Apologetics Training

Apologetics Live

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00:04

This is Apologetics Live, to answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

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We are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your most challenging questions.

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Whatever you have that you think we can't answer, we can. You doubt that?

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Well, go to ApologeticsLive .com, join the discussion.

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You just scroll down till you see the ScreamYard link, which is the little duck icon. Click that, join, give your browser permission to use your microphone and camera.

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Come on in, challenge us with your hardest questions. And when I say, I don't know, just remember, that's a perfectly good answer.

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Let me bring in my co -host here, Drew Vanita. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing well,

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I'm doing well. How are you? Good, good, good. So what we got today, what we plan to talk about today is actually, well, we're gonna cover everything we did in the last two episodes, really, the last one.

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But here's what we wanna do today. And if you haven't seen the last episode, this is one of those ones where I'm gonna say, watch this one first and then go watch that because you'll get a lot more out of it.

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But what we wanna do is kind of break down what we did and why we did it. So that you guys who are watching can learn how to do

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Apologetics. That's the goal of this. We wanna do Apologetics training. We wanna teach you the hows and whys of Apologetics.

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And last week's episode, which was a doozy, it was a long one. We kind of -

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Yeah, I thought we'd go a little bit long because I knew that our guest,

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Ben Zion, was going to come in at the top of the second hour. And I just could tell from the emails, he was not gonna get done in one hour.

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But I didn't think we'd go that long. Now I will grant, I cut out all the silences in the podcast and we got it down to like three and a half hours, which means we had 30 minutes of silence.

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I guess that's where he was thinking. So KT asked the question, will

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Andrew break down everything I said wrong? Well, we actually couldn't remember anything that you did say wrong.

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So I guess the answer to that is no, no, we won't. Yeah, but if KT wants, she could say some things wrong so that Drew can respond to it.

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Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, so let me start again, like I did last week. I am still up in Boston.

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So it will be a little bit echoing because the best place for Wi -Fi back at the

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Parsonage where they put me up and let me stay here when I'm up this way, they're having

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Bible study. And in this building, the best place for the Wi -Fi is here behind the pulpit.

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And so you can see, if I move this down, you can see the baptism, baptistry right there, which looks kind of cool.

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And we got the cross, I lit those up because well, it looks cool, but it is a little bit echoey and I'm sorry about that.

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And yes, I can't figure out how to turn any lights on my right side. So I look really dark on the right side and really light on the left.

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Here, let me help you out. So next time you see Pastor Larry say, hey, where's the light switch?

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You assume he's gonna know the answer to that, but we're gonna find out because he always comes in to check the building and make sure he gets his stuff before he leaves.

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So I'll ask him and we will test that live. So yeah, but he's great.

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I enjoy talking with him. He's got like, and I'm not joking. I think my son -in -law told me he has like 50 motorcycles.

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Wow. Yeah, yeah, like he's not just a motorcycle rider. He's like a motorcycle collector. That's amazing.

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Yeah, he sold one of his, he sold his Ninja to my son -in -law. And I think my daughter was supposed to buy one of his other ones, but she got pregnant instead.

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So she hasn't been riding. But yeah, so he's got like a number of them, like antique ones and he rebuilds them.

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And he's a really interesting guy. See, my wife won't let me have a motorcycle. Yeah, I know.

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So when I used to ride, I was in my college days and I knew I was so reckless,

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I'd kill myself. So I knew that I just shouldn't be on a motorcycle. Then I had kids and I realized, okay,

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I got responsibilities. Then when the kids moved out, I thought about it. And my wife was like, yeah, no, no, you're not doing that.

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See, with my two little ones, sometimes I go, okay, I wish I had a motorcycle because I just need to bang my head into something just to get the echoing of the screaming out from the little ones.

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Yeah, so Melissa says, Andrew looks like a little angel with light shining behind him.

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Of course, we all know he isn't. Oh, that's good.

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So what we wanna do is, and if you haven't seen last week's show or listened to it, we're gonna give context.

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So you don't need to see that to know what we're talking about. We want to, in this show, explain kind of the why we did what we did.

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Because there are some things, I got feedback even from one listener who he did, the person was like, he knows

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Anthony Silvestro, he knows me, he's been out evangelizing with us and goes, man, you guys just like, he's evangelizing at a college campus with us.

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He's like, it's just, he's like, it just seems so argumentative and aggressive the way you're dealing with it.

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And he said that because I explained to him that I did that on purpose. And so one of the things

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I wanna do is explain the whys. Why did I approach him, especially if you guys listen to this show regularly, you know,

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I approached, you know, Ben different than I did the black Hebrew Israelite until the black

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Hebrew Israelite, until he revealed himself as being someone who is argumentative.

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And so there's, I'm not saying that I'm perfect in the way that I do apologetics.

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I'm just wanna explain the whys we do it. So that's what we hope to do that today.

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All right. Yeah, now there is, so you do, you've done debates, moderated debates.

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There's a golden rule in debate and that golden rule is stay calm, right?

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Don't get overheated. Don't let your emotions take over because what we could tell from Ben Zion was that he got really, really passionate at every single thing you said to where you couldn't make your point and he had to cut in and cut you off because he was that passionate.

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He couldn't stay calm. He couldn't listen to what you were saying and then respond appropriately.

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So the golden rule in debate or arguing whatever is to first stay calm.

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Yeah, and the thing is, is that this is something, I'll give a way of showing this.

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You look at a guy like Leighton Flowers. Now, for the record,

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I know Leighton personally. I haven't spoke to him actually in a couple of years. I think since the beginning of COVID, but.

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Bond servant for Jesus. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Yeah, I was gonna save that one for later, but yeah,

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I'll tag that one for later because that's gonna come up. But you look at Leighton Flowers and when he does debates, a lot of people think he's winning a debate because what

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Leighton does, Leighton is just, he's very laid back. He just has that very calm demeanor.

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And when you watch him in a debate, I think what happens for a lot of people is he gets under their skin, because he's really polite about the way he deals with things, but he makes really bad arguments.

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And people get so worked up about the arguments that what ends up happening is a lot of people think that Leighton is winning a debate because he just doesn't get upset.

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He's got a very calm demeanor. And that is something that gives the appearance of confidence in a debate.

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And so I'm not saying, hey, you should be calm so that it looks like you're winning, right?

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But it does have that effect, where if you're getting so agitated, you can't wait to speak, you have to say,

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Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, to use what Melissa said, right? If you can't let a person finish their sentence, you're constantly cutting them off.

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What that does for the audience is give a negative view of you as a person having the discussion.

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In fact, it also has a negative view to the person you're discussing with. And that is something that when we're doing apologetics,

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I'm just gonna say right from the get -go, we have to remember that we are representing Christ.

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We're his ambassador, and we have to conduct ourself in such a way that we represent him well.

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And that's the thing we have to constantly remember. So would we expect

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Jesus in a debate and an argument with the Pharisees and constantly interrupting them, constantly speaking over them?

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Well, no, we wouldn't. Well, then we shouldn't either. And so I don't do this, I don't do it to try to win points in debate.

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I do it because I wanna represent Christ well. Right, right. That's it.

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Before we get started with some of that, we do have kind of an announcement to make, and we got someone here that's gonna help us make it.

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Oh, no, we don't, not anymore. Wow. Right when you were bringing him on. Just when we're about to bring him on, and boom, he's gone.

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So there you go. Well, it must have been his internet. So much for that introduction. You know, that's it, we're done.

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We're not introducing him again. He's gonna have to go back and listen to this. He just couldn't be a little bit more patient.

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No, he's like, hey, I wanna be the first thing you guys talk about, or I'm out of here. And so he's out.

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Well, till he signs back on, let me just piggyback on to what you were saying about representing Christ. When we get to that great apologetic verse that Peter tells us about, right?

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Always have a defense. People always rush to that section. Always be ready to make a defense, but they overlook the first part of it.

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Sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart. That's where we must start. That's what you're getting at.

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We must first sanctify Christ in our heart as Lord, because then we are going to treat the person that we're talking to as though they are worthy of dignity and respect.

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And we understand that they're made in the image of God. Yeah, and that's the thing.

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Look, folks, when you do apologetics, what good is it if you win a debate, but the person goes to hell?

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Right. Which is one thing I did wanna say. I didn't know when we were gonna get to it, but I think it's good to say now.

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Apologetics is a great tool, but it's only a tool to get to the gospel. And this is why, for our listeners, if you watch this show and you pay attention, no matter what the discussion is, or no matter who

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Andrew is talking to, he always makes a point to get to the gospel, because he can give all the greatest evidences in the world, but those evidences are not going to save anyone.

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It's the gospel. So if he gives all these evidences, and he makes all these arguments, and makes all these points, and yet never touches the gospel, then he's done nothing.

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Yeah, and one of the things is that it took, what? Like an hour and a half to get to the gospel.

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I kept saying to him, I have something I really wanna get to. I really wanna get to. I really wanna get to. And it was hard to get there, right?

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But I didn't wanna end that show knowing that we had so many Jewish people listening, that were listening because of Ben.

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But more importantly, I was speaking to Ben. Right. And I did not want to not clearly communicate the gospel message.

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That's right. So that becomes really important. So Paul puts it this way to Titus is that,

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I think he's speaking of apologetics, but he basically is saying, the goal of sound theology, the sound doctrine, is to shut the mouth of the ignorant.

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That's the goal. So when we do apologetics, we're doing it to shut the mouth of the ignorant so that we can share the gospel.

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It's about the gospel. It's not about, oh, look at all this knowledge I have. Look how smart

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I am. Look, I can win a debate. Look at my debating skills. None of that matters.

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What matters is sharing the gospel. That's really what matters.

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So Melissa is asking, does Ben plan on coming back on the show? I don't know.

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It's open to anybody. I may read some of the emails I had back and forth with him.

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He wants to get together with me when I'm up in Queens, which I'll be on Saturday.

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Just saying, we'll see. Conveniently or? No, actually, as we come home from Boston, we planned to visit family in Queens.

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So the plan is to be in Queens for the day. I'll see what I can do. But speaking of sharing the gospel, if this guy can stick around long enough to make an announcement, he doesn't seem to wanna be here.

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I guess if he wasn't the first one being discussed, he was out of here. But that's just the way this character is.

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But let's talk about an event, Drew, that we have where we're gonna be sharing the gospel with none other than the president of Hearts for the

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Lost, Brian Nine. How are you, sir? How are you doing, sir?

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Drew, what's up, bro? What's up? Am I coming through okay? Because I busted it because of the internet issues.

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He went upstairs to tell everyone in the family, shut the Netflix off. Stop playing the video games.

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The internet. You're bogging up the internet. No, hey, so let's talk real quick.

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We're talking apologetics. We're talking about apologetics training and things. Hearts for the

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Lost, a ministry that you work for and do a lot with. First off, for folks who may not be familiar, could you talk about what

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Hearts for the Lost is, the goal, and then what we're gonna be doing in Indianapolis? If your internet's working, that is.

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Can you hear me? Give me a. Yeah, no. Oh, he's saying no.

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He dropped out, okay. So then I. So let me do that.

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Were you holding up your Fresca can there? Yeah, bondservantforjesus asked how much sugar is in it, and I'm trying to find it, because it doesn't say, it doesn't say.

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It says zero fat, 35 grams of sodium, one gram of total carbs, zero protein, but I don't see where it says sugars.

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It says added sugars, but it doesn't say how much. Okay, so.

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So I'm gonna, I can't, I probably, this probably won't work. Let me see, can you hear this?

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Did you hear that at all? No. Okay, see, I knew that wouldn't work. I can't, I was gonna play the video he had, but I don't think,

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I don't think that would come through. So let me. Where's it at? He had it on, oh, because you could do it, okay.

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Since I don't have my, let me tag you in this, and on Facebook, and you can play the video.

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And meanwhile, while you're looking that up, I'm gonna just explain some of the events.

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So if you go to Eventbrite, and just type in evangelism training conference, that's what you could type in.

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We basically, Striving Fraternity and Hearts for the Lost are gonna get together, and we're gonna do a combined evangelism training.

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Both ministries do evangelism training. We do it a little differently, which is fine. There's not like where there's only one way to do it.

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This is a free event. This is July 7th and 8th. This will be in Indianapolis.

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So basically the plan that we have is to Friday night from six to nine, and then

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Saturday morning, it's gonna be from 9 a .m. until 4 p .m. And what the plan is, the schedule is,

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Friday night, Striving Fraternity is gonna teach on ambassador evangelism. And then

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Saturday morning, Hearts for the Lost will teach on their evangelism training. And then the afternoon, we're gonna head out to some place,

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I think it's called The Circle, where we're gonna do some evangelism till four o 'clock in the afternoon. So the location is at Athena Church, which is at 7816

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Madison Avenue in Indianapolis, Indiana. So if you're in that area, July 7th and 8th, you can go to eventbrite .com

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to search for Evangelism Training Conference. And it's a free conference.

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So I think lunch is included, if I remember correctly. So we have, it's basically gonna be something where what we're planning to do is going out and training people to evangelize and then going out to evangelize.

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And so the idea is this. If you're not comfortable evangelizing, just not something you really like to do, it becomes, it's something where an event like this is so much easier because you get a bunch of trained, experienced evangelists that will be able to take you out on the streets, not only train you during the day, but then take you on the streets and help you to train you.

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So you don't have to worry about, oh, I'm gonna get stuck answering a question I don't know the answer to. We'll have someone there with you that can answer those tough questions.

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So this is a great training ground, help get your feet wet and some great fellowship.

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So this will be - When I was at the Vineyard Church, we used to do this thing where we would go to the

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Marietta Square and we would sing songs and pray for people and things like that.

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So I approached the pastor of the church before the week before we went. And I said, hey, would you mind if I did some open air preaching, open air evangelism?

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And he said, yeah, as long as it's done in love, I have no problem with you doing that.

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And so I said, okay, yeah, I can make sure that happens, no problem. And so we get there and I've got my

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Bible and I go to the guy who's kind of leading it. And I said, okay, I'm gonna set up over there because in the middle of the square, there's like this fountain.

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And so I was gonna perch up on top of the brick wall of the fountain. And I said, okay, so I'm gonna stand up over here.

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And he said, actually, you know, I just feel like the Lord doesn't want us to do that right now.

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And he gave me this talk and I said, oh, okay. So then

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I went around to everyone at the fountain and I started telling them about Jesus personally. Yeah, Jesus, Lord just doesn't want you sharing the gospel.

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Yeah. Hey, you got some food you could give them? Right. Just pray for them, tell them

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Jesus. Just pray for them, just walk around them seven times. Yeah. Yeah, that's what he wants you to do.

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So yeah, so if you go to eventbrite .com, just search for Evangelium Training Conference, you'll see the sign that says

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Indianapolis Evangelium Conference. This is July 7th and 8th, Friday night, I'll be doing the teaching.

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Saturday, actually the team from Hearts for the Lost will be doing teaching because we'll have, it'll be Brian, I think, and Jimmy.

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So both of those guys will be doing it. Brian was gonna come in and make this big announcement, but his internet wasn't working so well, so.

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I mean, do I even need to play the video now that you? Well, yeah, go for it. Can you share that? Well, I can't share the video,

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I can share the audio though. You should be able to share, go to present and from there share screen and you can share that and then we can.

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On my phone? Are you on your, you're recording, you're doing this on your phone? Well, I pulled it up on my phone.

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Oh, well, hey. Because I don't think my. Who's fault is that? Well, I don't think this computer's logged in to Facebook.

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Oh, okay. All right, well, then we'll do it next week. Okay. We'll make Brian come in and do it.

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Well, I'll figure out a way to download that or something. I should, I'll be back home next week so we could do that.

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All right, so let's tackle some of these things. There's some things that came in that you starred here in our comments.

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Why don't we deal with some of these? Facebook user, which by the way, if you want to not be just known as Facebook user, unless you're planning to be anonymous on the show, just go to apologexlive .com

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and we have instructions for how to allow Facebook to use your name so that we know who you are.

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But Facebook users said this, very timely, and Drew, you flagged this one, but you said, it says, was having a discussion about apologetics with my daughter and her boyfriend, he posited that when discussing topics such as abortion or homosexuality with non -believers, it's best to use logic apart from scripture because non -believer has no basis to accept scripture and truth.

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Now, I don't know if this is the same Facebook user, but he also said, a Facebook user, if the same, said,

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I countered with an argument of the sufficiency of scripture, but I have studied enough to do this well.

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Sorry, but I've not studied this enough to do this well. Any thoughts that you can share on this?

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So let's deal with this one first. This is actually great because I had a clip that I was gonna share, but now we can just discuss it here.

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And it's the idea, this is why we're presuppositionalists, because we start with scripture and we don't abandon scripture.

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And what Ben was trying to get you to do was enter into this discussion about, well, we're trying to figure out if the

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New Testament was written by God. And your position was, I'm not falling for that. No, no, no, it is written by God.

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That's not the problem I have, that's the problem you have. It is, I know that it's written by God.

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And so we don't abandon our foundation. We can't argue for the Bible if we give it up.

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And you're right, and I was gonna get there later in our discussion tonight, because one of the things that I did at one point was he wants to debate the

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New Testament, whether it's the word of God, but not have the same standard to debate the Old Testament the same way.

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And what I wanted him to do was be consistent with both, because both

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Old and New Testament are the word of God. And he wants to say, no, no, no, you have to first start with the fact that the

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New Testament is not the word of God, then let's discuss it, and I can point out all the problems.

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But see, the issue is that he has the same problems in the Old Testament, he just wanted to ignore those because he says, well, that's the word of God.

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Yes, and so is the New Testament. See, there was a point in there, and I know, Drew, you grabbed a bunch of clips,

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I don't know if you grabbed that one, but there was a point where I just said, sorry, but I don't debate the word of God.

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I don't give up the word of God to say let's, no, just as he doesn't do that with the

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Tanakh, the Old Testament, I'm not gonna do that with any part of Scripture. Now, we can make a fair argument that if there is an actual contradiction, like I can point out there's contradictions in the

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Quran, therefore, I mean, definitional, like when it defines the Trinity as including Mary, well, that's not the

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Trinity. So therefore, it's a definitional issue. But if you have something where the word

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Alma can refer to a young maiden, which would also be a virgin, and it, some places says maiden, and some places refers to virgin, and we'll get into that more, that's not a contradiction, that's just the usage of a word, and a word can have a variety of meanings.

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So one of the things we just have to recognize with that is the fact that when we look at these things, we have to recognize that there's really two areas that I do have studied, because I get asked this a bunch.

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We do this show live. Any of you can go to apologaxlive .com right now, join in, and we can end up in a debate.

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We could end up having a discussion where you disagree with me, and you're prepared for a debate. And we had a listener several months ago that asked about this, and said, how do you prepare for Apologetics Live when people come in prepared for a debate, and you don't even know there's gonna be a debate?

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I've always said there's two areas I focus on, hermeneutics and logic. And if you listen to what

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I did last week, it really was those two issues. I'm applying the rules of hermeneutics.

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What are hermeneutics? That is the science of interpretation. How we understand language.

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And that's all I was doing, was doing that, and pointing out where he was making logical fallacies, where he was making arguments that were invalid.

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Because if your argument is invalid, then the argument's false.

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So we don't wanna make invalid arguments. Those are the two areas.

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So if you say, and Facebook user, I think, is Melissa, because she says, sorry, this is

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Melissa. Now, she is a missionary to the Philippines, or was.

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She's, I think, now in Texas, I forget. So that's who it is, so it's good we now know.

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But what we end up seeing is, if we focus on how to interpret scripture, most of the debates or the arguments, the apologetics we're gonna use, will be applied in the area of hermeneutics.

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Understanding how to interpret the Bible. And then the second area, I use logic.

28:51

Now, there's other areas you can imply, or employ. But those are the two primary things

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I'm gonna focus on. So let's dig into this a bit. And I know you got a couple more comments that were there, and we'll get to those.

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Then you can check through, see if there's anything else we need to address or answer. But let me get to the main thing.

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So the main thing that Ben wanted to focus on last week, was this, the usage of the word

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Alma. Alma in Hebrew is the word for maiden. So the whole argument he was making was, that Matthew purposely deceived people by mistranslating the word

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Alma into Greek for virgin, so that he could support the

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Christian claim that Jesus was virgin born.

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And so he's saying, this is false. No Jewish person would ever interpret it that way.

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No Jewish person would do that. So what did I do? Okay, when you have an argument, by the way, an argument's not a bad thing, folks.

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We do it all the time. That's how you grow. That's, yeah. When we make a claim of anything, it's an argument, okay?

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When you tell your children they have to be in bed by eight o 'clock, and you give a reason why, that's an argument.

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You don't think that's bad as a parent, do you? As a child, you do. Yeah. Yeah. But we make arguments all the time.

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The question is, are they valid arguments? So when you have someone who challenges you, what do you do?

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Well, here's what I did with what Ben said. I took a look at the premise of the argument. Then you look at the support of the argument.

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And lastly, you look at the conclusion that they're making. Okay, so those are the three things. You look at the premise, the support, and the conclusion.

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So what was his premise? He had several premises that he made. One, Alma cannot refer to a virgin.

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Okay, so that's one premise. Right. A second premise, Matthew did this purposely.

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That was a second premise. A third premise is that he said that, and this was really kind of to his support, our support for the argument that Alma can mean virgin is that it was translated that way in the

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Svyatogin. His argument, his premise of the argument was that the Christians are the ones who did that translation.

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So we have three different premises. What was his support for them?

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His support was no Jewish person would ever translate Alma as virgin.

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Okay, so now, what do you look to do? All you need to do is find one

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Jewish person that translates Alma as virgin, and the support for that argument is gone.

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Which is exactly what I did, folks. When he was arguing that this word does not mean virgin, my argument was, well, whoever translated the

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Svyatogin understood it to be virgin. That was done, as I said, before the time of Christ.

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He was claiming, no, Christians are the ones that control it. But he never gave the argument to support the claim that the

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Svyatogin was done by Christians. He actually said,

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I believe it was, he said no Jew would translate it that way, or no

32:57

Jews translated the Svyatogin. And it's like, well - Well, no, no, no. He said the first five books were translated by rabbis.

33:08

And he kept saying, and this is the thing that I picked up on, folks, and if you go back and watch that one, he kept saying rabbis, the rabbis, the rabbis, as if a

33:18

Jewish person couldn't understand this word to mean anything else, because when he would say it, no Jewish person would translate it this way.

33:26

Well, that wasn't the rabbis anymore, it's any Jewish person. So whoever translated the

33:34

Hebrew into Greek of the Svyatogin did translate it that way. Now, they would have had to know

33:39

Hebrew. Yeah. So his argument is, they were Christians that did that. And he brought up Matthew.

33:47

Well, we brought up, I brought up Matthew, being the fact that Matthew knew Hebrew, and he was

33:53

Jewish. But see, the argument is, well, he did it purposely to deceive. The thing that was interesting with it, though, is that in that argumentation, if you notice, the issue becomes one where what he ends up doing is going, well, he did it purposely.

34:09

Well, you said no, no Jewish person would do this. And now I have a Jewish person.

34:15

Right. So what was I trying to do? What I was trying to do, and this is the thing to do when you do apologetics, is focus on the premise.

34:25

Because the first thing you wanna do to see if something is logically valid is to see if the premise is valid.

34:33

If you can show that there's a problem with the premise, then you show that there's a problem with the argument.

34:40

If the premise is valid, but the support is invalid, well, then you're gonna point that out, and that is where you show the invalid argument.

34:50

If the premise and the support for the premise don't draw the conclusion the way they do, then you show that.

34:57

So this is how I approach these sort of things to look at this is, I look at the premise, the support, the conclusion.

35:04

So what was his premise? That no Jewish person would interpret it this way. Well, I answered the premise by saying whoever translated the

35:13

Septuagint did translate it that way. And this, I showed you this before we started, but for our viewers and for our listeners who can hear, this right here that I'm holding in my hand is the

35:25

Novum Testamentum Graeca. This is the critical Greek text of the day.

35:30

It's what the New Testament of your Bibles it's the text basis for the

35:35

New Testament of your Bibles. This right here is the Septuagint, the

35:41

Greek translation of the Old Testament. In Matthew 1, 23, in the

35:46

Greek, it reads exactly word for word as the Septuagint, which means

35:52

Matthew had to pull from a text that already existed before he wrote his gospel account.

36:00

And so if, the question I would have loved to have asked Ben is that since Matthew did that, and that would only make sense to do it that way, what would be the purpose of a, if no

36:15

Jew would translate the Septuagint into Greek, what would be the purpose of a non -Jew to translate the

36:22

Hebrew into Greek? And what he, his argument that he was trying to make was that Christians did that to deceive people.

36:33

So they wanted to try and make an argument for Jesus being virgin born.

36:39

Now, just think about that. So you're telling me that you're gonna translate the entire Hebrew Old Testament into Greek just to make one or two points?

36:51

Well, the crazy thing that I found was he went from the

36:56

Hebrew to the English translation of the Greek. And I'm going, okay, Matthew didn't write it in English.

37:03

It was translated from Greek into English. Why didn't you do the translation from the Hebrew into the

37:08

Greek? Yeah. Yeah, he wants to focus on the English, which, and we should get to that, but so, because there is a point where you brought up with the

37:18

Greek that he had to concede, and there were several things he conceded. So let's see, Drew, at any point during the discussion last week, did he concede the point that Alma could refer to a virgin, his first premise?

37:39

So he's saying it never can. Right, he's saying it doesn't, it just doesn't mean that.

37:45

Okay, and so the question is, could it? And I think you have a clip for us. Yeah, let's hear what he says in his own words.

37:55

Alma refers to oftentimes people that happen to be virgins, but that's not what the word means. It refers oftentimes to people who happen to be virgins.

38:05

But then he says, oh, but that's not what it means. Okay, if it refers oftentimes to people who happen to be virgins, that means that the description of virgin is wrapped up in the word

38:17

Alma. Well, it doesn't, so the issue is, is that the word based in context will define what it is.

38:26

It refers to a young maiden who often is a virgin. Was Mary, and I asked him this in the thing, was

38:34

Mary a maiden, a young maiden? The answer is yes. Could the word refer to her?

38:41

Yes, but what was specific about her was her virginity. So in the

38:47

Greek, it became more important to focus not just on her being a young maiden, but specifically she was a young maiden who was a virgin who was pregnant.

38:57

Yeah, and this is why you kept trying to get back to the Greek. Because Matthew wrote in Greek, and then you kept trying to make the point that he's copying from a

39:08

Greek text. And he kept saying, I don't wanna discuss the Greek. I don't wanna discuss the Greek. But you have to because that's the language that Matthew's writing in.

39:16

And one of the things to bring up is, because I want listeners, when you are doing these kinds of discussions, don't fall for the tricks.

39:24

You notice very early on, he asked me whether I speak fluent Hebrew, and I don't anymore, right?

39:31

It's something I, yes, I grew up with learning it, but when I was done with my bar mitzvah,

39:37

I was done with it. And over time, I stopped being able to communicate in Hebrew.

39:43

And then eventually, I'm just not great with reading it anymore. I had one year of Hebrew in seminary, and after that year,

39:51

I said, I'm never touching Hebrew again. I said, I will gladly take all the Greek classes, but I do not wanna touch it.

39:58

Yeah, I mean, it would be good to have kept up on it. But what was then the argument he made?

40:05

Basically, the argument is, because I don't know Hebrew, I can't speak to the issue.

40:10

I wrote down this question, because it sounded like he was saying one thing, and the more

40:19

I've been listening back to it, I don't think he meant it, but he was trying to talk about the necessity of knowing the original languages.

40:29

And you said, well, I think what you were saying was the original languages aren't necessary to be saved.

40:36

They're not necessary to understand what's going on, and they're not necessary to be saved. And then he made, right after that, he said, they're most absolutely necessary.

40:46

And so the question I wrote down was, is my eternity based on whether or not

40:53

I can read the original languages? And it's not. It shouldn't be.

40:59

Right. Maybe he would say it is. Maybe he would say it's necessary to know that the

41:07

New Testament can't be written from God. But the appeal to the fact, well,

41:14

I know the original language and you don't. Well, the argument we're making in Matthew's based on Greek, there was a point where you ended up bringing up the

41:25

Greek, and he didn't know the Greek, and he had to concede the point. So now the question is, so are we right?

41:34

Because we know the Greek better, and he doesn't know Greek. You see, his argument, again, it's the consistency.

41:41

And folks, this is what I look for. I look for an inconsistency, and then I point that out.

41:47

But when someone is appealing to, you have to know this language to know this.

41:53

Well, do I need to know the language? In fact, not only do

41:59

I not need to know the language, I could appeal to him and ask him, does the word

42:05

Alma refer to a virgin ever? And he had to concede, yes, it can.

42:12

It's not the word you would use, but it would refer to a young maiden who is often a virgin.

42:19

Therefore, it's not a mistranslation, which it was, remember, that was the argument. It's a mistranslation done purposely.

42:27

Okay. Yeah, so which, hold on, because there's this clip, and this was right when he came in, and this is what he said.

42:37

The virgin birth narrative, and the fact that he says Isaiah 714 is a prophecy alluding to the virgin birth,

42:46

I was contending that that is completely misquoted and taken out of context and mistranslated.

42:53

And because that's true, the entire New Testament is completely untrustworthy. Because that's true.

43:00

He just throws out the assertion as though it's fact, and he has yet to prove it. Well, see, and one of the things that I noticed with Ben, and this is why

43:11

I brought up the begging the question of fallacy, what he does is he makes an assertion, that's the premise, jumps to a conclusion without any support in between.

43:23

He did that often. And so the first argument he had is, okay, can

43:30

Alma refer to a young maiden who is a virgin? Yes. So it can refer to that.

43:36

The second argument is Matthew did this. Well, my argument for that was just to point out that the

43:43

Septuagint was translated before Matthew. It wasn't Matthew who did this translation.

43:49

It was someone before Matthew that Matthew relied upon. Now, he claimed that Christians did this, but here's one of the things he ended up seeing.

43:58

If you listen to that discussion again, he did not want any burden of proof. He didn't want to have to answer any questions where he had to support claims.

44:08

He just says, well, the Christians, they're the ones who did this Septuagint. Well, okay, support that.

44:15

Right, right. Because we don't see that historically. There's no scholar that I know of that I ended up looking last week and this week.

44:25

I don't know any scholar that believes that the Septuagint was written after or translated after Christ.

44:32

They all say it was within, so 250 to 65 BC, 250 BC about that is when they did the first five books.

44:40

After that, the next century or two, the rest of them were done. That puts them all before the time of Christ.

44:48

So Matthew didn't translate this to try to prove Christianity. What he did was relied on others, which means someone else, and this was the point

44:59

I was trying to make to him. And if you listen, you hear he just didn't want to hear it because it is the nail in the coffin to his argument.

45:08

Because his argument is based on the fact that someone had to translate it that way after Christ to make the point that Christ fits this supposed prophecy.

45:20

That's his argument. But if somebody translated this from Hebrew to Greek prior to Christ, and that's what

45:27

I kept bringing up, then Matthew isn't the one that deliberately mistranslated it.

45:33

It was someone prior. Now, why does that become an issue? Because if it was done prior, it means that it was done not to prove

45:44

Christianity, but that the Jewish people that did the translating, or at least those who, whoever it was that did the translation from Hebrew to Greek saw that this prophecy referred to a virgin because they were more precise in the

46:01

Greek language. Yeah. And this is what I was trying to point out to him because if it wasn't

46:09

Matthew, if Matthew got it from someone else, then premise number two, that Matthew did this purposely and deliberately to deceive people can't be true because it was translated before Matthew was born.

46:25

Yeah, so you - Unless true, we might have a solution to it. We have brought it up. You remember what that solution is?

46:33

The solution that Matthew translated from - Or that anybody translated before, the time machine.

46:42

The time machine, yeah. Maybe it was a Christian time machine and went back and then wrote it down.

46:47

To translate to Septuagint, yeah. Maybe that's the answer. That's it. You know, but you remember when we were talking about Matthew and I asked him the question,

46:56

I said, what would be the purpose of Matthew deliberately trying to deceive people to follow

47:04

Jesus if Christians are being persecuted because no one dies for a lie, right?

47:11

What would be the purpose? And he said this, and I thought this was very interesting.

47:17

This is what he said. Original followers were certainly convinced of something.

47:24

And I don't know enough about how they got convinced of that. But one thing is clear is that he deliberately changed the words.

47:31

Whatever psychological reason, it's not my field. I don't know. He deliberately - Okay, so Jesus's followers, he says

47:38

Jesus's followers were certainly convinced of something. So they were certainly convinced that Jesus was the

47:45

Messiah but they deliberately did it. That doesn't make any sense. If you're certainly convinced that this is the

47:52

Messiah that we're following, then you're not deliberately changing anything. You're just writing out of ignorance at that point.

47:58

So you can't have someone being certainly convinced but then deliberately trying to deceive people.

48:06

Yeah, and this is the thing, folks, what we're trying to do. So when we do apologize, what are we looking at?

48:12

Notice what we're dealing with. We're dealing with the premise of his argument. Now, I grant you, it was hard to deal with the support for his argument because there wasn't a lot of it.

48:20

It was really premise, conclusion. That right there is a problem. If you have someone who does not support his argument and the only support he kept giving was no

48:33

Jewish person would translate it this way. Someone did, whoever did the Septuagint, they translated it that way.

48:40

So when you say no one would, someone did. Now he would say, well, Matthew did. And he asked, is

48:46

Matthew Jewish? Would he speak Hebrew? Yes, therefore he purposely did it wrong. Well, no, you said no

48:52

Hebrew would do this. And even if you're gonna argue Matthew did it, there is one

48:58

Jewish person that did. Now, here's one of the things I want you to note. What was his core argument when it came to Septuagint?

49:09

His way of arguing, which kind of is a saving technique for him because it prevents him from having to answer anything, is to say, well, the

49:18

Christians, they control the Septuagint, they translated it maybe.

49:24

We don't know who translated it, but maybe they did. But the reality is that becomes the focus.

49:31

They're, it's under Christian control. That was the wording he used. Right. Okay. Now, he never supported that to show where the

49:44

Christians had this, because remember, I pointed this out a couple of times, that the

49:49

Septuagint was prior to the time of Christ. How could it be under Christian?

49:56

I mean, it is, you could argue it's under Christian control now, but the original translation from Hebrew to Greek wouldn't have been.

50:05

And so his argument is, well, see, Christians did this purposely to deceive people.

50:12

Well, here's the question he never wanted to think about. Could the Jewish people, after the time of Christ, responding to Christianity, argue that Alma can only mean this, that can only mean a maiden and not a virgin.

50:31

And for 2000 years, Jewish people believe that now. The question is, in the time of Christ, and more importantly, before the time of Christ, would

50:41

Jewish people at that time translate Alma as virgin? That's the question.

50:49

And that's a question where we have to look at how that word is used both in scripture, but also in other works.

50:58

That becomes the thing. And he just wanted to reject that completely. You know, it's really, really funny you say that, because I do, let me find this clip.

51:11

Where, okay, number five. Okay, listen here. Be a virgin, could she not?

51:17

I don't wanna argue about what the word maiden means. Let's be clear on our terms. He didn't wanna argue about what the word maiden means.

51:25

But when you do a word study of Alma in the Old Testament, it shows up seven times, and the majority of those times it's translated as maiden.

51:35

So then, what does that tell you? You have to deal with what the word maiden means.

51:40

And he did not wanna get into that. Correct. And he didn't want to, because if maiden can refer to a virgin, then it's not a mistranslation.

51:51

Okay? And so, see, we're trying to do this slowly, folks, so that you can see how to do this, so you can do this.

51:58

This isn't that difficult. Don't think that there's something special about Drew and I that we do this. No, you can do this.

52:05

You just have to learn how to spot the things that are being discussed. And that's why we're doing this show using last week's as the example.

52:15

So if you go back and listen to last week's, and you'll see how we were doing this, the point is to focus on the premise of the argument.

52:25

That's the cardinal thing to focus on. And look to see, is this valid?

52:31

And I pointed out throughout the show that he was making logical fallacies.

52:41

And you see that he'll just ignore it and continue. I mean, it was kind of funny, because someone said to me, they go, you know, it's so funny that you could sit there with a guest on the show and point out to the audience, okay, this is what he is doing, and then they continue doing it.

52:57

And I said to this person, it's because people, they just, he does not see what he's doing.

53:06

He can sit there, if someone did it to him, he could see that behavior, but he doesn't see it with himself.

53:12

Well, he did that when, he would point out for you, he would say, Andrew, you're just being childish.

53:18

Andrew, you're being condescending. Andrew, you're doing this. And it's like, bro, you've been doing that the entire time.

53:24

Yeah, which is why, you know, when people say, why were you doing that? Why was

53:30

I being more aggressive with him? I was doing that because he had already exposed that he was gonna be aggressive.

53:38

And what he wanted to do is he wanted to take the whole show and just him talk and have a monologue.

53:46

He wanted us to just go, oh, you are so brilliant, we have no answer.

53:52

He didn't wanna actually deal with the answers that we had. You saw that, he just ignores the answers and just keeps going to his same arguments, even though we've answered them, and then claiming that we never answered them.

54:04

Yeah, and I pointed this out to you. He couldn't stop talking long enough to listen to a point you were about to make, because every time you got to where you were going to make your point, he cut in.

54:18

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, let me make a point. Andrew, let me say something. And so then it got to a couple of times where he kept saying,

54:26

I'm trying to understand what you're saying. Well, you can't understand if you keep talking.

54:33

You have to stop talking so that you can listen to what the other person's saying. And I challenge you to go back and re -listen to how many times he interrupted me.

54:43

And what did I do? I pointed out that behavior. So he is what Greg Koko would refer to as a steamroller.

54:51

And when you do witnessing, you're going to run into the steamroller, that person who just wants to keep talking, talking, talking, talking, and just not let you get a word in edgewise and want you to submit to them because of the plethora of talking that they do.

55:09

And so what you end up having. Yeah, here's what Rob MC says.

55:16

I think that's common on this show, it seems. Yeah, it is. And he follows up and says, not from Drew or Andrew.

55:22

Yeah, and you do see it, because people come in because they want to debate us. They want to challenge us.

55:28

And that's fine. Not opposed to that. The point is, though, what do we end up doing time and time again?

55:36

We give people the time to voice what they want to say. Why? Well, for one reason,

55:41

I want to make sure I understand what they're saying, but hey, this is my show, folks. I mean, I joked with the guy saying, can

55:47

I answer a question on my own show? Is that okay? There was some humor in that, but it was making a point as well that he was trying to dominate my show, right?

55:59

But I have this week to respond. I could take this entire two hours and respond to everything.

56:06

I mean, I never got, we got the six pages of notes here with my comments. I looked up every single verse he had, every challenge, and part of me feels like I want to be able to respond to that.

56:17

Could I do that? Yeah, I could do that the following week. So I believe as a host, it is my job to let the person say what they want to say, make sure

56:28

I understand, engage with what they're actually saying. When you see someone that doesn't want to let you speak, it usually exposes a person who's not confident in their own argument to be able to defend it.

56:45

And so don't get upset with that. Rejoice in that because you know you won. And that's why

56:51

I kept saying, I kept pointing out to him his own behavior. So why was I getting aggressive with him?

56:56

Because the only way to be able to get a word in with an aggressive person is to be aggressive.

57:03

So one of the things Greg Koukl says in his book, Tactics, when you have what he calls a steamroller, is the first thing you want to do is lay out the ground rules.

57:14

What were the ground rules? Can I finish a sentence? That was the ground rules. I'm asking that question. And I ask it as a question.

57:21

Can I finish a sentence? Would that be okay? And he would say, yes. But even after saying yes, he would cut right in.

57:30

So what do you do when they break the rules? You shame them. Now, I know that a lot of people think that when you do that, you're shaming them.

57:38

That seems aggressive, and it doesn't seem loving and graceful, and it doesn't seem very

57:44

Christian. And so that's why I want to address this one thing. Greg Koukl says basically, he's got three points with a steamroller.

57:53

Set the ground rules. They break the ground rules. Shame them. They don't submit to the fact that they're shamed.

58:00

They break the ground rules. You walk away from the conversation, right? Now, I didn't want to walk away from the conversation until I got to the gospel.

58:08

Right. So it kept being a problem because it did take me an hour and a half to get to the gospel. But what you want to do when someone is interrupting like that is just lay out the ground rules and shame them into the fact that they're breaking the rules.

58:24

That's what you look to do. Okay. And there's, just for the listeners, so you can have a little more confidence.

58:34

Sometimes when you give people a lot of time to speak, because like when you go talk to Jehovah's Witnesses or you talk to Mormons, they can speak for a long time.

58:44

And they will try to throw out multiple things at once. This thing, that thing, that thing, that thing.

58:50

And they want you to respond to each of those points. You don't have to.

58:56

Don't feel like you have to respond to each and every point because you're not going to have time to, you know?

59:04

So pick a point, hit that point, and then let it be what it is.

59:11

Because truth be told, you're not going to have all the time in the world. And that's the thing, you know, we talked about this before, you know, he wanted my email.

59:20

And if I was going to, you asked me if I was going to email him back. Yeah, I will. But you know,

59:25

I'm right now in my silence and not addressing him. I'm letting him know he's not the most important thing right now.

59:31

I have other responsibilities and I'll get to it when I get to it. Because I know I'm going to get six pages of emails.

59:38

Yes. Worth, and you just don't have to respond to each and everything. Correct.

59:44

Yeah, I mean, he sent us a six page document, right? I did the due diligence to respond to it.

59:49

But what did we get to? We got to his first point. That was it. We didn't get past that.

59:54

Now I forced it to get to some of the other things because I wanted to get to his whole view of the offerings, because that was going to get to the gospel.

01:00:05

But he wanted to stick on point number one. And when I tried moving it, it's like, well, let's go back to it.

01:00:10

Because that was what he thought was his strongest argument. Now, I want to point out, it is something we have to recognize when you're dealing with a person who just wants to steamroll you.

01:00:24

Now, if you're on a show like this, okay, maybe we want to keep the conversation going longer than it really should have gone because I want to get to the gospel and we want to be polite.

01:00:33

But folks, you saw how hard it was for me, if you listen, to just get a word in without being rude and having to interrupt.

01:00:43

But, and at the end, he said he had one more thing he wanted to say. And I said, no, and muted him and ended the show.

01:00:53

And afterwards, when we were off air, he said, all I want to do is thank you for having me on. Okay. Now, after three hours of him saying,

01:01:04

I got one more thing to say, because I kept saying, there's something I want to get to. And he'd go, well, just let me say one more thing, one more thing.

01:01:11

Kind of like Steven Jobs, when he does his Apple things, he'd go, and one more thing, right?

01:01:18

Well, he was one more thinging me to death. All he wanted to do is thank the audience, is what he claimed. But after three hours of him saying one more thing and then going back to something we've already covered,

01:01:31

I'm like, oh, you're one more thing to me to death. I want it to end the show. Because I gave him plenty of times where it was one more thing and all he was doing was reiterating what we've already addressed.

01:01:42

And you kept saying, we're going to end on this. Yeah. Because the thing you're going to see sometimes with folks is they go back to what they think is a really solid argument for them, but they're not listening to anything that you're actually saying.

01:01:57

So what Ben wasn't doing was tracking with the conversation. He was still stuck in the beginning of the conversation and never heard any of the argumentation that was being made.

01:02:08

Because I don't think he was really listening, which is something when you do apologetics, folks, please listen to the people that you're discussing with.

01:02:19

Be able to make their arguments as well as they can. Doesn't mean you have to agree with them.

01:02:25

Right. And you tried to get him to do that. And it was obvious, he did not do that.

01:02:33

Because you laid out his point where basically you were talking about using different standards.

01:02:39

He uses one standard to judge the New Testament, but he doesn't use the same standard in judging the

01:02:46

Old Testament. And then you said, okay, now I want you to repeat back to me my argument and he couldn't do it.

01:02:54

He couldn't do it. Because I don't think he was listening. So what he was doing was he was listening to poke holes in the argument, not to have to respond to the argument.

01:03:03

And this is when I do our evangelism trainings, as we'll do in July 7th and 8th in Indianapolis.

01:03:11

I will teach people that when you hear a challenge, ask a question. Because when people are sitting there just to poke holes in your argument, they don't have to think about what you're saying.

01:03:21

When you ask a question, they have to think it through. And when they think it through, they respond differently.

01:03:28

And so for that reason, I teach people to ask questions when people make claims. He was making claims, but he didn't want to have to support any of them.

01:03:37

He didn't want to have to prove that Matthew is the one who first translated Alma into Greek as virgin.

01:03:45

He didn't want to have to answer that at all because he couldn't support that claim, I'm sure.

01:03:52

But see, that's a core part of the argument. So what I kept doing, I kept focusing on the premise of his argument, okay?

01:04:01

And then point out where he had basically invalid arguments. So now someone had said, where was it?

01:04:17

Oh, Dee had said this. He's probably used to winning simple arguments on social media with his tactics.

01:04:26

And so this is what I want to bring up. He is not comfortable coming into a show like this where there's a give and take like this.

01:04:34

He prefers more the written form. We know that because he said that in emails, okay? He wasn't super comfortable coming onto a show like this.

01:04:41

I think he handled himself well as far as him being in his ability to speak.

01:04:48

I don't think his arguments were valid, but I pointed that out. But I think he handled himself well in the ability to speak.

01:04:57

So I don't think it was an issue of that. But I do think there's something to be said when you're a keyboard worrier, when you're just making arguments online, man, it is easy to win in your head.

01:05:07

Folks, I got news for you. We always win in our head, okay? Whenever we make an argument in our own brains, we win because we don't see any argument against it.

01:05:18

You know what? It's so funny you mentioned that in the social media comment because there's probably so many people out there that think they've beat me on social media because I'll post something, they'll respond.

01:05:31

I may do a response or something and then they'll just come back. But I'm not even reading their response because I've already walked away and they're probably going, yeah,

01:05:40

I got him. He didn't know what to say. And I'm like, I didn't even read it. Oh, well, I do.

01:05:45

Okay, so I do this one, which is really funny. I have done this, I don't know, hundreds of times probably.

01:05:53

And it's just so funny how it works. I'll get some person who's arguing with me and messaging me, texting me, whatever.

01:06:00

And they wanna win, they just wanna win. And I will eventually say, point out that they're being prideful and they get upset when

01:06:08

I do. And this is what I do. I say, I will give you a way that you can know for yourself whether you're prideful.

01:06:17

You're going to respond to this. And I'm telling you right now, whatever your response is,

01:06:22

I will not read it. I'm not gonna read anything you type.

01:06:30

I will ignore it. But yet you will still respond because that's what pride does.

01:06:37

So if you respond to this, if you have to get the last word, if you have to defend it, you have to make a point knowing

01:06:45

I'm not gonna read it, you know I'm not gonna read it, then you're prideful.

01:06:51

Do you know only once did I ever have a guy not respond? Every single time

01:06:58

I see them, I don't read it, I ignore it, but they respond, you know, and I'm just like, okay, and they don't get it.

01:07:07

Well, this is what Ben's issue was. He just wanted to win and that becomes the issue.

01:07:17

So some of the things that I wanna point out, right, is that we need to focus on what their premise is, what their support is, is their argument support?

01:07:28

So let me give the example from my own argument, right? My argument is that Matthew didn't translate this, okay?

01:07:39

He got it from a previous translation, someone else translated before him and he used that to support that this applies to Jesus.

01:07:50

Now, that translation that was done before Jesus was born, could not have been written in response to Jesus.

01:07:59

So what am I doing? I'm now supporting the claim, how am I supporting it? I'm supporting it by saying, this couldn't be a

01:08:05

Christian deception because it was written beforehand, that's the support.

01:08:12

Now, if it was written beforehand, is there any other way to explain how someone before the time of Christ could have translated this as virgin into Greek and the claim be that it can't possibly mean that?

01:08:30

Well, I gave the only thing I could think of and that's a time machine, right? Right, now is a time machine a plausible argument?

01:08:38

No, I don't think it is. But the point being is there's no other point, you cannot make the argument that this was a

01:08:49

Christian deception if it was done before the time of Christ, that's the support.

01:08:56

So my conclusion now is that Matthew wasn't deceiving because Matthew got it from a time before Christ.

01:09:02

So some Jewish person or multiple Jewish people before the time of Christ saw it perfectly legitimate to translate the

01:09:12

Hebrew word for maiden into the Greek word for virgin. Yep, and so I'm walking you through it so you see what my premise is, you see my support for the premise, the conclusion, it fits.

01:09:28

That is a logically valid argument and it's supportable.

01:09:35

Now, his argument wasn't supported by himself. He just said, you know, it's interesting because he said, well, all the scholars.

01:09:43

Well, I looked at the scholars and every scholar I read says that they believe that the

01:09:50

Septuagint was completed a century or two after the initial translation of the first five books, which puts you before the time of Christ.

01:10:01

Now, you hear this a lot, this generalization or this over -generalization of all scholars or all theologians.

01:10:10

Okay, no scholar, no theologians, they are not 100 % unified in anything.

01:10:18

You can always find a scholar somewhere that either agrees with the point you wanna make or disagrees with the point that you wanna make.

01:10:27

And the thing is, as I pointed out to Ben, that's a logical fallacy known as a fallacy of population.

01:10:36

Just because they all agree, just because all Germans agreed with killing

01:10:43

Jewish people doesn't make it right, okay? Appealing to the population doesn't mean it's right, it just means the population is all deceived.

01:10:54

Okay, it could mean that, I should say. So he would do that, he'd appeal to all scholars.

01:11:01

Well, the fact is all you gotta do is find one scholar now. You know, this is what happened when Michael Brown did a debate with Rabbi Tovia Singer.

01:11:09

Tovia made the claim that no Jewish rabbi would translate Isaiah 53 as referring to the

01:11:18

Messiah. And Michael Brown came up with two of them, not during the debate, though.

01:11:24

It was a very interesting thing in the debate. What happened was Michael Brown said, if I find one of them, will you repent and believe in Jesus?

01:11:36

And Tovia said yes in the debate. So he found two of them. When you say none of them, all you need is one of them.

01:11:45

And he found two scholars, I believe they're both before the time of Christ, that had written about Isaiah 53 referring to Messiah.

01:11:54

The point that Michael Brown was trying to make is that before the time of Christ, Isaiah 53 was seen as a prophetic view of Messiah.

01:12:06

Jews in reaction to this, to Christianity, denied. So the same argument, here's the thing.

01:12:13

One of the things you'd see is that you'll have a person like Ben who will say, well, Christians purposely deceive people, but he doesn't take into account that, well, could the

01:12:24

Jewish leaders deceive people? No, they couldn't. Why not? Because as I pointed out, there is a lot when you read through the

01:12:32

Talmud, there's a lot in the Talmud that is reactionary to Christianity.

01:12:40

Now he denied that, okay. I didn't say most of it, there's a lot.

01:12:46

Also, did you notice when I said I read through the Talmud, he said, oh, that's not possible. Why not?

01:12:52

Well, because scholars study it for years. I didn't say that I studied it. I mean, yeah, it would take years. There are a lot of volumes.

01:12:59

But he said he teaches the Bible and the Talmud for a living.

01:13:05

So he can teach through it, but apparently you can't have read through it. Yeah. And you're just a couple of years older than he is.

01:13:15

Well, I think way more. He's 34 and I'm 55.

01:13:20

So I'm 21 years older. There were tons of comments coming through where we would correct him on the

01:13:30

Bible, or we would bring up a point about the Bible. He would say, oh, well, I'm not familiar with that.

01:13:35

And the comments would explode. He doesn't even know the scriptures. Yeah, well, and it's interesting because most

01:13:44

Orthodox that I know that I just dialogue with, their focus is the Talmud.

01:13:50

Now he said that's not the case. He said he studies the Tanakh, which is the Old Testament. And so what am

01:13:56

I gonna do? I'm gonna take him at his word. Mm -hmm. Okay, that's the thing to do.

01:14:02

And that's what I tried to do. So I didn't make my arguments from the Talmud. Right. Okay, why?

01:14:07

Because he's saying that the proper authority is the Tanakh, the

01:14:13

Old Testament. But many Jewish people would see that the

01:14:19

Talmud is scripture. So it's equal in authority to the Tanakh, the Old Testament.

01:14:24

Which is interesting when he talked about Jonah in Nineveh not having to have sacrifices.

01:14:33

Yes. So because in the Talmud, the idea is, so Gentiles aren't required to make sacrifices.

01:14:43

That's Israel's job. And so in the Talmud, it actually teaches that the 70 bulls that are sacrificed are for the 70 nations that they believe are represented in the world.

01:15:00

So Nineveh can repent, and the sacrifice that has been made on behalf of the nations, that sacrifice then covers

01:15:13

Nineveh. Yeah. And that'd be from Talmud. But see, we couldn't go there.

01:15:21

So the thing I want you guys to see when we do this, there is some different points just to pick up on the hows and whys of doing apologetics, what to look for when we do this.

01:15:35

Now, I wanna get into discussing where I really want to go with is the gospel, because that becomes a focus.

01:15:41

But before I do, I should give a word from our sponsor, which is MyPillow. They sponsor us here at both here and on my

01:15:51

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01:16:06

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01:16:25

And they are, I mean, I don't know. I know the owner claims to be a Christian. I don't know if that's the case or not, but yeah.

01:16:34

But at least you're getting good products and you're not supporting some woke company.

01:16:42

So, you know, that's a benefit. And I do, I love their products.

01:16:48

We have a new sponsor. Someone reached out that we may have as a sponsor and they've reached out.

01:16:54

They really want to sponsor this show. The problem is, I said, I don't use your product. And so I will be having a meeting with them to discuss the use of the product because I here will not support something and say, oh, go get this product that I don't believe in.

01:17:13

Okay, I have used MyPillow for years, a decade before they were sponsors.

01:17:19

I begged them to be sponsors because I love their products that much. And so it's something that, yes,

01:17:26

I do. You know, every once in a while, they'll send me a free product. The latest slippers

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I have were free, things like that, I love them. But I don't sit there and say, because they gave it to me free,

01:17:41

I'm supporting, no. I love their products, that's why they're sponsors. And so if we sponsor someone here, it's because we firmly believe in what they do and what their values would be or what the products they produce.

01:17:56

So mypillow .com, use promo code SFE. Logos Bible Software is another one that we have here.

01:18:04

If you don't have Logos and you want to do serious Bible study, go to logos .com slash

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01:18:16

So logos .com slash SFE is how to do that. All right, so let's get into the discussion where I really wanted things to go.

01:18:27

The issue that I really wanted to get to was the gospel. And I want to point out to you folks something that we ended up doing.

01:18:35

And we already pointed out early on the presuppositional argument. You heard me at one point where he wanted to say, well, we're trying to see if the

01:18:43

New Testament is the word of God. And this may have shocked some people because if you're not used to a presuppositional argument, you may not have been used to what

01:18:52

I did. But was I willing to debate whether the New Testament is the word of God?

01:18:58

No, I don't debate that. That's a presupposition. Now you notice he has a presupposition with the

01:19:07

Old Testament being the word of God. And so what I wanted to do, and I was trying to do with him is to say, okay, if we're going to debate this, then we need to take the

01:19:17

Old Testament and compare it the same way. He wasn't willing to do that.

01:19:25

One of the things that was interesting, Drew, that I found with it is when he didn't even know the textual variances between the king being 20 years old or 40 or 42 years old, he doesn't even know that textual variant means he never actually had to do the apologetics.

01:19:44

He never had to actually defend things like this, but he's attacking the New Testament for the very same type of things.

01:19:50

And so the point is, is that if you're going to claim that the

01:19:55

Old Testament has no contradictions in the English translation or even in the

01:20:00

Hebrew that we have today, then there can't be any. But if there's one, then by his own standard, it's not the word of God.

01:20:10

If you go back and listen, you'll see, he just rejected that. He didn't want to even deal with that. Right, which is very interesting.

01:20:16

So I've had discussions with atheists who have brought up those textual variants and those apparent contradictions that are in the

01:20:26

Old Testament. And they've used that as a weapon to try to discredit the

01:20:33

Bible. Well, what would Ben's response be to that? If I'm an atheist and I say,

01:20:39

I don't accept the Old Testament as the word of God because of this contradiction, well, now what?

01:20:46

Well, now I've just turned his own standard back on him. What's he gonna do?

01:20:52

See, and this is, I will admit, since Rabbi Tovia Singer is dodging me and too scared to debate me, it was a chance for me to try out some of what

01:21:03

I was gonna do in the debate with Tovia, right? Because part of it is to sit there and say, okay,

01:21:10

Tovia, that's why I thought he was a follower of Tovia because he's making the same poor arguments that Tovia makes is that, well, the

01:21:16

New Testament has textual variances. So does the Old Testament. But see, the argument that Tovia makes is the fact that the

01:21:25

New Testament has textual variances means it can't be from God. Well, then the

01:21:30

Old Testament can't be. And I remember talking to a Orthodox rabbi and he made this argument and he's the one, this rabbi was the one that pointed out that in the

01:21:40

Masoretic text, with Solomon's chariots and horsemen in the Kings and Chronicles, they're reversed, the numbers are reversed.

01:21:48

And so, well, that's a textual variant. And he says, no, God, for purposes we don't understand, inspired it to be that way.

01:21:59

So I mentioned my Novum Testamentum, which is a critical edition of the

01:22:05

Greek New Testament. Our English Bibles, the Old Testament is based off of the

01:22:11

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which is also a critical edition of Hebrew texts and critical editions mean that there are multiple sources and you're coming together to get the best readings from these multiple sources.

01:22:28

So why are there, there have to be textual variants when you're dealing with multiple copies from different sources.

01:22:35

Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I think as Christians we're willing to do, but you saw

01:22:42

Ben wasn't willing to do. And that's why I'd really like to see how Trovia would handle an argument like that, because I think he would probably do very much like Ben and just go, well, we don't debate the

01:22:52

Old Testament, we're debating the New. And like, okay, well, then you don't have a consistent standard, right?

01:23:02

So we've seen how we have a person who's very difficult to deal with, interrupting a steamroller, just wanting to make his points, not wanting to engage with what you say, being aggressive.

01:23:13

We sort of discuss and how do you handle someone like that? Well, you have to be a little aggressive back, you need to set the ground rules, you need to shame them or point out where they're breaking the rules.

01:23:22

There's a point where you wanna walk away and we did eventually, because trust me, I think we could have continued till five in the morning and he'd still be trying to convince us, okay?

01:23:36

But the thing is, is that what I wanted to get to was the gospel.

01:23:42

And so the way with him I wanted to do that was to talk about the Old Testament sacrificial system, because in his six pages of stuff that he sent me, he's pointing out that the sacrifices aren't needed.

01:23:58

We don't need the sacrificial system, we need repentance was what he had said.

01:24:04

And so Leviticus, I'm looking at the notes to try to see if I could find it. It was either 11, 17 or 17, 11.

01:24:12

17, 11. 17, 11 says that basically you can't have the sacrifice, you can't have a repentance or atonement without blood.

01:24:25

How do you do that today? Now, my argument would be that now that they don't have a temple and they don't have a sacrificial system, what do you have people do?

01:24:33

They rewrite the rules to fit their culture. That happens all the time. And so they basically said, oh, we're gonna take it from that, we're gonna reread these things.

01:24:43

I would argue that they're gonna reread these things in light of the fact they don't have a temple. So they're gonna reread it and say, oh, it's about repentance.

01:24:52

Well, that's okay when we look at those things and he brought many verses where it says that God would prefer a contrite heart over sacrifices.

01:25:00

Well, that's true. It's not that he's saying I don't want sacrifices or that the sacrifices aren't commanded or not needed.

01:25:08

He's saying the priority is being repentant and coming to him repentant with a sacrifice.

01:25:16

He'd rather a repentant person than a self -righteous person with a sacrifice.

01:25:24

So a repentant person - And you pointed that out, I believe, or I think you were trying to point that out.

01:25:30

I was trying to. That a person can come and be repentant and not be sincere about it, or they can go give a sacrifice and not be sincere about it, but he wants sincere repentance, but the sacrifice is required.

01:25:47

Blood must be shed. And look, just go all the way back to the garden. Adam and Eve covered their shame with fig leaves, but that wasn't enough to cover their sin.

01:25:58

God had to shed blood. Correct. And here's the thing that I wanna get to, because I wanna get some of the questions that came up.

01:26:06

And so here's the thing. What I wanted to do was talk about what repentance was.

01:26:11

He viewed repentance as a work we do. That God must submit to.

01:26:17

That God must submit to. And I should've got that one. Yeah, that's the clip to get, because see, what it is is, what did

01:26:25

I do? I let him explain it. I asked the questions. I got him to commit before saying anything.

01:26:33

Then once he committed, what did I do? I pointed out that his religion is man -made because he has

01:26:39

God, the creator of the universe, submitting to man. And Christianity has

01:26:45

God where God is controlling everything and man submits to him. That contrast is the difference.

01:26:52

I mean, the fact that I pointed out, the fact that a virgin would give birth, that should get his attention that there's something supernatural here.

01:26:59

He just rejects that altogether. That's another question to ask him. Okay, Jesus existed.

01:27:07

Was Jesus born of a virgin? No, well, he denied that during the show. He would probably, the argument most believe is they even named the

01:27:15

Roman soldier that they say had relations with Mary. And so they say it was a

01:27:21

Roman soldier. So, but the point I wanna make is this, is that the goal was to get to the gospel.

01:27:27

But what do I do in this? What was I trying to do in this? Is what I wanted to try to do is show that in his religious system,

01:27:36

God submits to man. So who's the authority? Man, that's a man -made religion.

01:27:45

You could look at that objectively and see this. When you have a religion where lifts man up on high, where God has the creator of the universe submits to what men do and not men submitting to God, you got it backwards, right?

01:28:02

And that's why I want to point that out. Drew, I know you had some other clips.

01:28:08

I don't know if there's other things you wanted to share from that before we get to some questions. No, I mean, we really covered just about everything that I had a clip for, but the interesting, another interesting part was where we were talking about adoption and we were talking about going through the line of Jesus.

01:28:26

And I brought up Moses, right? Moses being adopted by Pharaoh's daughter. And he said, adoption is not a

01:28:36

Hebrew idea. And so he said, you won't find any

01:28:41

Jew that would affirm the idea of adoption. Okay, well, how about this?

01:28:49

TheTorah .com, an article titled Raised as an

01:28:55

Egyptian. How does Moses come to identify as a Hebrew? This is written by Professor Rabbi Jonathan Magana.

01:29:06

And in his opening paragraph, he says Pharaoh's daughter adopts

01:29:11

Moses. So apparently it exists, but then let's go to the

01:29:17

New Testament, okay? You have Paul. Paul talks a lot about adoption. Paul was a

01:29:24

Pharisee. Paul studied under Gamaliel. Gamaliel was held in very high esteem.

01:29:31

Now, if adoption wasn't a Hebrew idea, that would have sent red flags through Paul.

01:29:39

So what was it that changed Paul from Judaism to being a follower of Christ, to be willing to go through everything that he did and ultimately dying for the gospel, if this one idea of adoption wasn't real?

01:29:58

Well, and furthermore, if you're looking at the New Testament, this is where I thought you were gonna go, is

01:30:03

Hebrews 11 .24. By faith, when he had grown up, speaking of Moses, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter.

01:30:17

So his whole argument that he wouldn't be seen, so was he Egyptian? Yes, that was the whole point, is that he was

01:30:26

Egyptian, but when he grew up, he rejected that. He walked away from that because he recognized that he was of Jewish descent.

01:30:37

And there is a part where it mentions Egyptians as Moses's brothers.

01:30:45

Yeah, and Melissa says, has Ben spoken to every

01:30:51

Jew on the planet? I laughed every time he broad brushed all Jewish people and what they would believe.

01:30:58

And that's the point, is he's just making this claim as if every Jewish person, well, no

01:31:03

Jewish person would believe these things. I didn't do this, but I could have said, well,

01:31:09

I'm Jewish and I believe these things. Then you drop the money.

01:31:17

You go there, you know? Yeah, I mean, right? I mean, no Jewish person. All you gotta do is point out one, okay?

01:31:25

So yeah, the adoption thing was quite interesting because, now granted,

01:31:30

I couldn't, you brought up Moses, which was a great example, but I can't think of anywhere, and I think

01:31:35

I mentioned this, just because I don't think of anything in the Old Testament where we have an example of adoption doesn't mean it didn't happen.

01:31:44

Now, the only example I could think of - Esther was adopted by Mordecai, which

01:31:49

I guess was actually her uncle, but it says she had no mother and father, and Mordecai raised her as his daughter.

01:31:59

Yeah, and I didn't think of that one. I mean, the only one I thought of was Abraham with his inheritance gonna go to his servant because he didn't have a child.

01:32:08

Which is another thing that kind of threw me for a loop because he was talking about, in talking about the biological father, well, who gets, and he's saying, well, who gets the double portion if you've got two fathers, if you've got an adopted father and a biological father?

01:32:26

Okay, well, the biological father is inheritance, but then at another point, he said, you can give your inheritance to whoever you want.

01:32:34

But you couldn't, and that's the whole reason in Ruth that when offered the kinsmen redeemer, right, the closest kin goes, hey,

01:32:45

I'll take it, I want that land. Oh, you also get Ruth. I don't want it because now I gotta take my inheritance and split it not in his name, but in the name of someone else, which was the whole argument.

01:32:57

And so, yeah, those are the two areas that he wanted to focus. And so I think that what you end up seeing is, like, look, folks, you're gonna get the person that's sitting there going, you know,

01:33:10

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, just one more thing, Andrew, one more thing, Andrew. Linda, Linda, Linda, listen, listen, listen,

01:33:17

Linda. Yeah, I mean, it gets, I don't get the Linda thing, but it's probably some movie, but the thing that you will see is you will get people that will do something like this.

01:33:32

And don't get razzled, don't get frazzled, don't let it get under your skin.

01:33:39

Recognize it for what it is. Don't get emotional with it. And just point it out.

01:33:46

I mean, so that's what I was trying to do. And all right, so let's deal with some of the questions that, or comments that we had.

01:33:53

You put this one up. So John says this, Andrew has taught me a lot about how to talk to people about the

01:34:00

Bible, love the show. Well, thanks, John, that's encouraging. So Drew, thanks for highlighting that one.

01:34:07

Yeah, I mean, that's what we wanna do here is we wanna show you just how to do these things, how to handle them.

01:34:12

There is nothing super special about Drew or I that it's just learning how to do these things.

01:34:20

And this is what this show is for, to teach you how to do it as well. And so if you, by the way,

01:34:25

I should say, if you enjoy the show, if it's helpful for you, please share it with others, especially live.

01:34:31

You know, there was, let me go back there. There's someone put this up. Dee had said,

01:34:37

I'm drinking hibiscus tea right now. So there was some discussion about hibiscus tea that was going on. I guess it was sugars and things like that.

01:34:44

You know, our audience, okay. And I love being in the comments too.

01:34:51

When you get someone like Ben that comes on or some of the other guests that we've had on here, our audience is sharp.

01:34:59

I mean, they're throwing scriptures out. They're throwing arguments out. I mean, just left and right, they're sharp.

01:35:06

But we also get lots of other things that go on in the discussion, which if you're not watching this live, you really do want to join us on live, especially on YouTube where you can see all the comments because I think you're getting good health benefits.

01:35:18

I drink hibiscus tea because it lowers blood pressure, by the way. But I always sit there like, okay,

01:35:25

I will admit some of the times I go like, what is going on in the chat? Because you see all kinds of discussions and I'll see a comment go, what in the world are they referring to?

01:35:33

And you go back and realize they've had a whole time, they've had a whole separate discussion while still paying attention to what we're saying.

01:35:40

But we do like those who are in the chat really get to know each other and kind of becomes a whole fellowship.

01:35:48

So neat to see it live, but do share this. So, okay, John has put this question for Drew.

01:35:54

Good, no pressure on me. It's all on you. Although I guess we're both Drew because we're both

01:35:59

Andrews, but okay. But I think this is more toward you. If they build a third temple in Israel, could it be a full fulfillment of Bible prophecy of Matthew 24, 70

01:36:15

AD, Titus partial fulfillment? I think this is going to your post -millennialism.

01:36:20

I think John is taking - He loves asking me post -mill questions. But I would say no, because the temple that Jesus has in mind when he's given the

01:36:32

Olivet Discourse is the second temple because, and really the

01:36:37

Olivet Discourse begins, I want to say in Matthew 22 is where you get the full context of it,

01:36:44

Matthew 22, 23, and then 24. But when they're coming out, Jesus' disciples look and they say, look at this temple.

01:36:55

And Jesus essentially says, yes, get a good look at it now because it's going to be destroyed.

01:37:02

And so we, I mean, when we couple that with Luke 21,

01:37:09

Mark, I think it's Mark 13, you know, when you see these things take place, he uses second person pronouns.

01:37:17

He says this generation, the word there, generation, genea. Every time we see it used in scripture, it means a span of 30 to 40 years.

01:37:27

So he's talking to them and he says, when you see these things, do this.

01:37:33

When you see these things, don't do this. So I believe Matthew 24 was fulfilled.

01:37:38

Now there is a part, I will say, and I'm kind of torn on it, where he says, but I don't think

01:37:47

I am anymore now because I think after it, he says this generation, is when he says this generation. It's the part where he says, heaven and earth will not pass away.

01:37:56

But then he says, just as in the days of Noah, you know, and I'm thinking, okay, well now he's switched context and he's talking about when heaven and earth pass away.

01:38:05

All you need to do is ask Jim Osmond. He'll set you straight. So, hey, speaking of your post -meal, you know,

01:38:15

I don't know if you have you, did you listen to the latest conversations that matter with John Harris? No.

01:38:21

Okay, so here's the thing. They did an episode on Christian nationalism, basically responding to G3 with guys who would disagree.

01:38:31

And unfortunately, what I wish would have happened was that the guys from G3 would have come on. I guess the argument, at least that John said, was that in the communications, they said they wouldn't come on because they felt they were misrepresented.

01:38:45

Well, my view, it's like, well, that's the perfect time to get in, right? If someone's misrepresenting you, then get in the discussion so you're together and it's clear.

01:38:53

I mean, that's what we did with Ben. You know, he's saying we misrepresented him. And I said, well, that's why you must come on so that we can make sure it's clear what you're saying.

01:39:02

And I still heard the exact same thing, both what we said each time.

01:39:09

So I don't know where the misrepresentation was, right? But, you know, because people,

01:39:14

I think what Ben was doing was just saying, oh, you misrepresented me. Okay, where, how? Show it. But, so I wish they would have gotten together and we could have had a good discussion.

01:39:24

I don't quite know what the differences really come down to, but they were, it was interesting because the argument

01:39:30

I guess they were making was that these guys are having a view of Christian nationalism because of their post -mill view.

01:39:37

Yeah, yeah. But then they were promoting Doug Wilson, Doug Wilson's view of Christian nationalism and he's post -mill.

01:39:47

So I was really confused with like, that's where a discussion would have been good. But, so I encourage folks, go check that out.

01:39:54

Check out the Conversations That Matter podcast with John Harris. And that talk on Christian nationalism, man,

01:40:02

I just stay away cause it's - I just, I'm not sure what the, I'd like to hear both sides in a dialogue to explain clearly what is their distinct differences.

01:40:13

Cause I'm hearing each side talking, I'm going, it sounds like you're saying the same thing. And I haven't, granted,

01:40:19

I haven't watched or listened to a lot of it. I stayed out of the whole Twitter sphere part of it, which everyone seems to say was just bad.

01:40:27

It really was. Yeah, I didn't follow it, but I think that, I think we should get together and have discussions.

01:40:35

I appreciate that John tries to do that. That's what we try to do here. It's always sad if one side doesn't, is not willing to do that.

01:40:44

That's why I was so glad when Ben was willing to come in and have the discussion last week, because that's much better way of dealing with it.

01:40:51

We can actually dialogue and have the discussion. And so I appreciate, you know,

01:40:57

John doing that and - And knowing Josh, Josh Bice, because he's only about an hour or so away from here and I've gone to his church.

01:41:08

Whenever I go there, he makes a point to, he sees me, he comes and says, hey, gives me a hug.

01:41:14

But he is a guy that if you have an issue and you say, hey,

01:41:21

I'd like to talk about this thing, he's willing to go have coffee with you and open up the Bible and talk about things.

01:41:28

That's been my impression as well. So, all right, so let's get back to, so Dee had made the point about Ben's condescending attitude.

01:41:40

Okay, so this is something we didn't get to yet. How do we deal with a person who has a condescending attitude especially the fact that he accused me of being condescending, right?

01:41:51

And it was funny because I had to point out, but you keep interrupting me. He was upset because I finally started interrupting him so I can get a word in on my own show, right?

01:42:01

Now granted, I had the power to mute, but folks, you could go and watch past episodes.

01:42:10

How often do I use the power of mute? Very rarely, right? I don't wanna have to resort to that.

01:42:17

Do I have that ability? Yes. Do I want to do that? No, I want to allow the other person to speak freely and communicate what their point is.

01:42:29

But when they keep just being interruptive and keep being condescending, there is a point where if we're gonna have a dialogue, we have to mute them so that we can discuss.

01:42:39

So I have used it, but very sparingly. But it was a point where he ended up, several times

01:42:46

I had to point out the condescending attitude. He denied it and it was funny because he denied it and people are going,

01:42:52

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew in the comments because everybody was seeing the condescending attitude where he kept interrupting, kept talking down, and yet he doesn't see it.

01:43:02

So the thing is, folks, recognize that when you are dialoguing with someone, and this is true for us as well, we have to be aware of this, that people do not see their own behavior the way they see someone else's.

01:43:17

There's very few people that are able to see when they're acting in a way that they could see in someone else, but they don't recognize in themselves.

01:43:25

Very few people seem to be able to do that. There is an aspect where you have to really recognize your own behavior.

01:43:33

Ben couldn't see that. Ben did not believe that he was interrupting me at all because he said it, right?

01:43:40

He didn't think he was condescending. He didn't think, and yet he can see the comments and see the people, what people are saying, and go, well, the audience doesn't agree.

01:43:50

Right, you know. There was, and especially that point, right, where he said, where we're talking about Isaiah 7 and he goes, you know,

01:43:59

I don't know if you know, but there's six chapters before and there's words after it, and those words mean something, right?

01:44:07

It's like, that's where, can you be any more condescending? But, and the crazy thing is, is when he went to Numbers, Numbers 1, to talk about how you count, how you count lineage, the problem with that is

01:44:25

I wanted to go, hey, Ben, you know there's words after that, right, the point that you're trying to make, because it's not saying this is how you count.

01:44:36

Moses is told to count them, but not just every male in every family.

01:44:42

It's males who are 20 and up who are able to fight in war.

01:44:49

So there's a specific type of male that Moses is told to count. And so there's a whole context with that, but he's trying to rip that out of the context and say, no, no, no,

01:45:00

Jesus can't go through the lineage because this is what Moses says, and this is how he must do it.

01:45:06

Okay, you completely missed the context of why Moses was doing that. Yeah, and that's what

01:45:13

I was trying to point out to him is that we have to look at the context to read that.

01:45:20

And he didn't wanna do that at all. And so that becomes the thing that we have to be able to do, is to look at what the context is if it's making the argument that they're saying it's making.

01:45:39

All right, so got some more questions here. Melissa says, do you think it was passionate because you are both ethnic

01:45:47

Jewish people? And this is something that I think, there is an aspect where, let me go back.

01:45:56

I remember having a conversation with David Wood, and he explained that Nabeel Quresh, when he became a

01:46:04

Christian, he would do debates with Muslims. And David Wood had said that Nabeel would debate differently if he was debating a

01:46:17

Muslim from America or the Western world versus one that is from the

01:46:22

Middle East because he'd be very argumentative and seem angry and agitated and just very vocal and emotional in his argumentation, where he wouldn't do that with Americans, American Muslims.

01:46:40

Well, why? One of the things that he understood about Muslims is that in the

01:46:47

Middle East, if you're not passionate in your argumentation, they think you don't really believe it.

01:46:55

So in order, so this is what Paul says about being all things to all people. When he's speaking to someone who has the view of Islam that's more

01:47:05

Westernized, he's going to be more polite and have the conversation like I did with the black

01:47:12

Hebrew -Israelite a couple of weeks ago, where what's the difference with this one?

01:47:18

Is it because it's ethnically Jewish? I think there is an aspect where we both understand the way of debate, or we should have.

01:47:24

I actually, to be honest with you, was quite saddened that Ben had such poor logical argumentation.

01:47:33

I'll just be honest, being raised Jewish, being raised to debate, as many, I mean, all my friends in Hebrew school, we would debate at home in our families.

01:47:45

It wasn't, you're trained to make good logical arguments. I was really sad to see the arguments he was making to say, there was a point,

01:47:55

I'll be honest, Drew, there was a point where I wanted to say to Ben, like, Ben, you're

01:48:00

Jewish. You should know how to argue better than this. Like, it's just something - I just expected a better argument, okay?

01:48:10

I was disappointed with the arguments that I was hearing. So is there an aspect of it?

01:48:16

Yeah, I mean, just like Nabeel would argue more passionately to someone who expects that passion, otherwise, you don't really believe what you're saying.

01:48:26

When I'm having a discussion with someone who is more passionate because of that, because they have that, where a

01:48:34

Jewish person, we're gonna be able to debate without the emotionalism. I couldn't,

01:48:39

I would not be able to do that as easily with someone who, you know, raised in a

01:48:45

Christian home. Mm -hmm. Because it's like, oh, well, you gotta show grace. It's all grace, grace, grace, grace, grace.

01:48:51

And somehow, if you're pointing out my flaws, you're not showing love and grace. Well, first off,

01:48:57

I'm gonna say that that's just a wrong definition of love and grace, but so there could be an aspect of it.

01:49:05

Look, in our emails afterwards, he is still convinced that he could convince me back into Judaism.

01:49:13

And Drew, I told you, I shared with you some of that. You were like, yeah, he doesn't know you very well. No, because I'm gonna be, it's based on logical arguments, okay?

01:49:22

And he just wasn't making them. All right, let's see how many more we can get through. D says, I had

01:49:28

Bible study teacher tell our class that we should avoid the abortion issue altogether when trying to reach the lost.

01:49:36

Your thoughts. Your Bible teacher's wrong? Why would we want to avoid an issue?

01:49:47

So for example, I'm at a gay pie parade and people coming from the parade,

01:49:55

I'm up doing open air and they're bringing the issue of homosexuality. I did not bring it up.

01:50:01

Was I avoiding it? Yeah, kinda. Why? Because there's plenty of other sins I could go to, but I also know that they were gonna bring it up.

01:50:11

And by me not bringing it up, it gave me the opportunity to say, well, I'm not the one bringing it up, you are.

01:50:17

Why are you bringing up? Is it that you know it's a sin? So that's something, a tactical thing

01:50:25

I did on purpose because I wanted to be able to do that. So that's some of the few times

01:50:31

I avoid a thing, but I don't have to bring it up, especially if I know they will.

01:50:36

But if someone brings up the abortion issue, I'm not going to avoid it. In fact,

01:50:42

I'm gonna argue they don't have a response to it from their point of view. Yeah, I wouldn't avoid any issue.

01:50:50

Yeah, I'd never do that. Yeah, I don't think we need to. We have the truth. Okay, so here's another one for you.

01:50:57

Didn't Drew bring up the point that there actually is a word that could be used to say

01:51:05

Mary wasn't a virgin and it wasn't used? And I don't think you brought,

01:51:11

I think you raised that as a question for me. Yeah, so the question was, in the

01:51:17

Jewish culture, what would you call a maiden, a young maiden who had not known a man?

01:51:26

And then what would you call a girl who wasn't married who had known a man?

01:51:37

So one who had committed the sin of fornication versus one who was a virgin. So that was the difference.

01:51:45

And then through that, we got him to say, yes, she would be described as Alma. Okay, that's the point we're making.

01:51:54

Yeah. All right, so let's see. Okay, John says, hey,

01:52:00

Andrew, your thoughts on the Book of Enoch. Is it a viable source of biblical history?

01:52:06

It's been a long, long time since I've read the Book of Enoch. As far as any of like the

01:52:14

Book of Maccabees, any of that, I think that what you have is, yeah, they may be, they're not scripture, but they give you an idea of the time, the biblical history, the time in biblical history.

01:52:27

You have a view, you get the view of what people thought and stuff like that.

01:52:33

So it could give you insight, but it's not scripture. And therefore it's not infallible that we could trust.

01:52:41

So yeah, I mean, it'd give you insight. Just the fact that it could be quoted even in the

01:52:46

Bible doesn't mean it's authoritative or anything. All right. Rob says, rarely do you see quote, wow,

01:52:55

I never thought of it that way. You've changed my mind, unquote, or something to that effect.

01:53:00

That's true. When you're doing debates, look, human pride is what it is.

01:53:06

I wanna give kudos to Ben because there were several times,

01:53:13

Drew, there's one point where you brought out the Greek in the definitive article and he had to concede the point.

01:53:20

Now, it was interesting. He didn't wanna concede. He did concede the point that Alma could and often does refer to a virgin, but then he wanted to just deny that.

01:53:31

So it's like, wait, you just conceded my whole point. Now, maybe it's because, again, because we're both ethnically

01:53:38

Jewish, it's a stronger thing, but he conceded it.

01:53:43

Now, that is good because a lot of people, their pride, they can't concede anything.

01:53:49

It's like, if you give anything, you give an inch, it's, no, I can't do it. I mean, look, okay, so when we're recording this,

01:53:57

Ron DeSantis just announced he's running for president. What do you have? You have a bunch of Trump supporters that are calling him a traitor, right?

01:54:04

So if DeSantis is the one who ends up running for office, are you not gonna vote for him just because he beat your guy?

01:54:12

That's the attitude we have sometimes with people with their pride. Like, it has to be this way.

01:54:18

Yeah, speaking of traitor, Trump was the one that said six -week abortion bans are too harsh, but this is the same

01:54:27

Trump that was running saying we should end abortion. Yeah.

01:54:34

Talk about a traitor. Look, the reality is DeSantis seems to be far more right and conservative than Trump, but let's go move on.

01:54:45

KT says this, they need to have a moderator, a mediator. Striking Fraternity, why don't you do that?

01:54:53

We have done that, actually. When we've done formal debates here, we have had moderators that will do that, but because this is a live show, we don't really need it.

01:55:03

I mean, I'm okay with giving a person who comes in ample time to express their views.

01:55:11

So John asks, question, is John Harris post? I actually don't know.

01:55:17

I guess I would think he's dispensational pre -mill, but I don't know that for sure.

01:55:24

I think that's how he was raised and where he went to school, but don't know.

01:55:30

Okay, Rob says, isn't Christian nationalism what CRT supporters are accusing Christians of?

01:55:37

This was something that they brought up on, that was discussed on the matter, and the argument,

01:55:45

I guess that, I'm guessing, having not followed all the Twitter stuff, that G3 was making, or at least on the podcast, and one thing

01:55:53

I did appreciate, they played the podcast. I mean, right, there was an hour -long podcast, they played it, and John was trying to play through it, but he got to a point where he's like, look, all they're doing is talking about how wonderful G3 is.

01:56:05

They're not actually dealing with the argument. Is there a point where we could deal with the argument?

01:56:11

And what he wanted was, he wanted a discussion, and so when they didn't show, he figured to just play their hour -long podcast, and he just, okay, let me just move forward to find times where they're discussing stuff.

01:56:27

I think what would have been better is to grab clips of that, but I think he was really counting on having that discussion.

01:56:34

So they mentioned that the accusation, I guess, that folks from G3 are making is that these other guys are making a

01:56:43

CRT type of argument. They said that that's not the case.

01:56:48

They laid that out. I'll let you listen to a conversation that mattered here. Bond Servant for Jesus said,

01:56:56

Melissa says, I don't think he liked when Drew said something. Did anyone get that vibe?

01:57:03

I'm not sure what she was referring to at that point. I don't know, probably just when I was, when

01:57:09

I would ask Ben a question, she thought, and he didn't like the questions I asked him.

01:57:16

No, he didn't. Well, that's because you got to ask questions that demand an answer, which is what we talked about, asking good questions.

01:57:25

And so one of the great things about being here and allowing Andrew to take most of the discussion is that I get to listen and then think about questions that I can ask.

01:57:39

And so the questions that I asked were in line with kind of what he was saying. And I was trying to think of a different way to get to what

01:57:46

Andrew was saying, but maybe come at it from a different angle through asking a question in a different way.

01:57:53

And so sometimes it works, sometimes they dismiss it. Sometimes, you know. Yeah.

01:57:59

So John is asking, question, what is G3? So G3 is, it was a conference, it's now a ministry to support churches.

01:58:11

Josh Bice is the president of it, founder. So yeah, so they've got podcasts and different things.

01:58:19

All right, so this, we'll end with this question, although it'll take a bit. John asks, question, any thoughts on Ravi Zacharias from RZIM?

01:58:28

Yeah, we did a whole podcast about Ravi Zacharias.

01:58:37

And so I'll encourage you to go back and listen, you know, search for Paul Jack's live and Ravi Zacharias.

01:58:46

Here's the things. Okay, so this was after it came out that he was sexually abusing women.

01:58:53

So the real issue, I've had problems with Ravi Zacharias for many, many years.

01:59:00

Biggest thing, first off, that set me off with Ravi Zacharias was very early on when he came to America, he started to get a kind of a big following.

01:59:12

What ended up happening was his claim was that he got a

01:59:20

PhD from a university in India that he then afterwards was teaching at that university before coming to America.

01:59:29

And that was an issue of debate and discussion. And this is going back,

01:59:37

I mean, I want to say in the 90s, but when the internet had come out, and the internet really did create lots of interesting things because people used to be able to make claims like the

01:59:53

Mormon church made claims for centuries. And the internet is doing such damage to the

01:59:59

Mormon church because you can now verify things. Well, I think Ravi Zacharias was able to claim that he had a

02:00:05

PhD from this university and was a professor. But I remember seeing on that university website that they actually had an article about Ravi Zacharias denying that he ever attended a single class.

02:00:19

So not only did he not have a PhD, not only was he not a professor there, he never even attended a class there.

02:00:26

They said they don't even know if he was ever on campus. Well, that's a major issue.

02:00:33

Okay. And so that's something that he continued to tell something that was false.

02:00:42

Then you have the case where there was some financial mishandlings. Then you have the case where we find out he had been involved in human trafficking and sexual abuse of women.

02:00:57

All of these things are very serious claims. And so I wouldn't,

02:01:03

I gave up listening to him long ago because of the fact that he lied about his credentials.

02:01:10

Yeah, before I even knew any of that stuff, I had listened to Ravi a couple of times, but I quit listening to it because he was giving all of these philosophical arguments, but he was never touching the gospel.

02:01:24

He would never give it at, and he would go, I mean, his ministry headquarters was here in Georgia and he would be at Georgia Tech all the time.

02:01:34

And these college students would ask him all these questions and he'd just give all these philosophical answers that you go, oh, that sounds so good.

02:01:42

But if you think about it and you just realize what he's doing, you go, oh, these kids are gonna hear this and if they die, they're still gonna die in their sin.

02:01:53

Yeah, like Rob says, persuasive arguments, no gospel, agreed. And that's the thing, he's a philosopher.

02:02:00

He's not an evangelist. And that was always the issue. You walked away thinking

02:02:06

Ravi's brilliant and you can't do what he does, okay? Folks, why do so many people watch this or listen?

02:02:15

And we have thousands of people that will download this and podcast and listen, why?

02:02:21

Because what we do here, you can do. We don't sit there and say, look at how wonderful we are.

02:02:27

Don't you, it's amazing that you can't do what we do because we're so smart. You know, like John is saying here,

02:02:34

William Lane Craig does the same. It's the same thing. You walk away saying they're brilliant. I feel so inadequate.

02:02:41

Well, that's not what we wanna do here in this show. The purpose of this show is to show you are adequate to do apologetics.

02:02:48

You can do it. You just need to know the word of God. Study your Bible and you can defend it.

02:02:56

You can do this. That is the difference with William Lane Craig or Ravi Zacharias and what we're gonna do here.

02:03:02

We want you to know that if you know the gospel of Jesus Christ, if you've been converted to Christ, you've recognized your sin before a

02:03:09

Holy God and he put his Holy Spirit inside of you, brought you to repentance so that you are now converted in Christian, then you have the

02:03:18

Holy Spirit. You can defend it. Every Christian can do this. That's the difference we have.

02:03:24

This is my thing with William Lane Craig because in his debates, his public debates, he will say,

02:03:30

I'm not defending the God of the Bible. I'm here to defend just a general open theism.

02:03:37

Okay, well then get off the stage. I don't believe in a probable

02:03:45

God. Like when he says the greater preponderance of the evidence leads to the greater probability of a

02:03:51

God. No, I don't believe in a God. I believe in the God. And so I'm not gonna argue for a

02:04:00

God, for the possibility of a God. Like Greg Bonson would say in his great debate against Gordon Stein, right at the front,

02:04:09

I am a Christian, I am defending the God of the Bible. Yeah, and see, a

02:04:14

William Lane Craig would have taken the discussion last week a totally different way. Because when Ben says, well, let's accept that the

02:04:22

New Testament isn't written from God, a William Lane Craig would say, okay, let's start with that premise. And did

02:04:28

I start with that premise? I wouldn't start with that premise, right? I'm gonna say, well, you're not handling scripture the same way.

02:04:36

You have to make the argument that there's actually a contradiction and there isn't any in the

02:04:41

Old Testament that are similar. You can't sit there and say that the Old Testament can have a dual meaning, but the

02:04:47

New Testament can't, right? And so like Rob says, what that does is concede the ground already.

02:04:54

And see, I won't do that, right? So I hope this is helpful. I hope that we spent two hours kind of dissecting last week's show in a bit.

02:05:05

But what I hope it did was show you guys why we do what we do, why we bring up some of the questions we bring up.

02:05:12

What was our focus when we're asking the questions and having a discussion like that?

02:05:17

And I want you to remember, because you're gonna start to see it. Go back to old shows and watch, you're gonna see I do the same thing all the time.

02:05:23

I'm looking at what's their premise, what's their support, what's their conclusion, and I'm looking for logical validity through that.

02:05:32

And if it's not there, I point it out. I'm gonna look at really the main focus is learning how to interpret the

02:05:39

Bible. When he's saying, this is what Alma means, what am I doing? Saying, well, context, what is that?

02:05:44

That's hermeneutics, right? I'm looking at how we interpret. And so John says this, great job,

02:05:54

Drew and Andrew, love learning from you guys. Well, thank you very much for that.

02:06:01

We enjoy being here to be able to do this. John is saying, where was it?

02:06:09

It was this one. Should I join the show and show my chickens again? So, yeah, that'd be fine, except we're gonna end.

02:06:18

But so with that, folks, I hope this was helpful. So I think next week we'll probably do,

02:06:27

I believe next week we'll do an open Q and A. I don't know of a topic that we have planned.

02:06:36

I should tell you that on June 15th, we do have planned we're gonna be having someone from the

02:06:47

Essential Church documentary on to have a discussion on that documentary.

02:06:55

It's gonna be coming out. So that's coming up again. If you're gonna be around July 7th and 8th in Indianapolis, check out the

02:07:04

Evangelium Training Conference. You can go on to Eventbrite and share that, check that out.

02:07:11

I would encourage you guys, check out my other podcast, Wrap Report. It's a wrap with two Ps, R -A -P -P,

02:07:17

Space Report. Check that out as well. And just really appreciate you guys, if you share this with others, if you think that it's helpful and you find some value in this, please share it with others.

02:07:32

We really appreciate that. We'd also just recommend if you support us, either whether it be through supporting our supporters, which would be my pillow and Logos Bible Software, or just go to strivingforturning .org

02:07:45

slash support, that'd be a best way to do it so that the support goes directly there.

02:07:51

So we appreciate you guys tuning in each week. Love you guys all in the chat, and we'll see you next week.