Debate Update and Some Current Events on Today's Skype Dividing Line

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James skypes in from Evergreen Colorado today.

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And I'm assuming now is the time to start the dividing line. I don't know. We're live.
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It's all yours. Thanks. Appreciate that. You can tell we didn't really have all this planned out quite right, but I hadn't thought through that.
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Welcome to the dividing line. My name is James White. I'm coming to you live from the midst of a herd of elk.
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Yeah, actually, at the home I'm staying at, I saw 20 and then
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I'm told another 30 came through while we were preparing for the program or so. So that just gives you an idea of sort of where we are.
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We are in the deep woods of Colorado. And a couple things just to catch you up.
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If you have not seen the presentations we did last week at Gospel Light Community Church in Santa Fe, we have those posted up on a response to the gay
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Christian movement. And so I spent a few days in Santa Fe and then drove on up here.
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And last Tuesday evening, well, last Tuesday evening, just a couple nights ago, we had the debate with Bob Enyart.
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I'll be talking a little bit more about that a little bit later on in the program. And I'll be heading back to Phoenix, should arrive back on Tuesday of next week,
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Lord willing. I'm not sure when we'll be doing the dividing line, but anyhow, got a bunch of things to get to today.
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A lot of things in what Rush calls his stack of stuff, which for me is nothing more than a list of articles in pocket online.
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But I'm going to start with one no one really expects me to start with, I think. I wanted to actually play a little clip from Kenneth Copeland and talking about the
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Reformation and Roman Catholicism and all the rest of this stuff, started to bring it up to use today and it's been canterized.
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Yes, Bill Johnson had linked to it, I think, a couple of days ago, and I had listened to some portions of it and I thought,
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OK, this is I'm going to put this in the list. I think this is something that needs to be addressed, brought up today.
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And lo and behold, that video has become private. It's not available anymore.
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I wonder why. Well, no one is overly surprised. Well, I'm not overly surprised.
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I'm not surprised at all that word faith teachers and people of that ilk are stumbling over themselves in rushing off to bow down to the
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Roman papacy. Obviously, certainly in generations gone by, their forefathers were strongly anti -Roman
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Catholic, but they were so out of tradition rather than out of conviction, as far as any type of meaningful historical understanding goes.
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They certainly weren't reformed in any sense and were only Protestant in a in the mildest form.
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And so to have their modern leaders taken in by a modern pope who himself,
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I think, is going to present to Rome's apologists some pretty serious challenges in the not too distant future.
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He already has, but even more so with some of his statements isn't isn't surprising at all because they don't have a meaningful theological foundation in Sola Scriptura, Tota Scriptura, and emphasis upon justification.
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Look, anybody who's listened to Kenneth Copeland and the word faith teachers know that that meaningful, in -depth, soteriological discussions, discussions of salvation and merit and the relationship of works and grace, that's not their thing.
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So the idea that they would have any meaningful foundation upon which to resist the wooing of the ecumenists, well, they don't.
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And so you see this happening. And again, shouldn't have surprised anybody, but it might surprise a few of you that you might start running into some of your your word faith friends and all of a sudden maybe they've got a rosary with them or something like that.
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You're going to go, really? Wow, that's strange. But shouldn't surprise us at all.
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Really, I think the next few years you need to have you need to have a firm foundation.
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In fact, I was thinking a little bit about Spurgeon's morning and evening is devotional from this morning. He was talking about the text after you have suffered for a little while.
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And he talks about how, you know, the tree that has to fight for survival gets the deep roots.
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Well, we better be working on those deep roots, because if you're one of those people who your faith is impacted by seeing others, so you need to have heroes.
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You need to have people you can look up to. And it's not something that's that's really rooted in yourself.
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The next few years are going to be really tough for you, because I am seeing evidence of a absolute tsunami of apostasy going every which direction.
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The collapse on the issue of homosexuality and biblical ethics, morality, definition of sin, marriage, everything, collapse on biblical authority, collapse in soteriology.
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It's, you know, everything in regards to biblical sufficiency and inerrancy and inspiration.
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If you believe those things, you're going to find yourself in a very, very, very small minority.
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And so you need to be thinking right now, I need to be getting my roots deep, and I don't need to be looking to anybody, myself included, as the one who, you know, if that person goes, then
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I, you know, I give up. No, no, no, no, no. You have to really keep your eyes upon the prize with what's coming at us.
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So I'm not really I'm not really surprised, as I said, about Copeland and others at all.
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But there's going to be a lot more, and I think they'll become more surprising as the days go on. Then I saw an article, and so many of these just go together.
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This was two days ago, 11 -year -old boy being changed into girl in California, sex change procedures on children.
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There's this picture of this abused child between two lesbians, and you read the story, and it is just absolutely beyond Thomas Lobel.
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There's 11 -year -old boy in Berkeley, California, Thomas Lobel, who has had the misfortune to have been adopted by a couple of lesbian women who, in what may be their own little act of revenge upon the male gender, are transforming a defenseless little boy into a girl.
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Thomas is undergoing a controversial hormone -blocking treatment, which will prevent him from going through puberty as a boy, etc.,
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etc. It is so disgusting.
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It is so loathsome to recognize what happens to a culture when it loses its moral mind.
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This is so clearly judgment upon this land, and people are blind to it.
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This is so plainly child abuse.
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It is so plainly wrong, immoral, and yet people will do their little golf clap and applaud, and it is just the destruction of this human life.
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The confusion, the harm, and we're talking at this age, there's no way to undo these things, and yet this is allowed.
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It should be causing an outcry. There will be no outcry. There can't be an outcry any longer, not with what our government and our society has already done.
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It's just not possible. By the way, I'm seeing a thunderhead getting closer and closer, and I'm seeing lightning, and so this program could come to a screeching halt at any point in time, because I was watching the radar earlier, and there are some fairly decent storms moving into this portion of Colorado, so Rich, if it happens,
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I'll just have you pick up the thought wherever I was, and you can just roll with it from there.
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We could have Squirrel call in, and if Squirrel called in, I think right now he might be awake, unlike the last time he was in studio when he was not, and we had to filter out the snoring part, and so maybe there you go.
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Maybe we'll do something like that. Anyway, the sad thing is, honestly, that there are so many of these articles that I could be looking at.
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I mean, you've got the 11 -year -old boy being changed into a girl, and then today, yesterday,
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I'm sorry, a judge in Australia has been criticized after saying incest may no longer be a taboo, and that the community may now accept consensual sex between adult siblings.
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Judge Gary Nielsen from the District Court in the state of New South Wales likened incest to what?
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Anyone want to take a wild guess before I finish reading that phrase? Not difficult to do. Likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and unnatural, but is now widely accepted.
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He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring, but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant.
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Why? Because of the availability of contraception and abortion. Quote, a jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men, and was now available, not having a sexual partner, the judge said.
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This is a judge, folks. If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you'd invariably have, they would say it's unnatural for a man to be interested in another man.
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Orange. Though. Amongst many other.
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Accused of. And everything. Thank you. Oh, it's the old slippery slope thing.
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This has nothing to do with incest. This has nothing to do with pedophilia, has nothing to do with bestiality.
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Oh, really? And now that it's happening, those people who used to say that are just as silent as can be because they knew we were right all along.
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And here it is happening, happening. You know, the sad thing is Judge Nielsen made the comments during the trial of a brother charged with raping his younger sister.
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There you go. There you go. Again, should we really be shocked?
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Once the foundations are gone, should we really be shocked? It just we're just running on moral inertia right now.
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Nothing more. And. The the downward slope is increasing at at a very, very rapid pace.
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And I think there may be. I think it'll be too late, but there there may be just such a natural revulsion on the part of so many people that there there may be a reaction backwards from this briefly.
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But I just I just don't believe that there is sufficient ground left, you know, unless it unless it includes a positive move toward God and toward his truth and toward a recognition of the the role that that the scriptures have played in the founding of Western culture and all the rest of these things.
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I just don't see I don't see any way that it's going to be stopped. And so it is it is truly amazing to to observe these things and to recognize that the slippery slope is real.
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It's happening. And the people who mocked us for talking about that are people who clearly are now rather silent.
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I notice notice how much darker it is now. It's gotten really dark.
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We may have to turn the lights on in here somewhere, because this this thunderstorm that I can see right over us, which hasn't started raining yet, has just completely blocked out the sun.
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I'm slowly disappearing. See, there's a little light right here. Here we are. It's wild.
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But anyways, we will get to we will get to showing you what we're actually gonna try to do today is we're going to try to show you some things from my screen while I discuss something.
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We've never tried doing this by Skype before, and so it will probably crash and burn.
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Epic way. But we're going to try. We're going to give it a shot. And the only way you can eventually perfect these things is to is to keep trying.
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And so that's what we're going to. That's we're going to do. I'll have to. You know what? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain a little further back.
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Tilt it a little further back. There you go. Now we see all of you.
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There we go. I got a zoom shot here and you messed my zoom shot up. I was just trying to get close to the light.
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That works good. You look good. You look good. It's just no, I don't. But it's just because it is really gotten darker.
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It's sort of like 10 plagues dark out there. The plague of darkness is descending. It's like I said, do you have squirrel on the
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F squirrels number on standby? Because, you know, we might need to John Sampson in the other room. And I think this is this is dark.
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And I've seen the light disappear. Anyway, I did want to talk a little bit about the the debate on Tuesday evening that we had here in in Denver.
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It was put together very, very quickly, obviously. And I appreciate
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Bob Benyard's guys, Will Duffy, especially for putting it together. The venue worked real well.
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I'd never been to the Brown. I never take that back. I might have been through downtown Denver at some point in the past.
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I don't remember. But the
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Brown Palace Hotel, now that I've seen it, I think I've seen pictures of it. It goes way back and it's really snazzy.
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It's really nice. It was a good location and stuff. And so do it.
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Hey, Alan, do we have lights in here? You pop the light on.
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Hey, is that there you go. Now they can see me. I mean, that that cloud came over and it's just like I just I descended into into into darkness here.
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Thank you, sir. Anyway, it was a good location. And I was a little worried about the fact that we were only supposed to be able to have 100 people there, but we ended up having 150 that has put out a few more rows of chairs.
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And so I was very happy with the podiums and and all the rest, that kind of stuff.
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And there's a lot of work that goes into that. It was done in about two weeks. And so all of that was was was helpful.
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As far as the debate itself was concerned. Well, I'll just give you my own personal feelings.
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We can go from there. I had done as much studying as I could in two weeks with everything else that I had going on at the time.
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I listened to Bob Enyart's three DVD set on the subject of open theism.
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I listened to his and I listened to, in other words, I converted to MP3 is 250 pages.
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He often says debate with Dr. Lamerson from Knox Seminary. And at one point and this is a sort of a warning about the limits of the of doing the the multitasking that I do.
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I was obviously doing a lot of study while driving because I drove up here from Phoenix drove through Santa Fe. And at one point,
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I can tell you I can show you on a map exactly where I was when
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I heard this one comment that just stuck in my mind when I got up here to try to find it, to type it out for utilization in the debate if I needed it.
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I have never found it. I've never found it. I've listened to what I thought
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I was listening to more than three times at high speed can never.
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I've never found it. Now, it still came out in the debate and I didn't need to quote anyways. But that was incredibly frustrating.
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It really was. But it was providential. It was providential because what happened and those of you in the chat channel, what happened is
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I mentioned this in the channel. And I said to guys, I said, I can't find this.
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And he said something along these lines. And has anybody ever heard anything like this? Well, there were a few people in channel, including the infamous.
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And it's a little scary how often people mention this guy to me when I'm traveling.
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But the infamous algo. There was a guy, for example, at the debate who said that he's listening to all the debates and someday he may be the new algo.
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And I've had people overseas saying, well, I'm the Russian algo or I'm the South African algo.
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And so I'll go had better keep better, better keep working because there are people gunning for his position as algo.
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So anyway, I'll go was in there. And he said, you know, something similar that was said.
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And then there's somebody else in the channel that said it was it was a Hebrew student that said it. I think it was.
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Somebody will correct me if there's if they were in there who said, well, you know, he said something similar to that in his debate with Gene Cook.
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And I went his debate with Gene Cook didn't know, didn't know he had debated
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Gene Cook. And so as a result, I'll go goes looking around and finds his copy, his audio copy of the debate with Gene Cook.
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Well, I'll be honest with you, that was probably the most useful thing that I listened to. And so I got that from algo and then listen to that on my next ride up and over Juniper Pass.
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It's raining really nicely now and lightning flashes. Like I said, better have somebody on speed dial.
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And so that actually ended up being very important in the debate because one of the issues that came up was the specific statement about the sons.
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Could the son have chosen not to love the father to rebel against the father, et cetera, et cetera? And that, of course, came up in the debate.
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And that's been the main thing a lot of people have have considered and thought about is the reality of of what open theism really leads to.
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And that came up in the cross -examination period. So the the debate was very interesting.
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It is the first debate in which I had to debate Satchmo. Yeah, some of you don't know who
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Satchmo was, Louis Armstrong. But one of his most famous songs was
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Wonderful World. And Bob Enyart's side decided to try to use some audio clips to spice up the presentation.
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And they didn't work well, didn't work well at all. And they were trying to play this clip from a
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YouTube video. And it was the YouTube video that was the early edition of the absurdity.
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Remember the absurdity? Remember a couple of years ago, we went through how this one
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YouTube video took something out of context from the Bryson discussion, completely demonstrated that people putting it together could care less about accuracy, truthfulness, honesty, integrity or anything else.
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I had responded to that YouTube video. And then YouTube dinged me for playing the portion where they were talking about me because it had that song in the background.
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They didn't ding the people that originally did it. But when I try to respond and attack upon me, they limit its distribution because I'm quoting.
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It was completely unfair. Anyway, so remember then that we found out that George Bryson had included in some addition to his always growing read my book that, you know, this this absurd paraphrasing of what
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I allegedly said on the Bible Answer Man broadcast and that it ended up in Michael Cote's book when we refuted that book as if it actually represented what
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I had said and what I believe. Well, so I knew which video as soon as they started playing this, this clip.
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It's it's the it's the instrumental introduction to what a wonderful world. So I knew which which video it was.
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And but they could never get it to the point where it was actually quoting me. So there's this long section in the debate where we used to have a musical interlude, basically.
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And eventually they did get around to playing a portion from something from my debate with with Dr.
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Sanders. And look, I want to try to be as as kind as I can here.
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But the reality is that Bob Enyart and his people as a whole have developed their own theological vocabulary, in essence, and evidently don't have enough interaction outside of their very narrow confines to really recognize when they're misunderstanding what the rest of us are saying.
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There tends to be a sort of a small little group, and the result has has been a lot of misunderstanding on their part when they criticize what others are saying.
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This was very clear, for example, in Bob Enyart's responses to to Dr.
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Lamerson. There are a number of examples of that. And by the way, there are a number of examples.
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I thought there was some egregious behavior on Bob Enyart's part in the debate, especially with Dr.
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Lamerson, his final installment in the debate, the written debate, where he put all sorts of words into Lamerson's mouth, saying, well, since Lamerson wouldn't answer these questions, which means from his perspective, they won't deal with my arguments in the way
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I want them to deal with my arguments. Dr. Lamerson had answered all those questions.
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Maybe Bob Enyart didn't understand the answers. But I found that just to be an egregious level of behavior on his part.
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And so when we did have behavior problems in the debate, I wasn't surprised. When Bob Enyart polled the ask a question, let you say two words, interrupt you with an argument thing during cross -examination,
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I wasn't overly surprised. It was frustrating, frustrating for the audience, as I pointed out, is very disrespectful to not only to me, but to them as an audience.
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But I wasn't overly surprised given what I had seen in the materials that I had studied. And there's a there's a agreement with that.
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If you heard that, that's thunder. Anyway, so when we when we got into the debate.
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They played a segment from my debate with Sanders. And what's really bugged me, and I'm sure that Will's going to watch this, what's really bugged me is that a number of times
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Bob Enyart would say, well, James White admits this and James White admits that. And and I'm like, where did
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I admit this? And when they give examples. They're reading into my words, their own meanings and their own backgrounds, not mine.
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They're not coming from my context. I go, well, you must mean this given their own understanding of things. So the one that they did manage to play during the debate was just a brief statement to Dr.
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Sanders, as I recall, about, well, open theism doesn't have to answer the questions of God's goodness that Calvinism does.
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Well, what was I saying that the Calvinism makes statements about God's providence that are very, very different than what open theism states and that therefore our need to defend
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God's goodness is to be focused on these issues. And they understood that to mean that, well,
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James White admits that open theism it affirms God's goodness and doesn't doesn't have any problems.
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God's goodness. I never said that. I mean, it just the category errors in the thinking of these folks is a little bit frightening, to be perfectly honest with you.
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Like I said, small group think thinking like speaking alike and not really communicating with the outside world.
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Well, well, that's that's that's a frightening thing. Very frightening thing.
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And so I I've tried to point out
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I tried to point out as briefly as I could in response is I was saying, I think open theism has tremendous problems in defending the goodness of God, because here you have a
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God who creates a universe where he he clearly has to know as the creator that he is bringing forth all sorts of opportunities for evil.
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Even Bob said that the cross was a a contingency plan because he knew it might have might might the sin might take place.
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So he he knows that all this evil could take place, but he doesn't know whether it is or it isn't.
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And all he has is contingency plans to try to deal with it. And you don't think that that causes a fundamental problem with the goodness of God?
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Of course it does. It obviously does. So it's been a little frustrating to have to try to explain these things, because this again, this group is is sort of functioning outside of the the natural realm of of scholarly intercourse and discussion.
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So what happened during the debate was I was a little surprised we had
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I had first suggested 20 minute opening statements. Then they had said, let's let's cut it back to 15.
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So, OK, then they get back with me later. Let's go back to 20. OK, that's fine with me. I did not have a written opening statement.
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This this subject to me is I've been dealing with finite godism and attacks upon God's omniscience and immutability from the
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Mormons and people like that for. Wow, coming up on how many years over 30 years, and so it was just a matter of what are the main points that I want to make here?
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And so I was a little surprised. I mean, I knew exactly where he was going. He seemed a little intimidated, did not seem as smooth as he had been, for example, in debating
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Gene Cook or in some of the other things that I had that I had seen. We got into the cross examination.
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He misbehaved very badly. We had talked about what it was supposed to be beforehand, that you're supposed to ask a question only give the person opportunity to respond when you feel they've responded enough.
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But, of course, two words is not response enough. He would not allow me to just kept interrupting and interrupting and interrupting.
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And the people in the audience saw it. You know, if you want to demonstrate that you really aren't interested in communicating anything, you don't really want this cross examination to clarify things, then this is this is how you behave.
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And, of course, then I had the opportunity of cross examining him. And I showed you how it was supposed to be done. I followed the rules.
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I asked questions. I allowed him to answer the questions. I, you know, just just did it the way that it's supposed to be done.
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And I think I think Bob knows how it's supposed to be done. He's a sharp guy. And then we had the closing statements.
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And in the cross, my cross examination, I didn't even use my whole time because once Bob Enyard admitted that from his perspective, the
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Godhead could cease to exist, that they a fundamental disruption of the relationship with the father and the son could take place.
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I think for any Orthodox Christian, that's pretty much all you needed to say. And if I went on to anything from there, it would actually be blunting the the impact of the confession that Bob Enyard had just made.
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And that part is on YouTube already because someone in the audience used their their camera to record that and posted it that night.
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And so you can see that part. We hope to have all of it. The entire debate. I mean, I have all the audio of the debate.
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I could have queued up some sections of the audio or something like that, I suppose. But I had an
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MP3 player and my Livescribe pen going. So I have those. But the video should be arriving fairly soon.
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And I know that Rich is quite interested in having that ready to go and and getting it up on YouTube as soon as possible.
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All of that to say that the next day I drove down to meet with a
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Christian brother in Boulder that I spoke at Flatirons Baptist Church that evening.
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And I wondered if Bob would be on the air or if he would be still on vacation because he had canceled or moved a trip to do some other stuff back east just for the debate.
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And so I found what station they were on locally. And as I was driving, as I was driving to Boulder, I tuned it in.
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Oh, goodness. The stuff on that station almost almost went into a diabetic coma.
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Some of that stuff is just all these women teachers just anyway.
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Anyway, it was it was really bad anyway. But they came out at three o 'clock and I only caught a few minutes of it.
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And then later I download the audio. And it was it was two different people that were there on the program.
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And so I've asked some questions. It was Joe Scott and Michael Sugar.
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Joe Scott and Michael Sugar were the two people and both had been at the debate.
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And so they discussed they discussed the debate. And as I listened to them talking, the only thing
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I could think of, I'm just being perfectly honest now, I've been told that Joe Scott does sidewalk counseling against abortion.
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That's wonderful. I know lots of little nuns that do the same thing that Michael Sugar is a wonderful young man.
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That's that's not the point. What was frightening to me was how little they heard of what
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I said. Again, I could only parallel this to talking to Mormon missionaries and seeing the mindset that Mormonism creates in those those missionaries to where they can only process and hear within the confines of their little group.
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And that's what I was hearing from both of these individuals. I mean, and the language that they continue to use is
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Bob Enyart's language, even when that language had been demonstrated rather clearly to be completely insufficient to really deal with the issues during the debate itself.
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But that didn't have any impact on them. And so that was that was really troubling to me.
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And I want to play a segment from the from the program that we're going to look at Philippians chapter two, because one of the things that came out very clearly and what
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I want to try to use in a teaching fashion in the time we have left in the program is that consistent open theism cannot maintain the fundamental assertions of the
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Christian faith, especially in regards to the person of Jesus Christ and his work upon the cross. That's what makes it so vitally important is that Christian truth is a whole, and that what open theism does, once you turn the cross into an afterthought, into a contingency plan rather than the eternal purpose of God.
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And once you elevate the concept of and I keep using the old concept, the proper terminology of libertarian free will,
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Bob doesn't like that. He considers that to be a repetitious phrase that any will has to be free and a will has to be free as a libertarian free will.
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As I pointed out in the in the debate, that's just absurd. The Bible clearly presents to us wills that are under the control of sin and things that you've got to you've got to deal with these issues, but he doesn't.
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Anyway, not only is the work of Christ and the gospel deeply impacted, but the person of Christ, because you elevate libertarian free will to the ultimate, it is the ultimate overriding characteristic of open theism.
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Now, Bob says it has nothing to do with human beings, just freedom of God. That's not where open theism came from. That was not its intention and purpose.
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That's not what developed it. The reality is that you are taking something that was ironically extremely important to a number of Greek philosophers, libertarian free will, which is not a biblical concept in any way, shape or form, and exalting it to the highest position.
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And it becomes the lens through which everything else must be viewed. And of course, the result is an utter distortion of biblical teaching, and that's the other distortion you have of open theism.
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And the result is some serious Christological errors, serious Christological errors.
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Now, I noticed that Bob did not attempt to argue with me about the
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I am phrase, John 13, 19. He had tried to argue with Dr.
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Lamerson about that, but he was wrong. And I was expecting him to do the same thing with me and would have been happy to have demonstrated that, but he did not attempt to do so.
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And so that was one prediction that I had made that did not actually come true.
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But he did argue that Jesus was not identifying himself as the I am of John 13, 19, the debate with Lamerson about which he was wrong.
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And then, more importantly, you have this assertion that the Godhead itself could cease to exist, that Jesus could sin.
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And as I pointed out, I didn't have a lot of time to do it, but why do I believe in the impeccability of Christ?
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Is it because I'm following Plato or something? Absurd! No, it isn't. Why do
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I believe in it? Real simply, I came to this conclusion a long time ago, and I've never been given any reason to not believe this, but it is very plainly obvious that the inability to sin, which is the negative flip side of the positive holiness of God, is far more definitional of who
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God is than the ability to sin is definitional of who man is. We believe that someday in heaven, we will be perfected, and that sin will not any longer be a part of our experience.
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Does that mean we cease being human? Evidently, from this perspective, it does. I didn't ask
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Bob, but I can't see how he could possibly avoid the reality of saying that the possibility of evil will continue into eternity.
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That we will be eternally insecure. I cannot see how he could say anything other than that, because if the very essence of what it means to be
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God or personal is libertarian free will, then evil always has to be a possible reality.
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God could cease to be God for all of eternity. We could cease to be in communion with him for all eternity. There is no possible way around that from this perspective.
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And so what they end up doing is really joining with some real liberals in emphasizing a radical view of kenosis from Philippians chapter 2.
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And so I want to play a section of that. I hope this is going to work. It's not really doing a lot of thundering outside right now, so maybe it will work.
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But let's listen to this section of Joe and Michael talking about this issue.
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One of the things you will hear that I tried to explain in the course of the program, or in the course of the debate, was that the incarnation did not require a change in the essence of God.
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In the Enyartian mindset, and I guess that's what we have to call this, the Enyartian mindset, in the
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Enyartian mindset, any action of God is a change in God.
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So the incarnation involves a change in God, because he did something that he had not done before.
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And of course, I deny this definition of change. But what it does is it, of course, limits
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God to time, which is, of course, their assertion. Time does rule over the Enyartian God.
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And we can't ask about the origins of time or anything like that, because it's sort of like asking Molinus, who's the card dealer?
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Well, we don't know. And so God is in time, from their perspective, and is not the creator of time.
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And so with that, they have to assert that any action in time then involves change, because it does for us, so it must for God, too.
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And I tried to point out in the debate, your God, Bob's God, is too small, because, well, again, he's like an exalted man, except without the physical body.
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So there are a lot of parallels, a lot of parallels. It would be interesting to see Mormons and Enyartians interacting, because they would go, hey, that's what
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I believe, that's what I believe, too. It would be very interesting. Anyways, we've got to get to this. So let's listen to a portion of the radio program, and then we'll look to the text description.
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There was another example that Bob was talking about last night. When he asked
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James White, did God exist before he came to Earth? Yes.
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Did he come to Earth? Yes. Did he empty himself to come to Earth?
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Did he have to be taught? Did he have to learn while he was on Earth? Is that a change?
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And James White said, no, because it didn't change his nature.
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I think when you empty yourself in heaven and you come to Earth as an infant, you're changed.
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When you don't understand the little things in life, when you have to grow from a child to an adult, and you grew in stature and wisdom before the
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Lord, and the Lord grew in love for you, those are all changes.
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But he would not admit that. No, because it would completely contradict everything that he believes, that God can change.
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It would completely contradict everything I believe. That's why I wouldn't admit it. Maybe they're misunderstanding the equation of change with action in time, didn't listen to my saying that God exists outside of time, decrees to create, creates time, decrees his own interaction in time that does not involve a change in his essence or his being.
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But again, it's just so far outside of their experience as Enyartians, that they won't hear.
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They won't hear what we're saying. Is the antithesis of what they believe. And so that Jesus emptied himself and took on a human nature,
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James White tries to make like the separation between the deity of Jesus and the human nature, where the scripture doesn't make that.
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It says that he is God and he is man. So if you recognize that Jesus takes on a human nature, that the very essence, as we're going to see of his making himself in our reputation is the positive action of joining a human nature to himself.
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That's an inappropriate recognition. Don't think so. He had to be he had to be 100 %
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God and he had to be 100 % man in order to pay the price for sin.
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Only someone perfect could pay the price and only a man who could be tempted like Jesus was.
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Which they would say he can't be tempted. So that was really just another farce that God put on with another farce that God put on.
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So again, unless the ability to so so what he's saying is the ability to sin is more definitional to human nature than holiness is to God's nature.
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All of this is, again, illustrates the great danger of what Bob Enyar does, and that is he he sets up certain attributes and he exalts them, makes them central.
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I mean, he actually stood there. I wonder if if I think one other time in all my debates, someone did something similar to this is he went through the
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Gospels and he outlined in yellow everything that he said emphasized God's personality, goodness, loving, et cetera, et cetera.
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And then in some other color, anything about the what he calls the omnis and ems.
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And then he sits there and, you know, fans through the pages as a graphic illustration.
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Again, it reminds me I'm sorry, all these are cultic figures because this is cultic thinking. But it reminds me of Jesus is not
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God from the way international. Now, nobody remembers the way international anymore. But one of the arguments that he made that was made by Victor Paul Wirbel way back in the day was that since Jesus is called son of man, more often he's called son of God.
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That means he's a man and not God. Well, there you go. I mean, this is not a meaningful method of exegesis or hermeneutics, but neither is fanning the pages of the
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Gospels, a meaningful mechanism for saying I am right to elevate these attributes and and therefore diminish or deny fully deny these as attributes of God when it's absolutely necessary, given the entirety of biblical revelation to affirm those things.
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But that's what you got going on. It's a little handyman, the devil. Yes, yes. But he was tempted.
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You think God the Father can be tempted? It's a good question. What do you think?
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I think he can. I think when he spoke to Moses about wanting to kill
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Abraham, that was a temptation. He was tempted to kill all of Abraham's descendants. I don't remember when
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God spoke to Moses about trying to kill Abraham. Of course, I'm not sure what's going on there.
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And Moses talked him out of it. Temptations. Moses talked God out of doing something bad.
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And, you know, we really need to think through what we're saying, especially when we're sitting on a radio program.
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So that means morally and ethically, Moses was superior to Yahweh, right? That's what's really going on in those texts.
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Yahweh isn't changing Moses. No, that would just be a farce. Wow, I mean,
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I'm glad this is a real small little view because I would hate to see these folks try to bring this stuff into apologetics because it would be bad.
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It's not sin. And if God, you know, he was just tempted to do it.
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Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. And he refused.
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He answered every one of Satan's temptations with scripture, which was amazing because when you look at his answers to the to Satan's temptations, they just they blew
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Satan out of the water essentially. And could that have been a figure of speech when you're just talking about Jesus being 100 percent
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God in order to take to make the sacrifice? He had to be perfect and he had to be able to take that sacrifice, his blood and put it on the altar in heaven.
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Okay, so if he could have sinned, there would never have been a sacrifice and everything
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God did would fail and there would be no redemption, right? That's the only possible logical conclusion to all of this.
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There's not another God, the son to send and the incarnation is there. And then does
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Jesus become a rebel deity that now the father is going to have to fight? With all due respect, there's nothing even remotely
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Christian about any of this, and it's because they're taking chunks of Christian truth, but they've been given this cultic, open theistic gobbledygook that turns it all into a mishmash of self -contradiction.
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So with that being said, we listened to what was said there.
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Now, let's see if we can do this. I want to point something out, and this is the biblical teaching portion, and we've got about eight minutes to do it in.
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This is the biblical teaching portion. Hopefully you can see on the screen. We are going to try to bring up my
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Accordance screen here, and let's ask ourselves the question, what was the nature of what's called the kenosis?
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The term kenosis comes from this term right here, akenosin, in Philippians 2 .7,
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and there has been all sorts of books written, and many trees have died, and many barrels of ink have been spilled discussing what's known as the kenosis, the emptying of Jesus.
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Well, the reality is, of course, that as Dr. Lamerson did point out to Bob Enyart long ago,
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Paul never uses kana 'o, the verbal form, in a literal sense.
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He always uses it in a sense such as my labor becoming empty amongst you.
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Well, it's obviously not that his labor leaks out on the ground or something like that, but that there is a result that his labor would not be seen or be fruitful or something like that.
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And so that is why the majority of translations translate verse 7 in such a way as to refer to his making himself of no reputation.
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Jesus didn't come with trumpet blasts and angels mowing down Roman armies and establishing a throne in the center of the world or anything like that.
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But what's important to see is that after it says, who existing in the form of God, and I've rendered that as eternally existing in the form of God because we are talking about eternity past here, did not consider the equality he had with God the
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Father something to be grasped or to be held onto. And, of course, that term hegeseta also would indicate the fact that the
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Son as a divine person preexisted the Incarnation and gave consideration to things.
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He did not consider that equality he had with the Father something to be held onto, but notice he emptied himself.
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This is a voluntary thing that he does. He empties himself, and what does that mean?
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What does that mean? I don't think that Joe and Michael, Mr.
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Sugar, really seem to understand what this text is saying because the next phrases found right here, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, these are positive actions on the part of Christ that involve his taking on that human nature.
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So he empties himself, if you insist upon utilization of that translation, by taking something on, not by getting rid of something.
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Now, one of the reasons that they so strongly emphasize a canonic form of Incarnation is because the fact that Enyart really focuses upon Mark 13 .32
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and Jesus' ignorance, specifically in regards to the day of his coming.
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And I've even heard him say, God did not know. Well, obviously God did know the Father and the
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Spirit, and I would argue that the Son was fully aware of that prior to the
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Incarnation and after the Incarnation, but that this is an example of the veiling of particular divine attributes necessary to accomplish the intention of the
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Incarnation itself. And I gave an example during the debate that I don't believe he really gave any response to, and that is that the glory that was the
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Son's was veiled during the Incarnation itself. There was one exception to that, and that, of course, is on the
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Mount of Transfiguration, when the glory of the Son was seen in the presence of the
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Father. But Jesus didn't walk down the back roads of Jerusalem, the back alleyways of Jerusalem, at night and glow.
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His disciples had to carry torches to see where they were going. And so this is a natural attribute of God that he is glorious, and yet it was veiled so that Jesus could pursue the ministry that was his as the
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Messiah and to be the sacrifice for sin. Well, in the same way, that's what you have going on here.
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Now, do I know why that particular element of knowledge had to be a part of what was veiled to the
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Son at this point in time? I don't know why. But the idea that there is this emptying to the point of, well, see, we can worship a
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God who is not omniscient, who doesn't have all knowledge. That's the direction that they're going with this, not seeing that the real nature of the
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Incarnation is the positive taking on of the human nature that is found in these words.
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He took the form of a servant, made in likeness of men, and as a result, being found in likeness as a man.
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Then, verse 8, he humbled himself. He humbled himself, and that humility is what leads him to the cross.
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Now, that was his intention from time past. That was the intention of the
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Father, Son, and Spirit, and I don't know how you read those Gospels that he was flipping through in his
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Bible and not see the perfect unity that exists between the Father and the
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Son and deposit the idea that the Son could rebel against the Father, the Son's love for the
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Father could be imperfect. If you can't see that your dedication to that kind of libertarian free will has become an idol so that it utterly overthrows the teaching of the
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Bible in regards to the nature of the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and their relationship to one another, I don't know what to say.
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I mean, it is cultic thinking. It is not Christian thinking. It is heretical thinking. And as much as the
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Enyartians want to be included, if you want to be included, then you can't believe things that are fundamentally contrary to the most central doctrines of the
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Christian faith, and the relationship of the Father and the Son is one of those things that is absolutely positively central.
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So it's unfortunate to hear these types of things.
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It's frightening to hear these types of things. Sorry about that. I shouldn't have minimized that without warning you in case you still had it up.
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But assuming that we only have a few seconds left in the program, I figured we were already back to me. So there's some comments on the debate and the issues related to it.
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Lord willing, at least by Wednesday, I suppose it's possible seeing how things go. Last year,
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I know I did one on Tuesday afternoon, but we'll see. Tuesday or Wednesday next week, we'll be back with another dividing line there in the studio.
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But I'm glad, hopefully, that this worked out, and that means we should be able to do it in the future when
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I travel as well. So thank you very much for keeping in line today and listening.