Radio Free Geneva: Showbread’s “Dear John Piper” and Leighton Flowers on 1 John 5:1

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The mighty fortresses are gone, the bulwark never faded.

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I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them, they're following men instead of the word of God.

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I'll never tolerate.

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I'm gonna be the one standing on top of my hands, standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out,

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He died for all, those who elected were selected.

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Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers.

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I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves

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Calvinists. For God so loved the world, that He gave

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His only begotten Son, that whosoever... Ladies and gentlemen,

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James White is a hyper -Calvinist. Now whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper -Calvinists.

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I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper -Calvinism and Calvinism.

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It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper -Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper -Calvinism.

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Read my book. And now, from our underground bunker, deep beneath Bruton Parker College, where no one would think to look, safe from all those moderate

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Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and re -read George Bryson's book, we are

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Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say for His own eternal glory.

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And welcome to Radio Free Geneva, The Dividing Line. Today I had enough stuff that I thought, you know, if we're going to address a lot of this anti -Calvinism stuff, we might as well fire up the electric guitar and do a riff on Mighty Fortress for the fun of it.

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Though I'm sure we'll get the regular complaints about that too. But welcome to the program.

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I wanted to, both of our primary topics today came from Twitter.

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And in fact, I just got a link, I don't know, not more than half an hour ago, on Twitter that will,

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I'm not sure how much it's going to add, but it will help, I suppose.

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A couple days ago, somebody on Twitter said, you should review this on The Dividing Line. I get that all the time.

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I get tons of stuff. And sometimes I click on something and go, why?

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People think I should review everything. And I don't know why anybody thinks that I know about everything, because I don't.

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You know, I mean, I've never made that claim. There are people who accuse me of thinking that way, but I think fair folks, fair -minded folks, he avoids lots of subjects because he hasn't studied those things.

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And so his opinion wouldn't have any more worth than anybody else's, I suppose. But anyway,

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I was sent this link, and at first, if I recall correctly, there was no, it said you should review this thing, but there was no link.

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And I'm like, what on earth is that? It was just the name of a song. I didn't even know what it was.

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And so for some reason, it sort of caught my attention, distracted me from what

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I was doing, which happens a lot these days. And so I think

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I googled it first. Yeah, I googled it first. After going, what on earth is that? I went ahead and googled it, took the time to stop, look, and found this song.

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Well, it's supposed to be a song. I personally really, I'm starting to really understand how out of step

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I am with the modern generation. And I'm happy about that, given the modern generation, what it's doing.

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But I don't consider this music, because I can remember times when we would have a situation where the gym class, it was raining outside.

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And so the coach told us to go into the band room. And before you got in there, some guy started banging on the drums and screaming.

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And I did not consider that to be music. But that's what this is. There's no difference.

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I'm going to play just a little bit of it here for you. Don't worry. Don't panic. I found the lyrics, because that's the only way you can understand this.

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That's the only way. It's not meant to communicate in that sense.

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You're not meant to actually understand what's being said. But you'll see why here.

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You don't really need video on this, because it's a still frame. You can just play it.

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That's true. It's just a still frame. I have to tell you, my first reaction when you played it for me was it was something akin to the static that you get when you go to a drive -thru speaker and you can't understand the word the person is saying.

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No, this is what you hear... No, this just sounds like a really angry person screaming himself hoarse.

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This is what someone sounds like when they're on the losing team in the second half of a college basketball game.

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They're yelling and screaming angrily at their players, and they're just about to lose their voice.

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That's what it sounds like. With the drum added in. Let's just go for it here, and you'll see what

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I'm saying. This is called Dear John Piper. Stillbirth in Space by Showbread is show dead.

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That's the album, but the group's called Showbread. Here we go. There you go.

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Did you catch Prevenient Grace? Okay, let me go a little bit later in this

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Beethoven -like symphony, and it changes a little bit.

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Now, there's a female voice that isn't screaming, and if it was balanced so you could hear her, you could actually understand what she was saying, but it's specifically balanced so that you can't hear her, and if you couldn't

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Google the lyrics, who would know? Who would know? But that's the song, and so I'm like, what?

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And so I brought up the lyrics, because I Googled it, and so one of the things was lyrics, which...

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So here are the lyrics for Dear John Piper.

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John Piper wants to put me away because I believe in possibilities, and that's not okay.

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He tells me you've got to draw horns on your picture of God, deliciously capricious and vicious, don't you spare them the rod.

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And then the chorus, I guess, throughout this is this.

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No fate but what we make, corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace.

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So you catch the two there? Now, I'll finish the other ones up here, but it'll help you to understand better.

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And it helped me to understand better that a gentleman on Twitter not very long ago, a fellow by the name of Hutch MDH underscore

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Junior on Twitter, it was actually 50 minutes ago now, 54 minutes ago, dropped me a link to an interview with the lyricist of Dear John Piper.

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It was on Ecclesiam.

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It's one of these blogs. Designers, please, why do you put text in light gray on white on a font of about 10?

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Do you not want someone to read it? It was one of those things. I had to select the text, copy it in a text edit, and select black.

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What a thought to be able to read it. Anyways, it is an interview from February of 2016 between Aaron Ross and the gentleman who wrote this particular song.

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And it explained a lot because right toward the beginning, and again, now

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I'm having to read the blog and it's like, he says,

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Then I kind of stumbled into reading and studying theology a couple of albums in just because someone handed me a copy of a book by Greg Boyd.

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He, as a thinker, was really interesting to me. The other way he polished out some of his ideas in turn made me jump from him to other authors that were influential, folks in the

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Mennonite tradition, John Howard Yoder and stuff like that. All right, so we've got

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Boyd, the open theist inclusivist, who is a primary influence here, which will become rather clear as we continue with the lyrics here, but certainly you get there, the corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace stuff.

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God goes strolling through the nursery playing duck, duck, goose, appointing babies for destruction, and they just can't refuse.

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Poor baby. Sovereign all -controlling God who pushed over man, you set the table for our failure, you put the fruit in our hands.

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It must be lonely when you sort it all out, the sheep from goats, the listing boat of all these questions and doubts, someone must rise and swell and eclipse the moon, like so many loathsome spiders skittering to their doom.

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And then our wonderful chorus.

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Wait, there was a chorus in there? No, yeah. No fate but what we make, corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace.

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No fate but what we make, no divine hand that's behind genocide, no good behind rape.

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Hail the sovereign Lord who turns the world like a toy, he chooses suffering for children, their agony brings him joy.

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And then, I can't figure it out from listening to it, but there's a parenthesis, but only sort of, parenthesis closed, all -powerful.

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So I have a feeling that the but only sort of is actually modifying the all -powerful, not the other, not what came before it.

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But only sort of all -powerful, so strong he sends molesters to children, all that he does is true and is good, and no one can resist him.

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Ever all -controlling, who sends earthquakes and famine, the author of suffering and death, who can understand him?

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It's best to shut your mouth and hope for the best, because even when you catch the worst, it's still kind of like the best.

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And then, evidently, this is the quote from David Bentley, who is

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Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, that I guess the woman was reading in the song.

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If indeed there were a God whose true nature, whose justice or sovereignty were revealed in the death of a child or the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell, then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge, and to hate him and to deny him worship and to seek a better God than he.

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So, there you go. As I've always said, theology matters.

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And the first thought across my mind when

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I read this, aside from the fact that here is where you see the destructive influence of a

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Gregory Boyd, of the emergent movement, Brian Zond, even classical

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Arminians, I still have in my feed a certain

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Arminian. It just drives me nuts to read him, because he's just liberal enough to be able to skitter by the real issues.

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No one is ever going to hold

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Reformed theology if you are not absolutely convinced that God has spoken. And we have shown over and over and over again how individuals who have left the

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Reformed movement have likewise abandoned a high view of Scripture. And which came first in their particular situation isn't necessarily the issue, but it is quite obvious that many of these individuals, these formerly

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Reformed people, are on a slide.

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There's no handholds to stop them. There are no scrub brushes to grab on the way over the cliff.

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They're on a slide to where they must do what people like Brian Zond have done, and that is to allegorize, or in some other way, find a means of abandoning the true and full inspiration and meaning of the

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Tanakh. Remember my discussion with Brian Zond? I kept talking about the Tanakh, and finally he said,

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What's the Tanakh? And at the time he was writing a commentary on an Old Testament book for some publishing house, and I'm just like,

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Torah, Nevi 'im, Ketevim, Tanakh, the Law, the Prophets, the

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Writings, standard terminology used of what Christians normally call the

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Old Testament, but what is probably even better called the Tanakh, because not everything in the

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Old Testament is specifically about the Old Covenant or something like that. It's more often described in the

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New Testament by the Law or the Prophets or things like that.

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And when you listen to Zond in his debate with Michael Brown on pedo -substitutionary atonement, when you listen to him in his debate on Calvinism, remember on Radio Free Geneva we played that stuff, we played his sections and reviewed his comments in the debate, it was absolutely crystal clear that the only way that he could attack

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Reformed theology was to fundamentally attack the consistency and inspiration of the Scripture itself.

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And once you do that, once you no longer have an inspired body, then you get to pick and choose what you're going to put together according to your predilections, according to what you like.

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And that's why the god of the emergent movement and those who in our day are just trying to produce something that will keep the millennials happy, that god ends up looking shockingly like us.

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Instead of being the sovereign of the Old Testament. Because not only have

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I been preaching through the Holiness Code, I'm now in Deuteronomy, dealing with tough stuff, dealing with very, very difficult material, but we're also reading through pretty much the same section.

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We're now in Joshua in the evening service. Reformed Baptists have a tradition where, most of us anyways, read a chapter of the

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New Testament in the morning, a chapter of the Old Testament in the evening, and our morning and evening service is on the Lord's Day. And so we're somewhere in Joshua right now in the evenings.

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And man, there's tough stuff in there. I mean, Judges is coming up and there's the toughest stuff, except for a couple sections in Ezekiel right there.

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And most of us know that stuff's there. I mean, most serious Christians have read the

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Bible. If you haven't yet, I would highly suggest having the discipline to do that.

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It's not all that long actually, but we know it's there.

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And a lot of people just simply want to try to avoid it. They don't want to deal with the destruction, the

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Amorites just last Sunday night. I read the section about the destruction, the King of Jerusalem, and a couple of other of the city -states around Jerusalem, when

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Joshua goes in, and wiped out every living creature in those cities in just a matter of days.

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And modern people look at that. And because we have never seen plague, at least in Western culture, most of us now have never lived through war.

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Here in the United States, we've never really experienced war on our own soil in our lifetimes. Obviously, people in the 1860s fully understood that.

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But because we've not seen these things, then we are extremely sensitive to the very idea of God having anything to do with any of that.

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And for most people, if you don't understand the holiness of God, if you don't understand

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His kingly freedom, if you've been brought to the faith with this namby -pamby, milk -toast,

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God is your girlfriend type of presentation, you have no foundation upon which to even begin to understand

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God's role in history, let alone your own relationship to God.

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And so, for many of these people, they have no problem whatsoever putting

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God in the dock, putting God on the witness stand, or making

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Him the defendant, actually, and demanding that He justify His actions in this world.

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And, of course, the result is they end up with a God that, from their perspective, really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in this world anyway.

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It has nothing to do with it. And so, despite the clarity of Daniel chapter 4 and the reality that a pagan king can come to understand that God does whatever

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God chooses to do, and no one can stay His hand, despite the repeated statements of God hardening this king's heart to destroy this people and keeping this person from sinning against Him, but judging this person, the freedom with which

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God can grant His mercy and grace, because all are guilty before Him, all are under His wrath, the expression of His wrath against sinful mankind, not only in the destruction of the peoples in Canaan for their sin by Israel, but supernatural things, plagues and hail and so on and so forth, despite Psalm 135, 6,

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God does whatever He pleases in the heavens and the earth, despite all of that, those things are all allegorized and pushed off to the side and people end up with this neutered

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God whose holiness is a mere abstract concept, easily dismissed, easily dismissed, and is it any wonder then why these same groups end up, you can track it, denying penal substitutionary atonement, the plain teaching of Scripture in regards to the purpose that Jesus Himself, the angel said, why would

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His name be called Jesus? Because He will save His people from their sins. Well, how is He going to do that?

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It's necessary that I go to Jerusalem, it's necessary for the Son of Man to be betrayed in the hands of sinners and to be beaten and killed and buried, rise again the third day, it's all right there.

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You have to chop up the Bible and get rid of its unity and get rid of its harmony, but it's not shocking then that once you've come up with a different God because you're uncomfortable with the

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Old Testament, that then what that God does in His greatest revelation of Himself in the

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Gospel, in the purse of Jesus Christ, that becomes changed too. We can't have propitiation because propitiation speaks of wrath.

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We don't want to have a wrathful God anymore. And so it all ends up just being flattened out and turned into this simplistic, humanistic, milk -toast, fluffy

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Gospel, which is what we have all around us, and so here you've got some punk rock death metal,

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I don't even know, this sounds like death metal to me, but whatever you call it, and you get past the noise and you listen to the lyrics and it all makes sense.

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Now, I did take the time to read the response from the author, and I don't get any of it.

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You know, he says, I'm a seminary student right now, and if I'm in my class and I start to talk the way

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I talk, and the lyrics in Dear John Piper will all, like you say, be easily dismissed. It will be taken as a character, an ad hominem, ad hominem is completely misspelled, a red herring, and all that would be completely valid.

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But if you're writing a punk rock song, you can do certain things with satire, and you can do certain things that are seemingly vitriolic, and kind of blur the line between what is ostensibly theological and what are theological statements, even doctrinal statements, and what you're just over with.

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I feel like that is kind of fun. Well, and then the end of the paragraph.

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And so I thought it would be funny to have this song that was so deliberate and so over the top that would begin one way and launch into this sort of ironic,

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Calvinistic hymn. That was what I wrote in the beginning, a

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Calvinistic hymn, and then I added John Piper on top of it. It's just funny that there is a punk rock song with John Piper's name in the title.

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I can't make heads or tails out of it. It seems obvious to me that we have a millennial punk rocker studying theology, and here's the problem.

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He's studying it using the worldview of the millennial generation. Christian theology was not formed in that worldview, and that worldview is so decrepit, so self -centered, and so shallow that he thinks this is funny.

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Wow. Wow. Now, some of you are going,

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Oh, you're so mean to millennials. Well, given that in my country, it seems the majority of them are now professing socialists.

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Who show absolutely no concern about their own history or those who handed them this liberty and freedom which they're now using to re -enslave themselves with.

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Yeah, I do have some issues there, but there are some that understand what's going on, thankfully, and I wanted to...

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It's interesting. Let me see if I can bring this up here.

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It's throwing me a curve here. There we go. Come on.

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There we go. Well, that's not it either. It's really throwing me a curve here.

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Let's go back to... I'm not sure how that came up.

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That's interesting. There it is. We'll find the right one.

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There we go. I had never heard this song.

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I had never heard this song. This morning, while I was preparing for the program, my daughter tweeted or Facebooked or something that my granddaughter wanted to have this song on repeat just over and over again.

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And so I thought, well, I don't recognize this song. And once I brought it up on YouTube, lo and behold, guess who was quoted in it?

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John Piper. And guess what he's talking about? Exactly what he was mocked for by this,

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I think, playing with theology is fun, because he's a millennial. Now, I don't know what the ages of the performers are, and John Piper ain't no millennial.

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But there are still folks who take theology seriously. And it just so happens this song really refutes, rather fully, everything that was said by Showbread in its satire of John Piper.

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And so I thought, you know what? Let's just play this, especially because this is real music.

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This actually takes skill to play instruments and to control your voice and harmony and all that old -fashioned stuff.

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This is real music. Here is a song called

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Though You Slay Me. Though you slay

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Yet I will praise you Though you take from me

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Bless your name Though you worship Sing a song

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To the one who's all alive My heart and flesh may fade

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The earth below give way I'll see the

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Lord To hide upon that day

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Behold the Lamb that was slain And I'll know that every tear

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Was worth it all You slay me

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Yet I will praise you Though you take from me

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I will bless your name Though you ruin me

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Still I will worship Sing a song

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To the one who's all I need

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This cup passed from me now

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You're still more than I need

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For me Not For me

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Oh Not only is all your affliction momentary, not only is all your affliction light in comparison to eternity, and the glory there, but all of it is totally meaningful.

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Every millisecond of your pain from the fallen nature or fallen man, every millisecond of your misery in the path of obedience is producing a peculiar glory you will get because of that.

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I don't care if it was cancer or criticism. I don't care if it was slander or sickness.

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It wasn't meaningless. It's doing something. It's not meaningless.

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Of course you can't see what it's doing. Don't look to what you see.

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When your mom dies, when your kid dies, when you've got cancer at 40, when a car careens into the sidewalk and takes her out, don't say, it's meaningless.

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It's not. It's working for you an eternal weight of glory.

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Therefore, therefore, do not lose heart, but take these truths and day by day focus on them.

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Preach them to yourself every morning. Get alone with God and preach his word into your mind until your heart sings with confidence that you are new and cared for.

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Though you slay me yet I will praise you

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Though you take from me I will bless your name

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Though you ruin me Still I will worship

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Sing a song to the one who's all I need

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I'll sing a song to the one who's all I need

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Well, certainly in my experience, the message there is defensible biblically on the basis of the highest view of scripture.

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The message in the previous song requires you to abandon the highest view of scripture.

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That's just all there is to it. That's just all there is to it. And so we will we will continue on with a second subject on the program today that I now only have a shorter period of time to cover but I don't want to rush too much through this and we're not under any specific time limitations.

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And that is I want to bring up accordance here for you and if you

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I will confess if you are listening if you're one of those folks that's listening to while running, riding, biking, whatever you might want to watch the video on this one because we're going to be looking at some texts in scripture and we're going to be looking at some

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Greek and we're going to be responding to some comments by Professor Leighton Flowers regarding the subject of the

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Ordo Salutis and Regeneration and hopefully this will be useful, this will be a little bit of a

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Bible study type element but very much a part of Radio Free Geneva and the subject of Reformed Theology.

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When when I seek to defend

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Reformed Theology I frequently make the argument that we must be very careful in examining the hermeneutical methodology that we utilize and make sure that we are watching for tradition flags and tradition flags, that's when you honestly discover that the method of interpretation that you use to defend the

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Trinity and the deity of Christ and the resurrection and the cross and monotheism and things like that, that that respectful, contextual original language sensitive method of interpretation all of a sudden shifts and changes only when you start getting around to stuff that's a part of your tradition and that this is a sign that you are at this point following a tradition rather than Scripture you have been given a belief and you didn't derive that belief from Scripture you instead have had that belief placed upon Scripture and look we all have our traditions this is a lifelong process in constantly semper referamanda, always going to the word of God now by the way, semper referamanda does not mean that there are not settled truths sometimes it's misrepresented what semper referamanda means is that I must always be listening to Scripture with the highest level of respect for it as God's word, what does that mean?

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well that means that I must be handling it aright I must be putting out the effort avoiding the apathy that so often invades our handling the word of God because we

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I heard a whole sermon on that text once, I don't, I got it all figured out that's that that assumes that the meaning and value of Scripture is significantly less significantly more shallow than it in reality is and sadly in many theological schools today that's pretty much how

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Scripture is presented I mean if I went to a lot of liberal seminaries today I don't know how

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I could ever do ministry because once you graduate you pretty much figure you're pretty much smarter than all the um biblical writers anyways so the point is that we need to look at our method of hermeneutics and be consistent with it now when we talk about the issue of what's called the ordo salutis ordo salutis the order of salvation it's a logical order not a temporal order it is those actions of God that and their relationship to one another for example we know that that God forgives we know that God justifies, we know that God sanctifies, we know that God adopts how are those related to one another um some of them are concurrent they happen at the same time some of them have a beginning and then a working out some are complete at one point in time some have a future aspect a present aspect even a past aspect and one of the problems for a lot of people is that when they think of salvation they think of it they confuse the sub parts of salvation with the whole and so very often when we reformed folks will emphasize well let me give you an example before I get to the reform thing in the reformation the intimate connection and yet distinction between justification and sanctification was emphasized of necessity because in Roman Catholic theology justification and sanctification had become confused and yet biblically they are distinguished from one another and biblically you can see them being used in different ways in different parts of scripture once the

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Roman tradition became encrusted over scripture and its exegesis those nuances that are there for us they're there for our benefit they're there for our insight they're there for our joy became lost with the rediscovery and the reassertion of the primacy of scripture and the fact that scripture stands in judgment over tradition not that scripture is just a part of a larger tradition we are able to see these things well reformed folks emphasize the reality of the fact that regeneration has a specific meaning in scripture and that there is this thing about spiritual life in key texts from Jesus all the way through the epistles to the end concepts of spiritual death spiritual life the difference between a person who is able to do spiritual things who is spiritually minded versus the fleshly minded person what the person who is not in union with Christ cannot do, is not able to do the mind set in the flesh cannot please

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God Paul says in Romans chapter 8 over against what the new nature can should and must do these are all things that have to be taken into consideration these are all things that we must recognize, we must understand and so in the reformed ordo salutis, one of the great controversies is in Arminianism in any synergistic system and there are people today trying to avoid

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I'm not an Arminian, I'm a Biblicist it's absolutely empty, it means nothing that means nothing that communicates nothing, you're wasting oxygen to make such a statement, to be perfectly honest with you in synergistic systems and especially in conservative synergistic systems, the normal approach is well, see from our perspective temporally in time a person believes repents and as a result they are born again and they become a new creature in Christ and the assumption then is that the unregenerate person the person who has not had their heart renewed is capable as an unregenerate person of the actions of faith and repentance and this is necessary if you're going to especially defend the central idol of the synergistic systems human autonomy, human free will now there is a reformed use of the term free will, but that's not what they're talking about synergists believe that man, the creature must have an autonomous will and that God the creator though they will affirm that he too has an autonomous will, will then in the very next breath say that he has abandoned his autonomous will and he has granted to man absolute autonomy and so one of the dividing lines between these two systems is do you believe that God has free will that God continues, not that God had it theoretically in the past but that right now

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God continues to function with autonomy if you're a synergist you're going to have to say no, he's given that up and he's basically given it to his creature the creature man now has autonomous free will and the monergist believes that God has free will and as R .C.

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Sproul has put it God has free will I have free will, when my will runs into God's will,

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I lose and what that means is I have creaturely will but my will is enslaved and my will is a slave to my fallen nature this goes to anthropology, this goes to your doctrine of God that's why you have to start you have to start with the doctrine of God first, then your doctrine of man, before you talk about anything else, because if you try to jump in here somewhere else in the process without the foundations you're never going to get anywhere never get anywhere when we look at what the

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New Testament says about the subject of regeneration we discover that the

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Bible says that man is incapable of doing that which is pleasing to God, including repentance and faith the dead unregenerate human being, though very active in his rebellion against God is not capable in and of himself of doing what is pleasing to God, is it pleasing to God for a person to believe in the one true

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God well of course it is is it pleasing to God for an individual to repent of their sins and flee to Christ of course it is but the

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Bible says if you're according to the flesh, you can not do these things you can not do what is pleasing to God and so we see perfect harmony between Romans 8

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John 6 no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him and I'll raise him up on the last day there is a specific group there that inability is a universal thing it comes from the fallen nature of man

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Romans chapter 5 we've walked through that before those in Adam, those in Christ and so we believe not that a person not that our human observation of what happens in time determines what the biblical teaching is we allow the biblical teaching to interpret for us what we ourselves have seen we do this with everything else we do this with sanctification we do this with justification, we do this with adoption but this is one area where the sinner just say no, we can't let the

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Bible determine these things for us we need to turn things upside down but the fact of the matter is the

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Bible describes faith as the gift of God it describes repentance as the gift of God these are spiritual activities and if we don't recognize this if we don't recognize that faith is the gift of God and that it is a part of the work of the

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Spirit of God in His elect then we end up going down that road where we're constantly having to deal with, well what if someone has has faith for a while and then they lose their faith and you can't have any level of assurance you end up over in the mess of non lordship salvation that just rips the heart out of God's entire purpose of sanctification and union with Christ and everything else to where you end up with this well you just tip your hat toward God just have faith for a moment and you never have to repent and you've got your ticket punched, you're on your way to heaven that false gospel which has sent so many millions on the road to hell with a

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Bible under their arm and a hymn, whistling a hymn is what you get when you start at the wrong place that imbalance that is the anti lordship position now in the discussion of faith as a gift we go to Ephesians chapter 2

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I don't have time to go through these right now but we go to Ephesians chapter 2 where in a text we all know and recognize the word that neuter is is drawing together everything that's come before it so grace, salvation, and faith are subsumed under that neuter term that we have

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Philippians 1 29 it has been granted to us not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his name it has been granted to us to believe in him what do you mean it's been granted to us?

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if it's an autonomous act why would it need to be granted to me? and we've got the discussion in 2

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Peter where faith has been given to us as the term there is a gift and things like that so we have those texts but one of the other texts that comes in here is found in 1

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John and I want to look at this text we should be able to bring accordance up, yes?

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I want to look I want to start at 1 John chapter 2 verse 29 if you know that he is righteous you know that also everyone pas ha poyon ten dikaya sunayn ex autu ge genetai everyone ha poyon ha poyon right here

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I'll outline it for us here the one doing poyo means to do this is a present active participle the one doing righteousness from him has been born now this is the term ge genetai notice there are two news right here ge genetai right there that means it's from gena 'o which means to beget not genos which means kind or tight because that only has one new there in the middle of the word the perfect is seen in the epsilon reduplication beforehand and in the greek language when you have a participle now participles um participles are incredibly rich they're just um

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I don't know why everybody's different I've confessed this before infinitives

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I'm very weak in infinitives have never just popped out to me

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I love participles and for most people that makes me very weird okay most greek students participles are just not a whole lot of fun for me they're they are the color in the palette that the artist can use in painting the text in coloring and texturing the text they really are and especially when you get into the syntax of participles first year you're just trying to figure out what this thing is but once you get past that level to how this thing functions in phrases and sentences and that's when it really gets rich that's when it's really really exciting so what do we have here we have the statement everyone also cough cough who and the new american standard translates this practices righteousness now it's literally doing righteousness but this is a present tense substantival participle so it's it's past so there's your all or everyone everyone and then here's your action doing but since it's present tense it's ongoing and so the

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NASB's translation here is somewhat interpretive but appropriately so because it's an ongoing action so it's a practice everyone practicing righteousness not just doing because you could have used an aorist participle here so someone who just does an act of righteousness but no it's the one doing so it's the one practicing righteousness has been born from him so here is the question can the text give us any indication of the relationship between being born of god and practicing righteousness can it well it can because when you have a present tense participle with a perfect tense verb finite verb is not a participle when you have the two together you are able to determine the relationship of the actions to each other now the finite verb is going to have a firmer time frame than the participle does because the participle is a mixture and the participle is more dependent upon the verb than vice versa to make a long story short this would obviously be a text of controversy between what major religious groups within quote unquote christendom

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I'm using the term there extremely broadly because I'm not saying that they are all the roman catholic could look at this and say see you do righteousness and that results in your being born of him certainly many forms of synergists would want to read it in that way but the synergists with whom we are speaking well some would read it that way there are protestants who have rejected the historical protestant reformation and its emphasis upon the sovereignty and freedom of god today the vast majority of what calls itself protestantism today has rejected its history there is no question about that but certainly anyone who believes in justification by faith alone by grace alone would look at this and go no no no the reason anyone is practicing righteousness is because they have been born again they have been born from god the very ability that we have to desire to do righteousness comes from god it comes from that new nature and so the grammar the syntax supports that the perfect tense verb is either concurrent or antecedent to and it wouldn't make any sense that every time i do an act of righteousness boom i've been born so the concurrent part doesn't make any sense especially because the ongoing action is properly translated here because of poieto as practice so why well first of all i speak to myself and to everybody else and to a few calvinists who are frothing at the mouth excited because oh i'm getting some good stuff to go after my arminian friends with right now before you make any reference to this before you make any reference to this if you do not desire and if you are not practicing righteousness you shouldn't be arguing theology with anybody okay it should be our desire that this is a regular description of us doing righteousness practicing it there's a challenge for all of us we could start a hymn and sign off right now that would probably be good enough but that's number one number two the point here is that those who are doing righteousness do so because it is their nature as redeemed regenerated individuals to do righteousness it is not the nature of the unregenerate person to do what's pleasing to god there's nothing in the bible that even begin to suggest that even begin to suggest that unless you're a

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Pelagian and you're going to try to go back and well you know some people in the old testament and not see god's grace there that's dangerous absolutely dangerous now you say but what is this afternoon in first john if we could bring this up because i don't have the excuse me here is a search and for everyone who always asks me my screenshot on computer regular use bible program is accordance yes i have logos i have a huge logos library but i use accordance for my bible stuff that's what i know best and i can guarantee you i probably only know a third maybe a quarter of what accordance can do and should probably someday what i need to do is i need to find someday where they're having an accordance seminar somewhere near a high mountain and all the seminar starts at night so i can train on the mountain on my bike during the day and then train on accordance at night that's what i need hey accordance guys could we put together an accordance you could probably put that down for a second could we put together an accordance seminar like in idaho springs colorado because that's where you start to climb mount evans and that way and do it at night there's a great pizza and pasta place in idaho springs we could rent a room it would be great that'd be fun people would come up from denver um it'll never happen but that'd be a whole lot of fun i'd climb mount evans each day and then we'd do this anyhow um back to the screen here i did a search for geganitai it is found once in paul at galatians 4 .23

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but there is no um parallel syntactically or in any other way to what we're looking at here's our text in 1 john 2 .29

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then we have one in 1 john 3 .9 one in 1 john 4 .7 and one in 1 john 5 .1

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now 1 john 3 .9 is also not in a syntactical parallel with 1 john 2 .29

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what's the parallel? having a present tense participle hapoion with geganitai as the finite verb in 1 john 3 .9

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here's geganitai but it's in a hati clause after an infinitival phrase so it is not syntactically parallel but 1 john 4 .7

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and 1 john 5 .1 here we have pas ha agapon so here you have a present tense substantival participle and guess what?

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geganitai is the finite verb absolutely parallel what you have up here well ok ex altu by him here it's ectutheu but you even have the same preposition being used here it's just born from him here it's born of god so direct parallel and in 1 john 5 .1

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pas hapistuon ectutheu geganitai ectutheu geganitai geganitai in 1 john 4 .7

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so what i'm saying is let's go down to 1 john 4 .7 and look at it what i'm saying is that we have in 1 john 3 parallel identical syntactical constructions when you have a single author cough cough excuse me when you have a single author using a term and a parallel syntactical construction within the corpus of the same book any meaningful hermeneutic is going to make note of this and is going to give it great weight let me give you an example of this that no one should be able to argue no one orthodox anyways in 1 peter minimally four times peter uses what's called the granville sharp construction i'm sorry did i say 1 peter it should be 2 peter 3 other places beyond that now in dealing with jehovah's witnesses we would all including our synergistic arminian friends who believe in the deity of christ would go well wait a minute wait a minute 3 times in this book peter uses the construction our lord and savior jesus christ and lord and savior both apply to jesus in the exact same syntactical construction down to the word order tenses forms everything 2 peter 1 1 says our god and savior jesus christ if you're going to translate it lord and savior in the rest of the epistle you've got to translate it god and savior at the beginning of the epistle there's no other way to do it it's just honesty and nobody would argue that unless you're a jehovah's witness then you'll argue it until the cows come home but we know why well if you come to 1 john and you go to 1 john 2 29 and you see pos and then you have a singular present tense and then you've got we've talked about the relationship been born from god that's why you do righteousness well let's look at 1 john 4 7 beloved let us love one another for love is from god and everyone who loves is born of god and knows god and here is the phrase and let's bring it up and pos ha agapone and everyone loving direct parallel to poio poione in 1 john 2 29 everyone loving has been born from god so we ask the same question that we asked of 1 john 2 29 are you born from god by loving or are you loving because you've been born from god doesn't seem like a difficult question doesn't seem like a difficult question it's

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I don't know how any orthodox protestant I'll be honest

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I think there are a lot of even roman catholics especially augustinian roman catholic would really stutter a bit trying to say yeah by my actions of love

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I cause myself to be born from god at least some would try to say nah it's all baptism and blah blah blah but even after that because we're talking about this ongoing thing this is the one loving why do we love there is a textual variant there by the way codex alexandrinus has everyone loving god has been born from god which is interesting but that's a very minority reading so what do we have in 2 29 and 4 7 we have two parallel constructions and in both of them the same point is being made those who have been born from god this is what they do not the other way around it's not by my doing righteousness that I become born of god it is not by my loving but if I've been born of god this is what's going to be true of me right ok so what was the last text that I pointed you to in the search 1 john 5 1 and here it is again pas ha piste on everyone believing so what do we have here's our singular articular substantive participle everyone believing before it was everyone doing 1 john 2 29 last one was loving now it's believing everyone believing that jesus is the christ ek 2 theu gegeneitai direct syntactical parallel to 4 7 and to 2 29 the only difference between there being we have ek 2 theu there it was ex autu by him but the antecedent was the same so syntactically present tense participle perfect finite verb same forms same order 3 times in the short little book of 1 john 4 times 2 peter we go hey hey that's significant 3 times in 1 john isn't of course it is but it can't mean that because if you're believing if you have this ongoing faith that jesus is the christ that means you've been born of god yeah when the spirit of god raised you to spiritual life the new creature naturally believes that jesus is the messiah that's the result of regeneration it's not what brings regeneration that's a sovereign act of god it is the result of regeneration and that's why it lasts this is the only meaningful foundation for the perseverance of the saints everything else is a joke if you don't believe this stop believing the perseverance of the saints it's a joke why can i preach this and jesus' statement he who endures the end shall be saved you see why a lot of people are afraid of what jesus said there because they think that sounds like work salvation unless you believe this because you see what jesus is saying there is he's not saying by your enduring you save yourself but if you believe in him you will endure why because it's a divine faith that's the result of regeneration and it also rips any shred of boasting out of my hands because it's not my faith in the sense that i worked it up out of myself and somebody else worked it up out of themselves and we're both doing our best and then i keep going and he stumbles and falls and now i can boast over him because we're both working it up out of ourselves no i have no ground of boasting it is by his doing that i am in christ jesus first corinthians chapter one verses 30 and 31 see the consistency see the consistency now what brought all this up is that someone on twitter kept trying to send me let's see here yeah kept trying to send me some stuff on twitter and finally worked it out why am i sending you the wrong one there let's see let's try this one oh that's weird alright let's try this because i'm trying to send you a different one and then go back to window someday we're going to get something that really preview and now it's only showing me ok how about that one i need the that's brian mercer alright how about that one yay we got it alright alright layton flowers is a professor down in dallas i debated on romans 9 last year and he's been making some comments about first john 5 because obviously as a synergist he does not believe that it is the regenerating work of god that results in my faith let's look at two things he said make quick application and then we'll wrap things up today in this one let's blow it up so people can read it oh it went fat ok well doesn't matter to ron christensen jr layton flowers said i agree with this quote from the article referenced earlier first john 5 10 this passage has the same construction but clearly puts the participle logically prior to the main verb the one who does not believe god is not believing present participle has made perfect him a liar the construction is the same a present participle followed by the main verb and the perfect tense obviously the making a liar of god has made perfect did not precede the not believing rather it is because one is not believing that he has made god out to be a liar so with the exact same construction we have in first john 5 1 and 2 29 we have the participle present taking logical precedence over the main verb so the argument just doesn't hold water john wasn't giving a theological discourse on the ordo salutis he was giving various markers for identifying those who truly belong to god and are his children god's children can be identified by their righteous acts and their faith now i want people to understand when your tradition and synergism is a human tradition becomes your ultimate goal you will end up perverting the scriptures in a dangerous fashion let's look at first john 5 10 and see if what has just been said is true oops um oh drat we need to keep looking for something that will allow me to do this a little bit faster than click click click click click click click okay first john 5 10 let's look at it let's bring it up what i'm sending it to you aren't i there we go all right first john 5 10 okay where's pos we don't have a pos here so there's one difference the one believing in the son of god has the testimony in himself the one not believing so now we have a negative we have a negative may in god a liar has made him because he has not believed in the testimony which god has testified concerning his son now the only thing we can take it down the only thing that is parallel here at all is the use of a articular participle and the use of a perfect finite verb if someone tried to go to second peter and overthrow the granville sharp construction in the same fashion latent flowers would never accept it but he will hear because he has a tradition and his tradition takes precedence over the scripture itself this is not a syntactical parallel this is not parallel to first john 2 29 first john 4 7 and first john 5 1 we've just seen that so but what if you use this what if you believe them you have now just given safe harbor to those who say that by doing deeds of righteousness in the sacraments of the church you cause yourself to be born again by doing love through the sacraments of the church you cause yourself to be born again it's right there right there's one other that he gave and i'm just going to read this because i don't want to mess around with the thing anymore let me just read this other one to you to bruce mercer all are continued fruits of being in him but that doesn't necessarily speak of the obvious condition of becoming in him as reflected clearly in ephesians 1 13 through 14 and the other verses in my linked article for now let me just say that first john 5 1 is not the only place in john's writings where he pairs a present participle the perfect tense verb i stop for a moment that's not enough that is that is a purposefully vague description of what is a significantly stronger parallel syntactically even to the point of using the same words pass singular articular substantival present tense participle the agency of god either or x out to which are all parallel with that is a much stronger parallel than just simply saying oh it's a participle with a perfect tensor see what's going on here this is purposeful layton do you see that you're being purposefully you're this is how jehovah's witnesses get around the grandville sharp construction back in the olden days for computers when i did my paper on the grandville sharp construction i discovered that it was one of a complex of rules and that when jehovah's witnesses tried to deny it they ignored the other rules and they gave a less specific definition of it that allowed for variation that's what layton flowers is doing he's doing what jehovah's witnesses do not to deny the deity of christ he wouldn't do that but he has his tradition he has his tradition in john 318 for example john quotes jesus saying he who believes present participle in him is not condemned perfect tense verb i do not think that even calvinists would say that people believe in jesus as a result of not being condemned to the contrary according to the calvinists the whole world lies under condemnation even though they would say regeneration precedes faith i have never heard of any calvinist who claims that being freed from condemnation or being declared not guilty or being justified precedes faith as well well john 318 huh let's take a look at it ha let's bring it up hapistuon ais auton u krenetai um what that's not parallel but are you saying that the the the perfect at kekretai is cause krenetai is present but then you have a negated singular participle and it says has been judged already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten son of god these are parallel of course they're not parallel and is there not an obvious difference between the action of kreno and ganao especially when it comes to the order salutis it's not parallel so what you have here is a fascinating study a fascinating study of utilizing your scholarship your ability to read the original languages in defense of a tradition because and I think

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I've provided a very strong parallel in the Granville Sharp Constructions of 2 Peter and how by loosening up the parallel you can bring in alleged exceptions that then allow you to try to dismiss what is in fact very obviously the intentional meaning of the author of 1

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John 1 John 2 29 4 7 5 1 because what they would teach in at least 1

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John 5 1 would be contrary to your tradition so we start off with head banging stuff um that the author said was fun do you think he talks like that normally he might he would have lost his voice by the age of 3 can you imagine the damage to the human vocal cords doing that it must

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I think he's definitely at the very least early stage of smokers voice

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I mean chain smoker voice that's what I sound like right now but it has nothing to do with that and it's not because I've been screaming either um so we go from that to a beautiful song

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John Piper that was great stuff and some of you might have thought when we transitioned into this sort of like oh boy here we go he's going to get out of accordance again but in reality this second half is foundational to the first half because I've said it many times before I would be a lot more popular if I wasn't a

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Calvinist I'd have a lot more doors open to me if I wasn't absolutely convinced by the word of God that these things are true but it's really important that we be able to get down into the very text itself and examining what

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Layton Flowers has been doing I guess this is on Facebook Facebook gives us an incredible light to shine on how someone can think that they are defending

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God's truth where they're actually defending a tradition at the expense of proper exegesis of the text itself and I think that should really be a lesson to all of us to all of us thank you very much for watching

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Radio Free Geneva today Lord willing we'll be back again next