well, you know, I read that, and I remembered my own kid's childhood, and I really did personally do everything

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I could not to try to force them into being me, as much as they might want to be like Dad.

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Everybody, hopefully, if you've got a good relationship with your parents, at some point wanted to be like Dad. But the last thing

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I wanted to do was to put pressure on my kids to be like me. But because my wife has worked full -time pretty much their entire life—that's how we have health insurance and things like that, that's one of her biggest contributions to ministry—I've spent a lot of time with the kids, and they'll tell you that a lot of their memories of their younger days did have connections with apologetics, because Dad's an apologist.

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And so, one of my favorite clips to play when I speak on Islam is the fig tree question.

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Most of my friends know the fig tree question from the debate in 1999 on Long Island with Hamza Abdel -Malik.

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And I like to point out at the beginning that if you look down toward the front, the first camera shot, first camera angle is the question's beginning.

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You see Chris Arntzen, and you see my wife Kelly, and you see Summer. And Summer's turning around to look back at the questioner.

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And so, she's about nine years old or something like that at that point. So, you know, when you go to debates that your dad is doing when you're nine years old, and there's this whole line of Muslims standing there throwing questions at him, that's part of your life.

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That's part of, you know, isn't that what everybody's dad does? Well, not really. So when

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I read these things, I thought of the fact that there was a time when I bought these little whiteboards for my kids.

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And when we'd drive around, I'd throw questions at them, and they'd write stuff on the whiteboards in the back seat.

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This is much better than chalkboards would have been, which would have really messed up the car a lot, I think. But anyway, so, you know,

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I read this story, and it had a lot of connections.

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She goes on to say, Conversation with him was a daily challenge. He would frequently make blatantly false statements, such as purple dogs exist, and force me to just prove him through debate.

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He would respond to things I said demanding technical accuracy, so I had to narrow my definitions and my terms to give him the correct response, etc.,

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etc. Then there is a picture of her from Awana for being the most godly student.

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She would later complete the Awana course, memorizing over 800 Bible verses along the way. Now, 800 verses, that's going to become important a little bit later on, because the vast majority of this story is about involvement in homeschooling, and involvement in Awana, and all this kind of stuff.

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And then the beginning of karma, and stuff like that, and the things related to that.

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I was expecting this to be a really, really, really long article that would have then this big crisis point, and, you know, an in -depth discussion of that crisis point, and then some type of positive presentation of why atheism is so much better, and can be demonstrated to be true.

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I don't know why I was expecting that. Maybe because I remain naive at times, but that's not what it is.

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The vast majority of this article is all about, you know, what was going on with MAD and apologetics, and so on and so forth.

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And then you start getting into the transition stuff, and we read, "...as

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my knowledge of Christianity grew, so did my questions, many of them the classic kind. If God was all -powerful and all -knowing, why did he create a race he knew was destined for hell?

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How did evil exist? If all creation was sustained by the mind of God, why didn't I feel his presence when

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I prayed?" Now when I read questions like that, immediately my—well, just dealing with the entirety of this subject, the entirety of children who are raised in the nurture and admonition of the

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Lord, they are given a clear proclamation of the gospel. Many people really, really struggle with this particular subject, and there would be many people who would—in fact,

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I was told in channel a little while ago, I didn't have time to really look it up, that there were certain people blaming

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Matt Slick for all of this on Facebook pages, and I just rolled my eyes. Because we want to believe, and there are many

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Christian parents who do believe, that well, as long as my—as

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I'm—if I'm a Christian, my kids are going to be Christians. And we would like that to be the case. And there are certain people who actually think the

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Bible does promise that, and I would have a really hard time with that, if you go that direction, because you have some problems.

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Sadly, the normative response in evangelicalism in the

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United States today is to make that assumption. Even if you're not—for example, there are certain

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Paedobaptist perspectives that really do sort of make assumptions about covenant children that just automatically regenerate them and all is well.

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But you know what? There's a lot of evangelicals who do that, even though they don't believe in Paedobaptism. You know, they have some child dedication thing and figure, well, you know, little

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Johnny did put his hand up in second grade Sunday school, and yeah, he lives like the world, and he never goes to church, and he never thinks of Christ, and he cusses a blue streak, and he's on his fourth marriage, and he's got illegitimate children, but you know, he put his hand up in second grade, and we all believe in one saved, always saved.

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And the first thought that crossed my mind this morning, honestly, was, you know, a lot of people are going to think it's just horrible that Rachel Slick identifies as an atheist.

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But how many people are honestly going to stop and consider how horrible it is that there are so many children of Christian parents who are almost

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Christians but will go to hell, and they'll do so very comfortably without ever having raised a single concern with anybody because they say the right words, they did something when they were a kid.

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If you ask, they'll go, oh, sure, yeah, they know the right words to say, but they're almost

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Christians. They're not really Christians. There's no such thing as a nominal

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Christian in the sense of being actually a Christian. And so, isn't there actually something a little bit better about at least someone being honest in their rebellion rather than silent in their rebellion?

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Because we'd like to demand that God's grace be automatically transferred to our progeny.

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If Europe tells us anything, Europe tells us, that don't work. There were way too many people in Europe that thought that that's how it worked, and you got big state churches and great

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Christian culture. What is it today? It's a sepulcher, dead men's bones.

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Doesn't work that way. And so, I've always, as a father, prayed that God would be gracious to my children, but I realized, first of all, if it's up to me, if I somehow have to make this work, if I'm the one that has to save these kids, they're lost.

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Because if it takes being a perfect father, well, there's only been one of them, and he's the

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Heavenly Father, and I certainly make no claims whatsoever that I haven't been a perfect father by any stretch of the imagination.

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Anybody who does, you got to really wonder about them. And so,

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I know that I have a duty, but I also know that I'm not going to do that duty perfectly, and I'm going to have major failures as a father.

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And so, if it's all up to me to somehow do this, then they're in big trouble.

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And so, you present the gospel, but you also know your theology demands that you understand that if you discipline your children, if you lay down guidelines, and God does not change their hearts, at least as young people, maybe not until later in their lives, there's going to be rebellion.

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And that can be handled in different ways. Some people handle rebellion very quietly. They just internalize it, and then it explodes once they're out from underneath the roof or the control.

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And that's why I think we see so many allegedly Christian young people head off to university, and all of a sudden they are just going every which direction.

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And so, others, however, will manifest that rebellion in other ways.

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It would seem to me that the far greater plague that gets very little attention is the plague of nominalism, where there are so many people that because we don't want to deal with rebellion, we don't want to face it, they just make a profession of faith, but in our heart of hearts we know that there is no evidence whatsoever that Christ has any central location, that there's no evidence that in the rough spots of life they flee to the cross, that it's their relationship with Christ that defines everything.

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No, no, we know that. But we're more comfortable with some kind of an idea that, well, but this happened once.

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And so, you know, we're reading only one side of a story here.

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I haven't talked to Matt about this. Matt and I don't just chat with each other. Once in a while we have contact with each other.

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He had me on his program, what, a month and a half ago? Then again, so did everybody else when the book came out.

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So I haven't talked to him about this. I did contact someone else with the ministry, just to let them know that I was going to be discussing this, and I was informed that they're not going to be discussing this issue.

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So you're only hearing half the story, and I would hope that everyone would realize that, just as I would hope that you would realize that what happened with the video stuff was not even half the story.

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It's probably 1 ,500th of the story edited dishonestly.

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But I would hope that you'd realize that, and you're only getting the portion of the child that has moved away from the family.

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And keep that in mind. Just keep that in mind. I think that's important. So when these questions are asked, having a dad highly schooled in Christian apologetics meant, and this has really concerned me, that every question

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I brought up was explained away confidently and thoroughly. As soon as I saw that word away, every question

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I brought up was explained confidently and thoroughly might be one thing, but explained away? I mean, in English that would indicate a surface level answer.

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An answer that does not actually give an answer. It says, many times after our nightly

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Bible study, we would sit at the table after my mom and sisters left and debate, discuss, and dissect the theological questions I had. No stone was left unturned, and all my uncertainty was neatly packaged away.

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Think about what that means. If Christ does not satisfy in his truth, then possibly that truth has not yet actually been internalized and actually understood.

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She said, my world was built of reasonable Christians, the ones who thought, who questioned, who knew what they believed was true.

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In the face of this strength, my own doubts seemed petty. There was one belief

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I held on to strongly, though, the one that eventually led to my undoing. I promised myself, quote, I will never believe in Christianity simply because it feels right, otherwise

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I am no better than those in any other religion I debate. I must believe in Christianity because it is the truth, and if it is ever proven otherwise,

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I must forsake it no matter how much it hurts. Well, that's a good statement to make, but unfortunately the argument that she then presents, which led to her undoing, does not even begin to fulfill that standard.

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And what was it? Well, I'm going to skip down other things because it's not my intention to just read the whole thing in that way.

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There was an interesting statement here. I ran away from home when I was 17 due to reasons not pertinent to this post and went to college the following year.

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And I don't know about you, but that makes me go, hmm. And then a discussion with college professors and things like that.

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And then here's the quote -unquote crisis point. And I was reading up this point going, okay, okay, what's going to be this massive crisis point?

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This changed one day during a conversation with my friend Alex. I had a habit of bouncing theological questions off him, and one particular day I asked him this.

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If God was absolutely moral because morality was absolute, and if the nature of right and wrong surpassed space, time, and existence, if it was as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why are some things a sin in the

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Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament? Alex had no answer, and I realized

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I didn't either. Everyone had always explained this problem away by using the principle that Jesus' sacrifice meant we wouldn't have to follow those ancient laws.

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Now, I stop right there and go, whoa. Whoa. Major misunderstanding on numerous levels at this point.

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For example, it almost sounds in the first paragraph as if Rachel is presenting morality and right and wrong as something that has existence outside of the character of God, to which

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God is somehow aligned. Instead of it flowing from God's nature and God's purpose and so on and so forth, it's almost like it's something out there, almost like a fundamental property of reality as math.

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Well, math is math because God created the universe in such a way that math works. It reflects the ordered nature of God's character and God's creative purpose.

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But this, and then to say that, well, wait a minute, the only answer

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I'd been given was something about, well, that's just the Old Testament law and Jesus did away with that. That's no way.

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There's something immediately went, there's something missing here big time. Something missing here big time.

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And it says, but that wasn't an answer. Well, I guess

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I would agree because that's not even an answer that I think would have been offered. I mean, what you're asking is, well, all of God's law has to be limited to transcendent moral judgments and there can be nothing, for example,

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God cannot give a law to the people of Israel that defines for them their covenant relationship to God that would not then be binding upon everybody else for all time.

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God can't have one purpose of the people of Israel and a different purpose for the church later on. So you can't have a situation where God forbids the trimming of beards for his people as a sign of separation religiously from the pagan cultures around them and then have a time where the church, you don't have to worry about trimming your beard because the gospel is going beyond those borders.

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No, no, no, you can't. You can't do that because all the law has to be transcendent and absolute.

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And I just go, what? What? So obviously, when you analyze conversion stories, and unfortunately,

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I've had to analyze a lot of conversion stories in my life to all sorts of things, whether it's atheism, which is a worldview into itself, obviously, or Roman Catholicism or Mormonism or Islam or whatever.

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I've been there, done that, have a closet full of T -shirts. Once you get to this crisis point and you listen to what the real argument is, first of all, it's almost never what the real issue was.

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Almost never. And then secondly, when you do hear the expression of it, you really have to analyze what was being said.

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For example, I remember it just popped in my head, I guess maybe because it was a woman, but when

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Surprised by Truth first came out, the first volume of Surprised by Truth, there was this woman who was a former

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OPC member, member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And for those of you who can't keep your

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Presbyterian straight, I've often said that the two denominations that are most alike in worship, hymnology, and just sort of the way we do things are

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Reformed Baptists and Orthodox Presbyterians. Really are. We've got the same hymnals. It's weird. They think, of course, we're just odd because we're

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Baptists. And so I paid special attention to this OPC conversion story.

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And when she gets to citing from Paul, when he writes to Timothy, talking about the church, the pillar and foundation of the truth, she says,

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I had never seen this before. And I go, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I know the

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OPC. Don't tell me you've never seen this before. And don't tell me that I can't point to dozens of excellent sermons by OPC ministers that contextualize exegete, the whole nine yards, this text.

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Please do not tell me. I've never seen this before. That's just not possible. So you know that when the big issue comes up, the big crisis point comes up, almost always there's stuff that's left out.

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And then even when it's enunciated, you really have to listen carefully and go, eh, because here it says, but that wasn't an answer.

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In fact, by the very nature of the problem, there was no possible answer that would align with Christianity. Well, that is just ridiculously untrue.

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And I'm sorry, but someone who makes... See, what immediately struck me about this is that when, what, 75 % of your story is to establish your bona fides, to say, oh,

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I was this and I was that and I knew this. And oh, man, have I heard that one before?

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Have we not all heard that one before? But there's a little problem with that.

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Once you make those claims to having done all this stuff, then you have to be held accountable for knowing what you claim to have known.

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And if you don't bring those things to bear about your crisis point, then you're probably not being honest.

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I mean, we can think of real obvious examples. I think everyone would immediately start thinking of Eric Cantor, who puffs his resume, trained and lived in Turkey and da -da -da -da -da -da -da to make the conversion look better.

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But there's all sorts of other people, including other people in the Surprised by Truth series, who do the same thing, who try to make it look like they knew a whole lot more than they actually did when they decided to make their conversion because, well, it makes them more popular amongst people.

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And when you present an odd understanding of morality than a very surface -level understanding of the law and its fulfillment in Christ and the purpose of the cross and all the rest of these things and then say there was no possible answer that would align with Christianity, you're telling me

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I didn't want to find an answer that would align with Christianity for other reasons, and I think those reasons come out later on.

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And so she talks about, you know, the Bible's not infallible, it's not infallible, you've been basing your life's beliefs on the oral traditions of a

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Middle Eastern tribe, the Bible lied to you, and,

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I mean, it's within two paragraphs. I was no longer a Christian. Nothing whatsoever about Christ, about justification, none of these things.

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One of the things that is rightly pointed out here is there was never anything here about the gospel.

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There was a lot about keeping rules and things like that. There was nothing about the gospel, and that's exactly what you would expect.

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Whether this was a story, an honest story, about a young woman saying, you know what,

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I don't believe this stuff. I just don't believe it. I would think atheists would be a little bit more honest if they would just simply say, you know what, it's not that there were questions

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I couldn't answer. I've just decided I don't want to believe this. It's just a personal choice of mine. That would be a little bit more honest than to say, well, this one question just blew my faith away, when it's not really a difficult question at all, but that's how it's done.

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But I think that would even be preferable to, again, this is what kept coming across my mind as I thought about this, to the many, many, many, many others, the many more who are raised with a knowledge of the gospel, but they're just comfortable enough with their family situations, their life situations, to just play along without actually making application to their lives.

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And so they become nominal Christians, Christians in name only. I'd rather know that someone isn't really a

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Christian than someone's just playing the game. Someone's just playing the game. And at least because in that situation, you're not even dealing with the questions, and you're not really being honest with the fact that, well,

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I don't really believe that Jesus has to be so central that he's Lord of all of my life, but, you know,

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I'm going to play along. I'll play along anyways. That's a plague.

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That's a plague on the church. Rachel Slick is not a plague on the church.

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At least we know where she's standing. What's a plague on the church is the driftwood in the church that has heard the truth and is just too apathetic to do anything about it.

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I think that's much more of a plague on the church, to be honest with you. I was no longer a

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Christian. That thought was a punch to the gut, a wave of nausea and terror. Who was I now that all this had gone away? What did

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I know? What did I have to cling to? Where is my comfort? I didn't know, but I was free. See, I fully understand.

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Look, if you hear what I'm saying when

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I teach on the doctrines of grace, then you understand this. Because if God has not worked that miracle of regeneration in the heart of this young lady, then

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I can fully understand why she says what she says. And there's no way that Matt Slick or Matt's wife or a church or anybody else can raise a rebel sinner from spiritual death to spiritual life.

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It cannot be done. Only God can do that. And so my point is, if you don't preach the gospel with enough clarity, if in your church or in your context the gospel is not being preached with enough clarity, to force people to recognize that they need to be serious about it and to make decisions, then

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I would say it's not being preached at all. At least in this situation, there is enough clarity to go,

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I've either got to be a Christian or not be a Christian. And so when you say,

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I was free, you see, to the unregenerate person, what is the law? It binds you.

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It keeps you from doing the things that your flesh wants to do.

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Another thing I was thinking about was, so many Christians spend so much time lauding the autonomy of the human spirit, and here's an atheist going,

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Freedom! In fact, what's the last line? The last line here, freedom is my

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God now. And I love this one a thousand times more than I ever loved the last one.

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Did you hear that? Freedom is my God now. Freedom from what? Because the reality is, we know that Rachel's not free.

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She's actually in shackles. She cannot do righteousness. She cannot do what

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God calls her to do. But since she's given up the effort, then she feels free.

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And so freedom is my God now. I love this one a thousand times more than I ever loved the last one.

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Well, there is a statement that says it all. Because to the unregenerate person, the demand to do what only a regenerate person can do is a huge burden.

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And that's why eventually, you either have to just stop listening to the proclamation of the gospel, or you have to rebel against it.

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You have to throw off the shackles. But you see, to a true believer, you want to do what that new nature within you longs to do.

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I mean, this is Romans 7 and 8, folks. I'm very sad that Rachel does not see that she is fulfilling the scriptural picture.

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And we can obviously pray that God will have mercy and grace upon her. And maybe now that she recognizes the radical claims of Christianity in that sense, maybe there's going to be a better opportunity to do so.

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Somebody else do so. But the point is, when you make that kind of a statement, I was free, or my

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God is freedom. Freedom is my God now. And I love freedom more than I ever loved God. Well, what does that say about you as a creature?

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What does that say about your understanding of who you are and what life is?

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I mean, I don't get any evidence from this. And of course, this is a short article. But I don't get any evidence from this.

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She's really thought through what the ramifications of that might be. But it seems to me that right now, she's far more focused upon that celebration of rebellion and calling it freedom than she is thinking through what that really means for worldview, for who she is as a person.

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And unfortunately, we live in a day and a society where the entire intellectual climate has encouraged her to do this.

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I mean, she will be applauded by so many unthinkingly. But that's what will happen.

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That's what will happen. And so she says,

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Eventually, I worked with the courage to announce my choice on Facebook, which generates its own share of controversy. I'm fairly certain I broke my mother's heart.

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Many people accused me of simply going through a rebellious stage and that I would come around soon. Countless people prayed for me. I wouldn't put that in the past tense.

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I would imagine that there will be many who will continue to pray for her.

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And it says, I don't know how my dad reacted to my deconversion. I haven't spoken to him since I left home. Well, we certainly will pray for Matt, certainly pray for Rachel.

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But we need to pray for all of our children. And we need to do so in light of what the

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Scriptures teach. You know, I was raised in a day, I guess I'm really starting to feel the major disconnection with the younger generation.

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I guess the big thing today is, if you've got problems in your life, it's your parents' fault.

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I don't remember ever sitting down and having a conversation with my parents about this, but I just remember that the earliest instruction that I got, and I think it's because my parents, their earliest memories were of the depression.

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And you know what? People who lived through that didn't blame their parents. Because everybody was in it.

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They didn't blame their parents. And they were not part of the gimme, gimme, gimme generation, where everything was assumed to be, you know.

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And so I was just raised, rightly or wrongly, with the idea that you turn a certain age, and you are responsible for how you live your life.

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And my mom, who passed away a few years ago, you would say all the time, there are people who choose to be happy, and there are people who choose not to be.

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And that's your choice. And so it just never crossed my mind to blame my parents for anything in my life.

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I mean, once you're an adult, God's given you certain gifts and talents, you do it. You don't sit there and go, well, if this had happened when

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I was such and such age, then I'd be a better person, blah, blah, blah. No, I've never seen anything positive come out of that for anybody at all.

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And so the blame game, all that kind of stuff,

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I don't understand it. I will never understand. I've never seen anyone become happy and fulfilled because of that either.

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Really haven't. And so when

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I look at a situation like this, the biggest thing

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I want to take away, other than a recognition that theologically there is an answer for these things, there is an answer,

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I don't mean the objection. Theologically, what was stated here fulfills the biblical parameters.

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This isn't a shock. I'm amazed there are Christians who go, I just can't, how could something like,

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I just can't believe something like that is so naive. That is so naive, folks.

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I mean, you know, we are flooded with the numbers of Christian, quote unquote, and this is the problem.

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This is how it's put. We're flooded with numbers of Christian young people who lose their faith in university. Why were you assuming they were

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Christian in the first place? I'm not saying that we could not do a much better job than we're doing in preparing our young people to go to those places, but good grief, the young people at least at my church will tell you,

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I'm constantly talking about, now you're young people, you're going to hear this.

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I mean, we at least try, but why are you assuming just because someone goes to church once in a while that they're actually a

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Christian, that they actually have had that life -changing encounter with Christ?

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That is, and we've got to realize as we encounter more and more opposition to the faith, we have got to realize the true theological foundations the

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Bible gives us upon which we can then look at these situations and come to proper

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God -honoring conclusions. Yes, sir, when you raise the microphone, that normally means something.

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I'm thinking about he who has ears to hear, let him hear, and we as parents trying to lead our children to Christ, we need to recognize that, as you said earlier, unless that change takes place, they've got to have ears to hear.

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And I can't give them to them. We can't give them to them, and the thing is, it's frustrating. It's frustrating to experience a circumstance where, you know, all the right things are being said from the pulpit, and are you not—you know, is that getting through your head?

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And nothing. And you do all the right things. I think of—I used to listen in the 80s to David Hawking, and I will never forget the sermon he gave where he basically said, if my children didn't come to Christ, I would resign as a minister.

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Because he went on to take all of that load upon himself for converting his children, and there's just so much more to it.

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But we just have to continue to be faithful. Her life isn't over.

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We don't know what God's got in store for her, but she's responsible for what she's heard, too.

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There's no question about that. You know, people—some people—well,

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I've already addressed that. I don't have too much more I can say there. It's just, I hope we can all learn from it.

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I pray for Matt. It's got to be a real heartache, but I know his theology well enough to realize that he knows what this is all about, and he sees the same things that I've seen, the fulfillment of scriptural parameters, and you go from there.

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You don't stop being faithful. And see, I think what has concerned me most about this is where the church is entering into a time where the society around us is so soaked in unbelief and a mockery of the gospel that we are going to see a lot of apostasy.

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And we have to think through the categories in our mind to understand who a true Christian is, what makes a true

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Christian, what isn't a true Christian, because if we don't, then we're going to figure we're the last ones left on the planet. And that's not the case.

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And we're going to lose confidence that Christ is building his church. He is. But it's how he's building it, and in whom, and the way he's building it.

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We've had the wrong ideas all along. There's a lot of people that are very susceptible to this kind of an argument because they've got their eyes in the wrong place, and they don't have a theology of what really makes a person a

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Christian solidly in their mind, one derived from the pages of Scripture. And so there has to be, on all of our parts, a consideration of these things, because I truly believe that once we have to start really counting the cost of discipleship, we're going to see what's going on in England right now.

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Remember the last census. They saw this massive drop in the number of people who are called Christians. Well, does that mean

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Christ can't save anymore? Or was it the fact that Christ is continuing to save, but that there are many, many, many, many, many people who have a false faith?

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They are nominal Christians. They went to a state church. They were born into it. I listen to Unbelievable all the time, and Justin has always talked to us about your spiritual journey, your spiritual background.

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Well, I was raised as a Christian, and then when you really start listening to them, they had no earthly idea of what a radical break from sin or a commitment to lordship of Christ was.

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None! Zip, zero, nada. I mean,

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I suppose the one good thing that's going to come from persecution against believers in the United States is that there is one particularly reprehensible form of heresy that will not do well in that climate, and that's the non -lordship perspective.

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I mean, that's just going to tip your hat toward God and all's well, no repentance stuff.

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I ain't going to cut it when it comes to the real world. That's for sure. So I suppose that is an important element.

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Anyways, there is my commentary on that, and I'm going to—I didn't even bother to look and see where my cursor go.

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Here, little cursor, there it is. They're all idle. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and go back to some of the

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Calvinist call -in show to finish off the hour today, and it's rather interesting because this next section is somewhat relevant.

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Yeah, we're plugged in. I may be tired, but I'm not totally out of sorts quite yet.

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Anyway, because in this section, Michael's talking about—well, from my perspective, what's missing here is the slavery to sin, the radical nature of regeneration, things like that.

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Let's listen to this particular caller. Hey, Dr. Brennan, how are you?

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I'm doing very well, thank you. Great. I'm actually a pastor here in the Atlanta metro area, and this

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Reformed theology is really coming up a lot in some of the churches in our area. But I just want— It's a brand new thing, of course.

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It hasn't been around for a couple of centuries. Augustine, well, anyway. I wanted to talk to you for a second. In regards to the tulip prospect by which

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Calvinists adhere to, particularly the irresistible grace, I want you to maybe elaborate on that a little bit, because to me, the way that they see coming to Christ— obviously, we can't come to Christ unless we're drawn to the

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Holy Spirit. I get that. I understand that. Do you? Again, remember, what is the soteriological dividing line of the

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Reformation? He said you can't come to Christ unless you're drawn by the Holy Spirit. But the question is, are you saying everyone's drawn by the

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Holy Spirit and that the drawing of the Holy Spirit is not sufficient in and of itself to bring someone to Christ? That's the dividing line.

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It's between monergism and synergism. It's between those who say God's grace is necessary and those who say

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God's grace is sufficient. That's the dividing line. It is a major dividing line. It's an important dividing line. You can't ignore it.

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It's a huge issue. It impacts everything. And that's not what's being caught here.

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I feel like I need to have a choice once I am drawn to say yes or no so that my love for God and my desire for God is not programmed.

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So how many— so I'm not a robot. God can't save me completely on his own.

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I have to cooperate with God in my spiritual resurrection or my love isn't real.

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Okay? Now think about what that means about resurrection. Think it through. Apply it.

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Because this is an argument coming from outside of Scripture. Where does Scripture make the argument that salvation has to be a synergistic thing or my relationship with God isn't really real?

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So as a slave to sin, I have to have the ability to end my own slavery or I will not truly love the one who provides for me that freedom from slavery by actually freeing me.

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So in other words, slaves at the end of the Civil War could not actually love those who freed them because they couldn't have freed themselves previously.

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I mean, what is the basis of that? It's a given argument.

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People just accept it on face value that, well, if I was dead in trespasses and sins and God had to regenerate me so that I can do what is good in his sight,

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Romans chapter 8, so that all the Father gives me will come to me, drawing,

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John 6, all that stuff. If that's true, then I'm not really real because the idea is that you're not real unless somehow you're autonomous.

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I guess that's the argument that's being presented. And I feel like the very irresistible grace idea kind of seems like it's programmed that we can't say no to God and then

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I feel like I'm forced. No. Here's where the misunderstanding is. I can't say no to God.

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No, I'm saying no to God every single day. The issue is I can't say yes because of the slavery to sin.

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But see, the idea in the mind is that we're not actually really rebelling.

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We're not actually really living out the desires of our hearts. No, no, no, no, no. That part is just left off to the side.

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The reality is, again, those who are according to the flesh live after the flesh.

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They are not able to do what is pleasing to God. What are you going to do? I've yet to hear anybody explain

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Romans chapter 8 at that point in a meaningful fashion. I mean, the explanations I hear are either, well, that was for a different time, or this is only about carnal

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Christians versus spiritual Christians. No, I mean, just completely missing

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Pauline theology and terminology and stuff like that. Explain Paul's statement that those who are according to the flesh cannot do what is pleasing to God.

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Is repentance pleasing to God? That's why I wish more Calvinists had called in on Calvinist call -in day.

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The vast majority of the callers were not Calvinists, as they didn't understand the issue. Yeah, absolutely,

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Stephen. Even though my Calvinist friends would say that it's not coerced, that God's love awakens love in our hearts, ultimately, there was no choice that we had.

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Ultimately, there was no choice that we had. No, ultimately, our choice will always be against God because we are slaves to sin.

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That's why Jesus said that you had to be set free. So the choice is always the wrong choice.

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We don't have the capacity, because of our fallen nature, to make the right choice unless God, by His grace, raises us to spiritual life.

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That's the awesomeness of regeneration and the unmerited favor of God. There was no choice that we had.

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Ultimately, according to a Calvinist, we were born again before we believed. We passed from death to life because of God's call.

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And just as Lazarus had no choice when Jesus said, Lazarus, come forth, so also it was God's choice, not ours.

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In fact, the Calvinists would say, if you made a choice, then there was pride in your heart because you could say,

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I made the choice. Again, something totally bizarre. Now that's going back to Brian's call. Remember, this was all within an hour and a half or something like that.

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And again, Brian's point was that if you have two people, they're both presented with the gospel, and same backgrounds, same language, same opportunities, et cetera, et cetera, one accepts and one does not, then the difference, what makes one man to differ is not

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God. It's the individual. God tried equally. He put out 100 credits of effort to save each one.

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If one gets saved and the other one doesn't, then what's the difference? The difference has to be found in the man.

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The man had to be somehow better, smarter, more spiritually sensitive, something. That was Brian's point.

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It just seems in both of these calls, I don't see a big leap between what these guys are assuming and, you know,

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I'm a good person, and because I'm a good person, I believed in Jesus.

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Well, that is the ultimate end of it. I just don't see a bit, or... But what they're saying is, oh, but I only saw that by grace.

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Yeah, but if that grace is being extended in the exact same way, and this is the problem, because if they make a distinction between saving grace and some other type of prevenient grace or something like that, now they're stuck having to answer, why does

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God give redeeming grace to some and only prevenient grace to somebody else? What makes one man differ from the other?

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Exactly, and there's only two... And when people try to come up with a middle road, it always fails.

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It always fails for one simple reason, because there can only be two answers to the question.

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It's either of God or of man. I mean, who makes man to differ?

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Is it God or is it man? That's why there's only two sides on this. There is no middle, except for people,

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I guess, who try to say, well... And this was what Matatix did back in 1990,

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December of 1990, is he came up with the... Well, he didn't come up with the idea, but he repeated the idea that, well, you have the elect that God chooses and he saves them perfectly.

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And then you have non -elect Christians who are Christians because they've chosen to be

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Christians, but they're not given the gift of perseverance so they can still fall away. Some would argue that's

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Augustine's view, which I'm not really sure is accurate completely, but that's sort of how they try to get around some of those things.

57:31

That, yeah, those Calvinistic passages are true about the elect, but they're not necessarily true about these other people who actually choose to be

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Christians, but they can fall away because they're not actually of the elect. So you have elect Christians and non -elect Christians.

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Yeah, that's confusing to me, too. Anyways, we will continue. I mean, really,

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I said up in Evergreen, we are... We're close.

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We're going to get it done someday, honestly. We really will. Thanks for listening to Dividing Line today and listening to a tired

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Dividing Line person, that being me. But Lord willing, we will be back at our regular time on Thursday, and maybe

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I'll be a little more cogent at that point in time. Don't know. We'll see you then.

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Thanks for listening. God bless. I believe we're standing at the crossroads

58:38

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58:52

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58:59

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59:11

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