December 23, 2004

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world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded
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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now, with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line.
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I shouldn't be reading the channel right as we start. Someone's saying, I've always imagined the scene of The Dividing Line studio to be something like Frasier.
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No, don't think so. Frasier was in an actual radio station and nope, no, there are knobs on the control panel.
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And the phone system is the same phone system we had at KPXQ when we were on there.
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Other than that, I'm sitting in front of a computer at my desk surrounded by books and the other accoutrements of life, which means stacks of books because I don't have enough shelf space anymore for all the books
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I have. So anyway, so no, it doesn't look like that. Welcome to the last program before Christmas.
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It's 23rd of December and it's only 58 degrees outside, which for Phoenicians is rather cool and it's a little windy.
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We were having to get my motorcycle into the back of a friend's truck this morning. It doesn't want to start and so we were taking it to the emergency room.
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And we had it up there. It actually wasn't that difficult. It weighs over 500 pounds, but it wasn't too difficult getting in there.
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And then all of a sudden, this breeze came by. We all looked at each other and went, ooh. Some of you
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I know are doing the, I think Calvin dude said that it was like minus five degree wind chill there and all the rest of that stuff.
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And I can't imagine that. I've been on Long Island when it was 26 below wind chill just in the past couple of years.
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So after about, I don't know, 10, does it really matter? It's sort of like in Arizona after 110.
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Does it matter if it's 115, 120? Yeah, not a lot. You know, it's like it's just cold or hot, whichever one it is.
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And this just came in using my RSS reader technology.
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This just came in and I thought it was sadly interesting.
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Jakarta, Indonesia, fearing bombings and shootings by Islamic militants, some Christians in Indonesia are abandoning traditional churches in favor of more unorthodox but secure confines such as hotel ballrooms and office blocks.
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With foreign governments warning of holiday terror attacks, tens of thousands of police officers will guard churches in the world's most populous
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Muslim nation. Metal detectors will be in place for most services and armed escorts will accompany parishioners, church officials said.
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Armed escorts. It puts us at a lower risk for being a target for religious persecution, said
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Pastor Steve Lunn, originally from Seattle, whose international English service holds worship services for a thousand people in a downtown
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Jakarta office building. People tell me they feel safer, he said. The facility itself is not the most important thing.
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It's just a place to gather. The most important thing is being together and worshipping God together. Now, then the article says the vast majority of Muslims in Indonesia practice a moderate version of the faith.
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Are they saying they're practicing a different version of the faith than the people who are blowing people up? I guess that's what they're saying because the commentator puts in a little comment.
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It says, and a tiny minority of extremists practices wiping out Christians and other Westerners. Four years ago, suspected militants from the
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Al -Qaeda -linked Jamaa Islamia terror group bombed 11 churches on Christmas Eve.
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Isn't that the religion of peace? Killing 19 people. The group was also blamed for the 2002 nightclub bombings that killed 202 people on the resort island of Bali, a 2003 attack on the
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Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, and a blast at the Australian embassy in September. This year, more than 140 ,000 police will be deployed at churches, shopping malls, and hotels where Westerners gather during the
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Christmas period, a police spokesman said. People are still afraid, said Pastor Henki Ampi, whose church was attacked earlier this month by suspected
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Muslim gunmen on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
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We hope the attack stops so we can celebrate Christmas without fear. Plans to build new churches sometimes draw violent protests from Islamic groups, which view them as an attempt to convert
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Muslims. Church leaders also say a 35 -year -old decree requiring neighborhood approval before new places of worship can be built is being used to discriminate against them.
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Reverend Rayandi Hutusoy has eight churches and office towers in Jakarta, and a ninth that was closed following protests from Muslim radicals.
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His drug rehabilitation center and seminary were burnt down by Muslim mobs in 1999.
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There is our religion of peace update. You just need to understand, folks, that I don't care how moderate
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Islam is, as long as they believe in Sharia and the application of Muslim law, then that type of stuff has to happen.
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It's going to happen. And all the people sticking their fingers in their ears, including
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Australian judges who think they're theological experts, believe me, why don't they send
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Judge Higgins to Indonesia? Maybe he can explain to the peaceful folks there how they've misunderstood the
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Koran. That's what I'd like to see. Let's raise some money to send Judge Higgins over to Indonesia, where he can explain to the masked gunmen who are about to open up on the
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Christians who have gathered for worship on Christmas Eve that they have just simply misunderstood the
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Koran. That would be very, very useful. Oh, goodness. Anybody catch
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Medved today? The reason I mention, he pulled a quick one there, but I had a feeling it's what he was doing.
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But he read a presidential proclamation.
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And he read it in such a way, he didn't say it was from Bush, but he read it in such a way it sounded like it had just come out today.
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And then he took calls on it. And people were calling in about how angry they were and how offended they were because the proclamation talked about Christ.
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And it talked about Christmas. And it talked about how we want our younger generation to know the teachings of the
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Prince of Peace. And everybody was up in arms. And Bush is, this is what
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Bush is about. The religious conservatives are trying to force their religion on us and da -da -dee -da -da -da.
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And in point of fact, of course, it was a proclamation from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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And his point is a point that I think everyone does need to understand. I am so sick and tired,
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I truly am sick and tired of hearing leftists saying, well, the conservative
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Christians are trying to shove their religion down the throat. They're trying to, our throat, they're trying to establish a theocracy.
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They've purposefully decided to put into the context of the argument, the idea that it's the right, the right, it's the conservative
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Christians that are seeking to change things in our nation, make it more religious.
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When in point of fact, it's the left that is doing everything it can to destroy the history and tradition of this nation.
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The fact that there were all these monuments that we're now having to take down thanks to the Anti -Christian
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Litigation Union, ACLU. How'd those things get there? How did they get built 50, 100 years ago?
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Because of the fact that this nation didn't have the viewpoint. I mean, you can go as far back as you want.
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Presidents have always been able to make reference to God and to make reference to Christ and Christmas and Christianity.
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And no one raised an eyebrow except a few radical extremists in a university someplace, and they're the ones that have been cranking this stuff out.
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These are the folks who are waging a dishonest revolution.
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That's really what's going on here, and they, you know, I do debate. And when you're in a debate, you have to really, really exercise a lot of attention to the way that your opponent phrases the argument.
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You have to pay attention and not allow simply by the way that they phrase their argument and they lay their foundation, not allow them to, in essence, control the debate.
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It's very, very common, especially as you watch television, and I know it can be done on either side, but I see it primarily being done on the leftist side.
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The way in which things are presented, the language that is used, determines the outcome of the debate before it even gets started because they're not there to debate anyways.
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They're not there to find out if what they're saying is true, if it can stand up to honest cross -examination. They're just there to promote their viewpoint.
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And so that kind of thing happens all the time, and that's what the left has done. It's, oh, you're trying to shove your religion up.
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No, you're trying to create, for example, an entire, and sadly, because they control so many of the universities and hence now the judiciary, the rule of law is being overthrown, so now it becomes the rule of judges.
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They're being successful, but all this stuff, going back for decades now, where the wall of separation has been interpreted in the exact opposite intention of the founders, the exact opposite, 180 degrees, all of that stuff, that's what they've been trying to do.
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They're trying to get rid of the foundations in this nation that would stand against what they want this nation to become, which in essence is a vassal state of Europe.
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The Europeans are after us again, folks. We had to kick them out twice, and they're after us again.
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This time they're on the inside, not the outside. And if you want to see this nation become nothing more than a new version of France, or let's use another example of, you know, eastern, well, there's no eastern
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Germany anymore, but of Germany or some of the northern places where socialism has absolutely sucked the humanity out of those cultures, there is no drive for creativity.
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There is no recognition of man as creating the image of God. You have just dry husks of the cultures that were once there.
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If that's what you want this nation to become, well, that's where these people want to go. Medved also had last, just a couple days ago, this one caught my attention big time.
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He had what I would call a fundamentalist scientist.
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And I'm not using the term fundamentalist there in an overly positive way, but at least in an accurate way.
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This fellow would not even dialogue with a person who would present arguments for intelligent design.
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He refused to use that phraseology. And at one point he said, well, all creationist science can't be science because by nature it must be religious.
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Now think for just a moment what that means. The fundamental presupposition of his worldview is atheism.
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And hence, science must be atheistic. There can be no recognition of God whatsoever in his worldview.
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And one of the biggest problems that we're having is that we're being put at a tremendous disadvantage in the culture wars for one simple reason.
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And that is, what you've got going on is you have the secularists do not have to defend their own worldview.
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They can promote their own worldview in any context with government support.
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But the religious people can't do that. The religious people cannot promote their worldview, but the secularists can promote theirs.
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Why? Well, because we don't talk about a god. But the fact of the matter is they have a controlling worldview, just like we do.
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And they are just as dogmatic about their controlling worldview as any
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Christian is. And so what you really need to do to set things up properly here is we need to define a controlling worldview, the set of beliefs and presuppositions that determine the actions and behavior of a person and how they interact with the world.
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Now, if we were to do that, we would be able to stand on the same ground.
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We'd be able to compete with the secularists and say, look, if you're going to promote a secularist humanist worldview, then we have the same right to be able to promote our worldview that includes
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God. Yours just turns God into science or into random chance or whatever it is you want to talk about.
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That's your God. But you have an ultimate authority. We have an ultimate authority. Why is it that people whose ultimate authority happens to be at least philosophically consistent and able to be an ultimate authority have to be at a disadvantage in these debates, in this battle in our culture?
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Secularists are just as religious as anyone else. It's just that their
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God is not personal. But they get away with this constantly, absolutely constantly.
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And listening to this guy, man, talk about... The only thing
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I could think of in regards to this anti -creationist was he reminded me of the type of person that I would imagine was involved in the
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Spanish Inquisition. And as you're sitting there, and as they're examining you about your beliefs, and you make a question, they question you about your belief about transubstantiation or something, and you challenge them with a biblical passage, and they just immediately dismiss you and say, the church has already spoken to this truth.
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You must answer properly. Well, here it's not the church, it's the academy. He even said that the vast majority of the scientific community believes in evolutionary theory.
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It's not just a theory, it's the working model. Well, of course they do. If they were to dare open their mouth that they had any questions about, they'd get themselves kicked out.
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Talk about dogma and the Inquisition. You can see it today, and you don't have to believe in a god to be involved in the
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Inquisition. I can guarantee you that in any science academy, any science curriculum.
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Well, anyways, that's just the view from over here. 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341, ongoing series of discussions on the blog.
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Haven't heard anything new from up at the Berean Call, and any of their new excuses for quoting cultists about non -existent
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Hebrew texts and non -existent translations that somehow don't read like Calvinists want it to read, and their complete disregard for the truth at that point.
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Nothing new on that, and we will be continuing the response to our Islamic apologists, folks who are attacking the canon and transmission of the
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Bible, as long as we are able to do so. As long as we've got enough ammo and the food supplies hold out, we're going to keep going for it.
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Goodness gracious. And yes, I will be responding on the subject of limited atonement again in the future, but I'm going to do that very slowly, very calmly, so that it can be done the proper way.
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And if you have been following the blog, you have no idea what I'm talking about, but that's okay. 877 -753 -3341, let's dive into our phone calls on Christmas Eve, Eve, and let's talk with Aaron.
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Hi, Aaron. Hello. How are you, sir? Hi, happy holidays. And to you, too.
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I wanted to first ask something about John 6, about, well, obviously there's been quite an influx of John 6 news going on, and I kind of wanted to point out a pattern, maybe get your tips on how to deal with it, because I've talked with John 6 other people as well.
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One thing I've noticed is, besides the running around and skipping to other passages that, you know,
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Arminian exegetes do, one thing I noticed is they have no positive exegesis of John 6.
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It's really just negative assertions of, you know, when we have difficult text, we can interpret, we can go look at other passages or look at parts of the context and then interpret it in a way that's consistent.
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The only thing I've seen done with John 6 is look at other passages,
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John 6 can't mean what it blatantly says, but then there's no positive exegesis offered of John 6, which
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I've just seen over and over and over. I don't know if anyone can listen to the recent John 6 reputations when concerning the reform position, like with Page and others, and say, okay, so they make sense of John 6 by, and I'm just left with a blank.
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They have no positive assertion of it. Their only assertion is it can't mean what it obviously says it means, and we're not even going to try to interpret it in any way because it just wouldn't make any sense.
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Yeah, in the recent articles I wrote in response to Osborne in the
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Pinnock -edited book, Grace Unlimited, where we were told by a certain
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Presbyterian scholar that there we have serious exegesis that is provided to us. As I examined that serious exegesis, this was the constant theme we had to keep coming back to, and that is here you have someone who can clearly handle the text in the sense of translate the text, answer questions concerning the grammar of the text, the lexical meanings of words, the semantic domain of words, discuss syntax, and all the other things that go into properly handling the text, at least from a technical perspective, someone who can obviously do that, and yet clearly what they are offering is not an exegesis at all.
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It's not derived from the text. It's not an examination of the text. It is, here's my beliefs, and here's these passages, and here's how
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I can get around this passage. I mean, obviously the terminology isn't meant that way. But okay, so there are some who say he's not a
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Presbyterian or a scholar, but hey, I'll let you take that up with him. But anyway, there is a vast difference.
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Have you ever shot a rifle, Aaron? I'll say yes. I'm sorry? Yes, many times.
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Okay, and with a scope? Many with scopes, others with not. Okay, now, if you've ever worked with a rifle scope, you know that you don't get quite the same image when you look down the wrong end of the scope, huh?
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You're welcome. And that's the same thing with the difference between exegesis and isegesis.
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If you look down the scope the right direction, it does what it's supposed to do, and you can see the reticle, and you can see way far away, and it's in focus, and everything works.
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You look down the other end of the scope, and you really don't see basically anything at all. Well, when you come to the text of Scripture, you can either derive your beliefs from it, that is, go into the text itself, follow the order of presentation, look carefully at what it said, let the text define its own terms, let there be a flow of thought, which, by the way, in any decent freshman
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English class, my daughter's a sophomore in high school, and in the English class it's become rather famous because of what happened in there, which, by the way, my daughter continues to enjoy the class despite what happened in there.
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They have to write things where they are discussing the flow of the narrative of these novels and all the rest.
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This is basic stuff, except when we come to the text of Scripture. And if we were to allow it to do that, if we were to allow it to define its own terms and flow and don't run off, like you said, to something that wasn't even written yet, and get something over there that becomes the definitional part of what's in John 6, go to John 12, grab something, bring it into John 6, that now determines what
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John 6 means. You can't do that because the people standing there are left drooling. They have no idea what you're talking about.
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That's exactly what's going on in the Arminian exegesis. They're looking down the wrong end of the riflescope, and you wonder why what they're seeing is just a tad bit on the blurred side.
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It's not supposed to work that way. I don't know how the rifle, I know it shows it far away, but at times it's also upside down, if you've ever heard of magnifying glasses.
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Yeah, it depends on where you're looking at. It's going to do all sorts of stuff, but obviously the point is they're approaching it from the wrong perspective.
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The Scripture in the discussion that I gave of John 6 and John 10 in Osborne's comments, it's not the text that was deriving his conclusions.
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His conclusions had been fixed by previous considerations. Now, of course, immediately what you hear from people is people say, well, you do the same thing, and I say, no,
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I do not, and I refute that by simply pointing out that one of the two of us can start at verse 35, and we can go word by word, noun by noun, verse by verse, verb by verb, all the way through.
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We don't have to go flying off over here and flying off over there. We can walk all the way through it and let it define its terms and define our theology.
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I don't find Arminians doing that. A quick comment on what you said, that's exactly what
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I mean. One of the tactics I do is, I don't know, I'm into argumentative aikido, I let people define their own terms and then hang themselves by their own terms.
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But one thing that, when someone wanted to talk about John 6 in one particular conversation,
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I remember, in fact, all of them I remember, honestly, and concerning many topics, if they want to run away to other texts,
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I let them. I let them run away as to many as possible. Let them show me, oh, so this is clear.
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I said, great. Well, using that information you've just spent 15 or 20 minutes showing me, interpret
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John 6 in a consistent way. Again, blank face, let's run away. I said, I just keep on dragging them back.
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Okay, great. You've shown me these other passages. I'll do the same thing. If we get a confusing part like 2
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Peter 3, 9, I'm throwing it out there, I can go to the context, you know, and look at it to believers and stuff like that, and I can go to other texts, but then
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I can take what's in those other texts, come back to the confusing part that we have a few of them in Reformed theology, but then
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I can use that to interpret the disputed text in a consistent way.
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I let them go all over the place to wherever they want, and I say, great. Now bring that back to John 6 and be consistent.
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Interpret this in a consistent way. And what are their excuses? Well, all doesn't mean all. So what? Some that the
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Father gives me will come to me, and some I will not cast away. It just doesn't make sense. There's no positive exegesis.
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It can't mean that. Now let's go. Right. If you try to hold them to the same standards that they would use, and this is especially, it's one thing when you're dealing with a liberal who doesn't take the text of Scripture as an inspired whole anyway, at least they're consistent to be inconsistent about it.
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That's no major league big deal. What bothers me is when someone who would stand right by my side in the defense of the deity of Christ, monotheism, the doctrine of the
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Trinity, the physical resurrection, the incarnation, the virgin birth, whatever it might be, they'll stand right by my side, and they will use proper methods of exegesis and hermeneutics, and they'll catch the cultist when the cultist starts using improper forms of hermeneutics.
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They'll catch them and go, no, no, no, wait a minute. Now you said over here, and you can't do that. We have to look at context.
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You can't just go running away and things like that. You know, they'll do that, and then as soon as it comes to the one point where you're touching upon the very heart of the issue, the very heart of free will, libertarianism, all of a sudden, wow, things change.
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So that inconsistency is indicative of the fact that we're dealing with a system that is itself derived from philosophy and not derived from the text of Scripture.
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Do you have one more question? Just real quick, we've got two callers online. Okay, with the concern of total depravity, and obviously an issue
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Pierre brings up a lot, is the justice of God, our sinfulness basically giving us a one -way ticket to an eternal punishment, granted we don't have
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Christ backing us up. Is this something that even we as Reformed view, humans don't really deserve that much punishment, but that's what happens when you insult an infinite
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God, or does the punishment truly reflect upon how wicked we are?
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Well, no, it reflects upon how wicked we are. I really believe, there's one thing that's frequently missing.
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There's two things that are frequently missing, and I'll briefly mention. A, the vast majority of people today, even those who say they believe in biblical theology and even
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Reformed theology, have a hard time truly believing in what's called federal theology.
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That is, the federal headship of Adam. Our falling in Adam, or our being in Christ. That Romans 5 passage from 12 onwards, what that's based on.
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You can sort of go back to the Old Testament, show somebody what happened to Achan, and the fact that not only
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Achan, but his wife and his kids and his doggies and kitties and donkeys were all stoned for what
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Achan did. If they look at that and go, oh boy, I'm glad we don't believe in that anymore, then you know we've got a problem, and they're probably going to have a problem with the whole idea of our falling in Adam.
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That's the first thing is federal. Well, I think with concern with abortion and, you know, hacking, making it, turning practically every teenager into a music thief and stuff,
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I really believe that the pull to gravity, there's also an intensity that goes along with it.
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It appears that if you make sinning easy and convenient enough for people, they will do it.
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And I think the punishment we get reflects upon how truly wicked we are, not just how unfair God is. And I think that's a problem
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Arminians have, is they need to understand how truly, deeply wicked we are and how undeserving we are. Well, certainly,
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I mean, you look at Dave Hunt trying to attack Romans chapter 3 and say it doesn't mean that we all are really that dead in sin.
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There have been righteous people, etc., etc. You can see there's a fundamental problem with Arminian theology at that point.
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But what I was going to say, the second thing is that we tend to not talk enough about the restraint that God is currently practicing on the evil of men.
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And since we don't see the evil that is restrained, then we end up, instead of thanking
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God for the restraint, we end up developing a higher view of ourselves because God has restrained our evil.
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It's an amazing thing when you think about it. But we don't talk enough about that, and I don't think we thank
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God enough for the fact that when you do see horrible things that take place in this world, realize that's just God lifting his finger.
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And in hell, his hand is going to be completely off. And I honestly believe the greatest torment of hell will be the lack of restraint from God.
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It will be the absolute self -destructive expression of hatred for God that is at the heart of the fallen man.
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That's what I think is going to be going on. I'll tell you what truly goblins typical. Oh, yeah, it's going to be.
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I really appreciate your ministry, Doc, and I don't know if you get tired of it, but I always really appreciate your handling of rebuttals to reformed
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John 6 things. I really have a lot of fun with those. Well, my hope, honestly, I have already mentioned this to someone who can help to make it happen.
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My hope, honestly, is to write a book in the course of the coming year on John 6.
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They say you've already done that. Yeah, a little teeny booklet called John by the Father. I want to do an extensive, think of the most extensive exegesis in the
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God who justifies and then do that for all of John 6. That's the first part of the book.
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And then the second part of the book, I want to take every possible response I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of them, to John 6, starting with the published ones and then going to the internet ones and then going to maybe the pal talk ones.
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That'll be the stuff at the end. And respond to every single one of them. That's something I really, really would like to do, and we'll see if given the travel schedule
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I already have for next year, well, that's going to work out. But, hey, got two more calls to get to. Thanks for your call today,
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Aaron. Thank you, Doc. Thank you. Let's move on to Chris in Indiana. Hi, Chris.
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Hi, Dr. White. How are you doing? Fine, sir. It's good to talk to you again. I got to talk to you for just a few brief moments on one of your previous programs.
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Alrighty. I just wondered if you had seen the latest copy of The Berean Call that Dave Hunt puts out.
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I'm not certain. The last electronic one that I got had an article about the love of God.
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Yeah. And I had started commenting on it on a previous issue, edition of The Divine Line.
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Yeah. The last time I spoke to you, I told you how much
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I appreciated in your book, Scripture Alone, your definitions of exegesis and eisegesis.
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Those simple definitions have really helped me a lot to see when people write certain things about passages of Scripture, how they do eisegete things according to the beliefs of their own traditions.
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I think Dave Hunt is going to keep beating his drum against the reformed view of salvation for a long time, because that's what he keeps doing.
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The big guy to realize, Dave is not the youngest man on the planet. One of the sad things to me is he basically is making this his final big battle.
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Given what has happened of late with this absolutely wild -eyed desire to get around Acts 13, 48, which he says is the strongest
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Calvinistic verse. I've never made that claim. I don't know anybody who actually believes that. I think it's very clear, but I certainly don't consider it the strongest.
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To go as far as he's been willing to go is simply sad to me. Here's someone who has defended the inerrancy of Scripture and the inspiration of Scripture for as long as I don't know, at least 30, 40 years he's been doing this, and yet he's willing to, in essence, throw that out the window without a second thought just to try to get a stronger stance to resist what is clearly the message of Acts 13, 48.
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That to me is very sad. People will ask, when does someone's resistance to God's truth start to make you worried?
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It makes me worried when it becomes something that's long -term, it is persistent, even when refuted it does not acknowledge its errors, and it's willing to embrace falsehood in the service of defense of a false tradition.
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That's when it starts becoming very, very worrisome. Do you think that is a reflection of spiritual pride and being bound and determined to prove that I'm right no matter what anybody shows or tells me?
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Well, someone who debated Dave Hunt on another issue just a few years ago, after I first crossed his path and sort of crossed him in that radio debate, contacted me and he said to me at that time, he said,
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One thing you need to remember, I have never, ever heard Dave Hunt say, I was wrong.
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So, you know, when you look at what he did with Spurgeon, when you look at what he's done with 1
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John 5 .1, he quotes it, he misquotes it, he actually inserts parenthetically a thought that's the exact opposite of what's in the original language, and when faced with that, what does he do?
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I don't need that verse. I've got dozens more over here. And then when he redoes his book, what happens?
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It just disappears. No note, no apology, no nothing. I don't know how you do that.
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I don't understand that kind of mindset. I honestly don't. I mean, I've said from the beginning, this is the best example of blinded by tradition
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I've ever seen. But how far does that go? I mean, now we've got the entire ministry sending out bibliographies.
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They sniped from a cultist website. I mean, how far do you go in defense of this stuff before you put up your hands and say, okay, we blew it.
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We didn't know what we were talking about. I think people start to lose respect for a person when they're that bound and determined that they're going to be right no matter what.
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You know, if I may, I'd like to ask one brief question, and especially since I did hear a bit of you talking about an evolutionist going on about evolutionary theory and how they're right and creationists are all wrong.
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And I wanted to ask you this, especially since you emphasize the exegeting of Scripture so much in biblical hermeneutics as being the only way to interpret
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Scripture correctly. What I wanted to know was, according to Genesis 1 and the book of Exodus 20, chapter 20, verses 8 through 11, the whole idea of the six days and the literalness of the
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Is this a 24 -hour solar day or are these long periods of times? Do you believe, exegetically, was it ever the writer's intent to describe indefinite periods of time?
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And should scientific reasoning ever take a priority when it comes to a biblical hermeneutic? Well, of course, that's the entire debate over the framework hypothesis and all the related stuff that's going on in many seminaries today, unfortunately.
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And it is quite true that there are many people who, in their view, either of that narrower issue or of a much broader issue of the difference between theistic evolution and special creation, that there are very many people who honestly believe that the only choice that you have here is between a literalist interpretation of Scripture and simple sanity.
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I mean, I remember when I was in college, I started addressing this, I think, a week ago tonight.
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In the very last question, somebody asked me the very same thing. And I pointed out that I had gone through public high school.
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I fought the battle. I took all the accelerated classes. I was class valedictorian. That meant
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I had to, you know, I would sit at lunch with one of the science teachers and we would debate creation and evolution.
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And I went way beyond the normal stuff. I mean, he would bring in scientific journal articles on natural selection and the genetics of natural selection.
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And that's the kind of stuff I was reading in high school. And then when I graduated from high school and was a science major in college,
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I was going to a Christian college. It's like, all right, great, no more battle. But I was the only creationist at my
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Christian college. Everybody there were theistic evolutionists. And so the battle continued and only intensified because I was a biology major.
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And so every time, for example, I remember this class on limnology we took. Every place we went, we traveled all these inland lakes and streams in Arizona.
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We'd take life surveys. And in the van on the way and on the way back, what would be the subject of discussion?
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But I'd be defending myself against not only the professor, but against all the students as well. And so I went out and I got the best evolutionary stuff
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I could get hold of. I read Dawkins. And I developed, without using the terminology that much more intelligent people than I have,
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I developed, without having read any creationist works that presented this, the argument of irreducible complexity long before I found out anybody else had to.
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Long before Dawkins, Darwin's black box came out and all the rest of that stuff. And so I'd had to struggle with this stuff for a long time, pretty much on my own, as a science major in college.
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This was back in the 80s. And so anyway, I've sat down with many people within that context, because I eventually had a double major,
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Bible and biology. And so I would sit down with these theologians, and I would talk with them about why they believe what they believe.
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Why they believe in the evolutionary theory. Why do they believe in this, that, and the other thing. And also, as a science major,
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I had to learn how the various dating methods work. I had to understand the processes that were involved in calculating half -lives and the potassium -argon method and the vast, you know, most
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Christians are confused between carbon dating, which can only be done on biological things and only has a limited time span, and the other forms of radiometric dating systems that have much longer time spans available to them and can be used on inorganic things.
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And so I had to get into all that stuff and study all that stuff. And when I'd talk to these people, I'd say, so why do you believe what you believe about this stuff?
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And it was never first an exegetical thing. When I would ask them, what do you think about Paul's statement in Romans 5 about death and death coming upon all through the fall of Adam, and even bring that into the entirety of creation,
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Romans 8, and all the rest of that stuff. And unfortunately, the vast majority of the time, it was just simply, well,
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I understand those things in light of what we understand in science. And that really bothered me.
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And I understand when people say, well, to be what you're talking about, that means
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I have to, you know, sacrifice my mind. No, I don't believe in any way, shape, or form that I've had to sacrifice my mind.
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I've just had to take the time to stand back and go look. When we look at the evidence for an ancient earth in radiometric dating systems, for example, what is our starting point?
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When we examine, when we set up the indexes for those things and the assumptions that underlie it, when
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I look at scripture, the scripture tells me that creation took place for a purpose.
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It took place for a purpose. God created, and he created for a specific purpose.
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That purpose is focused in Christ. And this is really where the secularist just goes crazy. What do you mean this is just simply an insignificant rock circling an insignificant star in a significant galaxy?
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How can you say that God's purpose is focused upon this? And I say, well, you know, that's one reason why
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Christmas is important to me. Because, you know, if the creator himself entered into his creation on this planet and subjugated himself to the treatment that he experienced on this planet and died on a cross on this planet and rose to the dead on this planet, that tells me this planet is not insignificant.
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But again, I understand the worldview they're coming from, and I look at it and I go, look,
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God created this planet functional. Now, let's say just for the sake of argument, if this planet was created functional, that is, when
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I say functional, the things that it needs to have for man and the purposes
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God's accomplishing in man to take place. In other words, it can't be a molten rock. Man can't live on a molten rock.
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There has to be oxygen. There has to be plants. There has to be a means of eating and reproducing and building homes, and et cetera, et cetera, okay?
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So if this world was created functional for a purpose, and then you applied to this world a naturalistic dating system that does not allow for the idea of complexity to come into existence in a creative way, but it can only develop over time, what will the dating methods you derive from that tell you about this world?
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It's going to tell you it's extremely ancient. But it's going to miss the entire point, because it's assuming the world can't be created functional to begin with.
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And so I look at that whole battle and I go, I don't see why it's that much of a battle.
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People say, oh, you're talking about God's trying to fool us by creating the world already functional.
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No! God's not trying to fool anybody. We fooled ourselves because we're not allowing God to define his own purposes through his word.
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I mean, I do think we need to look at things from the perspective Christ taught us to. So I have no problem with what
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Genesis tells us about creation and about the purposes and the time frames.
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God can obviously do it that way. Do I automatically dismiss someone as a non -believer who holds to one of those things?
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No, I don't. I would sit down with them and I would try to share some of the struggles
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I've had because I really think I'm not scientifically illiterate. I don't keep up with a lot of the battle today.
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I try to keep up with the big things that are going on, but I'm a little bit busy with other things, but I'm not scientifically illiterate.
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And I do understand the pressures that are on people to compromise in that area. And especially in the vast majority of evangelicalism today, look, if we don't even care about whether God is absolutely free in the matter of salvation so the glory is only his, well, then why are we going to care about whether our exegesis is consistent with the
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Christian worldview? I mean, it all seems to go hand in hand, to be perfectly honest with you. Though, I will admit, within Calvinist institutions, this is just as much of an issue as anyplace else.
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So I'm not trying to make any point outside of that.
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But anyways, I don't know if that answered your question. Sir, I appreciate so much when
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I get to hear your webcasts, and especially now that I've got to talk to you a few times. Hopefully, I remember you saying that when you sit down to eat, you'll have people wanting to come and talk to you and your food gets cold.
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And I can understand how irritating that would be to a person. I couldn't help but think when
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I heard you say that, I thought, you know, some of these people probably think I'll never see this guy again. This is the only chance I'm going to get to ask him what
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I want to. So they probably don't think of their manners quickly.
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But thank you very much, and Merry Christmas. And Merry Christmas to you. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, 877 -753 -3341.
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Let's talk to another Chris, this time in California. Hi, Chris. Hey, how are you doing?
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Doing good. Okay, if I may, I'd like to just go ahead and start off by posing two questions, and you can answer them at your leisure if you'd like.
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Okay. The first being, with regard to the sheep and the elect,
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I had heard an argument. It wasn't an in -depth argument. With regard to the fact that the elect being referred to as sheep in Scripture, and not only are they referred to as sheep before regeneration, but they're referred to as sheep after regeneration as well as before regeneration.
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And that on the Day of Judgment where we see the sheep on the right and the goats on the left, that suggests that goats, that is the non -elect, have no intention or have no ability to become sheep, and that is another argument for the
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Calvinist position. Okay. I was wondering if that was a valid argument. Well, before you go to the second one, it's always best to answer the first one first.
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There's only one reason that I wouldn't necessarily go there, and that's for this reason.
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First of all, in John 10, where that terminology is used, that is primarily within the sheep -shepherd relationship that is not a part of the same language in Matthew 25, where you have this being used in a parable.
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And I would be uncomfortable pushing, leaving John's specific use of that and necessarily paralleling it with Matthew.
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Now, I think there is everything right to be said that it is the shepherd that chooses the sheep, not the sheep that chooses the shepherd.
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And when Jesus says in John 10 to the Jews, you are not of my sheep, that is where it amazes me that people will say, well, what he means by that is they're not now, but he's going to die to make it possible for them to become his sheep.
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There is a massive leap of illogic, but I addressed that just this past week on my blog in regards to Osborne's comments on John 10 at that point.
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So I think that that argument would be susceptible to refutation simply on the basis of you can't necessarily make the leap from John's specific use to the parable in Matthew 25 and the judgment, because they're two different contexts at that point.
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So I think the point is valid, that is that sheep are chosen by the shepherd, and if you're not of the sheep, then you're not of the sheep.
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It's not that you have that capacity. But I don't know that the parable in Matthew 25 is necessarily the strongest way of substantiating that.
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But I mean it's still valid in the sense that when
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Christ was telling the disciples to go not into such and such a city, but to go into the lost sheep of the house of Israel, that they had yet to have been saved, but yet they were still considered his sheep even though they weren't brought into the fold.
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Yeah, especially when you're dealing with anything like sheep -shepherd language, which are clearly meant to be analogies.
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They're meant to communicate something. Especially that kind of language needs to be defined within its particular context, and it's not the kind of language you want to necessarily make blanket connections between different contexts of that like sheep and goats.
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I mean sheep and goats, that is referring to nature. Yeah, that's a different thing than the shepherd and the sheep necessarily.
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But I just think we need to be very careful because basically what sometimes happens is while we might see that connection, we're talking to somebody who doesn't, and if we don't have our best argument put forward, their tendency is going to focus upon any weaknesses in that argument, and then they're going to use that as an excuse and not even listen to the strongest arguments you make.
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Right, okay. And my second question I had was I've read a couple books by a gentleman named
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Dr. Robert Morey. Are you familiar with him? Yes, uh -huh. Okay, I was just going to ask your opinion on him just because he seems to have a similar— argue similarly as yourself, and I was just wondering what your thoughts were with regard to his ministry or his books or anything.
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Well, all I know recently was that—I've not kept up with what
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Dr. Morey is doing. Some of his—for example, a book that he wrote years ago called
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The Battle of the Gods was almost prophetic in the sense that it foresaw the coming of open theism and the popularity of open theism.
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And so, you know, that was a valuable work, and his book
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On Death and the Afterlife had a lot of good stuff in it as well. These are older works. The only thing
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I've heard about Dr. Morey recently was, I think, an overreaction to the events in the
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Salt Lake City Tabernacle, whereas I understand it, and if I'm wrong, please bring it to my attention, but as I understand it, he called for certain—for people to be fired from their positions.
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He called for a boycotting of Michael Card, I guess, and some stuff like this.
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And I just—you know, obviously, I did not respond to it in that way. I responded to it, I think, fairly strongly, but I did so by pointing out the fact that to say that we've been lying about Mormons is simply wrong, and here's why, and here's the documentation.
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And the idea of calling for—to boycott Michael Card, I mean, give me a break.
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That I do not understand. So if that was a part of it, then there would seem to be a willingness to go a good bit farther than I certainly would in the way that you respond to something.
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The last time I saw Dr. Morey was at the debate with George Bryson in Los Angeles, actually. He was in attendance that evening, but I really don't have any contact with him for quite some time.
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Okay? Yeah, I was just curious. And so anyway, thank you for your time, and I appreciate your ministry.
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Thanks, Chris. Okay, bye -bye. Have a happy Christmas, not a holiday. All right, thanks,
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Chris. Let's run real quickly, because we're just about out of time, to back to California with Raymond.
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Hi, Raymond. Hi, Doug. You know, everybody loves you. Yeah, that's what
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I've been told by everybody. I don't feel like it. Let's all hug
53:36
Raymond. Come on, it's Christmas Eve -eve. Thank you. My question here is, does the
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Armenian gospel present enough of the gospel whereby God can honor it to save anybody?
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Well, you'd have to define for me exactly what the Armenian gospel is, because let's face it. The number of people today who would openly and consistently identify themselves as Armenians.
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I mean, Dave Hunt says he's not an Armenian, for crying out loud. Norman Geisler says he's not an Armenian. So to define that is a difficult thing.
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That would be like saying, what is the Reformed position on X, Y, or Z? Well, you know, that can sometimes be a little bit difficult to define.
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There are different perspectives. If we're talking about full -blown Arminianism as it's found, for example,
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I think in its most consistent form in open theism, where you have a clear trust in the will of man and a knowing, willful subjugation of God's will to man's will, the denial of the ability of Christ to keep his own, it's up to me, all those elements, then at that point
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I would say full -blown, five -point, knowing Arminianism, I don't see how that is a true gospel.
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I really wouldn't. But the problem is, as you probably know, I don't know but a few people who actually hold that position.
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The vast majority of people who would be non -Reformed in their soteriology borrow from Reformed theology all sorts of truth to patch up the major holes.
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And the fact of the matter is, I certainly did not have all the, and this is why
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I oppose the hyper -Calvinists, and I've written against this, there are people who basically say, hey, unless you've got all the five points down, you're not a
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Christian. Well, I was a Christian long before I understood the biblical basis of limited atonement.
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I think limited atonement is very important, it's beautiful, it's a beautiful doctrine. I'm not one of those
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Calvinists who shies away from talking about the particular redemption, because I believe it's important to the perfection of that work.
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But, I didn't understand that. All I knew was that Christ died for me, and that I needed to believe in him, and outside of him
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I had no hope. And I was very young when I first confessed faith in Christ.
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And so, I think we need to be careful. The tendency is, if we start defining any parameters to the gospel, is to draw the circle so tight that we're the only ones left standing in it.
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And I've met people like that, and you run into people on the internet that are like that, who basically say you have to have a perfect knowledge of Calvinism, and it has to be my
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Calvinism in fact, to be saved. And I've consistently resisted those folks, and written against those folks, and said, look, if we believe that this is something that God, that he explains to us over time, that he opens our hearts and our minds to understand his sovereignty, and his power, and our being the clay in his hand, if we recognize that's something that God does, well, then it follows that we had better not put
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God on our timetable, and say we have to have a perfect knowledge starting at the very beginning.
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Because none of us had it. I don't think there would be anybody who would actually be saved if you have to have a perfect knowledge.
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So the balance is between recognizing, yeah, the word gives us certain parameters as to what is and what is not the gospel.
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At the same time, I like the way that, and I first heard this from my fellow elder,
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God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. In other words, God, in his life for example, he was saved in what we would call an
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Arminian church. And as he became serious about the word of God, he started seeing these things, it was a process, but he started seeing these things, and God grew him up.
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But it was in that context that he first heard about his sin, and he first heard about a Savior, and that's where he trusted in that Savior.
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And then the Holy Spirit of God works in a person's life, makes you serious about the word of God, makes you serious about growing in that grace, and that's when you begin to see the importance of these things.
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So that's where I would go in response to that. And Raymond, everybody does love you, and you have a fine
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Christmas out there in California. And I will even say Merry Christmas to people in California. I don't care if it's politically incorrect to do so.
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I hope you do have a blessed time of remembrance of our Savior's love toward us, illustrated in the
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Incarnation. The Incarnation is one of the most precious truths of the Christian faith. I hope you will find time in the busyness of this coming
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Saturday to spend some time reflecting upon it. I'm going to try to do that. Thank you for listening.
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God bless. We'll see you next week. We must go away.
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We must contend for the faith our fathers fought for. We need a new reformation day.
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This has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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59:40
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59:45
World Wide Web at aomin .org. That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.