7 - The Triunity of God, Part 2

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology This lesson examines the triunity of God. This is a very important lesson as so many religions and cults explain it wrong.

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8 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 1

8 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 1

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Well, welcome back to the
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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.
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I am here as your, I don't know, professor? I don't know what that would be, but we are here together again for a very important lesson.
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If you were with us last week, well, you should have been with us last week. If you were not with us last week, you need to go to the
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YouTube channel and watch last week's lesson because that last week and this week are both lessons vitally important for any
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Christian so that you understand your theology because we are going over the lessons on the triunity of God, the doctrine known as the
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Trinity. This is one of those lessons that are vitally important because so many people get it wrong.
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So many people wrongly define what the Trinity is and that's one of the big reasons if you deal with anybody who is from a false religion or one of the cults, you'll see that they always stumble over the
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Trinity. The sad thing is there are some professing Christians that do also and we have to make sure that we are accurate in our definitions.
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That's why last week and this week are so important. Last week, let's remind you where we are.
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If you are a student of the Striving for Eternity Academy, then you have with you the syllabus.
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Let me move out of the way of the syllabus. Thanks. Someone likes to cover my face with the syllabus.
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I'm going to have to learn. I've got to move over this way. So if you have your syllabus, we are on page 19.
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We are in right now lesson 5, Roman numeral 2.
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So if you get your syllabus out, if you remember, we are in the first book.
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That book is the God's Throne Room and that is the first book.
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We are in section 1. Section 1, if you remember, was the doctrines of God.
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We started looking at lesson number 5, the Triunity of God. Now I want to do a recap from last week, what we did.
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We looked at several different ways from the Old Testament on the ways of seeing the
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Trinity, the hints of the Trinity in the Old Testament. If you remember, we first saw the use of the name
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Elohim and we saw that that is a plural name.
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We saw that with that name, it's used as a plural, not
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L, which is singular, but a plural.
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And then we saw, after that, we looked at the work of the
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Spirit, the Holy Spirit, that it was, the
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Holy Spirit is referred to as God. And then we then looked at, which goes sort of with the
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Elohim, plural pronouns. And when we saw the plural pronouns, we saw that there are things like, let us make
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God in our image and those are things that we saw that where we see a plural pronoun and a singular name, a singular
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God. The word, the use of the word one was another thing that we looked at and it was the fact that one means unity, not necessarily singularity.
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So we had seen that. Then we looked at number five, there was the angel of Yahweh.
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The fact that the angel of Yahweh is spoken of as having the attributes of deity.
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Also being the same as we'll see in a much later lesson, we'll see that that may actually be a reference to Jesus Christ.
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Then lastly, we saw the prophecies of the Messiah. And when we look at that, we see that these are the ways we see in the
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Old Testament, the hints of the
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Trinity. Now, we went over this last week, but it bears repeating that when we look at the
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Trinity, yes, the word Trinity, triunity, tritarian, however you want to try to work that word, it doesn't exist in the
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Scripture. It's not in the Bible. Okay, does that mean that just because the word
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Trinity isn't in the Bible that it's not true? Well, the word gravity is not in the
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Bible either. Does that mean we suddenly float? Of course not. The fact that something isn't in the
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Bible in the word that we use today does not mean that it's not true, but the teaching of the
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Trinity is still there. Now, one of the things we're going to have to remember, we're going to look at this, but we have to make sure that we define the
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Trinity properly. This is where people get confused, make mistakes, all kinds of things.
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Remember from last week, we said that the Trinity is defined as three distinct persons in one unified
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Godhead. It's not one plus one plus one equals one.
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That's how Muslims will try to argue. That's not the way it's defined.
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The way to define the Trinity is three persons, one God. Three persons, one
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God. We have to make sure we have that distinction. People are always going to say, well, it's three gods or three people equal one person, or most often they'll say three gods, and therefore they'll say, oh, well, you are believing in polytheism, poly meaning many, theism meaning the study of God or the understanding of God, so you believe in multiple gods.
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No, we don't. We believe in one God, but that God is not like you and I, that He's made up as one person.
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He's made up of three persons. You can go, well, that doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.
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Good. That's because God is greater than you. If you can comprehend everything there is to know about God, then
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God is not greater than you, you are greater than Him, okay? And so we have to remember that.
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When people argue, as the Muslims do all the time, that, well, it doesn't make sense, what they're actually saying, though they don't often realize it, is that they're putting their own human reasoning above God, okay?
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That is a mistake. We don't put our reasoning above God. God is incomprehensible.
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Remember when we studied the attributes? That was the first attribute. God is incomprehensible. We're not going to understand everything there is to know about Him, all right?
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So let's begin. If you're in your syllabus, and remember your lesson on this is, on this lesson is about three pages long.
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However, I have about 17 plus pages of notes. So that's why we broke this up into two lessons.
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We're going to go through right now looking at the Trinity in the New Testament.
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The Trinity in the New Testament. So let's look at that. While the
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Old Testament emphasized the unity, and that's your blank there, the unity of God, and it's time allowed for the teaching of the
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Trinity, the New Testament clearly presents the
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Godhead as one existence, yet existing in three persons, okay?
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So let's define this real quick. Let's take a quick look at a definition of the Trinity. So Trinity defined is three distinct persons,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in one Godhead. Now there's a picture of this that I think is helpful for us to understand.
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So let's bring that up. Now you see here in the picture, you have Father, Son, Spirit, three distinct people, yet all of them is one
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God. Now I want you to notice that the Father is not the Son, the
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Son is not the Spirit, and the Father is not the Spirit. So the individual people are not one and equal with each other.
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However, the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. So this picture is a way that many people like to use to show the
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Trinity or triunity of God. Notice you have all three persons.
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They are not equal to one another. They're separate and distinct from one another, yet they all are one
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Godhead. All right? So let us begin by looking, if you look in your syllabus at letter
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A, you see the three persons are recognized as God.
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So that's our first thing is that they're all, they are each recognized as God.
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And if you look in your syllabus, you see that first, the Father is recognized as God.
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The Father is recognized as God. We can see that in John 16, 27.
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Oh, we don't have, okay, we don't have John 16. All right, so I will read
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John 16, 27. It says, "...for the Father himself loves you, because you loved
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Me, and have believed that I have come from the Father." So in this,
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Jesus Christ is separate from, sorry, Jesus Christ is separate from the
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Father, but the Father is declared as being God. Now, most people don't argue over that, that the
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Father is declared as God. But that is, what I read was John 16, 27.
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So not only is the Father recognized as God, but we see that the
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Son is recognized as God. And we see that here, so we see that here in, which one do we have?
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Do we have John? Okay, John 1, 1. So the first one, we see letter A, three persons are recognized as God.
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First, the Father is recognized by God. Here you see the Son recognized as God. And this is, "...in
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the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
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God." Now, let's stop there. You say, wait a minute, dude, are you delusional?
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Where did that say Jesus Christ? Where did that say the Son? Okay, if you keep reading in verse 14, which we don't have, thanks, we don't have verse 14.
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But if you read verse 14, it refers to the Word, this Word, being incarnate, referring to Jesus Christ.
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So what we have is we have a case where the Word is
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Jesus Christ, who was God, okay?
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The reason that becomes important is when we look at that verse, if you come upon Jehovah Witnesses, they'll say, well, this doesn't have a definite article.
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Therefore, this Word is a God, lowercase g, not the
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God, okay? The reality is there is only one
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God. So, whether you want to give them a capital G or a lowercase g, unless you believe in polytheism, which
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Jehovah Witnesses don't, there's only one God. So, either way, the
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Word was God, and you don't need the definite article there.
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But that's okay, there's other passages that are just as clear.
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Let's go to one of them. John 8, 58. John 8, 58.
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What we have here in John 58 is Jesus said to them, very truly,
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I tell you, before Abraham was, I am. And so, the thing that's interesting about this is that when we look at this, all right, this does, he claims to be,
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I am. And some people could argue that this doesn't seem like it is a claim of deity.
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But when you look at John 8, and you read what comes right after this claim, the
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Jews pick up stones to stone Jesus, why? Because he, being a man, claims to be
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God. Well, actually, it doesn't say, in John 8, it says, for blasphemy, they picked up stones to stone him.
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In John 10, it says that they picked up stones a second time to stone him, and he says, for what good works do you stone me?
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They say, not for good works, but you, being a man, claim to be God when he says the Father and I are one.
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Okay, so that becomes the issue that we see, okay? So, we see here that Jesus Christ, the
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Son, okay, was recognized as God. Lastly, we see that the
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Spirit is God. The Spirit. Now, most people have trouble, let me just say this before we go to Acts 5, most people have trouble with the fact that Jesus Christ is
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God. If you accept that Jesus Christ is God, seeing the Holy Spirit as God isn't a far stretch, okay?
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Most people struggle with the view that Jesus is God. They struggle with that because there's great implications in that, and we're going to look at that when we look at the deity of Jesus Christ, a lesson coming in a few weeks.
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But let's see Acts chapter 5. Acts 5, and we see here in Acts 5, this is speaking of the
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Holy Spirit being God, all right? And it says, Annas Peter asked, why has
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Satan filled your heart to lie to who? Who does it say there? The Holy Spirit, okay?
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Watch that, because watch what happens next. And to keep back part of the proceeds of the land, while it remained unsold, did it not remain to you?
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After it was sold, were not the proceeds still at your disposal?
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How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us.
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Look at who it says he lied to. Not to us, but to God. Now, look back at verse 3. Who was it that he said that he lied to?
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He was lying to the Holy Spirit. But now you see at the end in verse 4, it was lying to God.
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In this you see that Luke had no problem recording what
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Peter said, and Peter had no problem saying that when you lie to the
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Holy Spirit, you're lying to God, okay? So, you see there that all three, okay, are recognized as being recognized as God.
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Number four there in your, or the fourth thing there in your syllabus, oops, that's not it.
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You're jumping ahead. But the fourth thing is there is that all three persons are seen in conjunction with each other, okay?
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Father, Son, Holy Spirit are seen as being in conjunction with one another.
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Now, let's go to Matthew 28, okay? Matthew 28, 19. Notice in here that each of the three individuals are used separately, existing separately.
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And I'm going to mention why this is important, but it says, it's part of the Great Commission that we know of, and it says,
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Do you see how all three are mentioned there? This is important, and this is important because those that would hold to modalism, modalism, if you remember from last week, is a false doctrine, it's a heretical doctrine actually, that teaches that the
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Father, that God was the Father in the Old Testament, became the
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Son during those times that Jesus walked the earth, and when He died and rose again,
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He became the Holy Spirit. So, they see three individuals, and each of those individuals, okay, are one person, but different modes.
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Modes, modalism, alright? That would be a problem here, because here we see all three people.
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We also see, I don't know if we have it there, but at Jesus' baptism, we don't, okay.
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Jesus Christ physically entering the waters of the baptism by John, He hears,
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John hears the voice of the Father and sees the Spirit descending as a dove, okay?
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So, all three members. So, how do you have the modes? I mean, how could those modes be, because they were all at the same time, okay?
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I hope that is clear enough, that all three are individuals that are all at the same time, same place, at the baptism, okay?
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So, that being said, we see that modalism has some very serious problems.
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You know, one of the biggest proponents of modalisms, to name names, T .J.
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Jakes. Most people don't know these things. They don't study these guys out and see what they believe.
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This is a heresy, because what it actually does is it denies a central, essential doctrine of Christianity, which is the
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Trinity, okay? It denies the doctrine of the Trinity, okay?
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So, we have to be careful with who we watch and listen to. Yes, even me.
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I heard that snickering over there in that classroom. Yes, you should. Honestly, you should be taking what
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I say and examining it against Scripture. This is our source. This is what we're going to hold up to and say, this is the
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Word of God. Not what I say, all right? And so, we have to remember that.
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It is God's Word that we must be comparing to. We have to make sure that we examine everything with Scripture, all right?
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So, we looked at the fact that first was that the three persons are recognized as God.
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That was letter A. If you look at letter B, the three are one in essence.
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The three are one in essence. So, they're one in essence, all right? Letter B there in your syllabus.
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And what that is there is that we see that each one of the members of the
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Trinity, okay, are one, okay?
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So, the Father is one with the Son in essence, okay?
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It doesn't mean they're the same person. This is where the difference between modalism and Christianity, okay?
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We see that they're one in essence, not the same person.
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So, the Father is one with the Son. Let's look at John 10, 30.
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This is the passage I referenced earlier. Jesus Christ said, the Father and I are one.
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This is a clear, a very clear claim of deity.
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You say, well, Andrew, how is this a claim of deity? Jesus Christ is claiming that He and the
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Father are one in essence. In other words, that they're both God. How do we know that?
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The context. If you remember when we studied, and I do hope you remember this, but when we studied in the school of biblical hermeneutics and we looked at context as being a very essential thing to understanding anything of what the
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Scripture says. You must have the context. And so, what we have there with that is that the context is right after that Jesus says,
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I and the Father are one, the Jews pick up stones again to stone Him. What's the again referred to?
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Again refers to John 8 that we saw when He said before Abraham was,
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I am. They picked up stones to stone Him for blasphemy there. They pick up stones again to, and He says for what?
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They say for blasphemy. He says, for what good works do you stone me? And they say, not for any good works, but you being a man claim to be
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God. Okay, so clearly the Jews of the time understood this was a claim of deity.
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It may not look that way to you and I, because you and I are 2000 years removed.
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If I say, hey man, that guy is really cool. Well, most of you today would think that that in American colloquialism, that means that the guy's fun to be around or exciting or something like that.
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But if you go back about 100 years, people are going to think the guy's cold. Why? Language has meaning and that comes over time.
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And so what we have is we have that the language of the time was understood by the
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Jews. When He says the Father and I are one, He's claiming to be the same essence as the
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Father, i .e. He's claiming to be God. All right, let's look at the next one.
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And that is that the Spirit is one with the Son. The Spirit is one with the
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Son. Here we could look at Romans 8, 8 and 9. Romans 8, 8 and 9.
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I hope you do have your Bibles out and you're not just relying on the teacher to have all of these. Maybe that's what
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I should do is just, I should remove the Bible verses and have you just have to look it up in your
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Bibles. That would be fun. That'd be a pop quiz almost. No, okay, let's look because I know some of you didn't come prepared for class next week.
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Be prepared with your Bibles. And those who are in the flesh cannot please
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God. But you are not in the flesh. You are in the
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Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the
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Spirit of Christ does not have Him. So you see the Spirit is one with the Son. Okay, the
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Spirit is one with the Son. Alright, and next we have that the
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Spirit is one with the Father. The Spirit is one with the Father.
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You can see that actually in, we already looked at, save time, we looked at Acts 5.
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So we'll save time and not look at that one. But in Acts 5 we saw when Ananias lied to God, the
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Father, when people speak of the Father, they use it interchangeably with God.
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And that's where the confusion is. We don't say, we don't often clarify
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God the Father. Sometimes we just say God. But when we lie to God, people assume the
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Father. So the real issue here is that we see that the Spirit is the same essence as God, as the
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Father. Alright, so let's look at letter C in your syllabus. Letter C in your syllabus, and that is, if I can get to my notes.
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That is that the three, no, that's, that is not, oh we don't have it.
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Okay, so in your syllabus, three are distinct from each other.
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That is letter C. They are distinct from each other. Okay, I've been really trying to stress this point so you understand this because there are many people who wrongly teach things like modalism that teach that one becomes the other.
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But it is essential to understand that the three are distinct from one another.
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That's your fill in the blank there, distinct. The distinction in existence does not mean that they are distinct in essence, okay?
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The distinction in existence does not mean that they are distinct in essence.
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In other words, they exist as three separate people. That does not mean that they are not the same essence.
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They all are God, okay? So, if you see in your syllabus there, we have a couple fill in the blanks there for you and it is this, it is, well, let's look, okay, we did have the graphic, okay.
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Then I will go back to that. Let's look at this distinction. The Father is distinct from the
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Son. So, the Father from the Son is the first that we see that there's a distinction and if we look at that distinction, let's look in John 14, 28.
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John 14, 28, you see here a distinction between the Father and the Son. You heard me say to you,
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I am going away and I am coming to you.
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If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the
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Father because the Father is greater than I am. Now, let's look at this briefly to get some things that we understand, okay?
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One, if you see in that verse, I want to keep this up for a little bit, I am going to the
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Father shows that they do not exist as the same person. There's a distinction in their existence.
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They're separate. But then where we have issue that I want to bring up is it says, because the
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Father is greater than I, the Father is greater than I. So, let's address this.
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Jehovah Witnesses will always bring this up, okay? Muslims that are trained will bring this up as well.
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By the way, in case you're wondering, the Muslims are being trained to defend against Christianity just like Jehovah Witnesses are and you'll often find that they know their rhetoric but they can't defend their rhetoric, okay?
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So, they know the rhetoric that they're told, Jesus said that the Father is greater than I, therefore, they are different.
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That's right, they are. They're two separate people. They're the same in essence. Now, this would be argued, especially by Jehovah Witnesses to say, well, because of the fact that this says that they are different, then they are not the same in essence or in existence.
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And so, is that what this is claiming? All right, let's look at this and let's keep something in mind.
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This is something we're going to go into much more detail later on, okay? When we look at the deity and specifically the humanity of Jesus Christ, we're going to see that Jesus Christ had two natures, something very important to understand when we speak of Jesus.
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Jesus had two natures. He's 100 % God, 100 % man. That's essential to understand because when we talk about Jesus, we have to understand that while He walked the earth,
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He had these two distinctions, two distinct natures that somehow existed in one being.
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We can't comprehend that, just like we can't comprehend the Trinity. But what we have is the fact that Jesus could speak as a man and say the
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Father as God is greater than I am. And if you see some of the context there, you see
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He's arguing for His humanity. One of the things people don't understand, and this is important because people, especially
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Jehovah's Witnesses, will argue Jesus Christ claimed to be man.
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Yes, He did. You know why? You know why the early writers had to spend so much time proving
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Jesus' humanity? Because in the first century, no one questioned
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His deity. Gnosticism, which was the heresy of the day, didn't question
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Jesus' deity. They questioned His humanity. They believed that Jesus was
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God. They didn't believe He was human because they thought that anything spiritual was good and anything material was bad.
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So if Jesus was material, He would have been bad. So they denied the humanity of Jesus Christ.
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So Jesus often had to prove His own humanity and the writers had to prove
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His humanity. But He also, as we saw very clearly in John 8 and John 10, explicitly claimed to be
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God. So when people bring up this passage in John 14, 28 and say that Jesus was not saying that He was
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God because He's saying the Father is greater than I, He's saying that to show the distinction between Father and Son, not to show that He's of a different essence.
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We already saw that He claimed to be the same essence and the Jews understood that claim. That's why they picked up stones to stone
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Him. Let's also look that the Spirit is distinct from both
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Father and Son. This we can see in John 14, just a little bit earlier from the passage we looked at,
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John 14 and verses 16 and 17. John 14, 16 and 17.
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And so what we have here is, and I will ask the Father and He will give you another advocate.
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First look here, right off the bat, I, this is
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Jesus speaking, I will ask the Father, so we see Jesus being distinct from the
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Father, and He will give you another advocate. You see that they are all three distinct from one another right here.
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You see that they're right now distinct.
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Since the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees
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Him nor knows Him, you know Him because He abides with you and you will be with Him.
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So you see here, this is another advocate.
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Now this becomes very interesting. I want to focus on the word another. Jesus is claiming here,
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I'll keep this up for a second so people can read it. He's saying another advocate.
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This word another is a word in the Greek that means another of the same kind.
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In other words, He's claiming to have the same essence here but to yet be different than Himself.
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So Jesus is saying the Father sent Jesus as an advocate, and the
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Holy Spirit is another advocate of the same kind, of the same essence.
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So you see right within there, all three people, you see the distinction between them, yet at the same time you see that they have the same essence.
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Alright, so let's now get to your syllabus there at the bottom of page 20 under 3 there.
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It says these three persons of the Godhead, each and all divine.
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Okay, so the three persons of the Godhead, each and all divine. So each one of them and all of them are divine, they're all
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God. Are to be recognized, and here are your blanks, as one in essence, one in essence, that's your blanks there, one in essence, equally existing in three persons or personalities.
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So it's one in essence, equally existing in three personalities.
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Okay, do you see that there? So that is what we have.
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We have one in essence in three personalities. That right there is a good definition that you can end up using, a more precise definition.
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These three persons of the Godhead, each and all divine, are to be recognized as one in essence, equally existing in three distinct personalities.
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Okay, if you need to shorten it, you can shorten it the way I've been doing it. I've been doing it repetitively because I hope that this gets drilled into your head.
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Three distinct persons in one divine Godhead. Okay, that is the definition.
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Now if you look at your note there at the bottom of your syllabus, and you know, someone had mentioned to me, why do you keep mentioning the syllabus?
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Because I want to encourage you to get one. You can enroll in the academy and get a syllabus.
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It helps to support us and it becomes a good thing to do. So I encourage you to do that if you want to get the syllabus.
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But if you look at the bottom of your syllabus, there's a question on the second blank for C.
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Okay, the second blank for C is distinction in existence.
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So letter C there is, there are three, the three are distinct from each other.
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And the distinction in existence, that's the blank there for under C, is existence does not mean distinction in essence.
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All right, I hope that answers that question. So let's look at this, this note here and it says this, many who deny the
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Trinity do so because they cannot explain it from a human perspective.
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That's what I said earlier, you'd see very often, right? The, the thing is, it says we have there, but there are many things about God that are completely beyond human comprehension.
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How he hears and answers all prayers. Now, by the way, when God answers all prayers, when
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God answers prayers, he doesn't answer prayers always with a yes. Sometimes he answers prayers of Christians with a no.
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They just don't like that, but that's an answer. Okay, so, so we see it, there's a, he's everywhere at the same time.
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Can we comprehend that? How could God be everywhere at the same time? We can't comprehend that. He knows the past, the present, the future, the real, the possible.
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We cannot comprehend these things about God. There are great many things of God that we cannot comprehend.
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So just because we cannot comprehend everything about God doesn't mean the teaching is incorrect.
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All right, no human can explain these things. However, because the Bible teaches the reality of the triunity of God, we believe it though we cannot explain it.
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That becomes the essential. So there's a question in the chat room that says this, the
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Bible tells us that no one has seen God, but Moses and others saw
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God. How can we reconcile this? If you look at the passage in there to reconcile that, which is different than reconciling these other things that we're talking about, how do we reconcile that?
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We reconcile it this way. Even with Moses, he did not see the full glory of God.
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If you remember with Moses, Moses hid in a cliff, okay, in the cleft of a rock, and the glory of God passed by him, but he didn't see the full glory.
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Jesus said, you've seen me, you've seen the Father, therefore we have seen him. We see theophanies and christophanies where Jesus comes or God comes as a man.
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I should reverse that to be respective. Theophany is when God comes in the form of a man, christophany when
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Jesus comes in the form of a man, and we see that they can come in the form of a man.
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They can appear partially, but we don't see them fully. But Jesus can say, if you've seen me, you've seen the
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Father. Okay, so in conclusion with that, what we see is this, that when we speak of the
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Trinity, it is not our human reasoning that becomes God. We have to remember that.
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That becomes an essential thing. That is something that people often quickly, when they're trying to argue against the
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Trinity, fall into the trap of. So, let me explain how to talk to someone, a
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Jehovah Witness or a Muslim, this works very effectively with the Muslims, to help them to understand when they argue about their own reasoning, okay?
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So, here's how you go about this. You ask them right up front, is God greater than our ability to comprehend him or understand him?
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In other words, is God incomprehensible? It was that first attribute that we looked at when we started the
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Attributes of God in the School of Systematic Theology. That was lesson one. Why is that the first lesson?
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Because it's important to understand that we're not going to comprehend everything there is to know about God, but that which he has revealed to us, that we can know.
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We know certainly what he has revealed, but we don't know him completely.
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Therefore, it is truth that there are things about God that you and I can never comprehend.
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I'm okay with that. I hope you're okay with that. You should be okay with that. But, the importance of that is this, that our human reasoning is not greater than God.
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Why is that important to argue? You know, even the atheists argue that. They'll argue that everything has to be what they can comprehend.
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Could God exist greater than you can comprehend? And they'll say, well, sure. Okay, you don't know everything there is to know about the universe.
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How could you comprehend everything about God that you argue that everything about God has to make sense to you?
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This is what people do when they argue this way. When they say, this doesn't make sense to me, therefore it cannot be true.
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You are arguing that you are God and God is being judged by you.
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You are putting yourself as superior to God. And you'll see a Muslim go, oh, I didn't say that.
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I'm not claiming that. I'm not saying I'm superior to God. Yes, you are. You are claiming to be superior to God because God is subject to your human reasoning.
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Not to the truth of what He has said in the scriptures, but to your human reasoning.
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And if your human reasoning is what is the answer to everything, then your human reasoning is the greatest thing in this universe.
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And yet, your human reasoning cannot even comprehend everything there is to know in this universe.
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You see, what they'll quickly do is subject the Trinity to their human reasoning and say it does not make sense to me.
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Once they do that, they've put their reasoning as God and God subject to them.
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They've put themselves in a position, a very dangerous position, a position I would never want to be in. They put themselves in a position as judge over God and dictating to God what's right and what's wrong.
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That is a scary place to be. I would not want to be there. And that's why we see here with this that there's many who will argue on the
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Trinity based on what their human reasoning says. And we as Christians need to argue on what the
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Bible says. And the Bible is very clear as we see. We see all those hints in the
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Old Testament. We see the use of a plural name for God. We see the works of the
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Spirit. We see plural pronouns used with singular names, singular people.
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Let us make man in our image. There's a plurality there in the pronoun. We see the word one being used as one of unity.
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We see the fact that the angel of God is used as claiming in the Old Testament as being a deity, as being deity.
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We see the prophecies of the Christ, the Messiah, as having deity.
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So all these things are in the Old Testament. We see all these hints. In the New Testament we see that we see as defined that each member of the
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Trinity is recognized as God. We see that each one of them is also distinct from one another.
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We see in this that this definition that we've been using that the three are three persons, three distinct persons in one divine
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Godhead. And so we see that.
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Now, I'm going to have some thought questions for you that will be posted up on our Facebook group. I do encourage you to go to the
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Facebook group. Go to the Striving for Eternity Facebook group and join the group, join the conversation that we have on there based on the lessons throughout the week.
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We'll be posting some of the thought questions throughout the week to get you thinking, to get you discussing.
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Even if somebody has already given an answer, I still encourage you to give the answer.
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Because if you give the answer, it's recognizing that you have an answer as well. But it also, maybe it helps people to see who else is thinking through this.
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So it's an encouragement. Next week we are going to start a very important lesson that's right on the heels of this.
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Not only is the triunity of God an essential doctrine to understand, but one that is hotly debated that goes along with debating for the
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Trinity is the deity of Jesus Christ. We are going to start section two next week with looking at the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
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In lesson six, we'll look into the deity of Christ. And we're going to have a whole lot of information to say on that.
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We'll try to get it done in one week. But if you have any questions, you can contact us through our
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Facebook page. You can contact us through our website, strivingforeternity .org.
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You can email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org.
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I encourage you to contact us and let us know if you have questions.
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You can go to our website, see different articles that we have out there, different videos, different audios.
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We have a lot of information. We're in the process of completely redesigning the website. So if you keep looking, hopefully by the beginning of the year, we're going to have a whole new website.
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I also want to encourage you, there's only a couple of weeks left before the
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Super Bowl outreach. Go to superbowloutreach .org, mention in there somewhere in a comment that you want to be on my team.
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There's only, I think, like a half a dozen slots open right now.
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So they are filling up. So I want to strongly encourage you, if you're thinking about going, register now.
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Try to raise support. They even have links that you can get to help raise support if you need the support.
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If you can't afford to go, you really want to go, try to register.
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Contact us, contact Bill Adams, and we'll try to see what we could do.
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Either maybe someone else would be sponsoring. Lastly, we want to go as we do each week.
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We want to try to encourage you to encourage others. It's one of the things we like to do each week, to be saying some encouraging things about one another.
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And so it's what we call our C -Bro, our Striving for Eternity Academy's Brother of the
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Week, or C -Sis if it's a sister. And this week is someone that many of us will know, especially those in the chat room, and that is
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Brother Joe Conkle. Brother Joe Conkle. Want to encourage you to encourage him.
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A couple things, and maybe I'm going to get in trouble now because, you know, maybe I'm going to share some things that people don't quite know about Joe.
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But Joe could use your prayers. He has been out of work for some time on disability.
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He's been, because of an injury due to his situation, he's been out of work.
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He's not the kind of guy that kind of sits around very much. But this is a guy that's really, he will be going to the
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Super Bowl outreach just on a wrong team. He's going with the
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Ohio crew, you know. My team's splitting into the
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Ohio crew and the rest of us. So he's going to go with the Ohio crew. But that's okay.
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We like him anyway. But he is a great brother. He kind of looks like a big teddy bear.
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He really does. But that's kind of how I think of him. This big kind of brawly looking guy.
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And you get to know him. He just seems like this really sweet guy. But he is an encouragement to me.
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And I want to encourage you to encourage him. He's someone who's not only very active with the
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Striving for Eternity Academy. Those in the chat room definitely know that. But he's always answering the questions on face group.
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He's one of the better students. Good role model for some of you others. But Joe is one who is always asking questions.
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He contacts me a lot. Will ask very good questions. Sometimes ones
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I just can't answer. But he's always learning. Wanting to learn more. And a good brother for you to get to know.
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In closing, there's one other thing. One other announcement that I want to make. A warning to many of us on Facebook.
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On Facebook, we recently had a thing. I hadn't mentioned it publicly yet.
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But I am now. That we did have a group of about five
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Facebook profiles that were all fraudulent. And if you were following on Facebook, whether my personal
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Facebook. I think they even got into the Striving for Eternity Academy group page.
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But people like Dave Muller was the names. And Philip, I forget his name.
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And there were a couple others. And they were posing to be. Some of them posing to be
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Christians. Supposedly, they got saved through on the box. One, they claimed to be that one was saved and led the other to Christ.
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Phil was an atheist. Dave supposedly became a theist.
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And so they were pretending to be different things. We don't exactly know what their goal was. But all of a sudden, there was a claim that one of them died.
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Some of us, Sai, Tim, Bruton, Kate, and myself kind of knew some things that were kind of funny.
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They all started their Facebook at the same time. Things like that. We wanted to give a little bit of time to see what the deal was.
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But if you saw throughout that, we were kind of going, how did you guys all meet?
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And trying to probe. I was asking some of the people to contact me privately to see email addresses.
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Because we quickly realized that some of them did not attend the schools that they claimed.
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So when they claimed that someone had died, we saw people getting very upset. They were praying for the family and things like that.
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And so Sai took it upon himself that the gig was up. That he announced that these were fraudulent.
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The pictures they were using were fake pictures. The names didn't exist. We didn't get to see what their endgame was.
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But we know that they were very, very active. Must have been out of work. They're posting all the time.
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We don't know if it was one person, a group of people. But this to be a warning. Just because someone is on Facebook doesn't mean they're a real person.
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And we need to be careful with things that we share with people online and whatnot.
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One of the things that I had done with my youth group, and I know we're going a little bit long this week, just because I do want to give this warning to people.
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What I did with my youth group when I was pastoring at a church where I was involved in the youth group, is
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I actually had a friend of mine who was a private detective. He had been a private detective and he took my
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Facebook profile. This was when Facebook was just starting out. I had a Facebook way back when, when it just had started up in about 2007.
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But there was a thing called Zanga. And what he did was he took my Facebook picture and my name, found one person on this
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Zanga, and used that to become friends with a lot of other people from the church, all the youth group.
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And just from one, he got to go from the others. He spent three months building what's called a community of interest. In other words, these people on Zanga from the youth, they all used fake names and fake ages and fake places where they lived.
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And in three months, he came into the youth group. I asked him, how many of you guys accepted me or subscribed to me on Zanga?
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And half the hands went up. And I said, no, you didn't. You accepted a friend of mine, Bernie.
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That's who you accepted. That's who you subscribe to. I said, this is what he found out about you in three months.
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And then proceeded to identify not only the relationships of who's related to who, but Bernie ended up saying, if I was a predator, here's how, where I would go.
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He said, he identified some of the girls. Hey, she's a pretty young lady.
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She says she's 92. I don't believe it. But he actually identified that there was a way that this girl announced in this online that she walked home from school after soccer practice each day and was home alone from 5 .15
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until about 6 .30. And she even gave the way she walked home.
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He said that he could pick her up at a certain corner where there was no houses, there was no visibility. And on that corner, no one would see.
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There's not much traffic. He said, if I want to kidnap her, that would be the spot I could kidnap her. No one would know for another hour and a half.
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With another girl, she announced that she had a fear of animals. And that whenever she argued with her parents, she went to one park and always sat on a specific bench.
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He said, if I wanted to abduct that girl, I would earn her trust. And he had a story he wrote that he said he would tell her.
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He'd sit down next to her and give a story of how his parents abused him with animals. And he had a fear of animals because of the way his parents abused him and treated animals.
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And so she ended up saying she would have built the trust with him. She would have believed that story.
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I say that to say, when you are online, please be cautious. Find out that somebody is real.
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And if you see that someone is on my Facebook page, it does not mean that I know them personally.
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You can contact me and ask me if I know them personally. There are many people on Facebook that are running scams trying to earn money, trying to make money.
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A lot of people that go after Christians because they think Christians are gullible. And they'll say, hey, we're in India.
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We're in Africa. We're in Pakistan. We're somewhere. We need your money. Can you send money? Can you send
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Bibles? Can you send this? Can you send that? And they look for things for you to send.
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And then they turn around and sell them. I had one guy that was like, we need laptop computers for our school. And I probed a little.
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He ended up, he had said that, you know, they're in such a poor area. They don't have indoor plumbing or electricity.
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Now I go back to the first thing. What do you need laptops for if you don't have electricity? Right? I mean, you do a little probing.
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I mean, don't, we need not be gullible. All right? And so, and I do say electricity, now that I have it is a good thing.
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We had lost it again this past week. So I'm really glad for it. But next week, we're going to get into a very important doctrine.
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One that hopefully I'll be able to announce a lot more information even next week. But definitely by the end of the year, a new book that hopefully will be coming out,
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Jesus Christ Claims of Deity. That'll be a book that will hopefully be out this year,
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I hope. Because I hope to finish writing it. But look forward to seeing you next week.
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And I encourage you to become a student of the academy. If you do become a student, you'll get your syllabus.
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You'll be able to have your syllabus, which will be good to have a lot of information in there.
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And you could, it helps us to support the ministry. All right? So I encourage you to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.