1 Timothy 2, Men and Women in the Church, then a Full Review of Shapiro/Craig

And welcome to The Dividing Line, my name is James White. We are in First Timothy chapter 2. First Timothy chapter 2, mainly because we want to have some type of a meaningful discussion about some of the stuff going on in social media, and it ain't gonna happen to social media, so gotta do it someplace else.

It's First Timothy 2 .8, therefore, I wish, and then the first assertion is, to pray. The men, in every place, lifting up holy hands without wrath, and it's literally, Dialogues Mu, which would normally be reasonings, but when coupled with orgaism would mean dissension, fighting, so on and so forth.

So Paul begins a section with Boulamai, so as an apostle he is desiring, expressing apostolic desire for ordering the church, to pray. So this is about prayer. And then, tus andros, now, the men, in every place.

The men in every place. Now, what's interesting is the next verse says, likewise, also, guneikos, women. You already know that word, if you hear the constant utilization of the term misogyny, that's from miseo, to hate, and then gune, women.

So, guneikos, there are places in scripture where andros and guneikos when put together would be husband and wife, but it doesn't look like what you have here. It's not like, I wish husbands everywhere to pray, lifting holy hands without wrath and dissension, and likewise, wives to adorn themselves with proper clothing.

In this instance, it would seem that andros and guneikos are being used generically of men as a whole and women as a whole within the church. So men are to be men of prayer, lifting up holy hands is a common stance of prayer in the Eastern world and continues to be today.

There's nothing wrong with it. Reform people need to get over it. At the same time, if you're the only person doing it, maybe you're drawing attention to yourself. So, something to think about. But it was a cultural thing and I don't think it is relevant to the form of prayer, though it is interesting to respond to our Muslim friends who think that the only form of prayer is on your face.

Instead, this would have been understood simply as an exhortation to prayer, to men everywhere, and that the point is that it is to be done a particular way, which is with holy hands, not hands marked by sin or greed or graft or whatever else it might be, without wrath and dissension, which would mean, this is talking about within the body, that there is to be, and it's tough because we are all sinners and we rub each other the wrong direction and there is friction, but without wrath or dissension, when the body prays, there should be a great deal of unity in that.

And then, likewise, as complementary to that, I wasn't trying to make a point there, but it is there, women to cosmeo, from which we get cosmetics, to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly, discreetly, I don't know how anybody would describe leggings that way.

I don't know, how in the world did that even become a controversy? But yes, there are teenage and college women today who paint themselves, basically. I can't tell you the difference between it being paint or something else.

I mean, it is as immodest as the day is long. It is meant to get people to stumble and to look at you. That's what it is. I'm not even going to argue about it. It's obvious. Good luck making that fit with idus, kai, sofra, sunes, cosmein, in 1 Timothy 2 .9.

With proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments. So the point is, again, drawing attention to oneself over against being able to serve others to be able to, and again, it's a slightly different context, but it's the same attitude.

Philippians 2, not looking to your own things, the things of others. And the other issue being, I've used the illustration many times before when I ran sound at a very large megachurch, oftentimes it was the people who had the best voices, or at least thought they had the best voices, who created tremendous division because they were, they want everybody to see, or in this instance, see and hear them.

And they would run over people, right, left, and center, to get that attention. And so I think that's what Paul is warning against here. But rather than doing that, rather by means of good works as is proper for women, making a claim to godliness.

So if you want to adorn yourself, then adorn yourself with good works. That doesn't mean you have to run around looking frumpy all the time. But what you should be seeking is to adorn yourselves, ergon agathon, with good works, which is fitting, proper for gunaik sin, who are making a claim, who are making a promise of being godly.

So very clearly, the term of women here has to be general. It can't just be wives. This is for all women, young women, older women, married, unmarried. These are general categories that Paul is writing to Timothy in.

Now, let me just mention, again, warning to new listeners, maybe haven't looked at the program before, things like that. One of the most dangerous places on the planet for the Christian soul or spirit is the Christian bookstore, as rare as they might be anymore.

But that can be online as well, which it is for most things today. However, the reason being, you can go down those rows of books, or enter your search parameters in, wherever you are, and you will find commentaries on the New Testament.

And if you are not aware of all the wide varieties of viewpoints out there, or if you think there is much more unity of viewpoints than there actually is, or if it bothers you to realize the wide variety of viewpoints, because as a modern American or modern Western thinking person, if there's a bunch of viewpoints, then no one must know the truth.

That's how we are taught. That's the way we think. It doesn't make any sense when you actually analyze it, but that's sort of the default mode that we go into. The problem is that you will pick up a commentary on this, and the first thing you'll discover when you start reading 1 Timothy, if you read the material at the beginning of the commentary, is that there are a number of people, not your conservatives, but a number of people, who will question the canonical status, or at least, not the canonical status, the authorship of the pastoral epistles.

So, for years, we have, for example, engaged Bart Ehrman, who would have what I would call a minimalist Pauline corpus, which means he has about seven books that he would say Paul wrote. This would not be one of them.

None of the pastorals. Why, you might ask? Well, long story, but sometimes it's vocabulary, though I find that to be an incredibly weak argument, because you're going to write differently to an entire church than you are to one of your co-workers.

I have—I'm now in the Paul position, in the sense that more than 30 years of ministry under the belt, moving toward 40, I know a lot of young men that are now in ministry that I taught years ago. And so, I know that when I speak to them, I will use different vocabulary, different means of expressing myself, than when I'm talking to an entire audience, or talking to an entire church.

That's just obvious. So the vocabulary argument isn't much for me. For Ehrman, one of the big things is he has a particular theory as to how the early church looked, and the pastorals don't fit in that.

Now, it's strange that you would come up with a theory about what the Christian church in the first century looked like without using the first century documents, actually, to express that, but he accepts this evolutionary concept of things, and that's part of the issue.

And if you want to read more on that, The Heresy of Orthodoxy is the book you need to—we've recommended it many, many times before. So, the point is, if you pick up a commentary, you're going to run into people who say, Paul didn't even write these things, which is why your modern leftist, quote-unquote, mainline denominations will really not even take what is found here seriously.

Or if they do, they won't view it as being Pauline, but as part of the tradition of the church. And once it's just a tradition of the church, then tradition can be changed by other tradition, and that's part of the reason that it functions that way.

Okay. So, immediately—so, women, prophetic godliness, and so, when verse 11 says, Gune, a woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness, this would not, again, suggest to us that we're talking here about wives only.

But that's the point, because the very next verse is one of the key controversial verses. But I do not allow or permit—the first word is didaskain, to teach, but to teach a woman, I do not permit neither to exercise authority over a man, but to remain in silence or in quietude.

So, one of the interpretations out there, which you'll find from a lot of conservative people, is that what's actually being referred to here is only a wife. The wife must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness to her husband.

I do not allow a wife to exercise authority over her husband, and that's why I said you can find other places where andros, and that's the term that is used here, andros and gunikos, those terms can be found other places where it's specifically talking about husbands and wives.

But that's why we started as far back as we did, and have been following the train. So, you'd have to theorize that somewhere, maybe at verse 11, a change takes place that just simply isn't announced.

That Paul just wasn't clear, you sort of have to argue that maybe, you know, maybe Paul could assume that Timothy already knew this, and so he didn't have to provide the transitional statement. You have to assume something, because if you just look at the text as it stands, there's no reason to assume that verse 12 is not a general statement, but has become a husband-wife situation.

But they might argue, yeah, but look at verse 13. For Adam, for it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. Well, yeah, except Adam and Eve represent the entire human race. They are the first humans, and the order of creation is considered to be relevant in regards to authority.

And so, it really seems like verse 13 is not talking about Adam and Eve in their marriage relationship, but Adam and Eve as created, and that, of course, that's the whole point of verse 13, is protos eplosthe, first made, first formed.

And very plainly, culturally, historically, that would give the priority and the preeminence of authority to Adam over Eve. And then, and it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression.

So, there is a assertion of the woman's experience of deception. It does not mean that Adam did not fall or sin, he did, but it wasn't based upon deception, it was willful transgression. But the woman demonstrated a lack of discernment, and Paul draws upon this.

And so, when you look at 1 Timothy 2, 12, very often it is brought up, it's thrown about in Twitter, Facebook, wherever, as a standalone verse, and if you allow it just to stand alone, then there's different ways that you can approach it.

But that's why, if you follow through it, this then is the section that goes into 1 Timothy 3, and what's 1 Timothy 3 about? It's about offices in the church. And to me, the compatibilism, egalitarian controversy, which both terms are, you would think by now would have come up with something better than that.

They're a mouthful, and I don't know how good they are in expressing anything, but the role, the God-intended relationship of male and female in the church is big stuff now in Big Eva. And historically, I don't think there's really any argument here.

Historically, an abandonment of the idea that the eldership in the church, now again, I would argue, I think I can defend this fairly strongly, that we are given two offices in the church for perpetuity, the elder-bishop-pastor office and the office of deacon.

These are laid out for us in 1 Timothy 3 and in Paul's epistle to Titus in chapter 1, and paralleling those two is extremely useful and helpful to us. The point is, and for me, this is the key, if you believe that the scriptures are intended to provide to the church what the church needs for her ministry in perpetuity until the coming of her Lord, few people believe that anymore.

But if you do believe that, then you must be a complementarian for one simple reason, and that is that there is no mechanism of laying out what the requirements for a female elder would be. And it is the elders who are to preach and teach the word of God in the congregation with authority.

That term authority was used above there, with authority. One of the reasons that egalitarianism is making great strides and has, of course, destroyed the mainline denominations, it has. It's not the only thing that did it.

It's a part of a complex of things. Every single denomination that you've ever seen embracing female leadership in offices for which we have no biblical qualifications ever listed, every one of those denominations has continued into rank liberalism and unbelief.

That is a historical fact. It's a historical fact. Our history proves it. Why? Because it's a part of a complex of things, a diminishment in the trust in the word of God, and fundamentally, a diminishment in believing that it is God's intention that the scriptures function in such a fashion as to give the church that kind of supernatural foundation.

Once you abandon that, that's pretty much it. That's pretty much it. You are going to be left to become a mirror of the society around you, because you have nothing else to guide you. And that's exactly what we've seen over and over and over again.

And now it's happening in quote unquote, Big Eva as well. But if you believe that scripture lays out how the church is to function, then it becomes very clear that in the authoritative proclamation of the word of God, in the worship of the church, we are only given qualifications for men to function in that fashion.

If you think otherwise, I've asked this question. Of course, no one answered it. But if you think otherwise, give me the references, because there are none in the New Testament that would give you the qualifications of a woman in the position of authoritatively preaching and teaching the word of God in the context of the gathered body.

And this is where the issue comes up today. And that is, there needs to be application of this. If your church does not believe that the word of God is ministered from in the gathered body with authority, then you're not going to worry about whether it's a male or a female sharing, because there's nothing about limiting sharing to men or to women or to both.

And for a lot of churches today, that's all you got. Once you're to the point of nothing but Hawaiian shirts and bar stools, and let's just have ourselves a nice little talk for 15 minutes, because I don't want to go too long, because I don't want to bore you, because we entertained you up to this point, and that's about as long as we can get before you're getting ready to leave again.

In that instance, it doesn't matter. But if we're serious about believing that it's Christ's intention that his church have his voice within it through the ministration of the word and the sacraments, the Lord's Supper, baptism, then those are authoritative activities.

And biblically, we can only say this is pleasing to God, we do it this way, because here are the requirements as found in his word, and we have followed these requirements. Now, don't let people drag you off into all the bad argumentation, yeah, well, I know a lot of men who haven't done it right.

Well, yeah. And if perfection was the standard, then only Jesus could have ever done any of these things, not even any of the disciples or apostles would have qualified. That's not the point. The point is that we are given qualifications for men to authoritatively minister in the church, to reprove, rebuke, exhort, train in righteousness.

And when those are actions of authority, they're actions to be undertaken by men. Yet, we still believe that men are men and women are women. We will always believe that, we can't believe anything other, even when that means we're de-platformed or thrown in the hooscow.

As followers of Jesus, there's no choices at that point. And of course, one thing to keep in mind is, yes, our society might turn upon us and throw us in prison for believing that, but that also means that society will not belong upon the earth anyways.

It will collapse internally fairly quickly, because it's not living in the real world. Anyway, so for me, all of this stuff I'm seeing going back and forth and back and forth, social media and everything else, arguing about the meaning of this word or that word, really, it just boils down, maybe I'm oversimplifying, but for me, it just boils down to something fairly simple.

And if you really do believe that Christ has organized his church in such a fashion, that its worship is to be ordered by his word, then the issue of egalitarianism, complementarianism isn't an issue.

The text is plain. You have to start engaging in multiple levels of canonical authority. Liberals do that. Liberals have done that. The result's always been disaster. Every one of those churches is dying.

If you want the best way in the world to turn your pretty, beautiful, wonderfully architecturally designed church into a discotheque or a 7-Eleven, then abandon the highest view of scripture, ordain women to become bishops or whatever else you want to call them, and you'll have that before long.

So there you go. So there's my comments on that. Say, well, that's too simple. Well, works for me. Works for me. Okay, so while I was away doing hopefully important stuff, I saw that over the weekend, the interview that we had been told was coming, William Lane Craig was on the Ben Shapiro program.

Oh, by the way, this morning, we've already mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, but this morning, very early this morning, what I think is going to be an explosively important discussion took place on Justin Brierley's unbelievable radio broadcast.

I know this for many reasons, but the primary reason is that when I was in studio with Justin just a few weeks ago, it's the 23rd of April, I walked over to the Premiere Studios. I can walk to Premiere.

I can give you directions from multiple tube and rail stations on how to get to Premiere by foot. It's on Chapter Street, just off Vauxhall Bridge Road. Anyways, in studio, when we got done doing two programs, one's already aired, the one I did with Abdullah Al-Andalusi, and then there's gonna be another one on Romans 9.

I think maybe this is gonna drop this weekend. I don't remember. Anyway, Justin asked me. I have a good relationship with Justin. We do not see eye to eye on everything, but the one thing that has to be said plainly is that Justin is always fair in how he treats his guests, no matter whether he agrees with them or not.

He's always incredibly fair. And so he asked me, he said, so who do you think I should get to dialogue with Andy Stanley? And I sort of got the feeling that what he was saying was, he'd never do it with you.

Never do it with you. So in light of that, who might he do it with that would do a really good job and bring the issues out? And it didn't take me more than a second to go, well, I would really recommend you my fellow elder, Jeff Durbin.

And so I was really excited when I think the next day I got an email, no, Twitter. Justin and I use DMs on Twitter to communicate generally, asking for Jeff's email address. And then once I gave that to him the next day, in my email box, Jeff's as well, invitation to Jeff to join him.

This morning, 4 .30 a .m. Jeff's time. And for those of you who know Jeff, that was one of the biggest challenges. He's a bit of a night owl, but not that time of the night owl. I am. 4 .30 wouldn't have been any problem for me, but that was a sacrifice of love on Jeff's part.

And they did video. They did Zoom video. So, and what's exciting to me is that Jeff tells me they went much longer than I had told him they would. And evidently, Justin explained that they'll have to edit it for the actual radio airing on premier and terrestrial radio in the UK, but that the full version will be on the podcast.

So you'll want to catch the video full version on the podcast because they went much longer. And they, I think the reason that happened is because I think Justin was probably very interested in the apologetic methodology aspect of the book Irresistible, because it is strange that in Stanley's perspective, apologetics, and that's, it is connected with what we're going to listen to with William Lane Craig, because it comes from not just Craig, but Craig is a, probably the best known representative of some of the perspectives that Stanley is attempting to incorporate, causing him to adopt a highly unusual, historically condemned view of the relationship between the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures, between the Old Testament and New Testament, Tanakh and the Christian scripture, however you want to put it.

And so from what I understand, they spent a lot of time on apologetic methodology at first, only then getting to the issues of God's law and stuff like that later on, which I guess I should have predicted because I could see that that would be where Justin's primarily, primary interest would be, because he does favor the minimal facts, argumentation, things like that, that Andy Stanley incorporates into his, what I would say, denigration of the Old Testament scriptures as to their relationship to the new and their continued and abiding validity in the demonstration of what God's will is, the nature of God, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's supposed to be out on the 30th, I believe, of May. And I'm certainly looking forward to it. Very, very happy that Jeff got to do that. And my hope is what this is going to lead to is getting Jeff over to London, maybe on the way over to someplace else.

I'm using my contacts as best I can to introduce Jeff to a wider audience over there in Europe, where I've had the opportunity of doing stuff for years now. I would love to see Jeff have the same opportunity I do, and that is basically I go to London and I just, I contact Justin beforehand, say, well, what do you want to talk about?

I'll make myself available. And generally, he comes up with really fascinating and interesting stuff. And he's really good at matching guests to address a wide range of topics. And so, yeah, I'm hoping that that's going to happen.

And I'm just thankful that Justin asked and then acted on my recommendation and so thrilled that I can recommend to people my fellow elder, Jeff Durbin, and know that he's going to step up to the plate and swing big, go for the fences.

And I'm sure that he did. So I saw some screenshots of what the Zoom thing looked like with Andy and Jeff and stuff. And I did make the comment, I think Jeff's going to scare the Brits with his big man beard.

He must be from Montana. Something like that. I bet she has a gun right out of the sight of the view of the camera, you know, that type of thing. I can just see that coming. So anyways, that took place this morning and I got good word about it.

So we're thankful about it. So it is connected to what we're going to look at here. And that is the discussion between William Lane Craig and Ben Shapiro. Now, of course, Ben had John MacArthur on, what, less than six months ago, three months ago, something like that.

And this is a very, very, very different conversation. And as soon as it aired, I saw all sorts of stuff on my Twitter feed about, man, I wish Ben Shapiro would have somebody on who actually believes in sufficiency of scripture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I listened to it initially between flights at DFW and then I had to listen to it again while queuing everything up. But of course, I was listening to it at 1 .8 at that point. So I've marked what I think is most relevant and interesting in providing a contrast and in providing a, at least from my perspective, my understanding of Reformed theology and the Reformed worldview.

And I am a presuppositionalist, a critique of, I have always said, and Craig verifies this in this conversation, that Craig is a philosopher first and a theologian second. And when it comes to evangelism, he is a philosopher first.

To him, philosophy is a tool of evangelism. And as a result, I believe it ends up ruling over and then fundamentally, I think, altering the message of important elements of the scriptures themselves. And so there you go.

Yes, someone channeled going, DFW means Dallas-Fort Worth. I suppose not everybody who travels would know what DFW was, but it was the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, which is a place where if you fly American Airlines, and I am an executive platinum flyer on American Airlines, you visit Dallas all the time.

It's a hub. One of our main, three main hubs would be Dallas, Phoenix, and Charlotte. And so you'll see me mentioning those places all the time. Okay, let's dive into what... I didn't do the video thing.

It's so much easier just to do audio, throw it into Audio Notetaker. Someday, when Audio Notetaker becomes Video Notetaker and allows us to do it that way, great, fine, wonderful. We'll do it. Till then, we got to do with what we got to do.

So you're just stuck looking at me, which I realize is not all that impressive, but okay.

So how do we get from the idea of an unmoved mover in some of the arguments that you've been making to the idea of a moral God who cares about us and is involved in the world?

Now, I appreciate Ben Shapiro. All of us appreciate Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is an incredibly bright guy. All of us love watching Ben Shapiro make leftists look like idiots, and that's great. But we know Ben Shapiro is not a Christian.

He is a form of Orthodox Jew, and so issues relating to the Messiahship of Jesus, cross resurrection, all these things are central in talking with Ben Shapiro. And so I appreciate this is an incredibly important question, because Craig's been talking about his cosmological argument, et cetera, et cetera.

But Shapiro's a sharp guy, and he realizes, yeah, but that doesn't really give you a personal God. That just gives you a God concept, the need of a God of a certain form, but it's not going to give you the personal God of Judaism, and certainly, well, at least not conservative, Orthodox Judaism, and it's certainly not going to give you the Trinitarian God of the Bible.

And one of the issues we've raised many times in talking about the perspective promoted by William Lane Craig and others is that when you don't start with the Trinitarian God, the only true revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity is going to be based upon divine revelation.

God has to tell us that he exists in this way. You don't just sit there and stare at a three-leaf clover and go, ah, yes, three divine persons, one being, perichoresis, yes, and no, that doesn't work that way.

The creation does tell us that God is powerful, and the creation tells us that we should be thankful to God, we are his creatures, and really that he's going to judge us, but it doesn't tell us almost anything else.

And while God's law, moral law, is written upon our hearts as the creatures of God, the specifics of that law are not to be found in examining a rock or contemplating the beauty of the cosmos. There are specific things that are only revealed in Scripture, and who God is, and how we are to worship him, and how we are to know him, is something that God revealed from the start, and that's why Scripture is so vitally important.

And so it's a good question.

That Ben asks. Well, it's quite right that arguments like the cosmological argument or teleological or design argument, which we haven't talked about, don't get you the moral properties.

Of the creator and designer of the universe. Not only the moral properties, but the fact that we worship a triune God. One of my concerns is that this form of apologetic approach leaves you tacking on at the end the central revelation of who God is.

That's why Bonson said, I'm not going to defend bare theism, I'm not going to defend deism, I don't think any of those are rational perspectives, I'm going to be defending Christian theism, which is Trinitarian theism, and I think that that's appropriate.

But the moral argument and the ontological argument do. Both of those lead to a being which is the moral paradigm and source of all moral value and moral obligation.

But not triune. And I would argue a Unitarian source of morality is problematic, because you can't define how God is love. And if you can't define how God is love, you can't really define how God is just and righteous or merciful, or you can't define loving-kindness.

Again, it comes out different in a Unitarian concept, and I don't think that Craig's appeal to the moral argument is going to be sufficient at that point without the Trinity, without the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit in eternity past.

And so those arguments complement the cosmological and teleological arguments by telling us something about the moral properties of the creator and designer of the universe.

So you have multiple arguments that you're going to use here to try to illustrate general broad categories, but what he loathes to do is to make the kind of authoritative proclamation that Paul did on Mars Hill, when he was interrupted, by the way, he didn't get to finish his argument.

As soon as he mentioned the resurrection of Jesus, didn't even get to mention Jesus's name, but when he said God was going to judge by the one whom he raised from the dead, the laughter drowned him out.

But he got there, that is to the point of making the authoritative proclamation that God was going to judge the living and the dead by this one that he has raised from the dead. And he doesn't make that argument on the basis of bowing to their philosophical supremacy-ism, even when it cost him the opportunity to continue the proclamation.

He had to proclaim the central aspect that God had done something that no philosopher could ever predict, but that the scriptures did. And that was Jesus's point too, in Luke chapter 24.

Now, looking at those properties, what makes that being a God of mind? And what makes that being constant, meaning like present now, as opposed to the deistic conception of a God who laid things in motion, maybe embedded moral codes within us, and then walked away?

What makes God something that is present in the universe at the moment,.

On any level? Okay, now these are good questions, and I would be answering them very differently, probably because I would have approached the whole subject differently in the first place. But especially, I don't think you would ever come to the conclusion that the Trinity is anything other than a later speculative thing to sort of believe in, but there is no centrality.

I would ask William Lane Craig, is the Trinity central to your worldview, or would your worldview be pretty much the same if you were a Unitarian? I think that's a perfectly honest, fair question to ask, because I don't see how Craig incorporates how the Trinity solves the problem of the one of the many, for example, or gives us a grounding for understanding personality in an appropriate fashion, because the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit.

I don't see how that ever comes out. It certainly doesn't come out in this conversation, especially the person who would reject the doctrine of the Trinity,.

And I think that needs to be challenged. A couple of questions there. First, with regard to why you think this is a mind, most all of the arguments that I just shared do lead to a personal, intelligent creator.

The first argument does. The teleological or design argument leads to.

Cosmic intelligence that has created the world. Cosmic intelligence. The reality is that the teleological argument, well, again, you could fit all of this into a Unitarian scheme, but if you just talk about intelligence, I do believe that the cosmological argument is a valid argument, given what's called the principle of sufficient reason, PSR.

The problem is PSR requires you to have an intelligent personal creator, and so, you know, if you will accept the validity and rationality of just brute facts, and you can get around the cosmological argument.

So, all of this, again, takes us back to those starting presuppositions, and how often in our conversations, especially with unbelievers, look, the whole point of presuppositionalism, you never let the unbeliever judge God, and you never forget what the Bible reveals about the nature of the unbeliever as a suppressor of truth.

These are absolutely necessary to understand.

The moral argument leads to a personal embodiment of moral value, because persons are the source of moral value, not inanimate things. The ontological argument leads to a being who is omniscient and morally perfect, and therefore is a person.

But not triune. The ontological argument would never even suggest it. Couldn't suggest it. These theistic arguments don't just leave you with some kind of unmoved mover. They give you a personal creator and designer of the universe who.

Is perfectly good, but not in the sense of defining what good is. And in fact, one of the problems here is that people who approach the faith in this way will often be the first ones to balk at the idea that the God of the Old Testament was truly good, when they—the idea that it is good for God to judge the world in the Flood, which was—I don't know why people always point to Israel and the Amorites or something as the horrible example of genocide or something.

The Flood was a whole lot more than that. Now, numerically, maybe not so much. There wouldn't have been all that many people in the world at that point, but it was a— percentage-wise, it was pretty big, okay?

Yeah, per capita judgment, very high. Very, very high, yeah. But yeah, the people who have been convinced by this kind of argumentation are going to balk on that because they've been invited to. They were asked to judge from the start.

There you go. Now, some of them give you a being that is metaphysically necessary. The second version of the cosmological argument that I mentioned leads to a being who exists by a necessity of his own nature, and therefore cannot fail to exist.

The moral argument leads to a being who is the paradigm and source of all moral value. Now, if you believe that some moral values are necessary, which most ethicists do, that means this being is also necessary in his.

Existence, and therefore—. Now, you know, I just don't think that Dr. Craig hears himself sometimes because he's said this so many times, but did you catch—let me just replay, just that last section. I'm going to actually go to normal speed here because we've been playing at 1 .2.

Just.

Listen. You believe that some moral values— Here you go. Now, if you believe that some moral values are necessary, which most ethicists do, that means this being is also necessary in his existence,.

And therefore—. So, if you believe, as most ethicists do—. You see what the basis, the foundation here of all this stuff is? So, you know, if you come to the conclusion, so you get to reason this out for yourself, and then you can join the majority of ethicists—it's not all, but the majority of ethicists—.

You're going for, there's a 51 chance here, and that's good enough. That's always been one of my criticisms of this approach is, you know, the majority, you know, go with this, and, you know, it's up to you, and if you believe this, and you put it together with that, and so on and so forth.