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Trinity Lesson 1, Uniqueness of God, Matt Slick
Will work fine? We're gonna find out. Okay, come on. Let's see. And hopefully, yeah, hopefully it works fine. Should we go for that one? It's looking, looking good. Okay, you ready? All right. Wait a second, I gotta put the microphone on.
Getting your wife ready? All right, gotta get my microphone on. All right, we have people here and we're gonna jump into a probably a five-point, five-part series on the Doctrine of the Trinity. And we're gonna pray and I'm gonna just introduce this and then we're gonna jump into it, okay?
Hopefully the graphics on Stringyard are better. You can let me know how it looks. It looks good. I think I changed, I went and did some stuff and changed some settings. Anyway, let's pray. We're gonna jump in.
Lord Jesus, thank you for tonight. I thank you for those who want to hear your Word and will put up with me being able to teach them. And ask Lord for your mercy on the teaching of your Word and the truth of who you are.
As we study, as we begin, I ask Lord for your mercy and your grace and for your anointing on the words of truth that would sink into our hearts. Please bring people to listen and may you be glorified in it.
We ask this, Jesus, your precious name. Amen. All right, now, I did not release this. This is the paragraph I'm teaching in and I will probably release it on CARM in the next day or two or three and tie it into the Bible study stuff with notes.
This is just the first segment we're gonna be getting into. And what we're gonna do here, I'm just gonna introduce the concept of the Christian God defined. The reason I did this was because, I don't know, maybe it was within a year or so, I was talking to an atheist and we were having a discussion about the nature of God.
And a lot of times what atheists will do is simply negate God. And I say, well, which God are you talking about? They go, whatever God you want. I said, that doesn't make any sense because there are theological perspectives that are contradictory.
You can't have that. Mormonism has a man who became a God. Christianity, there never was not a God. In Islam, God's not a Trinity, but in Christianity, it is. Which one is what you wanna go with? He said, well, you define God for me.
And that's what started the conversation. And so I started working on, I did, the Trinitarian aspect. And I thought, yeah, I'm gonna work on this some more. And so I have a file I've been working on for years called Outlines and Apologetics.
And I don't know how many pages it is, but it's lots. So I went in there and I created a section on just God, God defined. And I started this, when I first wrote it, it was like 30, 40, 50 words. Coincidentally, this is exactly 500.
But it's got the titles in here, Uniqueness of God, COT, et cetera, it's got the titles. So minus those, there you go. But I think it works. Nevertheless, it was kind of a nice coincidence. And I'll continue to modify this.
As a matter of fact, I should have a pen, there's a pen, right, there's your pen. And I can use a pen to write notes in here as I explain things. Thank you very much. And I wanna be able to get people to understand more and more of the doctrine of the Trinity.
The thing about this is it continues to grow. As I examine, as I think, as I relate, as I discuss, debate, defend, it comes up more and more. Last week, a week ago tonight, two weeks ago, sorry, I had a debate on oneness versus Trinity.
Now I've done Unitarianism versus the Trinity. And there's some stuff I haven't even put in here yet in my outline, which is 17 pages, just on this lesson. And the 17 pages is including scripture references.
There's a lot there. But I'll probably, like I said, I'll probably end up doing is just putting the whole thing up as one big article up on Karma. And so that people can just look at it, they could select the whole thing, they could put it up and I could modify it and just say there's updates to it.
So what I'm gonna do, instead of reading 500 words, I'm going to just read the subheadings, and then I'll read the first heading, the whole bit. And then what we're gonna do is go through the scriptures.
I want you to see from the Word of God. I want you to see from the Word of God. There are ramifications to this, the doctrine of the Trinity. And the more I look at the doctrine of the Trinity, the more I see how necessary it is and how pervasive it is in our lives, Christian lives and such.
And now that I'm thinking about it that much, I realize that in preaching, I haven't preached a sermon in a long time, but I wish I could preach some more. I could see how the doctrine of the Trinity would be needed a little every now and then to be woven in to what it is.
You'll see as we go over this in the next few weeks. Okay. So the headings, what I did this morning, I got up and got five hours sleep. So I'm a little bit slow today. So please bear with me. And I started to do something, and I started doing categories in order to help me categorize and rearrange stuff.
And then I realized there were five basic categories. I said, hey, this is working. So the first category deals with the uniqueness of God. And then the next category is the aseity of God, His independence.
Then we get into the nature of God, and then into unity and diversity of God. And that's going to be an interesting topic. And then the creation of God, and that gets in the created order as it relates to God.
So all of those are 500 words. And let's just read through the first paragraph, probably 30, 40 words, and then we'll continue. All right. Okay. So the Christian God is the one and only divine being. He is the I am.
He has nothing against which He can be compared and defined. Therefore, truth, wisdom, goodness, justice, love, holiness, mercy, et cetera, are all self-revealed as an expression of His holy nature. God expresses Himself through creation, Scripture, and Jesus.
His self-revealed character is the ultimate standard with which we measure all things. God is the ultimate source of all truths, all actualities, and all potentialities. All right. So that's what we're going to study tonight.
Now, I can double this paragraph and get particulars and some more minutia and some details, but I don't think it's all that necessary. If I were to expand this into a book, then we'd go into it even more and stuff.
But we don't need to do that. We're not here for scholarly stuff on PhD level. What's that? You're welcome. So the uniqueness of God. All right. So if you go to the next page that I gave you, you'll see that there are Scripture references with the same paragraph.
So the Christian God is the one and only divine being. He is the I am. That's Isaiah 44, 6, Exodus 3, 14. Now, actually, I see right away that I forgot to put some Scripture references in there, because I wanted to put in the one and only.
And I go to Isaiah 43, 10, 44, 6, 44, 8. And so what I'll do is just make a little note in there, and I'll add some of those and just into my paragraph. This is what always happens. I've written it. It's perfect.
And within a little bit, I'm correcting it already. Nevertheless, so let's just go through some of the Scriptures here. Now, it does say that God, the Christian God is the one and only divine being. He's the I am.
All right. So that's Isaiah 44, 6. If you go down to the paragraph there and to the outlines, what we have for people looking at this is the outline notes of Scripture references. It says in Isaiah 44, 6, Thus says the Lord, that's Yahweh, capital L-O-R-D, with all caps like that, is Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton, Yod-Heh-Vad-Heh.
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts. I am the first and I'm the last, and there is no God besides me. Now, what God is saying is there is no other God. Now, there are other verses, I'll put them in later, where it says he doesn't even know of any other gods.
Now, when I talk to Mormons, for example, I'll quote this verse and other verses, and they'll say, well, that just means of this world. Now, here's something you've got to understand. What false religious systems do and people do is get the text to say the opposite of what it says.
A real basic principle. Could you turn that overhead light out right there? Just switch it right there. Right there. Yeah, thanks. And so they get the text, thank you, they get the text to say the opposite of what it actually is saying.
So, when we go to Isaiah 44, 6, thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first and the last, and there is no God besides me. So, the Mormons, for example, will say, well, actually, it's not true.
There are other gods besides him. He just is referencing himself in this world. But then in Mormonism, for example, Jesus is a God, the Holy Ghost is a God, and God is wife. Then there's the God who exalted him.
So, people have ways of rationalizing and ignoring what the text says. When I go to Philippians 129, for example, it's a verse I use frequently when I'm dealing with the issue of free will, as people say that faith is simply something generated by the individual.
And Philippians 129 says that God grants that we believe. And I have quoted that so many times to people, and they'll say, well, it means the opportunity to believe, the situation that allows you to believe.
They never just go with what it says, because they want to submit the Scriptures to them, their feelings, their preconditions, their ideas. Often what I will do in a conversation with someone like that, if I'm online, generally, in a debate, I wouldn't do this, but online, you know, in a casual conversation where we're having a nice discussion for one or two hours, I'll say, can you do me a favor?
Can you just, you know, you got shoes on, right? Yeah. Is there anything underneath your shoes? Well, the floor. Oh, the Bible's not under your feet? I was wondering, because, you know, what you're doing is you're putting it under your feet, and you're the one who's telling us what it has to mean, not believing what it says.
And so, this is an important thing. And notice what God says when Moses says in Exodus 3 .14, you've got to understand the context. Moses spent 40 years learning he was somebody in the house of Pharaoh, 40 years learning he was nobody out in the desert, and then 40 years being used as a nobody by God.
And the pantheon of Egyptian gods, it was the god of locusts, the god of the Nile, the god of the firstborn, etc., the god of frogs. And so, when Moses says, well, what's your name? It's interesting. He just simply says, I am.
Wow. And that reminds me, because I've debated Muslims, and they'll say that the Bible's corrupted and that the Quran is true. And so, I've asked them, I said, is every word in the Bible corrupted? They can't say yes, okay?
And I can go to a different service and talk about the Bible not being corrupted, but it's another topic. And I'll say, so, you are telling us then that the same God of the Old Testament is in the Quran, right?
Yeah, that's right. The God of Abraham is a true God. I said, okay, then how come the Quran never gives us his name? Why is it he never gives us his name? That's a good point. And it is a good point. But the name of God is simply I am.
Now, you know how you have names for Indians, right, American Indians? Where's Running Bear? He's down over there with Flying Eagle, right? And so, Methuselah means when he dies, it will come. Matthew, sorry, I remember this, gift of God, Nathan or Nathan, to give.
So, there are different names. And so, in my novel, The Influence, I actually took Greek words which is transgression, I believe, or deceive or something, I forgot. And I used it as a name for demonic force, you know, things like that, because they have meanings of the names.
So, what is God saying? He says, I am. Now, that's an interesting declaration. God isn't saying his name, Bab, or what's a huha. It's simply I am. It's a continuous presence tense here that is translated into the English.
He is the I am. Now, God has revealed himself. This is something we have to realize, that there is a self-revelation of God. Now, I've been studying a great deal on the NAR, New Apostolic Reformation, and I've got so many tangents, I've got to research, I've got articles and sub-articles or related articles, I've got to write.
And these gentlemen and ladies will say that God gives them visions and God gives them words of knowledge and prophecies. And yet, these same men and women will support someone like William Branham, who's a heretic, flat-out heretic, denies a trinity, baptismal, it seems to be baptismal regeneration, we don't know, it's kind of iffy, but denies a trinity and Jesus-only stuff, claims to be the voice of God, he does, and he's a heretic, and yet they call him a great prophet.
Now, they're saying they're going to speak for God. Here's the thing. If the I am is speaking through you, will he contradict anything of his self-revelation? No. And the answer is no. He will not contradict his self-revelation.
This is a concept we've got to understand. He created the universe, and then what God did was he walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. He was revealing himself to them. Now, what if he had not walked there?
What if God had just, you know, Adam and Eve, you're asleep, and then he just kind of, okay, got a timer on you, okay, like 30 seconds, 30 seconds, you're going to wake up, and God takes off, and they wake up in a garden.
God never shows up, doesn't reveal himself. What are they going to conclude about God? God's there? Most probably, they wouldn't know things. God has to reveal himself, and this is the beginning. He says, I am.
He is the being one. And in the Septuagint, that's what it says. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and how the Jews translated this in Greek is, I am the being one. This is who he is.
So, because of this, he is the being one, and other stuff we know in Scripture. God has nothing against which he could be compared and defined. Now, because he says, Isaiah 44, 6, and other verses, it says there's none by him, he has no many others, etc.
If that's the case, there's logical conclusions we can draw from this. If we know that God is the only being, and he's the beginner—and we'll know this from later on. Remember, we're going to be going over stuff.
We're going to be overlapping and reviewing things periodically, as some verses are used multiple times for different reasons. But if he is the one who exists, and has always existed, and is the creator, then he has to reveal himself to us.
If that's the case, then he has existed before anything existed. He existed before anything existed. Well, that would mean that in order for us to know him, we've got to exist, which means he has to create us, which means he's separate from creation.
We'll get into that another time later. What also means that there's nothing to compare him to. We can't compare the universe to him. He created it. We can't compare time to him, if we say that it's created.
We're going to use to compare it. Now, this is important, because this is going to come up later, and I'm going to be reviewing things and repeating things. I want you to understand some stuff. I talk to atheists, as an example, and they'll say, how do you know God is good?
Wrong question. I'll tell them it's a wrong question. I say, no, it's not a wrong question. Your God in your Bible, he does this, he has people killed, and allows babies to die, and all that stuff, and floods and stuff.
So what makes you think he's good? I say, wrong question. They go, no, that is not a wrong question. I say, yes, it is. You need a standard of goodness by which you can say God is good. How do you know what a universal standard of goodness is?
If he is unique, and he's the only, and he created everything, you are part of the creation. You can't reach up to God and say, I know what you are, and I'll judge if you're good or not. This is the arrogance of the atheists in this perspective.
We cannot then develop a series of logical syllogistic points, say, you know what, this is how we know God is good. Atheists will tell me, well, God, good. I'll say, well, what's good? Well, good is what brings about the betterment of people.
How do you measure betterment, and why is that the right standard? And so we go through this bit where they will offer something, and I ask them to justify it. And they'll say, well, you justify your God.
I say, I don't justify my God. You're asking the wrong question, making the wrong request. For me to justify God is to submit him to my reasoning and my logic. That's not the Christian perspective. The Christian perspective is that he simply is the I am who reveals himself.
And we know this in creation, in Jesus' scripture. We'll get into that in a bit. So I said, this is what it is. And because of who he is, then truth, wisdom, goodness, justice, love, mercy, holiness, mercy are all self-revealed as an expression of his holy nature, Matthew 12, 34.
So, oh, I skipped some stuff. He has nothing against which he can, you're going to back up, go through the verses. God has nothing against which he can be compared and defined. So we go to Isaiah 40, 18, and 44, 7, and 46, 9.
So Isaiah 40, 18, to whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare with him? Isaiah 44, 7, who is like me? Let him proclaim and declare it. Yes, let him recount it to me in order from the time that I established the ancient nation.
And let them declare to them the things that are coming and the events that are going to take place. And Isaiah 40, 6, 9, remember, the former things long past where I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is no one like me.
So if there's no one like him, and he is the I am, and we know he created the universe, then we can only know him by his self-expression. That's it. And this is an important point as far as apologetics goes, in defense of the faith.
We're all called to give an answer one way or another, but you've got to learn this. I'll say this over and over and over. He has nothing against which he can be compared. And therefore, you can't compare him to your logical machinations and reasoning.
That's not to say that we can't reason about God, as God does say in Isaiah 1, 18, come, let us reason together. And then in Acts 17, Paul dialogues, Acts 17, 17, he reasons with them, he dialogues with them, with the Athenians.
And he does this because we're to hold captive every thought captive, I think it's Hebrews 10, 5, I think that's what the verse is. No, 2 Corinthians 10, 5. And so what we can do is we can realize that if anybody wants to say, well, what is truth?
Truth is what corresponds to the mind of God. What is wisdom? Wisdom is that which corresponds to the mind of God. What is goodness? Goodness is that which corresponds to the character of God. What is justice?
Justice is that which corresponds to the character of God. What is holiness? What is love? What is mercy? These are the aspects, these are the properties of God's greatness. They are revealed out of his character.
And then the actuality of their existence becomes known to us. And we can know them because we're made in his image. We're made in the image of God, Genesis 1, 26 to 28. What's called the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God.
And we'll get into that later on. So the only way to know these things is to know him. So remember, if someone says, how do you know God is good? Then the response is because, well, it's another response.
I'll say, because he tells me he is. Oh, people don't like that answer. I say, well, you know, because he told me, well, what did he tell you? Did he give you any vision? No, in the Bible, you know, in Mark 10, 18, Jesus says, God is good.
God only, you know, I call him good, only God is good. So he's good. Well, how do you know what good is? By looking at him. I recently had a conversation where this conversation actually went like this.
Well, how do you know he's good? He said he's good because he says he's good. I don't say anything else, right? Oh, you just believe whatever the scriptures tell you? Yes. Okay. Well, he's just saying he's good.
There's no way to know if he is. How do you know he's not a deceiver? Well, if he was a deceiver, he wouldn't be good, would he? Right? There's a principle, we'll get to it later. If he possesses one characteristic, he cannot also possess its opposite characteristic.
If he's good, it cannot also be the case that he's not good. Makes no sense. We haven't even gotten into why he's a necessary precondition for all intelligibility and the necessity of the one and the many transcendentals and universals.
Oh, that's going to be fun. That's going to be fun. We'll get into that later. So he is self-revealed, and because he's self-revealed, then his revelation is a standard of righteousness and goodness, not us.
Humanism, on the other hand, says man is a standard of righteousness. But one of the tricks I will do with Christians is they're debating Reformed theology, debating total depravity, free will, libertarian free will, compatibilist free will.
And I'll say, I'll say, can I ask you a question? They'll say, yeah. So I'm going to see if I can set you up for a fall. All right. I'm just telling you, being honest, I want to see if I can set you up.
So you have humanistic philosophies, what I've been realizing. Sure, go ahead and try it. And you've heard me say this before. Okay, so I'm going to talk about free will. Free will is the ability to choose between good and bad.
You can do either good choice or you can do a bad choice. No one forces you to make a free will choice, and that's what free will is, right? There's usually a pause because they know I'm setting them up, but they can't see where I'm setting them up.
Well, let me try it again. You have someone who can do good and bad. He can freely choose to do good and bad. No one's forcing him to do good or bad. He can do either one, and he just freely chooses to do whatever he wants, right?
Because it's moral choice, right? Yeah. Do you guys agree with that? Yeah. So, oh, good. You're all humanists. Well, how are we humanists? I said, because God doesn't fit that definition. What you did without realizing it is just assume man as the measure.
God cannot have options of good and bad and be able to choose good or bad. You can only choose that which is consistent with His holiness. We have the tendency to be humanistic in all of our ways. You know, I'll do my best.
God will take care of the rest. God knows my heart. My heart is sincere. And this is a problem because we want to look and judge. We want to look at God and judge God and His mercy and His kindness based on what we think, what we feel.
Back in seminary, the fifth most difficult graduate school in the country at the time, paying a lot of money, a lot of work. And I get to the class, and I still remember where I was sitting. And the professor gets up to the board, and he says, oh, gentlemen, I'm going to teach you one of the most important things you're ever going to learn in seminary.
I'm ready. And he wrote two sentences. There is a God. You are not Him. I've told you guys about this before, but it was true. And I went, no, come on. I know that already. And over the years, I've reflected on that and how important it is.
There is a God. You are not Him in about every single way. You know, sometimes I'll pray, and I'll say, Lord, I don't even want to pray because I don't know what to say. I don't know what to ask. I don't even know enough.
I don't have enough wisdom to know what to ask for. I just ask this one thing, do with me whatever you want. Basically, when I'm done praying, I can intercede. And there are times when I do pray for my wife, pray for the children, pray for others, people who really need help.
I can pray for all kinds of people and intercede. But there's times when I just say, Lord, I don't want to ask. I'm afraid I'll mess it up because you're God, and I'm not. You have all knowledge, and I don't.
You have all wisdom, and I don't. Just what do you want? And you see, when you understand that God is the unique one, the only one, the complete one, the all-knowing one, the perfect one, then He is the standard of all righteousness, all truth, mercy, grace, and love.
He's the standard. And Jesus, of course, is the express image, the representation of God. Hebrews 1 .3. And so we see in Jesus the reflection of who God is. That'd be a good study. Just study how Jesus was with people.
That'd be an interesting study. Now, nevertheless, we're going to continue. So, an expression of His holy nature. Let's see. Yes. Therefore, truth, wisdom, goodness, justice, love, holiness, mercy, etc. are revealed as an expression of His holy nature.
Matthew 12 .34, Jesus says, you brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak of what is good? Well, that's a good one. How can you speak of what is good? Out of the mouth, or this mouth speaks of that which fills the heart.
Now, He's making a statement, a true statement. What's in your heart is what comes out. What's in your heart comes out. It's true. Genesis 1 .3, God spoke, and He said, let there be light. And there was light.
Now, He dwells in an approachable light who no man has seen or can see. 1 Timothy 6 .16. But light is also used in contrast to darkness. Darkness means spiritual blindness, sin. And so He chooses light and for us to be able, and creates us to see it, but also to experience it, not just with our eyes, but also with our hearts in the person of Jesus Christ, the nature of truth.
Let there be light. God speaks. The light is not just simply the manifestation of that wavelength, but it is more than that. It's the truth, that which exposes that which He is in His nature and His essence.
And His speech is actually a reflection of His character. Let there be light. Now, God dwells in an unapproachable light. So most probably God is dwelling in unapproachable light, light that is glorious, that's magnificent.
I thought about this when I was writing my novel on the influence, and I needed to describe the fall, and not the fall of Adam and Eve, but the fall of the demonic realm. I forgot what reason it was I needed to, but I did have a plot and wrote a book years ago.
And so what I visualized was a light way out there in this vision that one of the characters has of light. And smaller lights that reflect that light are approaching and moving around this great light.
And then a third of them become dark and they move away from the light. And that's how I described the fall of the angelic realm. It's based on this. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not saying it's great, but it is an illustration because they became dark and they moved away from that light.
They were cast out of heaven in that brightness, in the presence of God. And this we could only know by His self-revelation. It's cool. Now, so point number four here, God expresses Himself in creation, Romans 1 .20.
Scripture actually says 21 to 5, John 5 .39. And in the person of Jesus, John 1 .114, Hebrews 1 .3. Let's go through these verses. Romans 1 .20, for since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so they are without excuse.
Now the Bible tells us right here, the unbelievers are without excuse. Well, I'll talk to atheists, just so you know, the reason I bring up atheists a lot is because I'm on different chat systems on the internet, and I'm known in the atheist circles, I debate atheists, and so I have a reputation.
And so atheists frequently will find me and want to have discussion. But I have, I can say this, to the glory of God, that many of the atheists say I'm very gentle with them, polite with them, and just have nice discussions, and they respect me.
Where others will get on them and insult them, and I don't agree with that. But neither here nor there. I talk to a lot of atheists, and I say to them, I say, look, this will come up, and I'll say, Bible says that you know that God exists, but what you're doing, verse 18, is you're suppressing the truth of God in your unrighteousness.
And so when I say this, I say, I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just telling you, this is what the Bible says, I'm informing you about the revelation of God through the apostle Paul. That you, in your sinfulness, have rejected him, and are continuing to do that in your rebellion against him.
This is what the scripture says. Well, I don't believe in the scriptures. Now, Isaiah 5511 said God's word will not come back empty without accomplishing what he desires. So it doesn't matter if they believe the word or not, I will quote the word.
Let me turn this light on, I forgot to. And so I quote the scriptures, because it's the word of God is powerful. Let's see, there we go, a little bit more light. Hey, that could be light. Being understood through what has been made, so they're without excuse.
So everybody knows that God exists. Christian too. Now here's a question. If you go to Romans 118, it says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness. Might that somehow maybe apply to any of us?
All ungodliness. Can we, this is questions, can we suppress the truth of God in our unrighteousness, even as we believe in him? Yeah. I don't know about you, but I think I can. I can say, well, I don't want to do that, or I wanted this and not that, or I don't feel like praying right now, or that might be.
We have different issues, different ways of looking at it, but nevertheless. So I try to remember that, you know, even with talking with unbelievers who suppress the nature of the true God, the understanding of the true God, Mormons, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, I don't want to condemn them.
I mean, I condemn them in the sense that theologically, you deny the true Christ, I'll pronounce upon you what God has already said, you know, unless you believe that I am, you'll die in your sins, John 8, 24, et cetera, you know, various things.
But I mean, I'm not there to say, hey, I'm here, just look, let me tell you how it is. I'm not doing that, because I'm saved by God's grace and only by God's grace. Remember, I used to be involved in the occult, a lot of bad stuff.
There's no reason for God to save me other than what's in Him. Nevertheless, so let's continue. So anyway, in creation, so I could get into the issue of, in fact, let me do that a little bit. Since the creation of the world, Romans 1, 20, is that visible attributes of the eternal power of divine nature have been clearly seen, so that they're without excuse.
So I could get into the bit of the issue of the nature of creation. We live in a trinity of trinities. So time is past, present, future. Space is height, width, depth. Matter is solid, liquid, gas. Now, there's actually slight variations of that, like plasma.
It's a fourth state of matter. Some talk about a fifth state. What we're talking about here is, normatively speaking, what we see, what we understand, what we experience as people. We live in a trinity of trinities, three sets of three.
The fingerprints of God are all around us, and not only in the physical realm, but also in the transcendental realm. I need to write an article. I keep talking about it. I've got to write an article called Bumping into Transcendentals.
I'm going to start working on it sometime. So we have time, space, and matter, and it says, since the creation of the world is invisible, attributes. And we can look at creation. We can see the attributes of God—greatness, wisdom, intelligence, power.
I watch these videos, and I get a kick out of some villagers in India. I don't even know if they have running water in their village or if they have electricity, that kind of a thing. What they'll do is they'll bring them into a place, put a camera on them, and then they have an interpreter, and then they'll have them eat pizza, and then they get reactions.
They'll have them listen to Metallica once, and then one of them was interesting. Their reaction was interesting, because they're Muslims. They asked them, how big is the earth, and how far away is the moon?
Their conception of this, by our standards and understanding, was pretty basic. They didn't understand much. So they had a video they were showing, and we could see their reactions. They were going back and forth between these individuals, and they would show the size of the earth.
They saw how far away the moon was. Wow. And then how far away the sun is. And then how far away Mars is. Wow, that's incredible. And then the solar system, how big it is. And then how big the sun is.
Okay. And then they started showing other suns. And our sun is like a dot, and there's this big thing, and it goes on and on and on and on. And as they saw creation, they said, God is great. They have more confidence in Him.
It's unfortunate they've been deceived and believe in a false God, but you understand, even they get it by looking at creation. Wow. They understand. He's great. And He is. But general, that's called general revelation.
Creation is called general revelation. It's not sufficient for us, normally speaking. I'm not saying someone can't become a true believer, be redeemed, by looking at creation. Someone, maybe they could say, look, Lord, you're just great.
All I know is you're great. I need you. Who knows? But anyway, so He also reveals Himself in Scripture. And there's a lot we could say, a lot of verses we could talk about. But I went to Exodus 21 -5, the Ten Commandments.
Then God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God. It's like saying, I am, I am. But anyway, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.
So He's revealing Himself. Now, notice what I'm saying here, reveals Himself. He says, I am the one who did this. Don't have any other gods before me. And if you do, you mess up, there's punishment coming.
Why? Because there's righteousness, because God is a universal standard of righteousness. We'll get into this a lot more later. John 5 -39, Jesus says, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but it is these that testify of me.
So the scriptures reveal God and they reveal Jesus. They reveal what I don't like. They reveal me. When I go to Colossians 3 and read Colossians 3 and I find out how I don't stand up to Colossians 3 or basically John 3 or Romans 3 or anything, they show me what I am, the power of the word of God, because it's His word.
He is great. And of course, He reveals Himself in the person of Jesus. John 1 -1, in the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God. Verse 14, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
And we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. And Hebrews 1 -9 again, 1 -3 again, excuse me. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature and upholds all things by the word of His power.
Wow. That's quite a statement. When He made purifications of sins, He sat down at the right hand of majesty on high. All right. A lot of theology there, but we're not talking about that stuff. Now let's go to point five.
His self-revealed character is the ultimate standard with which we measure all things. Now, you'll notice as we go through this, that there's going to be repetition of some concepts, slightly worded.
I do this often on purpose, but also because the slight variations have slightly different meanings. And what I want here is this is self-revealed character is the ultimate standard. What does it mean to have an ultimate standard?
An ultimate standard means there's no standard greater, nothing greater by which you can measure it. There's nothing greater with which we may measure all things. Why? Because 1 Peter 1 -16, God says, because it is written, you shall be holy, I am holy.
So this is important. His self-revealed character is holiness. And we wouldn't even know what that was if it wasn't for Him revealing Himself to us. We wouldn't know what love is if it hadn't been for Him revealing Himself to us, or justice or mercy.
So when people say, how do you know God is good or kind or whatever? By looking at Him. It's a submission to Him and His character and His essence as a standard of all righteousness and truth. I don't reach up and say, oh, I know you're good because I can tell you do these things that are right.
He just is, and He reveals. He is the I am who created heavens and earth, gave us the word, and is in Christ. And He's holy. And notice what He says, you shall be holy, for I am holy. God Himself is setting the standard of His character of righteousness.
His character is the standard. His character, not us. His heart, not ours. His mind, not ours. People say, well, I'm sincere, so therefore God will do ABC for me. Really? How do you know that? Because God is good.
So that's the standard of goodness that you come up with. So you're saying you know what God is good, and you're saying it's based on Him doing something because of how your heart is. But He says be holy because I'm holy.
But you're saying, I'm going to look at my own heart as a standard to combine it with the goodness of God, because it makes sense. The arrogance is there. And don't think we're not guilty of it too many ways.
But it happens. But He is the standard of holiness. People will ask me, will God ever ask you to do something you can't do? Yes. You know, in Excerpt 1730, it commands everyone to repent. Be holy, for I'm holy.
Can you be holy? No. But we have everything we need in Jesus. Now, people will say to me sometimes, yes, you can, in Jesus. Yes, I get that. But it's in Jesus, because you can't do it. That's why it's in someone else, not you.
Because there's no way you can do it. But they'll say, God would never ask you to do anything you can't do. Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, Matthew 5 .48, Jesus says. Can you do that? No.
So God does not lower His standard for us, and not even on the slightest. His Word is perfect. His creation is perfect. Sin has entered it, corrupted it, but His creation is perfect. His Word is perfect, and Jesus is perfect.
Jesus is that representation of the character of God. And I think the Greek word is pronounced character. He's a representation of the very nature of God. Jesus is, if you think about this, more than what we think.
Because we kind of see Him as the guy—no disrespect to my incredible Lord and Savior who died on the cross, rose from the dead—but we sometimes think of Him as our equal. But He's got special abilities.
He's God. Yeah, we get it. But no, He is the one who spoke the universe into existence. He's the one who is the perfect representation of God. And in that representation, in His character of perfection, He overturned table temples, and yet He also sat with the ladies.
He sat with the children, and He taught, and He healed, and He loved, and He died. He suffered. He is the standard of righteousness. And one of the other projects I do want to do sometime is to study just Jesus, how He was.
Just learn from how He was. That's all. Just read through stuff and go, how did He react to that person? I want to look at His character. He was loving. He was patient. He was kind. And I'm trying this more and more.
I'm waiting for my wife to go, pfft. Colossians 4, 5, and 6, conduct yourself with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech be seasoned with salt. Always be seasoned with salt so you may know how to respond to everyone.
2 Timothy 2, 24, 25, the Lord's blind servant must not be quarrelsome, but be patient, kind to all, with patience correcting those who are in opposition, that for a chance God may grant them repentantly the knowledge of the truth.
I have been working on this for years. And the reason is because that's the character of God. Because those things say, be patient, be kind. Was Jesus patient and kind? Absolutely. But the ones He was upset with were the false religious leaders who would lead people into damnation.
And so I'm allowing myself at certain times to let my spiritual Tourette's surface when talking about people like Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, etc., who were false teachers. So nevertheless, the standard of holiness is Christ Himself, or is God Himself.
Same thing. And so He is that ultimate standard by which and with which and against which we measure all things. So remember this. When someone says to you, how do you know He's good? It's always because He said so.
Because we look at Him to find out. Because to even ask the question implies a standard of comparison. To have a standard of comparison, you have to have a standard of something you can compare to. That's just simple logic.
Very, very, very critical point when it comes to defending the Christian faith and also in preaching and teaching the truth. Because we need to know. God's holy. We're not. God's perfect. We're not. That's not to say we're going to go out and eat some worms now because we're no good.
No. But we are redeemed. We're loved. We're valued by God. His thoughts of us for eternity are infinite. He has chosen us in the Son, Ephesians 1 .4. He has loved us from the foundation of the world. And so our worth is found in Christ and who He is and what He has done.
And again, that's where value comes in. We've got to be careful not to exalt ourselves. And it's easy to do. All right. Now let's get to the sixth and final point of this section. He is the ultimate source of all truths, all actualities, and all potentialities.
Now, I've got to confess, I enjoy talking like this. I enjoy having words like this. So you might see me just enjoy a little bit too much, but I like this kind of stuff. The ultimate source of all truths.
An ultimate means nothing beyond it. Think of it this way. A terminus. What is the end of the line? You can't go any further. The terminus. What is the terminus? What is the ultimate source? What is it?
And it says in Romans 4 .17, the ultimate source, as it is written, a father of many nations, I have made you. In the presence of him who he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls him to being that which does not exist.
So he's the ultimate source. He calls it to being the things of all truths. Now, we can't say that God calls into existence truths from his eternal mind and eternal perspective because he has always known all things.
Go to 1 John 1 .3, we'll get to that later on. He knows all things. 1 John 3 .20. If he knows all things, then he knows all things actual as well as potential. All things actual when God existed and he was the only one who was existing means that all things actual was just him in the inter-trinitarian communion.
All things potential was everything else. And the everything else existed in the mind of God. Let's get to 6 .2. All truths. He is the source of all truths. Psalm 31 .5, into your hand I commit my spirit.
You have ransomed me, O Lord, God of truth. Ephesians 1 .11. Also, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to his purpose, who works all things after the counsel of his will.
All things, truths as well. All actualities. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1 .1. Isaiah 44 .24. Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb.
I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth alone. Maker of all things. He's hinting more at the issue of the physical realm. But we can't just say it only means the physical realm.
We can't say, however, logically speaking, that he creates truths. Because you can have what's called the actualities of the knowledge of truth, so counterfactuals. It would be true under this condition that this would happen.
That's all in the mind of God, and they're all true. God knows all things actual as well as potential. And I can get into that in an hour lesson, just in these. I've written a whole thing on that. Just on that.
The nature of God's omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnisapience, and what they logically require. Won't do that right now. Now, so that means all things actual, everything that exists, exists.
All things potential are called counterfactuals. Things that don't exist, but might have existed or could have existed. Luke 10, 13, Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
It's called a counterfactual. They didn't repent. It did not happen, but God knew what the different conditions, He knew what would have happened. Now, we can get into the logic of why that's the case.
Ultimately, it's because of God's decrees. Now, John 15, 22. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sinned, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Counterfactuals. Now, what I'm going to do here is, look at this piece of paper here.
This, I've done this before, but do it again. This is the universe right here, okay? It's white. There's nothing there. That little dot right there, you guys can see it, is God, and there's nothing else, just God.
Now, God knows all things potential, all the universe that can happen a certain way, and He could do this any way He wants, all things, and it's not working. And so, He has different things. He has different, these are potentialities in a realm of non-existence except for God, so that whatever God would create, or whatever God knows, is because these are mind thoughts or knowledge, potentialities, counterfactuals of things that could exist in the universe.
The universe He creates. He'd create me sitting over there or sitting here. There's an infinite number of these that exist. Theoretically, an infinite number. I don't know if there actually is. I'm not going to get into that.
But theoretically, there's an infinite number of potentialities. Now, this is important. Let's just say that God chooses this one right there. He chooses that one to come into existence. The potentialities still remain in the mind of God.
The actuality is what God has brought into existence. That means that all things within this realm and this world exist because God has ordained that it will exist. Our free will occurs in here. I used this argument in a different form a couple weeks ago when I was debating a guy who's against this issue, and I got him to see the point, and I actually said, good, now you believe in the compatible's free will view.
I mean, because does this not have all your free will choices in here as well? Yes. Well, then didn't God bring it into existence? Yes. Done. So your free will choices are compatible with God's sovereignty and predestination, right?
So when we start looking at the nature of God, His omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and you start understanding that out of an infinite number of potentialities, He's actualized one. He still knows all the potentialities that could exist.
These dots mean potentialities in that realm. He knows all the potentialities as well, and He can sit there and say, what do you call this? If this had happened, then this would have happened, because that's this one right there.
How do we know all this? Because God reveals Himself to us in the scriptures. He reveals that He is perfect, He's holy, He's love, He's merciful, He's just, He's the beginner of all things, the ultimate cause of everything.
We'll get into that causation issue later. He is the one who is a standard of righteousness and truth, and that we need to submit to whatever He has revealed, because whatever He reveals will be consistent with His character, and it's always true.
He always reveals truth. Be a rational reveal yourself to you. Lord, reveal me. Show me my sin. I want to say, show me the good stuff I've done, because it's to be flatlined. But if I say, show me the mistakes I've made, show me these areas I've got to correct, and it's going to be a bulldozer avalanche.
Here it comes. Volcanic explosion, and it's a periclastic flow. You get inundated, because we just don't compare to God. Pyroclastic, sorry. And yet, He just gave us Himself in that reality, in this reality that He created.
There was this interesting thing that happened, that crucifixion, and He chose, for whatever reasons, the world to be the way it is. Sovereignty of our choices, and yet at the same time, that cross, the place of the redemptive work, of the self-revealed one, was perfect in all ways.
Who entered into a realm that He created of an infinite number of possibilities, an actualized one, where He died for us, through the expression of His love and His character. So ultimately, that event is the greatest expression of His character.
Because Jesus says in John 13, 15, that the greatest act of love, or is it 15, 13, the greatest act of love is to lay your life down for your friend. Jesus can't tell us anything that's not true. He's the representation of the character of God, Hebrews 1 .3.
Because He is God, John 1 .14, Colossians 2 .9. He is God, therefore what He said is an ultimate truth. There's no greater love than this. Could it be, it's a thought, that this is created so that, right here, it's created so that, the greatest act of love and the character of God can be manifested.
And that's why He created it, for one of the reasons. I like to think that's the case. Now here's a question then. If you were the only one made, would you have done this? Yes. Because the greatest act of love is self-sacrifice, John 1 .14.
God is love, so therefore I think you would have done it even for one. That's His nature. And that's how we learn what love is. And I'll tell you, I have a lot to learn when it comes to the issue of love, because love is other-centered and sacrificial and kind, and I'm not.
And I know you are reflecting on your own character and issues. The thing is, though, that the Unique One has revealed Himself in the Unique Son. Incidentally, only begotten in Greek, mano genas, from mano, one, genao.
Mano genao, when you have an aorist in Greek, you put an epsilon, an e on the front, so mano eganato. The o and the e come together, they form a diphthong, a different vowel. And that combination of only begotten combines as also the word unique in Greek.
So this is who Jesus is, the only begotten, unique one, the representation of the Unique One of God. It just occurred to me, the uniqueness of God is reflected in the uniqueness of Christ. And we cannot be like Him, not in the sense of His unique quality and character.
We can be like Him in the communicable attributes. He's loving, we can be loving. He's merciful, we can be merciful. We can emulate Him. But He is so unique, we will not have the ability to rise to that level.
The uniqueness of the incarnation, the hypothetic union. I'm actually thinking about developing a paragraph just on Jesus, like as the Trinity, you do that as well. I'll start that soon. But nevertheless, you can see how much there is here.
Now, we haven't even gotten into the personhood, the Trinitarian essence and economic and ontological Trinity, but we will be getting into that stuff later. But next week, Lord willing, what we're going to talk about is the Aseity of God.
I'm going to talk about interesting, fun things like non-contingency, immutability, which is a redundant thing here. I'll fix that. Unchanging and immutable means the same thing. And transcendent and sovereign.
We're going to get into transcendence. We're going to do some concepts. And just remember, I will be going over similar concepts at different times. You're going to say, but you covered this last week or two weeks ago.
Yes, because they are interrelated. I'll just tell you, here's a bit of a confession. I struggled on how to arrange this. How do I arrange this? Because I don't want to be redundant, but I want to be complete and sufficient.
Well, I describe God himself. So I have a bit to chew on. Chew on there and figure out. So this won't be perfect, but I think it'll be sufficient as we continue to study. All right. Amen. All right. Guys, got any questions or comments or anything you want to add?
How do you respond to people that say, I am? People who say, I am, they're referring to themselves. Meaning God said, I am. Yeah. Oh, you mean that God's statements about himself is, I am me? By God saying, I am, that we read, I am, or say, I am, translate to me.
They're exalting themselves, right? Yeah, that's blasphemy. I just say, you're committing blasphemy. Anything else to go with it? Depends. I'll just say, you're committing blasphemy. You need to repent of the great sin against your holy God, or is your holy God, because you think that the I am is part of you.
And that's just blasphemy. That's arrogance. It's sin. And you are risking the hellfire of eternal damnation. You repent. There are times when it's just, you just, you tell them the truth. And I've told people, in fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing with some atheists, and I do like to have very polite conversations, otherwise I won't continue.
I say, if we're not going to be polite, I'm leaving. And they go, well, you're just, well, look, I'm gone. They go, well, you chicken, you're leaving all this stuff. No, I'm just not going to do that.
So I was talking to some atheists, and I said, look, guys, this is after an hour of conversation, polite conversation. I'd be answering them and saying, this is why this is why that. I said, what's going on?
Sorry. What was it? Oh, so I had a conversation with the atheists, and I said, I always get distracted. It's my autism. Sorry. I said to them, I said, look, I need to inform you. I'm not judging you, but I'm informing you that according to the word of God, what God has revealed, that if you continue in your denial of Him, should you die in it, you will face eternal condemnation without hope, without deliverance.
This is where you're going. It's not me mocking you. It's not me hating you. It's me just informing you. I've had atheists say, well, we appreciate that, that your concern is there. And it is. It is. It's there.
And so I just, I tell them that, and I'm trying to love them. So anyway, we try this stuff. I'm in the front lines all the time. I try to listen to stuff and make my mistakes and try and grow, but I'm learning a lot because of it.
As you know, iron sharpens iron. Here's some of the, I guess you could say some of the sharpening as I'm learning. Anyway, just tell them like that. Okay. You've got some questions in there. Heard Matt say this many times.
Humbled Clay, James Sanborn. Were you born on a beach? Yeah, pretty bad. All right. So let's see. Look, I can look here. Love how Matt brings some depth to his Bible study. Some? Okay. Loving it so far, Laura says.
Christian Family Men says, excellent. So glad I was able to catch the first lesson. Thank you so much, Matt. God bless everyone. Randall says, hello, Mark. M-A-R-C. Good to see you here. And someone says, narcissistic, which I don't know if that's in reference to.
Thanks, Matt and Anique. James spelled her name right, Anique. And I've heard Matt say many times, James. Okay. So anyway, if you've got any questions or comments on online, let me know. Okay. If you want to, you can.
Got to give them some time. Yeah. So I think I've heard similar terms when we're doing the part of the paper. I think I've heard similar words that were used with the discussion of Molinism. I think that'll probably help.
Molinism, counterfactuals. Is there a 30 ,000 foot simple explanation for how that relates or doesn't relate or why it's not the same? Well, Molinism says, well, what Molinism is trying to do is solve a, so to speak, paradox or problem between God's sovereignty and our freedom.
They create a problem that isn't there. They say that our freedom is not compatible with God's sovereignty, God's absolute knowledge in all things. Well, who says it isn't? It's just their position that they say, that they say that's the case.
And that's one problem. I begin with, show me that that's the case. And they don't. They can't. They just say it is. You haven't shown me anything. And I'll say, look, does Jesus have free will? Yes. Jesus said he could only do what he saw the father do.
Right. John 5, 19, John 5, 30. Yeah, that's right. But yet he had freedom. Right. He said, not my will. It can only do with the will. Right. Yeah. Okay. So that's, we call that compatibilism because Jesus had human free will.
It was compatible with God's eternal decrees about Christ, which was decreed from the eternal communion of the Godhead from eternity ago. So now that can be ferreted out because they have comebacks, but the comebacks aren't, in my opinion, certainly aren't very meritorious.
And the other thing is Molinism presupposes libertarian free will and denies total depravity. Well, total depravity, for those who don't know, is a teaching that sin has touched all of what we are, heart, soul, mind, body, emotions, everything.
It's been touched by what we've committed. And the result of it is that we're not going to be able to come to Christ on our own, of our own sinful, enslaved free will. So people will say, well, that's not true.
Yes, it is true. Jeremiah 17, 9, the heart is desperately wicked, deceitful, no man can trust it. 1 Corinthians 2, 14, the natural man cannot receive the things of God for they're foolish to him. You are dead in your trespasses and sins, Ephesians 2, 1.
You're quite natured children of wrath, Ephesians 2, 3. You're slaves of sin, Romans 6, 14 through 20. Don't seek for God, don't do any good. Can do no good, Romans 3, 10, 11, and 12. So I said, these are the conditions that are there.
So I say, if you understand these conditions, and then you understand that the necessity of these conditions means that you cannot come to me unless the Father draws you, John 6, 44. You cannot come to me unless it's granted to you, John 6, 65.
That only makes sense if these are both there. They make sense to each other. In light of each other, they make perfect sense, which is why God has to grant that you believe, Luke 1, 29. And our belief is the work of God, John 6, 29.
You're causally born again, 1 Peter 1, 3. You see, these things work together because those verses like that in John 13, 48, as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed, is consistent with the inability of people to see, to do, to seek, to do that.
Now, sometimes I get the pre-penitent grace, so I'll come to that in a second. And I'll say, because of that, I say, there are no counterfactuals where they will believe of their own free will. And that's where, in my opinion, that's the Achilles, one of the Achilles heels of Molinism.
They say there's counterfactuals in which people will believe. But I say, they won't. If they could under different circumstances, then why does God have to grant that you believe? He grants them the opportunity to believe.
We're back to where we were. So the solution that I've often offered is the issue of what's called pre-venient grace, the grace that comes before pre-venient grace. Pre-venient grace enables you to be in a neutral kind of a state by which you can then freely choose God.
First of all, show me that in Scripture. And second, you have, let's just say, pre-venient grace. Bob and Frank, these poor guys, I use them all the time, these twins, Bob and Frank, you know, everything's the same, same job, same everything, same, they made identical twins, same number of kids, you know, they go to church, Bob believes, Frank does not.
Why? That's your free will. Why does Bob's free will enable them to believe and Frank does not? They can't answer the question because they don't have a terminus that rests in God. Their terminus rests in man.
I would say, no, they believe because God granted they believe. And you're saying God doesn't give it to everybody, correct? Well, that's not right. Excuse me, who are you? Say to the molded, say to the molder, why'd you make me like this?
Romans 9, 22 and 23, T1000. So I think Molinism severely fails because it teaches counterfactuals that are not counterfactuals. And it tries to solve a problem that's not a problem. I just think Molinism is extremely weak.
What else? Let's see. I didn't see if anybody said anything. Let's see. I'm going to just tease them. Let's see if they said anything important or worthwhile in the chat here. Okay, Joanne Hayes, you have been rather salty.
Maybe she's outside. Let's see. Randall Dobbins, she is humbled. Don't make me come to Texas, Joanne says. Oh, watch out, Joanne's good. Deal. Then I'm going to go to Florida, salty Molly. Okay, so nobody has any questions?
Okay. A question in my mind, I can only see one mind of Christ, which started in the Word. But I see this is considered heresy. It's called, I just wrote on it, where the mind of Christ replaces the human mind.
Oh, I just wrote on it. It's a word, not Molinism, not Eutychianism, monophysitism. Okay, I hate that one. There's a word for that. But it denies the incarnation, because what it's saying, what is that?
Oh, driving me crazy. Maybe someone in there will figure it out. Tell me what the word is. It's on my website. It's under heresies of Christology. If you go to CARM and go to the homepage and look on the CARM homepage, I released it a few days ago.
I did a chart on varying heresies, and you'll see it's in there. Matt, we love our fellowship as much as we love you. Good. Thanks. Oh, I wish I could remember that. I hate not having to, oh, driving me crazy.
So someone go look and then write it in there. You'll see it on the left-hand side of the table. So to say that the mind of Christ replaced the human mind is a problem, because then it says there is no incarnation.
There's no incarnation. He's not made like his brethren. He was 215, so therefore you don't have an atoning sacrifice. Now, how is it then a denial of true incarnation? Because otherwise it's zombification, to zombify.
And that's in the slictionary. See, prevenient grace, in my opinion, is zombification. You ever see Princess Bride? You're just mostly dead, okay? Just mostly depraved. So that's what I call that. Monothelitism?
No, that's not it, Giles. That's eutychianism and historianism. But so, oh, I've got to know what that word is, driving me crazy. I could, but then I'd have to stop talking. Okay. Then I'd have to go like this.
I've got to look it up. Okay. What's that? No, I can't wait. It's killing me. And then I'll get into the Christological error. And let's see. Table of Christological Errors, right there. And it's not docetism, ebionism, eutychianism, Marcionism.
Oh, no, no, no, it's not Marcionism. Socinianism. No, no, no. I'm getting confused. Socinianism says Jesus was only a man, not divine. And Marcionism, Christ never became flesh. Eutychianism, I was just going over this.
Eubionism, Jesus was not divine, was only a man. Docetism, Arianism, Apollinarianism. That's the word. Apollinarianism, yes. The divine nature took the place of the human nature. Okay. That's the idea of Apollinarianism.
Okay. Thank you. I knew it was there. I was thinking M's and C's, but it wasn't. It was A's. It wasn't working. So if the divine nature took the place of the human nature, then there is no hypostatic union and no communication of the properties.
There would be no will of the human, and therefore it could not say, I am thirsty. So I was talking to a guy who was a Oneness guy, a debate we had, and he said Jesus was not a man. Yeah. Apollinarianism.
And so in the debate, because he's a Oneness guy, which teaches that Jesus is a man. So he said that and went, what? He's not a man? I said, well, what do you do with the verse, 1 Timothy 2 .5? There's one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus.
He said, don't you see it? It's Christ who's the man, not Jesus. Again? Yeah. Hey, I got something for the ladies. Christ? What's that? Yeah. So now the Christ is a principle of God that inhabited a human body.
So the sense of possession, it's kind of an indwelling. I know. You've heard that. Yeah. It's called Apollinarianism. Yeah. Oh, he was. That's what I want to say to people. Put your hand in front of your face.
Look to your left. I didn't say it then, but I wanted to. So, yeah, on the radio. Yeah. And it was hilarious. And the other guy goes, you're so childish. And I'm laughing because you're such an immature man.
That was funny, though. So that's Apollinarianism. Jesus had a human body without a human nature. Okay. So that's the idea. Someone else asked a question. Let me get over here. How do you answer someone that says if Jesus cannot sin, then how is victory won by someone who is God Almighty in the flesh but cannot sin or tested by something he created, i .e. Satan?
Don't forget, he had two natures, and he can be tempted but without sin. So it actually says, I think it's Psalm 106 or 110. They did tempt God in the wilderness. So you've got to understand what temptation means biblically.
They did tempt God. And I forgot where it is exactly, but I can find the verse. So they said they tempted God in the wilderness when the Jews left the Exodus and stuff like that. They tempted him. So the biblical form of temptation is that it can be offered.
The analogy I give is, like me, I have no interest in sports. It's just a flat line. Someone says, hey, man, you want to go see the B-movie science fiction movie in 3D or the Super Bowl? I'd be like, 3D movie, huh?
Yeah. So I'm not tempted. Well, I might be tempted to the Super Bowl. I guess. Is it the zero yard line? That's a good place. Is that in the middle? Fifty? Zero's not good. That's at the end something.
Too much science fiction. It tells you how much I have interest in sports. I don't. I watch some sports clips with baseball, and my wife knows more than I do about it. So anyway, I can be tempted, but I'm not tempted.
I could have an external temptation but not an internal one. And so they can tempt Christ in that sense. Now, that's one of the ways they answer it. The other one is the communication of those properties to the one person is a reality.
So he said, I'm thirsty. I'll be with you always. So he could be tempted, but because of the attribution of holiness, the temptation could take no root in him. He could say, he could do what might be a temptation.
You know, Nick and I are going to go out to dinner, and someone says, there's a new 3D science fiction movie with aliens. And I go, just for a second. That's a temptation. I'm being tempted, but I make the right decision.
And I tell him to go away, and I go to the movie. Oh, sorry. Sorry. It's the other way around. So I say, no, I'm not going to do that. I entertained it without entertaining it. You know, these are the possibilities.
No, I'm going to go out with my wife and do that. Was I tempted? In that sense, yes, but without sin, without failure. So there are different levels of the temptation that can occur. All right. God was tempted, but he was not tempted as in a desire to give into the temptation.
Right, Randall. Oh no, Jimmy's got me signing Philadelphia Freedom again. Okay. I don't know what that was. I think there's a different chat room. Okay. Let's see. LOL. Makes sense, but what about the victory over sin by someone who could not sin?
Because there was some sense in which it was a temptation to him, but he also had the quality of holiness. And so the combination of that doesn't mean it wasn't a sensation of experience that he had. Okay.
Yeah. Right. Jesus possesses. Right, James. He's not able to sin. That's correct. I'm given the temptation of watching Stargate SG1 after the show. See, this is not a temptation. This is just how it should be.
It's just how it is. Maybe we should have a sci-fi night and I watch Aliens for the 71st time. 71 times. Yes, I can quit when I want. Okay. And thank you, Lauren. And so we have, there we go. All right.
So did you guys enjoy the study in the chat room and you guys enjoy this? Yeah. Was it interesting? Glad I did. Yeah. There's more. With everything else you're saying, all these debates, it just amazes me.
And I know a number of stuff. The way the ways that people try to get away and make themselves go. It just pulls me away. They suppress the truth of their own righteousness and they think they're righteous.
Yeah. Look at this. Okay. So I was talking to another guy, another heretic guy, and his name's Christian Man on Clubhouse. I'm outing him. And so he's quite competent in his comeback. And I'll show various things to show that the Trinity is true and that Jesus Christ is God in flesh.
And his thing is to say, no, he's just a representation so he can adopt the name of God. That's all it means. He's not God by nature. And so if I were to quote John 5 .18, where Jesus calling God his own father, making himself equal to God.
So that's because he has the name of God in him. Doesn't mean he is God. So it's always something like this, right? Usually when one heresy exists, others exist. Guess what I found out in this discussion?
I started asking questions. I said, okay, so Jesus is not God. Okay. So if he's not God, then that would mean then that you've got a problem. Because I said, because can Jesus hear millions of prayers from people all over the world?
Because we're told to pray to Jesus. Millions of prayers all over the world, spoken in thought, simultaneously spoken in thoughts in different languages with an intention to hold it. Can he hold it? Yes, he can.
Well, does he attributes of God? No, God gave him the ability to do this. I said, but he's human, right? And he wouldn't answer the question because if you're human, how can you do that if you're human?
God gives him the ability. Okay. Well, that was bad enough until a girl gets in who I'm listening for an hour while I'm working on a project. And then I finally started talking and she'd already said some stuff.
And I, and she said, well, of course we're going to be like Christ. And I went, are we going to, are you saying you are going to be able to hear millions of prayers simultaneously? And they both said, yeah.
Mary can. Yeah. So you see when you deny the true living God, you end up denying who Christ is. And so you exalt yourself. Exactly right. When you deny him, you exalt yourself. And what I'm trying to do in this study in part is to educate you to teach.
I get to be, I'm blessed as well, but also here's God, here's us. And it just keeps going. The more we know, I go, okay, all right. He is great. And then when you think of who he is and that's Jesus, and he's forever going to be a man.
Who are we privileged? The privilege is beyond our comprehension, which is why I think hell's going to be that bad for those who reject that greatness from God. Okay. Let's see. Anybody else got any comments, questions, daddy, like John Wayne.
And I was hoping for some intelligent correspondence in the chat room. Let's see. I'm saying three spirits are in the beginning, a spirit called the word. Oh boy, here we go. Yeah. It's a better thing.
These guys, three spirits are in the beginning. The spirit called the word indwelling, indwelled flesh in the beginning, nature of God and mind of Christ and nature of man with the indwelling body. That's non-sequitur statements.
They're not coherently put together. Anyway, maybe you noticed that I couldn't draw heretics. Okay. Yeah, that's right. Okay. The husband of the prophet is not true. Did he create sin? Yes. Yes. That's correct.
Yes. He'd make a choice for us. He chooses who to redeem and he chooses who to regenerate and he chooses who to give that faith to that we freely choose and believe in him with. It's all ordainable by the foundation of the world.
What I just taught you was reforming the choice. Yeah. Like God created, but he is God. Jesus. When did Jesus come into existence? It's a trick question. When Jesus was born 2000 years or the exception, conception is when Jesus, because Jesus by definition is, you heard us in the radio today.
Jesus by definition is the union of the divine and the human. That union who we call Jesus that began 2000 years ago, but the divine nature is eternal. Yeah. So the choice God had chosen from eternity, who to redeem and not redeem.
Yep. Sure. Right. The impassibility of God deals with, there's another doctrine of the word where he cannot be affected by our sin. But yet it says it grieved God that. So there's a doctrine in one sense, God can't be injured by anything we do, but in another sense, he could be affected by what we do because it says it grieved him that, et cetera.
Because I was just thinking before the foundation of the world, whenever, I don't know, whatever the story is like, did God have a reference to that pain? Well, then we get what's called the A theory and B theory of time.
A theory is a time of sequential, B theory is it's all at once known if he was experiencing it, but before he created anything, then he was not experienced, but he would have known exhaustively the experience of it in his mind and understanding.
This gets complicated. Yeah. Here's a question. Okay. Ready? Does God know everything? It's not hard. I need a yes or a no. I mean, you're suspicious. Okay. I'm not going to trick you. I'm going to show you something.
Now you're going to say yes, wrong. No, that's right. So God knows all things, right? Right. Does he know all things eternally? Yes. If he knows all things eternally, can he contemplate what he knows, consider what he knows and think about what he knows.
But if he already knows all things, he'd know what he would contemplate. So why contemplate? These are just questions, right? Now, but go somewhere with it, though, by the nature of God. I'm not saying these are good questions because we don't know the mind of God.
There could be some quality about God. He goes, that's so dumb. You don't even know. But I don't know. If we can contemplate, they can't contemplate. There's what's called emergent properties as well.
Does God show mercy from eternity? Because in the eternal Trinitarian Godhead, there's no need of mercy. So mercy is an emergent property or quality of his nature in light of those who have gone against his character, sinners.
So it's within him because of his character. It just manifests in that condition, an emergent characteristic, an emergent property. All right. Now, if God knows everything eternally in a static state, his mind is static.
Does that imply a static state? Because if he's going to contemplate, that means his mind is not static. But wait a minute. That means he knows everything from eternity, but he'd know what he was contemplating and what he was thinking.
And he couldn't make a decision. Well, how could he make a decision that's eternally known? So where did this come from? These are kind of paradoxical questions. I'm thinking about this in relationship to the issue of God being Unitarian, God's eternally one mind.
Then these questions suggest problems with that scenario for obvious reasons. But what if God was a Trinity? Could there be contemplation? Now there could be reciprocation and fellowship. But if someone's good, they would say, well, yeah, but you teach perichoresis.
We'll get into this later. Divide simplicity into three persons, into one mind and one substance. They have one really ultimate thought. Yes, that's true. But there's also a tri-personality or tri-personhood, I should say correctly, in God eternally.
So there's a hint there of the eternal fellowship and communion that goes on, which should happen. But then they could say, well, but then if he has knowledge of all that communion and stuff, then how could he have it?
Knowledge is different than the expression of communion. So then I think in the Trinitarian essence, which I haven't even put this in there, I may work on it, and the nature of God, why Unitarianism doesn't work and Trinitarianism does for various reasons, and the nature of love and the nature of personhood.
And in this issue, I've raised this issue to a few of my friends who know this kind of stuff, they could talk, and they say the same thing as I do. They go, hmm, I don't know about that. I go, yeah, I agree, I don't know.
Just kind of think about it. It's like in the back of your head, you go, there's something there to work on. I've got to think about it. And then sometimes when I'm doing this, I can't quite word it right.
I'll have someone just say something, and that's the wording. They're not even talking about it, but they'll use a few phrases. That's what I'm thinking. And that's happened a few times. So I go, yeah, that's a phraseology.
It makes it sound better. But so these are some of the things that I wonder about, think about. So this is part of the issue of the nature of God's qualities, uniqueness, characteristics, and stuff. And you can see there's a whole bunch here just on the nature of God.
There's a whole bunch. There's a lot more to come. We're going to get into some pretty heady stuff, which I'm going to have to pass out so tough to go. The issue of the one and the many and transcendentals.
And what's the unifying principle behind multiple transcendentals? Particular manifestations of an essence. Particular. It's going to be fun. And how does that relate to God? Well, because he's the one and the many, one God, three persons.
What's the ultimate? The one or the many. In secular theological and secular philosophical systems, or non-Christian theological systems, there is no trinity. So the one and the many issue becomes a problem.
Few people really know about this problem. I got introduced to it a few years ago. Like, what is this? I didn't know about it. So I had some guys taught me about it. Oh, and it's become more and more of an issue.
Here's an example of it. I talked about the radio just a little bit. So I was talking to an atheist guy. I said, look, you and I are sitting on a park bench, a couple hundred feet away as a woman. We see a man come out behind a bench, a bush, hits her, knocks her down, kicks her, takes the purse away, and runs.
You and I are already running to go rescue her. We're both really good gods. We're racing to see who's going to get there first to stop this guy and rescue her. But he gets away. Is that an injustice?
Yes. A year later, we're on the other side of the world, South Africa, let's say, or Australia, whoever it is. And we're sitting on a park bench. Lo and behold, a man jumps out of a bush. Same thing happens.
He gets away also. I say, now, are both of those particular instances, are they both wrong? An injustice, right? And he goes, yes. He has some particular things he wanted to say about some stuff. I got him back on track.
He said, well, the intention this, the intention that. I said, well, we've got another problem here, since you brought up intention. He said, you recognize that it's an injustice, right? Yes. Okay. But you recognize a principle of injustice.
It's not dependent upon when you are or where you are. That's a transcendental principle. You're saying both of those men are wrong for what they did, and they ought to be punished. And then that, when you say the word ought, that gets into some sidetrack conversations and some stuff about how you bridge the gap between is and ought.
And then they say, well, you do this thing with God. Hey, I don't work in the Christian worldview, anyway. So he brought up the issue of intentionality. And I said, okay. I said, the intention can make something bad or good.
Let's just say we're walking along and we see a man drop a grenade in a woman's purse. And what you and I do is we're brave. We run up to her and try and snatch her purse, and she won't let go. We want to save her life.
So I kick her, knock her down. I have to elbow her in the head, whatever. I get that purse away, and I run and throw it over the cliff. Kaboom. I said, did I do anything wrong? No. But the exact same action, so to speak, is okay and not okay, depending on intentionality.
Now that you've introduced intention as an issue, now we have the transcendental nature of intentionality. What makes that intention good and intention bad? Because now you're saying, if this were to happen in multiple places, the same thing, the grenade in the purse, multiple men do this, then there's a universal principle that it's okay.
How do you bridge the gap between the many particular instances of that righteousness versus the many particular instances of the unrighteousness of the intentionality of the same act with a universal principle that unites them all?
He can't. The one and the many problem is a problem unless there's a universal mind. The Trinitarian God, who is both the one and the many, He is the author of the universality, the revealer of the universality of justice and injustice.
And He is a necessary precondition for all intelligibility and provides a condition for the manifestation of particulars in image bearers. That's right. Another thing I do with it, I'll say, is it true that statements are either true or false?
I am an elephant talking to you. False. I'm sitting on Mars right now. False. I am a man talking to you. True. So statements are either true or false. That is a round light. That is my laptop. This is another laptop.
There's my drink of water. These are chairs, particular instances of the variables of chairness. Anyway, so there are chairs, right? These are all true statements. I said, I'm going to ask you a question.
Can you please tell me if the statement is true or not true? Is it true or if it's false? This atheist guy goes, okay. I said, remember, I told him, I'm trying to set you up here for a fall. He said, okay, no problem.
Set me up. I said, okay, good. It is always morally wrong for everyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure. He said, yes, that's correct. Then I said, as an atheist, you are asserting a universal moral absolute.
How do you do that in your atheistic world view? One of the many issues becomes important, but how do you have a moral issue merely for the personal pleasure? That's the intention issue. And so now you're saying there's a universal truth.
I didn't say there's a universal truth. Yes, you did. It's always wrong for everyone, morally wrong, right? That's a universal truth. Yeah, that's true. So it's true. Yes. Then you have a problem. He said, with respect, I said, I know I said, I'm going to try and trap you here and make it look bad, but that's not the intention.
It's just to show that there's a worldview problem from your perspective. That's all I'm doing. So from your perspective, you see that how do you justify that that statement has a universal applicability?
He said, from the Christian worldview, we can answer the question because it violates the character of God. And he's the universal precondition and all transcendental necessity emanates out of him. Therefore, that's why we know it.
He's the terminus. Where's your terminus? You see how this works? This is based on Trinitarian theology. The solution is in Trinitarianism. He said, I'm going to think about it. That's what they'll do.
They'll generally say, we're going to think about it. I'll consider what you say, but I just say, okay, fair enough. I don't get on them. Yeah, you say you will, but you will. So I know some Christians, don't lie to me.
I just leave them alone. I just say, okay, that's fair. I said, but do you see why I don't hold you? One of the reasons I don't hold your position, I hold your positions incoherent. You see why? He goes, yeah, I see.
Very polite. The guy said, yeah, I can see why you'd say that. I said, so further, I said, I said, look, if this is the condition that your worldview is incoherent in this sense, and I said, and I can show you the incoherency in other areas, well, then shouldn't you give up that worldview?
And I said, that's what we could talk about another time. He goes, okay, I appreciate your conversation. And that's how it left, very polite. I really tried to work it. Absolutely. I'm not out to show that word might buy it.
You can't bring something to Christ. Generally speaking, that's correct. Generally speaking, that's correct. Well, I can't say all people, all time. Otherwise it's a universal. Exactly. But generally speaking.
Now, you know, I say things like that. It's back behind my head. I'll say, is it always, I can't say all, I don't know all circumstances by which you can, but I'll say generally speaking, normally speaking.
Yeah, that's right. That's where I get a little bit with some things. So I'm like, this is all the back of my head bouncing around. That's why when I'm walking, sometimes you can hear things rattle. That's why.
That's what that is. Okay. Let's see if anybody else. So if there were four entities, then it would not be the maximal efficiency because if there's one person, then we have the problem of the static mind issue.
We also have the problem of the non-expression of the very nature of love, which is to give. And we would not have the fullness of the revelation of personhood. And if there were two persons in Godhead, that solution would part would be solved.
But the problem with that is that it would mean that the exchange of the knowledge between them ultimately would be impersonal because knowledge itself has an impersonal quality and characteristics. So therefore a fundamental characteristic of God's essence would be impersonal with a two of the binitarian view and a Trinitarian view.
Then each of the member of the Godhood could participate and be the means by which the fellowship and exchange of intimacy, perichoresis and all this is existing. Therefore there would not be an impersonal fundamental quality to God's nature in a Trinitarian sense.
It seems to be the minimal, perfect necessity of all of this. That's one of the things we're going to get into later, get more detail. If it's four, then you have redundancy. And so redundancy is not maximally efficient.
And so then we have to say, well, why not have four or five or six? Because then if we want to say that redundancy is maximally efficient, it seems that the efficiency is without any waste, without anything more than is necessary, is the perfect idea.
And we imply from that, that's what the nature of God would be. So if it was four, it would not be that way. Then we'd have multiplicities of these things and then we'd get to the point of confusion. It's kind of semi-semi.
It wouldn't be Trinitarianism, it would be polythenarianism, where there's one being with multiple hundreds of minds. And then you have, I would think about that, polythenarianism. I hope no one says, man, just made up a new heresy.
Let's get to it. Polythenarianism, what is it? It's just that there's so many heresies. So having said all of this stuff, you guys don't think these kinds of things, you don't walk in my circles like that.
Okay, fine. I do this. I like this. I enjoy this. I get to teach you. But having said all of this kind of stuff, isn't it kind of cool to see how some of this comes together and interrelates? It's like, yeah.
I'd like to be in a church where I teach this. Wednesday night, come on down. I'm going to hurt your head. I'm going to make your brain swell. Come on down. Teach you some stuff. And then you can imagine if I was teaching this kind of stuff over, is that something I said?
My wife had it. I guess her back hurts. And so, can you imagine? I'm teaching this and teaching this. Let's say I'm teaching this a lot and going through and you're learning these kinds of things. Hypostatic union, we're learning communicative idiom, we're learning about diathletism, we're learning about incarnation, we're learning about Apollinarianism, about Socinianism, and you're getting all this stuff.
And then I'm preaching. And then I say something to the effect of, and that's why when Christ at the baptism, why all three were there, that's a necessity. They're all there because we have the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy and the requirement of priesthood requirements.
But also more than that, there's the necessity of God in His inter-Trinitarian communion, which cannot be broken, expressed in the work of Christ, in the mediatorship of others. Therefore, they're all there.
Makes sense. Because the essence cannot be divided. That's divine simplicity, not partialism. And so, we'd expect to have the manifestation of the plurality of God, also the singularity of God, which we'll get into later.
He speaks in singularity and plurality. So, I like talking like this. I enjoy this kind of stuff. So, I'm just exposing certain issues that are obviously deficient, obviously. But you notice he keeps quiet.
That's why he's okay. He doesn't say anything. Yeah, that's right. He's not saying anything. Right. And I don't pick on the ladies, though. Unless it's Nephilim, but then, you know, it's sorry. A few years ago.
For real? She's not like me?
Well, good. I do get that. I'm not trying to say kudos to me or Greg, but you're teaching and you're going over it. And I get this a lot. Man, you just made me mad. Yeah, that's right. You don't do what they think.
I mean, if you don't, you say it's wrong. You're not sure. Yeah, it's okay. Just tell them, save your question, write them down for after, and then we can have a discussion. So, there's a guy here who came to fix or to do something, and I called him up for a fiber optic internet, which I'm not going to get because I've heard a number of things.
And doing this guy, you know, I call him up, but yeah, fiber optic because I know who you are. Well, that's going to be bad. He goes, yeah, I'm a Christian. I got a list of your stuff. I love you. Love to come over and just meet you anyway.
So, we're talking and a great guy. And he brought me lunch. He goes, hey, we just sat and talked for a bit. And so, on the way out, I said, look, if you're interested, I said, you got any Bible study or anything, you know, I'd be glad to come over, pick any topic that they like to hold on to, and I'll mess them up.
I said, you have plenty to do for weeks of cleanup. I said, not a problem. I could mess them up. I said, what about this? What about that? What about that? And he kind of chuckled. It was a joke, but what you're saying is you start sharing things that people don't like because they identify with a certain perspective.
There's only a few you should identify with, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, things like that. Preach of Rapture. Yeah, my friend began with that. He started the full way. So, he's been saying it a lot.
Well, tell her to come on over one night, and I'll do a specific teaching on eschatology. She needs to hear this. I mean, I've got it all, you know, the paper and the line, and the opening. But she's moving, and like I said, she's a wonderful Christian.
Yeah, she really is. And her husband, he agrees, you know, pretty much. Oh, that means he's smart, he agrees. That's good. Yeah. That's a better joke. In fact, people aren't getting that. My wife asked me how it feels to be old.
I tell her that I will let her know. Okay, Randall says that. So, do I look that old? I'm 65. That guy told me I looked 51 a couple days ago. Like, yeah. Okay, I thought of writing the same thing, but didn't know if everyone would, okay.
Leaving chat, finishing on TV. All right, I guess that's it. And no more comments, questions. Hope you guys enjoyed this. My wife asked me how it feels to be old. Next week, we're going to go through the acuity of God.
Cool. Okay. And you're going to notice, I'm going to tell you, you're going to notice repetition. You're going to notice repetition. Yeah. Everything's connected. It's right. And so, you'll hear some of the same arguments, some of the same illustrations, and that's okay.
It's to be an inculcation. It's to inculcate. You know what that means? To teach by repetition. What does that mean again? To teach by repetition. That's when people see it over and over again. That's why I'm teaching it again, over and over again, repeating it a lot.
To inculcate. The selectionary? It's on Karm. Yeah. You haven't heard my selectionary? Some of the words? Here, let me do. Let me. Yeah, it is. You go to karm .org. Karm .org. Oh, you guys can leave it there.
But selectionary. There it is right there. And here's some words. Here's some words on it. Oh, wait. How did it come up? I did not spell my own word right. The selectionary. And I have all kinds of words in there.
It doesn't have it. Selectionary. Yeah, I have stuff like. Here it is. A selectionary. S-L-I-C-K-T. There's backwards intelligence. The phenomena of thinking wrongly about everything while thinking you're intelligent.
To blurrify. The use of big words and citations of various philosophical views in rapid succession for a long period in lieu of a direct answer so as to confuse the listener and make things unclear. Chicken autism.
The practice of avoiding serious confrontation in order to substantiate an assertion, usually done by attacking the person or changing the topic. How about deniolation? The state of willing ignorance in the face of truth and not considering another view in an attempt to destroy the other person's view.
Also, the constant ignoring of something that doesn't agree with your opinion, hoping it will go away. Deniolation. Densification. The practice of failing to think clearly due to increased cerebral confusion while attempting to put down what you really don't understand.
Diverinian. A person who's overly childish in behavior and action when confronted with truth and logic and throws crud at you instead of dealing with the issues like an adult. Dodgification. The repeated practice of using useless statements in an attempt to avoid a challenge made against an assertion.
Festiculating. To festiculate is the involuntary inclination to walk quickly. That's festiculation. Yeah. Festiculation. To speak quickly while explaining a position. Phileology. Making theology by experience and feeling, not scripture, not logic.
Flabbergastriotate. To say something that flabbergasts someone while also irritating them. Flabbergastriotate. That's a tough one. Googleramus. A person who pontificates fails to back up his opinion and instead tells others to look something up on Google so he does not have to prove his point.
Okay. To horrisify. To distort the truth so much that it becomes a false teaching. Horrisify. Make it heresy. OTD. Acronym for obstreperous twit dude. Or obstreperous twit dudette. Ramblify. The practice of speaking about nothing, switching topics, and not focusing in order to sound confident without really saying anything.
Or ramblification. Rantacostal. Someone who rants against something but they don't know why they're against it. Reformaphobic. A person who claims to be a Christian but is rapidly hateful of Reformed theology and the sovereignty of God.
Okay, that takes a spelling error. Scriptnastics. The fervently jumping from scripture to scripture to prove a point out of context. It also involves transferring the meanings of different forms into different contexts.
That's right. Script Nazi. A person who demands total obedience and submission to his scripture quoting. Someone made me put this one in here. Slickification. The process by which a person is converted to Mat Slick's theology and desires to attack heresy.
Number two. To refuse someone to the point of not being able to speak heresy anymore. As in, ooh, you just got slickified. Three. To convert someone to the cult of Slick. Getting slicked when you call into the show and talk too much and Matt puts you on mute, hangs up.
You just got slicked. Slictionarian. A person who really likes a slictionary. Hey, I've only got about six more, okay? So, Slicturgy. The church liturgy style that consists of only announcements, then worship, preferably no hymns, then preaching, expositional, then dismissal, offering box at the back of the church.
That's my view. That's Slicturgy. To stubbornize or stubbornization. To refuse to learn, be corrected, or adjust a position due to an idolatrous fixation on an opinion. A prideful mental block against truth.
To stupidify. To open your mouth and let people know what you really think about something when such thinking is illogical and over-emotional yet is offered as intellectual truth. Verbal carpet bombing.
To say a whole bunch of words and phrases in a rapid pace for a long period. You need to, you need to BCB that. B-C-B, like you did the other one. Oh, okay. I see what you mean. An acronym. BCB. Yeah.
I say verbal carpet bombing because it worked. A whanny. A person who complains for no good reason and continues to do so even when competent responses are given. Two more. Wacko genetics. The science of finding out how utterly whack a person is on the genetic level.
And zombify. To say that prevenient grace is given to a person who is dead in his sins and that it somehow makes him alive enough spiritually so that he's only mostly dead, thus enabling him to make a choice to believe in God.
Take the miraculous Max Mostly Dead movie, blah, blah, blah. So, the Slictionary. Those are, those are fun. You got to admit, those are fun. They're stupid. And then we have to go into the, when you want some time, I'll go into the how to insult Matt Slick page.
How to write an insult. I got a whole bunch of those. Pick your insult page is another one. But yeah. Joyce, Joyner, Bill Hammond. Not yet with him, but he, I know he's there. So far, William Branham, Bill Johnson.
These are the main ones. I'm going through, what I'm doing is reading like two or three books at a time. One of them just gets boring, go to the next one, read for a while, go back to it. And I'm taking quotes.
Some of the stuff they're saying, talk about stupidification and harrissification. But yeah, it's, it's bad. I can write probably a lot, a lot of articles. It just depends on how much it goes. I'll often work until I'm done.
I go, I can't do it anymore. I'm sick of it. I just quit, but it's just, it's bad. I haven't done it. I haven't done any research on Hillsong, but they're part of NAR overall and they do some heresy stuff.
And yeah. So also someone gave me a video of the little girl. Who was it? One of you guys? Yeah. I got to look at that. And what I'm doing is when I do something, a project like this, I go to the main sources.
So I'm reading Bill Johnson. Oh, see Peter Wagner, read stuff from him. And forget this, these books are 200 pages each. You just read and I need to read 15, 20 books. Well, that's going to take me a year, you know, where you've got to read through and understand the context on your line.
Then you're going to transfer it into a page. And then I have to categorize them, plus provide the documentation, the page number and the whole bit. It takes a lot of work, hours at a time. I went to Google Scholar and I want to find, because I want to keep buying these, let me back up.
I can buy a lot of the books on Kindle, but they're basically, so I can look up one or two words and see how they use them. 10, 20 bucks, I can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. And there's a certain point where, yes, I do need to have certain books.
And I have probably 20 books in the NAR folder on my Kindle. There's got to be a cheaper way. So when I was looking for William Branham, he's a heretic. Yeah. Oh yeah. And these guys are praising him.
A lot of them are praising him. So I wrote an article on William Branham. I just stopped what I was doing, researching William Branham. But once I got William Branham basically figured out, I wrote an article on release.
Well, I wanted to find out which NAR teachers hold or approve of William Branham. Well, I could buy 15, 20 of their books and just put them on Kindle and then do a search for Branham. Well, then I waste, you know, nothing there, nothing there.
Well, if someone gave me 500 bucks to go here, just buy all the books. Okay. Dig, dig, dig, dig. Put them there. I could do my searches. Scholar .google .com. I found out you can type in an author's name and then a book title, and it'll give you like the first 50 or a hundred pages of the book.
Wow. Wow. So then I'd learn, just go search for a word. And I actually found some quotes about Branham and I put them in an article on, on, on it. So it actually, you know, worked. So let's see. Yeah.
William Branham. And yeah, I haven't got this. I haven't released my research on him yet on what they're doing. So I've got, oh, it was rain. So, so I've got five or six quotes from different teachers and they are people who say Branham was a, was a real man of God.
And one of them says, well, he did teach some false things, but here's the thing. Why would you say, man, he had a movement of God denying the Trinity oneness, getting baptized in Jesus name, claimed to be the one who prophesied God.
And then there's a whole website that's dedicated to just exposing him. It's like a carm just on William Branham. So I put a link. I will put a link and I do it right here. I got on my article, William Branham, I released and let's have this false prophecies.
They go through and they analyze everything in super detail. So I'm not going to do all that. And, oh yeah, absolutely. So Branham met a supernatural being. Branham was visited by an angel. Branham is the voice, is God's voice.
Faith can create objects. The Trinity is three gods. Baptism, not a Trinitarian formula, but in Jesus name. Serpent seed doctrine. Satan had sex with Eve to make the body of Cain and the Canaanites are evil, bad people.
Women, okay, I got to read this. You're gonna like what William Branham said about women. Every sin that was ever on the earth was caused by a woman. And a unclear word, just from Chicago, a woman wrote this article with the police force that they chased down in the United States, metropolitan United States, that 98 of every crime that was ever did in any form in the United States, there was either a woman in it or behind it.
That's right. That's right. Women, given birth to people who do their own thing and make their own choices and rebel. You can have the baptism of the Holy Ghost every hour in your life and still be locked and go to hell.
So this is what he was teaching. These are some of the things. So I've got this. I'm going to summarize some of it. And then what I'm gonna do is say in my article, why are these people that are NAR, why are they supporting this guy?
If they're getting his visions and these words from God, that's a question. And I also have a bunch of questions I'm just asking, developing a list of questions. I've been doing a lot of work on NAR. What do you know about World Transformation Movement?
I don't know. World Transformation Movement? Is that world NAR? World Transformation Movement. This is Seven Mountain Prophecy? It's a biologist who is talking about the human condition. Oh, well, this isn't NAR though.
No. Oh, okay. Okay. Different thing. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I was just thinking that. I was. Transforming the individual, the human race, that's our world through biological understanding. Now I got to start studying the World Transformation Movement.
Thanks a lot. Guys, I only have two hands. Since the 90s. But the early forms of it are Dominion Theology, Manifest Sons of God, Name It, Claim It, Blab It, Grab It, Crapola, and Ladder Rain Movement.
Yep. Stepping Stones. Yep. I'm going to use the restroom. Oh, man. I'm going to use the restroom. He died in 1965. Yeah. Or 1909 or 1965. Keep talking. Yeah. Talk about what? I've heard things, but I can't bear them.
Well, I found out one thing you said, and I started looking up. You made a statement that, you know, Christians have a privilege of praying to God. Yeah. Okay, that's fine. And he says, in fact, God wants to hear your prayer.
He says, in fact, God welcomes the prayers of all faiths. Oh, he does? You said that? That's a great story. Yeah. He also. Yeah. Yeah. See, they just had a big deal here. Big crusade, right? Yeah. And, in fact, John Le Park, which that's good enough for me.
Well, he did a whole series against them. Yeah, but he's, he's, we've got, we've got people that came here to sing with him. But it strikes me out here. One of the elders got this guy. Number 16. Can you guys hear us in the room with a mic right here in the chat room?
Which one of everybody can hear? Keep going. Okay. Okay. The mic's right here. No, it's okay. Just see anybody that can hear us all over. Okay. So the Bible said he was really upset because I would even question it because he was preaching the gospel.
Well, his gospel is not the gospel that we know. What did he preach? I haven't heard. I've just, I've heard him preach. Yeah. Yeah. Was it good? Was it okay? Yeah. And this time? I mean, it's okay. It's what Calvin Charles preaches, but the other thing is the gospel.
So people flip pages. I just think he's a good guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just things around him. You know, like he's involved with the Catholics and then, but you know, having the Catholics being involved in his organization, he invites them in.
That's a problem. Yeah. We've been doing this for some time, but nobody pays attention because he preaches the gospel like they told the gals. So it's just, I guess the point of this is, and some people may be safe in his faith and then, oh yeah, you know who Steve Furtick is?
Oh yeah. He's bad. They support each other. Greg Loy wrote a deal about Steve Furtick. Steve Furtick loves T .D. Jakes who denies the Trinity. He does? No. I mean, Furtick does. Yeah. He does. When I studied him, he didn't, but I mean, he didn't deny it, but now he does.
I wrote an article on him years ago. So if there's some updated information, I need to add it and say, you know, he's not a trustworthy individual. They have a private email about heresies. Just so I'll go to a few people.
You find this, you find that. Go ahead and email us your documentation on how to do it. You need a high rise for all the heresies. I do need help. No, you missed it. Look, if you're going to, you have got to learn how to walk through a door and insult someone.
I said, I need help. And then you go, yeah, I'm mental. I think you should have said that. When you've got to teach a guy how to insult you, that's not a good thing. What's that? That's a good thing. These women are accepting you.
Okay. So anyway, sorry. Yeah. I do need help on research.
I give you guys softballs.
It can't be. Absolutely. I'd rather have them be there doing it than not. What's it? 1%. Okay. I know who he is. Where is that? It's in the Bible, but I forgot where it's one of those verses that I had trouble memorizing.
Just some, for some reasons. Right. Want me to close the room for you guys? Keep listening to us talk. Can you hear us all? Or want me to shut it down in the StreamYard here? You guys can type in what you want.
Continue or shut it down. Yeah. Do what? Oh, yeah. Yes. There's certain people. People need to pay attention a little bit more. That's a new, why didn't I think of that? I mean, you got to pay attention a little more.
They were working with the Mormon church. I had the Mormons come and drop off.
