March 2, 2006

Broadcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602. Or toll free across the United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. I'm going to try to be a little bit better with the voice today. Feeling about 80 better than last time. But still, well, we won't get into it.

But we're doing better. That's the most important thing, I suppose. It would be worse if I was getting worse, so that would be bad. But anyways, we're doing better. And as we mentioned on the blog, someone cursed me by hooking me up to the audio from, let's see, what was that?

That was the 26th, so that wasn't all that. 26th, is that what it was? They had a program on Sunday?

Hmm.

All right. Well, a Dividing Line, not a Dividing Line, a Brian Call broadcast from less than a week ago, let's put it that way, where the questioner asked the question concerning the issue of free will.

And, of course, when Dave Hunt is asked a question about free will or T .A. McMahon is asked a question about free will, you can imagine what is going to happen as a result. I mentioned on the blog I no longer even bother to raise the issues of, well, maybe Dave forgot or maybe Dave was confused.

No, it's not even an issue any longer. The simple fact of the matter is Dave Hunt doesn't care about what the Bible says. He doesn't care about what people say in response to him. He doesn't care about being factually refuted.

Dave Hunt is just simply, you know, he's his own infallible source of all things, and he's just going to run around out there and tell his people what they want to hear, and that's all there is to it.

And for some reason, I don't know why, there are a large number of people who, I guess, because they have talked with him over the years and spoken at conferences with him over the years, just let him get away with it.

I won't call him on it. In fact, I know I'm thinking of one particular individual who has gone after me personally over the past couple of years on other issues. The reason that that person has done so is rather clear to me.

It's his wife's on Dave Hunt's board, and that's sort of their way of trying to get back at me for refuting Dave Hunt on these issues and demonstrating that the man simply has absolutely positively no shame when it comes to being willing to just do the most incredible things, as far as Calvinism is concerned, the Bible, misrepresenting it, and so on and so forth.

So this is the Bree and Call broadcast, and here is the questions being asked of T .A. McMahon and Dave Hunt, and let's listen and review.

Dear Dave and T .A.,. I recently read What Love Is This?, and I appreciated the book because you made me consider some things that I have never given much thought to before. Election, predestination, foreknowledge, and being chosen, to name a few.

But the main issue I wrestled with from the book is free will. I can't fathom how someone could deny that everyone must have free will. If we don't have it, what was Jesus talking about in John 5, 40, when he said, But you are not willing to come to me that you may have life.

Now let me just stop right there, but that's a passage, of course, that did come up in our conversations, and I pointed out, I mean, there's no Calvinist under here, Oh, I've never heard of that before, you're not willing that you should,.

Of course you're not willing, that's the whole point. You couldn't say that if everybody just had libertarian free will, and some would be willing and some are not. And you're going to listen to Hunt just, once again, struggle mightily to explain, Okay, why is it that some people then do and some people do not believe?

And the issue always has to go back to something better in the person who believes. That's just all there is to it. Somehow they're better. Somehow they are more sensitive to spiritual things. The answer can't be in God, the answer has to be in man.

God can't have any control over such things. That's going to come out, he's going to struggle with that, but there's nothing about John 5 where it's even slightly relevant. And of course, remember, Dave Hunt has been told over and over again now, Calvinists do not deny that man has a will.

God did not take away man's will. Man's will is corrupted, it's in love with sin, and it's in rebellion against its creator. And as such, it is enslaved, that's the biblical term. Now remember, he's heard all this.

I mean, unless he had somebody ghostwrite all of debating Calvinism, and he never bothered to read what was said, he's heard all of this. There's absolutely no excuses anymore for the kind of willful misrepresentation that Dave Hunt engages in, over and over and over again.

One of the mysteries of, you know, and I know many people who are Calvinists, and I have family members, and I love them, and they're bright, really bright people, articulate. Yet, when it comes to something that should be so obvious, they reject it.

Tom, it's pretty incredible. Now, I understand how they comment this, because this has to do with whether we can say yes or no to the gospel. Whether we have the option of receiving or rejecting Christ.

Because the Calvinists would say, well, if you can decide your own fate, your own eternal fate, then God is at your mercy. You know, Christ came and died, but it's in vain unless people believe. So therefore, they have limited atonement, of course, so that Christ's blood is not wasted, as they would say, shed for people who are going to reject him anyway.

That is not, again, he's picked this up, someone's used that terminology, and of course what he's referring to is the idea of Christ failing to save someone for whom he died. That's the issue. It's not a matter of wasting his blood or something along these lines.

It is asking the question, does the Bible directly address the issue of the purpose for which Christ died? And the answer, of course, is yes, it does. Trying to get Dave Hunt to address that is far more difficult, but it does address that specific issue.

And that's what he's trying to refer to there, but again, just listen to this recitation that he gives and just how grossly inaccurate it is.

And so for God to be sure that somebody's going to go to heaven, that it's not going to be just an empty place up there, he is going to have to cause people to believe. And so then they would go to scriptures like, except the Father draw them and so forth, you cannot come to me.

They forget that it does say come, Jesus does say come unto me.

Now, how can someone be so dense?

I mean, just so completely, I mean, this is slavery to tradition to the max. And if you sense frustration in my voice, it's because I'm the one who has tried over and over again to get this man to listen to the most basic level of biblical discussion on John chapter 6.

Oh, it still says come.

Yeah, I know. Dave, it does say come.

And who's the one who comes? I mean, absolutely no willingness whatsoever to listen to the word of God. None, none, none, zip, zero, nada, and so forth.

But I can sympathize with that because they're concerned. Now, it's a mystery, Tom. Why do some people believe and some don't? You will have to ask the person who said yes or who said no.

Now, notice who you have to ask. You don't ask God. The answer here does not lie in God. It doesn't lie in God. It lies in the person. And this is what I've said over and over again. The only way to make this system work for Dave Hunt is to admit that the fundamental answer to the question as to why someone saves someone is not in God's hands.

It is in man's hands. That's, of course, free will. That's what it's all about. That makes perfect sense. But that's where it's coming from is it's not God. God didn't make the differentiation. Man makes the differentiation.

It's their choice. We know that there could be no love between husband and wife, parent and child, and between man and God without the power of choice. You can't make someone love you. And the power to love someone is meaningless without the power to hate them or at least ignore them or not love them.

So as this person says, we know every day we make so many choices.

As if anybody in this debate was saying that we don't make choices. And there is an entire chapter on this in the book. We talked about the different kinds of love.

We talked about the will of man. It's like he's never read it.

It's like, okay, I dealt with that once. I'm not going to deal with it anymore. And so I'm just going to ignore the repeated corrections that have been offered to me over and over and over again, and I'm just going to sit here.

And it's almost like the Berean calls already gotten rid of all their Calvinists anyways, right? The Calvinists have already dropped off and said, stop sending me this stuff. You don't know what you're talking about.

You're not willing to accurately represent things.

So forget it.

Just go away. And so it's like, you don't have to worry about them anymore. The only people left who are listening to what I'm saying are the people who already believe anything I say. So I don't have to be accurate.

I don't have to be truthful. I don't have to be concerned about anything that these people have to say. I don't have to be concerned about what's gone on in the past. I don't have to worry about how often I've been refuted on this stuff.

I can just go back to the easy straw man argumentation I've been using all along. I just have to keep asking myself the question, who is out there who, even if they don't agree with Reformed theology, aren't there Arminians who would at least have the integrity to say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.

We can disagree, but shouldn't we disagree accurately? Shouldn't we at least make an effort to speak the truth and call for some responsibility on his part? No, this doesn't seem to happen. As long as Dave says it, then it's okay for Dave to say it.

You can't say that we're just puppets on a string.

You can't say that we're just puppets on a string. Well, thank you very much. I'm very thankful that you don't say that. And, of course, if you're saying that that's what Calvinists say.

But how can you say that you can say yes to Jesus or no to Jesus, then aren't you in charge of your eternal destiny? Well, there is no way to get around it, Tom. We do make choices. And it does say, whosoever will.

The thing is, we're going, if you will compare this, this is what shocked me when I first started listening to this yesterday or the day before yesterday. If you will compare this with the radio interview that I did with him, right?

And this was prior to writing What Love Is This. This was back when he started off the radio program by saying, I don't know anything. I've not read any of the Reformers and I just go with the Bible, blah, blah, blah.

Back before he started making the claim that he knows more about Calvinism than most Calvinists do, these are the same things he was saying then. Now, some might say, well, that's a good thing. Don't you want to be consistent?

Yeah, but if they were straw man misrepresentations in the first interview on these subjects, why haven't they changed? Because he won't listen. He doesn't listen to what anybody else is saying. He doesn't listen to correction.

He never, ever, ever says, I'm wrong.

I'm sorry I was wrong about that.

When he makes the changes in his books, he just simply takes out the embarrassing stuff he said, replaces it with newly embarrassing stuff, and goes on from there without a footnote.

Absolutely.

Talk about just completely and totally destroying any shred of credibility you wanted to maintain. It's unreal.

May come. Let him, Jesus says, if any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. Now, that's a misleading statement to say the least, or it's even worse than that. If a person can't come to Christ unless he makes them come to him.

Now, why is that an error? Not that we haven't explained this 5 ,000 times before, and not that Dave Hunt doesn't know the answer. Well, he may not. He may be completely ignorant of the answer because he just won't listen to anyone's correction of him.

But who thirsts? Who hungers? Isn't that John 6 again? Isn't that the unbelievers? Jesus is explaining that they are unbelievers and they don't know their spiritual hunger. They don't know their spiritual thirst.

Who hungers?

Who thirsts? All these passages, because he'll go on and on, and he does this all the time. All these dozens of verses, hundreds of verses calling people to God just make no sense in Calvinism. Yes, they do make perfect sense in Calvinism, Dave.

You don't have to embrace pagan libertarianism to make it work. Once the person has been changed by the Spirit of God, that heart of stone has been taken out, heart of flesh has been given, they've been changed by the Spirit of God.

Don't they need direction? Don't they want to hear the voice of Christ?

Of course.

So the whole idea that he keeps presenting is basically, well, everything in the Bible, if there's anything about choice in the Bible, that means that even the spirit of a dead man has the abilities that are implied by that phrase.

No, that's not the case at all. Choose ye this day. See, it says to choose. That means we can choose. Yes, and who's going to choose for the Lord over against their own sinful desires? The slave? You know, we'll might get around to playing some of that Davis thing today, and he starts off talking about they believe that we are so dead.

What's this?

So dead. Take these terms seriously.

Who's going to hunger?

Who's going to thirst? The person who has been freed from slavery to sin to know their hunger and thirsting. And that's why those passages are in there.

Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.

And then why does he say, come unto me? Why does God plead all through the Bible with his people to repent? And he says, don't do this abominable thing that I hate. I don't want to punish you. He sends his prophets day and night crying out.

You could take Psalm 81. If my people had hearkened to my voice, I would have fed them with the finest of wheat. Or Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered you together, but you would not.

Did you hear it? Did you hear it? I couldn't believe it. I could not believe it. Let's just in case you missed that.

Or Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered you together, but you would not.

Remember?

This is how it all started.

His newsletter, May of that year, misquoted Matthew 23, 37. That's not what the text says. It doesn't say how often would I have gathered you, but you would not.

That's a lie.

L-I-E, lie, dishonesty, falsehood.

And he knows it. He knows it, he knows it, he knows it, he knows it.

It's in the books for crying out loud. I mean, it's in debating Calvinism.

I pointed it out. I cited it. And does it, it makes no difference. He does not hear. He is absolutely beyond all correction.

It's just amazing. You can explain it to him over and over again. That here Dave Hunt is demonstrating his utter slavery to the issue of tradition. So much so that he can only see the Bible with what tradition will allow him to see.

And does that stop him?

I mean, if I had, if that had come up, if my, if I had based an entire argument on the miscitation of a verse that comes out in a book, the whole nine yards, I would be a little more careful in my public statements on that issue in the future.

But not Dave Hunt.

No, no, no, no. Dave just keeps throwing it all out there. And he's just absolutely insensible to any level of correction.

Or Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered you together? But you would not. Or Joshua saying, choose you this day whom you will serve. All of those statements are nonsense. They are a mockery telling a person who, according to Calvinism, is totally depraved, can't make a choice except for evil.

And you keep pleading with him to repent.

See what I said before? I told you this was coming. I've already mentioned, already explained. Okay, so, you know, the Bible can't contain any commands for spiritually alive people unless everybody is spiritually alive.

That's the deep theological conclusion here. Grace cannot enable you, cannot change you to desire to do the commands of God. You can't have instruction for the regenerates as to how they're to live and so on.

You know, it was frustrating enough when he claimed ignorance. It's far more frustrating when the man claims expertise and has been corrected over and over and over again. That's why people have asked, well, what about Dave's work in other areas?

I'm sorry, but if he can be so completely without credibility in studying this area of theology, there's no area of theology you can trust him in.

None.

His eyes will only see on a page what his filters will allow him to see.

That's it.

Nothing more. So, no, total destruction, in my opinion, of the entirety of his credibility. That's just all there is to it.

But God withholds what the Calvinist calls irresistible grace so that he can't repent, and yet he keeps pleading with him and berating him for not doing what he can't do.

Now, notice the backwardsness. Again, corrected on this many times. So he's engaging in, and this is false teaching. Dave Hunt has become a false teacher. This is all there is to it. He needs to be identified for what he is.

Once you become dishonest, it's no longer a matter of opinions. You're just being dishonest. And Dave Hunt's now dishonest. Because God withholds irresistible grace from him. Withholds irresistible grace.

Think about that for just a minute. Think about that for just a minute. Withholds irresistible grace. In other words, grace, which can never be demanded or deserved, is withheld. You mean God does not freely give that which is not only undeserved but de-deserved.

And so since God doesn't give what cannot be demanded, then it's God's fault if the person, because they're in their sin, remains enslaved in their sin? It is so hard to figure out how this kind of warped thinking, and it keeps getting more warped over time.

Remember a few weeks ago, children who die in infancy, they're automatically saved because they never sinned. And now the brain calls doing backpedals on the original sin issue. Oh, no, they weren't denying original sin.

Well, why'd they die? Well, they won't answer that question. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, wow. This is why countercult ministries, quote-unquote, need to be under the authority of a local church. They need to be connected to sound local churches so this kind of stuff isn't going to happen.

Which God could cause them to do if he wanted to. David, as you say, as we read through the Scripture, that's all you have to do. Verse after verse, it's either true that somebody can make a choice, is willing.

Let me say it this way. Jesus said, you know, you're not willing to come to me, so there must be a choice to be willing.

Mr. McMahon, would you like to debate? I would love to see T .A. McMahon debate this subject. It's so sad. I mean, you'd like to think that maybe T .A. McMahon might be open to correction because the only source of theology in his life is Dave Hunt.

And yet, has he not read debating Calvinism? Has he not read the constant correction of Dave Hunt saying that we do make choices? That's the whole point? That the choice of the unregenerate man will always be against God?

Has he read Romans 8 where it talks about the fact that those who are in the flesh cannot please God? They cannot submit themselves to the law of God? But they just go zooming right in past those things.

Remember how often have we tried to get folks to deal with biblical passages and it's run off to, yeah, but if what you say is true, then your mommy might not be regenerate and might not be of the elect and might go to hell no matter what you do.

It's like, oh, well, thank you for that deep response. Can we go back to the text, please?

That's a charade, but the charade really hits, it's like the climactic charade at the great white throne judgment. I mean, what is going on there? What is God saying to those, to really the unregenerated, the lost?

How is he holding them accountable for something? Well, according to Calvinism, they couldn't do anything but sin. In fact, I give quotations in What Love Is This of many leading Calvinists and they say God causes them to sin.

Excuse me. Not much you can do about that when every attempt you make to deal with compatibilism is met with, let's face it, Dave Hunt doesn't understand it. And since he doesn't understand it, he just ignores it.

He just throws it out the door and says it's just not there, and so I'm going to quote these Calvinists. And I wonder which edition of What Love Is This that was. Was that the one with the Hebrew original of Acts 1 through 15?

Or is that the one that cites the New World Tradition? It's hard to remember which one it is. There are so many of these days, who knows?

No, so then he's on the wrong side of the judgment seat. He needs to be among those who are being judged. He's causing people to sin.

Oh, yeah, these poor, innocent people. He's got them behind him with a gun. He's making them sin. Excuse me, if you haven't heard this program before, maybe it's the first time, I'm sorry if we're sounding rather mean here, but this is not the first time that we've dealt with this.

We've been correcting this man for years. We've sent him those corrections. I've done books with him. We've done programs with him. I've sent letters to him. We're talking about someone who is willfully perverting the truth here.

Okay?

I mean, that's why we can just say, you know, I can make that without any question whatsoever because it took me years to be convinced beyond all shadow of a doubt that that's the case. It took me years.

I didn't jump on that bandwagon. You read the first things that I wrote to him. You read the letters that I wrote to him. I bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt. But after all the errors he has been caught in, and he knows he's been caught in because he changes them.

You know, he will change things. He'll pull things out of his books. He won't admit it, of course. He'll change entire things in his book without even a footnote to mention why his entire argument has now changed.

It's because he was refuted. That's why. But he doesn't want to admit that. It's a pride issue. And so, you know, that's why I can say what I'm saying. It took a long time to finally beat it through my brain that this guy, what's true on these issues is irrelevant.

It's what his tradition says. That's his final authority. What the Bible says, irrelevant. It's just, you know, his own thing.

Or let's not go that far. Some would say that's hyper-calvinism. But any way you try to get around it, it ultimately comes down to that.

Okay?

Why does Jesus ask us to pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, if everything is already according to God's will?

And did we not address that one? And, of course, we then respond by saying, and why do you pray for the salvation of anyone if God is, in point of fact, expending a 100 effort for the salvation of every individual anyways?

Hello?

You know, purpose of prayer, but do they listen? No, they're not listening.

Everything is already according to God's will, and man has no power of choice. Then all the rape and murder and crime and wars and evil, the evil thoughts and so forth, God is behind that.

And in your position, they have no purpose at all.

God knew they were going to exist. He created them for no reason at all.

Thank you, Dave. Could you answer that question? No, and that's why he won't debate. Because he knows I would ask him that question, and I would hold his feet to the fire to answer that question, and he can't answer that question.

He knows that, and so he won't debate. That's all there is to it.

But look, he's sitting at the judgment seat of Christ, and he's saying, I could have caused you to believe in me.

I could have extended my mercy to you. Yes, isn't there something in Romans 9? He will have mercy on whom he has mercy, and he will pardon whom he has pardoned.

I could have caused you to repent.

I could have changed your heart, but was I under any obligation to do so, or did you love your sin? Yes, you loved your sin, didn't you?

But I didn't because I wanted to damn you.

Oh, my goodness. What this man is going to have to answer for in light of the amount of correction that's been given to him is unbelievable.

Tom, if we go to, for example, I think one of the most powerful passages is Isaiah chapter 5, where God talks about Israel as his inner. And he says, what more could I have done for my vineyard than I did?

I did everything I could to make them fruitful and to bring them to me.

And they didn't, which means what? You see, the external stuff that God had done in regards to sending prophets and everything else, outside of his turning the heart, the heart is in the hand of the Lord, he turns it wherever he will.

That's the whole point. That's the depth of man's sin. And remember, this is the man who argues that those passages in Romans 3 are not saying that man is totally depraved. He has to become a Pelagian just to simply make his free will arguments work.

And they rebelled against me. Tom, it's difficult. Oh, then we've got our eternal destiny. We can say yes or no. I don't think you can escape it. But on the other side of it, Tom, as you pointed out, it is so overwhelming, you turn the Bible into a charade.

Turn the Bible into a charade. Isn't that exactly what you find in debating Calvinism? Isn't that one of the chapter titles? Turning the Bible into a charade. Turning the grace of God into a charade. That's what the whole thing is all about.

Refuted then, didn't listen. Been refuted since then, won't listen. Just continues on and on and on and on. Sad, isn't it? There is a level that just makes you so sad to see someone continue to embarrass themselves the way Dave Hunt continues to embarrass himself.

It is just unbelievable, truly unbelievable. 877 -753 -3341. We're going to take our break, and then our phone lines are already lit up, and we'll be getting right to them right after this.

Such a rarity today. Many stop strong and true and quickly fall away.

What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book Chosen But Free, A New Cult, Secularism, False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called Calvinism.

He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant. In his book, The Potters' Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler. But The Potters' Freedom is much more than just a reply.

It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself. In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so-called extreme Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture.

The Potters' Freedom, a defense of the Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at aomin .org. This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God. The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church. The elders and people of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day.

The morning Bible study begins at 9 .30 a .m. and the worship service is at 10 .45. Evening services are at 6 .30 p .m. on Sunday and the Wednesday night prayer meeting is at 7. The Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church is located at 3805 North 12th Street in Phoenix.

You can call for further information at 602 -26-GRACE. If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at prbc .org, where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.

Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality. Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

In their book, The Same-Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans.

Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law. In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

The Same-Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at aomin .org.

How the pilgrims progress is not an easy way. It's a journey to the sun day by day.

And welcome back to The Dividing Line. Our phone lines are pretty well full up here, so let's go ahead and... In fact, I think they are going to be full up here. Let's talk with Josh. Hi, Josh.

Hi, James.

How are you doing?

I'm good. Well, thank you for your ministry.

Thank you, sir.

I haven't followed your ministry too long, but I was required to read your work on the King James Bible for a new class, and I think the thoroughness with which you approach not only that issue, but others honors God.

Well, great.

I wanted to ask you a specific question about the Atonement. I've recently come across terminology that surprised me regarding the design and intent of the Atonement. There seems to be much agreement that the Atonement was Senator Dork, Calvin's commentary on 1 John, Boyce, Carl Codge, and John Owen, and I assume others too.

My question to you is where do you come down on this, and why is it necessary to affirm a general sufficiency if the Atonement was indeed for a particular group of people?

Well, the reason that there is an affirmation of the general sufficiency is to make sure that there could be no limitation in the result of the death of the God-man. So that's not an issue. I mean, the only thing that I object to is when people will say, well, I understand the Atonement only in the lines of, well, how would people place it?