Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 1A

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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We began discussing who we would like to come for this second annual conference here at GRBC.

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And I'll tell you, the first name that came to mind was Dr. James White. And I remember looking over to Mike, Mike Thompson, one of our elders, in my office and said,

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Mike, do you really think that we'll be able to get Dr. White to come here? And he said, well, it's worth a shot.

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So Mike, I remember sent him an email, and very shortly thereafter, heard back from Dr.

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White, and he accepted. And I remember being so excited, and I remember going to a like -minded friend of mine who was not a member of GRBC, and I shared my excitement with him.

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And thinking that he would share that excitement, all he responded was, and the only way he responded was, how did y 'all get him?

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But we did. We did get him, and I'm grateful that we did. But before I formally introduce him,

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I do want to share my first exposure with the writings of Dr. White.

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I was a first -year, first -semester seminary student, and I remember walking into my church history class.

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And the professor had yet to walk into the room, and as seminary students usually do, there was a group gathered in one corner of the room, the back corner.

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I can still see it right now. And they were in a rather intense discussion. And I remember walking up to them, because I knew a few of them, and one of them that I knew looked to me and whispered, and he said,

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Brad, I think you would like this book. And it was, again, this hush. And he handed me

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The Potter's Freedom. And I felt like at that moment I was holding contraband, I must say.

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And I carried that book around, and I felt like I was carrying around a banned book, because every time we discussed it, it was in this passionate whispering.

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And I'm sure many of you in this room know what I'm talking about. But then I began to read it.

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And for the first time in my life, I must say, I had not been raised in a church where biblical exegesis was held in highest esteem.

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I can assure you that. But for the first time, I was exposed to what biblical exegesis truly is.

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For the first time, I saw what it meant to allow the Bible to speak for itself.

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And since then, I have read just about everything that I can get my hands on by Dr. White.

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As I, like many of you, listen to his dividing line. In fact, I am an instructor here at NCA, and I require all my juniors, and some of them are actually here this evening, to read

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The Forgotten Trinity. And I commend it to you. In fact, this year, and they can attest to this,

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Fridays became known as Heretic Fridays. Because not only could they wear jeans, but we got to listen to the dividing line.

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And they loved it. So I was grateful for that. Heresy Friday, I should say.

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Not Heretic Friday. I said this morning in the sermon, and I need to repeat, that in theology, there is no subject where precision of language is more important than theology.

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So forgive me for that. Heresy Friday. I'm sure I'll hear about that again. But seriously,

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Dr. White is, in my opinion, and I mean this, one of the greatest theologians, apologists, authors, and speakers of our day.

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And I mean that in all sincerity. He is bold, articulate, and to the never -ending frustration of his critics, he is thoroughly and intensely biblical.

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In fact, on his website, one statement says it all. The gospel is ours to proclaim, not edit.

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Dr. White is an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and Executive Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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And I am thrilled for a change to stop speaking and be able to sit back and listen.

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So with that, I introduce to you Dr. James White. Well, after an introduction like that,

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I'm excited to hear it. I had not heard that story.

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I can assure you, I could spend the evening regaling you with stories about Potter's Freedom and the places that that contraband book has gone, including

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Calvary Bible College, Calvary Chapel Bible College. But I don't go into that right now.

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It is, of course, an honor to hear those things. Every time that I hear someone saying that some small work of mine has had an impact on their life,

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I truly am blessed by that. Because you need to realize, Alpha and Omega Ministries, of which

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I'm the director, is a very, very small ministry. There's two of us in it. We've been around for 25 years.

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But we're very, very small. And in fact, this morning at church, someone said, thank you for coming to such a small church like ours.

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And I wanted to say, your church is bigger than mine. Actually, I think we're almost exactly the same size.

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We have about 60 members. And our facility is about the exact same size. And that just seems to be how

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Reformed Baptists are. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but we won't go into that. But I will say it's a valuable fellowship that I'm a part of.

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My fellow Elder there, I've been there since 89. My fellow Elder there, who does the Bachelor of Preaching, has been there for 33 and a half years.

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And amongst certain denominations, if you're at a church for 33 and a half years and you have 60 members, you are the world's biggest failure.

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But in reality, I think just the opposite of that is the case. You're talking about a faithful shepherd who loves the people and is very consistent in the preaching of the

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Word of God. In fact, you young men who are thinking about ministry or involved in training for ministry, let me just, before we get started this evening, give you a challenge.

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One of the reasons I ended up at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church was because as a graduating student from Fuller Theological Seminary, believe it or not, you can survive that.

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It's good for you if you're going to be doing apologetics. But anyway, you get to learn from the people you'll be debating later on.

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As a senior just about to graduate with my Master's degree, I attended the

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Civil Reformed Baptist Church on Sunday evening and the pastor comes out and he is preaching verse by verse through Amos.

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Now, I was an advanced Hebrew at the time and I was just amazed that anyone would preach through Amos at all, let alone in the way that he was.

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It was very clear to me that here was a man who could work with the text in its original language. And so I came back the next week with a friend of mine and the pastor came out and he said, turn to one of the

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Psalms. And I was like, Psalms? I thought we were in Amos. And he, after an opening prayer, some of those who attend regularly will know that we've been working through Amos.

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But I've encountered a section now that I, it's just going to take me a while to work through it because it's very, very difficult and I don't want to go into it until we can really handle it well.

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I was sold from that point onward. Because in the church I was coming from, the pastor would never stand in front of the congregation and say,

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I'm not sure what this text is saying. It's going to take me some more work. And that kind of honesty just was extremely attractive to me.

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But there's a man, my fellow elder, his name is Don Fry, who knows Greek and Hebrew better today than he did when he graduated the seminary.

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And that would be my challenge to you. I've taught both Greek and Hebrew in seminary and I hate the way it's handled in seminary.

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Basically, I'm forced to teach people to hate the language because we have to go so fast. But if you are looking toward that kind of education, please, whatever you do, people ask me, what has been the best classes that you took in Bible college and seminary to prepare you to do the debates that you do, be on national radio, take phone calls on every

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English subject under the sun. I have no idea what's behind those blinking lights when they come on.

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And I've always given two answers, Greek and church history. Not systematic theology.

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Greek and church history were the two classes that were the most useful to me. Because as we'll see this evening, church history, if you forget where you've been, you're not really sure where you are.

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And you certainly can't figure out where you're going. And so I would encourage you in your studies.

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I remember once in seminary, when I was teaching systematic theology, I was asked to teach the

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Hebrew class. And I took everything offered in Hebrew and even petitioned to take more in Hebrew.

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But I've never considered myself a Hebrew scholar at all. But the man that had teaching in, had a

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PhD in Hebrew, but he couldn't teach Hebrew. When people would ask him a question, he'd just repeat what the grammar said.

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And he wasn't getting, everybody was dropping Hebrew. And so they asked me to take it over. And the only reason I could get people through Hebrew was

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I was able to excite them about the biblical languages and excite them about the

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Bible. I was able to give them illustrations about being on the air in Salt Lake City on KTKK radio for four hours in a row, talking about Mormonism, why

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Paul in Salt Lake. And the last half hour, a guy named Phil calls from Provo.

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And he starts throwing stuff out about how in manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, in Deuteronomy 32, it demonstrates that Jehovah and Elohim were separate distinct gods and all the rest of that stuff.

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And I had my goodly, great stucartensia with me. I was able to examine the textual variant and respond to them.

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It turned out he was a professor from BYU, calling in the last half hour or four hours to throw something like that out.

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But using illustrations like that of the practical utilization of this is what got people through that difficult class.

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So hopefully as you hear the original languages being used in an apologetic context or in exegesis and things like that, that will give you a reason to really press forward in your study of those things.

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Well, since we have so much to discuss this evening, though I'm very thankful that the clock on the back wall doesn't move. And that's as honest as I got here.

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So we're not in any rush here, I guess. So I won't have any difficulties covering all sorts of information between now and into the morning hours.

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But I will be trying to provide you, obviously, only with an overview this evening.

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We are looking at the subject of scripture. So tomorrow evening we'll be looking at the doctrine of the

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Trinity, the deity of Christ, the person of the Holy Spirit. On Tuesday night we'll be looking at the doctrine of salvation.

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And then on Wednesday night we have a real interesting treat, where I will be playing segments of a recent sermon that was delivered here in the

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Houston area on the subject of Calvinism and providing my own unique interaction therewith.

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And so I hope you will take the opportunity of being here if you possibly can. I am using interesting technology this evening.

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Hopefully it will work for me and you'll be able to see things. By the way, if you don't notice, the background on the screen is my tie.

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Thank you. I designed it both. It was way to tie it. And I already got one compliment from someone.

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I appreciate that. Oh, by the way, before we start, I just have a question. Those two hymns you sang, why was anyone using a song sheet?

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You were not. I watched, and you didn't do it with Mighty Fortress. I was watching who...

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See, you can tell who a true Calvinist is by the fact they don't need a song sheet for a

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Mighty Fortress. In fact, if you really want to be a true Calvinist, you sing it in German. Anybody know where to start with?

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Both of those hymns are beautiful hymns, but I was looking around, and I was like, okay, who's... My daughter, by the time she was eight, refused to open the hymnal for Mighty Fortress, so I thought that was pretty cool.

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All right, looking this evening at the foundation, at Scripture, at the very subject, that honestly, it is exciting to me to see so many young people here.

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And of course, my definition of young is changing as the years go by. But it truly is exciting to see young men, young women here this evening.

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And the reason that I say that is because the world has an X painted on your back, a laser beam between your eyeballs, to go after you, and the primary area they're going to go after you on is exactly this, the reliability and the inspiration of Scripture.

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I don't care what secular university you go to, there's going to be an atheistic gunslinger in there who is nauseous his gun handle every time he gets a conservative

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Christian to abandon his or her faith in the inspiration and the authority of the

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Scriptures as the Word of God. And we cannot help but recognize the fact that when you live in a society where there is a constant drumbeat of disbelief, a constant drumbeat of skepticism, that it's hard to go against the flow.

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You at least have to recognize you're going against the flow. You at least have to recognize that the whole position that Christians have held, you're going to have to stand against the majority of our society.

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That wasn't the case 100 years ago. That wasn't the case really overtly even 60 years ago.

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But it has become the case now. And so to be able to see that attacks on the validity of Scripture are not a new thing will be helpful,

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I think, to you in evaluating the kinds of argumentation that are just constant in our society.

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I mean, you're not going to find people like myself. Once in a while John McCarthy gets a shot at Larry King, but in the vast majority of instances when something comes up, for example, the

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Gabriel revelation. How many of you have heard of the Gabriel revelation? Just a few people.

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Brand new story that you're going to be hearing more and more about. It's in the news right now. A slab of stone in essence with Hebrew writing on it.

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Not a Scripture, an actual writing, ink writing, that may, depending on if it's going to take a while for this all to be hammered out, but may have a pre -Christian reference, a reference from the century before Christ, to a

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Messianic figure who after three days lives.

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Now, they're not sure about the word lives. But there's a lot of speculation right now. But of course, once CNN gets hold of it, as long as it's about Christianity, it's no longer speculation.

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Am I not speaking the truth? Do I get an amen out of it? So, the idea being that up till now, what all the critics would say is that the

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Christians made up the resurrection to explain why the disciples continue to believe in Jesus after he stumbles into being crucified by the

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Roman authorities. And now the idea being, well, if there is a historical reference prior to Christ about a

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Messianic figure rising three days, or coming to life three days after he's died, then that's clearly where the

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Christians stole it from. And that means the resurrection didn't happen either. So before it didn't happen because there was no evidence of this before Jesus.

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But now there's evidence of this before Jesus. It's still the past. So that's how skeptics think and that's how their minds function.

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But that kind of stuff ends up in the media. And it ends up being thrown out at us as yet another example of the ubiquitous statement, well, scholars know the

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Bible isn't what Christians believe it to be. That is so common that we as believers in the church need to be constantly addressing these foundational issues.

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We have to recognize when we live in a society where there's this rank unbelief and constant attacks on our faith, we have to focus upon those areas where the attacks are so that our people will be prepared for themselves, for their own faith, being grounded in the faith, as well as the fact that we don't want to be silent

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Christians. We don't want to be those Christians that say, well, you know, I'm a Christian, I'm just a friend and a brother in our society.

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Well, we don't want to do that. We want to be able to give an answer and to testify, at least as long as we have the freedom to do so.

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Because, folks, I don't know how long we're going to have the freedom to do what we're doing right now. If I was addressing one of the subjects

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I've written on, the subject of homosexuality in Canada today, you all would have had to sign a statement before you came in here saying that you are here voluntarily and that you're voluntarily exposing yourself to what

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I'm going to be saying. Did you know that? Most people don't know. But that's the way that it is.

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Or you will be sued. And you can be sued. And just recently, just in the past six weeks, a pastor in Canada was fined $7 ,000 for writing a letter to the editor saying that children, first and second grade children, should not be exposed to information on homosexuality in public schools.

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$7 ,000 for writing that because he hurt the homosexuals' feelings. That's what's coming our direction, folks.

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Now, Texas may secede before that happens here. We hope you do. You should have a reputation for being a little independent.

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And if we can get Alaska to come with, we can start our own nation. And we'll be moving down there real quick if that happens.

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Unfortunately, my state borders California, so I get the fees and all that stuff. Seriously, we need to be thankful for the freedoms we have to do this thing and not take it for granted because I don't know how long we will have these freedoms.

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I really do not. There's a time coming when we're going to have to count the costs.

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God's Word. In almost all the debates that I do, the final subject comes down to the authority of God's Word.

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And it doesn't matter what subject it is. I'm addressing, I mean, I've debated John Shelby Swann, John Dominic Crossan, Barry Wynn, two of those who are on homosexuality.

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What does it come down to? Whether God has spoken with clarity in His Word. When you're dealing with Roman Catholicism, has

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God spoken with clarity in His Word? Do I need a magisterium? Do I need a papacy? Do I need traditions of the

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Church? Do I need someone to determine for me what the traditions of the Church are? When you're talking about Mormonism, is the

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Bible enough? Do we need to put Mormon Dr. Thomas Floyd Ray Price, the Mormon priesthood, the Mormon prophet? Jehovah's Witnesses, though they'll say they believe the

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Bible alone, do we really need the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses to interpret these things for you? Over and over and over again, it all comes down to the question, has

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God spoken, and has He spoken with clarity? In our society today, the idea is, there are so many voices.

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There are so many different opinions. How can anyone be so, listen to this, arrogant, as to think that their opinion is right?

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That level of skepticism is fundamental in our society, and if we seek to proclaim the

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Gospel to people, we need to realize that. That's how most people think. You are being arrogant to say that X is right and Y is wrong, or X is right and not

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X is wrong. Many people find that to be an arrogant statement to make.

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Well, are they right? This very fact that there's all this different perspective.

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Wednesday evening, one of the statements in that sermon was given at First Baptist about Calvinism. You think you're going to figure out these issues that people have been arguing about for 500 years in college station

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Texas? To which I'm going to say, what? God's truth isn't available in college station

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Texas. God hasn't spoken with enough clarity to determine whether salvation is a free act on His part, all of His glory, or it's a cooperative act upon His part where He tries but fails and sometimes succeeds and so on and so forth.

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You're telling me that God's word isn't clear enough to decide that issue? And so, attacks upon God's word, attacks upon the scriptures are, of course, nothing new.

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From the very beginning they've existed, but obviously they've taken different forms at different times. When we look at some of the historical challenges to the scriptures, the earliest challenges came from something called

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Gnosticism and what I call Incipient Roman Catholicism. Now let me explain that phrase,

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Incipient Roman Catholicism, before we move on from there. Many people, remember when Pope John Paul II died a few years ago,

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Fox News became that essential and every Catholic apologist on the planet is getting free air time on Fox News for days and what you heard over and over and over again was the church has existed for two thousand years.

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Well, anyone who has that naive view of history, whether they are Roman Catholic or whether they are non -Roman

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Catholic and think that, for example, it's very common for you to see these lists and Protestants will put this out and it'll have a date and it'll say,

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Purgatory comes into existence or this is the first place the papacy is found, something like that.

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Church history doesn't work that way. It's not like on December 16th everybody believed one thing and they don't have

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December 17th. Wow, we got a pope, cool! It didn't function that way. Church history doesn't work that way.

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Besides that, they didn't have blackberries and cell phones back then and so things, you know, communication wasn't overly fast and things took time to develop.

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And the same thing is true of Roman Catholicism. I have often challenged my Roman Catholic opponents. Show me a single bishop, a single bishop at the

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Council of Nicaea in AD 325 that believed what you believe as a modern

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Roman Catholic as dogma, not just as doctrine, but dogma that which defines faith.

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You deny dogma, you're not a Roman Catholic. At least technically. The Roman Catholic Church is not really big into discipline these days so you get a lot of wide variety of things.

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But at least theologically, you're not a Roman Catholic. Show me a single bishop at the Council of Nicaea that believed what you believe and if you can't then how can you claim that your church is the same church that existed for the past 2 ,000 years?

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Well, it's a pretty difficult case to make because no one there did. All the Marian dogmas and the idea of papal infallibility and purgatory and indulgences and all these other things just simply were not a part of the faith of the church at that one time.

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So when I say incipient Roman Catholicism I mean that element of development over time that eventually became the

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Roman Catholic Church. In fact, we can have a very interesting discussion if we wanted to as to when Roman Catholicism itself begins.

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Because you see a wide variety of viewpoints over time. And some would even argue that until you get at least to the definition of transubstantiation of the

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Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th century and things like that that you have such a wide variety of viewpoints you really can't pinpoint what would today be called

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Roman Catholicism. So that's what I mean when I speak of incipient Roman Catholicism.

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And we'll look at that a little bit more in just a moment. Now, especially again you young folks and I'm not trying to leave you older folks out since I'm in your generation now but I focus this upon some of the younger folks because this is a part of the constant attack that they will be receiving.

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You cannot walk into a grocery store today first of all, not sticker shop but you can't walk through the checkout line and scan through the scholarly journals that they have there at the checkout.

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What is that? You know, I was looking at this guy over here going, you know if I let my hair grow out

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I'd look like X at the top. So enjoy it while you can. Just all disappears.

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Gets too tired and instead of getting achy all the way to the top it comes out the nose. Just a gravity thing.

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Sad. But anyway. You can't go through that that checkout line without seeing all these headlines.

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Scholars discover Jesus never I remember this happened in 1989. Scholars say

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Jesus never said he was coming back, so he's not. That was the Jesus seminar. The Jesus seminar had taken a vote with their little, you know, putting their little marbles in the bag and discovered that Jesus had never said he was coming back so guess what, he's not.

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I remember doing a radio debate on a secular radio program with Robert Funk, the co -founder of the

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Jesus Seminar with John Don MacArthur in 1989 on that very issue. Dr. Funk did not like conservative

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Christians very much. In fact, he eventually told us what the hell had come up on us. But he was very clear in his distaste for us.

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But that's the kind of stuff you see is these statements. And in our day what's happening is an amazing thing.

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Gnosticism was the first great challenge external challenge, religious challenge for the

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Christian church. If you don't count the Judaizers once you get outside of that apostolic period for the next couple of hundred years, and you actually have it in the apostolic period

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Paul writes against it, John writes against it but Gnosticism was the great battle. And eventually the

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Gnostics disappeared primarily but what's happening in our day, especially since the discovery of the

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Nag Hammadi library and some other works in the middle of the last century we have a resurgence of Gnostic studies and almost everything you're seeing, there's just tons of books that are coming out these days if you hit

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Amazon I could show you just dozens and dozens of titles of people who are reviving the ancient heresy of Gnosticism and using it as their primary means of beating the

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Christian faith over the head. In fact it was almost humorous, it wasn't sad to me to note that in some debates we were doing against some

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Muslim apologists back in Norfolk back in March they, almost all the resources that they were using to cast doubt upon the crucifixion, the resurrection, the transmission of the text of the

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Bible any of those things were all Gnostic sources so we need to understand something about Gnosticism most of the textbooks you'd be studying in any type of university on the subject of the

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Bible will heavily rely upon Gnosticism as the foundation for in essence rewriting the position that Christians have held all along so if that gives you some reason to sort of stay tuned in here, because some of this stuff seems somewhat esoteric to people maybe something you'd never really be interested in but hopefully that will give you a reason to remain focused and look at this information very clearly

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Gnosticism comes out of the East and it is coming into the area of what we would call the

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New Testament and places like Colossae during the time of the New Testament it is at its heart a dualistic system as many of the religious systems were certainly

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Greek religion at this time was dualistic, what does that mean? In essence, dualism refers to belief that that which is spiritual is good, and that which is material is evil and therefore

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God is all spirit but the idea of him for example, becoming incarnate, seriously incarnate with a real body or being the one who created this world, to a dualist would be something that they would reject, you can see evidences of this in the

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New Testament, remember when Paul was preaching on Mars Hill the people listened to him when he's preaching there in the midst of the great philosophers of Greece up until one particular point, he says one thing, and the people start mocking when he says that, what does he say?

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Resurrection Anastasis in the Greek language, and as soon as he says resurrection they begin to mock, why?

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Oh because of what Anastasis means it means that which died coming to life again it is not a physical body dying it is a spirit coming out of the ground as Joe's witnesses would like you to think it is in fact that which died coming to life again they recognized he was talking about the raising of the physical body, and they began to mock, why?

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Because for the Greek salvation involved getting out of this physical body this physical body is an evil trap, your spirit which is inside you is a good thing, your physical body is where evil resides, that's how they could sort of get away with their behavior, their debauchery because that's just in the physical, that's just the body doing that, that's not my spirit doing it, there's a separation between the two, and once I get rid of that physical body, now my spirit can rise to ever higher levels of existence, a la some of our new age type of presentations

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Shirley MacLaine, I don't mind, but those of you who are younger than I remember Shirley MacLaine as anyone, so they began to mock this concept because it was fundamentally opposed to their own perspectives and to their own understanding, so Gnosticism is dualistic,

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Christianity is not, when God created the world he said it was good, and evil is not inherent in the physical universe, man is a unitary being we may distinguish between the body and the soul but man is made to be whole, that's what resurrection is all about, that's what the hope of the resurrection is all about, it is not natural for man to exist separated from his body, that's why resurrection must take place, these are much more of a

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Hebrew concept of man as a unit, rather than the Greek concept of these very distinct units that can be separated from one another we are not dualists as a result of dualism, and as a result of the fact that Gnosticism as a religion was a very eclectic movement, what does that mean?

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well I liken it to theological Plato remember Plato, do kids even still play with Plato?

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how about Silly Putty, do you still have Silly Putty? I remember Silly Putty but the problem with Silly Putty, does it still come with a little plastic egg?

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yes, ok cool there's some things every time I guess they play with that until they discover their first video game and they're lost but we just didn't have that when

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I was kids, you just kept playing with them but it was kind of this plastic egg and it was really cool, you could stick it on the newspaper and pull off images of cartoons and stuff like that and we were deprived,

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I was poor but anyway, the problem with Silly Putty was that once you dropped it like in the dirt, what does it do?

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it picks up anything it touches and so eventually there's all sorts of stuff that isn't Silly Putty, in the

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Silly Putty it becomes less silly than it used to be and the same thing with Plato, it'll pick up anything or get on anything as mothers tend to know, ears, shirts inside socks how does it get there, you don't know it picks things up, it grabs things that's what

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Gnosticism was like the Gnostics did not have a doctrinal system that they'd come in and say, hey, this is truth the

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Gnostics, the very term Gnosis means knowledge and from the

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Gnostic perspective, you obtain quote on quote salvation whatever in the world that means you obtain deliverance from this earthly life, you obtain favor from God, so on and so forth by your gain of this esoteric secret knowledge and it didn't really matter what that knowledge was that knowledge could change over time they weren't coming along and saying, we are right and others are wrong, they were the quintessential moderates they were the quintessential remember

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Rodney King, can't we all just get along they were the Rodney Kings of theology and so they would pick up elements of the religions that they would encounter, partly as a means of bringing those people in but partly just because that's the nature of their religious perspective and so as they'd be moving into Asia Minor as they would encounter local religion, wherever it might be they would pick up elements of this well, when it encounters

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Christianity what happens and you see this plainly if you read the book of Colossians, where most scholars believe

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Paul is dealing with a form of proto -Gnosticism the earliest arrival of Gnostic thought in that particular area where there is a movement to in essence, keep

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Jesus but demote him and fit him into the perspective of the

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Gnostic world view and part of that because they're dualists, is that if Jesus is a really really good guy, then they had a problem with the idea of Jesus actually being a human being with a physical body and so the

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Gnostics would say that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body, the

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Greek term for seen is dachine, and so you forget from that the Gnosticists who thought that Jesus only pretended to have a physical body, he didn't really have a physical body, they would tell stories about Jesus walking with one of the disciples by the seashore and when the disciple looks back, there's only one set of tracks not because Jesus is carrying the disciples but because Jesus doesn't leave tracks in sand because he only seems to have a physical body and so they're called

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Gnosticists, and if you want to know how Christians would respond to Gnosticism, read 1st

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John because what is 1st John all about? Who is the Antichrist but he who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh the

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Apostolic example is to say that is so wrong, that is so false that anyone who confesses that does not even have eternal life that person is not a part of the church, that person is an

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Antichrist, he is opposed to the Christian message, as unusual as that is in our society for people to actually believe there's a right and wrong you need to realize that when the society places pressure upon you to abandon categories of right and wrong, they're asking you to deny the

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Bible, they're asking you to deny categories of Christian thought now we should be offended by that, and if we're offended then they'll certainly stop, right?

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not exactly, because we're the one group that can be offended by anybody so this is

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Gnosticism a denial of the reality of the physical body of Christ, you only see that in the physical body, and of course if you only see that in the physical body, then the result of that is there is no true crucifixion, there is no true resurrection, there is no redemption,

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I've already mentioned that Gnosticism is a very eclectic religious concept that draws many things into its fold and tries to find a place for them now, what you need to understand about what the

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Gnostics believed about Jesus, they had a problem, every religion has to answer the question of evil whether people know they need to answer that question whether people give thought to it or not everybody has to answer the question of why evil and suffering exist and in Gnosticism the answer to this had to be consistent with their dualistic perspectives and so if the physical world is the realm of evil, and evil clings to and abides in the physical realm the question immediately comes well, how did

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God who is all spirit create that which is the source of evil the physical realm and so what they did is they posited the idea that you have your one truly spiritual transcendent

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God and then emanating down from that God you have divine beings called

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Aeons and of course the first Aeon closest to God is very much like him, just slightly less, and then the next one, and the next one and the next one, descending down from him and this whole group of Aeons together forms what's called the

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Pleroma Pleroma is the Greek term for fullness the fullness and you may notice that both of these terms are very common terms in the book of Colossians where Paul is utilizing the very terminology of the

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Gnostics against them, which I take as an apostolic example of how we likewise should seek to communicate with those who have a different religious perspective so what it seems was going on is the

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Gnostics were willing to put Jesus into the Pleroma as one of the

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Aeons he is a highly exalted emanation from God but he's not the only one and so Paul talks about people worshipping angels and things like that in Colossians and saying don't taste don't touch, don't do this, the

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Gnostics were known for, many of them for being somewhat ascetic, some branches were very ascetic, almost like monks others were very indulgent with flesh, it depended

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Greek philosophy did much of the same type of thing but they demoted Jesus they fit it into their system but they would not allow him to be who he was okay, this is the

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Gnostic perspective, now before I go to that think for a moment, in fact I'm going to back that up so you don't get distracted think for a moment with me about one text that I would highly recommend to your memorization, in fact

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I highly recommend to you the memorization of scripture, it's somewhat of a lost art it used to be big when

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I was a kid, you had scripture memory challenges and things like that but I especially when

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I the Lord really got hold of my life in a very strong way in high school

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I just had a voracious hunger for the Bible, the word of God and I remember that one summer between my sophomore and junior years

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I had memorized 189 verses of scripture and I remember walking up and down the hallway in my home working on the prologue of John, the first 18 verses of the

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Gospel of John and especially when I began witnessing the Mormons going up to Salt Lake City to the general conference throughout the

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Easter pageant in Mesa, Arizona, and you're talking to a group of clad in the Mormons you do not have time to be using the 28th book of the

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New Testament called Concordance to find your references, it's not going to you're going to lose control of that conversation very quickly, you have to have the

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Bible memorized so when I first encountered my first two Mormon missionaries and started doing that I went from 189 verses to 654 which is a matter of months, because you had to,

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I mean I was going to the Mormon ward chapels to give you my testimony during a fasting and testimony meeting again, you don't have time to be using something like notecards in that type of situation so I just strongly recommend to you the memorization of the word of God, and a text

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I have often suggested to people not just because it's short, but that helps and to get people started but especially to work with your local witnesses when they come to your door or if you encounter them in the workplace, whatever it might be it's

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Colossians 2 .9 Colossians 2 .9 in fact I'm going to try something here and hope that my technology does not fail me but in Colossians 2 .9

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and we'll go over here to Bible works unfortunately I have 2nd

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Timothy chapter 3 up which isn't going to do me a whole lot of good but here we go this is how we can do it,

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Colossians chapter 2, isn't this cool, I love technology in Greek too how many of you have

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Bible works how many of you have librarians that's interesting we'll have a food fight after this see which one is actually best

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I have both of my Bible works 247 on my system

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Colossians 2 .9 remember what I said to you about Gnosticism keep in mind what

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I said to you about Gnosticism now hear Colossians 2 .9 for in him that is in Christ all the fullness here is the word right here pleroma all the fullness of deity theocytos that which makes

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God, God this is the only place this term appears in the New Testament some translations like the

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King James say Godhead, that's not really an excellent translation, deity is a better translation, for in him all the pleroma of deity dwells somatikos bodily, soma means the body now think about the

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Gnostics is that not the same thing as dragging your fingernails across the proverbial chalkboard for a

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Gnostic, that works real well for the older folks the younger folks are going, what? pulling your fingers across a whiteboard doesn't do anything yeah try it on a chalkboard, a chalkboard?

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what's that? wonderful illustration no longer really works for the older generation do you hear what

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Paul is saying? he is presenting who Christ is in words that the

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Gnostics can understand but the Gnostics can never agree to you cannot do the compromise the

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Gnostics wanted to do, he uses their language fullness, the pleroma they were talking about all that which descends down from God and Paul says in him all the pleroma of deity, that which makes

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God, God, dwells bodily in him and this is after the resurrection so you ever wonder does

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Jesus still have his physical body, yes he still has his glorified resurrection body, that is the hope that we have, that we will have our glorified resurrection bodies as well he remains the

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God man and so their theory had been you could eventually get down that chain of the pleroma far enough that you got to what's called a demiurge and that demiurge that is still deity it's still got divine power, but it's far enough removed from the one true

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God that it now creates the physical universe and many of the

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Gnostics I think it's time to write a new testament but over the next hundred years would develop the idea that Jehovah, Yahweh of the

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Old Testament was the evil demiurge who created all things and so the

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Gnostics, the most famous Gnostic character of all time is a man named Marcion if you wanted to be a

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Christian author in the first hundred years of the Christian church you wrote a book against Marcion everybody wrote a book against Marcion, Irenaeus' work being the most well known of that but Marcion developed this idea in Rome that Jehovah of the

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Old Testament was the evil God and so he got rid of all the Old Testament and then he went through the

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New Testament and got rid of everything, even chopping up books and things like that, get rid of anything that would be positive about the

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Old Testament, so what does he do with Romans? He only goes through chapter 8 because once you start in chapter 9 you have a whole testament citation so he doesn't get rid of all that stuff and he gets rid of certain of the

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Gospels and he comes up with this expurgated version and stuff like that and he became very important in prompting the church to begin addressing issues for example about the canon and things like that heresy tends to do that but this is what the

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Gnostics do and so they come up with this idea that the creator of the physical universe is evil now think back with me to what

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Paul likewise says just before this in Colossians 2 .9, in Colossians chapter 1 beginning at verse 15 notice what he does here he is the image of the invisible

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God this is Jesus he is the image of the invisible God the firstborn of all creation the firstborn is a

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Greek term for Apotokos it means the one who has preeminence over not first created firstborn of all creation now listen to this for by him all things were created both in the heavens and on the earth visible and invisible whether thrones, commandments or rules or authorities all things have been created through him and for him he is before all things and in him all things hold together now again how in the world oops,

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I didn't want to do that how in the world could a Gnostic hear that and not just screech with horror at the idea

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Paul exhausts the language he absolutely exhausts the language to say Jesus created everything, there is nothing outside of his creative realm and in fact he even says not only are all things created through him but for him as well now that's a description of the creator, is it not?

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you can't get away with anything less than that which is why, by the way, Jehovah's Witnesses insert the word other before, after each word all, all other things in their

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New World Translation descriptions to get around the clarity of this text in demonstrating that Jesus Christ is the creator of all things but you see how

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Paul's using their own language he knows what they believe he accurately represents what they believe and then refutes it with the truth,

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I think that becomes our example as well that's what we need to do as we are seeking to engage in the world around us so, with that look at that no time has passed at all

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I love that it's great this one isn't working the same unfortunately so, we'll do our best now how many of you have heard of the

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Jesus Seminar? ok, good how many of you only heard of the

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Jesus Seminar when I mentioned it earlier this evening? did you know they had published their own edition of the

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Gospels? yes they did and you know what they decided to do? they decided we didn't have enough of them now they didn't like John at all and so they added a fifth gospel and it's called the

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Gospel of Thomas and may I suggest once again to the young people who are going to university if you have a little extra time during the summer now

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I just know that young people during the summer want to be doing what

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I'm suggesting they do rather than hanging with their friends but may

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I suggest to you that maybe reading through the Gospel of Thomas might be a good thing for you you might say, you're suggesting reading a

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Gospel? yes because in essence what's going on today is you'll have your professor standing up there and with a serious face opining away on what we learned from the

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Gnostics and we learned this about Jesus and we learned that about Jesus and blah blah blah blah blah and if you just take the time to actually read the book for yourself some of this stuff is so silly that it is shocking when you actually start reading it and if you actually know something about it you can say yeah you know, the

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Gospel of Thomas they decided that's the fifth gospel so they've translated and they've added it to the New Testament and that's the kind of information that your local community college is the guy who teaches the philosophy and religion course, he's just real big on this stuff but in reality he doesn't really know much more about it and he may not have even read all of it himself and so when people say hey, you know, oh the

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Gospel of Thomas great stuff, it talks about Gnosticism and all this stuff yeah, I bet we're in the 114th section of the

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Gospel of Thomas that's where Peter is asking Jesus about Mary, Mary Magdalene and he's a little upset with Mary Magdalene and Jesus' response is don't worry,

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I'll make her a male like he males so she might turn white now aren't you big into feminism? how can you put those two together?

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when you read this stuff when you actually see how not only internally incoherent it is, but how it comes from a completely different world view than anything in the

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New Testament the idea that this somehow is the context through which we should be reading the

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New Testament and all the rest of this stuff is absolutely absurd but how many people have ever read the

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Gospel of Thomas? I mean, I know the guy named Dan Brown who made millions of dollars off of the utter ignorance of the book -buying public, and I'm referring to the

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Da Vinci family that book is so upside down and backwards and laughable that a man would not get out of a kindergarten history class it is the most ridiculous thing that's ever been put in print there's a reason it's in the fiction section but unfortunately, when you live in a society that wants reasons to disbelieve well, they may well find those reasons to disbelieve the

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Gospel of Thomas even appears in that context as well and so this kind of stuff is being thrown out there some of you may recall the

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Tapiatun story that came out about a year three or four months ago

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I wrote a book in response to it in 16 days about the alleged finding of the ostuary that supposedly contained the bones of Jesus and what almost nobody in the media recognized was that the lynchpin to the entire argument the identification of the one as Mary Magdalene went back to a somewhat gnostically tainted work from the fourth century in Asia minor that is, from a historical perspective pure fiction and yet it was the lynchpin, the entire argument remains that way today and almost nobody picked up on it that's the kind of stuff we have going on that's why we have to know something about our history or at least know where to look to find out where these people are digging these things up now obviously the

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Gnostics if Marcion is chopping up the Gospel of Luke totally chops

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Matthew out of the canon because Matthew says way too much nice stuff about, you know, quotes from the Old Testament all the time and, you know, throws out

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Hebrews and so on and so forth the Gnostics didn't have any problem altering the scriptures and they certainly did not view them as the final authority for them, scriptures are like, again, like Plato they're things you can just play with and form into various forms because the key is not having a truth that you're communicating from generation to generation the key is having esoteric experiences in gaining this

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Gnosis it doesn't matter what the Gnosis is the Gnosis can change from place to place and person to person it's what you get out of the experience that holds the religion together completely different view of the world and what