Road Trip Dividing Line: Only 45 Minutes Today

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and we are coming to you live yet once again from undisclosed locations. Well, we're here in Missouri and it is gray and dark and cold and breezy and wet.

I like days like that. I'll have to admit, you know, I've got my flannel shirt on and we're doing all right. We're doing okay. I'm still struggling with a few issues with the unit, but RVing is learning how to adapt.

Either how to repair or how to adapt. That's just sort of how it works. You have this list when you get back and you don't just go park your unit someplace in the storage area. Uh-oh, the cache is filling up.

Looks like I'm crashing. Doesn't look like we're going to make it today. Sorry. We will, of course, get this posted as soon as possible afterwards, but there you go. The cache is full and we are dead.

So going to a dead cast. Sorry about that, everybody. Nothing we can do about it. I don't know what's going on. I reset the gateway right before we got started and it's just not gonna let us do it. We're gonna do a shorter program anyways and we're getting it recorded and that's just how it's gonna have to go.

I don't know why. Atmospheric situations can impact things. Who knows? I haven't bothered to set up the satellite yet. We didn't have a reason to, but now maybe I should have. There you go. Anyways, a couple things.

A bunch of stuff I wanted to get to. Actually, little things. I pulled the plug. Still recording. Just letting Rich know since he can't hear anything about what's going on because I didn't set up his little computer thing with Bobby.

I started to say something in the last program. Isn't amazing how the mind works or doesn't work. I started to want to make a point and say something. I never got around to actually saying it. I got distracted with some background information or something.

I don't know. A great deal of conversation. Social media has been, I don't know, doesn't seem overly fitting for the week after Thanksgiving or the week beginning Advent, the Christmas season. You'd think there'd be a little bit more brotherly love to be someplace, but it's not working that way.

You had the Kevin DeYoung article about the Moscow mood. That, of course, has encouraged all sorts of other folks to be jumping on this aspect of that aspect of things. Of course, it's right at the end of no quarter November, so everybody can go, well, he's asked for it.

He was using a flamethrower only a few weeks ago. Anyway, one of the things I was going to say, I think what happened on the program yesterday, is I've been reading Jared Longshore's article in response to me and thinking about the reality that I'm going to have to say some fairly strong things in response to the idea that when a Christian man and a Christian woman are married and she becomes pregnant, the church has grown.

There are some ramifications that I think are really troubling. I've been very consistent since 2001 or so, 2000 -2001, in really, really emphasizing that for my Presbyterian brothers, we cannot go anywhere that presumes regeneration.

It almost sounds like there are people today who have the idea that, hey, as long as a child is born of Christian parents, that child is holy. That's not what 1 Corinthians 7 is about, guys. Paul Jewett nuked that years and years ago.

If you haven't read it, you need to read it. It's just, I don't know that anyone would really want to even try to defend that in any meaningful scholarly debate, given the context of what is being said by Paul there.

But this idea that, in essence, if you have children in the covenant, that there is a promise of their salvation. Again, I start thinking back years and years ago to reading Pierre Marcel and how the covenant children have the effect of original sin removed from them, so they are like a new Adam.

I'm just like, what? What is going on here? It's very troubling to me, and so I'm probably gonna have to say some hard things there. But at the same time, what I've wanted to say yesterday, and that's probably where I got off the track, is I've been up to Moscow, I think, three times, at least twice, maybe three times, and I have had dinner.

There's a particular eating establishment slash pub there that everybody goes to, and I think a video was posted a couple days ago of sort of a flash mob thing there. That's sort of what you expect when you go there.

But I've eaten with the guys from CrossPolitik and the Jared Longshore. Obviously, I've had Sabbath dinner with Doug Wilson and his family. Doug Wilson and I have sat at taco time, just the two of us, eating crisp meat burritos.

And in all of that time, in recording all sorts of stuff, and visiting Canon Press, and preaching at a couple of the churches a number of times, in all of that time, I never heard profanity. You'd think reading some of the stuff that you're seeing on Twitter right now that Doug Wilson walks around swearing a blue streak.

And the fact of the matter is, the only time I've heard him using what we would call off-color language at all is in a written context to make a point, some type of cultural point. Now, I've taken a clear stand.

As I understand things, he evidently has a freedom that I do not in those areas. I do not feel it's appropriate to utilize profanity, off-color language. The serrated edge needs to be sheathed for the vast majority of us because of the fact of our remaining sin and the ease with which we can abandon the biblical command of purity of speech, and purity of heart, and things along those lines.

So I'm not mature enough to do that. But other people feel that they are, and okay, there you go. I just, especially in Doug's situation, he doesn't need to needlessly give his insane critics who have Doug Wilson derangement syndrome on a fatal level anything more than what they already have as far as to be able to attack him.

And so, but I just wanted to say, in all the times that I have been with the cross-politic guys that's down in Arizona, every place we've met and done things, I've never heard profanity. And so it's not what people are saying, some kind of a regular thing where you're just constantly popping off with foul language.

It's just not been my experience, and I wanted to say that. At the same time, I have to say to my dear brother Gabriel Wrench, the tweet that I saw yesterday about grape juice and I think it used the term cowardice, I don't remember, um, really?

That one wasn't fair. I know there was a context to it, but especially on topics like this, where we are literally talking about issues like, well, what kind of bread do you use in the supper? Man, there are people that will draw swords over something like this.

And I've been in churches that used a loaf, and I've been in churches that used unleavened bread, because you can make an argument for either. Paul uses the same language. And so, let each man be convinced in his own mind, and let individual churches make that choice.

And if you find a church where the gospel is being preached, and where truth is being put out there, don't let these little things tear you apart. Don't let these little things cause you to not be in a fellowship that's reaching out and making a difference in the community, and is being faithful to the gospel, and all the rest of these types of things.

Just don't do it. People just get off on these side issues and end up dividing over stuff. We use wine, okay? I grew up using grape juice. I mean, uh, no one's going to convince me that I didn't have the Lord's Supper until we had wine.

And no one's going to convince me that churches that are convicted that alcohol isn't necessary here are not doing the Lord's Supper, and vice versa. Why do we have to? The conversations should be, I think, edifying and useful, but always leave room for final disagreement on certain things.

Everybody is so dogmatic on all this stuff. It's just like, okay, whatever. But I don't believe anyone's a coward, or effeminate, or whatever the term was. Um, if you have grape juice, if that's the tradition of your church, I like the outer rows are wine, inner rows are grape juice type thing to give an option to people.

You know, that's fine and dandy, but I don't make a big stink about it one way or the other. Same thing with the kind of bread. I've had people just get all angry about that. You could use a loaf. You can use unleavened bread.

You know, we use unleavened bread. We use matzah, you know, the unleavened bread that would have been used, um, probably in the original Lord's Supper, but, uh, for 29 and a half years, I was at a church that, uh, passed a loaf around.

And, uh, you know, you broke a, it was basically like a French bread loaf type thing. And you, you broke a piece off as, as you passed it along the, along the aisle. I'm not sure how that would work at our church because we come forward to receive the supper.

Um, but anyway, um, it's, it's, it's not something to divide over. It's not something to get angry over and, uh, insult people over, but man, that's, that's how, that's how the internet works. That's just, that's just, uh, that's just where it is.

Um, let's see here. Yeah. Uh, Darren Stid, uh, I don't know, a couple of days ago, maybe a couple of weeks ago, um, posted a, well, I, it says the year is 2100. Jeff Durbin's grandson is married to Douglas Wilson's great granddaughter.

He is the president of the United States and the national slogan is by what standard? They are Baptist of course, because this story is post-millennial. Uh, you know, we do have better humor. We can have more fun with stuff, you know, um, blood up to the bridles, the horses, it's sort of hard to come up with anything overly funny about that, but that one's a good one.

Uh, by what standard? That's, um, that's excellent. Uh, thank you, Darren, uh, for that. Okay. Um, I want to, uh, thank, uh, punk publican, punk publican, all one word, on Twitter. There is a account, there are many accounts.

I mean, uh, anti-Calvinist derangement syndrome is, um, rather prevalent, uh, these days, but punk publican, uh, reposted and tagged me in a comment made by a, and I've seen this, I've seen other people posting, I'm not following this particular, uh, uh, account with a whopping 417, uh, followers on it, uh, but the, uh, the name is Calvinism is a Lie.

And I, you know, I guess there might be some Calvinists out there that would have an account Arminianism is a Lie or Synergism is a Lie. It just seems to me, or at least for me anyways, I, I would not want to have a ministry that is based upon just only what I'm against.

I mean, in apologetics, you're against all sorts of things, but we try to do that in such a fashion that we are being, uh, very straightforward in what we are for. So you'll, you'll often hear my Muslim friends saying something along the lines of, uh, yes, uh, James debated that subject and made sure to give us a good gospel presentation in the process.

I always try to get the gospel in, obviously. Um, but we're much more, we're much more focused on what we're for so that when we talk about what we're against, we're consistent in our criticism of false teaching because we're first and foremost desirous of seeing the truth of those areas being presented.

And so I feel sorry for people who would have a Twitter channel called Calvinism is a Lie. And in my experience, you're not going to get almost any honesty or integrity or accuracy from these folks, um, because they're not balanced in their perspectives.

So this guy posts a picture of me from the dividing line. Uh, I think it was just a few weeks ago, really. And, uh, in the regular studio and it says, uh, Neo-Calvinism is a cult that started because Calvinists were first to get on YouTube.

Ponzi schemes benefit from first mover advantage, but then reality catches up and they collapse. Imagine letting this guy convince you God hates most people and Jesus didn't die for all. Okay. So, um, the Calvinists were the first guy on YouTube.

I I'd love to see how you would prove that. Um, you know, I was on YouTube pretty early, but I had seen other people using it. And when I first heard about it, you got to understand internet speeds were so slow back then that the idea of watching video was very often a painful experience.

And once it started really taking off, then yeah, you know, there was all this stuff you had to do to get your channel monetized. And then we discovered you monetize your channel. You're basically giving YouTube control over what you're going to do.

So we then got rid of all that stuff, demonetized everything. Um, but certainly we've been using it extensively and will until we get kicked off, which will happen someday. But there were anti-Calvinists on YouTube from the start.

It wasn't that we were all just smart enough to start YouTube or something. So it's, it's a Ponzi scheme. Who knew? Um, okay. But then reality catches up and they collapse. What, what this guy's got 417 followers.

Uh, we have millions and millions and millions of views worldwide and we've collapsed. I, they live in a fantasy world. It's sort of sad, but anyways, imagine letting this guy, that's me, convince you God hates most people and Jesus didn't die for all.

Well, you know, I suppose that there are Calvinists that are guilty of that kind of exaggerated and imbalanced statement in reverse, but I sure hear it a lot, especially from provisionalists who seem to be getting more and more radical by the way.

Um, but imagine letting this guy convince you God hates most people. Hmm. Well, I obviously affirm that God's love and mercy, um, is throughout his creation, which is why sinners are not consumed in the instant of each sin, uh, or even at the point of their conception.

And they are extended tremendous, uh, grace by God and given many great gifts for which they will be held accountable, uh, as to how they use those gifts. But if a serious person were making, uh, this kind of accusation, then the discussion would have to be, well, what are the different kinds of love that God has?

And as soon as you say that, a lot of these people, ah, I'm not going to talk about that. It's like, well, wait, wait a minute. Um, the scripture speaks of a special love that God had for Israel that he did not have for our nation.

Yes or no? Yes or no? So many of these folks have never been challenged to have any kind of consistency in their theology whatsoever. And they are, um, triggered when you demand or when you, when you ask for that kind of consistency.

And so to be consistent, we have different kinds of love. Um, my love for, uh, family, um, for ministry, uh, for people in my church, fellow ministers is very, very different than, um, my love for a fast food restaurant chain, um, or anything like that.

My, the love for my wife is very different than my love for anybody else's wife. Um, the love for my grandchildren is different than my love for other grandchildren because they're not my grandchildren.

Um, we have to be able to make these types and it's proper for us to make these types of differentiations. And it's amazing that so many people seem to believe that God can't make these differentiations and God's love cannot be differentiated.

In fact, if it's, if it's perfect love, then it will be the exact same kind of love for every individual. That's the thinking that many people have. It's not biblical thinking because, well, this is why the, why the old testament is often sort of left off and left out of people's thinking along these lines, but it's pretty clearly obvious from the Hebrew scriptures that God had a special redemptive love for the remnant of Israel and that many promises for that remnant are, are made in the pages of scripture that are not made for the rest of Israel and certainly not made for the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Amorites.

So God has distinctions in his love. You can't read the scriptures and come to any other conclusion, but many of these people don't believe that and they don't accept that. Don't even want to hear someone saying anything like that.

And so does God hate sin? Does the scripture teach that God hates sin? And if the answer is yes, and it is yes, and if a person remains in their sin outside of Christ, then what is the inevitable result as far as God's relationship to that person is concerned?

Now, I don't know who the elect are and neither does anybody else in this life, but we are called to proclaim the gospel and its demands to everyone. We do not have to first examine fruit and try to figure out whether this person's regenerate or not.

We can't know any of those things. And so we promiscuously present the gospel to all people, which is itself a command to repent and to believe. And God blesses that either in drawing his elect into himself by that means, which he is foreordained, or glorifies himself through the rebellious rejection of that message by those that are not the recipients of his grace.

But there is the issue. For these folks, everyone must be a recipient of grace. Grace cannot be free. Grace must be peanut butter grace. It can't be specific. It can't have a purpose. It can't be specifically how the triune God is going to glorify himself.

No. It has to be peanut butter grace, so it goes to everybody equally. That means it can't necessarily accomplish anything in and of itself. So when he says God hates most people, if we're talking biblically, then we want to ask the question, at what point in time?

Are we talking about at their judgment, during their lives? What is God's relationship with rebel sinners who are in opposition to him and who love their sin? These are all important questions that are just simply skipped for the rhetorical effect of creating a quote-unquote anti-Calvinist message, which is what you have in that line.

And then secondly, and Jesus didn't die for all. Well, Jesus did die for all. All kinds of men, kings and those in authority, rich to poor, Jews, Gentiles, male, female, Scythian, bond, free man, all the categories that the New Testament itself uses, Jesus did die for men and women in all those categories.

But obviously what he's saying here, and Jesus did not indiscriminately offer a sacrifice that saves no one. Yes, I definitely believe that Jesus did not offer a semi-salvific atonement. I believe that what the Son did was in perfect harmony and unity with the Father and with the Spirit and with the differing roles each of the divine persons have taken in the economy of salvation that results in the glorification of the triune God.

And so when the Son intercedes before the Father as a high priest based upon his finished and completed work on the cross of Calvary, he does so in harmony with the Father, not in opposition to the Father.

So if the Father has already decreed not to save a certain individual for his own purposes and to his own glory, and if you say that that's wrong, then you believe that grace can be demanded. You don't believe in the freedom of grace.

You don't believe in the freedom of God. And so there is a perfect consistency between the decree of the Father, the salvific work of the Son as their substitute, so there is a specific people united with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection.

The atonement is intimately personal. I know my sheep. They know me. They hear my voice. They follow me. I give my life for the sheep. You are not of my sheep. There is an intimacy that becomes so intimate that in John 17, the oneness that we have with Christ is likened to the oneness he has with the Father, and that's divine in nature.

And so again, the idea of a nameless, faceless group, just a generic group that we fill up by our actions, is not what is seen in the New Testament. It is not what is seen in the understanding of substitutionary atonement, which is why, again, we must point out that substitutionary atonement is a reformed concept.

It is not an Arminian. It's not a synergistic concept. It's amazing to me how many people hold to PSA, penal substitutionary atonement, who are not themselves reformed. They don't recognize that they're holding to a reformed doctrine of atonement rather than a governmental theory or a representational theory or a ransom theory or a recapitulation theory or Christus-Victor theory or all the other things that you could bring into the conversation.

I do find that truly fascinating. But the Son, then, his intercession is for a specific people, and we say that in our hymnology. We sing it in our songs. I wonder if someone like Calvinism is a lie would refuse to sing before the throne of God above because it says it plainly.

My name is written on his hands. As he dies, it's personal. It's specific. It's the elect that have been given by the Father to the Son. He's now effecting their perfect salvation and his perfect self-giving.

And then the Spirit of God, again, inter-Trinitarian harmony. The Spirit of God at the exact time that the triune God has decreed raises these individuals to spiritual life, gives them the gifts of faith and repentance, union with Christ, adoption, forgiveness, sanctification, eventually glorification, all to the praise and honor of his grace, not to our accomplishments or our being wiser than someone else or more humble than someone else or any of these things.

The praise of his glorious grace. So the atonement is a Trinitarian and God-glorifying reality, and there is perfect harmony and consistency between the divine persons in accomplishing that. Now, I don't want to go off on a tangent here, but it's not going to be too long in the future that we have to address, I think, some of the confusion that some people have in regards to how to identify the actions of God and to understand how the divine persons take these different roles and what that means.

But we'll address that at another point. And so, imagine this guy convinced you God hates most people and Jesus didn't die for all. The debate that I'm going to do with Jason Breda in March in Tullahoma, it's either late February or early March, whenever that...

I think it's late February now to think about it. Anyway, yeah, late February. I specifically requested the topic on the atonement, and so I'm excited about that. Some Calvinists are hesitant to affirm that doctrine or afraid of how someone's going to respond.

I've told the story before, but I can even remember what the room smelled like. It was at Trinity Chapel in Wandsworth in London when Doug McMasters was the pastor there. I had just either done a presentation or a debate.

I did a number of debates there, and it's an old church. That's the one that has... It's been years since I mentioned it, but one of the pews has this perfectly shaped indentation in it. I can show you right where it is.

I have pictures of it. It's the indentation made by a German incendiary device during the bombing of London in World War II. It came to the roof, landed on that pew, and a passerby saw that something had hit the roof and had gone into the building.

They were using these timered incendiary devices so that the fire control brigades couldn't get to everything because there would be a time delay and fires would be breaking out over and over and over again.

So the guy broke into the church and got it out before it went off. I mean, he risked his life what it was like running out the back of the church, that thing in your hand, not knowing what the timer was set to.

It could go off at any minute, but he got it outside before it went and saved the building. Anyway, boy, talk about memory lane there for a second, but there's a passageway. If you're looking at the front of the beautiful building, you go over to the right and there's a narrow passageway that goes to a building in the back, fellowship center type thing.

I was heading through there and this woman came up to me and she stopped me and she said, I don't remember how the conversation started specifically, but she said, now you don't believe in limited atonement, do you?

The way she said it was she expected me to say, of course not. And I said, if you mean that Jesus dies perfectly for his elect people and it's specific and focused and intentional and that he's going to intercede with the very same people for whom he died, there's not going to be a difference in the audience, which is what a lot of people will say.

Then, yeah, of course I believe that. And she was flabbergasted. She couldn't believe it. I'm like, why wouldn't you believe that? And then you've got 30 seconds of shock to work with there to get into a biblically-based presentation of the truth of particular redemption if you want to take advantage of it.

But I'm not in any way shape or form embarrassed to say that. And so this fellow just is out there in his derangement syndrome. I was seeing there's seven responses to something here, but we are really having net issues here right now.

I've seen the evidence of the connection failing out over and over again, and I can't even bring anything up in Twitter right now at all. So, well, you know what I could do is, yeah, I'm just going to bail out of our wireless system and try to go to, well, now it bailed out on all of us.

How about, I wonder if it would work on my phone. Yeah, we're having all sorts of fun issues here. There we go. I'm on my phone now. I wonder if I can pull this up. I want to see if he, there we go. Okay, I'm just seeing this for the first time.

He says, neocalvinism has been around for 20 years. Okay. Christians have already engaged your arguments and proven that scripture refutes calvinism entirely. Now we're focused on warning others against your gnostic cult and helping others escape from your toxic doctrine of lies.

Repent. So, we've already refuted you. We're not going to refute you again. We're just going to warn everybody. Again, you feel sorry for these folks. You know they don't have answers. You know that they can't do the exegesis, and they can't even accurately represent what you're saying.

And it really does make you wonder what is the motivation for a lot of these folks. And it differs from person to person. I mean, you know, some people have been hurt in a reformed church or something like that.

But a lot of it really honestly is just a, I can't handle the idea of how different God is than I am. I want God to be comfortably the big grandpa in the sky type of an idea. And calvinism does not allow that because it deals with everything scripture teaches on the fact that God is holy and completely other and does with his creation as he sees fit.

You know, Psalm 1356 says and other passages say that. So, um, uh, so 1689 reformed has that button thing and it's you with a hand and it says everyone I disagree with is Gnostic. That's, I have warned against the abuse of the term Gnosticism.

Uh, Calvinism is a Gnostic cult promising you guys secret knowledge. This is back to Calvinism is a lie guy promising you guys secret knowledge and teaching you that Calvin God picked you special and he hates everyone else.

And y 'all believe that. Oh, and your God decrees every sick and perverted sin that man does for his glory. So ridiculous. It's, it's, it's sad to see people in this level of self-deception. It really, really is.

Um, and there really, there really isn't much. The only, only reason I even read these or interact with them is to sort of warn, you know, some, some people read the Puritans, they read, they read Sproul or something.

They read the Potter's freedom, they become reformed and they don't realize the kind of deranged, unhinged hatred there is out there for something you've just now come to love. The sovereignty of God, uh, really recognizes God's God and I'm not, and I can't put him in my categories.

And so it's more for you folks to warn you this stuff's out there. And if you end up with a coworker in this type of a mindset and things that these are some limit ways you might want to try to give a witness.

But in many instances, in my experience, they're not going to listen. They're just not going to listen. And this clearly is, uh, is one of them. If you're in the St. Louis area, uh, starting tomorrow night, uh, seven o 'clock coming to Grace Church on Moogie Road.

Um, the sufficiency of scripture, we've done it probably three or four times before over the past 23 years, but interestingly enough, over 23 years, new reasons to address it arise, which means you're going to be focusing on different aspects of it, um, that did not exist, uh, or weren't a part of our experience at that particular point in time.

So sufficiency of scripture, um, 10, two and seven on Saturday at two o 'clock one is so killer. Uh, and then Sunday school and the Sunday morning sermon on Sunday. And then I'm heading, look at the calendar, uh, at aleman .org heading to Sedalia, Missouri for Wednesday and Thursday.

And then I'll be in the Kansas city area again on the calendar Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Um, so sort of a Midwestern swing here and, um, um, just pray for traveling mercies and, uh, stay healthy, get through this, get home in time to go to the Messiah with my granddaughters and my wife.

Really looking forward to getting a chance to, uh, to do that. That'll be a beautiful thing. Um, and, uh, so anyways, thanks for, it's a shortened version today because I have a, um, um, I have pastoral duties in a half an hour on zoom, a little concerned about the connection right now, to be honest with you, I'm gonna have to reset that modem again, see if I can get something working better.

Um, and then recording a webcast, uh, this evening at seven, um, that you all will find if you, if you know, the fellow goes by the name wise disciple, he's the fellow that teaches debate and he reviews debates and stuff like that.

Um, we're going to be recording, um, a webcast tonight at seven o 'clock. So busy, uh, day, busy weekend and, uh, appreciate you making it possible for us to be out here doing this stuff. And I appreciate you watching.

Thanks. We'll see you next time. God bless.