Open Zoom Calls, Great Questions!

Well, greetings, welcome to a Zoom call based dividing line today, taking your calls.

Rich says there are some people out in the waiting room that can't get in because they didn't watch the video and they're not doing things right.

I just thought I'd let you know that in case you're wondering. But some people did. We probably already have more people in the in the queue than we're going to be able to get to, depending on how fast

I get to stuff. Let me just say, before we start taking calls, I was sent a video,

I sent two videos. See, there's just no way with you all saw on the last program, by the way.

Thank you for the incredible feedback on the last program. There were a lot of folks.

That just were really blown away by the program, thought it was great, liked doing that kind of stuff.

I was a little worried, honestly, it seemed. A little on the technical side, and I didn't have time to do, you know, graphics and put stuff up and have quotes and all the rest, that kind of stuff.

We sort of had to do that as we as we moved along. But yeah, that was very appreciative of the positive feedback from that.

I'm glad it was helpful to a lot of folks. That gives you an idea of the stuff that I'm doing in the background right now, in preparation for the debate in October and looking at the sources, and it's fascinating right now.

I'll be honest with you. I actually bought a book.

In Kindle format yesterday. And I opened it up and it was the it was, oh, drat,

I was going to have this up because it looked really good. And it was 40 questions.

On what was that called? That's interesting that I have that still up.

It's not pulling it up. Maybe if I went downloaded and then went to all, it will pull it up.

Oh, oh, there it is. It's called 40 Questions About the

Text and Canon of the New Testament. And go back to the cover here so I can actually read the whole thing, there's the cover.

By L. Scott Kellum and Charles L. Quarles. Benjamin L. Merkel, series editor.

40 Questions About the Text and Canon of the New Testament. And so I was just looking at it. It had been recommended by someone on on X, and I was looking at, you know,

I just sort of opened it up and I ran across this discussion of the variant that we've talked about a million times in this program, 1st

Timothy 316. And I forget what it was that prompted me to look at the

UBS Critical Edition. And it had Pseudodionysias listed with a certain reading.

That started a fascinating rabbit trail because I'm working with Pseudodionysias.

In fact, when I brought up Kindle, that's what was up, was the current critical

Greek text of Pseudodionysias was up in Kindle. And it prompted all sorts of questions about, well, what was the textual tradition that he's utilizing?

I've discovered, at least I think I've discovered from talking to Claude and having

Claude do some deep dives. I've discovered what would be a cool doctoral dissertation thesis for somebody who would like to do it.

What was the textual character of the citations given by Pseudodionysias?

Or does he not cite it clearly enough to even determine those types of things? It ended up being two hours of chasing stuff all over, things like that.

And that's what I'm doing right now. And so, you know, there's people who want me to do stuff. Eli wants me to do something in response to Jay Dyer.

I guess Jay Dyer was on with Rulan. And I did happen to just stumble into him mentioning me.

And he's going to be talking about Genesis 12, Genesis 15, Genesis 22, Justification.

I can tell I didn't even have to listen to much of it. That would be a worthwhile thing to respond to, though Jay Dyer is not a worthwhile person to talk with.

I'll just tell you straight up. When he's talking with Ruslan in this video, he's very calm, very collected.

Go to his websites, watch the rest of this stuff. Maybe he has sort of a mental issue where he can be calm one time and then he's completely insane another time.

I don't know. But his general demeanor and behavior is that of a 12 year old. And he made a comment about Wes Hough in the picture that he posted of us a couple of nights ago.

And it was just, again, it was 12 year old, vile 12 year old. That's Jay Dyer.

That's that seems to be his natural state. Evidently, he can sort of put the brakes on that and behave in some context.

But it just makes it worthless to, I think, engage with him much. But I've got that, might make some comments on that, might just put that aside and just deal with the

Genesis 12, 15 justification thing from Romans four, because Rome just struggles with that horribly.

They have to run off to nominalism and stuff like that. And then real quickly,

I was sent the video this morning. I did get to listen like the first 15, 18 minutes of it, of a

Joel Webb and thing where he's talking about the worldwide global religion of Holocaust entity.

And this seems to be where he's going now. I mean, it makes it when you go back, when

I go back and I listen to what happened a couple of years ago, a couple of summers ago, I think it's three years ago this summer or two years ago.

I think it's might be three years ago this summer. Yeah, I think it is. The stuff about, you know, having a member of the church,

Benjamin, you know, mocking the Holocaust. And now you you hear

Webben making an entire religion an entire religion of Holocaust entity.

It's a major world religion that Jesus hates. Jesus hates Holocaust entity.

And it just just one quick comment. He taught he pulls all this stuff together and it's all the

Jews. It's all Holocaust entity. This is why we can't have a nation and can't love our kinsmen and all this stuff.

I mean, the connections are as wildly disjointed as anything from Candace Owens.

OK, it just is just as completely you're connecting all this stuff together. And the stuff that he truthfully actually identifies as real problems is due to secularism, not not

Holocaust entity. So you're directing people to their attention away from the real issue.

To all this, you know, the same thing with Judeo -Christian, write a whole book about it. You know, the heresy of it's just so ridiculous.

It's it's an astonishing and how damaging it is. It really is.

But man, just off the cliff into the next canyon. It's just happened fast.

Well, OK, some people would say it didn't happen fast. It took a couple months or years.

But in the time frame of church history, that's that's fast. OK, so are we just starting from the beginning up here or?

All right. OK, well. Well, OK. Yeah, I'm just but yeah,

I would rather go with people have been sitting there for a while. So we've got Danny is looks like he's learning biblical

Greek. So let's start with that one. Hi, Danny. Good evening, Dr. White, how are you?

I'm doing pretty good. Perfect. And Dr. White, my question was, so I'm serving in my church here in Ireland and I'm looking to start learning, hopefully, to learn biblical

Greek. I'm currently working full time, so I don't have the opportunity to move abroad and go to a seminary.

And I was wondering for like a layperson, is there any resources you might recommend for self learning for biblical languages?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've told the story before. A friend of mine that I knew from IRC chat decided he wanted to do a double master's at master's seminary.

And the only way to do that was to try to test out of Greek to learn it before he went to seminary.

So he could test out of that so he could do the double masters. He did and he accomplished that ended up at Trinity doing his

PhD in the same same areas. And it can be done. But here's we'll start with the negatives.

Most people don't have the self -discipline to pull it off because when

I took Greek, when I when I took my first year of Greek in college, it was four times a week. The first semester and three times a week.

The second semester, there were quizzes every single day. You couldn't take a day off. You couldn't just put it aside because family issues or whatever.

You just had you had to do it. You had tests. You had quizzes and you had to do the vocabulary.

And back then we're all walking around with these vocabulary cards. You could buy them at the bookstore and they're on a ring and you'd sit there.

I still got him. I still got him in the other room. They're old and yellow now, but and written in Sanskrit, but you could tell who the

Greek students were. They'd be sitting in the hallway and they're thumbing through these vocabulary cards. That can be all be done on computer.

I'll be honest with you. The feeling I get is the more paper you can touch, the more times you can write the words down, the better it's gonna it helps with vocabulary.

So you might want to actually avoid some of the computer crutches and write out your own vocabulary cards.

It's slower, but I just have a feeling most people memorize better. You might be different. You got to figure that stuff out for yourself.

So what I suggested and what has worked for it has worked for a number of people is

William Mounce's beginning grammar workbook.

He has his entire course, all the lectures at I think it's technia .com.

If I recall correctly, you can just Google it or ask Claude to find it or whatever. You can get all of his lectures.

He's got the answers to the workbook. So you can do the workbook thing, then check your answers.

He's got tests. He's got parsing, practicing programs for your phone, your computer, your iPad, whatever.

He has the vocabulary because what you learn in first year is called the 300 word vocabulary.

So it's all the words used 300 or more times in the New Testament. And that's basically, no, no, 50 times.

It's 300 words that are used 50 or more times in the New Testament. There you go. And that gives you the 50 word vocabulary.

I would always suggest getting your, go ahead and getting your Greek New Testament early, carrying it, trying to look through it, even when you can only recognize, you know, one out of every 10 words, just to get familiarity with the language, the script, the alphabet, etc.,

etc. A lot of people have found that to be really helpful. But, so if you go with mounts, you get all this stuff, it always helps to have somebody for accountability.

If you can't have the class, if you can't have a professor, if you could find another friend at church that wants to go through this with you, and you can struggle together, but that encouragement, that accountability, that always really helps a lot.

And the biggest thing I can help, that I can say ahead of time, that I have found help a lot of people with doing this, is you don't want to be learning two languages at the same time.

And what I mean by that is, I've told the story back in 8th grade, there were these two

English teachers at the school that I went to. One was the old school grammar and everything, and thankfully

I didn't get her. I got Ms. Stickley. Ms. Stickley had just graduated from Berkeley, and she was a hippie, and we had fun in her class, and we did debates, and we did play acting, and all that kind of fun stuff.

And years later, when I'm taking Greek, I'm wishing I had had the other lady.

Because we did switch classes once. One time, I had to sit in her class, and I remember what she taught to this day.

Predicate nouns follow linking verbs. Predicate nouns follow linking verbs.

I can hear her voice saying it. And I wish, I wish, I wish I had had her.

Because I sort of had to learn two languages at the same time. It's not that I was bad in English grammar.

It's just that I was always in the advanced class, and so we would talk them out of doing it.

They'd rather do Shakespeare, too. So what I'm saying is, before you try to tackle

Greek, you need to make sure you've got English. You need to know what a participle is. You need to know what a direct object is.

You need to have an understanding of what an infinitive is in your own language, because Mounce is going to be using your own language to explain what

Greek is doing. But if you're having to stop and go, I'm not sure what an infinitive is, and what's a gerund, and what's a participle, and what's a direct object, and what's the verbs and pronouns and everything else, you've got to have the

English down first. That way, you're not learning two languages at once. So you've got to have the discipline.

Vocabulary is absolutely necessary. Thankfully, Greek vocabulary, in my opinion, is considerably easier than Hebrew vocabulary, because there are so many connections.

English borrowed so much from various languages, Latin, Greek, so on and so forth. But you just can't fall behind on the vocabulary, and that's the thing that someone who's doing it on their own tends to stumble on.

Because, you know, when I took Hebrew in seminary, my daughter had just been born.

She wasn't sleeping through the night, and that's why my Hebrew vocabulary has never been as good as it could have been otherwise.

Because when life gets in the way, that's the one thing that starts falling apart, is you might do it for that week, but then you let it slide for the next week, and then all of a sudden the grammar starts getting confusing, because you're also struggling just recognizing the words.

So the vocabulary has to be top priority, or you'll never understand what

Mounce is doing with the aorist, or whatever else that's part of that.

Well, when I taught Mounce last, I think there were 30... was it 34 or 36 chapters?

And I'd have to do... when I taught that at Golden Gate, on the seminary level, we had 13 weeks to cover about 34, 35 chapters.

So that's more than one chapter a week. That is not the way to do it. I was... what

I hated about teaching it at that speed was I was teaching people to hate Greek, not to love Greek. So there, you just got the whole kit and caboodle in one shot.

That was super, super helpful. Okay, well hey, and you guys are losing your country over there.

I thought I might tell you that in passing. Whoever's in charge is trying to sink you, just like the

UK, and us, and everything else. So I hope you all can turn it around. Well, thank you so much for taking my call, and thank you for your ministry.

I came across it during the pandemic in Ireland, and your content really helped inform me of the biblical role of government, and I'm forever grateful for that.

All righty, thank you, sir, and bless you in your studies. It can be done, but it's a challenge.

It's a challenge. Okay. All the best. All righty, thank you. That'll hopefully help other folks, too.

That's a common question we get a lot. I want to learn Greek. I can't go to seminary.

I can't go to Bible college. I've got a family. I've got kids. Is it possible? If you are truly self -disciplined, if you set a goal, make the commitment, it would be helpful if your wife is a part of it, too, because she's probably going to have to pick up some stuff around the house, duties -wise, to give you that kind of time, because any guy who's asking that is already working hard as it is.

It can be done. Is it worthwhile? Man, I'll tell you. I don't know how many times

I've said it. What is the greatest commentary on the New Testament? The New Testament in Greek.

And I got that from my Greek professor, Mike Baird.

Seven years, poor man. That was a line that I did steal directly from him.

What is the best commentary on the New Testament? The New Testament in Greek. No question about it. No question about it.

Okay, let's go to a church history theology issue with Andrew and the topic of theosis.

Yes, sir, Andrew. Hey, Dr. Wyatt. I don't know why it showed that on my name.

It's actually a question of the canon. Oh. Well, somebody put it there.

I don't know who, but all right, go for it. So I've read your book,

Scripture Alone, as well as Chapter 5, in particular, repeatedly. I believe

I understand the categories within Canon 1 and 2. I have also listened to your discussion with Michael Kruger on the topic of canon.

I have listened to his talks on YouTube. I've even attempted to understand

Owen's work. So I have two questions about this. The first one, I think, is a fairly yes or no question.

Is the mechanism by which Canon 1 and Canon 2 communicated or unified, the self -authenticating model as described by Michael Kruger and others?

Is that the way those two concepts are united? Well, everything that Dr.

Kruger says about this and that I say about this, I'm sure you've listened to the thing that we did together in G3, right?

Yes, sir. Okay. It's based upon the same foundational principle that the canon is a theological concept, not primarily a historical concept.

So it is canon is a theological thing and therefore must be approached from that perspective before you start doing surveys of early church fathers and their writings and what did they quote and what didn't they quote, etc.,

etc. So we're both coming from the same perspective at that point, but what's confusing about the question to me is

Canon 1 is known to God and is the result of the nature of Scripture being

Theanostas, it's God's speech. Canon 2 is our knowledge of what

God has inspired, what God has breathed out. And so, I mean, both are dependent upon a high view of Scripture, but I'm not sure what you mean by that's what combines them or unites them or something like that.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Well, I guess the question is, is like, so we know if Canon 1 is known by God and Canon 2 is known by man.

So I guess the question is, is that how do we, through what way was Canon 2 aligned with Canon 1?

Was it through the self -authenticating model? Well, you know, it's interesting, the current catechism question we're doing at Apologia is on this topic, and it talks about the evidences that the

Bible is the Word of God, but then it says, but apart from the Holy Spirit, we would never submit and believe in the

Word of God. And so there is the spiritual aspect that, again, speaks to the theological character of the canon.

But I think I answered that question in the book toward the end of that section, where I, in essence, said, if God has a purpose for His people to know what

He has and has not inspired, then He will extend the same level of power in revealing

Canon 2, in the sense of leading His people to have what He's inspired, as He gave in the inspiration in the first place.

I mean, it would make no sense for God to inspire, and it's not the best term, but for God to breathe out the

Scriptures to function as the guide for His people. Paul says that these things are written for our encouragement, for our edification, so he's seeing

Scripture as having a specific divine purpose that God intends us to have it.

So it'd make no sense to do that, and then we're all sitting around going, well, we don't know what Scripture is.

And even in the New Testament, in the Gospels, when you have what some people would say is canonical differences, when they talk about the

Sadducees and the Pharisees, it's very common to say, well, in reality, what's going on is you have the

Pharisees accept the full 22 or 24 -book canon, depending on how you're counting them, whereas the

Sadducees only accept the Pentateuch. It's possible, though, that never manifests itself in the

Gospels. You don't see that overtly being stated or coming into play in the conversations.

There's only a couple places where Jesus is specifically addressing the Sadducees anyways, and He does stick with the

Pentateuch when He does that. So maybe that's a sort of incipient nod to that reality,

I don't know. But the point is that there really isn't a big problem, as far as the

Gospel writers are concerned, that has to do with canons. So however God did it, it was already accomplished at that point in time, because Jesus holds men accountable for what the

Scripture said, and there's never any pushback, well, I didn't know that was Scripture, Rabbi so -and -so doesn't think that book was

Scripture, or something along those lines. That never happens. And so we do have to look back at that, because we're on the other side of the

New Testament. And if the New Testament's teaching that Jesus is the final word, that He's spoken by apostles and prophets, by prophets in the past, but now, in these final days, has spoken by His Son, if the

Son is the final word, then there has to be a recognition of that, and that's going to play into how we understand how

Canon 2 is being revealed. As I said, there's a very similar historical timeline between the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew, well, at least, birth of Christ, actually, and then you have pretty much the same time period as far as the

New Testament's concerned, though there are a lot of differences as well. And what

I mean by that is, in the Old Testament you have a covenantal people, you don't have those books being sent out to the world in a missionary -type situation.

Even the Greek Septuagint, at least initially, is primarily just for the Jews. It's not meant to be a mechanism of reaching out to the

Greek world with the message of Yahweh, or something like that. And in fact, just in passing, once the

Christians sort of start doing that with the Septuagint, the Jews pretty much reject it and say, yeah, no, don't want that.

You're using it, and your writers used it as well. Anyway, so there are other differences, though.

I mean, the persecution of the Roman Church, the very fact that the New Testament is outward -looking, and the

Old Testament was inward -looking to a specific community. So there are differences that I think are important, especially when you look at the historical discussions of development, and what did

Marcion have to do with the Church struggling with these issues of canon, and things like that.

But still, time -wise, it ends up being the very same type of experience in time.

So anyway, but if the question is fundamentally, is the best answer on canon fundamentally found by recognizing the nature of Scripture, and what the

Scriptures teach about themselves, as far as God breathed, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit, have you not read what was spoken to you by God? I mean, those are direct, didactic statements.

And so my answer would be, yes, the nature of Scripture must determine that, and I think that's one of the weaknesses of the historical approach, is that the nature of Scripture is often just simply dismissed as having any relevance to the discussion of canon.

That makes sense. So the follow -up question, I think I get your point.

So this is the follow -up question. Is this—so essentially, just really quick.

So essentially, the mechanism, whatever it may be in particular, we see with the

Old Testament must be parallel in some way, shape, or form with what we see in the

New Testament. I think I get your point. So the follow -up question would be this, is that how does this mechanism provide for us the necessary epistemological grounding that we see in presuppositional thinking and apologetics with men like Van Til and Greg Bonson?

Well, I think both Van Til and Bonson would recognize the providence of God in historically guiding the people of God to a recognition of His Word.

Just simply on the—when we're talking about the few books where there were serious questions,

I mean, there was never really serious questions about Romans or the Gospels themselves.

I mean, aside from all the woo -woo stuff that we get on YouTube about the Gospel of Thomas and stuff like that, that was never a serious issue for the

Church. It came so much later anyways, and is pretty woo -woo itself. But anyway,

I think that they would recognize—and

Greg, of course, was more modern, so he would have encountered some of these issues in regards to Nag Hammadi and stuff like that, and Van Til might have had some exposure to some of those apologetical questions, things like that, maybe.

But if the question—and the question was clearly typed out in the way that you read it there at the end—

A little bit. It raises all sorts of questions as to what the context of the question is assuming.

Is it talking about grounding a specific epistemology?

Is it talking about a theory of history that would— Primarily epistemology,

I would say. Yeah, okay. So, I think that's the easiest part, because, again, if the content of Scripture itself says that God has a purpose in gifting the

Church with His Word as the primary means of its guidance, then making sure that we have it is sort of a logical necessity.

I mean, it flows from the act of inspiration itself. They're both purposeful acts on God's part, and to do the one without the other basically makes the one worthless.

So, if what we're looking for is some kind of external—

See, what people want—and I've had this conversation. There's one fellow, I'm sure, who's going to be listening, who's going to remember this lengthy conversation we had about it.

What people want is some type of objective epistemological fact that you can just simply drive into the ground and say, here it is, and this is how you answer all the questions.

And given the nature of Scripture, given the fact that God used, you know, 40 different people over 1 ,500 years, and two or three different languages, and all sorts of different contexts, and that most especially of the

Old Testament Revelation comes out from the experience of God's people in rebellion, restoration, rebellion, restoration, exile, restoration, this sort of lived -out nature of the

Revelation, it makes it sort of hard to come up with what we as Western thinkers especially want to have, which is, you know, an inspired index, and a table of contents, and maybe a few bibliographies, and some stuff like that.

That's what we want, but that's not what we have. And so some people would say, well, because that's not what we have, then

Vantill and Bonson are tilting at windmills because that's what we would need. But Vantill and Bonson are dealing with epistemological questions that have been raised by the

Enlightenment and by everything that's come after that. Bonson starts obviously getting into especially the apologetic elements of these things in regards to secularism, and, you know, the

West was certainly secularizing during Vantill's era as well, but not to the radical degree that it has now.

And, you know, Bonson's certainly in on that type of stuff taking place. And so they're dealing with some pretty modern questions that wouldn't necessarily have been in the forefront of even the

Reformers' minds. And I think the fact that they're able to do that without abandoning the very high view that Scripture presents of itself of inspiration, of the binding nature of God's speaking, really speaks to the robust nature of the theological system that they were defending, and that we are seeking to defend even today against further refinements of attacks and things like that.

So a lot of this would have to do with what you mean by mechanism and how clearly you want to define that.

Because when you first used the term, that's the first thought across my mind is mechanism sounds like something outside of the nature of Scripture itself?

Possibly? I'm not sure. Which the self -authenticating model necessarily relies upon, looking at the nature of Scripture and things like that.

Well, that takes you to the ultimate epistemological question as to whether God can speak.

I mean, there has to be, you've got to start someplace. And if we recognize we can't start with ourselves, then we've got to start with the one who made us.

And we have to ask the question, can he communicate with us? Did he make us communicative beings?

And I think that's one of the clearest and obvious realities of the world around us, is that we are communicating beings and God has chosen to communicate with us through the means of how he has made us.

And if we don't start there, I don't know that we can ever get anywhere in being able to communicate with anybody else.

But that's the self -defeating nature of human philosophy over against starting with all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hid in the one who walked out of the grave and is the

Lord of History. So I think that's why Greg could be so, I don't know, bold in what he said to Stein, is if you really do live in light of the empty tomb, you can be pretty bold to say, that's where I start.

And if you don't start there, you're going to end up spinning in circles your entire life and dying unhappy like Gordon Stein did.

So basically, we're not reliant upon some council in the city called

Trent, right? Well, you know, it's funny. I've had the opportunity recently of doing a little more looking into who specifically was involved with those decisions in April of 1546.

And the more you dig into that, the more you realize for all of Rome's pretended authority claims, it all comes down to individuals.

It all comes down to politics. It all comes down to all sorts of things that they don't really want to admit.

But that's just the way it is. Like Vatican II? Oh my gosh, don't even go there.

Now we've got... Oh, all right, all right.

Rich is going nuts in the other room saying I've spent too much time with you. All right.

Sorry, Rich. I'll talk to you later, Dr. Warren. All right. Thanks, Andrew. Bye. Let's break things up just a little bit here.

Let's talk to, I'm going to pronounce it, Ralph. Voting as a

Christian, I think. Good afternoon, Dr. White. I'm calling from Hungary, by the way.

Yeah. And this last weekend on April 12th, we had the national elections.

Right. We heard about it. And we had a regime change after 16 years. And I'm still young.

I'm trying to figure out how to do politics as a believer. And basically my question boils down to this.

Is there a point where it is wrong to choose either of the parties?

Can both of them be so evil or like un -Christian or too secular?

I pose my question like this because both of the parties claim to be

Christian and right -wing. But neither of them want to do anything about abortion in the slightest, for example.

So that's where my question is aimed. Yeah. Well, Ralph, it's probably

Rolf or something like that, right? It's Rolf. Rolf? Okay. All right. It's fine.

You're not alone in pondering these things. There are Christians pretty much in every nation, from Africa here to the

United States, pondering the exact same things. And that means you're going to get a lot of different answers from people.

Here, I'll just share with you where I'm coming from. We heard about the election, and we've heard about the shift there in Hungary.

And there's all sorts of different takes on it over here, though I'll be honest with you, 99 % of Americans wouldn't have a clue where to find

Hungary on a map, let alone know Viktor Orban or anybody else. So there are only a few of us that really pay attention.

You all probably know more about Donald Trump than anybody over here knows about what's going on in Hungary.

But Christians face the exact same issues, no matter where they are.

And look, there are going to be believers who will answer the question you asked positively.

They will say, yes, the parties can become so hypocritical, so ungodly, that you could not, in good conscience, positively vote for either one, which might leave you without a voice.

So there will be Christians, and that is exactly what they're convinced of that. And I would never tell a

Christian to go against their conscience. I would say to them, please make sure that you are seeking the spirit and the enlightenment of God's word on these issues, but if that's where you come down, then that's where you come down.

Here in the United States, in our last major election, we had the choice between an egomaniac, a narcissist, who is not overly stable as a person, and a woman who is basically a smiling communist, but who is such an airhead, that it was very clear she would just continue to be a placeholder like Joe Biden was.

And somebody else would be running the country. Somebody else who's not even... we can't hold them accountable. We don't know who ran the country for four years under Joe Biden.

It certainly wasn't him. So that was the choice we were left with. And I recognize all the mess that Donald Trump is, and the mess that we have right now with him, his dishonesty and his narcissism and everything else that goes with it, but for me, the choice was immediate destruction of the freedoms that allow us to herald forth the gospel and print

Christian materials and to continue to seek to try to end human abortion in the

United States, and just simply come to an end. I mean, you're probably not aware of this, but I'll go ahead and mention this.

The Justice Department here in the United States, five days ago, I think, released documents, were forced to release documents by Trump that demonstrated that under Biden, they had been spying on and reporting on and seeking to suppress the activity of pro -lifers here in the

United States. And we have pictures now. One of the pictures that was released,

I had been cut out of it, but I was standing right next to Jeff Durbin in the picture that they had of him and talking about end abortion now and radical anti -choice activities and all this kind of stuff was what they were doing.

This was what my own government was doing toward me and my fellow elders and people like me.

So if Kamala Harris had won that, that's where we'd be right now. And so, yes,

I did vote for an egomaniac in the last election, and I did so purposefully and knowingly because I wanted another four years of being able to continue to teach and to continue to educate people on the abolition of abortion and the nature of the unborn child and try to stop the insanity, which we just saw did just happen on one level.

The state of Colorado is going to have to change how it does things in regards to transgenderism and stuff like that.

So, yeah, that's the decision I came to. Now I can understand why someone might say,

I can't do that. Okay, I can do that in hopes that by buying that little bit of time, voting for the lesser of two evils, they're still evil, and if those are the only choices you've got, you can either not participate in the political process or you can try to tap the brakes, so to speak, and pick the side that's going to rebel slower,

I guess would be the way. Is that ideal? No, of course not. But when

I look at the early church, they never had options like that. For the first 300 years, they were under persecution.

They never had the option of doing anything positively in politics. So, yeah,

I think it's a place where we should give each other a lot of grace and listen to each other, which isn't generally how we're doing things, unfortunately, but it would be,

I think, the best way to do it. So there's my thought on it. That's how

I voted in the last election. Well, thank you, and I thought you'd appreciate it if I mentioned that your ministry has been very helpful for me in the past few years.

I managed to leave a cult, by God's grace, and you helped me with that, so thank you.

And one last happy thing, you mentioned at the start of the program this, it's all about the

Jews. Yes. It's spreading in Hungary as well. Not many good churches, but among my generation,

Gen Z, I can see this genuine anti -Semitism, and what

Joel is talking about, it's spreading rapidly. It's very concerning. Yeah, it's really all over the place.

But thank you for your answer. It's been helpful. Okay, thank you very much, Alf, and God bless you and your service to Christ there in Hungary, and all the saints there as well.

Look, the Lord has his church all over the place, and it's great to hear that we've had

Ireland and Hungary so far. And I didn't know, did you know that? Did you know that they're outside the

U .S.? The people we've just been talking to. Oh, okay.

All right. Okay. All right, let's go on here. Dylan on Covenant Theology.

Hi, Dylan. Good evening, Dr. White. I'm doing well. How are you?

Doing pretty good. Good. I just want to give you fair warning. I have my daughter with me here.

She's eight months old, so she might interject as we're talking. So it's a little bit of grace with that.

So I had a question about Covenant Theology. I'm an ordained pastor with the

Assemblies of God. We're church planting in upstate New York. And the question doesn't really have to do with that, but I just want to say thank you for your work and for your ministry.

I went to an Assemblies of God Bible college, and we would watch your debates in our apologetics class.

So you're having an impact there, which is an interesting place. Indeed.

That's exciting to hear. So what's your question? Yeah, so I've been trying to get into Covenant Theology.

I was looking at it a little bit in college, and that was, I don't know, maybe like eight years ago or so.

And I've been trying to work through just some of the ideas between the old covenants and the new covenant and some of the things that Jesus says and Solomon says about covenants, about promises, about pledges.

You know, obviously there's the warnings and proverbs about making pledges and promises. Matthew has his comments in Jesus' Sermon on the

Mount about making promises, yes is be yes, no is be no, don't swear under heaven, all those things.

And I was just curious how that relates to the covenants of God and why

God uses covenants as His, I don't know what you call it,

His mode of speaking and working with His people, especially when we see that they're not a priori good, you know, according to Solomon, according to Jesus.

Obviously there's the difference ontologically between God and man, but why does

He choose covenants, and what are some sources, maybe you could point me in the right directions?

Yeah, you know, a covenant's a whole lot more than a yay or nay.

It's a whole lot more than swearing. I mean, there are oaths involved in the making of covenants, but it's the foundation of the covenant, and it's the relationship of those who are entering into covenant that is really what marks

Biblical covenant theology, and again, you're going to find a lot of different viewpoints, even amongst the

Reformed. I'm a Reformed Baptist, there are a lot of Reformed Presbyterians that would say we're not covenant theologians at all, though we are, and we end up debating each other and stuff like that.

At least we can go to a common ground to do that. But I think you really see the nature of covenants in how

God deals with the patriarchs. You see Abraham, you see in the vision when the fiery pots and passing between the divided bodies, and there's sacrifice involved very often in the creation of these covenants.

And really, the beauty of seeing how God covenantally dealt with the people of Israel is the fact that what it did was demonstrated

God's faithfulness in the midst of Israel's constant unfaithfulness, and that was a picture of the fact that the

New Covenant, and this is Jeremiah chapter 31, and this is a big thing

I harp on in regards to the signs of the covenants and things like that, but the New Covenant is going to be new.

It is going to be radically new in the sense that because it's based upon the union of God's people with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, then the covenant terms are fulfilled in Christ, which is why every person in the

New Covenant knows God. Every person in the New Covenant has forgiveness of sins. It's not a halfway covenant.

It's not a covenant where God goes so far, and then man has to pick it up there and fulfill things on the other end, which is why the

Old Covenant kept being violated and collapsing and all the rest of that type of stuff.

So there's a lot of truly beautiful spiritual truth to be garnered from a recognition of the nature of the

New Covenant. And I think, personally, the book that just fleshes that out completely, and this is maybe why a lot of modern evangelicals don't get this, is the book of Hebrews.

Because Hebrews talks about the priesthood, and Hebrews talks about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant and the differences between them, and if you don't have the

Old Testament background to what's being said in the book of Hebrews, it's just going to go flying past you.

And I think that's why Hebrews is rarely someone's favorite book, is because you've got to know

Leviticus to know Hebrews. And so we're canonically challenged along those lines.

But you dig into Hebrews and you start, he's the guarantee of a better covenant.

He's a better mediator. And when you start digging into what all that means, that's where the true beauty of covenant theology,

I think, comes to the fore. And really should be something that every believer is excited about and cognizant of, conversant with, knowledgeable of, because therein lies the very force and power of our salvation.

And I think a lot of the surface -level stuff that people end up running with is due to the fact they don't see that covenant relationship that is the foundation of their peace with God, their relationship with Christ, and His mediatorship, and that's all covenantal as well.

So there's a lot of exceedingly deep theology that flows from recognizing that the

Old Covenant and New Covenant, and we talk Old Testament, New Testament, that's really what it is, Old Covenant, New Covenant, the fulfillment themes, the fact that God basically takes the fulfillment of this covenant upon Himself in the

Incarnation, so that even that is covenantal. Once you see all of that, it's truly beautiful.

It captures the mind, and it helps you to avoid some of the simplistic stuff that we, unfortunately, get a lot of the time in evangelical theology.

Got it. That is super helpful. Thank you. Is there any, obviously, reading through and studying the book of Hebrews and some of the covenants throughout the

Bible, but are there any sources you would recommend? I just bought

The Economy of Covenant Between God and Man, Herman Witsius, and some of Augustine's works.

Are there any others? I'm not too familiar with too many Reformed theologians and whatnot, but what works would you recommend for further reading on it?

Yeah, you're going to get, I mean, there are obviously tremendous works that have been done on the covenants by Reformed writers.

You also have to do a little more digging around to get some of the better works on the covenants from Reformed Baptists, but they are out there.

If you get hold of, you know, what you would want to do, if you want to be balanced in your study of the covenants, what

I would do is I would actually write to or call

Greenville Presbyterian and ask for their professor who's currently teaching in that field and ask for a book list from him, and then

I'd get hold of Sam Waldron and the guys at his seminary or there's a couple of Reformed Baptist seminaries, one down in Florida as well that I can think of.

Look them up, get the emails, ask the professor who's teaching from a

Reformed Baptist perspective what books on covenant theology that are currently in print, that's one of the problems, that they would recommend, and get that balance.

If you just go with one side or the other, you're going to sort of get a colored viewpoint there, but get a balance.

They don't tend to be the easiest reading books you're going to encounter.

You might have to work through them a little bit on the slow side. All of us do that, so don't feel badly about that.

But yeah, that would be really helpful as well. Okay? Yeah, sounds good.

I'll look those up, I'll look up those individuals in those schools. Thank you for your time, Dr. White. Okay, thank you. All righty, let's keep going.

I know you need to wrap up fairly soon. Just one more?

Okay. Okay, all right, let's talk to Marcus on God's sovereignty.

Hello, Marcus. It's still muted on my end. There you go.

Hello, Marcus. Hello. Thank you for taking my call.

I like listening to your shows. Yes, sir. Can you hear me?

I can. Go ahead. Okay. I like to know—I'm not a

Calvinist, but I like to learn more about Calvinism. So I was wondering how, in Calvinism, God is in control of human actions while keeping people responsible for what they do.

Okay. Well, I think the best way to illustrate that for you—I like to do this from Scripture.

Let me just direct you to three quick passages. I won't spend a whole lot of time on them, but I would ask you to read them carefully and to consider them.

In Genesis chapter 50, when Joseph's brothers—their father has died.

Joseph's brothers are afraid that he's going to kill them now for what they did to him, selling him into slavery in Egypt.

They come before him, and Joseph, very kindly and graciously and with great understanding of God's sovereignty, he does not, for a second, dismiss the sinfulness of their actions toward him.

But he recognizes that while his brothers had acted in malice against him,

God had acted in the exact same actions for his good.

So he says in Genesis 50, you intended this for evil, but God intended it for good and to save many people alive to this day.

So it was one sinful action, and God had actually—if you remember the story,

God had actually kept the brothers from killing Joseph. He restrained their evil. But he did allow a certain level of evil that brought

Joseph into Egypt, which was his purpose and his intention. And so he uses the evil of his brothers to accomplish his purposes.

He didn't force the brothers to do that. He even restrained the brothers from doing more evil than they did.

It wasn't like they were innocent people and he's going, you go do something bad. No, he restrained their evil, he brings

Joseph down there, and that's how the whole exodus takes place and everything else. So there you have the specific statement by God in Genesis chapter 50, you intended this for evil,

God intended it for good. The second passage, I'm not going to ask you to comment on these things, just write them down and take a look at them.

In Isaiah chapter 10, God talks about how he's going to use the

Assyrians as the rod to punish the people of Israel. But then he says he's going to then punish the

Assyrians for what they do to Israel. Now how can that be? Well, again, he talks about the pride of the

Assyrian leaders and how they think they're doing this all on their own, they don't realize they're just the instrument in the hand of God.

And so he justly punishes the people of Israel who violated his covenant. Look at Deuteronomy 28 and 29, there's the blessings and the cursings.

And then he punishes the Assyrians because of the attitude of their heart.

They're rebels against God. And so he accomplishes his purpose in the actions of the

Assyrians and then punishes them for the attitude of their heart.

The last one that I think you really need to think about deeply, honestly, is in Acts chapter 4, verses 27 and 28.

Acts 4, 27 and 28, here's what it says. For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant

Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to occur.

Now, this is about the crucifixion. This is about nailing the sinless

Son of God to the cross. And four people or groups of people are mentioned here.

Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the peoples of Israel. And when you think about those groups, they all had very different purposes in the crucifixion.

Herod was just a nut. Pontius Pilate was a coward. The Gentiles were just the instrument, they were told to do it.

The peoples of Israel hated the Messiah. They all had different intentions. But notice what it says.

To do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to occur.

The crucifixion was predestined by the purpose of God.

And that does not mean that Herod was unaccountable. That does not mean that Pontius Pilate wasn't held accountable.

It doesn't mean the Gentiles or the peoples of Israel were not held accountable. But what they did was the fulfillment of God's predestined purpose.

That is the direct, explicit statement of the text. So there's three different places where in one sinful act, you have the sinful purposes of man and the holy purposes of God bringing about God's glory, saving people alive, redemption itself, and yet men are held purposefully accountable for what they did because they weren't innocent actors being forced to do something evil.

In the Genesis 50 account, we know specifically they had been restrained from doing more evil because they wanted to do more evil but God wouldn't allow them to.

So there you have three places where the Bible gives us a balanced understanding that yes,

God is the one who works all things after the counsel of His will, Ephesians 111. That's the statement of Scripture.

But in these instances, we see exactly how that ends up working in regards to the sinfulness of man.

Okay? Yes, sir?

Can you hear me? I can. Okay, so somehow you weren't hearing me when you were talking.

I was trying to talk to you and it wouldn't work. Yes, I understand.

That's the only way we can do this and people can hear what is being said.

Okay, so I was saying that I actually agree fully that the

Bible says that God is in control of human actions. And I totally agree that we are accountable, but I don't know how

Calvinism puts the two together. Like, what mechanism does

God use so that He can be in control? Well, God doesn't give us a mechanism.

He doesn't say, this is the means that I do this.

He tells us that He has a decree, He has a purpose, that He works all things in heaven and earth according to His purpose, and that we, created in His image, are accountable for our actions, and that that is how

He can be just and sovereign at the same time. And He's big enough to answer those questions, but He doesn't give us sort of like a schematic diagram of exactly how

He works that all out. So, I think those texts really give us an in -time look at how that ends up working.

So, hey Marcus, we're running out of time here. I appreciate the call. I hope that's useful to you. Peter, Wesley, Marco, and John, we will try to do this again and what

I've said in the past is when we do this, and you come in, let

Rich know that you were in before and that you've been in the queue before.

We didn't get to you, so that'll give you priority the next time around. So, Peter, Wesley, Marco, and John, thank you for being patient.

Yeah, I do tend to talk a lot, but I also think that some of these questions, you guys come up with really good questions, okay?

I mean, this audience asks really good questions. When you've got somebody asking about the Epistemological Foundation for Van Til and Greg Bonson in regards to canon, you don't just, you can't do short answers.

They're not going to really help anybody. You guys are already thinking past the short answers.

I think that's why you listen to this program. If you wanted short answers, I don't know you'd be listening to this program because we don't entertain you.

I mean, I'm ugly. Same background that we had before. Well, actually,

I just realized you can't... There it is, see? There's Westhoff's P1 facsimile back there.

I guess I'm sitting in front of it. I can't get too much thinner than I've gotten already, so I'm not sure

I can shrink down enough to show that, so I may have to move it over to another side. But anyways, so I'm complimenting the audience.

You all are a great audience. We really appreciate that you're out there, and we just hope that each program...

Look at these two programs we just did. Look at the range of stuff that we addressed in these two programs.

This is... I've had a lot of people say this to me, and this is our purpose. This is what you get when you go to seminary.

And this is seminary -level stuff. And some people say, yeah, you should simplify it.

There's plenty of people who simplify elsewhere. We're not trying to tell you you can't go listen to them.

You go do what you want. But this is the type of stuff that I think really helps people.

And to hear it helping people around the world is the other amazing thing. I mean, that was the one thing.

When we started this program, we were doing a little Saturday program on a radio station in Phoenix. We're not thinking about the world, in that sense.

And even when we went to real audio. I mean, how do you get the word out to Hungary, to Ireland, to South Africa?

But we have. And that's another... By the way, in regards to the question about Christians and politics, that's another thing across my mind.

How can we try to keep open this type of global communication possibility?

Because I love the second time I went to South Africa that I had a homeschool family come up to me at Pontchartrain University and say, we listen to Dividing Line all the time.

That was the other side of the planet. And that was years ago. And it's still the case today.

So, I rejoice in that. Thank you for being a part of the program today.