Road Trip DL: Nashville Report, Capital Punishment, Catholic Mythology, Back to Allen

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We are on the road, and in fact, I have arrived in the area where I will be staying for the Harbor Freight G3. Now, we've been sued for that yet. Either by Harbor Freight or G3, I'm not sure which.

I'm not sure that either one of them would not necessarily want to be connected with the other, but there you go. Anyways, the conference this weekend will be going on, and looking forward to that. I'm going to be on with Jeremiah Nortier, even though somebody else at the last conference called him Nortier, because they obviously have studied French.

But that's Jeremiah actually contacting me. So, half an hour after we finish here, so it's four o 'clock central time right now, so at 5 30, I'll be joining Jeremiah. We're going to be talking more about the upcoming debate, number 200, with Dale Tuggy and stuff like that.

And he interviewed me about some of this stuff at the conference there in Nashville as well. So, let's start there, I suppose, while it's still somewhere in my mind. I was going to say fresh in my mind, but I've slept since then, so it's not necessarily fresh in my mind.

Nashville Conference Wrap-Up and the Josh Scott Dialogue

First of all, you know, right at the end of the time, I was talking with Aaron and Tim. They were the guys that put this all together, and I don't first remember when they contacted me. I know that Jason Lyle's travel manager, Denise, I was sitting, I was in Conway.

I remember which hotel was that, so it's been February. She was trying to work with me to make all this work out and stuff like that. People who've never put one of these things on don't realize how much work it is.

The very fact they're talking about one next year means they're gluttons for punishment. We've done a few over the years, you'll notice we don't do much of that kind of stuff at all, because it is labor intensive.

You just don't have any idea until it starts happening, all the details and all the things that can go wrong and everything else. So to Aaron and Tim, thank you very much. I thought it went really, really well, and it was a very interesting mixture of speakers.

Jason Lyle is always fascinating. He did his fractals presentation, and it keeps evolving. I hope we can use evolving, given the creation emphasis, and so there was stuff in it that I had not seen or heard before, so I really, really enjoyed that.

And Dr. Ross, really great to meet him. He would tend to go over time a little bit, but that's pretty common at conferences. And of course, Eli Ayala kicked stuff off and was normally one of the first guys to speak, and Eli is just really becoming, he's coming into his own.

He's really, you can just tell that his confidence is growing, and his knowledge of the topic is growing, and everything else. So it went really well. It was, met great people, had good attendance. It wasn't a G3 size type thing, but for a first time there in the Nashville area, I think it went really, really well.

It was organized well. The only negative thing I have to say is all my stuff, pretty much all my stuff other than a Q &A session, was all on one day. And generally, what we try to do is, if I'm going to be doing a debate, this wasn't a debate technically, discussion, try to keep that the main thing.

And if I do speak only once that day, so that was Saturday, and man, was I done at the end of that. I was gone, just exhausted, really, really, really was. So the talks went fine. And then I suppose the main thing is, and I can't direct you to the videos.

I don't know when they're going to be posted. I can't imagine that it would be a very long period of time before they are available. But yeah, Josh Scott, author of Cross-Examine, which I found odd. He refused to call it a debate, to do a debate, to have equal time, a thesis statement, all that kind of stuff.

Even though his books called Cross-Examine. So you can't really have cross-examination if you don't have a debate. So anyway, big guy, man, I was six, four, maybe six, five, big, big boy. And so he had a few people there, you know, just a few, you can tell who they were by the questions they asked at the end.

I really did not know how this was going to go. I had three pastors, local pastors, that I guess had done a dialogue with him just a few days earlier. They came and they filled me in on what they had experienced and what they, what I could expect.

And I'm like, yeah, I read his book. I know where he's coming from. He's LGBTQ affirming and women leadership affirming and, you know, holds to progressivist views of scripture, which means there was no Moses and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And I got to ask him the one question that I really had thought of while reading his book. And that was, did you, well, I asked him, had he read The Same-Sex Controversy? And he had no idea what I was talking about.

And I was like, oh, okay, well, that was the book I wrote, co-authored 24 years ago on the subject of homosexuality. And I said, I was going to ask you if you did read it, if it wasn't just a little bit weird that we had predicted every argument you would use in your chapter on this subject, addressed it and refuted it.

And he's like, well, he didn't really have an answer for that for obvious reasons. But, so I don't remember now. We were getting into the LGBTQ stuff. I was dealing with Arsene Koytay and the fact that he had not dealt with Arsene Koytay in any meaningful fashion in his book.

But somewhere along the line, something was said. He said something. I don't remember what the exact context was, but it was all of a sudden, the whole conversation changed. And I found myself realizing he does not affirm the resurrection.

Well, he redefines what resurrection means. And this was really, maybe it will be useful in the future when people see it and you're dealing with progressivist stuff. I think everybody there rather quickly realized that if you're a progressivist, you can redefine any word you want and use it any way you want.

And so he would sit there and say, I don't know what happened to Jesus's body in the grave. But then in the next breath say, but that's not what Easter is about. We affirm the risen Christ. So he didn't rise, but we affirm the risen Christ.

Now I know what that means. I went to Fuller Theological Seminary. I had to read the liberals. That's why I had to do that. I didn't know that at the time, the Lord did. So I knew exactly what he was saying, but I had to make sure that the audience understood what he was saying.

So we spent most of our time on that until the audience questions started. And Eli even got a question and he was like, sounds like you're equivocating. You're using the same term to mean different things.

And of course, that's exactly the reality. And it's frustrating. He would make claims and I would challenge them and he'd say, well, so-and-so says this. And I said, dude, did you ever read the refutation of so-and-so?

You have no idea. When you talk to these folks, even though you did try to say, well, I once believed like you. Yeah, but you didn't know why. He was King James only until he was like 11. That's not exactly to give you a solid background.

You didn't know why. He hadn't read my book. He hadn't read Michael Brown's book. He hadn't read Gagnon's book. None of that stuff. He was just left going, nope, I haven't read that. Nope, not familiar with that.

Nope, don't know that. And I challenged him, where's the lexical source that says that? Well, just sort of look at me, sitting there going, I'm glad this wasn't a debate. And so, yeah, it got a little frustrating a few times when he would make some real flippant, again, ultra-progressivist weird statements.

And then during the Q &A, the vast majority of the questions were for him, obviously. But his people were there. And I could tell there was this one couple over to this side of me. And she stands up to ask a question.

And she says, so you have six grandchildren. Statistically, one of them will be gay. I'm like, no. And it is fascinating because when I first started dealing with this, again, a quarter century ago, the numbers were around maybe 1%.

There was argument about they're always trying to inflate the numbers. The numbers today, I mean, I see something about five years ago, Gen Z was like 37%, LGBTQ, whatever. If that doesn't tell you that this entire revolution is social media driven, and it's not real, and if an EMP hit and took out the entire power grid around the world, the entire LGBTQ movement would collapse.

And so that tells you a lot. But then she's like, so what if one of your children, one of your grandchildren is gay, and they say they're going to commit suicide? What are you going to do? And I said, that's one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard.

No, it's one of the stupidest arguments that you people keep presenting. It is so, you know, that's all they know to do, is what if they commit suicide? And it's like, so if they decide they're a bank robber, you need to affirm them being a bank robber unless they commit suicide.

But I used a biblical example. I said, so if your grandchild comes to you and says that they've been made by God to have sex with animals, and they're going to commit suicide, if you don't affirm that, you're going to affirm that, right?

And the only answer they get, the only answer that Josh gave, was why it's offensive to compare homosexuality with bestiality. I'm like, Moses did, and that's not the point, is it? No, you can't deal with the point.

It's not love to affirm self-destructive behavior. And so anyway, it was, I guess on the one side of things, you know, the guys there in Nashville, they had sent emails out to all sorts of folks, and basically got ignored by everybody.

This was the one guy who said, yeah, I'll do something. They had tried for a number of different people, and generally that kind of stuff does get ignored. No one is interested in taking that kind of stuff on.

So the comments that, you know, I didn't stick around long after, it was a long day. The comments that I did hear from people, the few people I did talk to afterwards, it's like, man, that was really helpful to see what we've been talking about, how it all comes together, and the need to be able to talk to these people and do apologetics.

Excuse me. And so, yeah, it was quite the interesting encounter. Hopefully they'll link, they'll drop me a note and link me to it when it is posted. So I'll be able to let you know, and maybe we'll play a clip or two of it or something like that.

But it was, it was only 90 minutes, and it went pretty quick. It probably felt a little bit longer for him, but it did go pretty quick. And so there you go. So if you're a praying person, as I just mentioned, I'm now here, I'm not in Tullahoma, but I'm fairly nearby, within driving distance anyways of Tullahoma.

And things get started Thursday evening with the debate with Dale Tuggy, and then the conference is Friday and Saturday, and I'm preaching Sunday. And so if you'll pray that Lord bless this time, and give me strength and continued health to be able to do what I'm doing.

And then I'm off from here. I'm going to be stopping at one church on the way up to Pennsylvania, and one church on the way back in Pennsylvania, as part of the road trip at aomin .org type thing, where you're traveling and you stop and speak in a church one evening, casually dressed and half brain dead.

But still do it, and it's fun. And then I'll be with Chris Arntzen for his Iron Sharpens Iron pastors luncheon, and then preaching at the church. And like I said, one more church on the way back, and then it's straight across the good old US of A, getting home.

And the temptation is always to try to push the trip home, spend a little money, and as long as you've got KOA reservations, they don't hit you up on stuff generally, and try to push a little bit farther.

You try to resist it, because you can get tired on the road, especially when you're alone. And remember, for all of you go, I can drive, I can drive eight hours. Yeah, you're probably chugging enough coffee, or jolt, or Mountain Dew, to keep a city lit up at night.

I can't touch any of that. I can't have any stimulants, or my heart goes to thump, to thump, to thump. Caffeine, ew, that's the end of me. Anything like caffeine, ew, that's the end of me. So, yeah, it gets a little sometimes on the road.

So, pray for our safety. And let me just say, when I get back after this trip, we don't, almost every radio program you used to listen to, programs you hear today, you know, there's a lot of stuff about support, giving, everything else.

And we rarely talk about that on The Dividing Line. I've told you the stories as to why that is, the stuff that I grew up listening to, and a certain guy, who I guess is still running around, who just really put a sour, sour taste in my mouth, about basically saying to people, you know, if you don't support my ministry, you know, kingdom of darkness wins, and all the rest of this type of stuff.

And not going to do that. But, you know, we have the travel fund, and we're going to be hitting it hard when I get back. Again, love my little house, but it has to be repaired. I noticed some stuff falling off someplace.

Oh my goodness, the bridge is on the 840 in Tennessee. Please fix them somebody. My goodness. About the only place, and I exempt Houston from this, but generally driving across the 40 in Texas is okay.

And there are some other southern states that they do it right. But man, Tennessee, guys, your bridges. There's an entrance onto the bridge, there's an exit off the bridge, and if you are flying through the air at the end, that probably wasn't well designed.

So anyways, you know, our beautiful mobile command center needs work whenever we get back. And especially, I've hit some real doozies, like I said, here in Tennessee. I did not expect that, but wow. I was worried it was going to just rip this right off the back of the truck.

It was just so badly, badly, badly designed. Anyway, so the travel fund takes care of that stuff, and you know, the RV park here. I can tell you stories about big names and their top-end first-class suites.

You know, this morning I was unhooking the sewer hose, having dumped the black tank this morning, and yeah, a lot of folks wouldn't be doing that. But you know what? If I get to be in churches I wouldn't be in otherwise, I'll wash out the sewer hose.

Life is good. But then the regular fund is, you know, that's how we keep the website going, and Rich and I going, and the lights on, and stuff like that. So I'm just, I have to once in a while just remind everybody that we're a non-profit organization, and we'd love to have local churches support us, but it's pretty much mainly individuals.

And when folks step up and say, you know, you've been doing this forever, and we want you to keep doing it for at least a few more years before we pull the plug on you, you old thing, it's extremely encouraging.

And a lot of people need a lot of encouragement right now. It just seems to me, honestly, that I talk to pastor friends, and my own experience right now, and the people I know, just a lot of heavy-duty, hard stuff going on.

And encouragement seems to be few and far between. And so we do appreciate that when you help to support us in that way. All right. So that's what's coming up, the debate, all that kind of stuff on this trip.

I saw a, did I? Yes, I did. Where'd I put it? There it is. Okay, we'll find it. I saw a graphic on, let me see here. Let me think if we go like this. Nope, that's not it. It's there. There we go. There it is.

Nope, go back. And boom. There we go. Ta-da. And I didn't even cover any of the writing. That's good. I saw this from a Roman Catholic guy on X. I've blocked him, he's blocked me. So I couldn't respond to it.

But I did mention that I wanted to talk about it. And let's, again, this is, we can honestly tell everybody, we have been talking about this for as long as the ministry has existed. Well, at least since 1990.

At least since 1990. So that's when we really started dealing with Roman Catholicism, probably 89, but ever since then. So we've tried to help people be prepared to give an answer on the subject of solo scriptura.

We've really, really worked at it. Years of oral teaching and tradition before the Bible. Before the Bible. And notice the first date, 30 AD. Do you remember, ever read the Gospels? How many times did Jesus make reference to the scriptures?

In fact, how many times did he hold men accountable to the scriptures, as if God had spoken to them, like in Matthew chapter 22, perhaps? Or when he was responding to the Jews in John chapter 10, he said, the scriptures cannot be broken.

For Jesus, the citation of scriptures was the final word in any dispute. So what about before 30 AD? Oh, you mean the majority of the Bible was already there, right? Yeah. Now we can argue about the apocryphal books.

The Jews never accepted them as scripture, and that causes a major, major problem. There's all sorts of problems. Those books as well contain obvious falsehoods, errors, historical issues, things like that.

But the reality is that Jesus held men accountable for what was found in the written scriptures in possession of the Jewish people. They were written in Hebrew. They had already been translated into Greek and was called the Greek Septuagint.

And so this all existed prior to 30 AD. And Jesus was a preacher of the book. He directed people. He said this was the words of the Holy Spirit. This is God speaking. Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying?

So we need to have Jesus's view of scripture, and we need to have a proper understanding of the fact that graphics like this seem to completely ignore. Notice this oral teaching and tradition before the Bible.

No. I mean, if you want to argue, well, there was oral teaching and tradition before Moses wrote those books or something like that, you're going to have hard time with that. Long time ago, all we have is the written record from that far back.

But it's almost like the Old Testament doesn't exist for these folks. And so you have, no, it says 20 to 65. So it goes 10 years before 30 AD. I'm not sure what they're trying to do there. Are they talking about before?

Well, I'm not sure what they're trying to do there. But 20, the church isn't founded in that sense in 20. So maybe it's a typo. I don't know. But 20 to 65, why E? Hmm. The church passes the faith orally.

Well, the church is quoting from scripture constantly in the written documents that we have. And there was a whole lot of oral teaching going on. But remember, what is, what's always the thing to remember about Roman Catholicism?

They are going to assume what they cannot prove. And that is that the content of what was preached contains all this dogma that they have developed over the years, but it never got written down. It's not in the scriptures.

It's in the oral teaching. Now with, there's a bunch of stuff going on here. So I keep looking at it and I'm just making sure that Rich isn't going, you crushed. It looks like everything looks fine over there.

Roman Catholics want to have their cake and eat it too. And so on the one side, they will say that this is apostolic tradition. The apostles taught it, you know, here the church passes the faith orally.

And then when challenged on that point, then when you go prove it, all of a sudden John Henry Cardinal Newman rises from the dead, the newly minted doctor of the church, and they abandon the historical claims and go, well, it's development.

This developed over time, you see. Well, either it was delivered by the apostles or developed over time. It's not both. Which one is it? Depends on the day, it seems, for most Roman Catholic apologists.

Depends on the audience that the Roman Catholic apologist is addressing, but it can't be both. And this wants to tell you, well, no, there's this stuff being passed on. And then notice circa 375 AD, the biblical canon is fixed.

I mean, the New Testament canon, the Old Testament canon had been fixed 200 years before Christ. You can't believe that because that would exclude the actual fixing of the canon from the Roman Catholic perspective in 1546.

So when this says 375, it's almost 1200 years early, even from the Catholic side. See, they don't want to admit, well, yeah, the dogmatic definition of the canon is 1546. But, you know, you got the supposed council of Rome and, you know, stuff like that.

Well, why not Athanasius? That's before 375. Well, he's just an individual. Yeah, but that's where these lists came from, the Muratorian fragments 200 years before that, that seemed to have been from a single individual too.

Canon stuff is messy, and it's messy for everybody. But Rome thinks that by the exercise of her infallible authority, she can get around the mess. Well, she can't. She's mired in it, but her adherents don't seem to recognize that, don't seem to know what to do about it.

So 375 AD, the biblical canon is fixed, is not even a true statement from the Roman Catholic perspective. Pope Gregor the Great rejected the books of Maccabees as being canon scripture. So you've got full canonical scripture, you've got deuterocanonical, not really canonical, but not really not canonical.

Oh, it's messy, messy, messy, messy. But this kind of simplistic graphic, not useful at all. It really, really isn't. So there you go. I said I would respond to that, and I posted that on on X. So I don't know if anybody would tune in to hear that, but there you go.

Well, there were eight responses to me, and this, I mean, yeah, and then of course, but stand firm and hold the traditions received from us either by epistle or by our mouth. And every time, it's funny, whenever I go on YouTube and look up my debate with Jerry Matatix on Sola Scriptura from Long Island, it automatically starts at the beginning of my comments on that text, because I've posted it to people over and over and over again.

Nobody ever responds. You post it, and they just ignore it. I think most of them obviously don't even take the time to listen. They don't care. They don't care if there's an argument from the other side.

Capital Punishment, Social Breakdown, and Public Safety

Doesn't matter to me. I've already got my beliefs, and I'm going to stand with them. Okay, before we go back to David Allen, and I've had people requesting that we do so, so that indicates there's continued interest, and that's good.

I have to address, we see such astonishing violence in the world today, and it's not that violence is new. It's that we're seeing it because of social media. We're made aware of it, and it has been exacerbated by fentanyl, by, you know, the term for drugs in the New Testament is pharmakia.

The term for sorcery is pharmakia. They were seen as interrelated, and there's no question that utilization of mind-altering drugs opens your mind to spiritual influence, and I can't come up with explanations for so much of what I see online these days outside of the demonic, outside of spiritual.

Yeah, a lot of these people are, what was the term, shot out. They're shot out. They have abused a wide range of pharmaceuticals for so long that there's nobody home anymore. There's no rational part of the mind left.

It's shot out, and hence there's no resistance to any kind of spiritual influence. So we've all seen, it always freezes at one point, but we've seen the images of the young black man who killed the Ukrainian refugee.

She's just sitting there, looking at her phone. She's on the train going somewhere, minding her own business, hasn't offended anybody, and he takes out a knife and violently violently stabs it into her neck.

And you sit there and you go, what's the background here? Well, now we know 14 previous arrests. You want to know how George Soros is succeeding in destroying the United States of America? He's used his money to elect people to office that will not enforce the law, and he's taken advantage of the reality that there has been an ongoing degradation within the United States of our understanding of evil, sin, and punishment.

You know, we say, lock the guy up. The Bible never says, lock anybody up. Does it? No. Israel didn't have prisons. They had sanctuary cities you could flee to in certain situations of manslaughter and shedding of innocent blood, stuff like that.

Locking somebody up is putting them in slavery. That's what it is. It's non-moving non-moving slavery. But what it is now is, you take a violent criminal and you put them in a cage and they'll probably kill other people in that place or get killed themselves.

But you're providing them with possibly more food than they had on the outside, with medical treatment, an exercise yard, and it's costing the victims of their violence money all the time in the form of taxes.

So whoever thought that was a good idea? And once it was established, and it really was established early on, I mean, it did come over from British practices. It became right for abuse. And then what happens is, once secularism really starts making great inroads and the empathy movement begins making great inroads, you no longer have public executions.

And now you've got to do it humanely. Kill somebody humanely. Well, okay. I don't think there's any reason for burning someone at the stake. That's not a humane way of killing somebody. Very often, burning at a stake took quite some time to die in an agonizing way.

Sometimes it wasn't the fire that killed you. You were cooked. The wind would blow, the flames, you just had the heat, and you would literally be roasted alive. It would take you hours of just, oh, to think about it.

So I'm not saying that, but all of a sudden, now it's done privately. And remember, for a while, it couldn't be done because, well, the drugs we're using aren't necessarily doing this in a humane way, and blah, blah, blah.

You're killing someone for having normally very inhumanely killed others. And the real issue is not how hard it is for someone to die, and they die in agony and pain and things like that. The real issue is we no longer believe that human life is sacred.

And so when someone takes human life, we used to know that from the beginning, God had said, you forfeit your own. You shed human blood by human beings, your own blood will be shed. We knew that. We don't know it anymore.

And we don't believe it anymore. And we don't practice it anymore. And so, you know, people say, if you're really pro-life, you'll be against capital punishment. No, it's just the opposite. This man who killed this poor young woman, right in front of everybody, had been arrested 14 times.

I was just watching a clip before we came on of a sheriff someplace, I think in Colorado. He said, I just had to release a guy. The law says he's been found incompetent to stand trial on a couple of charges, so he has to be released.

He says he's violent. He's horribly violent. There's video of him knocking people out and then standing over them and just beating them to a bloody pulp, trying to kill him with his fists. But my hands are tied.

Protect yourselves from him. You know, the amazing thing is, if anybody in Colorado protected themselves, if a man protected his wife from this killing machine, they'd go after him. If someone shoots this guy, they'd go after him.

It doesn't matter what his past is. It doesn't matter. Everybody knows this man is a danger. This man cannot be in society. If you protect yourself, you're the one that's going to end up in prison. That's what happens when a society abandons the foundation upon which its laws were originally built and originally based.

And you might, you know, we've really gotten to the point where I just can't believe we ever had public hangings or public executions. I saw a graphic, I forget where it was, I think this morning, where it said, you know, we think about these western towns and how violent they were.

And it compared the number of violent crimes, it may have been Tombstone, to Chicago. And Chicago's, you know, 110 times more violent crime. And the graphic that accompanied it was the executions of criminals publicly in Tombstone.

That does communicate, that does say, and of course it can't be 20 years after it happened. That's the other thing. If you give them 20 years of free room and board, you're not providing any kind of incentive not to engage in violent behavior at all.

Now we know what the fundamental answer to all this stuff is. These young men, these young black men, who are beating people to death, are the product of a completely collapsed family structure. The black culture where the fathers are gone.

There's no discipline. And you all know it, and I got in trouble with this in 2016. I don't care anymore. It's just so obvious. It's just so plain. It's not because they're black, it's because black culture glorifies violence.

It glorifies sexual immorality. It glorifies being a baby daddy. How many years ago was it? We showed the clip of this one, I don't remember what the woman's name was, but she had these young men on, and she'd asked them, how many children do you have that you know of?

Well, I have 10. I have 14. There's one guy, I have 28. 28 children. He's not disciplining those children. They have no example from him. That's what the issue is. That's where it's coming from. And it is the plain and obvious result of a, this is the transitionary period into chaos from civilization.

And this is exactly what Soros and all of his people have wanted all along. They want this. They want those people dying on trains. They want this kind of chaos, so that eventually we all cry out, somebody help us.

And they come along and sweep in and with their totalitarian technocracy, take all your liberties away, all your freedoms away, drug you up, and keep you happy. And they become your saviors. That's they want.

That's they want. And man, they're doing a good job. They're accomplishing what they want to accomplish. They really are. Okay, anyway, one other thing, and I'm sorry, I know it's quarter till. I'll keep this short.

I mentioned that I was talking with, I've been talking with pastor friends and stuff, not just back home, but in other states. And with the Lord's Day coming, and it's still a little ways away, I'd like to invite you, if you're not a pastor, if you're not on staff, if you're just a regular Christian serving the Lord and have an interest in apologetics, since that's why you're tuning in here, think about doing something for me, not for me.

Think about doing something for your leaders in your church. Drop them a note of thanks. Tell them you're praying for them. Just take a moment to let know that they're not forgotten. There are so many people that just don't realize how difficult and frequently lonely ministry in the church is.

Shouldn't be that way, but it very frequently is. Part of it is our culture. Part of it is, you know, back in the day when you had to be close enough to walk to a house church, you'd be in a community, you'd be around people.

But we live so far away from everybody now that it can become very lonely, very discouraging. And if you do it just simply for selfish reasons, you may end up with a much better sermon. You end up with a much better sermon on Sunday if you encourage your pastor in this coming week.

You know, maybe offer to do something that might be of assistance to him, you know, take some time off of his hands. So many, especially bivocational pastors, have so much to do that any little thing might just mean the world to them.

So I'm not asking that for me. I'm on the road. I am preaching Sunday. Not sure on what yet, but I'm preaching on Sunday. And I preached four weeks in a row before I left on this trip. And I'm pretty sure I'll be preaching when I get back.

So I'm not saying this for me, but just for so many that probably just need to hear a word of encouragement this week. Just to, I encourage you to encourage them. Okay, back to liberating Romans from reformed captivity.

Romans 8, Assurance, and the Golden Chain of Redemption

And we're trying to get to, we're trying to get to the exegesis of Romans chapter eight. And what we're finding is what we're given is an overarching argument that is meant to tell us whatever the text is saying, it's not saying what the Calvinists are saying.

It's saying something much less. So I read to you before this is on, oh goodness. I keep them right there. They hang on a electrical plug over there. And that way I always know where they are. Page 61 of 240.

Why put something in a font that size? Why? And some of you are sitting there going, it didn't bother you 15 years ago. I didn't really have Kindle on screen 15 years ago. But yeah, I hear you. I know, I know.

On page 61 of the Kindle edition, all of Romans eight is about the believer in Christ. And when you look at that, well, it's not about the unbeliever. There's stuff in Romans eight about creation. They're not, the creation isn't a believer in Christ in that sense.

There is a lot more in Romans eight than the believer in Christ. But the whole emphasis that we've already documented before, we already read some of this before, is even though faith believer doesn't appear in Romans eight, it did back in Romans three, four, and five.

And so that's what this is all about. And so the key issue is you get to choose whether you're the believer or not. None of this has anything to do with predestination, election, even though those terms appear here.

So belief and believer don't appear in Romans eight, predestination and elect does, but you go with what doesn't appear in Romans eight and not with what does appear in Romans eight. That's the whole argument.

That's the whole thing. And so all of Romans eight is about the believer in Christ. And so we started reading through some of this stuff. And so he says, the those of verse 29a are the those of verse 28.

It is those whom God is actively pursuing his purposes, which in the full context, the paragraph are eschatological to be conformed image of his son. There is an eschatological element to being conformed to the image of Christ, but there is a present tense element.