Is the Bible Eternal - What We Believe, Part 1

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What is the Inspiration of Scripture? - What We Believe, Part 2

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Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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Well welcome to The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rappaport, joined by my trusty sidekick,

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Bud the Wiser. Bud, how are you? I am great, sir. How are you? I am doing better than I deserve.

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So it's nice to see you went to get your hat on, and it's nice to see your hat matches your shirt.

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No comments on your t -shirt, just a regular blue t -shirt. That's good. You're color -coordinated.

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Your wife dresses you in the morning. No. No. I just have an innate sense of style, you can tell.

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Hey, listen, we got an email, and folks, if you want to write a review for us, you could.

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We always like the reviews because we do these podcasts and we don't hear from you unless you reach out to us.

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And so we appreciate when you do, and we've got no new reviews this week, but if you want to send us a review, we would appreciate it.

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There is a link in the show notes to give us a review. And so if you wanted to do that, that would be wonderful.

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But we did get an email, and so should let folks know how they could email us as well.

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First, let me let folks know how to give us a review. Just go to lovethepodcast .com,

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lovethepodcast .com, lovethepodcast .com, lovethepodcast .com, lovethepodcast .com, lovethepodcast .com, there's some people who don't have the money to pay the legal fees, go up against a big company with a big lawyer, they may lose and then they get victimized twice.

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And that's, so there is a balance there, but in this case, they got paid the legal fees, which is why

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Epoch News is interesting because it's unusual, but here's the key. And this is why I want to bring this up in our

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In the News section. So many churches, so many big evangelicals were critical of John MacArthur when he would not close.

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When he opened up and he made a case for others to do the same to say, look, this is against the, we do live in America, we do have freedom of speech, we do have a freedom to assemble that's in the constitution and being in the constitution, we have the right to do this.

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And so that was the basis of their argument. Now, this is different to the way a lot of churches were arguing over COVID restrictions.

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And that's why many churches were losing court cases. The way Grace Community Church did it was over the first amendment, they made it a constitutional issue.

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And one of the things that's interesting that came out of this lawsuit that occurred is not only from looking at this, did they have to pay back 800 ,000, which by the way, the

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Grace Community Church was being fined $1 ,000 a week. So when this started, they had to put $1 ,000 a week in escrow.

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So they kind of just now get, where the church has been paying out all this legal fees, they now get $850 ,000 that suddenly comes in, in the same,

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I mean, it's not just free money, it's money that is paying the fees. Now, I don't know one of the things that, the reason that they ended up having the state and the county had to pay was because it was proven that this was, that they were targeting them.

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This was retaliation. And I didn't see anything in the article referring to the parking lot situation.

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I do wanna ask some folks out there if they got the parking lot back, because they had leased the parking lot for like 30 years.

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And over this issue, suddenly their parking lot was taken away. When they, as soon as they said that they were gonna open, as soon as they challenged the county, the county just decided, the county actually tried to get them, the police to arrest them.

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And the church has such a good working relationship with the local police that the sheriff said, you could pass the bill, but we're not enforcing it.

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Like no one's going to Grace Community Church and arresting Pastor John MacArthur. So it was like the county and the governor tried passing laws against them and that didn't work so well.

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But the thing that's interesting with this is, not only did they have to pay the sum of money, but also in this is an injunction that the state and the county, sorry, state and the federal can never do this again.

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They cannot shut down churches again, or actually houses of worship, not just churches.

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So this was, and that's actually one of the reasons when you look at what happened with the parking lot being taken away, it was really interesting because when that was taken away, there's a, right by them is a synagogue and they tried to work with in the past, but it didn't work out.

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Well, the interesting thing with this is that once John MacArthur's church,

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Grace Community Church stood up and took a stand, that, and they lost their parking lot, the synagogue contacted the church and said, hey, would you wanna use our, now granted, they went from 250 parking spaces to 75, but the synagogue said, hey, do you wanna use our building on Sunday even?

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So now they have extra classroom space, which they had, they were actually praying about it. They needed more classroom space.

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So it really has been a good working relationship there. But this, what happened actually helps that synagogue as well, because now they can't have these kind of targeted responses where they shut down houses of worship anymore because of this case.

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So this case had a broader thing on the entire state of California and the federal government.

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That doesn't mean individual states can't, but what it does mean is that they can't do this again to some other church, at least in California or the federal government.

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So this is a big win for more than just Grace Community Church. And so this is something we should be rejoicing in for those who are

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Christians. So that's our in the news section. I don't know if you have anything you wanna add to that.

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I don't know if you've read the article. No, I think it's just very providential the way the

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Lord orchestrated all this with the faithful folks out there like John MacArthur and the elders at Grace, because I don't know of a more liberal place in America, maybe your former state, but California is just extremely liberal, socially, politically liberal.

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But what was interesting, and I don't have a link right now that I can provide to you. I read an article about this that was surprising to me that the

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California state constitution has actually a more robust protection for speech and religion than even the

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US constitution. So that's kind of an unknown thing.

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So this comes out with all the MacArthur and those guys did in a place that has really strong support for churches, houses of worship, like you said, and the freedom of speech, kind of ironic that it happened there, but certainly a wonderful precedent.

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And that was great. And I was gonna say about the parking lot thing, and I think it was Phil Johnson, I saw a comment from somewhere that they did get the parking lot back too.

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Oh, did they? Okay. So that was, I guess, rescinded it along with all the other fees that were in escrow and nonsense.

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So praise the Lord for that. That was great news. Yeah. Now this is a little bit longer of an in the news segment that we usually do, but I thought that that took some,

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I think this is an important enough of a thing because one of the things is that this permanent injunction barring government officials from ever again imposing discriminatory restrictions on houses of worship.

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This is something if your local church is being discriminated against by your state or county, you need to go get a hold of the folks here.

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The Thomas More Society is, I guess, who is the special counsel. And so get a hold of these people, get how

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Grace Community Church fought this and do the same because now there's precedent.

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And that's the thing with courts. They do it based on precedent. Now there's precedent. So hopefully states and counties and federal government will be less likely.

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Although with our current president, I mean, he admits he doesn't have legal authority and then just goes ahead and does it anyway.

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So - He's the current resident. Well, no, he is technically president, okay?

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Because in our system, the electors have selected him.

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Now, here's the thing. There's a lot of people who wanna say that Biden's not president. We know he didn't win the election.

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That we know, right? I mean, mathematically, it's impossible. If this was flipped, the news would be all over it.

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How do you stop all the voting in the middle of the night and suddenly 138 ballots, 100 % for Biden, right?

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It's just, and you're seeing it. Arizona has shown fraud.

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But here's the thing. There were people who were arguing that the electors should ignore the vote because of the fact that there was fraud and vote for Trump.

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Now, had they done that, would you hear anyone saying that on the conservative side that Trump is taking that position?

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No, they would say he's president. Why? Because the electors voted and the Democrats would be the ones saying he's not legitimate.

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So he is legitimately the president. It's just, we disagree on the reason that the electors chose.

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Oh, I don't doubt. I don't deny that he is the office holder. I just questioned who's actually in charge.

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The question is legitimacy. I understand. So what we wanna do, not just today, and I'm gonna admit, but I have no grandiose ideas that we're gonna get through the first and smallest section of this today.

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But we wanna start a series. And so we're gonna go through this series. What we're gonna do, I'll put a link to this in the show notes, but we're gonna go through a systematic theology, just an overview.

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What we're gonna do is go through the doctrinal statement of striving for eternity.

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And so if you go to striving for eternity under the about section, it says what we believe, that's what we're going through.

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We're gonna go section by section explaining these things. And we're gonna start today with Holy Scriptures.

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That's the first section. It's actually the shortest section. Now, these sections that we have there,

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I've tried to be as concise as possible. It is kind of funny, bud. When I was in seminary,

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I took my theology classes and I decided to, now is the best time for me to write a doctrinal statement, because you're gonna need one eventually in ministry.

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Let me try to be as concise, but give enough detail as I possibly can.

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And so my wife was, I was working, trying to make sure I have a detailed doctrinal statement that I was working on that I wanted as detailed as possible.

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And my wife was asking me, so this was when I was in my class on soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation.

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So I sold the doctrine of the church and doctrine of end times or eschatology to go. And I was working on it.

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And it was really funny because my wife said, how many pages is your doctrinal statement right now? I'm like, oh, about 75 to 90.

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And she's like, she goes, that's your statement? I said, yeah. She goes, you try to write a statement and it's a book.

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She goes, you try to write a book, it's going to be a series. So she's like, you try to write a series, it'll be the encyclopedia.

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Yeah, well, you did write that book, by the way. And it turned out that I did write that book.

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What do we believe is it really actually, what do we believe for the most part is my doctrinal statement.

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For the most part, there's actually some things I didn't include in the book because my detailed doctrinal statement, when

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I get into the doctrine of man and reasons against abortion and things like that, of how some of the really detailed views affect, and really, when you think about when man is created, and we'll get to that when we talk about the doctrine of man, it affects the view you're going to have for abortion.

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I have more just in notes. But yeah, you're right. It did become a book, which is about 200 pages.

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Now, let me, I have a question. Have you had to pull like a, has this been litanized like an

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Ed Litton where you had to go through something because you had it wrong or? No, not copy and paste.

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You wrote it, it's not copy and pasted. No, there are some sections, especially under eschatology, which is probably my weakest area.

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The area I study the least in systematic theology that I grabbed a lot of it from Grace's book,

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Grace to You, because I am very much in line with them. And there's some things I couldn't write better. For my own church doctrinal statement, we actually use the,

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I think we use pretty much Grace Community Church's doctrinal statement, except for one addition that I put in, which

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I need to add to Striving Fraternities is a section on marriage, divorce, dealing with homosexual marriage, same -sex marriage,

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I should say, transgenderism, things like that. I need to beef up the section of man to explain some of that, because now that's an issue nowadays we have to do.

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So there are sections, there's a couple of sections under soteriology, if I remember correctly, that I could not get it as concise as they did at Grace Community Church.

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And so the goal was not to be like, oh, this is me. But there are some points where I could not get it more concise.

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And that was the goal of it. I mean, as is, you print this out, it's, I think, 10 to 12 pages. Yeah, I think 12 I printed this morning.

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Yeah, so it's kind of funny when I used to candidate at churches and they'd ask for a doctrinal statement, and they'd be like, ah, yeah, you gave us a doctrinal statement.

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One person said, you know, we usually get one page, maybe two. Yeah, well, that's what

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I wanted to point out. I don't know where you're going with all this, and I don't want to interrupt your theme here, your logic.

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But I think believers need to understand the importance of researching this kind of thing.

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If they're looking at another church, if they are looking to support a ministry, it is imperative that you understand what their doctrinal statement is and whether it not only aligns with scripture, but whether you can support it.

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And there may be secondary tertiary issues that you may have some disagreement on, but fundamentals need to be precise.

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And I think that's what you've done here. But yeah, I think far too, I mean, you've got the president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention that I joked about earlier, who had no clue that he had heresy on his church's doctrinal statement.

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Seriously? Hello, hello. This unimportant to you, doctrine is that unimportant? Terrible. It's very important.

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And so these things are useful tools and they're useful sources to ask questions and inquire and also learn from.

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So don't disregard doctrinal statements from churches or ministries that you may support or rely on.

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Well, and this is the thing that I find is you go to most church websites and they give you a,

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I mean, some, it's just one paragraph doctrinal statement. We believe in the

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Bible. We believe in God. No description there, no definition.

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You're not dealing with, okay, what differentiates your church from other churches? How do

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I know when I come there, what you actually believe? And this was the thing I didn't wanna do with striving for eternity.

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I wanted it to be detailed. I wanted it to be something that people can go and say, even if you disagree with us, this is what they hold to.

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What they believe. Yeah, but you're right. I've seen some of these doctrines, like the way you're talking about we believe the Bible. I mean, some of these things are so broad that Satan could drive a semi through it.

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Come on, you need to be precise. There's more to it. And that's what you've done here, even though it's 12 pages.

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Well, and I've tried to be concise. I mean, that's the thing, but you need to be detailed enough to explain these differences.

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So folks, if you're going to a church, you're gonna go visit a church, the first thing you should do is look at their doctrinal statement.

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And this is the first thing, when people ask me about a church, oh, hey, I'm thinking of going to this church, what do you think about it?

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First thing I do, look at their doctrinal statement. If they don't have a doctrinal statement on their website, that's a concern.

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Now, I'll give a caution with this though. You have churches that have a perfectly fine doctrinal statement, but that's not what they believe or practice.

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One of the arguments, we'll deal with this on Apologetics Live, Justin Peters and I are gonna address

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Sam Storms who is critical of people like Justin, who say you shouldn't be listening or playing

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Bethel music, Hillsong music, Jesus culture in your church. One of the arguments is, but Bethel's doctrinal statement is fine.

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Well, it's so generic that it doesn't really give the details of the errors.

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So what people do is go, well, look, they believe in the Trinity, so that must be fine. Okay, they also believe

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Jesus was born again in hell. You know, like, so that what they do is they put a statement that everyone can believe.

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Why? Because some people want to deceive. So they don't want to define what they mean.

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You'll see this with cultic groups. You know, the Mormons will say they believe in the Trinity, totally different definition of the

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Trinity than we would have as believers, totally different. But they would say we believe in the

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Trinity. Yes, they just believe that God the Father was a separate being who was physical, had flesh, became

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God. So, you know, it's so off.

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So you have to realize that you need to be precise. You need to dig in deep. You need to get definitions.

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And that's why we have such a detailed doctrinal statement and why we want to spend the time to go through this because one, we want to educate you guys on what should we be looking at theologically.

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Now, I'm going to say at the outcast of the start of the series, some of you may disagree with the positions that we at Striving for Eternity take.

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Okay, some of these are going to be there. There's going to be some, as you'll see, we get toward the end where Bud and I have differences.

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Okay. Some of those differences are just, this is where we take a stand. That doesn't mean this is what all

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Christianity takes a stand. So what am I saying there? There are some areas that are non -negotiable.

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You deny them, you are not converted to Christ. You're not a Christian. Those are primary issues.

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Issues we should be willing to die for. But then there's secondary issues, convictions.

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We feel very, very strongly about them. Not going to die over them, but they're going to be things that we could differ, but still have fellowship.

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We don't need to split over, but we may not go to the same church. I mean, there's going to be people who go to Presbyterian churches versus me going to a

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Baptist church. I wouldn't have a hard time being a member of a Presbyterian church because of our differences, but they're still brothers in Christ.

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And I'm still going to be able to work alongside them in a lot of different ministries. And so those are secondary issues.

35:18

Then we have tertiary issues, third level issues, I call preferences. And these, you shouldn't even fight over.

35:27

So first one, you die for. Those are your beliefs. Your convictions, you fight over, but you don't separate.

35:37

The quarter ones, you're going to separate. These, you're not going to separate. And then your preference is let's not even fight over them.

35:43

Okay. So - If you're not using the NASB, you're probably in trouble.

35:49

You say that now, but I bet that once, once the legacy standard comes out, you're going to change, my friend.

35:55

I've actually, I've switched to that for my New Testament stuff. Because you're not using the

36:01

NASB 2020, I'm sure. No, no. So, but you see, these are the things where, some of these things, some people make, take it stronger than others.

36:13

And that becomes a thing that I just want to encourage you to think about because, you know, when we do this, when we have these discussions, especially online folks, you go online, man, there are people who are fighting over stuff that just, they shouldn't be.

36:33

And so much fighting that's going on, that really it's over secondary or tertiary issues, not primary issues.

36:46

And I just wish that people would stop fighting so much, stop trying to prove they're right, and try to understand what someone else's position is.

36:56

What do they believe? Understand what they believe in context, understand what their position is without misrepresenting it.

37:06

And so I'll recommend to you guys to, if you go to look up Do Theology, it's part of the

37:14

Christian podcast community. If you go to the Christian podcast community, go to shows, you'll see

37:19

Do Theology. Their entire podcast is based off this idea of what we're talking about.

37:24

They have a chart that they refer to, a theological chart that they have in their episodes.

37:30

And what they're doing is working through that chart. What is a primary, secondary, tertiary issue?

37:37

And that's what they're doing. And so this is something you need to know.

37:43

Okay, where do we look with that? How do we examine these things? But the reason

37:48

I wanted to do this is so that if you do start to look for a church or maybe you're at your church, a lot of times

37:58

I get questions. We get a lot of emails at Striving Fraternity with people who are struggling with the church they're in. Something's going on.

38:05

Something's happening. They just, you know, I've had just this past week, someone calling because they're like,

38:11

I'm trying to understand if this is actually biblical. I have, this is the situation going on in our church.

38:17

Is this something to leave the church over? Now, in that particular case, it probably is.

38:26

That church, from their side of the story, now notice how I said that. There's always two sides of the story.

38:31

From their side of the story, it sounds like the church is becoming very controlling in a bad way, very patriarchal, where wives can't even speak.

38:42

You know, women can't speak in the church supposedly at all, not even to sing. And so no women speaking.

38:49

Okay, well, that's bad news. But even in the home, women are not allowed to speak.

38:57

And so they're not allowed to teach children in church or teach other women in church.

39:03

And there are, that is happening more and more. I dealt with another that's getting a church similar in that way, not to that extreme yet.

39:12

And so things like that become where you're now denying the women the ability to use their gifts in the church as commanded by God.

39:23

And that's the difference. Now the church leadership is violating the commands of God for the sake of their patriarchal system.

39:31

Now, if that becomes the case, then yeah, if you're being denied what

39:37

God commands, then yes. I mean, this is the same thing with the government. I'm gonna be dealing with this.

39:44

And for those that follow Striving for Eternity, you know that at my church,

39:49

Grace and Truth Bible Church in Bucks County, we have a

39:54

Wednesday night Bible study that right now I still make available at Striving for Eternity on the YouTube channel and Facebook.

40:01

And I'm gonna be dealing with the government this week and our submission to government.

40:07

That's gonna be a tough one for some folks. And so, but the issue there is if the government tells you to do something that is against the word of God, that's commanded in the word of God, you disobey the government.

40:21

It's when it's not specifically against the word of God that we have the issues that we need to look at.

40:27

And so, but where are we gonna know that? What's gonna be our standard?

40:33

Well, we need to have some understanding of theology. Okay, the first course that I usually teach folks is hermeneutics, how to interpret the

40:43

Bible, why? So we know how to rightly handle the Bible. But once we do, the next course that I end up teaching is systematic theology, why?

40:50

Because once you know how to handle interpretation, you need to take the whole Bible and look at it as a whole and start categorizing it in these different categories.

40:59

So there's seven main categories we have on the website at Striving for Eternity.

41:07

So that we have, that we're gonna look at, and there's gonna be a series of podcasts that we're gonna do. We may break it up with some special ones here and there as need be, and we're not gonna deal with one whole section a week because there's just too much.

41:20

But holy scriptures is one, God, angels, man, soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation, the church, and eschatology, which is doctrine of last things.

41:34

Now, each of them, of course, have more bigger names we could use, bibliology for holy scriptures, theology proper for all of God.

41:45

We could break it down to theology proper, Christology, which is the study of Christ, noumenology, which is the study of the spirit, angelology, anthropology, soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology, each of these different ones,

42:03

I reversed the last two, sorry about that. But each of these have, it's a study of something.

42:12

And what we wanna do is look at bibliology. Now, there's an order to these, by the way. If you see that the first one is scripture, why do we start there?

42:23

Now, I'm starting here with a doctrinal statement because this is where we're gonna base the rest of everything on.

42:29

How do we know about the study of God, angels, man, salvation, church, end times?

42:35

It comes from the word of God. So we start with the word of God. Now, if you take our class at the

42:41

Striving Fraternity Academy on systematic theology, you'll notice I start with theology proper, the study of God.

42:48

Why do I do that? Well, in that class, I explain why. We wanted to start there because all of our theology is gonna be based on the attributes of God.

42:58

That's where a starting point. So where we did there was we put bibliology down after soteriology or after we get through some of those things.

43:09

Why? Because there, what we're trying to do was focus in on getting people to, in that class, we didn't wanna overwhelm them with getting deep into some details of the word of God that we're starting really an entry level.

43:26

And so we wanted to start with the attributes of God because that would greatly impact people in the way that we want to lay that course out.

43:35

And so there's a difference there if you take that course, why we did it different in our doctrinal statement. So just that's an overview intro for the series, but I don't know if there's anything you'd like to add.

43:47

No, I would just say that in your series of teaching, that doesn't contradict what you've done here because everything that you're teaching prior to the time that you get to bibliology is based on scripture.

43:59

So it's drawn from that. And I particularly liked how you started this first portion of the statement about the

44:08

Bible being God's special revelation because in very broad categories, we only have two, we have natural revelation and we have special revelation.

44:17

And the details come in, particularly for our understanding of salvation, the details come in that special revelation, which is scripture.

44:28

And this is gonna be the thing, like even this is, like I said, we're very concise in this, but what

44:34

I wanna take these podcast episodes is to explain some of, unpack this statement for you.

44:40

So, but would you mind doing us a favor and reading all three paragraphs, read the section on Holy Scriptures, even though we won't make it through too far of all of them, but we're not gonna -

44:52

We're not gonna read three sentences, I think. I think we'll get the first paragraph. Okay, so -

44:58

Maybe, which within itself is what? Three sentences. So that you're right, we may -

45:04

I mean, I've got comments before we even get to the first comma in the first sentence. So anyway,

45:10

I'll read this. The Holy Scriptures. The Bible is

45:16

God's special revelation, which is limited in space and time and are directed to various designated individuals.

45:24

Second Peter 121. The accepted writings that make up the Bible are the 39

45:29

Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books without any of the additional writings commonly known as the

45:36

Apocrypha. The Bible provides the only inerrant and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

45:45

The Bible is inspired by God. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the

45:50

Holy Spirit in which He superintended, controlled, and directed the reception to the writers and communication to the hearers and the readers of the divine message to mankind such that the product, the original writing, is verbally every word and plenary completely, both inerrant, without error, and authoritative.

46:16

From 2 Timothy 316. God spoke in His written word by a process of dual authorship.

46:23

The Holy Spirit so superintended the human authors that through their individual personalities and different styles of writing, they composed and recorded

46:32

God's word to man. Second Peter 1 verses 20 and 21. They did this without error in the whole or in the part, according to Matthew 518 and 2

46:43

Timothy 316, thus making the scriptures completely and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

46:51

The only means of interpreting scripture is a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation which affirms the belief that the opening chapters of Genesis present creation in six literal days,

47:03

Genesis 131, Exodus 3117, and seeing a distinction between Israel and the church.

47:10

The Bible constitutes the only infallible rule of faith and practice, and you have numerous verses there that folks need to go check.

47:18

Whereas there may be many applications of any given passage of scripture, there is but one true interpretation according to God.

47:26

The meaning of scripture is to be found as one diligently applies the literal, grammatical, historical method of interpretation under the illuminating of the

47:35

Holy Spirit. It is the responsibility of believers to ascertain carefully the true intent and meaning of scripture, recognizing that proper application is binding on all generations.

47:47

Yet the truth of scripture stands in judgment of men. Never do men stand in judgment of it.

47:57

Okay, so we're not gonna get through this whole thing. I understand, okay?

48:03

I have no delusions in that. But I do want us to look at this sentence by sentence and break this down because there is a lot here in this that I'm being very specific.

48:17

Now, why am I saying this? Because some of these things and what we're gonna deal with today, we're going to, every word of this is targeted to do one of two things.

48:29

Be very specific in what we believe or answer some heresy that someone else believes, okay?

48:37

I am trying to make distinction here. So let's start with the, really, like you said, to the first comma. The Bible is

48:44

God's special self -revelation. So let's stop there and look at this.

48:50

What we're saying there is that this is, this is something that is, the only way we can know

48:59

God is if he reveals himself to us. Now, there is a difference between, and you already mentioned this and alluded to this, is the difference between general revelation and special revelation, okay?

49:15

General revelation, we can look at the stars. We can look at creation. Just had Jason Lyle on Apologetics Live.

49:21

He's talking, I mean, just things that blow your mind with astronomy. And you look at this and go, wow.

49:28

And we can know something about our creator, God. We know something about his attributes. This is Romans chapter one.

49:34

We can see that he exists. Creation reveals that. We can see that he is a

49:41

God of great design. We could see something about his attributes, but we can't know about salvation.

49:47

That's specific to the scriptures. So this is special.

49:53

This is something we would have no other way. This is not natural. So the difference we make is between natural and special or natural and supernatural, but I prefer natural and special.

50:05

Yeah. Because what we call nature is supernatural in a sense. God created it.

50:11

Yeah, yeah. Miraculous. I would just point people to Psalm 19 where you've got a concise summary from David of both those categories of revelation.

50:22

And I actually, I think that's actually what Paul is alluding to in Romans one is back to Psalm 19.

50:29

Psalm 19 is, it is. Psalm 19 is very concise. I think that Psalm 119 is just taking

50:35

Psalm 19 and exploding it out. And so the point here though, is that the

50:41

Bible is, it comes from God and we're going to deal with this much more next episode, but because we're going to get into a thing called superintending, very, very important doctrine to understand.

50:54

It answers a lot of issues when it comes to sanctification. We'll talk about that. And the

50:59

Calvin and Arminianism debate, when we talk about next week, is what helps most people resolve the debate on Calvinism and Arminianism.

51:08

And so we'll talk about that next week. But as we look this week, this is God revealing himself to us.

51:16

Therefore, can this be trusted in explaining who God is? You see, when man writes about God, and this is when people think that the

51:26

Bible is just man's word, man writing down their impression of God, what ends up happening there is, you have a man -made

51:34

God. Now you look at the Greeks and the Romans and all their deities, you end up seeing that their deities are very much like man.

51:44

The thing though, is that, that is man's interpretation of God. So what we're saying is the

51:50

Bible is different. It is not man's interpretation of who God is. It is God revealing to man who

51:56

God is. And there's a difference there. Bud, you said you had some comments up to that section.

52:02

So I'll throw it over to you. I've covered them, you've already done it. Okay, we've covered them. Okay, well then if that's the case, let's move on.

52:10

This is very specific now. I say the Bible is God's special self -revelation, which is limited in space and time and are directed to various individuals.

52:31

Okay. I said, that's very important.

52:36

Oh yeah, this is important because what we end up seeing here is, what am

52:43

I trying to address? One of the things I'm trying to address here is some of the other false religions that will teach that the

52:52

Bible is eternal. You'll see this in rabbinic Judaism. You will see this in Islam, okay, as well as some others, that they will say that the

53:06

God's word, the Bible, the scriptures came down from heaven. In other words, they were written in heaven.

53:15

Now, why does this become important? That part of it is important to understand because this is where like, for example,

53:24

Islam or Judaism have themselves a problem. What happens is that they end up saying that God's word is eternal.

53:32

Therefore, there can't be variances. There can't be, when they would make copies, there can't be a copyist error or it's not the scriptures anymore.

53:42

So the argument they make is, well, you have all these variances in the Christian Bible, so you don't have

53:49

God's word. Well, we don't have old enough copies of, that go back of the

53:56

Old Testament, but we do know there's some variances that we have in there. We just can't get old enough copies to see which one was right or that.

54:06

For example, in Kings and Chronicles, one refers to Solomon having, I forget the number, but X number of chariots and Y number of men.

54:18

And in the other, it says Y number of chariots and X number of men. The numbers are reversed. Which one's right?

54:23

Does it affect anything? No, but that happens. In the Quran's case, there are different variances.

54:30

They deny it, in Arabic, they'll deny it, but there are different translations.

54:36

Even today in the different areas, there are variances. Well, that becomes a problem. We don't have a problem in Christianity because God never said that His word as written is eternal.

54:48

His word is eternal because it is Him. He speaks it.

54:55

The Bible, the scriptures were never promised that they themselves would never have a variant in them, that they were somehow eternal.

55:05

So they are limited to space and time. That's what that means there.

55:11

And you go, you may have read this and read over that and there have been like, okay, it's limited to space and time. Well, it's all of this fact that it's not eternal, that this is a special book written for us.

55:23

Will we need it in heaven? Maybe not. But the idea of space and time means it's for us now.

55:36

And this is also leading to something that we could end up discussing is the progression of scripture.

55:45

Meaning, when you look at, if the word of God is eternal, as they say, then why didn't

55:52

God give us the whole thing at once? In this case, what we end up seeing is that He gives us the scriptures progressively and deals with things in a progressive manner.

56:04

So there's some scripture that would be for a time. And again, this is gonna be where this specific thing, there's gonna see some differences even with Bud and I.

56:14

I'm gonna say there's certain scriptures that are for specific people at specific times.

56:23

So I'm gonna see more of a distinction with Israel and the church more than Bud would. Does that mean Bud doesn't agree with this?

56:29

No, Bud's gonna agree with the fact that there are specific scriptures written for specific people.

56:35

In other words, Jeremiah 29, 11 is not for you unless, as we read in verse 10, you're part of the

56:43

Babylonian captivity. If you're part of that 70 -year Babylonian captivity, then verse 11 is for you.

56:51

If not, then that was directed toward them. Does that mean that the scripture of Jeremiah 29, 11 has no meaning to us?

56:59

No. What was the direct meaning? The direct meaning was to those who lived through the 70 -year captivity.

57:05

It was direct to them. However, what do we learn from it?

57:11

The principle we can learn from it is God was faithful to them over those 70 years, faithful to them coming out of those 70 years in such a way that he will be faithful to us in our life.

57:23

The things he promised to them, he fulfilled, and the things he promised us, he will fulfill. Is there application we can glean from that?

57:32

Yes. Are there principles we can learn from that? Yes. Is it directed directly to us?

57:38

No. And for those of you that are cringing at that and saying, but this is my life first, then just go down to verses like 17 and 18, read that and make that your life first, that God knows the plans he has for you, plans of destruction, of famine, of sore, of sickness.

57:53

We choose these things because we want them to, we like them, right? But those were specifically directed to certain individuals at certain times.

58:03

Not all of the scripture is that way, but some of it is. No. Generally though, what you've said,

58:09

I agree with, because the particulars always represent principles in some fashion.

58:15

And we may not understand them all, but the one you cited, yeah, that's a particular situation for a moment in time, for a specific purpose and specific people.

58:26

But like you said, it reveals a principle of how God consistently acts on behalf of his people.

58:34

And so I quote there 2 Peter 1 .21, which states, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the

58:49

Holy Spirit spoke from God. That's what's caught up there is the fact that there's no prophecy, okay, that this prophecy is not made by men.

59:02

They didn't come up with this. The way that it says here is that moved by the

59:09

Holy Spirit, they spoke from God, okay? So this is

59:14

God doing it. Now this is directed to designated individuals. Why is that important?

59:22

Because it doesn't mean that all of us have the gift of prophecy. We should go to church and go to a church where they have a school of supernatural gifts and prophecy, that's

59:31

Bethel. They teach you how to have prophecy. That's not what Peter said. Peter said, this is the

59:38

Holy Spirit who does it on designated individuals for a particular time.

59:44

Yes, right. And directed by the Holy Spirit. You can't conjure this up.

59:49

So you have all the new apostolic reformation, they're trying to conjure all this stuff up. This is why

59:55

I say doctrinal statements are so important. If you're seeing a church that says that they teach prophecy, that's not what scripture says, 2

01:00:03

Peter 1 .21. So you look at that, and this is why I understand doctrinal statements like this are important.

01:00:10

This is why I would say, why am I against the new apostolic reformation? Because this is why, when it comes to Holy Scriptures, they believe people can be taught to have prophecy, that they can conjure it up.

01:00:24

And yet this is directed by the Holy Spirit to distinct designated individuals that the

01:00:33

Holy Spirit chose to do this, to give this. And by the way, if that's prophecy, if they really are doing prophecy, that is equal in authority of scripture.

01:00:45

You can't be wrong. These guys admit that they're wrong, you know, that they're right 70 to 80 % of the time.

01:00:53

That's not so with scripture. Scripture is 100 % accurate, no error. And so when you have someone that says that they have prophecy, it's gotta be held to the same standard as prophecy, scripture, okay?

01:01:06

So when all of these guys, every single one of these word of faith, new apostolic reformation guys that were making prophecies in 2020 or for 2020, all predicted a great year, a year of vision, and more importantly, every one of them predicted

01:01:22

Donald Trump would win the election. And be in office, not just win the election, but be in archivist, two consecutive terms.

01:01:32

So now we know they were wrong. So every single one of them that made those prophecies should be rejected.

01:01:39

Technically, if you're gonna look at the Old Testament, they should be stoned. Now, what did I just do? Going back to how

01:01:46

I'm applying this, limited to space and time as directed to various designated individuals.

01:01:54

Why don't we stone these people? I would say, because we're not under the Old Testament laws. We're not the nation of Israel.

01:02:00

And so we don't stone them. But you should be avoiding them, please. Mark and avoid.

01:02:08

That would kind of be Pauline language. All right, any questions that you have there?

01:02:15

Should we move on to the next sentence? I'm good with that. I would point out though that it is to man.

01:02:21

He didn't give scripture to angels. He gave it to man. Very important.

01:02:27

And not from man, but to man, as you pointed out. Yeah, when we get to the study of angels, and I'm gonna do this throughout the series is mention things we'll talk about later because the repetition is good in stuff like this.

01:02:41

But when we talk about angels, 1 Peter talks about the fact that when it comes to our salvation,

01:02:46

I think also with the idea of scripture, this is things that angels look and long. Long for, yeah.

01:02:52

They long for this. They've not experienced something like this. They don't know what it's like to receive scripture.

01:03:00

Okay, they don't know that. They don't know what it's like to be converted to God. They don't understand.

01:03:07

They long after those things. So that's a neat thing. So we're an hour in only into the first sentence.

01:03:13

We're good to go. I think we're gonna get through two more sentences. We'll go a little bit long because we did do a little bit longer news section.

01:03:20

And we wanted to do an intro to the whole series. But the next sentence, the accepted writings that make up the

01:03:31

Bible are the 39 Old Testament books and the 27 New Testament books without any additional writings commonly known as the

01:03:39

Apocrypha. Okay, now I hope you're seeing already just one sentence, how much we can unpack with this.

01:03:47

Okay, there's so much here that we're trying to be concise. The second sentence is really addressing what happened in the 1500s.

01:03:53

When the Reformation occurred, the Roman Catholic Church's response was to try to argue that what they were teaching was biblical.

01:04:03

The reformers were arguing it wasn't. So what did the Catholic Church do? They ended up at that time in the 1500s canonizing additional books that we call the

01:04:15

Apocrypha or hidden. And they're the mysterious books that were considered part of the

01:04:22

Bible, but not the Bible. And then in 1500s, they're the Bible. Now, I would argue politically what this is, is they were making a lot of their arguments from books that were outside of the canon of scripture that was accepted at the time that was being pointed out.

01:04:36

And so they canonized, they basically said, we declare these books scripture as well. And now our arguments are biblical, okay?

01:04:44

These books are mostly Old Testament books, but one of the things to look at with the

01:04:50

Apocrypha is the fact that first off, the Jewish people never accepted these books as canon.

01:04:59

One of the things of canon, canon basically means a measurement. When we study the bibliology, we talk of canon.

01:05:05

It's the measure of what is scripture and what isn't. Okay, and so there's a standard for that.

01:05:11

One of those standards is that it had to be accepted at the time as beings from God, from scripture.

01:05:18

And so this was not accepted as the word of God for over 1500 years, over 2000 years technically, okay?

01:05:27

Because you had it, they're Old Testament books. Some of them going back, there's additions to the book of Daniel.

01:05:33

They go back that far. Some are in the intertestimonial period, those 400 years of silence, you have the

01:05:40

Maccabees. And so these are books that Jewish people saw as valuable, the same way you might see the works of Josephus as valuable or your concordance is valuable or things like that.

01:05:52

They're valuable. You may even have a section of your Bible for a concordance or archeology, things like that.

01:05:59

That doesn't mean it's scripture. It's included because it's valuable, it's helpful. And that's what you would see with the

01:06:06

Apocrypha. They were seen as valuable for Jewish culture, understanding Jewish culture and history.

01:06:11

They were not seen as scripture by the rabbis nor by the early church. It was when they would put the

01:06:19

Bible into books. Yes, we see those books included sometimes because they're valuable works, but they're not inspired works.

01:06:26

There was a difference. And so it wasn't until the 1500s that people started looking at those works as inspired.

01:06:33

So we wanna be really specific that the 39 Old Testament books and 27

01:06:38

New Testament books are the books we're saying are holy scripture. What does this exclude?

01:06:45

Excludes the Apocrypha. What else does it exclude? The Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants.

01:06:51

Those are all the Mormon books. It excludes the Quran. It excludes anything outside of these 39

01:06:58

Old Testament books, 27 New Testament books. What does it also do? It also addresses issues of people like Martin Luther who had trouble rectifying because he came from a

01:07:09

Catholic background that used James as a proof of salvation by works so much so that he couldn't reconcile it with Paul's writings on salvation by grace.

01:07:21

And so he thought James was not inspired. So what you end up having there is he would exclude that book.

01:07:28

Well, the reality of that, and we'll see that when we get to soteriology a bit, is the fact that James is dealing with, well, let me start with,

01:07:37

Paul is dealing with regeneration, the first step in the process. After that becomes the process of sanctification, or being more like Christ.

01:07:47

That process has works. That's what James is talking about. They're talking about two different doctrines. This is the thing you're gonna see as we go throughout this, folks.

01:07:54

The precision that we have here is helpful because what this does is help us to understand when people come to us, when different religions come to us, where they get things wrong is they're usually not precise in their language, and they have a broader aspect to what they say.

01:08:13

So they'll say salvation, and they're reading sanctification, and then using it for regeneration.

01:08:20

And you gotta be precise with this stuff. So what else does this exclude? Well, this excludes the Roman Catholic Church's view of the magisterium, the church being equal in authority with Scripture.

01:08:34

It excludes the traditions as equal in authority with Scripture, because what that does is that then puts that as the level of Scripture, making it, well,

01:08:44

Scripture, because it's something written down that would then be from God. It also excludes, in Judaism, it will exclude the

01:08:55

Mishnah, the Midrash, the Talmud, what are those? Well, you end up seeing, in Judaism, you have the, they have a written law, oral law, and then commentaries on those two.

01:09:09

The only thing we would end up seeing, okay, is the Old Testament is

01:09:15

God's word, but not the commentary on the Old Testament, not the oral law, not the commentary on the oral law.

01:09:23

We wouldn't see those three. So that's what this one sentence is, what it's defining and distinguishing.

01:09:33

Scripture is over the church. The church is not over Scripture.

01:09:40

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I'm sure you latinized that from someone else. I probably did,

01:09:47

I don't know. The other thing, just because I had, at one point, audited a seminary class, and this question came up from another student, and I was kind of surprised, but what this also means is that when you read in Scripture, and you do this and you see this in the

01:10:07

Old Testament, where the author, the inspired author, will reference some other work that's not in Scripture, you know, the book of the wars of whomever, or when you get to the

01:10:18

New Testament, even like Enoch is quoted, and the question that I heard in this audit class

01:10:24

I was taking was, so if we had the book of Enoch, because Jude references the prophecy of Enoch in his epistle, if we had the book, would it be considered inspired?

01:10:38

No. The citation of an inspired writer to an extra -biblical source is itself inspired, but it does not lend credence to the inspiration of a book that we don't have.

01:10:51

So when you see those references in Scripture to extra -biblical texts, whatever may be cited from them, you can count as inspired, but you cannot count the entire extra -biblical book, in which case we don't have them as inspired and missing.

01:11:09

So let's deal with why people make that argument. People make that argument because what they're trying to do is say that we're missing something of the

01:11:14

Bible. We have lost books of the Bible. Now, if you hear people talk about missing books or lost books of the

01:11:20

Bible, what they're, that phraseology is purposeful.

01:11:27

It is a logical fallacy because it's leading the question, okay?

01:11:32

It's what it's trying to do is get you to think there's something missing just by the phraseology.

01:11:40

Yeah, right. And so what we see is that there's nothing missing in the

01:11:46

Bible. That's the point of this statement. We have the Bible. Now, no one makes that argument, Paul will write about the accretion poet.

01:11:57

He writes this to Titus. No one thinks that's scripture, but yet he cites accretion poet. Is that scripture?

01:12:05

No, he's citing them. No different than citing a book of Enoch that may have existed at a time when there were a knowledge of it.

01:12:12

So that's okay. There's plenty of quotations or references, citations to Kings and Chronicles, and the rest of the writings are written in the

01:12:23

Chronicles of the Kings, and yet you go through Chronicles and Kings and you don't see more there and you go, where is that book?

01:12:32

Well, we don't have it. Paul refers to a letter he wrote in 1 Corinthians to the

01:12:37

Corinthians. So 1 Corinthians isn't the first letter to the Corinthians. It's the second. And in fact, we even think there might be a third between the two, and that what we call 2

01:12:48

Corinthians is actually his fourth letter to them. Well, what we have about the Corinthians indicates that they were so messed up, it probably took at least four letters.

01:12:56

And it probably took a couple of minutes. But notice that he wrote at least three, possibly four letters to the

01:13:03

Corinthian church, and only two of them were scripture. That's the thing that this is trying to address.

01:13:10

So what this does, and we'll get into this in more detail next week, but it's not the writer of scripture that makes it inspired.

01:13:19

It's not God directing through a pen so that the writer had nothing to do with it.

01:13:27

They wrote and yet God inspired that writing, but not everything they wrote.

01:13:34

And the fact that they make citations doesn't make that scripture. So the argument people make with the book of Enoch or others is to get people to doubt the

01:13:43

Bible. That's the goal of it. You don't know the meaning of the Bible. You don't even know if you have the Bible. And people believe those arguments.

01:13:50

And well, yeah. And you make the point later in paragraph two that we're not gonna make it to, but we have everything in scripture we need for life and godliness.

01:14:01

It's there. There's nothing missing. God has given us everything we need. That's right.

01:14:06

And why? Well, let's deal with this last sentence that we'll deal with today. The Bible provides the only inerrant and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

01:14:22

Okay, there's a lot in here. So let's break this down. What does inerrant mean? It means it is without error.

01:14:29

Now in the original writings, and I'm being very precise here, in the original writings of scripture, it was without error and without flaw.

01:14:41

There was not a single error. Now, can we say that about the manuscripts we have today?

01:14:48

Well, there are errors. And this is what we've talked about. And we've dealt with this in previous shows about is the

01:14:57

Bible reliable? Can we trust the Bible? We have a whole show on that. So go back to past episodes and find that.

01:15:03

Maybe I'll try to link it in the show notes. But the issue that we address there is, as people made copies, they had spelling errors.

01:15:12

That's an error. The original didn't have that. And people go, well, we don't have the original. No, we don't.

01:15:19

But scripture says that it would have been inerrant. It would have been without error. Why would we believe that?

01:15:26

Now, this is where I say it goes back to the nature of God. Everything we're gonna do, you can hear this a lot, goes back to the attributes, the perfections of God.

01:15:34

Okay? God is without error. If he's perfect and he wrote it, it's without error.

01:15:43

So in the original writing, it had no errors in it. And it is absolutely authoritative.

01:15:50

Why? Again, because who's the source of it? God. God wrote it. That makes him the absolute authority.

01:15:58

Why? Because he created everything. By virtue of being the creator of all things, he has the authority that comes with being the creator of everything.

01:16:09

That's being God, he has that authority. And it's an absolute authority because of where it comes from, the source.

01:16:17

Okay? And it's propositional knowledge. Okay, so this isn't to be some far -fetched thing.

01:16:25

Okay? This is specifically at directing us. On the knowledge that God exists.

01:16:36

Okay? Now, what am I trying to say with that? This is differentiating what we said earlier between natural revelation and special revelation.

01:16:46

Natural revelation, creation, can tell us some things about God. It tells us that he exists.

01:16:51

Yes. But it doesn't tell us why. It doesn't tell us what he's doing.

01:16:58

No, that propositional knowledge comes from Scripture. The knowledge that God came to earth to die on a cross as a payment of our sin, that we can have salvation, that we are sinners, that we break

01:17:11

God's law, that this is what he did for the forgiveness of sin, that comes through revelation.

01:17:17

Book of Leviticus, I'll just say. And it does, because that's what it says. In Leviticus, you can't save yourself.

01:17:24

That's in Leviticus. That we're unclean. Leviticus, we're unclean, we can't save ourselves. God has to do that.

01:17:30

That's in Leviticus. How do we know that? Because we get it from the word of God. Now, I'm gonna say something before Bud throws over to you, but for guys like Andy Stanley and his ilk, who want to say that we have to detach the

01:17:44

Old Testament from the New, or that we shouldn't say this is true because the Bible says so.

01:17:49

It's all about the resurrection. Well, Andy Stanley, how do you know about the resurrection?

01:17:56

It's in the Bible. That's what informs you about the resurrection. Oh, yes, you can go to Josephus and Philo and others, but why do they address it?

01:18:06

Because it's a historical fact. But are you gonna get your information and say the resurrection happened because of these unsaved historians that aren't trying to say this is what

01:18:17

God says, they're just trying to say this is history, rather than the word of God?

01:18:23

No, it's the word of God. That's why we trust it. And that's how we know about the resurrection.

01:18:29

You don't know about the resurrection in a propositional knowledge without scripture.

01:18:35

So when you try to get yourself away from scripture, you have really rejected the very thing that informs us on everything that God needs us to know.

01:18:45

Bud, your take. No, this is so important to understand, and it is so controversial right now in the world that we live in, this notion that there is authoritative, propositional truth or knowledge.

01:19:01

Because we live in a world in which everything is subjective and emotional. Scripture's not that way.

01:19:08

Scripture is propositional. It's objective truth. It's nature from God makes it authoritative.

01:19:16

But it is truth, and it is propositional, and that means it's subjective. We have to think through it.

01:19:22

We have to meditate on it and understand it. It is not something that we're to get warm fuzzies from and think that we've accomplished something.

01:19:32

We're to master it, to study it, to learn it, to know it, because God is a God of truth, and it's propositional.

01:19:40

That's extremely important, but it is extremely controversial because we do not live in a world right now that has any value on objective truth.

01:19:49

Everything is subjective. Wait, are you saying that Scripture is not for anyone to just interpret any way they want?

01:19:59

I think you can't do that. That's actually the verse before the one we looked at, 2

01:20:05

Peter 1 .20 says, but know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation.

01:20:17

And that's what's built up in that whole propositional knowledge, is that this is an objective standard.

01:20:24

This is not something subjective. This is not something where I can interpret any way I want.

01:20:30

No, there's an objective way to interpret. We all have the same book, so we all are looking at the same book.

01:20:37

And this is the thing when people use their experience as authoritative.

01:20:43

Well, I had this experience. Well, I can't exegete your experience. I'm sorry. You had that experience, but I can't engage with it to know what actually happened, right?

01:20:55

I could see, okay, these are the events that happened, but you're saying that's from God. I don't know.

01:21:01

And one of the things I always find interesting is Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, they all have the same experiences.

01:21:07

So how could the other experience prove God when others have the same type of experience? Oops. So what we have to do is look at what the

01:21:17

Scripture says. So when someone comes and says, well, I was healed, therefore healing is for day.

01:21:23

Today, we should have faith healers. Or I speak in tongues because I speak in tongues. I know it's true.

01:21:30

What does Scripture say? You see, we can go to Scripture and look at what the Scripture says. That's an objective thing that now we can disagree on how we're interpreting it.

01:21:40

That's a different issue. But we have a standard that's objective. We all come to it.

01:21:47

Now we end up having to say, okay, what are the rules of interpretation? That's a different issue. But it's not, well,

01:21:54

I'm right because God came to me in a dream. Maybe you were doing mushrooms.

01:22:01

Maybe it was just a hallucinatory drug that you accidentally took and didn't know better. And you thought you saw

01:22:06

God coming to you. Same people think that, you know, pink elephants are coming to them.

01:22:12

I remember in college, a guy that thought he was being attacked by a pink elephant that was coming from the wall. And he was really screaming at me to help him.

01:22:20

And I'm looking at the wall, looking at him, being like, dude, what were you on?

01:22:27

And then you took off your Dumbo mask, right? Look, I know

01:22:33

I got a big nose, but it really isn't that big. So folks, we're going to continue this next week.

01:22:41

And next week is going to be a really important one when we deal with inspiration, superintending. Superintending is a super important doctrine.

01:22:48

It's one that we'll spend a little bit of time on because so few people understand that one.

01:22:54

And it answers so many of the conflicts and things in scripture. So I really want to encourage you to go and maybe this week, go to strivingforturning .org,

01:23:02

go to the about section, look up what we believe. And I'll link it in the show notes. But if you go there, go and read through the entire statement.

01:23:11

And what we tried to do is make it where it's kind of a quick reference. So we collapsed them all down, each of the seven sections.

01:23:17

So you can click the plus sign and expand it out. The scriptures are right there for you to hover over and you will be able to get the links to the scriptures even.

01:23:27

And so I encourage you to do that. I encourage you to check that out because that's something that really will help you in your study of scripture.

01:23:39

I believe it'll help you as you're going to try to look for, if you happen to have, you're looking for a church,

01:23:52

I think this will be helpful to you. I think that this is something that hopefully as you study the scriptures, you will see this as something that will help you in looking for churches, in evaluating and also when you come upon people who argue for different belief systems.

01:24:15

I hope that this will be something you can go back and reference. That's what we wanted. And that's why we're spending time to unpack this a bit.

01:24:22

Any closing things you have, Bud? No, I would just point out that there is a link on the website if you want a printer -friendly version of it, which is what

01:24:31

I did. So if you want to print it out, study it, read it, I mean, it's a great resource.

01:24:39

Yeah, see, I forgot that we could do that, but yeah. That's what I did. Yeah, it was right up top.

01:24:45

Yeah, I forgot that we had the print -only version. So there. But I'm just did to see.

01:24:55

So yeah, it is 12 pages. There we go. So folks, I hope this is helpful to you.

01:25:01

We're going to continue a series next week. We're going to continue for a while because we think it's important for us to discuss what the scriptures believe.

01:25:09

So I hope that's helpful. I hope that you enjoy. And Bud's going to accuse me of missing something.

01:25:15

I was thinking. Yeah, you're thinking, but you know, I'm not going to forget our sponsors, even though we had some important things here, just there wasn't a good, you know, we just,

01:25:25

I knew that I was going to save it for the end. So that's what I'm going to do. Folks, that's a wrap.

01:25:32

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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I think that's the outro, but yes. Yeah, there we go. I got that from you.