April 29, 2021 Show with Dr. James R. White on “A Persecution Survival Guide”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own questions and now here's your host

Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 29th day of April 2021 and I'm always thrilled to have one of my favorite guests back on the program.

His name is Dr. James R. White, he's an author, New Testament Greek scholar, apologist, and pastor at Apologia Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

He's also the co -founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries and the host of the webcast titled

The Dividing Line and today I'm going to read our theme as if I were

Alex Trebek. Fingerprints, light from the empty tomb, established in the heavens, a cloud of witnesses, faithful promises, what are the five foundations for winning the battle in your own mind, a persecution survival guide.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to the show Dr. James R. White. Well it's good to be with you

Chris except for the fact that Alex Trebek is dead. That sort of, you know, is a sad thing because I liked

Alex, probably by the time he died the smartest man in the world if he remembered even a quarter of all the questions he asked over the years.

But no, I'm not sure how to characterize this particular topic and just so that people know,

I preached a sermon on this subject at Apologia Church a week ago,

Sunday night, and that's why I suggested the discussion of it maybe a little more in -depth or from a few other different perspectives, but we've had to preach a number of sermons over the past year or so that I would not have really thought of in, certainly in the year 2000 or 2010.

If I had been a little more eagle -eyed, maybe in 2018 or something like that, it seems to me like Francis Schaefer saw stuff like this coming when

I was a kid, so I have to keep that kind of thing in mind. But a lot of people, a lot of Christians are being forced to think about things that are not overly pleasant, are not the type of things that make people jump up and down and clap their hands and go, boy

I sure do like listening to this program, unfortunately. But we really, really have been forced to think about these things, and in some ways we're behind the ball, it's a little bit late, but in other ways, better late than never, we've got to get started on it now, while we still have the freedom to talk about it, think about it, and that's sort of what the subject of that particular sermon was.

And an excellent sermon. In fact, I had trouble finding it on the Apology of Church website.

I don't know if there's a trick involved. A friend of mine actually found it for me.

And by the way, thanks Rich, whatever you did, you stopped the echo. A friend found it for me and sent it to me, and it's an excellent sermon, but how can our listeners easily get a hold of that?

Well, I didn't have any problem finding it. I'm not sure...

I clicked sermons on the Apology of Church website. Oh, no, no, no, no, that's, okay, no, that's...

Well, it seems like a normal thing to do. Yeah, you would think that, but that would require the website to actually be current or relevant.

You don't go to apologyofchurch .com, you go to youtube .com, you go to the

Apology of Church, Apology of Videos channel, and that's where everything is.

That's where all the sermons are, that's where Apology of Radio is, and everything else. And so, just click on videos, and it would still be one of the top five or six there, because it's only been a week and a half since it was posted.

And you've simply titled it Five Foundations. Right, right, yeah, I would just...

And I'm not sure what they titled it, to be honest with you. That's the way I saw it, when I finally got it.

Yeah, it's live -streamed now on YouTube and Facebook. For now, I mean,

I'm... It's just gonna take them a certain amount of time to get far enough down the list to nail us, but we say all sorts of things that they've banned other people for saying, so it's just a matter of time, we all know that.

But that's where it is for now, and it goes along with other sermons over the past number of months that we've dealt with issues of civil disobedience and civil government and the

Church and fears of sovereignty and things that we in America got to sort of ignore for a long period of time, to be honest with you.

But we can't any longer. I don't know if you listened to the presentation last evening by the ostensible

President of the United States. Unfortunately, yes. Or a facsimile thereof.

And as I think about the things that were said, as I think about spending on a level that would have made

Bill Clinton blush, and not too many things made him blush, that he never could have even conceived of, honestly.

And the social pushing of the

Equality Act, transgenderism, the profaning of marriage, all these things being pressed as the just absolute moral good that everyone needs to buy into.

The fact that fundamentally we were listening to what would have been recognized only 20 years ago as pretty much bold -faced, not just socialism, but communism, being presented by the

President of the United States. Those people who read history know and understand what that kind of giant governmental presence has produced in the past.

I mentioned in the sermon the fact that a number of years ago, when

I still had the opportunity of traveling and was teaching in Berlin, I had one day where my host took me to the

Stasi prison in the old East Berlin. In fact, the school was located in what we would call

East Berlin. And let's just be honest, there's a lot of people in our society in the

United States today that don't even understand what East or West Berlin would even represent. They were not alive.

They were born after the wall fell, so they don't understand East Germany, West Germany, East Berlin, West Berlin, all those relevant issues in regards to communism.

But this was in the communist sector, and it was a building that people disappeared into and rarely came back out of.

And you would just simply disappear in the middle of the night, and your apartment would be rented to somebody else by the next day, and your name would just simply disappear.

And as I toured that facility and read about its history, I had never heard of it until I started going to Germany.

There hadn't been almost any discussion of it over here. But as you can go into some of the cells, and you'd see that there was a single light bulb in this extremely dark cell without windows.

And the thing that I remember very, very clearly was the fact that when you went out into the hallway, there were stoplights up in the ceiling.

And there was red and green, and that was my recollection anyways, but there was a lighting system that would make sure that when you were transported from your cell, basically to your session with your quote -unquote counselor, in other words brainwasher, torturer, whatever you want to call that person, who is meant to break you down and to either extract information from you, or if you're one of those terrible, horrible people that just don't believe what the government tells you to believe, to force you to do so a la

Big Brother Orwell 1984, the only person you would see would be the guard and that counselor.

And so they're moving lots of prisoners around. So they literally had a system set in place to where you would never see another prisoner, because they recognized that even that brief period of eye contact between yourself and another person who was suffering like you were could undo weeks and months of the conditioning that they were trying to put you through.

And so that isolation, that kind of idea, I read a couple weeks ago about a

Chinese Christian from a house church. They had put his story in,

I think it was like Radio Free Asia or whatever something like that is called, and he was talking about these portable torture situations that the

CCP will set up where they will use basements or whatever it is that they can find in a certain area and come after a particular house church and they will arrest the people and they will separate them and they will isolate them.

And he spent, I think it was ten months, inside, no windows, two meals a day, beatings, being broken down.

And the whole thing was to, from the CCP's perspective, it used to be back in the days of the

New Testament, it was Christ or Caesar. Well, now it's

Christ or Xi Jinping. And they, I mean, literally, I've read numerous reports that what the

Chinese demand of their people is this religious reverence and worship of the state, giving thanks to the state for everything that they have and wanting to see the de -furtherance of the state, the state, the state.

And, you know, Solzhenitsyn, C .S. Lewis, Chesterton, all sorts of people have told us for a very, very long time that if there is no

God above the state, the only God will be the state. And that's what you have of necessity in communist systems.

In fact, have you seen the movie, which actually I'm quite pleasantly surprised that Hollywood would have produced and released this movie at this time in our history, but The Courier?

The Courier? No, I haven't. No, The Courier. Oh, The Courier. No, I haven't. Oh, you've got to see it.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a, it's a true story about a British spy for Great Britain during the

Cold War in the Soviet Union and his subsequent arrest and so on and the mind torture that he experienced.

But I strongly recommend the movie. It's excellent. It's true. And like I said, it's quite interesting and ironic that Hollywood, known for its left leaning on everything, in fact, the only movie

I could think of that's anti -communist other than this movie, it goes back to Red Dawn.

I can't even remember an anti -communist movie other than that. Well, I thought

Hunt for Red October was good, too. Oh, yeah. That's right. Anyway, but yeah, so we know these things are happening and we know why they're happening and we understand hopefully the worldview that is presenting this kind of stuff.

And that's why when I wander into social media and I see what's being said in our society and I see, well, for example, if you're familiar with Ibram Kendi and the work that is being done in promoting critical race theory.

Yeah, I've heard it, unfortunately. Yeah, and how Jamar Tisby has gone to work for him and that kind of stuff.

He made a statement about how if you deny your racism, it's the greatest evidence of your racism.

This complete ability to accuse and convict in one sentence.

And this is, if you're listening to the responses to Senator Scott's comments last night after the

President's speech, you see the exact same type of thing in this context.

Accusation and condemnation in one sentence. There's no argument.

There's no discussion. It is guilty without chance of even being proven innocent.

This is how the left has operated. Anyone who, you know, a couple of weekends ago

I was doing a long ride and listening to a history of the great purge under Stalin.

And it's like, oh, wow. It's like MSNBC's always existed, except back then it was called

Pravda. Nothing changes. The playbook is the same. You take over the educational system.

You get people ignorant of what's happened in the past. It just keeps repeating itself over and over again, which is why so many people here in the

United States who came from or old enough to have come from Eastern Europe when it was still under Soviet domination, they saw this coming.

They're like, wait a minute. We've heard all this stuff before. We know what these people are up to. Where are we going to go now?

We've got no place to go. We thought we had come to the Bastion of Freedom. Anyway, all of that is the background to why

I felt a very strong compulsion, even though I'm supposed to be continuing a series on baptism at the moment, and I will eventually, but I just felt a really, really strong compulsion to, first and foremost, obviously,

I've been called to minister in that particular place as one of four pastors, and so that's your first goal, your first issue.

But I know that I desired that that sermon would be heard by people far and wide, which it has been, was basically,

I don't want my people, I don't want someone who's been under our preaching for a period of time to end up in one of these situations and not have any idea where they can start to try to survive a situation like this.

Because, you know, we've been joking for a little while now, hey, I'll save you a bunk in the gulag, etc., etc.,

etc., and certainly there is that aspect of things, and I don't want my grandchildren in gulags, but if you're in a prison and you're allowed to meet with other

Christians and things like that, that's one context, and it's a terrible context, but at least you're around other

Christians. The tendency, however, of the left is to, it took the totalitarian mind, and again, anybody who's read 1984 understands this, because this is what the point was.

Winston, it would have been quite easy to just simply shoot any dissident and get it over with.

That's not what tyrants want. That's not what totalitarians want. They want to break you to get you to love

Big Brother, and then they'll kill you, because you don't have any worth to them. But the idea is that level of control.

You have to break the person and conform them to the image of the state, and then you can get rid of them.

Then you can make them disappear. We're seeing this in communist China, obviously,

North Korea, obviously. It happened under the Soviet system as well, and we're seeing it coming into a soft geopolitical corporate methodology right now, but it can't stay there, and it won't stay there.

It will grow fangs and teeth very, very quickly. It's a little bit like Monty Python's cuddly rabbit.

If you're not male and in your 50s, you have no idea what we're talking about.

Probably not, unfortunately, but for those who do know what I'm talking about, when you first see the little rabbit, he looks very cuddly, and he's just hopping around doing his thing, and then he kills a bunch of people.

That's sort of what's going to be going on with the future as far as the corporations are concerned.

The issue that I want to do is I want to lay out, and you already read the five foundations. I'm not smart enough to have made them rhyme or easy to remember or anything like that.

I realize that would have been the better way to do it. It sounded actually like a MacGyver of theology with that, the way you tied all these strange things together, but they made sense after you went through.

Yeah, well, I hope so. Basically, just something that someone could maybe put in the fly leaf of their

Bible, something that they could remember and start working on now, so that if you find yourself, especially for modern people, especially younger people,

I can't imagine the difficulty of all of a sudden finding yourself in absolute silence without a phone, without a computer, without another human being around.

I mean, even as old as my children are now in their mid -30s, they've almost never lived life without sound around them constantly.

And it's that silence. It's just you and the darkness that makes a lot of people suicidal very, very quickly and makes them willing to say or do anything to break that silence and that isolation.

And even that Christian man that I mentioned from the Chinese house church talked about throwing himself against the wall to try to injure himself.

I mean, thoughts of suicide coming to your mind very, very quickly because you have no one with whom to speak.

It's really, really challenging. And so what I did is I sought to put together those five foundations, things to be thought of.

I thought maybe you could look at your hand and go, well, there's five, and so you've got these things. I don't know, some way of trying to think about these things.

But obviously, just even memorizing what they refer to isn't going to be enough because they require discipline and preparation beforehand.

And so this is stuff that we need to be doing now. Our lives continue to distract us from these things.

I've said many times I feel like a schizophrenic because, on the one hand, you see so clearly what is coming, the playbook, what the result is going to be, the fact you're going to have two systems of law, you know, those for the elite, i .e.,

the party, and for everybody else, and there's no justice. And finally, eventually, justice will be understood again.

It's been co -opted right now to mean all sorts of things that justice never actually meant, but eventually everyone's going to realize, wow, okay, yeah, there is something called justice, and we ain't getting it anymore because we gave it up.

We gave up the foundations you have to have to be able to have justice in the first place. So you read them.

The five things they came up with were fingerprints was number one. Two, light from the empty tomb.

So I suppose you could see your fingerprints in the light from the empty tomb. That's the first two.

Establish in the heavens, number three. A cloud of witnesses, number four. So a cloud of witnesses could get in the way of your seeing what's established in the heavens.

I'm trying to find some way of putting these things together. And then the fifth is faithful promises.

In fact, we're going to go through all of those foundations when we come back from our first break, one by one, if the

Lord gives us the time to do that. If anybody has a question, send it to Chris Arnzen at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence in your country of residence. If you live outside the USA, only remain anonymous.

If your question involves a personal and private matter, don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. James R.

White. And we're looking forward to your questions at Chris Arnzen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Don't go away. I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

My friend Chris Arnzen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I are headed down to Atlanta, Georgia once again for the

G3 Conference. This year's G3 will be held Thursday, September 30th through Saturday, October 2nd on the theme,

Christ is Supreme Over All. I'll be joined by over 20 other speakers and musicians to lead in the worship of God through preaching, teaching and singing, including

John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, Conrad M. Bayway, Darrell Bernard Harrison and Virgil Walker.

For details, visit g3conference .com. That's g3conference .com. Chris Arnzen and I hope to see you

September 30th through October 2nd at G321. This is James White reminding you that Christ is supreme over all.

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We are back with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Today we are discussing something very important and very timely.

Five Foundations for Winning the Battle in Your Own Mind, a Persecution Survival Guide. And before you go into those five foundations one by one, just to make some things clear with our audience.

Number one, you have dismantled or disproven the stereotype of post -millennialists which you have recently made that news public that you are indeed a post -millennialist now.

But you've dismantled the stereotype that post -millennialists just believe things are going to get better and better and better and better in an upward arrow that never points down.

Because you have, although ultimately you have a great optimism for the future as all post -millennials do.

You don't have great optimism necessarily for the United States or things happening right now, right? Yeah, you know, the issue, this has been a part of the discussion of eschatology and things like that has been looking at all the great errors historically in making eschatological pronouncements have been due to trying to create an eschatology based upon current events.

And so I've taught church history long enough to know that there have been all sorts of times down through the history of the church when there were periods of great blessing and things looked like everything was going wonderful.

And then lots more times when just the opposite was the case. And if you try to create an eschatology from that, it's going to change from generation to generation.

It's never going to be consistent with the rest of your systematic theology. And so my adoption of post -millennialism was simply due to my looking at the consistency of the promises that God has made in Christ and to Christ.

Psalm 110, stretch forth your scepter, rule amongst your enemies, 1

Corinthians 15. So I started from the top and came downward rather than doing what

I had done during most of my life, at least as a younger person. And that is, let's look at what the possible application of a particular apocryphal creature in Revelation is in comparison to Daniel or something like that.

That's down here at the bottom and trying to reason up from that. And so in that situation, someone might say, yeah, if you're a post -millennialist, then you should figure there's not going to be any persecution and everything else.

And that's just simply not the case. Anyone who looks back over church history knows that there have been periods of great judgment where God has brought judgment against societies.

And this is a part of the process of putting enemies under Christ's feet. And I'll tell you what my thinking right now is.

It just seems to me, and I'm hearing other people saying similar things, there's never been a greater enemy to the claims of Christ than the current form of secularism in Western society.

Even the Romans believed there were at least gods, that there was something beyond merely the human plane.

And when you think about what it is that is being said by secular humanism, it is the most anti -Christ mindset you could possibly have.

We are literally teaching our children. And according to the

Biden regime, and whoever wrote the stuff for Biden, because I don't think

Joe Biden has almost anything to do with any of this, but he's just a placekeeper. But according to the Biden regime, now the government wants to have your kids from the time they're three years old onward.

And of course they make that sound like this is a great, wonderful thing, we're doing this so you can work for 60 hours a week instead of just 50.

That's a real positive thing for a family. But teaching children from that age onward that they are an accident, that they are a cosmic accident, that they are fizzing chemicals, they are stardust, that they are ugly bags of mostly water, whatever terminology you want to use that has become popular.

You are an accident, you have no transcendent meaning, you were never created, you will never be judged. And by the way,

I'm starting a punk rock band due to a phrase you used in a recent sermon that you borrowed from Star Trek.

Ugly Bags of Mostly Water. Ugly Bags of Mostly Water, yeah, I think that would be a great band name, but I think it probably is copyrighted.

And if I know the Star Trek franchise, they will be beaming you off the planet very, very quickly if you try that.

But it's true, I mean, that was one of my favorite episodes of The Next Generation, was there were these silicon -based,

I think it was silicon -based life forms in sand. And if you were sort of a hive mind that lived in sand and you looked at human beings, what are they going to look like?

They're going to look like ugly bags of mostly water. And so that's how they referred to human beings.

Well, in the secular worldview, that's all there is. That's all you are. And eventually, you spring a leak, the water leaks out, and that's it.

There's no judgment, there's no purpose, there's no future. All those things are gone.

Well, that is the exact opposite message of what the cross and the empty tomb say.

If we are ugly bags of mostly water, if we are nothing but fizzing chemicals, then there is nothing to the empty tomb.

There is nothing to the Christian message. It's all empty, it's all a fiction, there's nothing positive about it at all.

It's false hope from beginning to end. And so, if 1 Corinthians 15 is right, and he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet, this is an enemy that must be crushed.

And it must be crushed in totality. And so,

I'm simply sitting back going, alright, given those biblical promises, given that reality, is it possible that there could be an even lengthy period of extreme darkness where this anti -God, anti -Christ, and anti -human worldview is given free reign?

Until, as it must do, it destroys itself and becomes such a watchword that this kind of foolishness will never ever again enter into the hearts and minds of the children of men.

And I realize what I'm saying, because if communism killed 120 to 140 million people in the last century, given the technology that it has now, that could be amateurish.

As far as the number of people that could die under a globally communist, elitist, technocracy.

Now, do you think I'm being overreaching here when I say, because there are people, obviously, even our brothers in Christ, maybe even especially the

Reformed brothers and sisters, that think this kind of talk is crazy talk, it's conspiracy theory talk, it's dispensational talk.

About what? About the possibilities of what we're seeing as far as Marxism goes?

Yes, the takeover of this country that we view as being such a pristine land of liberty.

And when we think back to Nazi Germany, there were many, many

Jews who were too relaxed and complacent because this was the hub of the academy, this was the hub of the arts, this was the hub of science.

This was not a primitive country, and yet, look what happened.

I mean, it's amazing when you really think about what happened to Germany. And therefore, the

Jews, many of them, most of them actually, did not flee. Obviously, many started to try when it was too late, but isn't that something that should be a warning sign to all of us today, without being looked upon as nuts?

I just don't see, I don't understand why so many people today don't read history.

I understand why the younger generations, I understand public education, I understand the modern hubris that if you didn't have an iPad, you couldn't have ever done anything worthwhile or anything else like that in the past.

I get all of that, but adults should be able to recognize that it is important to see where we've been.

And if you would spend almost any time, just listen to some

Francis Schaeffer videos, for crying out loud, but if you would just spend any time looking at history, you'll be able to see the patterns.

You'll be able to see the repetition of the same forms of argumentation.

And as a Christian, with Romans 1 in your arsenal, in looking at the behavior of governments and the behavior of men, you should be able to see why tyranny keeps rising amongst men and has to be overthrown by people dedicated to a

Judeo -Christian worldview that man has created an image of God, and therefore there are certain things that follow from that.

There is the sanctity of life. There is the need for a rule of law. There is the need for due process. All the things that came from the

Christian worldview. That doesn't come from paganism. Even the close approximations to those concepts that came from, for example,

Roman culture, still did not get to the full expression that you have once Christianity begins to have its impact in those areas.

If we just would look at history, we would recognize that what we heard last night was very much in line with what took place under Lenin and then

Stalin and Mao and everything else. We would recognize when,

I don't know if you saw it, but right before it went on the air, I mentioned to Rich, there was a very funny tweet.

And I actually have, as you know, it took me into my 30s before I figured out what was funny.

You knew me when I was a straight -laced, very unfunny, conformed

Baptist guy that wasn't sure what to do with this crazy guy that was telling these funny stories at the beginning of the debate.

And was a little scared as to what might happen from that. I did see like an evolution, pardon that phrase, over the years between terrified and laughing hysterically.

Well, that's true. And that started, however, I listened to the first debate again recently on a ride.

And as Jerry started speaking, I flashed back. And no one else is going to get this, but I'll just mention it to you.

I flashed back to your face because I had told you. I had told you what

Jerry was going to say. Right at dinner, right at dinner before. At dinner beforehand, I said, he's going to come in, he's going to say this, this, this, and this.

And you looked at me like I was, like you were a little bit concerned about how tonight was going to go in light of what

I was saying. And then when he gets up there, and he almost did it word for word. I mean,

I had said he was going to do the David and Goliath thing. He did the David and Goliath thing. He said his books were packed away, and he said he hadn't had anybody die of coke.

And I think I nailed all of them. And he did the same thing with Eric Svensson, the same thing word for word. Well, there you go.

And so I see you standing in the back, and I had already noticed that some of the pressure was coming off you because the place was packed.

I mean, obviously you were really worried there could be 12 people there, but there weren't.

The place was packed. I see you in the back, and he starts talking, and I'm just looking at you.

And you're looking at me, and your eyes keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And at that point, I think that was where it was like, okay, it's going to be all right tonight. All right.

So how did we get on that? I don't know how we got on that. The tweet, the funny tweet, I can't find it here, but it was some press person took a picture of President Biden and the

First Lady on the White House lawn, and the President is picking one of those little dandelion -type things, which

I would think they would probably keep dandelions out of the White House lawn. But anyway, and the whole meme was, if you're really well -trained and you're paying very close attention, you might notice a slight difference in how the media treats the current inhabitant of the

White House and the previous inhabitant of the White House. Nice. And the understatement was just really, really, really good because they won't ask him any tough questions, and we know that the double standard is obvious, but the media is completely sold out to this.

There is no free media anymore, and if anyone tries to do that, you get censored.

And this is Pravda. We're seeing everything playing out in front of us.

And so I don't know why someone would have the idea. Well, okay, I do,

I guess. There are certain—there have been certain people who have been working for at least a decade in doing the groundwork to fundamentally disrupt the

Evangelical Church's response to this kind of stuff. So the people pushing the woke stuff, the people who have been doing this kind of stuff, they've been at this for a long time.

They didn't just happen to magically appear in key places in our seminaries overnight in 2018.

That started a long time ago. So you say, well, it's planned. Well, of course it's planned. I mean, duh.

It's the same—it's the exact same playbook that has been played over and over and over and over and over again.

And once—you know, when people are saying—I started talking about the Great Reset last year, and people are like, oh, man, this guy's—he's lost his mind.

What's wrong with this man? There are entire books published called The Great Reset by the people that are doing it.

That's not a conspiracy. It's just that a lot of people just don't know where to look. And I didn't know where to look either.

You're probably aware of the fact that, you know, for years before this, someone known to both of us by the name of Michael Fallon was telling me this was coming.

He saw it. He was in meetings where it was being talked about. And most of us looked at him like he was losing his noodle, and he's been spot on all the way along.

And, in fact, I remember years ago he told me, he said, James, you just watch. It's going to be public health issues.

It's going to be used. It's going to be some disease. It's going to be something. That's what's going to be used to fundamentally change our entire society.

Well, okay, Mike, whatever you say. Well, here we are, and that's not a conspiracy. That's just fact.

So, yeah, I know that there are those folks out there. Some of them do that because they're actually part of the movement, and others because they just can't believe that this is actually happening all around us.

And, hence, why in the world should anybody be talking about how a Christian can hold on to their faith under torture and isolation?

But, like I said, I just felt it was absolutely necessary to talk about that as unpleasant as it might be.

Yeah, and when we come back from our midway break, you can begin those foundations one by one, and perhaps you could preface it when we return on why you are focused in that message, that sermon, on the battle raging in our own minds or the minds of humans while they are being persecuted rather than the forces that are existing outside of us.

And, of course, the old saying is true that we can be our own worst enemies. So we could start with that, and then you can go through them one by one, and hopefully we'll have time to go through all of them.

But, everybody, if you want to send in a question, chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And be patient with us. This is a little longer than normal, this break, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. We'll be right back after these messages. Don't go away. Hi, I'm Phil Johnson, host and executive director of Grace to You, the media ministry of John MacArthur.

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That's solid -ground -books .com. Always mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio when making your purchase. Before we return to our discussion with James White, a couple of brief announcements.

You've been hearing us mention in some of the ads for the G3 conference that Votie Baucom is scheduled to be on the speaking roster.

Whether you know it or not, Votie Baucom had a serious health setback not long ago and is recovering from quadruple bypass surgery.

It is uncertain at this point whether he will be still featured on the speaking roster at the

G3 conference. We are hoping that still will be the case. I am certainly hoping that will be. But please pray for Votie Baucom's recovery, his full recovery, as my friend

Dr. Conrad Mbewe of Kabwatha Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa and African Christian University told me recently in an interview.

He contacts Votie every day and Votie is doing well in his recovery, but he's not out of the woods.

He has a long road of recovery ahead. So please pray for Votie Baucom.

Please join Dr. James R. White and me and Dr. Conrad Mbewe and about 20 other speakers at the

G3 conference September 30th through October 2nd in Atlanta, Georgia on the theme

Christ is Supreme. Overall I cannot wait to be there again. This will be my fourth year in a row manning an exhibitors booth there.

And Dr. White, I know that you love G3 as well as I do, don't you?

Oh yeah, of course. I'm not sure how many people at G3 love me, but... No, we, you know, thankfully

G3 last year was before insanity became the rule of the day.

And so we set up basically when

I spoke, I spoke on, I always speak in the morning. I'm one of the C -listers, you know, I'm the fill -in,

I'm one of the fill -in guys. Ah, give me a break. No, I am, I am. And so I speak in the morning at some point, you know, when people are still trying to wake up and things like that.

And afterwards, we just set up out in the exhibit area and just had a continuous line of people and shaking hands, no masks, of course.

I was just at the start of things. It was just come around the corner, but you know, just get to meet folks.

And it's funny, honestly, how each year a different topic predominates.

So like, I think the year before that, I met so many people that had come out of like King James -only -ism, independent fundamentalist

Baptist churches that were really sort of abusive and backwards and stuff like that. And they were talking about how they had run into my stuff or Jeff Durbin stuff.

And all around the world, Jeff and I will both say the same thing. We hear all the time from people and they'll either say,

I found you first. And then from you, I, you know, found out about Jeff Durbin or vice versa.

And we hear that all the time. And so that was sort of what it was like that time. And then I think the year before, what was it?

It was a different group, the predominant. It's really, really interesting to get a chance to talk to people. And I know all the speakers don't get to do that, but we try to do that as much as possible.

And the way things are this year, I'm having to drive to, I'm going to be driving to G3. So that's a little bit of a transcontinental road trip.

And we're going to try to stop at some churches in Texas on the way and make it a road trip.

But yeah, you know, I've been sort of a fixture there for a while. I wasn't at the first few, but I've been there ever since then.

So love the folks at G3, love to get there, get together with everybody. And normally, you know, you give me that hang dog look, and I'll come over and we'll do the interview.

I mean, you're just so good at it, sitting there, you know, just looking so sad and we'll come over.

And you're not the only one that does it. And there's a whole podcast row, at least there was last year, remember?

There was a whole row of folks that were recording podcast stuff and things. And some of those people have been banned.

And I might get there myself before long. Oh, not by Josh Bice, of course. No, certainly not.

No. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And it's a different time of year. You remember, just a couple of years ago, we had lots of snow and people had trouble getting in because Atlanta got hit with snow.

And so there was delayed flights and all sorts of stuff like that, but shouldn't have that problem in September.

So in fact, we could end up with some heat and humidity. Who knows? Well, we'll find out. Well, remember, folks, it's g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. Please join us. Take a plane train or automobile, anywhere you can get the parachute down there in Atlanta.

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Please, please pray for my former co host, a frequent co host anyway, Buzz Taylor.

Many of you will remember Buzz from the first few years of Iron Trip and Zion radio after we relaunched after moving to Pennsylvania.

Buzz Taylor's mother just passed on and passed on into glory, thankfully. She is now in eternity with Jesus Christ.

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And we are now back with our discussion with Dr. White. And if you could, before you go into some of these elements, these foundations, tell us why you focused on our own minds in the event that we are being persecuted rather than what's going on around us.

Well, the issue is, in listening to what

Christians have said who've been persecuted, and in fact it was interesting, a friend who's done missions work overseas near a very anti -Christian repressive nation listened to the sermon and he contacted me and said, you're right though, the hardest thing to deal with is isolation.

It is, you know, if you're allowed to be with other Christians, it makes all the difference in the world.

And so I had read so many comments and so many stories where it was that solitude, it was that isolation, and what that creates in your mind, and the ability that a persecutor would have to attack you in that vulnerable state, that was why

I focused on, look, you need to have communion with Christ, you need to have certain foundations built before this happens.

Obviously, the better those foundations are drilled down and laid in place now, the better you're going to be able to handle things in the future if that's what the

Lord puts you through. And, you know, a lot of Christians who have gone through this down through the centuries, we sort of feel like, well, that can never happen to us, but the

Lord has used it in the past and might call us to do the same thing in the future. And so I was focused on, if you're alone, what do you focus upon in your own mind?

Not so much, you know, if they're not feeding you, if they're not allowing you to sleep, you're not going to be doing debates, okay?

You may think that you're Superman, but it doesn't take too many days of sleep deprivation and that kind of stuff to get you past thinking you're going to be able to do stuff like that.

That's when these foundations will be exposed, everything else will get blown away, and so that's why

I focused upon them. Okay, well, fingerprints is your first foundation.

Yeah, and so basically, I want to start with something that could be remembered. Most of us will still have our fingerprints.

It's something right there in front of you. I suppose in the complete darkness you might not be able to see it, but we have to remember that if you are in a situation where you're being told to deny

Christ, you're being told the Christian faith is a lie, there is no resurrection, science has proven this, science has proven that, you have to remember that every word spoken to you by your enemies is a witness to their own createdness.

The very fact of the existence of language, their ability to speak, to see, to hear, the complexity of life that continues to take place within your own body, within the body of the person persecuting you, these are all fingerprints of the creator.

You can deny them, you can yell at them, you can scream at them, you can say science has disproven this, but the very existence of science requires those fingerprints, the fingerprints of the creator that he has left on his creation, and so I suggested to folks that while they have the freedom now to take some time to contemplate the clear evidence of God's design and creation.

But you're supposed to be a presuppositionalist, all evidence is God's evidence. Amen. I'm sorry?

I said amen. Oh, okay. I know Reformed Baptists aren't typically used to hearing that coming from the...

That's true, that's true. But every bit of evidence that we can muster in regards to this real truth about God's creation is

God's evidence, and so looking at the irreducibly complex systems found in the eye and the blood clotting mechanisms, the genetic systems, and if you've seen my debate with Dan Barker from a number of years ago, the incredible system of cellular respiration, that's my favorite, the mitochondria that are in every cell in your body that are producing energy, and the clear design,

I mean, we can't even get close to designing this kind of mechanism on that level, and if we ever do get there, it is only because we have spent so much time and energy designing it.

It is clear evidence of design all the way through, and so that reality needs to be always in the back of our mind, that whatever evidence is being presented to us, whatever arguments are being presented to us, whatever being told we have to say, the truth is that God's fingerprints are all over His creation, all over us, all over me.

That is the evidence that is right in front of us, even if I'm in a darkened cell.

And so the fingerprints of God's creation, they're trying to get you to believe in a creator -less creation, and that is utter fantasy, and that's all they have, but that's where they're going to go.

And the second foundation is light from the empty tomb. Light from the empty tomb is a phrase I've been using a lot recently.

I don't think I borrowed it from anybody, but I'm sure there are other people who have talked about it, but the reality is the resurrection is absolutely central to the

Christian faith, and it's absolutely central to all of human history. The scriptures show it as the center point of history itself, the death, birth, and resurrection of Christ, and the reality is that death is the universal human enemy, and Christ and He alone has conquered it.

They don't have anything to give to you. They don't have any means of conquering death, even in the wildest fantasies that they are pursuing now.

Transhumanism and the idea of, and it actually, interestingly enough, came up in the

Star Trek Picard series, the idea of being able to literally transfer a person's consciousness from a dying body to some other form.

All these things are fantasies that are disconnected from the spiritual reality of man.

Man left to himself, it's interesting, we've seen this in the COVID pandemic, will trade his very soul for another hour of life.

He will do anything. The fear of death on the part of the secularists is overwhelming, but since the stone has been rolled away, there's no fear for the

Christian of what he has conquered, but that is only true for those that are in him. And so, for the persecuted believer, the empty tomb is the light the world can't extinguish.

So, it does seem that in many of these situations, isolation comes with darkness.

They want to not let you to have light, but in the darkness of imprisonment, a light that no cell can banish exists for those who are united with Christ.

And that needs to be something that we understand why that is, the mechanism by which that comes to us by the

Holy Spirit, and then to realize the enemies of Christ may hold us in darkness in this world, but it is they who are stumbling in spiritual darkness, even when they have the light of the sun.

And part of this is important because one of the dangers is we would tend to foster hatred toward those who are misusing us.

And the reality is, we have the light of the empty tomb, they are stumbling in darkness and will fall into complete darkness and total darkness and eternal darkness if they do not turn to Christ.

And that always helps to keep you from hating someone when you recognize what awaits them. Yeah, and that's a difficult thing to do, even for things that are infinitely less serious than being persecuted.

Oh yeah, most definitely. But I did mention the sermon, I think for anyone, if you really, and I'm very thankful,

I saw some people on Twitter saying they were doing this, if you really want to do some preparation for this type of thing, read

The Hiding Place, read the story of Betsy and Corey Ten Boom in the Robinsbrook concentration camp.

And I'm so thankful, when I could travel, that one of the last trips I took, the last year of my traveling,

I got to visit The Hiding Place in Holland and actually see it myself, and the winding staircases and the watch shop and everything else that was there.

It was really, really, really neat to be able to get to see that, and I would highly recommend, minimally that you watch the film, but much more so that you would actually read the whole book, because the truth that Betsy, who did not survive

Robinsbrook, communicated to her sister, and then through her to the rest of the world, was that love is more powerful than hatred.

And they demonstrated that in how they lived there under the

Nazi rule in the concentration camp. So, I think that's important. The third one,

Establish in the Heavens, as we know, the focus of the world to deconvert

Christians in universities, for example, is upon attacking the Bible, and that is the case as well when it comes to persecution.

And while it's always good to have a broad, solider saying in the history of the Bible in its proper context, we've been teaching about this type of stuff for many decades now, no one can know everything there is to know about the scriptures.

But there's one thing that we have to remember, and that is that the same one who conquered death, the same one who rose from the grave, the same one who ascended on high, held the highest view of scriptures as God speaking, viewed them as the very words of God himself.

In other words, one thing you've got to really understand is to hold any other view of scripture than that which

Jesus held, a simple foolishness. No one else has risen from the dead, no one else has the authority to contramand and contradict

Jesus' view, and Jesus viewed the scriptures in that way. So why would we view it in any other way?

It does not make any sense whatsoever. No enemy who comes against us can predict his own death and his resurrection then bring it about, hence they lack the sufficient authority to overthrow

Christ's testimony to the Word. So what we need to be doing is not only understanding why we believe the scriptures to be the

Word of God, but to be memorizing scripture as well. And I think that is something that it's a beautiful thing to see when people are doing it.

I think, did you talk with Calperthwaite at G3 last year, and the young lady who has memorized a major portion of the

New Testament and can just sit there and quote for you all of Colossians or whatever else it might be?

No, but direct her my way if she likes the next one. Yeah, I will.

Yeah, well actually she's written a book about memorizing scripture now, I understand. And in fact,

Jeffrey Rice and I got together and she had so worn her

Bible out in memorizing it that pages were falling out. And so at G3 last year, we gave her a brand new

Bible so she could continue memorizing the scriptures without pages disappearing. We don't want anything missing while she's memorizing all that part of the

New Testament. But yeah, just remind me and I can get you in touch there.

So memorizing scripture, because it's going to be, if you've read The Hiding Place, that you know that God supernaturally allowed

Cory and Betsy to have a copy of the scriptures. Yeah. The guards just never saw it.

It's just amazing how that was. But that's not something you can count on happening for yourself.

And so the more scripture we have memorized, the better it'll be. Now, A Cloud of Witnesses is an interesting passage that comes from Hebrews chapter 12.

I was actually lovingly and gently rebuked because after the homegoing of my late wife, in fact, when

I was graduating from Hebron Colony Ministries, which is the Christian addiction recovery ministry in Boone, North Carolina, where I went after plunging back into excessive and really severe scandalous drunkenness, full bore, and thankfully was delivered from that by God after my time at Hebron Colony, even the desire for alcohol.

But at the graduation ceremony, I said that I lamented the fact that my precious late wife could not see me sober again.

And I said, I know that there are many brothers and sisters who have been well -meaning, and they're trying to comfort me.

And they've said, oh, but she's watching you now. Because remember, there's a great cloud of witnesses.

And I said, are you kidding me? She's got her eyes focused on Jesus Christ face -to -face. She's not looking at me and me standing here in Boone, North Carolina, speaking from this podium right now.

As much as she may love me in heaven, she loves her Savior much more and doesn't want to tear her eyes away from him for one second.

And I was thankful that you seemed to confirm that idea in your own sermon.

Yeah, I realized the emotional power that that concept can have, but that's not what the cloud of witnesses is talking about.

That's actually in Hebrews chapter 12, it's pointing us back to the people in chapter 11 who, by faith, had honored and glorified

God and endured many hardships and difficulties and things like that. In fact, we started off in that section in the sermon, because there were people who did great things for God and overturned kingdoms and things like that.

And then there were people that were thrown into and imprisoned and tortured and everything else. So it was all by faith, and it was all part of God's plan.

These are the witnesses, and it's not like they are watching us struggling along in our ignorances and sin down here.

They are witnesses to God's faithfulness and to what being a faithful person is about. And we want to join their number by being faithful as they were faithful, and they are witnesses to God's faithfulness.

That's the issue that is there. But the point is that we are told in Scripture to look back to those who came before us and to look to their examples, that God has sustained them and he has sustained them through every kind of conceivable suffering and difficulty and trial and challenge.

And we, therefore, can have that testimony that is given by them in their lives as something that is an encouragement to us.

And it does seem to me, unfortunately, that a lot of Christians, outside of maybe a few

Sunday school stories about David and Goliath or something like that, do not spend a lot of time pondering the lives of those who came before us.

Maybe part of it's because we don't want to fall into the trap of hagiolatry, the worship of saints and things that we see amongst

Roman Catholics or something, but the reality is that the Scripture itself tells us to think about those who've come before us.

And we cannot be separated from those who have suffered for the name of Christ in the service of God who went before us.

We are a part of that same family, that same purpose of God. And that is something that I think,

I know, has provided tremendous comfort and encouragement to people under persecution in the past as they have faced these things.

And especially in isolation, it would be something to be able to really recognize that I'm not the first one who's gone through this.

When you're alone, you tend to be focused solely upon your own pain, your own needs, your own difficulties.

But when you think about others who have gone through the same things, that can cause you to focus outward and not so much upon yourself.

And so that's, I think it's very, very important. So you mean the

Chick tract, Why is Mary Crying, is wrong? Where Mary is crying in heaven because she sees

Roman Catholics and hears Roman Catholics praying to her and worshiping her.

Obviously the sentiment was good, but if Mary is crying, that means you can have pain and sorrow in heaven for crying out loud.

Right. Well, yeah. And the fact is,

I mentioned I listened to that first debate that we did on Long Island again recently, and one of the first things that I said in that debate was

I did not believe for a moment that Mary had even an inkling of an idea of what was being done in her name, the prayers being addressed to her, because it would break her heart that there are people coming to her rather than to Christ.

And I just don't believe that she has any idea of what is done in her name here upon the earth, which of course led to gasps from the

Roman Catholics in the audience that night. But at least we didn't have in that particular debate the little old

Catholic lady row right down front that we had for the SACWA debate with all the extraneous audience participation that took place that night.

But anyway. I can remember a nun at the Gerry Madetik's debate.

I think she might have been a Lefevreite nun. She had like a blue outfit on, the sect that Bishop Lefevre started.

She came up to me during a break and she said, how dare you? I'm giving you a warning right now.

Our lady is returning soon. And I'm thinking, wow, they've even replaced the return of Christ with Mary.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We've yeah, we had a few interesting conversations after those debates.

Thank you very, very much. In fact, I think you were saying there when when Father Pacwa invited me out to get a beer, right?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was wearing pointy cowboy boots.

Yep. And a cowboy hat. And not during the debate, but afterwards. Anyway.

Yes. Yes. Speaking of cowboy hat, I remember when somebody from the audience during the question and answer session referred to him as Priest Pacwa.

A priest, I will not call you father. Priest Pacwa. And he goes, okay, Haas, what do you got to say?

But I do really like him, in spite of the fact that I disagree with him on over eternal matters.

I do really like him a lot. Oh, sure. Yeah. Faithful Promises is your fifth foundation. Yeah. And the last one really was where I sort of snuck a little post -mill stuff in here.

There are so many promises given to the suffering in Scripture. You know, you couldn't even begin to, just so much of the

Psalter and so much material that is there. And Christ has promised to lose none of his own.

He will always do the will of the Father. John 6, 38 -39, the will of the Father's Son, lose none of those given to him.

Your security for eternity is as secure as the Son's obedience to the Father's will. And there's nothing that mankind here on Earth can possibly do to break that relationship or to cause

Christ to fail. But we also have to look beyond ourselves. And I think this is important, especially if you are in isolation.

We have to look beyond ourselves to see our place in a much, much larger picture. That persecution can really cause us to focus in upon the narrow.

We must create a place very deep down in our souls where we remember that we are but grass that flourishes and it fades, the flower that blooms in the morning and fades in the evening, and that our

God is accomplishing a much, much larger task. And that we need to have a conviction that we are a part of that much larger task.

And I may not see how my suffering right now is accomplishing God's purpose, but He has promised that it, in fact, is accomplishing

His purpose. And so, in some amazing fashion, I am entering into the sufferings of Christ.

Those who are persecuting me are persecuting Him. And just as He has risen victorious from the grave despite the best the enemy could do, so will we.

And so, we have the promise that Jesus will crush His enemies under His feet. He must do so. It's the

Father's will. The Father has promised Him an inheritance of the nations. His strong scepter has been extended over all the

Earth. He reigns with a rod of iron. And many of those who've gone before us could only look forward to that day.

But they died in faith, and the same Spirit who upheld them will uphold us as well. And that is why we focused so much upon Hebrews chapters 11 and 12.

We did look briefly at all the positive things that people did by faith, but then we focused on those last verses where they suffered by faith.

They endured being sawn in half and imprisoned and tortured and exiled and living in rocks in the desert.

Then the author says, of whom this world was not worthy. And so, that gave us, at least in the sermon, a context to be able to say that God can use us to accomplish great things.

God can use us to endure great things. And all of it is under His sovereignty. And we need to see ourselves as a part of that much larger purpose, that much larger fulfillment of promises that have been given to us in Scripture.

We're going to our final break. It's going to be a lot quicker than the other breaks, so we'll be right back after these messages. Don't go away.

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Or visit linbrookbaptist .org. That's linbrookbaptist .org. Okay, Dr. White, we've got a question from our old friend

Pastor Gary George of Sovereign Grace Baptist, I'm sorry, Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts.

Hello, Brother James, I pray for you daily and sorry I'm not doing a good Massachusetts accent here.

I suppose you in the past and many in the present among reformed people are reticent to confront political issues.

As a post -millennialist, is your idea of fulfilling the Great Commission a compulsion to pressure secular government to be discipled so that the millennial period will come upon the earth in preparation for the establishing of the new heaven and new earth?

Well, not to bring that about, I mean, the reality is that for the coastlands to long for the law of God, there has to be a major work of the

Spirit of God, and so there has to be a great drawing in of God's elect.

One of the things that really startled me, honestly, as I started reading outside of what

I was comfortable with, was when someone said, you know, we might still be in the early church, and that just left me going,

I'd never even given that a thought. I mean, it's just such a constant part of my upbringing that we're right at the end, and that's what everybody thinks.

But then I realized in church history, that's what everyone has always thought. Every generation, from the start, that's exactly what they thought.

And so what if we are at the start and not the end? That would explain all sorts of things.

The point is that the reason for the proclamation of God's truth is to glorify

Christ and to, obviously, it's not to bring something about in the sense you have some type of secondary meaning to it.

The reality is that what we're seeing today is the collapse of the secularism is destroying human life.

I mean, look at what we're doing to 13 -year -old girls! Look at what we're doing to 13 -year -old boys, to 8 -year -old boys!

When you fill their bodies with hormones that stop their brain development, all because of the insanity of transgenderism.

I mean, the suicide rate is off the charts worldwide.

The results of secularism are massive.

And so, in reality, we are simply bringing to bear the truth that Jesus Christ is

Lord, and it's Christ or chaos. You either recognize that the Creator has designed his creation to function in a particular fashion, or you will have the chaos that is now being brought to bear, and being brought to bear now, technologically, in a way that could have happened in the last century, but the technology did not yet exist.

I mean, the Soviets, if they had had the ability to observe, as the CCP does today, then they could have had a greater shot at holding things together.

That's why this period of degradation, where this system has to destroy itself, could be a long period, because, man, there's a lot of technology out there to help these people stay in control.

But it cannot last, because it is not connected with God's actual creation.

And so, we proclaim the Lordship of Christ, we proclaim his law to the coastlands, to quote from the

Old Testament, because that is how we understand mankind. God made us.

If you want to know how to deal with man, then you have to start with the Creator and with his own, shall we say, owner's manual.

And so, I'm not doing something so much to bring some situation about. I think it is my job as a

Christian to proclaim the Lordship of Christ, and God then uses that to bring about his purposes in this world.

Okay, we have a listener, a first -time listener, who is asking a question way off -topic, but since he is a

Muslim, I figured I would give you the opportunity to at least respond in some way to his question.

Reminds me of Hamza Abdu 'l -Malik at all the debates. I'm wondering, now, do you remember when we had one of the debates, or you,

I should say, had one of the debates, I arranged it, with an imam? We had it in Queens, New York.

There were a thousand people there. Well, do you remember that there were like 30 people, and I can't remember if it was

Finland or the Netherlands, but there were 30 Muslims that flew in to the

United States to be there in attendance. Of course, there was something else going on here in America, but I don't know if this gentleman was a part of that group, but like I said,

I can't remember if it was Finland or the Netherlands. But anyway, John, who says, I am a

Muslim who has watched all of James White's presentations and debates on Islam, and I always wondered why he ignores important verses where even human desires can constitute as God, like verse 25 -43 and 45 -23.

His attempt to claim verse 5 -11 -16 is describing

Trinity that consists of Allah, Jesus, and Mary falls apart in light of these other verses, where the

Quranic usage of God can refer to excessive devotion instead of literal worship like human desires.

The reason why I bring this up is because James White never dealt nor addressed these verses, but continued to insist verse 5 -116 is describing

Trinity since it calls Mary as God. So it is high time someone corrects this notion that was used by Christian polemics in 1897.

Okay. Well, the error is pretty obvious. Let me just, we only have a second, but what he's talking about is surah 5 -116.

Um, the Quran primarily in surahs 3, 4, 5, and 6, there are a couple other places, but that's the central focus there.

The Quran emphasizes the oneness of Allah, and the repeated phrase is, there is no

God but Allah. And a couple of times in that section, you have, say not three.

It is better for you. There is no God but Allah. And every single time it says, say not three, the next phrase is, there is no

God but Allah. So the question is, where does the Quran identify the three?

And there is only one place. None of these other references have anything to do with where the

Quran is saying there is only one God, Allah. It's not addressing the issue of worship.

It's not addressing Tawhid. In this section, you have the issue of worship being addressed.

And in fact, it's saying, in the end time, Allah is going to say to Jesus, did you say to people, worship me and my mother

Mary, in derogation of Allah. So what's that referring to? Well, there are a lot of answers to that from Muslims these days.

But the vast majority of Muslims in Muslim countries, with whom I have had conversations, think, and probably still the most listened to Muslim in the world, even though he's dead, he likewise, from South Africa, in all of his lectures, had said, you know, you

Christians believe in three gods. And when I was in South Africa, I had a Muslim I was debating say, you all do believe in three gods and use the same text.

So certainly there are Muslims who interpret these texts differently than other

Muslims do. But the fact is, the vast majority of Muslims interpret these texts as having to do with the fact that the

Trinity is in error. Certainly, Surah 112 is interpreted in that way, the third ayah.

So it's just one of the few places where you can go to ask the question, who are the three in the author of the

Quran's mind? Where else are three listed? In the context, it would be relevant.

And that's why Surah 5, verse 116 comes up. So these other texts aren't talking about worship, they're not talking about Tawhid, they're not talking about saying about three, so they're really not relevant.

Okay, we have time for one more question. Olivia from Swansea, South Carolina. If Romans 13 is supposed to apply only to a government that is upholding

God's law, if defiance of tyrants is obedience to God, and if that means that armed resistance to protect the life and liberty of our neighbors can be acceptable, do we see any instances of the first century church interpreting it this way?

If so, what are they, and if not, why would they not take the initiative and defend themselves?

Well, defying tyrants is not a call to revolution. The early church was called specifically to proclaim the gospel, as are we.

And there's a difference between being a very, very, very, very, very small group in imperial

Rome, and living, for example, in the United Kingdom in the 19th century or 18th century, where you have an ostensibly

Christian culture, at least by public profession it is, anyway. They drilled it into the walls of the buildings anyhow, chiseled it, and it's still there.

Nobody walking by seems to care any longer. So there's a different context between the early church and what we would be looking at today.

I'm not sure exactly how the first part of the question, how they were supposed to be related to one another, because Romans chapter 13 is saying that a church is to be,

I'm sorry, the state is to be the servant of Christ, and that is the key issue in Romans chapter 13.

But I know we're out of time, so I'll just leave it there. Sorry, David in Albuquerque in New Mexico, and everybody else that sent in a question that we don't have time to read.

Hopefully Dr. White will come back soon, and we'll be able to read those questions for him then. I want to thank you so much,

Dr. White. I want to remind our listeners that your website is AOMIN .org, AOMIN .org,

and the G3 Conference website for the conference where you will be speaking among over 20 other speakers this fall is g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater