LGBT Terrorist

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded 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 on a Thursday afternoon, regular -sized program today, starting off with a graphic that TurretinFan addressed on his blog.

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I suppose I should have actually read TurretinFan's comments, but I have a feeling that even without having done so, we will probably be saying pretty much the same things here.

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I have linked to it on our blog. It is, it says, so you still think homosexuality is sinful and therefore gays shouldn't be allowed to marry.

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And then it's a, what'd they call them, Venn diagrams, something like that. And you have a yes and a no.

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And if you say no, it immediately goes to congratulations of being part of civilized society.

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So civilized societies do not think that homosexuality is sinful. But if it says yes, then under why, you have one, two, three, four, five, six possible answers to the question why.

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The first is because Jesus said so. Not true, Jesus never uttered a word about same -sex relationships.

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And of course, we know that immediately, well, we already knew that whoever put this together, can't really take them very seriously, but there are people who actually believe this stuff.

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And so we're taking the time to demonstrate that thoughtful people do not behave in this way and do not produce such things.

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Jesus never uttered a word about same -sex relationships. He also did not utter any words about all sorts of other things because the

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Gospels are not intended to be a complete recording of everything

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Jesus ever said. But an honest person would obviously want to ask the question, is there any evidence that Jesus was opposed to the law that existed in his day?

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That is, what is Jesus' view toward the Old Testament? Did he quote from the book of Leviticus, which is, of course, the text that—did he quote from the

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Holiness Code? Well, he did repeatedly, and he held men accountable to it. Was there anybody in his day that rejected the biblical teaching found in God's law concerning the fact that homosexuality was forbidden by God?

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The answer is no. So if you're going to assume that Jesus was radically in opposition to the position that had been held by the

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Jews all the way up to his day, then you have to provide some evidence, and none of these folks, of course, have even thought about that, let alone would they even attempt to offer such evidence.

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Jesus did, in fact, positively teach on the subject of marriage and sexuality, and he did in Matthew chapter 19, and when he did so, he taught that marriage was one man and one woman, and that this was the only union that God, of course, blesses.

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And so the first line is shown to be in error.

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Then the second is, because the Old Testament said so. The Old Testament also says it's sinful to eat shellfish, to wear clothes woven with different fabrics, and to eat pork.

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Well, we have obviously refuted that canard many times before.

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We have demonstrated that this is a cherry -picking of the Holiness Code, it ignores the differences between those things that marked off the specific people of God and separated them from the pagan peoples around them, and the moral code, which is found throughout the

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Holiness Code, which includes prohibitions against incest and rape and bestiality and all sorts of things that evidently we shouldn't be worried about anymore either.

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I really wonder if these folks have ever taken the time to actually read the Holiness Code. I get the feeling that 99 .8

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% of them have never cracked the binding of a Bible to begin with. Then from that it goes, should we still live by Old Testament laws?

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No and yes, and if it says yes, then it goes down to have fun living your sexist, chauvinistic judgmental, xenophobic lifestyle choice.

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The rest of culture will advance forward without you. If you were expecting this to have any kind of meaningful argumentation to it,

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I will get to some of those things later on, I guess. Then no puts you into a loop back up to the why question.

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Because next one is because the New Testament says so. The original language of the New Testament, anybody want to take any bets that the author of this graphic can't read

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Greek? I wouldn't take any bets on this. The original language of the New Testament actually refers to male prostitution, molestation or promiscuity, not committed same -sex relationships.

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Really? I would love to have some evidence of this presented. I've heard people say this.

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We have examined this contextually when we've looked at Romans chapter 1, we've looked at 1

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Corinthians chapter 6, 1 Timothy chapter 1. We've looked at all these texts and we have not found any evidence of this in the context.

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We have looked at Arson of Coites, it's Old Testament backgrounds from the Greek Septuagint, and we have not found this to be the case at all in any of these contexts.

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Paul may have spoken against homosexuality. Yeah, they got to admit that one because it's pretty obvious. But he also said that women should be silent and never assume authority over a man.

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Think about that kind of argumentation. Yeah, well, he may have said that, but he said other things.

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And so the dot dot dot goes down to, shall modern day churches live by all of Paul's values?

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If you choose yes, then it goes back to the same sexist, chauvinistic, judgmental, xenophobic lifestyle choice accusation.

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And no then takes you back up to the why question. So it seems that at least this person pretty well knows that what you've really got to do here is you've got to throw the authority of the

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Bible under the bus to be able to come up with this and to join a part, be a part of civilized society.

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So in other words, if you believe what the Bible says, you're a part of an uncivilized society. The next one, because God made

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Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. That was when the earth wasn't populated. There are now 6 .79

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billion people breeding clearly isn't an issue anymore. That's not even a meaningful counter -argumentation, because obviously if someone were to somewhat humorously, say, because God made

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Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, their point is that God has a particular purpose in creation.

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And it's not just for procreation, even though that is a part of it.

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And so you go from there. So the number of people on earth, not relevant to that particular issue.

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Then because the Bible clearly defines marriage as one man, one woman, wrong, the Bible also defines marriage as one man, many women, one man, many wives, and many concubines, a rapist and his victim, and conquering soldier and female prisoner of war, which goes back to the other graphic that is popularly on the internet these days as well, which again demonstrates the people producing these are either massively ignorant or completely dishonest, one of the two.

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Or both. That's a possibility. I'm sorry. I forgot about that one. I guess that is the third possibility.

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Where does the Bible define marriage in that way? Because the Bible recognizes all sorts of ameliorations over time, where does that get over Jesus' teaching that from the beginning it was not so, for in the beginning he made them male and female and said that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

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That's Genesis chapter 2. That's pretty early in the text. Now there are all sorts of problems that come up later on in regards to marriage.

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You have the issue of divorce, which Jesus says Moses allowed because the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning it was not so.

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Then you have polygamy. And then you have the issue of the rapist.

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A rapist and his victim. That one is really especially troubling to me, that people would completely ignore what the context at the time was and the fact that this is a law that requires a man to take responsibility for putting a woman in a position that she might not even be able to survive because of her inability to be married and the tremendous damage that was done to her by his actions.

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These folks don't care about what the original context was. They don't care. These people are dishonest and they don't care about handling the

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Word of God in any accurate way. They don't care about handling any ancient text in an accurate way. They obviously don't believe it's the

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Word of God. And so what they do is they will take situations that arose in the context of the

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Old Testament and they will take the Bible's limitations and the fact that the

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Bible did things that ancient civilizations in most situations had never even considered before.

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And for example, when the Old Testament addresses the issue of slavery and circumscribes it and limits it and applies the concept of Jubilee to it and opens up the possibility, you know, people go, oh, this is terrible.

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The Bible just should have banned slavery from the start. So it's better for people to die.

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Is that what you're saying? Well, what do you mean people would die? If a person had nothing else to do but to sell themselves into slavery, the only other option they had was death, starvation, different contexts than we have today.

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And people just ignore that. Well, it just should have. So the Bible just should have let people die. Is that what you're saying? Well, I wouldn't have.

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Yes, it would have happened. You just don't know what you're talking about. You don't understand the backgrounds. You don't understand the context.

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And as a result, you're saying things that are just dumb. And same thing when an army goes into a land, you're either going to have death or you're going to have to deal with the situations that arise from that.

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That doesn't mean that any of this reflects God's perfect intention for marriage.

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And unless you, again, ignore the relationship that the Old Testament bears with the New Testament, shadow and fulfillment, so on and so forth, and just cut it up into pieces, then you're going to have to deal with the fact that when the

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Bible deals with God's creative intention for man and woman, it was one man and one woman together for life.

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Now does it recognize that there are going to be times when that gets broken up by war and conquest and evil and then deals with issues like that?

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Yes, it does. But the reality is that homosexuality remains evil no matter how many pot shots you take based upon ahistorical and acontextual argumentation.

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So because the Bible clearly defines marriage as one man, one woman, yes it does. That's Jesus' teaching. That's Genesis.

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That's Jesus. That's the ultimate. Are you telling me that when the

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Bible deals with violations of that, that that somehow becomes prescriptive teaching? I'm sorry, that's just, it's beyond absurd, but it is the very essence of what we have in the pro -homosexual material.

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And then the last subject, the last response given to the why question is because it just disgusts me.

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Darn it. It doesn't say darn it, but anyways. Props for being honest.

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See, the idea being none of the rest of this was honest anyways. A whole population of people shouldn't have their families discriminated against just because you think gay sex is icky.

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Grow up. Well, there's a lot of reasons for thinking that gay sex is icky. The vast majority of them being that it is life -destroying, not life -producing and disease -producing and so on and so forth.

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But that's really not one of the reasons that anyone would actually be offering anyways.

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So here you have it. Now, the problem is, because it's colorful and because it goes around the internet and gets posted on Facebook, people will just go, oh, it's wonderful.

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In fact, I think someone in Channel, right before I came in here, was saying that someone they knew that was a student of theirs at a

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Christian high school had posted that, which is sad to see. I didn't get a chance to.

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I tried to follow the link, but the link didn't work, so I wasn't actually able to see that. But this kind of surface level, easily refuted if we have the time to do so, if people will even listen to what you're saying.

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But this kind of stuff is the very essence of the kind of apologetic that's being offered out there on the internet.

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And it is a sad thing to see. But I posted it,

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I think this morning or last evening, on Twitter and said, give yourself a test.

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How many of you could take this apart? And I would say to you, it should not take a

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Christian apologist to respond to this, in the sense of someone who does it professionally, like I do.

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Being able to respond to a graphic like this should be within the capacity of every single

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Christian who wants to be able to be salt and light in Western culture today. Just has to be.

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Just has to be. There's no two ways about it. In the same vein, everyone is aware of what happened in Washington, D .C.

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yesterday, when a volunteer for a local LGBT center,

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Floyd Lee Corkins II, walked into the

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Family Research Council with a 9mm and a little extra ammunition, and 15 Chick -fil -A sandwiches.

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I feel very sorry for those sandwiches. They never got to function the way that they were meant to function as sandwiches.

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But it really does make you wonder, did he really think this would be like wearing camo or something?

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I mean, it just really makes you wonder, what's the Chick -fil -A thing there? What goes in there, in the mind?

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But Corkins was a volunteer for the U Street Northwest Community Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered People.

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It was noted, in fact, I was listening to a local radio station this morning, and I had to get out of the car before I could hear the end of this.

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But they were talking about how much time had been dedicated by the major networks to this particular situation.

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And they had said that ABC had spent two and a half minutes. Now for a primetime main news show, evening news, that is a long time.

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That's a long time. There's a lot. But NBC and CBS together invested 37 seconds on this.

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Now think for just a moment. If someone wearing a

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Chick -fil -A shirt carrying a gun had gone into some homosexual place and tried to start shooting people up,

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I don't know that anything else in the world news would have been able to make it.

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They would have gone wall -to -wall, 24 -7, the whole nine yards.

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But let a pro -homosexual walk into the Family Research Center and specifically state disagreements with your policies as the reasons why they're doing this, specific politically motivated terrorism, and it's like, yawn, ho -hum, you all brought it against yourselves.

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Has anyone bothered to point out that the Southern Poverty Law Center, I mean obviously people have, but in a major context, the

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Southern Poverty Law Center has identified the Family Research Council as a certified hate group. So if they're a certified hate group, then that must mean that people should be able to do what they want against haters, because being a hater is a bad thing, right?

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It is amazing, but again, it's the double standard that is all around us, and it's sad to observe.

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Now, we had a local thing I'd like to talk about here. I know I'm just sort of bouncing around through topics, and that's okay,

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I've got stuff queued up for going from there, but bouncing through a number of topics.

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I guess last weekend, a local church here in the Phoenix area, which is a large, very large local church, had the singing group

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Phillips, Craig, and Dean in to perform. And it's been a long time since we've talked about Phillips, Craig, and Dean.

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I still remember being in Chicago. You know how long ago this was?

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I was actually speaking at a conference with Norm Geisler.

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That tells you how long ago that was, because after the Potter's Freedom, that ain't going to happen no more, let me guarantee you that.

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So this was pre -2000. This was, let's put it this way, this was the last century, okay?

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What's that? Yeah, I had hair. I definitely had hair back then. But this was after 98, because I know

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I had started getting into the weightlifting stuff at that time. So this was probably about 98, 99, anywhere.

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I was in Chicago, and I was writing an article for the

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CRI Journal on the Trinity. And I was talking about that phrase in the

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Forgotten Trinity, which had come out in 1998, titled, which

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I, of course, I was forgotten Trinity, and what I was talking about was that phrase that I used, specifically,

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I love the Trinity. And I was reading through material that I brought with me in preparation for writing the article, and one of the articles was about Phillips, Craig, and Dean.

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And I was unaware, at that point in time, of their theological background. And once I became familiar with that, as I was reading the article,

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I realized that I had one of my old laptops back then. But even back then, in the late 90s, they had

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CD drives in them, and I was listening to Phillips, Craig, and Dean. And so I kicked the

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CD out, and I sat there looking at what was on the screen, talking about loving the Trinity, and there's

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Phillips, Craig, and Dean in the CD drive, and that's something that made me think about where my priorities were, and what my emphasis was, and so on and so forth.

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And I've told that story a number of times before, and that began a fair amount of research into the background of Phillips, Craig, and Dean, and the churches that they were a part of.

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And at the time, one of the members, well, one of the folks that used to be a real regular in our chat channel, which we really miss a lot,

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E. Nielsen, Eric Nielsen, did a lot of research into the background, and there's still an article on our webpage.

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Unfortunately, most of the links are now dead because it's so old, and almost all ...

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It's not that the article has been cannerized, where the links go dead within a week because people are running around covering their tracks.

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Almost anything from 1999 or 2000, all the links are going to be broken because everyone has ...

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I mean, if anyone linked to our stuff back then, except for maybe some of our articles, which are still in the same form they were in in 1998.

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But everybody has got things that have changed since then, so I'm not saying that they're trying to hide anything at that point.

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But we did a lot of looking into things, and one of the trio was, at that time, very strongly modalistic, very strongly anti -Trinitarian, very strongly promotional of the modalism of classical

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United Pentecostal theology, an anti -Trinitarian perspective. One was in a church.

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All of them had a modalist background. All of them were raised in a non -Trinitarian background.

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But one went to a church, at that point in time anyways, that basically said, you know, people have really disagreed over the years about whether you should talk about persons or manifestations or all sorts of stuff.

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And we just, we at our church, we just don't know. We just don't know. This is like in the

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Statement of Faith. The About Us on the website is, eh, we don't know. And I'll be perfectly honest with you,

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I can, it's easier for me to respect a person who is openly modalistic than a person who goes, nah, no.

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I guess part of it is I just really struggle with liberals and their inability to, well, make faith confusing, unknowable, and hence turn the entire faith into a,

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I don't know, I just think of a pile of cold mashed potatoes, you know, just no substance and nothing overly attractive because mashed potatoes really have to be warm and well -buttered and salted and peppered to be overly, overly tasty.

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Gravy's good. Either butter or gravy. Either one will go good with, anyways, how did

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I get off on that? Anyway, so what's very, very clear is that Phillips, Craig, and Dean do not present to us an orthodox doctrine of the

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Trinity. Either they reject it or they go, I don't know. And so over the years, it sort of flares up and goes away and flares up and goes away.

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And honestly, it's more gone away than flares up because I'll be perfectly honest with you, the number of churches left in the

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United States that would care, that would really care what the personal beliefs of the performers are has diminished in the past 12 years or so.

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And especially concern about the doctrine of the Trinity amongst those who are involved in quote -unquote music ministry has diminished a great deal as well.

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There's no two ways about it. So when

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I found out, I heard in channel, because one of our channel regulars actually goes to this church,

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Scottsdale Bible Church is the name of the church, and it's a big church. And it used to be fairly closely associated with John MacArthur's church over in Southern California.

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It's not so much anymore. It used to be where Phoenix Seminary was located until they got their own digs farther south.

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And I know that Dr. Wayne Grudem still goes there. I'm pretty certain of that. And so the idea that there would be no discernment practiced by the leadership in regards to Phillips Craig and Dean Cumming and their evident non -Trinitarian stance really surprised me.

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But, like I said, I only heard about it and I'm really, really busy right now. And I didn't even know what the date was.

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And evidently it went right on past me without even knowing about it. Well, I guess some folks posted some information on the

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Facebook page of Scottsdale Bible Church in regards to Phillips Craig and Dean.

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And as a result, all that got removed from the Facebook page of Scottsdale Bible Church.

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Okay, so someone by the name of Mark wrote to folks at the

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Scottsdale Bible Church. And evidently there is, and this is an interesting title that I had never seen before, one of the pastors there is the pastor is the worship and creative arts pastor.

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The worship and creative arts pastor. You can tell you've got a megachurch when you have a worship and creative arts pastor.

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That's an interesting title. Anyways, he wrote back this fellow. Get that, get that, no, no, no.

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And some of his comments really troubled me because Scottsdale Bible Church used to be known as a pretty conservative church.

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Now, they've always had a little problem with anti -lordship theology, unfortunately, because that's been closely associated with Phoenix Seminary and things like that.

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But basically what the worship and creative arts pastor said is,

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I'm not interested in getting into a theological argument. We removed your post and others that posted argumentative comments because they are not helpful to building the congregation

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God has entrusted to us or reaching lost people for Christ. So if you point out that the group that you are paying money,

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I can guarantee you, and a big amount of money to bring in are not actually going to be directing people to the triune

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God, and hence I would say to the Christian gospel, because the Christian gospel is, of course, triune in nature, that you are, it's not helpful to building the congregation.

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Well, I would say to the pastor for worship and creative arts that to build the congregation in the

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Christian context, you have to know who God is. And that is, if your

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Christian worship is the worship of the triune God, and if you're not worshiping the triune

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God, then you're not worshiping from the Christian context. So to build the congregation, you have to lead them in actual truthful worship, which would require you to not have modalists doing the leading of that, it would seem.

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And how do you reach lost people for Christ when you can't answer the question of who Christ is?

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Because the answer that you're going to give as to who Christ is, is going to be different than some of the members or all the members of Phillips, Craig, and Dean.

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So how does that work? Then he said, might I suggest that people know us

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Christians by our love, not our arguments. Well, shouldn't we love

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God first and foremost, and shouldn't we love the truth about God first and foremost? So wouldn't that kind of thinking lead to, if it's by our love, not by our arguments, then we should all just get together and we should not worry about whether you're a

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Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness or a Roman Catholic or a modalist or, you know, we shouldn't have any arguments at all.

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And if that phrase means anything, then I wonder if the worship and creative arts pastor has read

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Galatians recently or Colossians or Romans or 1

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John, Hebrews, because they're all extended arguments relevant to dangerous falsehoods that could, well, actually really deeply damage the congregation that God has entrusted to us to use the language that he himself used.

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Then it gets even more troubling. I'm sure you're quite aware that very intelligent theologians have differed in opinion on many doctrines for hundreds of years.

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Well, I am aware of the fact that that Arius was intelligent and Sicinius was intelligent and many of the

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Popes are very intelligent and there are intelligent Mormons, there are intelligent Jehovah's Witnesses, but is that relevant to something?

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Is this actually a statement that whether we believe that the

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Son eternally existed as a divine person, which I think is very much part of the

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Orthodox confession of faith at Scottsdale Bible Church, or whether we believe that the

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Son is just the human nature of Christ that came into existence as birth in Bethlehem, which would be a modalistic doctrine, at least some of the modalists hold that view, many of the

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UPC do. You think that that's just an argument amongst intelligent theologians and we don't really know?

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This almost sounds exactly like one of the PCD guys that goes, well, you know, people have disagreed, we're not sure about that.

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And this is coming from the worship and creative arts pastor, which is very, very, very troubling.

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And finally, because you are not an active participant or member at Scottsdale Bible Church, you should not be using our public forum to pick a fight.

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I would expect better of a fellow Christian believer. Wow. So if you seek to warn folks about a non -Trinitarian position of people that are being invited in and paid to lead and worship in an orthodox church, well, unless you go here, we don't really care what you have to say.

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You would expect better of a fellow Christian believer. Well, how do we even define who a fellow

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Christian believer is if even the doctrine of the Trinity now seems to be up for grabs? Wow.

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That's, as someone on the channel just said, please use our public forum only for flattering us.

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Evidently the case. That's troubling.

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That is very, very troubling. And I sort of wish I'd had a little more heads up on this.

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I thought it was still way down the road someplace. Yeah, I did not think it just simply overran me.

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Or I would have said something about earlier and maybe even sent something in to say, folks, you know, this is local to me.

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Are you aware of these things? Because I'd sort of like to know. And reading that,

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I'm rather tempted to actually maybe write to the leadership and say, could you clarify this?

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Because this is extremely troubling. Yes, sir. May I point out that, you know, in listening to it, Matthew Vines strikes me as a fairly smart guy.

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Oh, very interesting. And, you know, there's just that whole line of thinking, why can you shut

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Matthew Vines out of your church? Why can you not put him up front? Because there's no stopping that argument anywhere.

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The United Methodists certainly are more than happy to do that. So yeah, who knows? So that was troubling to me.

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I found that to be maybe indicative of sort of the stereotypical worship and creative arts pastor position that seems to be in many situations far removed from someone with theological knowledge of what the truth is.

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That, you know, I'm sorry to those of you who are worship and creative arts pastors, but my experience has been that a lot of you guys just are more concerned about how everything goes off on Sunday morning than you are theology.

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And I've been a part of a megachurch, I can guarantee you. The folks that held that same type of position were not theologians of any level at all.

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So anyway, that's rather troubling. Now, we'd like to continue on, but we're going to go ahead and take a break real briefly.

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And on the other side, we're going to pick up with some of the debates we've been listening to for a while.

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We'll be right back. Hello everyone, this is

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Rich Pierce. In a day and age where the gospel is being twisted into a man -centered self -help program, the need for a no -nonsense presentation of the gospel has never been greater.

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I am convinced that a great many go to church every Sunday, yet they have never been confronted with their sin.

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Alpha and Omega Ministries is dedicated to presenting the gospel in a clear and concise manner, making no excuses.

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Man is sinful and God is holy. That sinful man is in need of a perfect Savior, and Jesus Christ is that perfect Savior.

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We are to come before the holy God with an empty hand of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Alpha and Omega takes that message to every group that we deal with while equipping the body of Christ as well.

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Support Alpha and Omega Ministries and help us to reach even more with the pure message of God's glorious grace.

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Thank you. What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen But Free? A New Cult?

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Secularism? False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called

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Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient and morally repugnant.

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In his book, The Potters' Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler, But The Potters' Freedom is much more than just a reply.

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It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself.

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In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme

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Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is and concludes that the gospel preached by the

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Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture. The Potters' Freedom, a defense of the

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Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at AOMN .org.

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On a Thursday afternoon,

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I have two options here as to which direction I could go, but looking to somewhat balance out the program today.

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I have a bunch of people on the channel right now that are just scratching their head over what I brought in to eat today, just the way you scratched your head when

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I brought in to eat today. Yes, I picked up some soy hot dogs. Soy hot dogs.

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I blame my daughter for this. I believe that's mentioned in the holiest code somewhere. Yeah, well,

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I'm sure they're kosher though, because soy is okay. But yes, my daughter introduced me to soy hot dogs.

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She picked up some soy hot dogs. She had had a friend at work that would bring them in and said they smelled great.

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So she picked up some soy hot dogs, and this morning, right before I came in,

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I read the instructions, put one in the microwave, warmed it up, put it in a bun,

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I had to put the ketchup and mustard,

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I had to make it an honest hot dog taste test, and it was quite good.

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So you put the ketchup and then the mustard on, and then you put more ketchup and mustard on, and then you put more ketchup and mustard on.

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No, no, no, no, no. And so I stopped on the way in and picked up a package of soy hot dogs with whole wheat buns and, you know,

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I had missed having hot dogs. I hadn't had hot dogs in a long time. Well, okay, you know, what?

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I'm still not having hot dogs. Yeah, but my brain thinks I am. That's the important part.

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And anyhow, so I'll probably have one after, yes, whole wheat hot dog buns, which my daughter had never even seen before.

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So a whole wheat hot dog bun with a soy hot dog. Isn't that great? Yes, indeed.

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I'm hearing a lot of people clicking off right now. Not going to listen to anything that guy has to say.

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Anyhow, so what were we talking about? Oh, yes. As I was saying, looking for balance in the program today, and we've already discussed that graphic and discussed the family research thing and stuff like that.

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So I think given that I finished a chapter this morning and I'm well into another chapter today,

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I only have 27 days left to get this done. I think

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I'm going to go back to Paul Williams here in the last 18 minutes that we have in the program today and pick up where we had left off with him, rather than going back to the

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Harry Knox material, because that'll get my mind right back into where I am.

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I'm currently writing, for those who are interested in such things, the chapter called Say Not Three, that is dealing with the

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Quran's teaching on the word three, its representation or misrepresentation of the doctrine of the

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Trinity. And I have to admit, I am a little disappointed right now, because I just heard back from a

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Muslim that I know that I've corresponded with before, and I was just asking some questions because he has expertise in certain areas.

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And he just basically told me to go away. And it was all because of,

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I guess, you had the mosque that was burned. Some moron, there had been arson down south against a mosque.

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And then I hadn't heard about someone throwing a firebomb into an activist's home someplace. And we know what happened in Michigan.

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Was it Michigan or Wisconsin? The Sikh temple? Wisconsin.

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Okay, it was where Ryan was from, isn't it? Yeah, okay. And in all probability, the guy that did that thought these people were

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Muslims and was just obviously has the intellectual capacity of a wet shoelace.

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And so evidently, you know, that is creating much angst.

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And I guess I can understand that. I mean, you know, I often talk about my Christian brothers and sisters in Muslim lands who live in that angst every single day because of the application of Sharia against them.

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And so it sort of has bummed me out because I was just looking for some information, for some guidance on some issues.

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I just wanted to literally provide a footnote that would accurately represent differing views on a particular set of Hadith statements, some

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Ahadith from Sahih Muslim. But I guess I'm just going to have to go with what

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I've got on that and not going to get that guidance, which is a disappointing thing. I'm a little bit down about that.

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But anyhow, we can we press on anyways. And we've been listening to Paul Williams's comments.

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You may recall on the last program, we oh no, did someone find a picture?

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I think. Yes, I think someone I'm loading, loading the image here, and I think so.

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I think Ralph found. Yep. Yep. Soy hot dogs. There they are. Ralph posted on Twitter, that's not exactly the same type that I have, but I'm sure they're pretty much the same, same thing.

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But soy hot dogs there, they I think mine are called veggie links. Veggie links is what they're called.

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So anyways, yes, that's that's. And I know

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Ralph will try them and he'll have to agree with me that that they're they're quite edible. They're not exactly

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Hebrew nationals. OK, but they are they're quite edible. But anyway, we go back to Paul Williams.

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I remember on the last program we had listened to him rattle off a whole series of misrepresentations of the

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Gospel of Mark. I call them misrepresentations because he concludes he rattles these things off.

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He does not deal with any of the positive evidence of the exalted view of Christ found in the

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Gospel, ignores all that, just like it's not even there and then comes to his conclusion. That's that's misrepresentation.

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If I were to rattle off a series of statements from the Quran without balancing them against other statements that need to be provided, then that's misrepresentation.

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And I am specifically attempting to avoid doing that in regards to the

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Quran. So anyways, he had just finished doing that. Let's let's pick back up with his his comments.

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A higher Christology than Mark. Matthew has quietly fixed statements where Mark implied or said that Jesus was weak or ignorant.

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For example, in Mark 5 30, a woman with a flow of blood that had persisted for 12 years touched

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Jesus' clothes and was cured. Mark portrays Jesus as not knowing who touched him. Mark's Gospel says, immediately aware that power had gone forth from him,

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Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, who has touched my clothes? Now, again, we we point out that on the most basic level, almost anyone reading this text would go, are you seriously thinking that he didn't know he perceives that power has gone out from him?

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But he turns out going, don't touch me. I mean, really, you don't see that he's bringing forth this confession of faith from this woman.

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You don't see that he's doing this for a purpose. I mean, any meaningful reading of the ministry of Jesus in Mark or Matthew or Luke or John is going to tell you this.

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It's just it's just so bad that that that it's hard to even know where to start in refuting it.

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It's just it's just really, really bad. It's in Matthew's version of the story.

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Jesus knew immediately who touched him, picked her out of the crowd and said to her, Courage, my daughter, your faith has restored you to health.

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Now, let's I actually want what is what is the reference? Unfortunately, he didn't he didn't give the reference that I would like in light and light of the fact of what we saw the last time.

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I would be very, very interested in knowing what what the text is in Matthew at that point.

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He doesn't give us much in the way of of references, but that's where's

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Jairus's daughter? That's that's where it is. Matthew 920. Thank you very much, sir.

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Appreciate that. You can multitask a little faster than I can while attempting to control the audio as well.

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Yes, I got it. It's there where she was saying to herself, if I only touch his garment, I will get well. But Jesus turning and seeing her said, daughter, take courage.

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Your faith has made you well. At once the one was made well. Now, let's do a comparison again.

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I love I just love this stuff. I just love being able to show where enemies of the

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Christian faith are just manhandling the word of God and not showing any care or concern to do so accurately.

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And then when we refuse to handle their material in that way,

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I think that's that speaks volumes. This should be for anyone who watched the first Shabir Ali debate, you should be going, hey, hey, wait a minute.

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I know something about that. Because you see, though this only came up tangentially in that particular discussion, this is the same story that Shabir Ali raised when we first debated at Biola.

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And remember what I mentioned at that time. And in fact, what's interesting, if I recall correctly,

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I think this is the exact same story that I've included in the book on the Quran as an example of the fact that Mark's rendering of this story is significantly fuller, much longer than Matthew's.

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And as a result, Matthew is doing what? He's telescoping things.

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One of the things he doesn't even mention is the coming of the men who inform

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Jesus of what has taken place. So if you look at Mark's rendition here, it goes from Mark 5, 25, all the way to Mark 5, 9, 34, nine verses he invests in this.

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And what does he, how many verses in Matthew? It starts at Matthew 9, 20, and it goes to Matthew 9, 22.

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So you have nine verses crammed into two verses in Matthew.

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And so what do you really have going on here? Do you have, as Paul Williams and liberals like him, well, he's not really a liberal because he's a

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Muslim, so he wouldn't take a liberal view of Islam. But when it comes to Christianity, he uses a different standard because he doesn't really obey what the

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Quran says. You're not supposed to use different weights and measures. You're supposed to have even scales. But as with so many

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Muslims, they just apply different standards. When liberals look at this, their intention is to climb into Matthew's mind and discern certain things.

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But the problem is, that's not what he's doing here. Because if he was, then he'd honestly have to say, now

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Matthew clearly is telescoping this information massively.

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He's cramming what took Mark nine verses to say into only, actually it's three verses.

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So he's taking up one third of the space with this story. And so he doesn't even give us, for example,

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Jesus perceiving in himself the power had gone forth from him, not found in Matthew. So does that mean that Matthew felt that that was wrong, that there shouldn't have been a discussion of the power going forth of Jesus?

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No. Matthew is telescoping. He is condensing the whole story down so that even what comes after this in regards to verse 35 of Mark 535, while he was still speaking, they came from the house, the synagogue officials saying, your daughter has died.

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Why trouble a teacher anymore? Matthew doesn't even mention it. Skips it. In fact, what he does is he takes that information and he imports it into the beginning of the story.

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That's what telescoping is all about. That's what telescoping is all about. So this whole mind reading gig on Paul Williams' part is completely bogus.

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There's a much more obvious reason for why there is a difference between Matthew and Mark, and that's because Matthew has greatly condensed the story and even taken out the order that Mark provides of the men coming and informing

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Jesus and stuff so that when Jesus gets to the house, he already knows, he's already aware of the fact that the child is dead, but he provides a much shorter condensation.

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There's nothing wrong with doing that. We do it every single day. Anybody who's going to accuse

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Matthew of dishonesty or something like that is just living in a fantasy world.

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So see, you take the time to look at it, and all of a sudden what sounded good in a debate isn't even close to the reality of the text, the background, and the actual intention of the author.

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And so this is, again, how Muslims, many Muslims, not all, but the vast majority of Muslims, will treat the text.

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But remember, this is an apostate. This is a man who claimed to be a Christian, who had been studying in a school of theology, didn't finish, but taking some theology classes.

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In other words, he should know better if he's dealing with the text honestly. But what's the evidence that he is?

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So far, we haven't garnered any of that. There's a second example. In Mark, we read, as Jesus started out on his way, a man ran up to him and fell to his knees before him.

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Good teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Why do you call me good?

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Jesus answered, no one is good but God alone. You know the commandments. Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honour your father and mother.

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Teacher, he declared, all these I have kept since I was a boy. Jesus looked at him and loved him.

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One thing you lack, he said, go sell everything you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.

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Then come, follow me. Note that Jesus does not tell the man that he must put his faith in Jesus or that salvation is solely dependent on Jesus dying to atone for his sins.

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But this passage caused embarrassment to Matthew is evident. Now, let's just stop right there.

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Again, why does Paul Williams assume that Jesus is under any obligation at this point to do anything other than to interact with this particular young man?

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Because he's just assumed that at this point, Jesus should be announcing the entirety of the gospel even before the crucifixion.

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How would this man even understand that? His own disciples do not understand that.

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How would this man even begin to understand that?

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He wouldn't. So it is absolutely bogus at its best to come up with this type of argumentation and say, oh, well, you should have this kind of an understanding and the entirety of the teaching that you are presenting, you know, it should be right here.

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That is not even a meaningful type of argumentation. Now, then he goes on from there and this is a text and we're going to be running out of time here, but let me just mention to you, this is one of the favorite texts that Muslims use.

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And he does so, Muslims do this because they think that what's going on here is that Jesus is actually laying out the entirety of how a person is saved.

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And if this guy had just gone and sold all his stuff that he would have been saved, that would have been good enough to do it. Completely missing the fact that the rest of the story makes something very clear.

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This young man was an idolater. This young man was self -righteous.

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And I think one of the reasons, honestly, that my Muslim friends don't get this is because most Muslims I know are self -righteous.

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They're self -righteous because they don't understand the doctrine of sin. They have not been taught the proper doctrine of sin. They reject the necessity of atonement.

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And so when you listen to them speaking about this, they really think that by their good deeds, they can in some way merit something in the sight of Allah.

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I mean, go watch the debate that I and Pastor Scott and David Wood did with Sami Zaatari.

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Listen to my closing statement. You'll see what I'm responding to at that point. We've posted that on our

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YouTube page. But the point is, this text is normally isolated by Muslims.

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And it's not just going to be Paul Williams, but this is something, if you ever want to witness to Muslims, be prepared to understand what

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Matthew 19, 16 and following, Mark 10, 17 and following, Luke 18, 18 and following. This text is really talking about, be prepared to know it in context.

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And to know that, in essence, what happens, you need to look look down at verse 22 of Matthew 19.

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But when the young man heard this statement, this is after he has confessed himself to be a good keeper of the law.

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Jesus said, if you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions, give the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven and come follow me.

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But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving for he was one who owned much property.

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He was saddened, Mark says, for he was one who owned much property. He was extremely rich. He was saddened,

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Luke 18, 23 says. The point was, he had been lying when he had said that he loved

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God supremely. There is idolatry in his heart. So we'll pick up there the next time we deal with Paul Williams and his argumentation.

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Thanks for listening to Divine Line today. We'll see you next time. God bless. I believe we're standing at the crossroads, let this moment slip away.

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We must contend for the faith above us fought for. We need a new reformation day.

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It's a sign of the times, the truth is being trampled in a new age paradigm.

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Won't you lift up your voice? Are you tired of plain religion? It's time to make some noise.

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I stand up for the truth.

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Won't you live for the Lord? Cause we're pounding on, pounding on, waiting by the door.

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The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the worldwide web at AOMIN .org.

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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.