A Nation Divided, My Irrelevancy, the Finished Atonement

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:29

You know, the scriptures say a lot about judges. In Israel, judges were established by God very early on, and the foundation upon which they were to judge, their duty to honor

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God and His law in judging God's people. Justice is described as the foundation of Yahweh's throne.

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And for many, many years, we have repeated Calvin's appropriate statement that when

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God wants to judge a people, when He wants to bring destruction upon a people, He'll give them unrighteous judges. Because it's one thing to have law, but we all know that law must be interpreted and applied.

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And when you have unrighteous judges, when you have judges who do not feel that they are under the authority of the law, they do not have to interpret the law as it was intended to be interpreted, or if they actually hold to a worldview that says no one knows, no one can know what was intended by this law.

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Now, of course, you can have legislatures and legislative bodies that create laws that can't be interpreted by anybody, and they're just a mess in of themselves.

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Okay, that's true. But when you have something like the

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Constitution of the United States that has a particular context to it, are there sections of the

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Constitution that rightfully could be disputed as to exactly what was intended initially?

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I suppose. But most of it, no, it's pretty straightforward, pretty clear.

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And yeah, things come up that the founders could never even have dreamed of.

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But then you have to apply the principles that guided the construction of the rest of the

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Constitution. And again, you have to look back at history. You have to do what we do when you try to handle the word of God right.

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Okay, you need to, first and foremost, grammatical historical. Once you abandon that, you don't have anything left.

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You just throw it out the window and it's all tradition or whatever else you want to call it, but you're no longer dealing with the scriptures in any fair way.

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So certainly what I've been watching, and I'm sure you've been seeing the same thing. You do literally have district court judges right now who think that they have the authority of the presidency of the

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United States. They were put in that position by people like Obama or by Biden.

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And there are some put there by Republicans too. You know, Republicans have a long history of really bad judiciary picks.

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It's like the Democrats know who their friends are and the Republicans don't or something like that.

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Or people get into those positions and then they swing wildly left.

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I can hardly think of a situation where they swing wildly right.

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But lots and lots of... It's like seminaries, you know? Seminaries get started, they're on the right and they swing to the left.

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Might take them decades or a century, but they do eventually. That's just how it works and that's how it works with these judges.

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And so I'll just be honest with you. I look at the situation, again,

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I say what I said in the last program. There are two nations living within one set of borders. And the more

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I watch these... I mean, how do you live together as a people?

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You know, a couple of years ago when that flaming nutcase guy who thinks he's a girl did the

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Bud Light commercial, remember? And they crashed and burned.

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Why? Was it because people who were offended by that attacked Bud Light trucks and blew them up on the freeways and torched them and burned them and attacked factories that make

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Bud Light? No, they stopped buying the product. There are lots of other products to buy, so they stopped buying that product.

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And that's... And it worked, if really. Dylan, that's right.

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Is that Dylan Mulvaney? Is that what his name is? What a complete freak.

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Anyway, so what's happening now? Well, this guy named

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Elon Musk is willing to do what no

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Democrat senator on the planet for the past 100 years have been willing to do. That is lose money to do what he thinks is best for the country.

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I mean, really, the one thing you've got to admit, you've got to admit this.

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And that is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

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They've both lost billions of dollars doing what's right. What they think is right for the nation.

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And all the Democrats do is make money with USA aid and money laundering through Ukraine.

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And, oh, it's great. You know, hey, I'm going to go into the Senate, the House, and I've got $20 ,000 to my name, and I'm going to come out as a multimillionaire.

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That's how the US government's been working. And it can't keep working that way. It can't happen forever, that level of corruption.

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So you've got people, and they're not smart people.

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I'm sorry, how many more keying of Tesla videos do we need to see before we recognize that the people doing this are not smart?

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These cars have a sentry system. They videotape this stuff, and they videotape it in high quality.

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And did you see the guy up in Colorado? The car's parked in front of his apartment.

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All you do is switch over to the camera. There's his apartment. There's the address. I mean, knock, knock, knock.

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Hey, stupid. Wow. But why?

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What do they accomplish? People burning down Tesla. I'll be honest with you.

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I'm looking into, and I mean this seriously, Tesla stock would be a really good buy right now.

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And you know, I've got a 2019 Subaru, and we're having to put a fair amount of money into it to get it up to specs again and stuff like that.

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It's like, the grandkids live a long ways away now. I wonder what is the range of a

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Tesla again? You know, could it get out to where they are and then back again? I don't know, but I have a feeling the wife's going to want to be putting some miles on a vehicle.

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We may have to invest in something that we could put a lot of miles on. And you know, it's making me think that.

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What do they think they're accomplishing? This is the difference. This is, there is still the remnants of a

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Christian worldview in conservatism. Now, crisis conservatism can be just as reprehensible as anything else.

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And I'm seeing that. We are seeing a lot of that. There's no two ways about it. But there's still, you know, still something there that makes most conservatives go,

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I'm not going to key this guy's car just because I can tell.

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And the funny thing is, until just a few months ago, EVs were, I didn't want an

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EV. You know, I was, you know, how far could I pull an RV with an

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EV? I'd need it. I need an ERV. But there are some out there.

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They ain't very big, but there are some that are just basically nothing but solar panels. And those are cool.

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I mean, hey, if I had solar panels all over a Tesla Cybertruck and the thing had solar panels, as long as the weather was good,

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I might be able to get someplace eventually. But it would take a while. But I never even thought about these things.

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But yeah, I'm thinking about it now. That's really a possibility. It's just that mindset that destroy...

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Most of these people, they were big EV fans until a few months ago. So I wonder how many leftist, left -leaning,

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Kamala Harris -loving Tesla owners are finding big old scratches all the way down their car from one of their fellow leftists that just happened to decide to trash them.

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It's just astonishing. Again, you can't... Some of the rhetoric that we're hearing in the

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Christian nationalism stuff is, well, look, a nation has to have a common culture, a common direction.

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That's true. It doesn't matter what color your skin is. You can have that common direction and common culture.

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It doesn't require that you have IQ tests and have everybody in your populace

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IQ tested to find out. But it's true. You cannot have... A nation divided against itself cannot stand.

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And I have never seen a nation more divided than this nation right now.

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This election has made that very, very clear. And right now, one side is in control.

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But how long is that going to last? I don't know. That's what we talked about last time. I'm not going to continue on with that.

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I just... Just watching these judicial activists pretending that they have power that they don't have is going to bring about, and I think this is purposeful, a constitutional crisis.

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And that's not a bad thing if what's been going on all along has been unconstitutional in the first place.

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The problem is the only way to solve that constitutional crisis is either through the

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Supreme Court or through a constitutional convention. And when you have a nation divided 60 -40, 50 -50, how do you...

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How does that even happen? How does that... I don't know. I don't have the answers.

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I'm just sitting here going, if we were smart, we would be applying biblical standards.

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You were reaching... Yeah, yeah, you were reaching. I've heard for so many years all these conservatives calling for a constitutional convention.

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And what's always driven me crazy is you don't think that the liberals show up? Yeah, well...

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You do a constitutional convention and the result will be your worst nightmare. Because they're going to bring a majority because they have majority populations in these states that they're in.

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And a constitutional convention is basically everybody's equal across the board. But the other side of that coin is you get a national divorce as a result.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to... It's hard not to see what's going on and recognize the people that are trying to make it happen.

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So anyway, okay. I have...

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I don't want to do this, but I think it's necessary to address this.

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Many, many times years ago, we had to address controversies that were being fanned, the flames of controversy being fanned by a particular individual or group of individuals, but primarily just one individual.

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And it got really ugly many times. I mean, really ugly.

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And just wears you down. You sometimes run into individuals that seem to have an unlimited reservoir of energy to create a division and to pretend they know things that they don't actually know.

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And it gets tiring. You want to move to another planet just to get away from some of this kind of stuff.

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And so you can go back in the archives. It's interesting. A lot of people listening today were not listening six years ago, seven years ago.

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That's when a lot of this stuff was at, seven, eight, nine years ago even. This kind of stuff started happening.

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So it just seems to me like there's a bunch of folks who have forgotten the years of pulpit and pen and pastor

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JD Hall up in the northern part of the country. And I think one of the reasons is we had a couple of years of peace.

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We had a couple of years where the wheels fell off of that particular group of folks.

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And it seemed, it was hoped for by many of us anyways, it seemed like that had finally come to an end and that there was some hope to think that maybe

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Pastor Hall would get the help that he needed. He was removed from the pastorate and the membership of that church and lost a lot of his personal property and things like that.

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There was legal stuff going on. And drug addiction and it seemed like,

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I saw an interview, I think, I don't know, it was about a year ago maybe. And it seemed like, hey, you know what?

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He's living on a farm. That'd be a good place to be, good, honest work. There's a lot of times

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I would love to be just out in the middle of nowhere and not have that daily pressure of stuff coming at you.

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And it's like, maybe that's exactly the best thing that needs to happen.

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That's good. Well, we were wrong about that. It was less than two years off, basically.

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And he's back and I've talked to a couple of people. See, I know a lot of people who have been friends with Mr.

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Hall, written for Mr. Hall, initially defended Mr. Hall. I defended

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Hall when he was attacked for the Braxton Canner stuff. And I always thought, no, that's ridiculous.

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Had nothing to do with it. There was a whole lot more there than met the eye. And yeah, no. But I can't think of almost anyone, honestly, who didn't at one point try to work with J .D.

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Hall that he did not eventually turn on them. And there is a long list of people that will go, yeah,

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I'm not even gonna talk about that. No. And they don't want to be in the same room.

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They don't want to touch with a 10 -foot pole because they know it will happen. They know it will happen. People who were invited to write for Pulpit and Pen and then three months later, it's like, whoa, wait a minute.

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And then they're on the naughty list after that. And I've talked to a few of them and they all say the same thing.

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He didn't learn a thing. He's right back to where he was. Nothing's changed. And he's rebranding himself.

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And so all the past couple of weeks, not overly shockingly or surprisingly, he has been platformed by the folks up in Ogden and by Joel Webbin.

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Stunning. And I think it was last week I saw him putting out something that said, and no,

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I'm not following them, but they give me, people send me stuff all the time. Maybe he'll go to the

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Trash World Conference. Well, stunningly shocking that that would be. And because those seem to be the people that are now platforming him and going, hey, this guy is great.

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This is super stuff. It's almost like they weren't around back then. And maybe they weren't.

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Some of these guys are so new and inexperienced that they maybe, maybe this didn't know.

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But even back then, a lot of people did not know a lot of the background stuff that was going on, and threats, and just intimidation, and nastiness, and stuff like that.

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So here's a fellow put something together.

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And I forget who sent it to me, but apologize for that. But here's just a little clip from,

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I'm pretty certain that this was Webin's webcast. Let's hear a little clip here.

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I would, as hard as it is to listen to James White and Doug Wilson, listen, their kingdoms are crumbling.

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They're old and their ministries are dying. It's not as though they lost their relevancy.

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For the most part, they never had it. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?

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Someone obviously knows me well enough to track down the... No, I know that.

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Somebody did that for me. Yeah, no, somebody did that. That's how it was sent to me, was somebody had taken that clip, and then they threw that in there just for the fun of it, which

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I thought was exactly right. So just a couple things. J .D.,

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I'd be careful with the age stuff. You ain't looking much younger than me these days. Looking a little rough there, bro.

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A little long in the tooth, yep. I could still beat you on a bike, no question about it.

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But one of the things that I used to have to say over and over again, I called him, he who judges from afar.

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And J .D. pretends that he, and he used to claim, and the thing is, if you say anything about what happened back then, you can always say, that was just the drugs, man, don't worry about it.

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I'm all past that. But he's still doing the same thing, where he claims to have almost supernatural insight into people's motivations.

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I don't have a kingdom. I've never tried to build a kingdom. Don't want to have a kingdom. Nothing's crumbling.

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We're doing just fine, thank you very much. Quite busy, in fact. We're not busy bodies.

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We're busy doing things. There's a huge difference. And he's always felt that he had the greatest discernment on the planet.

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He could discern what anybody was thinking. When he was on with Eric Kahn, he said that Doug Wilson and I figured that if he and I put out the

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Antioch Declaration, that would be the end of this. I'm just like, man, you could not even be farther from the truth if you tried.

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I mean, it's not... So often he'll say this with such seriousness, and it's not even close to being true.

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It's just, wow. So anyway, you look at the situation, there's two things

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I just wanted to say. A, God gets to determine who's relevant and who's not.

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And honestly, most of that's going to be seen with clarity in the age to come.

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And I will be more than happy. My prayer is we're about 43 years into this.

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Let's say this old body makes it through 50 years of this.

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You just want to finish well. You want to be consistent. You want to have done the same thing, only better as the years have passed.

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I could sit here and do the Paul thing. Because a couple of times,

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Paul goes, you've driven me to this. You've driven me to boasting. But here we go.

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And he goes through his stuff. I could sit here and go, have you guys ever had anyone come up to you, out of the blue, maybe even on another continent, and say,

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I was saved out of such and such a group by your ministry? How about anybody come up to you? I was about to commit suicide before your book on grieving stopped me.

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Anybody? Most of these guys weren't even hardly active 10 years ago, or if they were, well, we don't get into that.

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So how are you even defining relevance?

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Now, he likes to talk about, well, this is just a, you know, we're a small community. That's true. That's true.

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I've never, we have never even pretended to try to do the breakout thing and do the stuff that some of these

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YouTube influencers are doing. I don't have any sound effects. I don't have any special effects.

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I'm not bringing, who are these two twin brother guys?

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Have you seen, like the Hodge twins or something? Have you seen any of that? Supposed to be these conservative guys, and yet they have these wild and just gross people on.

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Andrew Tate and all the rest of the guys. No, not trying to do any of that. We're servants of the church.

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We seek to edify the church. And there's only a certain portion of the evangelical church that's going to listen to what we have to say.

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And we're perfectly fine with that. We built this ministry to be lean and dissolvable.

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In other words, there are a lot of people who do the legacy ministry thing, and you try to run stuff on somebody's name for 50 years after they croaked.

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Doesn't work, not from my perspective. That's something we've ever wanted to do. So yeah,

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I just would suggest that the individual saying these things really is not reflecting real well on his own history to be saying this kind of stuff.

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But we leave that to the Lord. And that's the only place it can be left.

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But the main reason that I actually want to respond to this was to warn, was to Uber Eats wants me to order dinner already.

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I'm not sure how that gets through there. I want to warn the folks that are platforming

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J .D. Hall. And I really, part of me doesn't want to do this. Part of me is like, okay,

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I think I just sit back and watch this now, because I know it's coming. Yeah, get some popcorn.

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Guys, little hint for you here. It may take five or six years. But here's a little warning for you.

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There is a long line of people who will testify that what

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I'm about to tell you is absolutely true. Unless you absolutely walk the line, unless you keep your mouth shut when

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J .D. Hall goes after a friend of yours, or a colleague of yours, or just goes after a whole topic where you're like, well, wait a minute.

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Whoa, what? You got to keep your mouth shut or he will come at you and everything you've ever said to him in any context at all will be absolutely fair game.

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And there's a bunch of people in this audience right now going, uh -huh, uh -huh, been there, done that, got the t -shirt.

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I'm just warning you. And like I said, there's part of me that's like, nah, you know, these guys, let them learn.

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If you want to platform somebody with that kind of history just simply to get clicks, well, you're going to discover that as long as he can get clicks by being nice to you, you ever get in a situation where he feels like his clicks are being threatened.

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Because you all didn't listen to this stuff, but I had to listen to this stuff years ago when he was talking about Pulpit and Pen, the

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Rolex of polemics blogs, you know, and he'd talk about how many downloads and how many visitors and he was just, numbers were everything.

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It was just, wow, we are so big and important and stuff.

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So you get yourself in a position where you diminish his possibility of getting those numbers, look out.

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When it happens, you're not going to be able to blame me. I actually took the time to warn you about what's coming.

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Yes, sir. We should always keep in mind that there are certain men that when you shake their hand, um, you have an instinctive need to wipe your hand off on your pants.

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There are other men, you just need to make absolutely sure that after you shake their hand, you count your digits.

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And you used to call this guy. You used to try.

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We had a few exchanges. I have a tendency to yell when

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I want to get my point across and I did that. And I made sure that I had a headset. Yeah, you used to try.

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Dominated the conversation. Yeah, it's no. You tried more than I did. Yeah. There's no two ways about it.

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A lot of people did. A lot of people did. There were, there were some names I could name that backed him up for years and he still turned on him.

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He still turned on him. It's just the way it works. So you have been warned.

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You will not be able to look at me and say, oh, why didn't you? And it's like, yeah. Oh, by the way, in one hour from now, not there's any connection here, but exactly one hour from now,

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I'll be joining Tony Costa on his webcast. I've been on with Tony a couple of times.

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He's actually coming out here to Phoenix. He's doing a debate, an Islamic debate. Unfortunately, it's same weekend that I'll be in Louisiana doing the debate with Doug Levesque on King James only stuff.

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And so I won't be able to be here, but I've arranged to have him preach an apology on that Sunday.

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So those of you there. Yes, sir. You need to remind me, the other debate, we need to get information about that so I can get that posted up.

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And the Google Play, our app is back in on Google Play.

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So those of you who've been trying to get it and haven't been able to, it's back there for you. And it's functioning, working all peachy now.

30:43

Yeah. So April 10th, Calhoun, Louisiana.

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I'm trying to find, yeah,

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I don't know that I, I think the emails that I have here are all, it's

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Parish Reformed Church. So if you could find that, if you could search for Parish Reformed Church in Calhoun, I'm 99 % certain that's where it is.

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And so, and that's where it'll be live streamed as well.

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But Calhoun is Northern Louisiana, sort of middle -ish,

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I think, of, huh? Yeah, I've just got, is that what it is?

31:55

Okay. Yeah, because the YouTube channel is the Parish Reformed, is what

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I'm looking at here. So anyway, yeah, we need to get that up on the website so that people can know how they're going to get there and stuff like that.

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We were just, I was just going back and forth. We were setting up the format for the debate, time limits and stuff like that.

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So that's the one that will be with A .K. Richardson. He's from the Church of Christ. And we will be doing Romans 9, which means there's no positive assertion being defended.

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So we can flip a coin as to who's going to go first, which is what we'll do.

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And that'll be on April 10th. So the first one's April 4th. That's in Livingston, which is

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Southern Louisiana, down on the 10 down there. Actually, 12,

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I think, down there. And then 10th is up on the 20,

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I -20 in Northern Louisiana. And then I'll be heading over towards Shreveport, and I'll be preaching that Sunday for Skip Rainbolt.

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And we'll be there with the fine folks over on that side of things. So that's what's coming up on this next trip.

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In fact, I pick up the unit to get it prepped a week from today.

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Yeah, a week from today. And I head out on Saturday. So yeah, there you go. Coming up fast.

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And if you want to help make those things possible, the Travel Fund at AOMN .org is how we do that.

33:45

All right. So a couple weeks ago, we had a debate.

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We had two debates. And interestingly enough, it's not like I sit there and go looking for debate reviews or articles or stuff like that.

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Sometimes people send me things. Sometimes I just run into stuff. They'll link, they'll tag me in a

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Twitter post or something like that, or even on Facebook, though I don't. The only reason I'm on Facebook is because for some reason, everybody at Apologia uses

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Facebook. So I have to use it. Anyway, what's interesting to me is it just doesn't strike me that the actual heart of both debates has been really touched upon almost at all since the debate themselves.

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In both instances, especially the one with Joe Heschmeier, something else has just completely distracted from any relevant discussion of what the topic was.

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The topic was, is the mass a perpetuatory sacrifice? And of course, one of the things that did surprise me about Heschmeier is that he really seemed to take the position.

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He's an attorney, a good debater. He's an attorney. He did not take the position of the vast majority of Roman Catholic scholarship in regards to either the broad topic of the development of doctrine over time, as Newman very plainly put out, or in the middle of the last century,

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Yves Congar does his stuff on tradition, things like that. And the concept of the development of the sacraments, it really seems to me that the majority of Roman Catholic scholarship is in a very different place than Roman Catholic apologetics, which is understandable.

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They'll say, well, it's the same thing as amongst Protestants. Protestantism is not a definable, there is no specific doctrinal set of boundaries that define

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Protestantism outside it's not Roman Catholic, it's not Eastern Orthodox. So there's significantly greater doctrinal coherence and unity amongst those who would call themselves

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Reformed and who actually try to practice foundational

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Reformed concepts, such as scriptural sufficiency and supremacy and solo scriptura, all the key elements, much more unity of perspective there.

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And within Roman Catholicism, on the scholarly side, there is, seems to me, pretty much a consensus.

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And of course, they would say, oh, they're just a bunch of liberals. When I hear that, I get it,

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I know that there are liberal Catholic writers, and I can't tell you how many times

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I will quote some father, a book with an imprimatur on it, which means nothing anymore.

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And my debate opponent or people afterwards, oh, that guy's a liberal, you shouldn't quote him, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And I'm like, has Rome corrected him? Because you want to sit there and tell me that Rome can interpret the

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Bible for me, but Rome can't interpret its own teachings and protect its own people from professors and teachers in their own institutions that are teaching the wrong things?

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I've never understood that. It just strikes me as a complete conundrum to sit there and go, well, yeah, we know what's taught at Boston College, and we're not going to do anything about it, and we're not going to discipline these people, and we're not going to say anything about it.

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But yes, you have to believe that our interpretations are infallible, even when we don't seem to care enough to make corrections about them, which does not make any sense to me.

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It really doesn't. So anyway, it does seem that the consensus amongst

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Roman Catholic sacramentarians or sacramentologists is they recognize the development of the sacramental system within Roman Catholicism, and that it wasn't in place immediately after the apostles.

38:45

When I debated Mitch Pacwa, he argued that presbyters became priests over time, but it was over time.

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It wasn't that that was the actual function in the New Testament. So last week in the big studio, we demonstrated, really,

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I think, beyond all argument, argument that presbyter, that presbyteros and episkopos are the same office in the

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New Testament church. It's just not arguable. They're used interchangeably, even in the same context.

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So I was a little surprised that Heshmeyer was basically saying, well, we know they were priests because they were doing priestly things.

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And I'm like, priestly things you've defined later on, you're reading your entire theology backwards here.

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It really is a denial of Newman's development hypothesis, which really became super popular and had to be super popular in the last century.

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And I've certainly debated a number of Roman Catholic apologists, who were dependent upon Newman, I've debated in the

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Newman Center in London, I believe it was. We were in the Newman Center at one of the places

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I had a debate there. But now it's like, well, no, actually, I'm going to make the actual assertion that, yes, they were priests and they were doing these priestly things.

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And I was a little taken aback by that. But even then, we never got a definition of what propitiation actually is from Joe Heshmeyer.

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I tried to bring this issue up, but it's a little difficult when you're in the negative and the other side doesn't really define its position real tightly.

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You don't have a whole lot of time to be adding to the definition of their position, especially later on in the debate.

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And so I did briefly bring up the issue of indulgences.

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And you might go, ah, it's a different topic. No, it's not. No, it's not. The classical, and who knows if this will remain the classical

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Roman Catholic doctrine. And don't sit there and say, well, if it's been defined as dogma, it can't be changed.

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No, I'm sorry. That doesn't work in your system. You have placed ultimate epistemological authority in a single individual in a single office.

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And if he interprets the church's teaching under the guidance of the

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Holy Spirit in a certain way, then you got to run with it.

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You don't get to go, hey, everybody back then when it was defined said this, you're saying that, that can't work.

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No, you don't get to do that. That's not your place. And so what you have is you have the doctrine of purgatory.

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And in the doctrine of purgatory, you have what's called satispatio. It seems like most of my

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Roman Catholic interlocutors want to run from that term. They just, it's like it's poison.

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They don't want to discuss it. They want to change the topic as quickly as possible. But satispatio is the suffering of atonement.

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It is the classical theological description of the suffering that takes place in purgatory that is meritorious before God.

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So the whole idea was you have this amount of the temporal punishments of sins left upon your soul.

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You died in a state of grace. You're going to go to heaven eventually, but you must be cleansed. And that cleansing takes place primarily through your own suffering.

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Now, once you started selling indulgences and you came up with transferring merit from the treasury of merit and stuff like that, then you could speed the process up for a certain fee up until the

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Council of Trent. And then you had to do other things to make that happen. But still, the theology was that there is this satispatio, which of course makes no sense outside of a temporal framework.

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It doesn't make any sense to talk about suffering instantaneously.

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That's not what they were talking about. When you talk about an indulgence of a thousand days, that's not an intensity term.

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That's a duration term. And so now, modern Roman Catholic apologists say, well, the church has never said.

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Of course, what the church did say couldn't mean anything other than this, but it's not officially said.

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And so that's how they get around it. It might be instantaneous. It might not. Nobody reading

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F .X. Shoup's book on Purgatory would ever come up with that kind of stuff. But the point is that there is satispatio.

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It's a suffering of atonement. And so once you recognize that, then you realize the direct relationship.

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How is the mass propitiatory? How does it provide atonement? If my suffering can provide atonement for the punishment of sin, and Christ's suffering is supposed to provide atonement for sin, then how is it that I can approach the singular sacrifice of Christ 20 ,000 times in my life, and yet I still need to suffer to provide atonement for the penalty of my sins?

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That would require you to have to pretty much publicly say, well, yes, if I'm saying the mass is a propitiatory sacrifice,

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I'm saying that that propitiatory sacrifice not only does not perfect, but it doesn't perfect the second time, or the third time, or the fourth time, or the fifth time, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time.

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Which says a lot about what your view of the actual power of the sacrifice of Christ is.

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That's why a lot of Roman Catholics I've spoken to, they just view the sacrifice of Christ as producing this, making grace available, and producing this massive amount of merit that's then doled out.

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It's not the idea. I've almost never spoken to any

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Roman Catholic that at least I had some confidence was actually under the authority of Rome, didn't think they could redefine things, that thought of atonement in the context of substitution.

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That's why they don't have the imputation of Christ's righteousness. They don't, the great exchange just doesn't ring with them.

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That's where the problem really lies. And that's why I've said so many times to people, when they say, where do

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I go? Where can I start? And I say, well, Romans 4 .8,

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who's the blessed man? Go to Romans 4, walk through it, talk about what justifying faith is.

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Justifying faith is not trying to purchase anything. God doesn't think it's going to get anything from God. It's not a sacramental faith in that sense.

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It is faith in the God who justifies the ungodly. In Roman Catholicism, you're made godly by baptism.

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So you are fundamentally changed. And that's why you get to go to heaven is because you're changed by the infusion of grace.

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And Paul's point is, you are made right before God because of what

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Christ does within you. And as a result of that, he then begins to conform you to the image of Christ, which that is when you are sanctified.

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That is when you are made holy. But that's not the basis by which you go to the presence of God. The reason you go into the presence of God is because of an alien righteousness.

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It's not your own. Your own righteousness is as filthy rags. And as a believer, you grow in the grace and knowledge of Lord Jesus Christ as a result of his love and purposes in you.

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But that's not the grounds of your relationship to God. So it's a fundamentally completely different way of looking at things.

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And unfortunately, it ended up far more focused on what somebody in the early church believed.

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And again, he seemed to have the idea. It really caught me by surprise that the theology he possesses today was what was being believed in the earliest century.

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So again, Roman Catholic scholarship, development over time, multiple threads coming together.

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I mean, purgatory. If you're quoting from third and fourth century sources, there is no purgatory yet.

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Are certain elements of it starting to develop? Yeah. But you can look at one century and see one writer here and one writer 700 miles away.

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And you can see one necessary part of purgatory in this guy. It's not in this guy.

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But he has a different necessary part that's not in this guy. And it's only going to be down the road that those two parts are going to be put together.

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And now you've got to bring in some more parts after that and some more parts after that. This is how things develop in history.

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And Roman Catholic scholarship has admitted this, but that's not what we were getting. We were getting, no, this is what we believe today about sacerdotal priesthood and the power of the priest to bring about transubstantiation, sacrifice the mass, and all the rest of that stuff.

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And even though we did at least have enough time when

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I was doing the questioning, because he went to Alki 111 and Isaiah 66, and he went to these passages.

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And I'm like, okay, yes, the early church cited these things.

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They did. But let's read them. Are they actually saying what you're saying they're saying?

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They're not. It's sort of like the same total abuse of the Maccabees text, supposedly in defense of purgatory.

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It doesn't say what they're even trying to make it say in the first place. So we did get a chance to get to some of that.

50:37

But it just seemed like there was so much ground that we were covering between Old Testament prophetic texts,

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Hebrews. And then the weird part, and I've only got a few minutes to cover this.

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I can't tell you what his intention was here. I can only speculate. And there was a lot of speculation.

51:06

Because again, this debate just got totally forgotten because of the pseudo -Ignatian controversy.

51:14

It was a pseudo -controversy. But he kept going back to when

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Jesus said it is finished, it wasn't finished. Because there is a time gap between Christ's death on the cross, his descent into Hades, his resurrection, ministry to the apostles, opening their minds to understand the scriptures.

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You know, that period of ministry to the apostles that we get glimpses of throughout the

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New Testament documents. And then finally, his ascension into heaven.

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And so the idea is, well, since there's a time gap between the cross and the death of the

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Son of God on the cross of Calvary, and his entrance into the holy place to stand.

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Now, of course, I put it this way. The picture, the only picture we're given of Christ as intercessor is in Revelation chapter 5.

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And what is it? It's the Lamb, what? Standing as if slain. So, the marks of death are upon him, but he's standing because he has been raised from the dead, but he is the one who has died.

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And so, if you are united with him, then you can stand in the very presence of the Father, because he is worthy.

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And so, I really don't understand what the significance was of saying, yeah, but there was like 50 days.

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Well, okay, so there were, how many years were there between the protevangelium and the promise of the coming of the

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Messiah, that he would bruise the, which you all misinterpret that one too, but bruise the servant's head, and that's not

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Mary, and the fulfillment in Christ. It was a long time.

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So, redemption was worked out in time. I did at one point go, well, think about it this way,

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Ephesians chapter 2 tells us that we are already seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, but we're not looking very glorious here tonight.

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So, there is a now and a not yet, there is a certainty of fulfillment, but then the outworking of these things in time.

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So, what does that have to do with the mass of the perpetuatory sacrifice? So, I've thought about that, and the only thing

54:25

I can come up with is, if you can make it so that it is finished doesn't mean it's actually finished, and say that there can be a time gap, less than two months, if you're going to really push it this way from then to Ascension, and there's a time gap, then we can lengthen that time gap way out, and then that will fulfill the quotation that I gave, and I had not used this, because I wish

55:02

I had brought this up, I'm not sure I can grab it fast enough, but there was the uber -duber super,

55:11

I had not, I didn't put this in any of my books, I don't know if, here, is this it?

55:22

Let's see if this is it. Oh man, I wish, excuse me while I get my glasses on.

55:30

Um, yeah, okay, here it is.

55:41

This is from Presbyterorum Ordinis, section 5,

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December 7th of 1965. Here we go. This is in about a four -point font right now.

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Priests, as cooperators of the Episcopal order, are consecrated to preach the gospel, and to shepherd the faithful, and to celebrate divine worship, especially in the

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Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the source and summit of the whole Christian life. In the

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Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the true and proper sacrifice, they offer, they offer, in the person of Christ, the propitiatory sacrifice of the sins of the living and the dead, and they apply its fruits to the people entrusted to them.

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That fruit must not be perfection. Because they have to do it over, and over, and over again. Reminds us of Hebrews chapter 10.

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But here's the phrase. This is the quote. By this sacrifice, the

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Church, through Christ the High Priest, perpetuates the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages.

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There's the phrase. The Church, through Christ the

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High Priest, perpetuates the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages.

57:08

So, was the idea that by separating the death from the intercession by time, you open that up, and now you can put the entire sacramental, sacerdotal, priestly ministry into that time gap and say, yeah,

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Christ may be up there in heaven, but he's perpetuating that sacrifice, which perfects no one.

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There are, Rome has to admit, there are all sorts of people who are attending, who are going to attend mass today, tomorrow,

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Sunday, who will die outside the state of grace. They will commit a mortal sin, they will not be reconciled to the

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Church through the sacramental system, and they will go to hell. But right now, since they're in the state of grace, they're literally, the perpetuatory sacrifice is being perpetuated by the

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Church for them right now. But it will not perfect it. Now, I don't see how you can think that that's an argument, but that's the only thing

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I can come up with. It almost seems to me like it's an argument aimed at someone other than those of us who believe what we believe.

58:43

So, in other words, maybe it's an argument to make Roman Catholics feel good about that, but not an argument meant to convince us of anything.

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Because it just doesn't, there wasn't any theological connection made that I could follow at all.

59:00

So, I don't know. So, anyway, all right, I scheduled myself doing two programs today.

59:08

Like I said, half an hour from now I'll be joining Tony Costa live up there in Canada as long as they haven't dragged him off to some re -education center.

59:19

It is Canada. Work up there. Anyway, so, and today is

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Thursday. So, yes, next week will be the last week with pretty much a regular, well, it might be regular.

59:34

I'm not sure about a regular schedule next Thursday. Probably Tuesday, Wednesday, because Thursday I've not only got to pick up the unit and get it set up, but I'm also teaching a

59:44

Mormonism evangelism class because the Easter pageant is coming up. And one thing

59:52

Apologia does is we reach out to the LDS people and we continue doing that. So, we will be doing that.