July 29, 2009

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This is Chris Arns, and if you've just tuned us in, our guests today are Harold Camping, the founder and president of Family Radio, and Dr.
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James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. And this is the two -day debate on the theme,
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Has the Church Age Ended?, which is part two of this two -day debate. And I'd also like to thank someone
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I failed to thank yesterday, Richard Pierce, one of the engineers, or the chief engineer, and the president of Alpha and Omega Ministries for helping yesterday to run smoothly.
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First of all, let me introduce to you now Mr. Harold Camping of Family Radio.
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It's great to have you back for part two of the debate, Mr. Camping. I can't hear him now. I've been hearing him okay.
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Okay, Mr. Camping, can you hear me now? Yes. Yes, great. Welcome back to the part two of the debate.
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And James White, Dr. James R. White, welcome back for part two of the debate as well.
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It's good to be with you, Chris. I'm not sure what's going on with your end, but you're breaking up a little bit, and then you sound good, and if somebody's playing with something, they need to stop playing with it.
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Okay. Well, hopefully... Right now, you sound good, so if they'll just leave it right there, everything will be good.
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Okay. Don't touch anything! Somebody keep this razor blade away from me.
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But anyway... Who will be the first speaker? Actually, we're going to let
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Mr. Camping have the last word during every segment today. We thought it'd be fair to give
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Mr. Camping the advantage today, since Dr. White was the second speaker every segment yesterday.
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Today, James White will be first, and Mr. Camping will be second. So for the first five minutes, we will hear from Dr.
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White, then the second five minutes from Mr. Camping, and then from then on, there will be three -minute intervals, just as they were yesterday, with Dr.
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White leading and Mr. Camping following. But Dr. James R. White, please proceed with your first five minutes of today.
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Thank you very much, Chris. In Mr. Camping's book, We Are Almost There, we read, for example, anyone who follows the man -made grammatical historical hermeneutic, which is utilized throughout the church world, will not be able to correctly understand many very important truths of the
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Bible. This includes the Bible's teachings concerning the end of the church age, and the fact that the true believers can know much about the timetable and details of the end of the world, end quote.
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Mr. Camping's methodology of abandoning the original meaning of the text, the authorial intent, and how the original audiences would interpret those words, turns the
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Bible into a large pile of theological play -doh, ready to be formed into whatever Mr. Camping desires.
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We should note in passing that the central doctrines of the faith are founded not upon Camping's allegory and numerology, but upon the sound exegesis of the original meaning of the text.
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This might explain Camping's confusion on the Trinity, and his repeated anti -Trinitarian assertions that Jesus is the
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Father, or the Holy Spirit. And this is surely what we saw yesterday as we examined his allegations that God's wrath is upon the church, that Jesus died twice, his annihilationism, and his teaching that a rapture will take place
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May 21st, 2011. Yet Mr. Camping attempted to defend his abandonment of any meaningful method of exegesis by appealing to Mark 4, 33 -34, which reads,
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And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. But without a parable spake he not unto them, and when they were alone he expounded all things to his disciples.
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Mr. Camping presents his exegesis of this text in We Are Almost There, page 4, where we read, The foregoing principle that Christ spoke in parables, and without a parable he did not speak, appears to be the chief means by which
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God assists the true believers to further understand the Bible. End quote. Now this is a gross misreading of Mark chapter 4.
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Jesus did not always speak in parables. Most of the time he spoke with great plainness and without a parable. But even more so,
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Mark 4 says that he spoke in parables to unbelievers, not to believers. He provided plain, shall we say, historical, grammatical interpretations of the parables to believers.
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So to turn this historical incident into a full -blown method of interpreting the Bible is plainly fallacious. Further, John chapter 21 tells us that the gospel is written so that people might believe.
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Camping has misunderstood a specific use of parables as part of judgment upon unbelieving Israel, as if it is a warrant for him to abandon the original meaning and intent of scripture, and this leads to all the rest of his teachings.
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Let me present an argument using allegory and parable, and see if Mr. Camping can disprove it. We know that family radio broadcasts all the world on the airwaves, using satellite, shortwave, regular broadcast signals.
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Yet we also know that the prince of the power of the air is who? Well, it's Satan. So obviously and clearly, the
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Bible, which is only speaking of our modern day and really said nothing to all those who were originally used of God in its writing, is teaching that in the end days, those who use the power of the air, like family radio, are under the dominion of Satan.
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Therefore, we should flee family radio. Now, I think that argument is bogus. It's nuts. But the point is, how do you disprove it?
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The only way to do so is to appeal to the original context and the original meanings of the words. Mr. Camping cannot do this.
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He has abandoned the text of scripture and turned it into a huge pile of disconnected words and phrases that he can reform into any shape he desires.
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So how can you disprove my argument? All I have to do is say that God has revealed this to me, claim Daniel 12 mentions a sealed book, make that the
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Bible, though the immediate context of Daniel 12 said it is not the Bible at all, say that we are in the end times, the
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Spirit has given me spiritual understanding of the book that is now opened, and who can argue the point? No one. Since I have now transferred ultimate authority from the inspired text to me, the inspired interpreter.
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And that is exactly what Mr. Camping does. Just this week on the Open Forum, callers have called in who have used the exact methods of interpretation, and I use the word lightly, to find out, for example, that Christ will come at noon on May 21st, or who found the number 21 in the
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Bible. Mr. Camping's reply? He rejected them all. Why? Because he can refer to some external standard and unchangeable criteria?
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Of course not. The final authority for reading the Bible today is Harold Camping. He told one caller on Monday that to do what he was doing was to abuse the use of numbers in the
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Bible. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. But we must understand that in the world of Harold Camping, there is no means of refuting his conclusions, since he is the final authority as to what any number or allegory in the
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Bible means. And this is the exact position taken by everyone in the past who has sought to gather followers to themselves, such as Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Smith, William Miller, William Branham, Ellen G.
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White, etc. We were warned against these men long, long ago in Acts chapter 20. Paul said,
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I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves, men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.
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To those who believe the apostles and listen to what the apostles said in Scripture, they will hear these words and flee from anyone who exhorts them to abandon the original meaning of the
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Scriptures themselves. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. White. And now, Mr.
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Camping, you have five minutes. Yes. Well, you know, I want to get into the argument that you were using in our yesterday's discussion when you were speaking of your total unbelief that 2011 could be the year of Christ's return.
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You know, it's interesting that God has given us marvelous proofs in the
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Bible that show that what we have been, the conclusions we have been coming to are very accurate by God's mercy, only by God's mercy.
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But, you know, years and years ago, in fact,
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I wrote a book, Adam Owen, that was published for the first time about 35 years ago, following very carefully the biblical rules for understanding, because God has laid down very biblical rules.
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In Mark 3, he says, Christ spoke in parables, and without a parable, he did not speak.
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And we know that Christ is the Word of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
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We cannot, and Christ is eternal God, and we cannot disassociate
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Him at all from the whole Bible. The Holy Spirit moved men to write, and this is what we find in the
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Bible. Now, on top of that, the biblical rule is we compare
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Scripture with Scripture, as we read in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 13, namely, the
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Bible is its own interpreter. It is its own dictionary.
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We have to get our information only from the Bible. Now, very carefully, following those rules, already about 35 years ago,
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I had learned, by God's mercy, that the Flood occurred in the year 4990
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B .C., when we coordinated with our calendar, 4990
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B .C. And then, of course, in these latter years, I have learned that, just again, carefully, diligently, faithfully, praying for God's mercy, praying for God's wisdom,
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I have followed these same rules and come to the conclusion that May 21, 2011, is the day of the
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Rapture and the first day of the Day of Judgment. Now, Christ gives us the proof of that.
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We read in 2 Peter chapter 3, he is saying, first of all, in verse 6, whereby the world that was then was being overflowed with water perished.
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That's the Flood of Noah's day. Then he goes on, but the heavens and the earth, which are now by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the
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Day of Judgment and production of ungodly men. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about May 21.
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But then God gives us a very interesting statement, but beloved, and we know from the
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Bible, Christ spoke in parables, our beloved has to do with those who are the true believers.
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Be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the
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Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
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Now, what is Christ saying? Well, we examine these two terrible events, the
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Flood and the destruction at the end of the world, and we find that in Genesis, God told
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Noah, who the Bible tells us he was a preacher of righteousness, to build an ark and to pitch it with in and out, with pitch.
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And incidentally, that word pitch is the same word as the word atonement.
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It's spelled exactly the same. And so that ark was a picture of the atonement.
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It is going to keep the floodwaters out. It is a place of safety.
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And he told Noah, you have seven days to get into the ark, because then the floodwaters will begin.
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And indeed, on the 17th day of the second month of the
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Jewish calendar of that day, the floodwaters did come. Now, Christ here in 2
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Peter 3 says, well, we'll look at that in the next moment. Yes, thank you,
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Mr. Camping. Now, Dr. James R. White, you have three minutes. Mr.
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Camping just said that I have a total unbelief that Christ could return in 2011. Of course he could return in 2011. He could even return on May 21st, but he could just as easily return on the 20th or the 22nd or tomorrow for that matter.
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And we need to recognize that by setting a date like this, Mr. Camping is saying he could not return tomorrow and he cannot return the 22nd.
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This is a violation of scriptural teaching. Of course Christ could return in 2011. That's the whole point of why we are not given the day or the hour.
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And no man knows the day or that hour. Jesus often spoke in other than parables.
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In fact, the amount of parables in comparison to the straight didactic teaching of Jesus is very, very small.
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When it says he only spoke in parables, it was talking about in that particular context at that particular time. It is just so plainly obvious to anyone who reads the
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New Testament that Jesus did not always speak in parables. We must recognize the different types of literature that are in the
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Bible. Yes, we compare scripture with scripture, but that does not mean that we treat the Bible as a contextless document of text to be put together in any form we want, where we ignore the original context of anything that we're dealing with.
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Mr. Camping says that he knows that the flood took place in 4990 B .C.
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and that he's used the rules given by the Bible. Well, what were those rules? Parables. He does not know when the flood took place.
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No one knows when the flood took place other than God himself. The Bible does not give us sufficient evidence.
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People have speculated and they've put together numbers and Mr. Camping takes apart numbers and says, well, the spiritual meaning of this number is this and the spiritual meaning of that number is that.
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Where does he get all of this? He doesn't get it from the Bible. He gets it from himself. And so he puts these things together and he tells us that this all happened.
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When he reads from Peter, why is that flood the flood of Noah's day? Now, it was.
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That's what's in the context. Remember, we can't trust the context. We can't worry about what Peter originally meant.
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Why? Why? Why can't we? Why can't the spiritual man say that it's like the flood of the gospel over the world?
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And see, this system of interpretation leads to an utter collapse of the meaning of the text. You can't go back and say, no, this is what it really says, because what you've done, as I said in my opening, is you've transferred the inspiration and the authority of the text to yourself.
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It's no longer the text that has a meaning, because any of those words could have any meaning that Harold Camping assigns to it, or that any other teacher comes along and says, leave the churches, follow me.
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I have this latter day understanding. And that's exactly what every group out there over the past, how many hundreds of years has done, has said, flee the churches, listen to me.
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I have this spiritual understanding that nobody else has. And that's why Paul warned us against those people.
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In Acts chapter 20, he warned Timothy about them as well. And those warnings remain valid to this very day.
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Thank you, Dr. White. And now, Mr. Camping, you have three minutes. You know, we're going, we're finding that there were seven days before, and Paul as a preacher of righteousness was proclaiming that because the floodwaters are going to begin.
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Now, Christ said, the Bible says in 2 Peter chapter 3, a day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.
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So let's substitute a thousand years for a day. And now
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Noah is effectively preaching, Ben, you have 7 ,000 years in which to get into the ark, which has been pitched with the atonement, which has the security of the gospel, the security of Christ.
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Well, okay. When was the flood? 4990 B .C. When is the end coming as we've learned following these same rules very carefully?
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2011. How many years are there from 4990 B .C.
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to 2011? We add the two numbers together, we get 7 ,001. We subtract one because there's no year zero, and we find exactly 7 ,000 years.
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Christ has said, has given us the gigantic proof that we have come to the right numbers in the 4990
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B .C. and in the 2011 B .C. Otherwise, how could it ever work out so accurately?
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And not only that, but the biblical date that we find in Genesis chapter 7, about when the floodwaters began, was the 17th day of the second month.
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And lo and behold, when we look at May 21, and find what the biblical date of that is, and you can check this on any
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Jewish calendar, you'll find it was the 17th day of the second month.
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Now, this is all from the Word of God. I have not had a dream, or a vision, or eaten sour grapes, or whatever.
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This comes right out of the Word of God. And it truly demonstrates that we have understood how to understand the
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Bible correctly. We've come up with answers that God is calling attention to.
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Now, incidentally, He doubles this. A day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day.
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And, frankly, that also is very important. I'll speak about that right after.
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Thank you very much, Mr. Kemping. And now, Dr. White, you have three minutes. Excellent examples just given to us of the inconsistency of this kind of allegorical interpretation, and how there is no way for it to carry truth because it is not disprovable.
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What was just pointed out was that the 21st of May of 2011 is the 17th day of the second month of the
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Jewish calendar. How is a Jewish calendar calculated? It's calculated on the basis of a 360 -day year, not 365 like we use.
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That's why they have to build a month into it every few years to make it catch up with the solar calendar. And yet, elsewhere in Mr.
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Kemping's writings, he uses, for example, when he came up with 8 ,723 years and he multiplied the things out, he had to use a 365 -day plus the leap year to make the numbers work out.
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So in one place, he's using a Western calendar and Western solar calculations of the dates, and then now he's using a
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Jewish 360 -day year whenever he can just make the two of them match up. And I can guarantee you, if they didn't match up, then he'd just switch from one of the others to make it match up.
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This kind of writing has been around for a long time. The Jehovah's Witnesses were doing this back in the 1800s.
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Miller did it in the middle of the 1800s, which gave rise to the Jehovah's Witness movement. There are shelves and shelves of books that have been written by people who have proven in the past that Christ was returning in the 1800s and in the 1900s, and all of them have had to find some way around of the clear biblical teaching that of that day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the sun nor the angels in heaven.
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And I think we need to point out that Mr. Kemping, in trying to explain that text, has actually even suggested that when
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Jesus said, nor the sun, nor the angels, that the sun might be Satan. He says, well, if it's not
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Satan, then it's just an experiential knowledge. This is partly due to his confusion of the doctrine of the
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Trinity, but again, context means nothing in these situations. You can take any number from anywhere.
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For example, he just said, you know, a day is a thousand years, a thousand years is a day, so on and so forth, years and all these.
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What was Peter's point there? His point was that people who were mocking the coming of Christ need to recognize that God works on a different timetable than us.
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That's not some kind of a system that you're supposed to insert into your favorite text.
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You could take any statement about any number of days or any number of years, anywhere in the Bible, and make it mean anything numerologically by abusing that text in that fashion.
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And on May 22nd of 2011, that kind of abuse and misuse of the
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Scripture is going to be very clearly demonstrated. And my concern is that the people who have been fooled by this will then lose their faith in the
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Bible, thinking that this misinterpretation of the Bible is, in fact, the same as the teaching of the
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Bible, and they are not the same thing. Thank you, Dr. White and Mr. Camping. You now have three minutes.
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You know, when we read in 2 Peter 3, verse 8, it says,
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A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.
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Why did God double that? God set the principle in Genesis 41, in verse 32.
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Remember when Joseph was talking to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh had the dream about the seven fat ears of corn, and then the seven fat cattle?
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And then God told Pharaoh through Joseph, for that dream was doubled unto
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Pharaoh, because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.
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And so we can integrate this piece of information into 2
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Peter 3, and learn not only has God given us an outstanding and accurate proof that we have done our homework accurately, because the year 4990 was not just grabbed out of the air, it came out of diligent work in the
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Scripture. The year 2011 did not come out of the air. It came out of very careful following the rules of the
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Bible. And now God doubles it to show that it is established, and that it is shortly going to come to pass.
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And I'll tell you, we're less than two years away for it to come to pass. But you know, marvelously,
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God has given other proofs. When we study the Bible very carefully, again, following the rules, we find that we can know that it was
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April 1, 2000, no, excuse me, April 1, in AD 33, that Christ was crucified.
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We—that is a very, very—it has to meet all the requirements of the
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Bible. It had to be a Friday. It had to be a day when the biblical calendar was the day of the
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Passover, the 14th day of the 7th of the first month, and other requirements.
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And that is all matched when we look at April 1 in 33
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AD. Now, we also find that we have found from the
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Bible, just following carefully, following the rules of the Bible, that May 21, 2011, is the end.
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Well, you know, I was teaching this a couple of years ago, and a caller called up on the open forum, and I'll tell you what he had to say.
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Thank you, Mr. Camping, and I want to remind those of you who just called in—or just tuned in,
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I should say—today is day number two of the two -day debate with Harold Camping of Family Radio and Dr.
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James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries on the theme, Has the Church Age Ended?
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And we are going to go to a brief station identification and commercial break right now, so please don't go away.
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We'll be right back with Dr. James R. White's next three -minute segment, right after these messages.
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James R. White. Well, it doesn't look like as much of a debate today because it sounds like Mr. Camping is ignoring what
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I'm saying and just giving his presentation about 2011, which is understandable. It is not diligent work in the scripture to abuse its original meaning and to turn it into theological
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Plato that you form into your own ideas. We don't know the exact date of Christ's crucifixion.
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It could have been April 1st, but we don't even know that it was in AD 33. To build entire things that you add to the gospel, need to believe these things as part of the gospel, based upon that is pure subjectivism.
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He says that we are carefully following the rules of the Bible. As someone in my chat channel just noted, rule number one, ask
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Harold Camping. Rule number two, agree with Harold Camping. Those seem to be the rules that are here. Where are these rules laid out in scripture?
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In fact, even to interpret parables, to interpret parables properly is to recognize that parables have a single meaning to them and to not get distracted in all the things that are on the outside.
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This is not doing diligent work. Let me show you what doing diligent work is. Mr. Camping has been corrected by a number of people who have called to his program.
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He has recently embraced, or over the past few years, embraced annihilationism. When people point to Revelation 20, verse 10, the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night, forever and ever.
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As soon as somebody quotes that, he says, ah, but you see the preposition in Revelation 2010 should be translated to, not forever and ever, but to.
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And so that means it's going to have an ending when the eternal state comes into existence. Well, I don't believe that Mr.
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Camping actually reads Greek. And if he did, then he would recognize that the preposition there is part of a phrase, the very exact same phrase that appears, for example, in Revelation 1, 18, where Jesus says, and the living one, and I was dead, and behold,
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I am alive forevermore. Exact same phrase. So if we take his understanding of Revelation 2010 and his retranslation of the
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Greek, which no Greek scholar would substantiate, that would mean that Jesus will cease to exist at the beginning of the eternal state.
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That's what you get when you start playing with the text of the Bible, when you don't actually know the fields that you're pretending to address.
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That's what happens. This isn't diligent study of the text of Scripture. This isn't handling the text properly.
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This isn't giving due diligence to the lexical sources and the backgrounds. That's hard work.
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And it doesn't allow you to gather a bunch of followers around you who call you and ask you for your understanding of, well, everything in the
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Bible. Because you see, that means that when a man really handles the word of God right, that means that there's going to be someone down the road and in the next county and the next city who's saying the same thing.
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And that's because God's word doesn't change. That's what we should be doing. Thank you,
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Dr. White. And Mr. Camping, you now have three minutes. I'm sorry that this isn't much of a debate according to your understanding.
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But you have to remember, you are making many, many charges about the way
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I am studying the Bible, and it's taking me a little bit extra time, I admit, to prove from the
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Bible by the information the Bible gives us, that indeed,
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I am following the Bible very, very accurately, and it's only by God's mercy.
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Now, we were talking about this, these two dates, April 1 and May 21,
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April 1, 33 A .D., and May 21, 2011. And a caller called me, and he said, you know, there's exactly 722 ,500 days, inclusively, between those two dates, and if you break that down, you're going to find it's very interesting.
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Well, I took the bait, and I'm going to tell you how you can break it down.
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First of all, how many years are those dates apart? They're 1978 years apart.
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You subtract 33 from 2011, 1978. How many days in a year?
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Don't look at your calendar, look at what the scientists, the astronomers have worked out as they have discovered
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God's perfect cause, as they're able to bring a man to the moon, or a rocket ship to Mars, that there are 365 .2422
33:47
days in a year. No matter how many thousands of years you go back, if you take the number of years and multiply it by 365 .2422,
34:01
you will get exactly the number of days. And from May, from April 1 of 2000, of 33
34:11
AD, to April 1 of 2011, is exactly, when
34:17
I multiply 1978 times 365 .2422,
34:23
we get the number 722 ,499 .07.
34:32
In other words, it's right on 722 ,499.
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Now, that's from April 1 to April 1. If we add 51 more days to get us to May 21, we find that the number is 722 ,500 days.
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500 days. Now, that's a very interesting number, and we'll talk about that next.
35:01
Thank you very much, Mr. Camping. And now, Dr. White, you have three minutes. On yesterday's open forum, a woman called in and asked what would happen if the
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May 21, 2011 date passed without anything happening. And Mr. Camping replied that we don't ask that question.
35:17
That would be like asking, what if the Bible is wrong? The identification of Mr. Camping's personal opinions, his numerology, his putting numbers together, and, oh, well, if we set this here and then we divide this by here, look, this comes out here.
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The identification of Mr. Camping's personal opinions based upon an unidentifiable, unprovable, incoherent method of allegory and numerology, which was used to prove 1988, 1994, 1975, 1914, and every other false prophecy of the past.
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To identify that with the truth, the Bible is a dangerous, dangerous falsehood. And that's why I'm taking the time to engage in this and responding to what
35:58
Mr. Camping is saying. Mr. Camping gets to present this stuff for hours a day on an entire radio network.
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In a debate, you'd like to have some interaction. I've presented a number of issues that already demonstrate that there's much to be questioned about Mr.
36:14
Camping's accuracy in his handling of the Word of God. But I wish that everyone in The Sound of My Voice, and especially those who are listening, who listen to family radio and are convinced of Mr.
36:25
Camping's perspectives, I wish you to know that the truth of the Bible is a completely different matter than the abuse of the
36:31
Bible by Mr. Camping. And I hope you come to realize that before May 22nd of 2011.
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I hope you come to realize that even now, as you look at the Bible and realize that it had a meaning when it was written, and there have been many people who have come along over the centuries since and have said,
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Oh, you don't have to worry about that. Just listen to me. I'm the one that has the spiritual insights.
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I get to choose what is and what is not relevant. Remember, I pointed out that people were starting to use the same type of interpretation, and they bring these things up to Mr.
37:08
Camping. Oh, no, no, no, you're wrong about that. We don't need to worry about that. And you just move on. Why? Upon what basis?
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See, there is no consistent basis for saying, well, we choose these words and we put meaning into them and we assign these spiritual meanings, but we don't do that over here.
37:25
We're not consistent. I can do it to Revelation 2010, and I can change what the meaning of the Greek phrase there is so that I can maintain my annihilationism.
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Or I can do this over here to say that Jesus died twice, even though it completely overthrows everything that the New Testament says about the atonement of Christ.
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I can do all of those things. I get to choose what I read into and what
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I don't. What's going to happen when Harold Camping's gone? Who's going to understand? Is it going to be somebody else?
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Are you going to be looking for some new prophet to lead at that point? That is the question. If the
37:56
Bible does not have one consistent meaning for each generation, then what good truly is it?
38:03
Thank you, Dr. White. And Mr. Camping, you now have three minutes.
38:09
Yeah, you know, we've come to the point where there are 722 ,500 days between these two biblical dates that have come right from the
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Bible. Right from the Bible. We have to follow the biblical rules very, very carefully.
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And when we break that down, we find that it is 850 times 850, 722 ,500.
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Well, and then when we break that down into significant numbers, we find that it is 5 times 10 times 17 times 5 times 10 times 17.
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Now, God used words in the Bible as parables. For example, he used the word, the land of Canaan to signify the kingdom of God.
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He used the word sheep to illustrate the believers. He used the word lamb to illustrate
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Christ. He used the word door also to talk about Christ. Christ said,
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I am the door. And numbers are words, and he used them also. For example, he used the number five to illustrate the atonement.
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We find in the Old Testament where a half shekel temple tax was paid as atonement money, and that is point five.
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It's illustrating the number five. And we don't have enough time, but there are other places where the number five is used that way.
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The number 10 or the number 100 or the number thousand is used to understand completeness.
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We find in Revelation 20 where Satan will be bound a thousand years, and at the end of a thousand years, he'll be loose.
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Everything in the Bible points that he was bound at the time of the cross, and he was loosed long after a thousand years went by.
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So what God is saying is that he was bound for the completeness of God's plan, just like he uses the word 10 coins to indicate completeness of believers, 100 or the 100 sheep to indicate completeness.
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Now here we find in the, and he uses the number 17, for example, to illustrate heaven, and that can be shown, demonstrated from the
40:52
Bible. I don't know whether we'll have time to do this right in this brief time, but when we break down 722 ,500 into its significant numbers, it's 850 times 850, and 850 breaks down to five times 10 times 17.
41:19
Thank you, Mr. Camping. Your three minutes are up. And I just want to make a quick announcement for those of you who just tuned in.
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This is day number two of the two -day debate. On the theme, has the church age ended between Harold Camping, the founder and president of Family Radio, and Dr.
41:37
James R. White, the co -founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, in addition to being the author of Dangerous Airwaves, Harold Camping refuted, and Christ Church defended.
41:48
We are not taking phone calls during this debate. We are going to be taking phone calls tomorrow with Dr.
41:55
James R. White alone, and then on Friday with Mr. Harold Camping alone. We will take calls from our listeners then.
42:02
But Dr. White, if you could continue now with your three -minute segment. Well, thank you very much.
42:07
We're not going to be having any interaction, evidently, today as far as the criticisms that I've made and the refutations of the errors of Harold Camping.
42:15
So I just hope that the people will listen. In fact, I would challenge Mr. Camping to do what he did. He said on Monday on the
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Open Forum that they would be posting this for people to download and listen to. I really hope that he will do that and let the people decide who has presented a consistent case and who has not.
42:34
On Monday on the Open Forum, Mr. Camping said we should never try to understand God. This was in the context where he made the statement that Jesus is the
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Father and Jesus is the Holy Spirit. Now, Christians have always believed that God's revelation of himself was the central aspect of what
42:49
God has revealed, how he's revealed who he is, and what he's done in Jesus Christ. If Mr. Camping is completely confused about the doctrine of the
42:57
Trinity, if Mr. Camping cannot even accurately enunciate it, cannot defend it from Scripture, if the very central aspect of God's revelation about himself is something that he confuses people about on a regular basis, then upon what basis, what reason would any logical or rational person have to believe what he has to say when he starts assigning spiritual values to numbers and multiplying them together and saying, this happened on such and such a date when no one else in the history of the world has ever come to these conclusions, and saying you need to believe this because if you don't believe this, then you're rejecting the gospel.
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And on the basis of that, start teaching people that Jesus died twice, that the cross was not a propitiatory atonement, that that had happened in eternity past.
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Teaching people that they should flee the churches, teaching people they should not engage in baptism and the Lord's Supper anymore.
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People think about what is being said here. We have a man who has come up with his own method of interpretation.
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He recognizes that it is not one that anyone has held before him, though I think Origen, the early church writer, came pretty close.
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He managed to mess up interpretation for a long, long time, but no one else has come up with these insights.
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We have to create this idea that this book has been opened and that Daniel was actually talking about the
44:14
Bible when Daniel's writings are in the Bible. I mean, it's completely incoherent at its foundations, but we grab these things and we hold on to these things and we say that this somehow is what the
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Bible teaches. It is not what the Bible teaches. It is what Harold Camping teaches, and when
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Harold Camping is gone, there's going to be nobody around to continue that on, and his followers will break up into all sorts of small groups, many of which will not ever return to the
44:45
Christian faith and the Christian church because they've been taught that that has been abandoned, it's under the wrath of God, and they also might well be embarrassed because of the things they've said about the church.
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But that's what we have going on here, and I think anyone who looks at what the Scriptures say can see that this is the situation that we have.
45:04
Thank you, Dr. White, and now, Mr. Camping, you have three minutes. Yeah, you know, we have found that Christ spoke in parables, the
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Bible, and without a parable, he did not speak, and we can find many, many, many, many words that have a spiritual meaning, but numbers are words, and some of them have spiritual meanings.
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We have, we can show that the number 5 can refer to the
45:32
Atonement, the number 10 to Completeness, and the number 17 to Heaven, and lo and behold, when we look at the number 722 ,500, which is the exact number of days, inclusively from April 1, when
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Christ was the Atonement, there is number 5, and then go completely to the end and the fulfillment of our salvation when we are raptured, that's the number 10, and then what happens?
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We are caught up into Heaven, that's the number 17. And so we find that the
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Bible is teaching by these numbers also exactly the same message that we find when we're looking, when we begin at the
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Atonement, at the Cross, and go all the way to the end of time, to the
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Rapture, when our salvation is completely, is completed in every sense of the word.
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Wow! What a proof that we have the right date. It couldn't happen if we just had any old date, and all of these dates have been taken from careful, careful study of the
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Bible. Interestingly enough, you know, even the Church Age, and I remember years ago when
47:01
I discovered this, there's exactly 1955 years from the time of the beginning of the
47:11
Church in 33 A .D. to 1988, when the Bible shows the
47:17
Church Age came to an end, and when we break that down it's 3, or it's 5 times 17 times 23, and 23 is used spiritually to signify destruction.
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And that matches perfectly 2 Corinthians 2, where it says we are a saver of life, or the
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Gospel is a saver of life, and the life, that is 5, that's the
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Gospel, is a saver of, that brings people to Heaven, and of death unto death.
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The number 23 is death and destruction. Again, how beautifully
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God guides us, and assures us that we are being faithful to the
48:06
Word of God. Oh my, it is utterly amazing, thank you for giving us that.
48:14
Thank you, Mr. Camping, your three minutes are up, and now Dr. James R. White, you have three minutes. Chris, just a quick question, this is the last three for me,
48:21
I believe, right? Yes. Okay. Alright, so, well, in conclusion, I'm sorry that there has been no interaction in the program today.
48:30
I think yesterday, where there was interaction, was very useful, but of course I really don't believe that Mr.
48:37
Camping's methodology of interpretation, where he assigns the spiritual values, and he just kept going on, even though, you know, we pointed out that his use of Mark 4 is an error, and Daniel 12 is an error, and Revelation 20 is an error,
48:51
I've talked to men who have sat down and met with Mr. Camping, pastors, back in the 90s especially, when he started teaching against the church, and even before the 1994 false prophecy, and they've all said the same thing, he's not open to correction.
49:05
He simply doesn't hear it, it's in one ear, out the other, he's got his system, and that's it, and that's what we're hearing.
49:12
And so I'm thankful for the opportunity, and I thank Chris Irons for arranging this, where anyone who really is concerned about the truth, and there are a lot of people who are not, there are a lot of people who just buy into this stuff because they're in rebellion against the church, they're in rebellion against God's way of doing things, and so they're looking for reasons to be out there on their own, ransacking the
49:31
Bible, looking for new spiritual insights, just like the Gnostics did in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. We still have our
49:37
Gnostics today, we've been listening to a modern -day Gnostic on that level. There are a lot of people like that, but for those who truly do seek after the truth, hopefully to hear the incapacity of this position to defend itself, the incapacity of this position to do anything more than to just proclaim itself, and anyone who's listened to the
49:57
Open Forum knows this is how it works, when someone calls up with an objection, with a counter -argument, once they've made the first part of their argument, they get muted, you hear, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, they get muted, and then thank you for calling and sharing.
50:11
That's the system, that's how it works, and so today we've had the same thing. I've been on consistent mute, as far as Mr.
50:19
Camping is concerned, and he's just presenting his stuff, and so even though I've documented errors on his part, his mishandling of the
50:27
Word of God, misrepresentation of the original languages and things like that, we're not going to hear answers to that, and you're not going to get answers on the
50:35
Open Forum because there are no answers. Once you have this kind of subjective, allegorical, numerological, spiritualized interpretation, you simply have to accept that based upon the authority of the person making the claim.
50:51
That's what Joseph Smith did, that's what Charles Taze Russell did, that's what Mary Baker Eddy did, that's what Ellen G. White did, and that is what
50:57
Harold Camping is doing, and so I, once again, just plead with those who would be confused to thinking that Mr.
51:05
Camping's abuse of the Bible by ignoring its original context, languages, and meaning is relevant to the truth of the
51:11
Bible. Separate the two, because you will see that the two are very, very different things.
51:18
Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. James R. White, and Mr. Camping, you have the final word with three minutes.
51:24
Yeah, well, you know, if you have listened carefully, you'll find that everything
51:29
I was saying came from the Bible. It is by following the rules that the
51:36
Bible has given us. Now, earlier on yesterday, for example,
51:42
I asked a question in answer to the idea that well, what does the
51:51
Bible, or what does the Bible mean to the local person of that day?
51:56
And I asked the question, Abraham was told to look at all the land of Canaan, all the way from the river of Egypt to the river,
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Euphrates River, and God said, this is for you and your seed forever.
52:13
What did that mean to Abraham? He could not know what that meant, he at all could, he could not know.
52:23
What is the Bible for? Who is the Bible for? For those people that happen to be living at the time a part of the
52:31
Bible was written? Oh, yes, it was for them, but it was more for us, it's for the whole world.
52:38
And that's why, when the Church Age began a couple of thousand years ago,
52:43
I go into all the world with the Gospel, and one of the grand things the Church has done is they have brought the
52:52
Bible into many, many languages all over the world. That's wonderful.
52:58
That was done. But unfortunately, in the process, they set up their own hermeneutics and decided that the
53:08
Church also had some right to make their own theology, and so we get all the mixtures.
53:16
And what we try to do in Family Radio is stick just with the
53:21
Bible, just with the Bible. And I'm on the open forum, and if anybody hears me quoting something that is not from the
53:31
Bible, that is something that's out of my own head, or because it's reasonable or something, they have a right to criticize, and I'm grateful for the criticism, because I, too, want to be tied in just with the
53:46
Bible. Well, thank you, Mr. White, and thank you, Iron Sharpens Iron, for giving me this opportunity to appear on this program.
53:59
And I hope that, I hope people will remember that there are 365 .2422
54:07
days, and do their own arithmetic, multiplying 1978, and what do they get, and then breaking that down.
54:19
And then you'll find that it all ties in perfectly with the
54:26
Bible. Thank you so much, Mr. Camping. I want to thank both
54:31
Mr. Camping of Family Radio and Dr. James R. White. I also want to thank everyone here at WNYG Radio, and everyone at Alpha Omega Ministries, and everybody at Family Radio who made this,
54:43
I think, a two -day success. And please look up the first day of this debate at the
54:52
Alpha Omega Ministries website, www .aomin .org. That's A -O -M -I -N dot
54:59
O -R -G. It is there on MP3 in its entirety right now. It will be in its entirety available at Sharpens .org
55:07
at some point very soon, God willing, S -H -A -R -P -E -N -S dot O -R -G, and possibly will be available at the
55:14
Family Radio website, although I'm not certain. Also, please, stay tuned tomorrow,
55:21
Dr. James R. White will be on this broadcast to take your phone calls. He will be on all by himself tomorrow.
55:29
I know that many of you have been waiting with bated breath to call during this debate. We did not want to interrupt the flow of the debate with phone calls from listeners and take up time from our two participants.
55:40
So tomorrow you will have your opportunity to call Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries with questions. And on Friday, we are delighted that Mr.
55:48
Camping has graciously agreed to join us again. He will be on by himself to take your calls as well.
55:56
And I just, again, thank everybody who listened, thank everybody for making this event possible, and I hope you all remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater