Road Trip DL from Jonesboro

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:39

I've been saying to everybody, I think the Lord sent that polar vortex thing last week just to make me all the more thankful every time

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I walk into our RV because I'm looking forward to getting home.

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Not that the trip's been bad or anything like that, it's just living out of a suitcase and dragging stuff upstairs and into elevators.

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I'm going to ask them tomorrow morning if they have real eggs here. I'm starting to think that the yellow fluffy stuff in the big pan, it's sort of like most of the juices you buy in the grocery store does not contain actual juice, does not contain actual eggs.

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I'm not sure what it is. It's not dealing too well with my body, that's for sure.

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So here we are and I don't even have my webcast light,

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I have one little light over here. It's a pretty small hotel room and so I don't really have room to set up like I did in the last one.

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So hey, we're doing the best we can. I'm here in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I asked someone last night,

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I went to the Walmart here. You know you're somewhere near something called civilization, it's

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Walmart. Getting out of that place was next to impossible. I was trying to turn left and the people lining up to turn in, it would be seven or eight cars long and it would take them all that time to get around the corner and then the light would change and the next group would come through and I thought

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I would be there, they're going to find my bones in the truck months from now.

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And I'm like, so how many people are there in Jonesboro? I said about 80 ,000, I said 80 ,000?

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They were all at Walmart tonight, just at the cultural center

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I guess. It was yikes. Someone said, well, actually, yeah, there's 80 ,000 people, but they designed the roads for 50 ,000.

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So that's why it is the way it is and there is a lot of construction. I noticed they're building a lot of hotels and it's a growing area.

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So anyway, we are in Jonesboro, which is in the upper right, upper east, northeast corner of Arkansas.

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And so I'm not too far away from other places that I will be later in the year,

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Lord willing, but hopefully when I'm going to those places, I will have my

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RV with my bed and my refrigerator and real eggs and the

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Dividing Line studio that have our nice, even though I've got to admit,

03:44

I've almost sold rich on Apple products because he's extremely impressed with the camera on this thing.

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And I'm looking at it right now and I don't know how thick it is, but it can't be,

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I do wonder how do you, I mean, like an Apple phone, you've got these big old lenses, three different lenses on it.

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I'm not even sure how all those work. But that little thing up in the middle, how does it have that level of clarity?

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It's a good question. I have no earthly idea. I really, really don't. But anyway,

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I'm not sure how long we're going to go this evening. I've got dinner to get to at the pastor's house of 12 -5 church here in Jonesboro.

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And last evening, for Wednesday night,

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Jeremiah and I, well, what they did, when

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I first came here, it was with the original Grand Design RV we had.

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And if I recall correctly, I parked it. I don't know how to describe the building that they were meeting in at that time, but half of it was like with equipment and stuff in it.

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And they were in the other half sort of. And they made it look really nice and stuff. It was functional anyways, but it was a metal building.

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And so I had seen that they had moved from the pictures that had been sent to me and I get there and it was a restaurant.

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And I guess they bought it with all the restaurant equipment still in it because I saw, you know, restaurant level ovens and stoves and stuff like that.

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And, you know, the bar is still there and they've turned that into the reformed bar because it's old bar and now it's been reformed.

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And that's where the debates will be too. So it's a really neat setup.

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And he and I were sitting up there in comfy chairs and just basically talking about the upcoming debates and stuff like that.

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And we covered a lot of ground. I'm not sure if you saw,

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I'm not sure if that was live streamed or not. It might have been. I don't really recall. I know obviously the debates will be recorded.

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And interestingly enough, I don't know if they'll be live streamed. Maybe if someone could inform me of that during the course of the time we're on the air here,

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I can let you know that or we'll try to let people know. Obviously, if I'm informed of that, we'll try to put that out on the app or something like that if you'd like to watch live.

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But I don't know if that's going to be taking place or not. But anyway, we're basically talking about apologetics and why we do apologetics.

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And I did not realize this at the time, but how did the question come up?

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I think someone asked a question about, you know, how do you encourage young people getting involved with apologetics and stuff like that?

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And Jeremiah told the funny story that I guess the first time I came through, he said something along the lines of he was going to be starting a apologetics webcast.

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And I guess my response was sort of like, yeah, many have started that and crashed and burned.

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Not exactly the most encouraging language that's ever been used, but I used that to give my normal little sermonette.

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And he understood it and he he's heard me say this before, but I often have people come up after a debate at G3, you know, large conferences like that, and they're young guys and they're all excited.

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And I want to I want to get into apologetics. And for many years now, my response to that basically has been to throw a bunch of cold water all over them.

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And Jeremiah said I did that to him. And and you may go, well, why in the world would you do that?

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You've actually talked recently about encouraging, you know, the next generation. Yeah. Yeah. I want to I want to encourage the next generation.

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But basically, you know, if someone's coming up right after a debate, they've just seen, you know, something that was exciting to them.

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They thought it was really, you know, maybe they thought it went really well or something. And man, I want to be able to do something like that.

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I know they did not see what went into making that happen. The years of poverty and struggling to make ends meet and studying stuff that most of the time in almost any church you're in, there are some exceptions, but most of the time in almost any church you're in, people look at you like you're just a little off, a little bit weird, a little imbalanced.

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Might keep an eye on that guy. Not sure you want that guy teaching Sunday school, that kind of stuff. And. There's just a lot that went into it.

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There was years and years of preparation. Looking back, I realize now in my life, there were years of preparation that I did not realize that what

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I was doing was preparing me for what I'd end up doing later on in life.

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You know, working as a radio announcer. I knew it was a really great job to have in high school and college because, especially when the

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California Angels baseball team was playing, which we carried on that radio station, from 7 .05

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to 10 o 'clock each night, all I had to do was press a button once every half hour.

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And other than that, I had a desk in front of me, I could do my homework, I could do my studying and stuff like that.

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And that's when I studied Mormonism, by the way. When I first met Elders Reed and Reese and I started buying all those books, had to read them.

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And I remember sitting hours behind that control panel with a yellow marker in my hand, reading teachings of the

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Prophet Joseph Smith and the marvelous work and wonder and articles of faith and Mormon doctrine by Bruce R.

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McConkie and all these books and sitting there, honestly, at times getting very discouraged.

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Because I'd sit there going, I can't, there's too much here, there's I'm not going to keep all this straight.

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And it really helped when I did get permission to teach a class on Mormonism in the,

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I think it was Wednesday night or, Wednesday or Sunday night, anyway, there was a time period where various elective classes were offered at the large

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Baptist church that I was at and that helped a lot. That, you know, when you have to type up your notes and you have to organize things, that helped to put a lot of stuff into the proper perspective and things like that.

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It was, it was very useful. But anyway, you know, I'm sitting there not making a whole lot of money, sort of wondering, what am

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I doing here? And then later on, you realize that time sitting there behind a microphone, doing the news, looking at the clock, making sure you're getting the commercials in, knowing how to use the clock, not having to rush things and all that kind of stuff, extremely, extremely foundational for doing debates, doing radio programs like, you know, national radio programs and stuff like that down the road.

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And you don't know it at the time. And so back to the young apologist, you know, basically, you know, as I said to Jeremiah, I said, if I can talk you out of it, then you clearly don't have the call.

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It needs to be a fire in your bones. It needs to be what you need to do. And if you can survive the initial douse of cold water, then great, then we can go from there.

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But we also talked about vital need to do that within the context of the church.

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And I'm very thankful, obviously, he's part of this church and teaches in this church and has that accountability and that balance.

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Because, as I said, apologetics is a spiritually dangerous thing.

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You can lose balance so easily. You can lose balance, for example, over the years,

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I've known many people who dealt with one particular group. And when you're constantly dealing just with one particular group, the danger is pretty obvious.

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The danger is you start seeing that group behind everything.

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They're the most important thing in the world to deal with when the reality is they are one religious group amongst many other religious groups.

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And there's a real need to reach out to other religious groups as well. And you may not feel a real passion for doing that, but somebody else is given real passion by God to do that.

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But you just don't think that that is that important. Then there's other kinds of imbalance to where I've certainly met all sorts of folks who, because they dealt with just one area, their handling of scripture would reflect that particular group.

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They would interpret passages of scripture so it'd be relevant to that particular group. And I've commented down through the years,

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I'm so glad that I was sort of forced out of that. Our first group we were dealing with was

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Mormonism. And I can't imagine,

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I imagine it was probably the very first class I taught on Mormonism, probably halfway through, somebody asked a question about Jehovah's Witnesses.

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And I'm like, don't know. But that did lead to starting to look at some of their materials and then collecting their materials and reading their materials.

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And then Benny Diaz comes along and forces us to start looking at Roman Catholicism.

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And thankfully in college at that time, I'm taking Greek and that's dealing with textual criticism and stuff like that.

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And so the Lord has his ways of providing that balance and keeping you from being, getting so focused on the one thing you start losing the forest for the trees.

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But regular teaching of the word of God in the church is the best way to do that.

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And not just teaching the adults, not just teaching the adults. You, if you can take your field of study, the thing that you find most interesting, let's say it's early church history.

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Okay. If you can take that and make it understandable and interesting to junior high schoolers, you're ready for the big time.

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You're ready for the big time because they are tough. Oh, are they tough.

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But I remember when I was doing a lot of my most in -depth Trinitarian studies years and years and years ago,

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I also was in the rotation to teach the young people who were late grade school into junior high area.

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And so I tried to take my own medicine and figure out ways of communicating to them the things that I was learning and formulating and things like that.

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That's good. That's the way it should be. Far too many apologists are lone rangers.

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They're out on their own. No apologist should ever be without experience visiting somebody in a hospital for lots of reasons, for lots of reasons, just partly just balanced so that you're not constantly at war with everybody.

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But I think there is a spiritual, mental and emotional maturity if you're visiting folks in the hospital, not as most of you know, as a hospital chaplain for a number of years, toughest job you'll ever do.

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Very, very hard work. But it helps to make you more sensitive and certainly in personal apologetic exchange.

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It's very helpful to be able to know how to recognize certain aspects of human behavior that you learn when you're actually out there in the world doing stuff rather than just hiding in your office doing studies on obscure texts from whatever group it is you're focused upon.

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So we talked a little bit about that and the need to have a biblically balanced ministry so the apologetics doesn't become an end to itself.

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And that included my constant lament, and I'll make it again now because people don't hear it.

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I just, I don't understand, but so many apologists, many people who get interested in this field don't know the biblical languages.

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They don't know church history. And I just don't, I'm not saying that the essence of apologetics is doing church history or something, but so much of the objections against the faith involve a twisting of church history, a misrepresentation.

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How many, I got to lecture just two days ago on Tuesday night,

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I gave a lecture at Grace Bible Theological Seminary on the ecumenical councils.

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Ironically, I was going to focus mostly on the seventh, but I ended up going longer in my time.

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And so, I mean, I got to it. I got, I said what I needed to say. But when

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I told the folks that had gathered about the

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Council of Nicaea, I'm seeing a lot of people going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. But then

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I talked about the Arian resurgence afterwards. And that is the

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Arians who were defeated at the Council of Nicaea, the

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Council of Nicaea affirmed the homoousious phraseology of the son being of the same substance as the father, full deity of Christ.

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They didn't just disappear. They didn't just go away. In fact, they turned out to be politically active, shall we say.

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And it didn't take long before they had gained control, the

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Roman Empire, politically. And everybody either got imprisoned or died.

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And you're left with Athanasius. That's where Athanasius contramundum came from. He's out there writing against the

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Arians and hiding from the Romans and gets kicked out of his church five times.

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But for decades, decades, Nicaea was in the minority and had to fight for its acceptance.

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And it wasn't Rome that defended it. It wasn't Constantinople. Amazingly enough, it was

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Alexandria and Athanasius. That bothers a lot of especially

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King James only guys. But anyway, and so I talked a little bit about the

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Arian resurgence. And during the Q &A session toward the end, there were a number of comments like,

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I didn't know that. That puts a whole new understanding on what ecumenical councils were that, you know,

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I pointed out no one used that terminology at the time. That's a much, that's an anachronistic term that we read back into the first ecumenical council,

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Nicaea. The second ecumenical council, Constantinople, 381. You know,

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Council of Ephesus, 431. Chalcedon, 451. And by the time you get, you know, 100 years after Nicaea, now that terminology is starting to be used.

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But no one viewed things like that at the time of Nicaea. And no, they were not talking about the canon and all the other stuff that you'll read on YouTube about, this was decided to the

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Council of Nicaea. That's where they kicked the Gospel of Thomas out. All this foolishness. But anyway, a number of people commented that it really helped them to put the councils in a proper context to be thinking about the fact that, you know, you had the

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Council of Ariminum that took place after the Council of Nicaea, had more bishops at it.

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More bishops attended Ariminum than attended Nicaea.

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And yet, they fundamentally contradicted Nicaea. Not in the sense of full -blown

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Arian rejection of the deity of Christ. But in the compromised way.

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And what I mean by that is, you've probably heard that at the Council of Nicaea, you had homoousius of the same substance as the father, full deity of Christ.

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Heteroousius of a different substance, hence merely a creature. And you had homoousius.

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So one letter, homoousius, homoousius, of like substance.

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And many people have correctly pointed out that the future of the

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Christian faith was determined by one letter. Because a semi -divine savior is not going to give you the

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Christian faith at all. It's just not going to happen. And so, one letter.

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And the councils after Nicaea weren't as bold in their teaching as Arius himself had been before Nicaea, but they were compromised at that point.

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They were more homoousius than homoousius. And Athanasius was having none of it and continued to defend the biblical perspective from the pages of Scripture.

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So the people found that to be really interesting and helpful. As well as charting the increasing involvement of the emperors and empresses in those first seven ecumenical councils.

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By the time you get to Nicaea 2 in 787, Empress Irene is going to get what

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Empress Irene wants out of the seventh ecumenical council. And she's pretty much got an army of monks to make sure it happens.

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And so it's so different than Nicaea 1. Nicaea 2 is a blotch on the history of Nicaea 1.

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And that's why when I hear Protestants saying, oh I accept the first seven ecumenical councils. Or Anglicans will say,

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I accept the first four ecumenical councils. Well, one of the reasons for that, one of the reasons an

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Anglican might say something like that. The fourth, of course, is Chalcedon. And so you're still talking about important stuff.

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But after that, the political, the fact that the empire is getting what the empire wants.

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And once you get to the seventh, the argumentation is just so facile.

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It's just horrible. You understand why someone would say, well, no,

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I can only go with the first four. And even then, you're only going with the creedal statements.

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You're not going with the canons and decrees. Unless you're a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

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But of course, just for clarity's sake, both Rome and the East accept those first seven.

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And that means that seventh one, which was just a, the only way

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I can describe it is an exegetical disaster. It was an exegetical disaster.

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They're stuck with that. That's, you know, it's ecumenical councils, basically infallible.

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You have to accept what it had to say. You don't get to change it. Though, of course, you know, historically, you get to reinterpret things as you go along, just as Francis has reinterpreted things.

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Speaking of which, I had seen something about 48 hours ago, or maybe it was actually 24 hours ago.

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Yeah, saying that Francis had 72 hours to live. I don't know.

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The medical reports coming out of the Vatican are what you would expect them to be, rather vague.

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It's certainly not looking good for him at all. And, you know, it's in some ways seems almost ghoulish that everyone's just sort of hanging around.

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But that's what happens when you elevate a single individual to the position that Rome has elevated this man to.

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And let's be honest here. Francis is partly to blame for this situation, because he has been very open in crafting the process of the selection of his successor.

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And in determining who's going to be able to have influence in that process.

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And so the College of Cardinals is packed with his acolytes.

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And I had read that he was making changes that were going to allow people who were not a part of the

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College of Cardinals to vote. I don't know if that was finalized. I'm sure that there will be some discussion of it should he pass away or resign.

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One of the two is going to happen fairly soon. If he recovers from this sickness, I expect he will resign very quickly.

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I wouldn't expect him to resign while very sick, very ill. But if he does recover, this is the kind of thing that someone at his age doesn't really recover from as far as getting back to a level of high activity, shall we say.

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And so he has indicated that he would resign in a situation like that, as his predecessor did.

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So we will be talking about the process of the election of the next pope and the direction that he's going to be taking and who he's going to be and what he's going to represent.

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There's an American high up in the speculation department as to...

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That would be pretty interesting. Very, very interesting.

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Though I'm not sure with Trump in office. That poor guy, he might have a good shot if Trump wasn't in office.

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But because Trump is in office, I think that would probably be held against him, honestly.

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But we'll see. I said in the last program, I think who it is has probably already been chosen.

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But who knows? Politics are politics. So there you go with all of that.

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So just a reminder for you all to very much appreciate your prayers for the next two evenings.

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Tomorrow evening is an intramural debate, and we will be debating the issue of the atonement.

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I am thankful that, as I said last night at the church, this wasn't purposeful on our part.

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It just sort of happened this way. But at least both debates, they're in the same general area.

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Because I mean, we're talking about for whom did Christ die? And basically, what does

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Christ's death accomplish? So the first debate with Arminians is on the scope, intention, application, and effect of the atonement.

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And since we do not share a presupposition regarding divine election, in all probability, we will not decide the issue to the point where someone will say, you know, that side's right, because we'd have to deal with all sorts of other things.

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But then the second night, with Joachim of Catholic Answers, he's defending the assertion that the mass is a perpetuatory sacrifice.

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And my hope has always been that people would listen to a debate like this and come to recognize how central

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Rome's view of the mass as a perpetuatory sacrifice really is.

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Because so much of our theology of the cross, and this is more in the modern period, because in generations past, we understood why the

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Reformation was still important. Now most people have no idea what the Reformation is about. They don't really care.

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And so those issues have been, they're not preached about. Our confessions of faith may still assume those things.

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They may assume that when you read them, you understand these things, but most people don't. Most people don't.

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And so this debate, it's interesting,

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I asked Grok, I said, could you look around and see if you can find in all of your vast database other debates that have taken place on whether the mass is a perpetuatory sacrifice.

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And he came back and said, and I said, that I didn't do specifically.

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And he came back and said, I'm afraid you own this area. I can't find any other debates on this topic.

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And I'm like, okay, interesting. It is vital.

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It is central. It is important. And I hope people will listen very carefully to that.

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I did want to talk about something else here. I had mentioned as I was driving last week that Gavin Ortland had put out a video about the

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Zaytoon stuff. And I had mentioned then, you know, it's very useful.

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And then there's been discussion going on online concerning the issue of the canon, as there will always be, but specifically in regards to the

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Deutero -canonical books, or what we call the Apocrypha. Deutero -canonical is the

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Roman Catholic terminology. But interestingly enough, the very term,

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Deutero -canonical, points to a reality that Rome has somewhat obscured with its decree of the

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Council of Trent. So let me just first say, you know,

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Gavin Ortland puts out a lot of really good stuff. Really, really does. And you can learn a lot of stuff.

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He puts a lot of time into his videos. And you don't have to agree with all the conclusions.

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You don't have to, you know, I guess he's an old Earth creationist or something like that.

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Or maybe something, that's right. He believes that the Noahic Flood was local and not global.

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And so there are things you can go, hey, I disagree about that. And it's funny, I saw people literally saying, and they're basically saying, well, if he,

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I just, how did the guy put it? I just don't know why I would listen to someone who could be so wrong on something like that.

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And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not going to try to get this guy angry.

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But one thing I certainly learned in my theological education, interestingly enough at Fuller, because he did his doctoral degree at Fuller.

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You have to learn to, you know, I hate the phraseology of the, you know, eat the meat and spit out the bones and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

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But that really is what you have to do. You have to be able to recognize there are some people that can do some really good work in this area over here.

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And you may disagree with them over here, but that doesn't change the fact that their work over here is really, really useful.

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Now, if you want to cut yourself off from it and have to do all that work again yourself and, you know, reinvent the wheel, well, okay, fine, do whatever you're going to do.

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But for most of us, it's like, hey, recognize that you may disagree about something, but someone may have done some really, really good work.

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Now, my understanding is Gavin Norton really doesn't like me. We've never had any correspondence that I'm aware of.

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I don't think I've ever met him. I don't think he's ever been in any of my debates. I haven't been in any of his, to my knowledge, anyways.

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And so I'm not really sure what that's all about. I've just picked stuff up, little comments that he's made on webcasts and stuff like that, where he's taking little shots at me.

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And it's like, well, okay, that's fine. You know, when I commented recently about some of the stuff he said about Catholicism, is it

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Christian and, you know, the category issues and stuff like that. And obviously, I take a much firmer stance on many of those issues than he does.

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And so maybe that's what it is. I really don't know. But I don't have any problem saying, hey,

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Gavin Norton's a good source to listen to on all sorts of topics. And, you know, feel free to do so.

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And I can recommend him. And he will never recommend me. But that's his loss, not mine.

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I'm not going to, you know, he may be narrower. It's interesting that he's broader in other areas, but then very narrow in that area.

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So whatever. Okay, fine. But the reason

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I mentioned that is this canon discussion stuff that was going on. And I didn't see it.

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I guess it's over two hours long. He had done like a half hour video on the issue.

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Well, remember, Wes Huff had made a comment in some context. I don't think it was Rogan. I think it was, it may have been on Rogan.

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And now thinking about it, I think it may have been on Rogan. Anyway, some

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Roman Catholics got together, including Gary Machuda, who I debated on that subject many, many moons ago.

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And I think people would say that, well, that's, you know,

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Gary's done a lot more work in that area now. Well, okay.

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View the debate yourself. I thought it was pretty straightforward. I thought he really struggled when

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I started pointing out some of the rather obvious errors in some of these books that are just glaringly erroneous.

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When you combine that with the fact that the Jewish people never accepted those books, well,

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I guess for some people that might, some people today, how that has changed, isn't it?

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I mean, wow, think about it. That's an amazing aspect of things. But anyway, but one of the individuals, one of the

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Roman Catholics that was involved in making this video response to Gavin Artland, and Gavin pointed out that he said in his video,

41:23

I'm not saying this, I am saying this, someone's going to try to say this. What he was doing is he was pointing out, and this is just basic stuff, that there were ecclesiastical writers in the history of the church that could call something like Maccabees scripture, and in the next paragraph say it's not part of the canon.

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And that's what I was mentioning earlier is the term that's used by Roman Catholics is deutero -canonical books.

41:55

Well, that's secondarily. So you have proto -canonical and deutero -canonical.

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So even in using that language, there is a recognition of a two -level, two -tier understanding of what we're talking about here is to the authority of these books.

42:15

And so there's a whole long list, and I've pointed out many times, it's a list made up primarily of the people who knew the

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Old Testament better than other people did, who knew Hebrew or had contact with the

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Jews. That the more they knew, and remember

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Romans chapter 3, and again this is, we literally would have people today that would start changing their views about this because we're talking about the

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Jews. Romans chapter 3, what was one of the advantages of the people of Israel?

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To whom the oracles of God were committed. They're the ones that God gave the

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Old Testament scriptures to, and you've got to deal with that. And so you put that together with the fact that these individuals made it very clear.

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Yes, this book is good to read for edification. This book, you know, will give you encouragement. They quote from this book, but then when they give you their canon list, they say, that's not a part of the canon.

43:26

That's not something you can use to establish dogma and doctrine. It can be edifying to you and give you some historical backgrounds, but it's not a part of the canon of the church.

43:36

These folks missed that. And one of the guys, and I could mention his name, but one of the

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Roman Catholics, even Gavin Artland and I should, we have so much in common.

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And this is one thing that we really have in common. And that is,

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I have engaged this person in the past. Turretin fan,

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I think, has engaged him about 370 times, I think. But there's one particular

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Roman Catholic apologist that for many, many years,

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I've just gone. And he's the Nader Achmed of Roman Catholic apologists.

44:27

And I just lost everybody. Nader Achmed is an Islamic apologist. And I only debated him once.

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I would never debate him again. And the reason is, there's no reason to. The one time

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I debated him, the Muslims in the audience were yelling at him. Get off the stage.

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You're an embarrassment. So, you know, he's always willing to debate.

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And so is this other guy, this Roman Catholic guy. He's always willing to. He'll debate anything, at any time, anywhere.

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And that's because, honestly, I've got some skincare stuff here.

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He could find proof of the Marian dogmas from the ingredients list of this.

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And it would be that insane. I've commented in the past, I listened once,

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I don't know, about five, six years ago. He and a Roman Catholic priest did something about early evidence for,

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I think it was the Immaculate Conception or Bodily Assumption or something, I forget what. All I could possibly say was, this is as insane as anything

45:44

Gail Ripplinger ever published. This is New Age Bible versions wacky.

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And he will not, even Gavin said he won't engage him because he's corrected him.

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He's corrected him on direct lies that he has said about Gavin Ortlund.

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And a few months later, he'll be listening to webcasts and he's repeating it again.

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He just doubles down. He will not be corrected. He has no scholarly standards by which to function.

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So why bother? And I came to that conclusion long before Gavin did,

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I think. And so I don't understand why people like Gary Machuda do anything with him.

46:37

They know this. They know. They won't talk about it publicly.

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But look, the big names well know that this other guy is just a loose cannon, firing everything he can fire, whether it's solid information or not.

46:58

And so, hey, we agree on that one. And I'm not sure why, again, why he seems to have some level of animosity toward me, but we definitely agree on that subject.

47:19

So it was interesting to see that. And again, if that's an area of interest to you,

47:27

I would strongly suggest that you listen to Gavin Ortlund's stuff. If you're interested in the

47:34

Eastern Orthodox stuff, you're interested in the issue of icons. He's done long, in -depth stuff.

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And what's nice is he will put the quotes up on the screen, and you can look at the references and look them up yourself and stuff like that.

47:52

You know, very, very helpful stuff. And so I'm more than happy to direct people to whatever information will be of assistance to them, even if it's someone who would say, yeah, and I'd stay away from that James White fellow.

48:06

He's pretty far out there. You know, not really. Now, what's rough about being on the road and having a bunch of other stuff on your mind is that right in the middle of that discussion,

48:23

I was sitting there going, okay, and there's another topic that I really want to get to today. And by the time

48:30

I went through all the weirdness, it was right at the time when

48:38

I was thinking about listening to that presentation that this Roman Catholic apologist had made that is just so far out there.

48:47

As soon as I said Gail Ripplinger, the train jumped the track. I think she's still around.

48:57

I checked recently. But believe me, if you're a fairly new listener to the program, if you want to hear entertaining stuff that at the time was literally splitting churches and causing all sorts of...

49:21

If you want to know why Bethany House Publishers had to delay the publication,

49:28

King James Only controversy, by at least a month and a half, is because they were running everything I'd written past attorneys.

49:36

Because Gail Ripplinger had threatened to sue Bethany House Publishers if they published that book.

49:42

Because I talked about her in the book. But if you want to... If you don't know who

49:49

Gail Ripplinger is, you need to go to aomin .org, put in Gail Ripplinger, G -A -I -L.

49:57

She made a big thing over the fact that I had initially spelled her name

50:04

G -A -Y -L -E. Of course, she wouldn't tell anybody what her name was.

50:11

In fact, her book had G .A. Ripplinger. She didn't want people to even know it was written by a woman. So, there's more than one way to spell the name

50:19

Gail. And so, I spelled it a particular way. I think, if I'm recalling correctly,

50:25

I think I have a relative on my wife's side whose name is Gail. And that's how it's spelled. So, I used...

50:32

But, oh no, he misspelled my... If you want to learn about acrostic algebra, and if you'd like to hear...

50:44

It wasn't quite an hour long. It was two half -hour programs. And so, once you put the introduction and stuff like that in it, it was just under an hour.

50:53

But I was the only person that Gail Ripplinger ever debated on a radio program.

51:01

And after that, she made sure that every question...

51:08

She did what Joe Biden did. She would send all the questions you were allowed to ask, and you just simply had to read them.

51:20

She never engaged anyone ever again. And for the obvious reason that she just got massacred.

51:26

Because her material is just incoherently bad. Incoherently bad.

51:33

But if you want to... That was one that's definitely... Now, interestingly enough, that's not on my list of debates because it wasn't a formal, moderated public debate.

51:44

But man, if you included the stuff I did like that, if you included all the radio programs with the

51:49

Gail Ripplingers in the world, and the atheists, and the people on Tom Likas, and when

51:56

I debated Robert Funk on KFYI Radio, I'd be up around 300 someplace.

52:03

I'd almost have as many debates as Ergin Canner, if you included all that stuff.

52:11

But yeah, if you're not familiar with that, I'm not saying you need to go do it. Some of you might come back and say, that was a waste of time.

52:19

But I think most folks would probably enjoy listening to the radio debate that I did with Gail Ripplinger and at least come away from it going, wow, that's amazing that there are people like that out there.

52:39

That hear from God as she did. Did you know that God calls the

52:46

NASB the NASV? How do we know this? Gail Ripplinger told us that. Oh my,

52:53

I can't believe that. But if you've benefited from the

52:59

King James Only Controversy, and what was the first book that Jeff Durbin, happy birthday, Jeff. Today is Jeff Durbin's birthday.

53:09

If you benefited from King James Only Controversy, and the first Christian book that Jeff Durbin read after his conversion was the

53:19

King James Only Controversy. Now he'll say the same thing I do. I do not recommend that. I do not recommend that as the first book a person should read.

53:28

It's down the road a little bit. I think it's very helpful in understanding where the Bible came from and all that kind of stuff. But I do not think that that's the best start.

53:39

But you have Gail Ripplinger to thank if you've been blessed by the King James Only Controversy. You really do.

53:47

Because after I did that radio program, we put the notes that I put together on her book in a little booklet.

53:56

And my dad worked at the print shop at North Phoenix Baptist Church. And he printed it up as little booklets, New Age Bible versions refuted.

54:03

And we just sort of threw it out there. And we got overwhelmed with people requesting it.

54:10

And you know who the major people are requesting? Christian bookstores. Yes, they still existed back then. This is ancient history we're talking about here, all right?

54:18

Christian bookstores. Because they're getting hit with people coming in. Why do you have these New Age Bible versions in here and all the rest of this stuff?

54:25

And so they'd order them and have them sitting under the shelf, under the counter, just to hand them to people and stuff like that.

54:32

And I was having a conversation with Steve Lobby, who was acquisitions editor for Bethany House Publishers back then.

54:39

And I'm telling him this. And he's like, sounds like you've got a book there. And I was like, yeah, yeah, you might be right.

54:50

And that's what led to the writing of the book. I wrote the book in three months.

54:57

That was pretty much all I did during that time period. But I wrote it in three months.

55:05

And then I had to typeset it. And you go, why? Because Bethany House Publishers was not a scholarly publisher.

55:16

They mainly did Christian fiction. And so doing all the biblical languages, they didn't have anybody to do it.

55:24

And there wasn't any standardized, if you know how to do

55:29

Greek and Hebrew today online and stuff like that, something called Unicode. Unicode hadn't been invented yet, or at least if it had been, it hadn't become the standard yet.

55:40

I don't recall. I had to typeset that book myself. I used

55:47

Ventura Publisher, which I don't even know if it even exists anymore. But so I had to do all the editing and pagination and getting the footnotes right and everything else.

56:01

And thankfully, when the second edition was done, what, in 09, somewhere around there,

56:07

I think, Unicode was now the standard. They could do all that at Bethany House. I think they had already been purchased by Baker by then.

56:14

And so that's how that worked out. So in a sense, and I've had many people, just the book helped them tremendously.

56:27

In a sense, you should thank Dale Ripplinger because it was,

56:34

I was driving home one day from the office and one of our, we didn't have many volunteers. We had one that called me and said, you gotta listen to this woman.

56:42

She's uncared. She's saying weird stuff. I tuned it in, tried to call in, and it was

56:49

Dale Ripplinger. And when I finally got hold of the host of the program, I said, you gotta let somebody come on to respond to this stuff.

56:58

This stuff's nuts. And he said, we'll be happy to have you come on. But she says no one will debate her because she demanded that you read her book before you comment on it.

57:07

Well, the book's this thick and it's filled with woo woo stuff, but I did it.

57:14

And that's what led to a lot of stuff. You just, you cannot outguess the providence of God.

57:23

You can see it in hindsight, not always, but in this instance, you can really see how the

57:30

Lord was working and how foundational all that stuff was down the road.

57:36

So anyways, thought I would share that story with you all from my hotel room here in Jonesboro.

57:42

I need to go have dinner with the pastor of the church and we actually have gone the full hour anyways, which is pretty cool.

57:51

And again, Rich is very impressed with the camera on my MacBook Pro. I personally don't know why anybody wants to look at me anyways, but that's how it works.

58:02

So with that folks, thanks for watching. Now, obviously this is Thursday. I've got the debates coming up.

58:10

I don't know if I can get a program in on the road next week. They're long days. I'm trying to get home by Wednesday.

58:18

Might be able to, there might be some stuff I really want to talk about. Can we just do it again like this in a hotel room after having been on the road for six hours or something?

58:28

We'll see. We'll see how things work out, weather and internet and all the rest of that kind of stuff. We'll see.

58:34

But please pray for the events this weekend that the Lord will be honored and glorified in all that takes place.

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Thanks for watching the program today. And we will see you next time on The Dividing Line. Thanks and God bless.