Deconstructed Baptists, Another Confusing Keller Tweet, Second Run at John 6

Good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line. James White along with you. We're back in the big studio. We've got some stuff to do on the big board. Want to start off with, actually, the tweet on the screen.

Tim Keller’s Tweet on Evaluating Worldviews by Their Own Premises

See if we can figure it out. It's another Tim Keller. It's one of those Tim Keller tweets where you are left going, what's that about? Well, and if you respond to it, then 12 hours later, you get some other response about it.

But anyway, it says, we should not judge another set of faith beliefs on the basis of ours. The fairest way to evaluate a world-explaining narrative is by judging on the basis of its own premises and beliefs.

If we decide it fails, we must show it fails on its own terms. OK, few questions. Set of faith beliefs. I think that's like, are we talking about Islam? Are we talking about secularism? Are we talking about Buddhism?

It's sort of hard to tell exactly what's being said by set of faith beliefs. But we're not to judge on the basis of our faith beliefs. So Christians have faith beliefs, which, again, is extremely strange language.

But we're not to use ours to judge someone else's. Instead, the fairest, fairest on the basis of what standard again? The fairest way to evaluate a world-explaining narrative. So this is a worldview.

This is something it claims to present. So whatever these faith beliefs are, they are extensive enough to be a world-explaining narrative. So a worldview. So definitely secularism, naturalism, and all the major religions is by judging on the basis of its own premises and beliefs.

If we decide it fails, we must show it fails on its own terms. So fundamentally, that would mean that the system would have to be inherently incoherent and allowed to define its own terminology and its own parameters.

How does that work? I am completely lost. I mean, this is today, March 10th, 538 AM, according to this here. How does this work for a Christian? Because a Christian believes there is only one real world created by God and defined by God.

And so any other worldview, certainly, we can provide an internal critique of that worldview. But what we're doing is we're comparing it to the world that God has actually made. We're not allowing them to define the parameters of what the world really is.

So I'm just, if you allow someone else to redefine language and reality and the parameters of reality, how can you then provide an internal critique? The internal critique that we are to provide, answering the fool according to his folly, is because there is an objective reality that God has revealed, and it is revealed in the Christian faith.

Now, what's interesting is one of the responses to this, and we've done a little work with the screens here. It's a little bit easier for me to see things now. I'll tell you a little bit more about that later.

But Jacob Brunton said, no, there is objective reality, and we have access to it. Well, that's true. There is an objective reality, and we do have access to it. But how do we have access to it? He says, all beliefs, faith beliefs is a redundant term, are to be judged by and grounded in objective reality known through observation and logic.

Observation and logic. And this is really where the disagreement with, if you're familiar with who Jacob Brunton is, he is one of those, that group of folks that believes that if you are a presuppositionalist, you're a false teacher and leading people to destruction, and all the rest of that kind of, what?

Well, there's nothing I can do about that. Okay, it's going to be wherever it is. And you just get to live with it. Okay, not accepting anything about, adjust that. No, it moves around on its own. And the other option is to take it off and put it down there, and you got to adjust to that.

So that's all there is to that. So, nope, not doing any of that stuff. Okay, back to what we were saying. Brunton and his group are desperately anti-presuppositional. And there's a debate out there that you can find on YouTube, look up the name, and it's on Romans 1.

I would highly recommend anyone listen to it because Brunton's presentation on Romans 1 was self-defeating. It stands on its own as a refutation of his own position. It's just that bad exegetically. Yes, there is objective reality, but there is the issue of sin.

And there is the issue of the suppression of the knowledge of God that God has made available to us. And so there has to be the recognition of the biblical teaching about who man is. And these folks are saying, no, no, no, you don't need any of that stuff.

It's all just out there, and we're like, you don't have a biblical anthropology. That's the problem with all this stuff. So you can get a bad take from Keller and then an equally bad take from people saying that Keller is wrong if that's where you want to go.

Now, most people are aware of the fact that over the past, I blame, and I blame him for lots of stuff, but I blame the troublemaker from Texas for all of this because sometime last week, he put out a graphic, and it was the bat signal, all right?

I guess that's really popular right now. I guess there's a Batman movie out. I think I've seen one, maybe two Batman movies in total. I'm just not a Batman guy. Sorry, I've just never, if anything, I appreciate the old Batman Robin stuff from the 60s.

That's more my speed. All these movies have just been so, I don't know, they're so dark, you can't see what's going on. Someone turn the lights up in there. What's going on? I don't know. Anyway, but yes, Batman, it was a graphic that he put up, and the image, the outlined image in the bat signal, instead of it being the Batman signal, it was, well, I joked that it looked a little bit like New Jersey with its top rounded off.

I guess it's just, well, you would sort of look at it. It'd look a little bit like that. But it was an image of Vody Balcombe, and the idea was, Vody, we need you. And I was like, what? And I can just text Tom, and Tom realizes that I have enough on him.

He needs to respond to whatever it is I say fairly quickly, lest things get really out of control. And so I was like, what's that? He says, I was just saying we could really use somebody like Vody. It wasn't really anything serious.

It didn't take long before it became really serious. And now there's all this conversation going on at the Southern Baptist Convention about Vody Balcombe running for president of the SBC. Now, I don't even know if that's possible.

I really don't. I'm not taking any stance on any of that. I have no idea. I'm not a Southern Baptist anymore. But as soon as that became somewhat of reality, I was, I don't know, maybe I'm just still naive in many ways, but stunned at the level of vitriol that appeared in what is ostensibly called Baptist Press.

There's a number of different publications that have Baptist and press and news, and you put the word Baptist in there. And the problem is Baptist is one of the least descriptive terms you could ever have.

Because all it's technically referring to is, in a minimal sense, a mode of one of the ordinances of the church. And maybe you push it a little bit farther, Credo Baptist versus Paedo Baptist, or whatever.

But there are massively liberal Baptists and conservative Baptists and every kind in between, and so it doesn't really tell you much. Then again, what does anymore? A Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, even Roman Catholic doesn't tell you much anymore.

You've got these wide, wide, wide, wide divergences amongst all these. So it didn't take too long until an opinion article was published. And I started seeing some discussion about it. And, well, this guy's a stay-at-home dad with pronouns in his bio.

OK, I'll admit, pronouns in your bio automatically says something to me, no question about it. I mean, that's an issue that is just, from the Christian worldview, there aren't any questions to be had.

So anyway, but eventually, I tracked down the article. I did not even know what in the world that was. I mean, it was so completely out there that I was just like, what? And it goes after, I mean, the left has no limits.

Remember back in the Clinton days when people started talking about the politics of personal destruction? That seems like a long time ago. We have gone so far beyond that. People on the left, there are no limits.

They will say and do anything as long as it promotes their agenda and their perspective. We know that politically now. We see that in our nation right now. I mean, every time I see anyone speaking for the current regime, as long as their lips are moving, I know they're lying through their teeth and they're smiling.

And the facts will be exactly opposite of what they're saying, but they don't care. Everything that's going on right now, oh, it's all Russia. You had a 513 increase before the whole thing with Russia started, and it's all Russia's fault.

No. Everybody knows, some of us were warning a long time ago that these people will destroy this nation. They will destroy its economy. They will destroy its energy production. They will destroy its military.

They will destroy it morally, ethically, legally, every possible way. We have a completely open border. We're being invaded by literal armies every month from the South. And they just sit there because that's what they want to do.

They're the enemies of, we have been taken over by our enemies. I don't know how long the ship will stay on the surface before it just sinks beneath the waves, but we've been taken over by our enemies and our enemies are in charge.

And they're being run by people outside this country, in my opinion. And you got to understand something. Let me just mention this in passing. What these people have said in the past, what these people have said openly is that they want you living in a box eating bugs if you happen to still be alive and haven't been killed off by wars, famine, and everything else.

If you happen to still be around, they want you living in a box eating bugs. You do not get to go where you want to go. You do not get to have any more energy than they allow you to have. You do not get to have the freedom that comes from association with other people, communication with other people.

These people want to enslave everyone in the world, not just people in United States. The World Economic Forum should be called the World Enslavement Foundation or the Woke Enslavement Foundation, whatever you, however you want to put it, because they're behind all this stuff.

They're putting out videos and books saying what they want to do. And yes, I agree with a video that I saw a couple days ago. I think Klaus Schwab, when you think about it, he is the quintessential Bond villain.

And that other guy he's got that we showed the video of him talking about hacking humans and stuff, he's his mad scientist. And they're exactly what you'd expect them to be. They wear the very clothes they're supposed to wear.

They've got the accents they're supposed to have. It's almost like it was purposeful because no one's ever gonna believe this if these people really look like Bond villains, that they are Bond villains, but they are.

They're right there in front of us. It's astonishing. And we just, and it's, people say, well, what can we do? I don't know. I don't know, but we have the Bond villains and what they're trying to do is enslave us all and they're working on it and they're succeeding.

They're succeeding. Anyway, sorry about that digression out there. Just by the way, just by, now I have to use code language here because we're on what we're on. You won't find this out in regular media because we don't have journalists anymore, anywhere.

I don't care if it's Fox or whatever it is. Nobody's out there. I mean, okay, there are some, but they're the, you have to go searching for them and then frequently the only place they get published is places that publish other weird stuff.

And so we're just, all of us are in the same boat. We're like, it sounds like it'd be really bad, but I mean, there are some sources out there that I ended up seeing linked by somebody else. And so I started following it for a while and then I'm like, what are these people talking about?

This is weird. And found out they're anti-Semitic and all the rest of this kind of weird wacko stuff. So there, look, there are wackos everywhere. There are wackos on the right, wackos on the left. Sometimes I think one side plants wackos on the other side just to make the other side look bad.

But anyway, one thing you will not hear because as I said, it's hard to find journalists anymore. The United Kingdom, our good British friends, the Brits love to keep records of things, you know? And so unlike many other nations, including your own, they're still putting out all of the records and the numbers concerning a certain recent sickness.

No, no, no, no, I'm not talking about cookies yet. This is a sickness. It's just a sickness. I won't mention what the sickness is. But did you know that there are more people dying in England of this particular sickness now than there were a year ago?

And in England now, at least 95 of the population has eaten the cookies. And they estimate that 99 of the population has antibodies due primarily to the cookies or having survived without cookies, if you get my meaning.

More people are dying now per week than a year ago. Think about that for a second. That's right when the cookies rolled out and they've been everywhere. And what's going on is there are a lot of people are going, yeah, we told you it was going to happen.

This isn't happening in nations that used other kinds of cookies that are not genetic, but it's happening in all the Western countries that used the super technical genetic cookies. And basically what the cookies have done is they've destroyed herd immunity.

Wow, gosh, you'd think that would be front headline news. You'd think that there would be people calling for inquiries because you could go back and you could prove this person said this would happen and this person said this would happen.

There were entire articles that said that if you do it this way, you're not going to have a full cookie response in the body. And yet it was shoved on us and those people got fired. And you would think that there would be entire inquiries going on in the halls of Congress, but no, Ukraine, that's all there is to it.

Now, you just go, what is going on? Anyhow, sorry, how did I get from there? Okay, so we go back to what happens. The story comes out about voting and an article is published in one of these Baptist news services.

Here's just one sentence from it. R .L. Stoller, a child liberation theologian. Now, if you're sitting there going, I've never heard of a child liberation theologian, join the club. A child liberation theologian who advocates for survivors of abuse details how Balcom's comment.

Now, this was, everybody knows, this was the viper in a diaper comment from long, long ago, where Vody had said, people who don't believe in original sin don't have children, that's a viper in a diaper.

The angry cry happens early, the demanding cry happens early, the stiffening of the body, that happens early, so on and so forth. He says, Stoller, a child liberation theologian who advocates for survivors of abuse details how Balcom's comment was born from a theology that combines the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity with a complementarian doctrine of patriarchy in order to position men as animal control and police officers over their children.

Stoller notes that according to Balcom, parents must treat their children as criminals deserving of restraint, must expect and see the worst in their children, should assume children are disagreeing because they are naturally covetous and murderous, and must also threaten their children with eternal torture in the flames of hell, end quote.

I'm reading this. There is nothing journalistic about this. It is, if it was a aircraft, it would have two left wings. This author wouldn't know how to write a fair piece if his life depended on it. It's a hit piece.

It's selective, it's unfair, it's biased, prejudiced. Everything that yellow journalism is, it is. And what's amazing is the people who publish it go, it's perfectly fair, this is wonderful, this is great.

They can't even see it. They can't even see it. I looked up this Stoller guy, and he's very proud of the fact that he has been quoted by Julie Ingersoll in Building God's Kingdom and by Kristen Cobes-Dumais in Jesus and John Wayne, both cited his research.

He's a co-founder of the viral website, Homeschoolers Anonymous. He's an anti-homeschooler. That's who these people are quoting and citing. And so I eventually looked up the author of this article, Rick Pidcock.

And so I made some comments, and last night I noticed an article came out on Baptist News that quoted one of my comments. I'm glad they saw it. That means they're accountable for it. But someone else on Facebook sent me some material from this Rick Pidcock's Facebook page.

And lo and behold, over a year ago, here is this article about his what? Deconstruction. Yes, his deconstruction. Now let's remember, deconstruction comes from Derrida. It is a term that, what's going on now?

And again, bless his heart, John Cooper from Skillet has been taking a tremendous amount of heat because he made a comment at one of his concerts that we need to declare war on deconstruction. And people like Phil Vischer, you know, VeggieTales, the also the guy with the two and a half left wings.

They did a response to that and John's responded to their response. And John's finding out what it's like to live in my world these days. It's a little bit different than the other world, but it's tougher for him because I don't have record companies that want me to keep my mouth shut.

So I get to say whatever I wanna say and John is still saying what he needs to say, but as a result has a whole lot more coming back in him than I ever would. Anyhow, pray for him in those areas. But the people on the left are trying to say that deconstruction can simply be rethinking the things that you were raised with as a child in Christianity.

And it's a spectrum, you see. Folks, rethinking what you were taught as a child and coming to understand your faith in a more mature way is called sanctification, okay? We've all gone through it. I was raised in a Christian family.

I had to mature. I had to analyze what I was taught. And there were things that I was taught as a child I do not believe any longer. They were traditions. They weren't biblical. But I didn't throw everything out, which is what you have an emergent church and stuff like that.

That's called sanctification. What we're seeing people doing like this Rick Pidcock is not sanctification, it's called apostasy. It's called abandoning the faith, walking away from the faith, rejecting the faith, then turning around and attacking the faith.

That's completely different than talking about sanctification, okay? So deconstruction is apostasy. So let me read you just two things and we'll get on to some other stuff. Let me just read you two things from Rick Pidcock from his, these are his own words, from his own Twitter feed.

All right, I am so thankful for cold liquids. It's so good. I've got to read something, I can't look over there. Mr., you know, Mr. Director Man, you know, if you want to get yourself on those director seats, you know, and the little thing to yell at people, so you just go ahead and I'll ignore you just as much then.

Anyway, listen to this. Evangelical worship lyrics celebrate justice through violence. Evangelical worship lyrics celebrate justice through violence. So they are formed through the power of community, music and technology to be gleeful about God's violent judgment on Jesus, which is what they think their neighbors deserve.

Eventually that takes a toll on the soul. Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Where have you heard that before? How many years ago was it now? I'd say minimally 10 years ago, minimally 10 years ago, probably 15.

We talked about on this program the words of a guy named Steve Chalk, Steve Chalk from England. And Steve Chalk claimed to be an evangelical, but he made a name for himself by talking about the idea of penal substitutionary atonement as cosmic child abuse, cosmic child abuse.

That's what this is about. Now, that perspective has been prevalent in mainline liberal Protestantism for decades, but we normally don't listen to those churches because we all know they're dying anyways.

And it's like, why bother? But when it appears in this context, it's important for us to understand there are so many people who have such a twisted understanding of penal substitutionary atonement, Trinitarian theology.

The reality that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are working in perfect and complete harmony in accomplishing God's will and God's purpose in creation, that the Son takes the position that He takes.

And in fact, the description in scripture, and keep me from getting into what I see is some real Trinitarian weaknesses in our day because they're unbiblical. But the terminology of scripture is that the Son makes Himself of no reputation.

The Son does this voluntarily, uses the reflexive pronoun. And whatever your Trinitarian theology, if your Trinitarian theology is not big enough to fit biblical categories, then you need a better Trinitarian theologist.

Mentioned that in passing. But these folks don't understand the Trinity, they don't understand penal substitutionary atonement, they don't understand what the Bible's teaching. And so evangelical worship lyrics celebrate justice through violence.

So rather than the Son freely taking what is necessary, see, what's underneath all of this is the rejection of the idea that the breaking of God's law brings death. No, that's, God just loves you the way you are, right?

Just the way you are. And this leads, of course, to complete redefinitions of what the cross is all about. And some of them will, there are some stopping places along the way. Once you become an apostate, you look for stopping places along the way.

And so you can jump into the Christus-Victor model, you can jump into the ransom model. And as I've said many times before, there's elements of truth to both of those, but they're only partially true.

And if you separate them from penal substitutionary atonement they become untrue. But don't jump into one of those along the way. But eventually, just abandon it because there's no reason to stay there, there's no foundation left.

To be gleeful about God's violent judgment on Jesus. Anyone who can confuse the thankfulness that the Christian heart has in recognizing what was due to my sin and the taking of that punishment by my Savior in my place.

And of course, recognizing that this all flows from the decree of the Father in the first place. Realizes that this man either never understood what he professed, which is a possibility, or is just simply so utterly self-deceived in his rebellion that he's just, he can't speak to anything truthfully about it.

Elsewhere, he says, and I think this is a continuation from that previous tweet. Think about this. Actually, he's actually responding to someone who just basically said, look, it looks like you've been given over, your heart's hardened, so on and so forth.

What kind of a God would pour concrete into people's hearts, angrily set them on fire for eternity for their heart being a heart of stone that he poured, and then expect others to sing to him about it?

Now, we know this is a person who openly says, I have deconstructed. It's an apostate. How many Christians will say the same thing against the Bible's doctrine of man's sinfulness? I've heard provisionists and Arminians say almost the exact same words.

Almost the exact same words. Yeah, here's, oh, it's right in front of me. This was the tweet he was responding to. Rick, you're in serious trouble. Your soul is kicking and screaming because God is actively exposing you.

Please understand you're being given over to God's wrath. I still will pray the Lord, crack open your heart of stone, but right now, I'm only seeing more concrete being poured in, so that's worthy. Now, obviously, I don't know who this person is, but it is a biblical concept that when a heart of stone continues in its rebellion, it's hardened.

Remember Pharaoh? Oh, you know, God hardens hearts, and Rick Pidcock no longer believes in the God of the Bible by any stretch of the imagination, and his response to that was, I'm not the one being exposed here.

Your God is, and God is not capitalized. I have read the tuperations of my faith by apostates for a long time, and that's what this is. That's what this is. But he's writing for, what was it, Baptist Global News, Baptist News, whatever, it's part of the leftist Baptist people out there, and that's the stuff that you're going to find from these folks, so there you go.

That's what we're up against. Hey, all right, now, last time we were together, I messed up, that's all there is to it. I was doing pretty good. I was juggling the audio and finding the clips I wanted to play, and playing them long enough, and then you switch over, and I'd done all right for a while, and then I think it may have been because we were going to a text that I've gone over, I've written books about, and gone over, over, and over, and over, and over again.

I got lost, and I even circled a finite verb and called it a participle, and then I'm like, wait a minute, where am I? And we have, by the way, for those of you following the technological evolution, and for those of you secretly going, oh, I wonder if we could get one of those for us, because I know who you are, because you've written to me.

You've written to me, and you've said we want one of those, and we're talking about the flip board here. Here's, just real quick, just a little tech thing. We just, you'll notice, I'm not sure if you can notice this, there's only one line going into my computer right now.

The HDMI cable is down there someplace. So, Rich discovered the Apple Play portion. I guess it's inside the software of the flip? How come you hadn't seen that before, Rich? I don't know. Just all you get, I don't know, okay, fine.

I hadn't seen it either, but, you know, anyway. So, what that has allowed us to do is to change the resolution. Because what you need to understand is, one of the things I was struggling with is there was no way I could see the little box down at the corner, which is where you enter your verse references.

That's because what was being displayed was, what was it, 3 ,000, 3840. So, I could make the fonts nice and big so everybody could see them, but you now had all the stuff around it, including the entry box, at 3 ,840, and I don't know, what is it, 60 inches across, like that?

So, 65 inches. So, it wouldn't matter, there you go. See that little guy down there? So, now watch what I can do now. See how much bigger that is now? Now, I can see that on the screen over there. It says John 635.

I can sort of make that out from this angle, but it's tough. At least now I know when I've got it selected, okay? So, that's gonna help some, but we've made some changes, and what I've done right here is, I have put this, I've put accordance on that side, and I can now draw notes over here.

I've taken the English off, but we're normally talking about the original languages anyways, and I can mark in the text, write notes over here, and we'll continue. The only thing I can't do yet, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to do, unless I go back to a Windows, and those of you who were around when I first started, you know that I've struggled far more with having to deal with Windows than anything else, so I'm not going back to that, but I can't manipulate the programs directly on the screen.

I can do that in Windows, but I can't in the current situation, but we're close, and I can work my way around it. Anyway, on the last program, I felt so super badly, because this is a text that means so much to me.

Like I said, I've written entire books on the subject, drawn by the father, chapters in God's sovereign grace, the potter's freedom, all the rest of that kind of stuff, and what are you looking at? It looked like you were signaling for me to look at my phone or something like that.

No, okay, all right. Anyway, oh, that's what it was. Oh, okay. Got to come up. We need two arrows right above your head. One points that way, one points that way, and that way, we'll get this figured out, yeah.

Go steal some of those lighted things from the Southwest guys that are doing the dances out there, getting the planes in and stuff. I guess they don't do that anymore. I guess a lot of people are like, the fun of flying Southwest ended with COVID.

So anyway, I just felt really badly about how that whole thing went. I just felt it was not clear because I was struggling and I got lost and I couldn't tell where I was and I made mistakes. And so I want to make sure this is clear because we'll eventually get to it.

In fact, I understand that a third video has been posted. I've downloaded it and converted it to MP3, haven't listened to it. But I really want to do that. And there's, I wonder what he was doing with him.

Cooper just sent me a picture with Dennis Prager. It's like, oh, that's cool. That's cool, I like Dennis. Dennis is a great guy, needs the gospel. He needs to, great guy. Anyway, so I want to take another run at this and hopefully do it a little bit more clearly and clarify rather than confuse.

John 6 and the Claim That Jesus’ Drawing Was Only for His Earthly Ministry

So if you recall, we were responding to the claims of David Paulman regarding John 6. He is a student at Trinity. Leighton Flowers is a professor at Trinity, probably where the connection is. So the assertion that was being made is that John 644, which I'd quoted, no one is able to come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day, right?

So what I was discussing was inability, the inability of man to come to the son apart from the effective action of the father. The assertion that is being made, and he's going to expand upon this in the future, so I'm sure that I'm giving him plenty of time to hone his position, I suppose, is that John 644 is not relevant today because it is contextually limited to the ministry of Jesus.

That there was a hardening that had to take place amongst the Jews for the ministry of Christ to take place, for the sacrifice to be made, and that after the cross, John 12, verse 32, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto myself.

And so the assertion being made is that the drawing in John 6 is identical to the drawing in John 12, and that it will be a universal drawing in the future, but currently it is not a universal drawing.

Now, illusion was made to John 637 where a present tense verb was used, and that's where I made the mistake in trying to get there. As we will see, that present tense verb is part of a subclause that is controlled by a future tense, and there are other present tense participles in the context that raise insuperable problems for the exegesis that is being offered.

But in John 637, all the Father is giving me will come to me, and the one coming to me I will not cast out. Now, there are lots of questions that just immediately present themselves, and we did cover this last time, but I want to do it in a little bit more cogent fashion.

Does this mean the Father is giving certain people to the Son, the people who worship Him? So there are people who are able to come to the Son because they have enabled God by coming to God the Father.

It almost sounds, both in Flowers and in Pullman's perspective, that coming, that worshiping the Father is a different category than worshiping the Son. Pullman seems to maybe hesitate a little bit more than Flowers does at that point.

It'd be interesting to hear a conversation between the two of them on it, see if they just go ahead and say, yeah, we're presenting the same thing. But it sounds to me as if you can, you are able to come to the Father, but you're not able to come to the Son.

And I'm left going, why is that? If you are able to hear what the Father has to say and be a worshiper of the Father because you humble yourself or whatever it might be, then why couldn't you come to the Son?

And I've not heard an answer to that yet. Does that mean that the apostles were already worshipers of God in the way that other Jews were not? Lazarus, Mary, Martha, Nicodemus, the woman at the well? That one's a problem.

Because obviously the woman at the well had not given herself in worship to the Father. The blind man? See, these are all in John. We don't even have to go to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We'd have to go to Matthew, Mark, and Luke because it's the same timeframe.

So if the idea is that during Jesus' ministry, you come to Jesus differently than after Jesus' ministry, that there is a hardening so that Jesus can be crucified, but now that he's crucified after that, then there's prevenient grace for everybody, right?

Well, that would mean that this isn't the hardening of Romans, is it? Because Romans 9, 10, 11, you have a discussion of that hardening that takes place and the time of the Gentiles. And yet Paul himself says that there is a lima, a remnant that is saved who aren't hardened.

So that can't be that because that doesn't fit with how this interpretation from the gospels is being put together. And then the idea that, well, John 12, 32 tells us that there is going to be a day someday when the cross will draw all men.

The problem is the Bible doesn't teach that. After that time period in Jesus' ministry, Paul writes and says that the word of the cross is what? Scandalon, foolishness. It's the stench of death to those who are perishing, right?

That's Paul's teaching. So if we believe that the Bible is consistent with itself, then the idea that the cross draws all men, I mean, we just read the words of a guy today writing for Baptist News that finds the message of the cross to be repulsive.

So that doesn't fit. So how does all of that work? Well, I think the problem comes with the assertion that was made. And so let's go ahead and go over here. I always like to make sure that we know that we have a context.