Radio Free Geneva! Flowers, McGrew and that Other Guy, then Gregory Boyd

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:24

The mighty fortresses are gone. The bold were never gained.

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You constantly hear people that are Calvinist harp on this. God's sovereign, God's sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign.

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They just keep repeating it. And they repeat it so much, you start to think it's a biblical truth. I'll never kneel or turn this way.

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

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He died for all. Those who elected were selected. Who's still our ancient foe?

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Does he do what God's called? You take lessons from Judas White and Jeff Durbin.

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It shows in this kind of sequential format. Do you really believe that it parallels the method of exegesis that we utilize to demonstrate those other things?

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No. I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper -Calvinism and Calvinism.

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It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper -Calvinist. Even Jesus cannot override your unbelief.

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Hydra is evil for causally determining Bucky to kill Tony Stark's parents. But everybody recognizes that Doctor Strange is the hero in Infinity War and Endgame.

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In Infinity War and Endgame. You need to realize that he's gone from predeterminism.

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Now he's speaking of some kind of middle knowledge that God now has to...

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I deny and categorically deny middle knowledge. Then don't beg the question that would demand me to force you to embrace it.

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I wasn't talking about necessarily God choosing something for no apparent reason, but you're choosing that meat because it's a favorable meat.

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There's a reason to have the choice of that meat. Now from our bunker deep underneath Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, safe from Dave Hunt fans,

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Layton Flowers, provisionists, and future monks of the Dominican Order, we are Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say to his own eternal glory.

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I hope you caught the new additions to the soundtrack.

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You were probably distracted by the fact that you now had something to look at as well.

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Tim Beauchamp shredding the guitar and the drums and all that other fun stuff.

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But we had two new additions. We had the clip from the debate with Brother Stratton there with Bucky and Stark.

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That wasn't the only funny face I made. And watching

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Steve Tassi do the determinism middle knowledge thing is still one of the most painful things that has ever happened during a debate.

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No toys about it. And we are very thankful that there at the end, our new outro.

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We have a new bunker. I would imagine right now there are

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Thomas Aquinas fans running around the campus at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the cold, in the frigid cold there in the

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Midwest, looking for our bunker. You'll never find it. You'll never find it.

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They never found it in New Orleans. They didn't find it at Bruton Parker or wherever it was we were before. It's just too well hidden.

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You're not going to be able to find it. But Jeff Durbin himself voicing the final outro to Radio Free Geneva.

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And future members of the Dominican Order. Yep, I wrote that.

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That's all mine. Tim had written to me and said, well, we need to move the bunker.

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So what are we going to come up with? And honestly, I hadn't given it any thought.

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And then I'm like, hey, how about this? And literally in a text message,

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I typed it out and we never changed it. We went with it. And recent events have only confirmed the propriety of the closing of the new video version.

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Thank you to Tim Bushong and his team. I'm sure he didn't do it all himself. I mean, he was playing the instruments himself, but you have to have a cameraman and you have to do video editing and stuff like that.

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So I'm sure that other folks were involved. But there is our new Radio Free Geneva theme, and I'm sure people will be downloading this particular episode over and over and over again just to grab that out and copy it out and make it.

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I don't know what you're going to make it, but do something with it. There certainly has been some evolution over the years, because at one point

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I remember I didn't do the singing, but we took somebody else doing the singing and the music would just stop.

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And then I inserted various clips from various things. And so, yeah, that was many, many years ago.

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Oh, yeah, Milo. Yeah, we had a version by Milo. But the original versions were actual.

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I think Steve Green, I think he was the original one as far as the

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Mighty Fortress went. But, yeah, anyways.

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Well, there you go, kids. You're probably not going to listen to a word I have to say the rest of the program because you only tuned in for that anyways.

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But that's fine. We're good with that. We are going to respond to a

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Greg Boyd video. It's not a new video, but it's sort of representational of standard stuff.

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But I came in and turned on the computer and fire up Twitter, and this was the first thing that popped up.

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And I'm like, okay, this is all of one minute long, and it's why you do

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Radio Free Geneva. I mean, the first one we did was an in -depth response to Adrian Rogers.

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I was going to say Andy Stanley and start with an A. Adrian Rogers and playing important parts of the sermon and responding directly.

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And so we've responded to honest disagreements with Reformed Theology.

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We normally are responding to ignorant attacks upon Reformed Theology.

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But then you've got the people who just know. They just know. And for differing reasons, they're willing to say things that are just so far beyond.

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Well, you'll see. So this pops up, and it's

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Leighton Flowers. Nothing new there. Warren McGrew. Haven't talked about him in quite some time.

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We were engaging with him fairly regularly for a while, but it was very obvious that he was spinning off into all the stuff he's spun off into since then.

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Open theism and all the rest of that stuff. And like I said, hey, they only consist of minions and open theists, but most of them don't want to go there.

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Leighton Flowers dreams at night about being an open theist.

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That's what he wants to be, deeply. You can just tell. And his job would actually allow him.

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I don't know how he has time to be doing, quote -unquote, evangelism, unless the Texas Baptists think that anti -Calvinism is evangelism.

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And at that point, that explains why he has all the time that he does to do that kind of stuff.

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But anyway, Warren McGrew is the one doing the primary speaking here. And then you've got this new kid on the block,

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Jordan Hatfield. We responded to one of his videos, and it's sort of the foundation of all the rest of his stuff.

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And once that's gone, all the rest of it isn't all that relevant. It's not really anything new, though he seems to think that it is.

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Sort of weird. But anyways, this popped up on my screen, and I'm just like,

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OK, so that's how you all want me to start this. All right, we'll do it. Here is a—it's only one minute long.

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It's only one minute long. How deranged does man's love affair with his autonomy—

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How far does that go? How much can it twist you? How much can you sit there and hold this book in your hands and say you actually believe it?

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How far can you go in how you twist what it says? That's sort of what we're going to see here.

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Listen to these comments from these three men, and well, here we go.

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It made mention, Leighton, of like, well, if I'm elect and my children aren't, that's

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OK. And I just wanted to highlight how that's the same kind of spirit and mindset that the ancient worshippers of pagan deities would engage in when they would sacrifice their children to Baal.

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Because as long as I get my good crops, I'm willing to throw my child on the pyre. As long as I am being blessed financially,

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I'm willing to throw my child on the pyre. It's the same mindset where they're like, well, God may have eternally reprobated my child, but as long as I get into heaven,

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I'm cool with that. I don't know about you guys, but I mean, I've got four children. If God's the kind of God that would reprobate your child, how do you have the kind of worship and love for that version of God?

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Leighton, Leighton, Leighton, you're just making God in your own image. You just want God to be to be like you.

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You want him to align with your own moral standards. And who are you? How about the image of First Corinthians 13?

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How about that image of God? So, so there you go.

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One minute of absolute foolishness. I have no respect for anyone who spoke in what was just said.

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For what was just said. First of all, Leighton Flowers claims to have been a Calvinist. Again, demonstrating that's either a bold -faced lie, or he is just willing to be so wildly dishonest that it's not even funny.

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If he was ever reformed, then the only proper response to Warren McGrew's absurdity, because, hey, as long as I get in,

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I'm cool with my children not being saved, is one of the dumbest things I've ever, one of the dumbest objections

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I've ever heard anyone make. It's not that it's not a vitally important subject, it's just these men don't treat it with any kind of seriousness at all.

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It's just, it's, oh, it's horrible. Wow, I don't even know how to address it.

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But anyway, Leighton's response upon hearing what

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Warren McGrew said should have been, Sir, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm a former

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Calvinist, and while I disagree with Calvinism now, I recognize the absurdity of what you just said.

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In fact, we're done here, and cut it off. That would have been the only appropriate thing to do, but instead he runs with it, he plays with it.

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So let's, and then Hatfield just is thrown in there for the fun of it, even though the irony is, the first thing he says is absolutely true.

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The first thing he says is, yeah, you're just forming God after your own conception of creatureliness, which is exactly right.

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He's correct about that. And of course, Leighton then runs off to give us his understanding of what love is supposed to look like amongst human beings as if that somehow determines how

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God is supposed to create and things like that. But again, the man -centeredness of all of these men is astonishing, and that's why we're never going to agree, because the reality is we will never agree until there is a willingness on the part of all to be conformed to everything this teaches and to recognize that this teaches we are creatures,

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God is our creator, and that massive chasm is only crossed in the person of Jesus Christ, and that is in accomplishing the purposes that Father, Son, and Spirit have already determined.

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But let's talk about the main thing that was said. Calvinists are just fine with putting their children on the pyre, sacrificing their children in the way that Moloch did, as long as they get into heaven.

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I've never heard anything more stupid in my life. I really haven't. I'll just be honest. There is not a scintilla of honesty in what

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Warren McGrew said. He's not a stupid man, so he's just a massively dishonest man.

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That's just all there is. It's horrible. I cannot believe. There is no reason to... People say, well, we need to have niceness in our conversation.

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You can listen to that and then tell me I need to be that way? Okay, well, seems it only goes one direction, doesn't it?

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Yeah. Look, let's think about some of God's elect down through history, found in Scripture.

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Now, I think we all agree that David was a man after God's own heart, even though he committed sins.

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We all understand that. And yet he saw what happened with his own children, and his heart was grieved.

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And we know anybody who has a scintilla of understanding or a scintilla of honesty knows that Reformed people pray for their children.

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Now, these people then go, well, you shouldn't have to because the Creator said you have to pray. Look, I know you don't understand. I know you don't have the slightest interest in accurately representing the other side because you don't have any interest in us listening to what you have to say.

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This is just for your own people. It's the red meat or the chosen meat or the prime meat or whatever.

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Huh? Yeah, choice. Thank you. The choice meat, you're just throwing red meat out and it's to get clicks and stuff like that.

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I get it. All right. But if you had honesty, then you would never have played along with this and you would have said, look,

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Calvinists believe that God ordains the ends and the means.

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The means is what takes place in time. That means our striving for biblical justice versus man's perversion of justice, our striving for freedom so that the gospel can be proclaimed to people.

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All these things are good things that we are to strive for because we don't know what

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God's decree is. We know what the end of it is going to be. We don't know how to get there. We know that everything along the way is going to glorify

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God in the final analysis, but we are given God's prescriptive will.

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His law tells us what his character is like. And we know that we are to instruct our children.

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We know that we are to pray for our children. We know that we are to do everything we can to make sure that they hear clearly the message and that we represent that message in how we live our lives.

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One of the most beautiful things I've seen of late, I decided not to retweet it just because it would have...

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There's just people out there that wouldn't understand it. But my daughter, I don't know if you saw this,

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Rich, but my daughter tweeted, I think it was day four yesterday, something along these lines. Something along the lines of, one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me is that from the time

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I could understand, I have believed that the Bible is truly and fully the word of God, without question.

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Because that's not only what we taught, but we... She sat on...

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I've got the video of her at nine years of age sitting on the front row and I'm debating Muslims on the deity of Christ in 1999.

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We teach our children that. We show that in how we live the word of God and trust the word of God and interact with the world.

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My kids remember sitting in the back of our... I forget what year it was. It was a

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Ford... Was that an Escort? I think it was an Escort.

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It's so long ago. It was a used car that we thankfully were given sort of by D .L.

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Culliver. Anyway, we're driving around and they've got their... I bought these little whiteboards for them with little erasable markers.

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Those were fairly new back then. New tech! And we're doing

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Christian worldview stuff. How the Christian faith interfaces with what's going on in the world.

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And we'd be talking about what, I don't know, was it Clinton or whoever it was back then? What they were doing and what does the word of God say?

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This is how you show these things. You demonstrate these things to your children.

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Now, I don't know what came before this. Maybe it was something along the lines of, well, you know, as a Calvinist, you have to accept that there is no promise.

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Now, this is... Okay, now we get into real theology, not this kind of stuff. There is no promise that every one of your children is going to be elect.

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I think I've got some Presbyterian friends that actually struggle with that. I think they actually have a different viewpoint on that and that does concern me.

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But the fact is, there is no promise in Scripture that the faith is going to be genetically passed on.

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And one of the great heartbreaks of any Christian parent is to see their offspring going astray, rejecting the faith, joining another religion, whatever it might be.

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And it's easy to go, well, where did I fail here? Because none of us have ever been perfect. But then again, the reality is that if you understand the freedom of grace, the freedom of grace...

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Grace must be free. Grace cannot be demanded. Grace is an effectual power from God that accomplishes

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His own glorious purposes. And it is free in its exercise by God.

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If it's demanded, it's no longer grace. It's now a, I give you this, you give me that. It's a quid pro quo type system that most religions have.

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What makes Christianity different is the grace of God is free. It cannot be demanded.

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And in fact, it's been rightly said, it's normally called unmerited grace.

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It's actually demerited grace. It is favor toward those who rightfully should receive punishment from a holy

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God. But instead, receive His grace. And so, you cannot demand that of your children.

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Now, again, I don't know where the one guy is, but we know that Leighton wants to be an open theist, and Warren McGrew is an open theist.

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So, they're stuck with some kind of prevenient grace. Which is an unbiblical concept.

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You'll find it nowhere in scripture. And it's the cheap cellophane tape that holds synergism together.

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You gotta have it in there somewhere, or you might as well go ahead and get the Pelagius tattoo that you really would like to get anyways.

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And so, prevenient grace is this idea that God is helping people along.

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We're gonna hear this from Greg Boyd in a second. But the reality is, there is no such thing as prevenient grace in scripture.

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I remember buying a book on prevenient grace about 10 years ago, and I was just, okay, I wanna see what the arguments are. There were no arguments!

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It was pure philosophy. There was no exegesis. Because it's just simply not there.

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And so, as an open theist, are you saying that God is trying with everybody?

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But it's not up to him anyways? See, it's real easy to do.

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I remember, in a number of the debates, people have, you know,

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George Bryson, at the end of the debate in, what was that, 2001? Something like that. You know, what about your children?

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What about your parents? And it's like, I'm like, oh, so you would rather trust the sinful hearts, the rebellious hearts of your children or your parents than God.

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Because all you're doing is saying, oh, it's up to them. God's done everything he can. There's nothing more

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God can do. There's nothing more that God can do than he's already done.

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There's no reason for you to be praying, is there? Are you gonna try to make God work harder for the salvation of your children?

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See, when we pray, we are asking God to change us to make us better instruments in his hand of his grace.

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But I cannot sit there and say, because you have been gracious to me, you must be gracious to my children as well.

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I cannot demand that. That shows such a fundamental, man -centered, yes, full -on

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Pelagian understanding of grace. Yes. Yes, definitely. Most definitely.

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That's what it's all about. So they don't have, you know, they don't have any other answer to the serious question of how you deal with your children that is any more biblical or balanced or anything else than what

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Reformed people live and practice when they seek to raise their children in the admonition of the

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Lord. Okay? They got nothing. So to sit there and stare at that camera and lie through your teeth that what

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Reformed parents are doing is, hey, as long as I get mine, who cares what you do to my kids? There is no reason to listen to another word that man has to say until he absolutely apologizes for such utter foolishness.

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And I'll be honest, I don't listen to him anyway. I stopped listening to him quite some time ago because it was just obvious there was no reason to do so anymore.

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But for anybody else, that is absolutely disqualifying. No possible way out of that one.

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None whatsoever. So what causes people to do this kind of thing? Well, in his case, for years and years and years, he's been railing against the truth.

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You know, you bang your head against a solid wall long enough, it does have, you know, results.

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It's going to cause problems. It's going to cause problems. And you can't change what this teaches, and so you just become more and more desperate over time.

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And that's what you see with these folks. And it's a sad thing to observe. So anyway,

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I was only, it's only a minute long. This is 10 minutes long. How are we going to get to all of it? I'll have to play longer clips.

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But Greg Boyd is a well -known open theist, annihilationist, anti -penal substitutionary atonement, pacifist, neo -Anabaptist theologian.

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How's that? I first heard of him in his conflicts with John Piper back in the day when

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Piper was trying to get Boyd and his group kicked out of a Baptist group up there in the

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Minnesota area. Man, has Minnesota fallen into a hole. That's my native state. Sad. But anyway, and I'm not,

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I'm talking about politically there, not anything else. And so he does a 9 minute and 46 second thing here on why we believe in free will.

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And so I will try to get through it. You know, let me, playback speed, look at that.

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It has a playback speed selector. I love when, we're going to go to 110%, try to get it done a little faster.

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How's that sound? All right. Let's listen to what Gregory Boyd has to say.

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This is where George Woodfield and John Wesley split apart. George Woodfield believed, like many people have believed throughout history, many people today believe, believe that everything is predestined by God before the world even is created.

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Everything's predestined, predetermined. And so whether it's good or evil, it's predetermined. I'd prefer if they used the term,

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God has a sovereign decree. He works all things out of the counsel of his will. But there you go. Whether it's a blessing or a curse, it's predetermined.

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Whether you go to heaven or hell, it's predetermined. If you're predestined to go to heaven, you're one of God's chosen, the elect.

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If you're predestined to go to hell, well, then you're one of the reprobate. And they believe that the majority of people are actually predestined to go to hell.

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And George Woodfield believed. Well, again, that depends on your eschatology. There are certainly a lot of people that would have that view, but it's not necessary to the system to believe that the majority is supposed to go into hell.

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For that reason, Jesus died just for the elect. His death was only for the elect.

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Yeah, so in other words, there's harmony between what the Son does and what the Father decrees. I realize the other side just doesn't think this way.

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I realize that they're not trying to present the strongest side, but they might get farther if they recognized what it was they were objecting to.

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We're saying that there is perfect harmony between what the Father elects to do and what the

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Son accomplishes in redemption. And when you just stop and ask somebody, and your objection to that is exactly what again?

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He wouldn't die for the people that the Father predestined to go to hell. That would be weird for the Son trying to save people that he knows the Father is predestined not to be saved.

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That wouldn't make any sense at all. And so they believe in what's called limited atonement. Jesus died only for the elect. John Wesley was revolted, repulsed by this picture of God.

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Yeah, you know, Wesley says some horrible things. There's a lot of Orthodox that Wesley really detested.

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John Wesley, not Charles Wesley. Yeah, there's some real issues there. Point where, as I said earlier, he said this picture of God is worse than the devil.

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For John Wesley, he saw this as introducing a duplicity in God that you don't find in the devil.

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And the devil, you know what you're getting with the devil. He's evil. Everyone knows that. He's evil. You see it coming. But John says in this picture of God, God is controlling the devil.

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And yet God is supposed to be all holy and all good as he's controlling the devil who's now supposed to be evil for doing what

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God controls him to do. And John said that makes God worse than the devil. So, okay. All we can do is, if you just put it down in the corner, it'd probably be easier than switching back and forth because I'm going to be making comments.

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But unfortunately, what happens in this particular presentation is instead, what people don't hear, all they hear is the objection.

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They don't hear what's being offered in its place. So, if God isn't, if God does not have control over Satan, you now have

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Gnosticism. You have two equal powers, light and darkness. And in open theism, yeah, you're, he's not going to be even consistent along those lines as far as being an open theist here in a little bit.

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I'll point that out when we get to it. But you always have to ask, what is the other option?

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You can use emotion to get people to agree with your objection, but what are they offering in its place?

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You start, there's a duplicity there. It's like God says he loves everybody, but then he damns the majority of people to go to hell.

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What kind of love is that? And God says he loves everybody, but he isn't demonstrating. And God tells us to love everybody, but then he doesn't.

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So, God can only have one kind of love. And so, redemptive love and common grace.

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He can't have a lot of stuff. It's, it's, it's, and he's got to be reduced down to our levels.

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That's what he's doing with all of this type of stuff. It's a common, this is, again, very, very common kind of argumentation.

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And reformed people need to be prepared to hear it and then not allow it to get you off the track of what you want to get you.

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So, if, if you are talking about particular redemption or something like that and somebody starts wandering off into this stuff, you don't chase the rabbit.

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You, you stay focused on where you want to go. So, that makes him hypocritical. He doesn't practice what he preaches. And God then tells us to resist sin, but predestines the sinners to sin.

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What's up with that? And God... What's up with that is not a deep theological comment. Okay? What's up, what's up with that?

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That's, because there, there have been entire discussions going back into the early church on this particular subject.

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And what's up with that does not exactly summarize the more serious conversations that have taken place in regards to primary and secondary means and purposes and intentions and eternal covenant of redemption and all the rest of that kind of stuff that goes into it.

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He says he hates evil, but he predestines evil. And God tells us to fight evil, but then he, he predestines the evil that we're supposed to fight.

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And as an open theist, God didn't even know it was going to exist when he created it, and there's nothing you can do about it.

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See, that's the rest of it that you need to hear. That's the rest of it. It's real easy to do the objection part.

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It's real easy to try to rile up people's emotions like Warren McGrew did, but to give something positive on the other side.

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When God created, God did not, this man does not believe God knew he was even going to exist when he created the universe.

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Because any one of us is the result of billions of free choices.

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And according to open theism, God can't know what free creatures are going to do. So he can't know what the outcome of that is going to be.

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All he can know is what he's going to do in the natural world. The interesting thing is he's going to sort of deny that a little bit later on, so I'm not sure how that exactly works.

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Whether we fight it or not is something that's predestined. John saw that as being duplicitous, and therefore he said it is worse than the double, and that's why the two had to split apart.

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John, in contrast to that, didn't believe that everything was predestined. Some things are predestined, but not the choices that free agents make.

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I'd like to know what things are predestined. Because later on, he's going to say tsunamis, earthquakes, stuff like that, you know, this isn't a part of God's will.

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Then what is predestined? What is predestined? Because if God does not have exhaustive knowledge of future events, there's nothing that can be predestined.

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How can God predestine the exact time of the

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Incarnation, and hence the ministry, life, death, burial, resurrection, Jesus Christ, if all the people that are to be a part of that, was

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Herod supposed to be a part of that? Was Pontius Pilate supposed to be a part of that? Of course they were. So, how do you know they're going to exist?

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God can't know these things. Not in open theism. How can he know? Even if you take a simple foreknowledge view, you still are left, if God just simply takes a snapshot, sees what time's going to be, it's not him determining that it's going to be

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Herod and Pontius Pilate, it just happened to be Herod and Pontius Pilate that were involved, and God uses that.

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There's no active sovereignty there. There is only a passive, hey, look,

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I win, praise me, type of sovereignty that's involved in that kind of a situation. We here within this church stand in that tradition.

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We believe that people and angels have free will. We believe in free will for a number of reasons. We see throughout the

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Bible that God gives choices to people. So in Deuteronomy 30, for example, the Lord says, I set before you today blessings and curses, life and death.

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And then he says, choose life! Choose life! That you and your children may live. And of course, we fully and completely accept that men make choices, that God exhorts,

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God pleads. All these things are perfectly true. It is only those who want to smash the rich, full revelation down into just two little levels, just squish it on down, and, well, if God's going to call us to do something, then there can't be a divine decree.

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Because my mind's not big enough to put those things together. So my God's never going to be any bigger than what my mind can conceive.

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And that's what they're left with. It's pitiful, it's sad, but that's what they end up with.

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God wants us to choose life, but he doesn't make us choose life. We can choose death if we want. We see this kind of woven throughout the whole

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Bible. We believe in free will because we see places where people resist God's will, even thwart

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God's will. So, for example, in Luke 7, it says that the Pharisees and other experts in the law, they resisted

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God's purpose. They rejected God's purpose for themselves. I've often said to people, if you see someone quoting from Luke 7 on this one, they just don't know what they're talking about.

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They've never really thought it through seriously. And I know he's considered to be a real important theologian and stuff like that.

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Maybe he's grown since this point in time. I don't know. It seems like this was a long time ago. I think the resolution is only 640 by 480, so it could be way back there sometime.

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I didn't look at what the time was. But the problem is, of course, that you have

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God's prescriptive will. You have God's law. This is where God reveals what his purposes for mankind are.

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And every act of sin is a rejection of God's purpose for mankind. But that doesn't mean that men are thwarting

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God's decree. God's prescriptive will and his decretive will are not the same thing.

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You can stand on your head and spin in circles. It's too easy to prove that they're plainly taught in Scripture.

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You have to sacrifice the consistency of Scripture to get around that reality.

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It comes straight from the pages. You cannot interpret Isaiah chapter 10 without that distinction.

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You can't do it. It flows directly from the text. You're just rebelling against the text when you try to get around it.

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So there you go. They had a purpose for them, and it was good, because God is good and all of his purposes are good. But these folks and people in general have the ability to reject it, to thwart it.

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C .S. Lewis thought that the greatest act of omnipotence was making creatures who could say no to him. I agree with that.

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Folks have the ability to say no to God's will. We believe in free will because we see that in the Bible, God wants everyone to be saved.

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God is patient, Peter says. God is patient, not wanting anyone to perish, but for everyone to come to repentance and turn and have a relationship with him.

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He wants everybody to be part of this. Yeah, and of course, we've gone through 2

39:37

Peter 3 .9 dozens and dozens of times on Radio Free Geneva over the years. There's an entire chapter in the

39:45

Potter's Freedom on the Big Three. And the fact of the matter is there is a contextual, linguistic, grammatically correct, contextually accurate reading of that text that does not require you to believe that God does not have a sovereign decree of election.

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Okay? Same thing with 1 Timothy 2, same thing with Matthew 23. And yet these folks just repeat these things as if they've actually done the work to completely refute those other readings, when normally, to be honest with you, they don't even show knowledge of what those readings are.

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They just repeat them as if it's a mantra. We believe in free will because we see throughout the

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Bible when God is rejected, it grieves his heart. His heart breaks. He doesn't always get his way.

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He loves people, but people sometimes don't love him back. And so, for example, in Romans it says, he's quoting

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Isaiah here, the Lord says, all day long I've stretched out my hands to this obstinate and disobedient people all day long.

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And you get a picture of God here stretching out his arms saying, come to me. I want to give you life. I want to give you myself. I want you to share the bliss of my eternal love.

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But we have the ability to be obstinate and disobedient and say no. And from his perspective,

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God did not even know it was going to happen. God's shocked. He's stunned. And yet we read the

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Bible and go, but Israel's rejection is actually part of what brings about the

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Messiah, and their rejection of the Messiah is central to his bringing about a salvation, and how do you even come up with this kind of stuff?

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And I just go, I don't know, but, you know, you're an open theist. What do you do? It breaks his heart. Throughout the

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Bible you see a God whose heart gets broken. And then you find as we read the

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Bible, we believe in free will because we see that Jesus died for everybody. John says he didn't die just for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world.

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I don't know how much clearer you can get. Yeah, how much clearer can you get? In light of the fact that the original audience hearing that would not have had your individualistic westerner understanding that means every single individual has ever lived or ever will live, but of all kinds,

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Jew and Gentile, that's how they would have heard it. You don't hear it that way. And then you don't make any type of meaningful application in the sense that you go, oh, yeah, that means

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Jesus died for the Amorite high priest that was destroyed by the Israelites when they went to Canaan.

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And God never sent him a prophet. And they never even had a chance to hear. But Jesus died for him anyways.

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That's brilliant. Why does Jesus bear the sins of someone who will never be saved again exactly?

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Why is that? And they can't answer that question. And what he's getting at here is really he's confronting this.

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Don't ever think that you're some kind of special class when Jesus only died for you but not them. I would agree. I'd agree.

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Don't think you're some special class. We are not some special class. The only reason that anyone is an heir of saving faith and grace is the free gift of God, not because of anything in us.

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That's what, oh, what's the term? Oh, unconditional election is. It's not because we fulfill a condition.

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It's because God's grace is free. No, no, no, no, no. He died for you. That's wonderful. He died for everybody.

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He died for everybody. That's why we want to share this good news with everybody. Because his death does not actually bring about salvation at all.

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It just makes it possible if you'll do this, that or the other thing.

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That's the difference between a Savior who saves and a Savior who makes salvation possible.

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Provides. But does not save. God wants everybody to be saved. And so we here at Woodland Hills Church are passionate about preaching that God loves everybody.

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And Jesus died for everybody. And God wants everybody to come into the kingdom. It's free for all.

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Like we say a little earlier, it's free for all. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed. And the Son wants us to set everybody free.

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Everybody. And we can proclaim that message to everybody without denying God's sovereignty, without denying

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God's knowledge, without turning God into someone who's disappointed and who's constantly changing and everything else.

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We can do that because we can proclaim the message, repent and believe to everyone knowing that the only people that are actually going to do that are those in whom the

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Spirit of God is working and working effectively to the glory of God, not to the glory of them. We can do the exact same thing and get people clapping and the whole nine yards.

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Ooh, the emotions. But we don't have to sacrifice, well, the God of the Bible in the process. Everybody.

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And if He wants to set everybody free, He wants to set you free. And if God loves everybody, it means He loves you. You. You.

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It doesn't matter what you've done. It doesn't matter what sin you've committed, however gross, however heinous, however ugly, however mean -spirited, however debaucherous, however diabolical, whatever murder you've done.

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You could be the worst sinner on the planet. I'm here to tell you that God loves you. Jesus died for you and God wants a relationship with you.

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No ifs, ands, buts or qualifications. That's it. Simple, straightforward. He loves you.

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See, if some are in and some are out, then some of us are sure that we're out. This is the way our brain works. The only way...

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Is that supposed to be an objection? Is that supposed to be an argument? If some are in and some are out, then some will be convinced that they're out.

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Um, um, okay. Is that somehow supposed to explain

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Isaiah 10? Is that supposed to explain God's dealings with Israel? His destruction of Egypt?

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His sending of prophets to Israel and not to anybody else? Is that supposed to explain

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Ephesians 1 or Romans 9 or Romans 8 or any of that kind of stuff? It doesn't explain any of it. It's just rhetoric.

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Uh, but it gets... And people just get emotionally involved and once they're emotionally involved and emotionally committed, then you can show them all the scripture in the world.

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And unless the Spirit of God places within them the conviction, I need to know Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura.

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I need to know these things. I need to act in light of those commitments. I need to know what scripture teaches.

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Uh, you're not going to get anywhere. But, at the same time, on the other side, I've seen it over and over again.

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People who were introduced to the faith in what we would call a defective fashion.

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Um, as one of my former elders used to say, God can draw a straight line to a crooked stick.

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And so you can have people who are, uh, not exactly accurate in their understanding of the gospel, and yet, bring a message that God uses to bring someone to faith and salvation.

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And, once they hear the message, and so many people I've talked to,

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I'll never, ever, ever forget, and he came up to me, um, just a few years ago, I think at G3, yeah, at G3.

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It may have even been this year. Or last year. Anyway, uh, this guy comes up to me after a class where I've just gone through Romans 9, and he's like, you know,

46:58

I'd read Romans 9 before, and that sounded like election, but I didn't think we believed that. And it's like, yep, that's, it's right there, and it's like, yeah, you know,

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I've been seeing this stuff, and it's left me confused, and once they find out that, yeah, actually, people have been talking about this for a long time, it really helps them out a lot.

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The way that I can be confident that I can be in is if that, if everyone is invited to be in. And, uh, um, so God wants to have a relationship with you, whoever you are.

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Now, he won't force you! He won't force you! He doesn't want a relationship with a puppet! That's not a relationship! He wants a relationship with you, the person!

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And therefore, it's a relationship that you have to choose! See, there's, there's, he does not have anything even close to a biblical anthropology.

47:38

Doesn't believe that man is dead in sin, doesn't believe that, you know, doesn't believe what Romans 8 says, that you can't, cannot even do what is pleasing to God, cannot submit yourself to the law of God, uh, those who are slaves to sin need to be set free by the

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Son, uh, and of course, there are some people that try to say, well, that's what prevenient grace does, it sets you free, da -da -da -da -da, uh, there's nothing like that in Scripture whatsoever, that's not what

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Jesus ends up saying in John chapter 8. Anyways, but, they don't have a biblical anthropology.

48:10

You know, honestly, Rich, it looks like someone's coming at you with a gun right now. You're looking this other direction, and you're, you're looking like someone is right around the corner, and they, they've got a gun on you.

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I, I mean, what, what world were you on? Right? What were you, oh, okay, see,

48:33

Rich isn't able to put this into a little box, the way I said, and he's sitting there staring at the moon, wondering, why can't

48:43

I do this? And it's because of something he did to play the opening, okay? And, and, and because he has the outro cued up, so we have to blame,

48:53

I'll tell you what, let's, let's, let's blame Tim. What do you think? Tim?

49:00

What are you doing, man? Come on. You're messing us up here. Everybody's just, we're just rolling along, and, and all of a sudden,

49:09

I, I just look up, and I just had to stop, because he's just like, I, I was just worried that, that, you know, the, the terrorists had broken in, the

49:20

Synergists, Layton Flowers, Warren McGrew had just gotten into the front door, I don't know.

49:27

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's right. I, I don't have a car here today, so I, I need a ride home, so, um, anyway.

49:33

All right, back. I, I might get this done, but I'm not sure.

49:38

Let's see. So he won't force you. As much as he wants you, he won't force you. The relationship's gotta be real. And you can only choose him because his grace is already operating in your life.

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You couldn't choose him on your own if his grace wasn't already there. See, that's, that's something that, that I think

49:54

Layton realizes. If you accept that, you're in trouble. Because I, I've heard him say stuff that, that he's like,

50:04

I'm not so sure about that. That's the prevenient grace stuff. And again,

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I just, I say it boldly, but I, there is no such thing as prevenient grace.

50:18

I mean, aside from the fact that it's not a Biblical phrase, I don't even, I'm not, Biblicism doesn't mean that you demand that those words appear in the

50:26

Bible. I'm not, what I'm saying is, there is nothing in the Bible that presents to you a concept of some kind of grace that is just given to everybody to sort of push them along in the right direction, maybe undo the effects of original sin, something like this, to get them going the right, the right way so they can make the decision.

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There's nothing like that in Scripture. God's grace actually saves. There's saving grace.

50:55

There's redemptive grace. There's restoring grace. There's restraining grace. But there is no prevenient grace.

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It's an un -Biblical category. It's a theological tradition that came out of Roman Catholicism, out of the medieval period, and entered into people like John Wesley, where they compromised the

51:21

Reformation, fundamentally. Grace won't force you to choose him. And so, if you're here listening to this, and there's a pull on your heart, any kind of pull, that is

51:29

God's grace. That's the Holy Spirit working right there. Your job is to yield. To yield. To just say, okay, now surrender the

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Holy Spirit inside of you. Surrender your life to Christ, and start living for Him. Because we believe in free will.

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You notice, the Gospel for Greg Boyd is not a command. Just yield.

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Just yield. It's this exhortation, but not a command. And of course, most people and most of us who have, again, gotten out of the halls of academia and gone out on the streets, we know that all sorts of other groups use that very kind of language.

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Now, one of the reasons that I even knew about Boyd years ago is he wrote an apologetics book for his dad who was an atheist.

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But it was an apologetics book that was quite problematic, as you can tell.

52:23

I mean, if your theology is as bad as Greg Boyd's, is on the doctrine of God, your apologetics is always going to defend what it is you actually believe.

52:34

We are able to say God wants everybody in. Olly olly, it's free for all. Come on in.

52:40

Come on in. Whoever. Whoever will say yes is on the end. And because we believe in free will, we don't have to say that whenever a tragedy happens, it was

52:49

God's will. When the tsunami kills thousands and the famine kills millions, we don't think that was

52:56

God's perfect plan for their life. Did you catch that? This is what I was saying earlier, is that this isn't...

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Wait a minute. Famine, tsunami, earthquake, the open theists that I've dealt with have all said the same thing.

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That what God does know of the future is what he's going to do in the natural world, which includes tsunamis, earthquakes, so on and so forth.

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So if that's not a part of God's will, then how does God know anything?

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God created a world where there were going to be tsunamis, but he didn't know when they were going to happen? How on earth does he accomplish anything?

53:42

How on earth does he accomplish anything? How can he know that anyone's going to exist at any one given time?

53:50

He may be working to create a certain... He may be working to create the Twelve, the Twelve Apostles.

53:57

And then a tsunami comes along and wipes eight of them out. He's got to start all over again. He might never even get around to having

54:04

Jesus come, because every time he starts getting close, earthquake, famine, war, something happens, a tree limb falls, and you lose one of the

54:16

Twelve Apostles. You've got to start all over again. I mean, you just have to recognize that the reason that Christians down through the ages never had these kind of views is because they make everything absurd.

54:29

They make everything absurd. That's glorifying God. Whitefield would say, oh, it's all predestined for his glory, but we don't see anything

54:34

God glorifying about starving children. And when the endless, mindless wars go on throughout history, and atrocities caused by Hitler, 10 million people died under Hitler, and Stalin, and the rest, we don't think that was planned by God or predestined by God or enjoyed by God.

54:50

No, he hates it. That's stuff he hates. He's against that. He doesn't predestine that. He fights that. And he created a world where it was going to happen, and he didn't even know it was coming.

54:59

He didn't even know it was possible. He created the entire world with the possibility that all of that could happen, and he didn't even know.

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That's open theism. That's open theism. And you can buy into it if you want to.

55:17

Just throw this out the door when you do it, because you don't believe this. That's not... I've listened to atheists talk about this and go, well, it's obvious what the

55:27

Bible teaches for us, ancient lectures, that's clear. They can see it, but these guys can't.

55:34

All evil, all evil is the result of wills other than God. That's our conviction, whether it's human wills or angelic wills or a combination of the two.

55:41

God is good. All the time, all the time, God is good. Man, that sounds a little Gnostic there, doesn't it? Angelic wills?

55:48

That's where evil comes from is angelic wills. Sounds like you've got a little light darkness thing going on here.

55:55

Is Martian hiding in the background there? I don't know. The will is always good, and his plans are always good, and his purpose is always good. It's people, fallen people and fallen angels who screw things up.

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This world is all crappy because of other wills than God. God is always good. So when you have kidnapped children and people sold into sexual slavery and unthinkable things done to these little kids, and the terrorist goes into a market and blows himself up and kills dozens of innocent people with him, we don't think that was

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God's plan for their life. That wasn't predestined by God or willed by God. That was the terrorist who thought that. Maybe there's influence of demonic spirits on top of it, but it wasn't

56:28

God. It wasn't God. God cannot will anything to his glory.

56:37

God has to simply run with whatever a man does. He's the great responder in the sky.

56:43

You know? No decree. Got a few steps there.

56:51

There's my watch going, Hey, you made your gold. It's like, Nope, nope, sorry. God can't decree anything.

56:59

God can't accomplish anything. He's the great responder in the sky and he's just constantly having to respond to what we're doing.

57:04

And man, these days, he must be really busy. Can you imagine God sitting up there going,

57:11

Drag queen story hour? Transgenderism? What has my creation done?

57:17

That's the God of open theism. I did not know. I didn't see it coming.

57:23

God is involved in all the evil, but not to cause it. He's involved to minimize it. He's involved to bring good out of it.

57:28

Minimize it? How does he minimize it without destroying the free will of man? Minimize it?

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What's that? And the promise that he gives to all who will follow him is that it will surrender all the stuff in our life to him.

57:44

Then everything we've suffered or everything we've made someone else suffer, every evil that's been done to us or every evil that we've done to others, it all can be used to his advantage and the advantage of the kingdom.

57:53

It says in Romans 8, 28 that God is involved in all things, working together for the better for those who love the Lord. It does not say he's involved in all things.

58:00

He's working all things. It's based upon a sovereign theology that Greg Boyd doesn't even believe in.

58:07

That's all there is to it. Look, not much more in there to get to and there is one other thing

58:12

I want to do. This has nothing to do with Radio Free Geneva. I'm sorry. But the next program probably won't be until Tuesday and unfortunately most people will have forgotten this by the time we get around to Tuesday.

58:31

There is something that I wanted to do. I need to do it quickly because we need to get going and where to go.

58:41

Well, that's interesting.

58:47

Oh, there it is. Okay. Never mind. Yeah, there it is. All right. Real quickly here.

58:56

Okay. I love Alistair Begg. Love his accent, obviously. September of last year, this has just come out,

59:08

September 17, 2023, an interview about a sermon that he preached and at the end he makes comments that have left most everyone completely lost.

59:28

Here is a man, again, with as many years in ministry, consistent ministry, as I have, so decades, and the

59:39

Lord has used him mightily and great insights, but we're all influenced by the society in which we live.

59:47

And so I'm going to play what he said and make some brief comments and then we'll wrap up.

59:54

So here it is. The moment, can you come alongside me, learning to say, yes,

59:59

I know that these people believe a very different agenda, that their lifestyle is orientated in another direction, and learning to say, but I have no basis upon which

01:00:11

I could argue that I myself would not be where they are, were it not for the amazing grace of God, were it not for his compassion towards me.

01:00:21

And in very specific areas this comes across, I mean, you and I know that we field questions all the time that go along the lines of my grandson is about to be married to a transgender person, and I don't know what to do about this, and I'm calling to ask you to tell me what to do, which is a huge responsibility.

01:00:41

And in a conversation like that just a few days ago, and people may not like this answer, but I asked the grandmother, does your grandson understand your belief in Jesus?

01:00:56

Yes. Does your grandson understand that your belief in Jesus makes it such that you can't countenance in any affirming way the choices that he has made in life?

01:01:08

Yes. I said, well, then, okay, as long as he knows that, then I suggest that you do go to the ceremony, and I suggest that you buy them a gift.

01:01:17

Oh, she said, what? She was caught off guard. I said, well, here's the thing, you're not going to, your love for them may catch them off guard, but your absence will simply reinforce the fact that they said these people are, what

01:01:35

I always thought, judgmental, critical, unprepared to countenance anything. And it is a fancy, it is a fine line, isn't it?

01:01:43

It really is. And people need to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. But I think we're going to take that risk.

01:01:54

Alistair, it's not a fine line. It's a clear biblical line. Now, look, we need to acknowledge what he said.

01:02:04

He said, do they know? He said your faith in Jesus.

01:02:10

I'm not sure exactly, that's a little vague. Do they know that you do not countenance, that this is a proper thing to do?

01:02:16

Because we're not talking about homosexual marriage here. We're talking about transgenderism. So we're talking about, what does that even make it?

01:02:25

Does that make it a male -female marriage? I mean, when you think about it, I don't even know.

01:02:31

I mean, that's, there are really horribly messy things that happen in the world today.

01:02:39

But marriage is established by God. And it is not, to say that we should not attend a homosexual marriage, or especially a transgender marriage, which

01:02:57

I don't even know what that would look like. I mean, is that a guy marrying a guy who's pretending to be a girl?

01:03:04

Or a girl who's pretending to be a guy? I can't even figure that one out.

01:03:10

But all of those are blasphemies of marriage itself. And hence, to attend and to bring a gift is to demonstrate where your commitment is.

01:03:25

The grandma had the right sense. She had a basic, proper sense and recognition that there's something disordered here.

01:03:35

There's something wrong here. And it's not a fine line. It is a line that takes courage.

01:03:43

It's a line that takes commitment. It's a line that takes commitment to saying that marriage is defined by God.

01:03:50

And that therefore, to attend to the blasphemy of that established reality is something a believing

01:04:00

Christian simply must refuse to do. Now, I can't speculate as to why

01:04:06

Alistair Begg would come to this conclusion. Why he would, for example, say this demonstrates judgmentalism or narrowness or an unwillingness.

01:04:18

I don't know. I know that my mother country in many years past is in full -scale, wild rebellion against God's way and God's truth.

01:04:36

I mean, Scotland is... Wow, what a mess Scotland is in.

01:04:42

But I don't think that's what's going on here. At least I wouldn't expect it to be. So I don't understand this.

01:04:48

What I hope is for serious responses, for people to seriously say to Alistair Begg, Brother, you need to rethink this.

01:05:00

That wasn't wise counsel that you gave to this woman. Is there something else that you didn't mention that would change the character of this advice?

01:05:12

I think we need to very graciously, in light of decades and decades of faithful ministry, go, this seems completely out of character.

01:05:25

Could you explain how that is not a fundamental compromise on the part of a

01:05:34

Christian person to attend to an anti -sacrament, an act that is an open rebellion against God's way and God's truth.

01:05:49

That's what I would like to hear. There are people jumping all over it.

01:05:55

Okay, it needs to be discussed, but hopefully, graciously, and I would hope, since it obviously flew under the radar for four months, almost exactly four months,

01:06:14

I would hope that there would be a public discussion of it on his part and an explanation.

01:06:22

How is this not? How is attending and bringing a gift, how is that not, in some fashion, an acceptance that this is a marriage?

01:06:35

It is not a marriage, and no Christian can say it's a marriage. And so, what's going on here?

01:06:44

I think that's important, and I felt like we needed to talk about that, even though it's not

01:06:50

Radio Free Geneva, but there you go. We won't be back on until Tuesday, probably, so there you go.

01:06:58

So, thanks for listening to the program today. Let's let Tim Beauchamp, even though he's a gracious man, we accused him, we blamed him for something that really wasn't any of his fault, but he's used to that, too, because he pastors.

01:07:11

That's how it works. So, we're going to let him take us out. Thanks for watching the program. God bless.