Simply Trinity (part 24)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Our Father in heaven, what a glorious day it is to be here, to be among your people, to have the opportunity to have fellowship, to worship you, our triune

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God, Father, Son, and Spirit. Father, as we study what the

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Church has taught, what your Word teaches about the Trinity, I pray that you would strengthen us, help us to grasp these things, and help us to understand the importance of doing this rightly for our own sake, even as we read your

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Word, how it influences what we read and how we understand things.

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Bless us, strengthen us, we pray in Jesus' name. Well even yesterday morning as we were talking about the son who learned obedience in the men's group, and while we were chowing down on donuts, you know,

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I would ask the guys some questions, and you guys probably know, even though we're talking essentially in that class about the

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Trinity from a different perspective, talking about the humanity of Jesus, things like that, when

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I ask certain questions, I get blank looks on their faces, why?

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And the answer is because they haven't been in a Sunday school. If they had been, they would know these things, you know, and I thought, you folks are way ahead of the curve.

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Is there anyone like Paul who doesn't have a copy of the quiz that we've been doing here? I think this might be my last copy, so, you know, probably not.

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Yes, yeah, I think we'll start on the Holy Spirit, my guess is probably next week.

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Okay, so we left off, we did number 28, and 29 as we're reviewing this, because we took several months off, and I want to make sure that when we get back into it, everybody is on the same page here.

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Number 29, mutual indwelling, that is to say, mutual indwelling between the persons of the

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Trinity is only possible if the Trinity are of the same substance. That's a tough one.

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Let's just pause and give that a moment. Is that true or false?

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See, at times like this, I have to rely on the inspired highlighter. Look at the quiz, and it says, true, mutual indwelling is only possible if they are of the same substance.

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Augustine gives us insight, and again, you know, I'm going to give this little disclaimer.

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When we talk about Augustine, we talk about Aquinas, we talk about Anselm, we talk about Aquinas, whomever.

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Is what Augustine is saying authoritative? Might be helpful, but you know, our ultimate authority is our confession, right?

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People say, why do you have a confession? Everybody has a confession. The only question is, is it written down or not?

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Our confession is not the ultimate authority. Our ultimate authority is Scripture. But God has blessed the church, as I've said many times, with men throughout the centuries.

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And so we don't have to, you know, pretend like no one ever existed before and come to the text with a blank slate and try to understand things anew.

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We have men who can help us. And one is Augustine. Augustine gives us insight.

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When the father is shown, the son who is in him is shown also. And when the son is shown, the father who is in him is shown too.

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As we saw in John 10, this is Barrett saying, writing, this mutual indwelling is only possible if the son is of the same, self -same essence as his father.

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Let's look at John 10 verses 36 to 38. John 10 verses 36 to 38.

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When he says, the father is in me and I am in the father, what is he talking about there?

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Sounds like mutual indwelling to me. And they only do that, they're only able to do that because they're of the same substance.

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I get back into the Greek, you know, but we don't really need to do that. The homoousius and all that stuff.

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Number 30, true or false. Each member of the Trinity wholly possesses the divine essence.

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Each member of the Trinity wholly possesses the divine essence.

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True or false. I see a puzzled look. I see a concerned look.

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I see smiles. I see blank stares. I see people reaching for their coffee.

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John Zook says, true is correct. Well, why is that true?

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Matthew Barrett tells us, God's one essence is indivisible. It has no parts.

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God has no parts. God is simple.

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Thank you. The divine essence does not break into three parts to form three persons.

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I mean, there are, and we've talked about this a multitude of ways, but if we just engage our brains here for a second.

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If there's one divine essence and it breaks up into three parts, Father, Son and Spirit, then what?

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Well, maybe, but I mean, certainly we have a

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Father, Son and Spirit who are not all God.

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They're not all of God, let's put it that way. And if we do that sort of thing, we're tending towards, and one of the issues we had yesterday morning is it's really hard if you start thinking about three wills to get away from this one question, which is this.

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If each, the Father and the Son and the Spirit have a will, then what? What's that?

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They can disagree. I mean, it's so interesting, you know, we were talking about the

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Father electing yesterday because that's in Ephesians 1 .4. God elects, the

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Son dies, and the Holy Spirit seals. Did the

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Father, and this is a bonus question, did the Father elect those who would be saved by himself?

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I see a wag, I see two wags, I see a no chance. Why is that wrong?

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Because God is one. It gets back to what I was just talking about. If God the Father kind of goes, like I said, this is yesterday morning,

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I said this, you know, kind of goes into his prayer closet, and he elects people to be saved, and he comes out and he says, what do you guys think of this list?

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Well then, you know, the Son says, hmm? The Spirit says,

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I don't know, that's not how it works. There are one in, not just in purpose, but in will, there are one in,

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I guess we could say in function. Can you have the

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Father, and the Son, and the Spirit operating separately? As somebody said yesterday morning, and what's the answer to this, well, okay,

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Jesus alone redeems the elect, right? Did he or did he not?

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A hush fell over the room. Did Jesus redeem people himself or not?

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Okay, the Holy Spirit convicts their heart, the Father draws them, right? What did Jesus do that none of the other

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God had participated in? He died. I mean, the

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Father didn't die, the Spirit didn't die, but how do we explain that? If we talk about inseparable operations, how would we then explain the

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Son doing something that the Father and the Spirit don't do? So in his humanity, right, the handy little diagram that I gave out on double consubstantiality, which just rolls off the tongue, and I'm sure all of you have committed that firmly to memory now, if we just think about the

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Trinity being the triangle and the rectangle being the humanity of Jesus, we understand that there are, you know, what is done by the humanity, the human, the man,

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Christ Jesus, is separate from the Trinity. Okay, so mutual indwelling is possible only if the

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Trinity have the same substance. Number 30, true or false, each member of the Trinity wholly possesses the divine essence.

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We just did that, true. He says, the three persons are one in essence, each a subsistence of the identical self -same essence, wholly possessing that one essence, not merely a portion of it.

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Although we distinguish the persons from the essence, we dare not think the essence is some fourth thing that the persons divide up.

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When we distinguish the persons we talk about, this is just kind of review, free of charge, the

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Father is unbegotten, the

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Son is eternally begotten, and the Spirit is eternally spirited.

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Good. Number 31, true or false, of the

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Trinity, only the Father can be said to be without source. That is true, that is true, and, you know, now we kind of puzzle and we scratch our heads and we go, well, wait a minute, how can the

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Son be eternal if he has a source? How can the Spirit be eternal if he has a source?

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Well, what does it mean to be eternal? I mean, you could put it this way, to have no beginning and no end, well, to have a beginning you would have to be created, you would have to have had a time when you were not, so to be eternal means you exist outside of time.

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Okay, he says, and here's a word for you, I can't even say it, it just means it's a fancy theological word that means the

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Father is from no one, I'm not even going to try to say it, it's too many unpronounceable things here.

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While the Son is begotten, the Father is unbegotten. Unlike human fatherhood,

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God the Father has no father. He is, in a word, unbegotten, no father brought him into existence.

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The great tradition, our dream team, used the word principle, which according to Aquinas means simply that from which something proceeds.

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So if we ask the question this way, which of the persons of the Trinity can be said to be without principle?

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That would be the Father. The Father is the principle, and the only one of the

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Trinity who can be said to be without principle. Okay, number 32, true or false?

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Being from the Father has to do with the Incarnation. I could have said

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Jesus being from the Father has to do with the Incarnation, that probably would have been a better question. Jesus being from the

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Father has to do with the Incarnation, false. We talked about that last week, and anybody remember the phrase, and this is not to heap shame on John MacArthur, but he taught this for many years.

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We talked about this last week, and what's the phrase that he, what he believed for many years?

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And in fact, it's funny because the IFCA, which is the Independent Fundamentalist, whatever they are, they're a group big in master seminary circles, they used to chase him around, upset with him over this.

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And it's called Incarnational Sonship, the idea that Jesus became the

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Son of the Incarnation. So MacArthur got rid of that view,

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I don't know, probably close to 30 years ago, somewhere around there. To be from the

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Father does not refer to the Incarnation, to Christ as mediator, being sent by the

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Father, to save may reflect eternal generation, but in no way constitutes eternal generation.

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Instead, to be from the Father refers to the Son's origin in eternity, apart from creation.

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So that's all it means, it means he's, we've already mentioned it, he's eternally begotten.

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As we will learn, generation is internal to the Triune God. The fancy word, the

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Latin words, are ad intra, means it's an operation that occurs within the

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Trinity, as opposed to an operation that exists outside the

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Trinity, which would be ad extra. So Jesus is the Son, whether or not he is ever sent into the world.

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He is the eternal Son from the Father, whether or not he ever becomes incarnate. He does become incarnate, but, there you go, number 33, true or false?

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Generation within God is unlike any other. Which is to say, that when

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Jesus is eternally begotten, it's unlike any other generation.

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True. If the Son's generation did fall within time, if he, in effect, was created, even if it was spiritually created, if the

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Son's generation did fall within time, then not only is there a time when the Son was not, but there's also a time when the

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Father was not a Father. And if there was a time when the Father was not a

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Father, then there was a time when the Trinity was not the

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Trinity. As Athanasius points out, if the Son is not proper offspring of the

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Father's essence, but of nothing has come to be, then of nothing the

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Trinity consists. And once there was not a triad or a trinity, but a monad, and meaning a singular

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God, but the Trinity always existed. Okay, number 34, can someone be generated and be eternal?

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Can someone be generated and yet eternal? And I've talked about that already, so this is this morning, so this is review for those of you who are just, the caffeine's just kicking in.

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Can someone be generated and yet eternal? Or is that a contradiction? I mean, when

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I was conceived or generated, I came into being.

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There's a difference, though, between me and Jesus. Barrett writes, this may sound like a contradiction, how can someone be generated and yet eternal?

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It only sounds like a contradiction because we know generation within the experience of our own finitude, finitude, well, within our own limits, let's put it that way.

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For the infinite, timeless, eternal deity, the confines of our existence do not apply.

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Let's not forget that whatever words are used of God, even scriptural words and metaphors, there is, they're basically accommodations.

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This is God we have in view, infinite and eternal, immutable and everlasting.

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So when we talk about eternal generation, and we talk about the Son being eternal yet generated from the

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Father, it's an analogy, it's to help us understand the relationship between the

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Father and the Son. That's all it does, because we can sort of understand the relationship between the two of them just like we would understand the

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Father and Son, or, you know, that relationship. But it is different because it's eternal, it exists outside of time.

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He says, and I'll get to your question in a second, he says, language is by definition analogical in every way.

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The metaphor must then be adapted to the incomprehensible one, not vice versa. So too would generation.

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As Augustine says, since the generation of the Son is eternal, one exists not as before the other, but as from the other.

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The Son is not generated from the Father or after the Father, which would make him less than the

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Father, but the Son is generated from the Father and from all eternity. Again, difficult for us to grasp, but that's because we have no experience of existing outside of time.

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Vadim. Okay, good question.

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Jeremiah 1 .5, before you exist in the womb, I knew you. God speaking,

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Jeremiah. A Mormon might use that, and this is why

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I know this, being a foreign Mormon, a Mormon might use this to say what?

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That Jeremiah existed before he was created. And they would say to you that we all existed before we were created, that we were spirit children.

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Now, the problem with that is, of course, well, there are a lot of problems with it, including the idea that it's all made up, but Jeremiah 1 .5,

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how would you answer that? How does it not prove that Jeremiah existed before he was created in his mother's womb?

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He knows before things happen, right? He knows aforehand. He knows us before we exist in the sense of his foreknowledge, but there's something else going on there when it speaks of Jeremiah.

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Before you were in the womb, I knew you, meaning if we just think in terms of the eternal counsel of God, where we could look at John 17, or we could look at Ephesians 1, when we talk about choosing beforehand,

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God's election of his people, what does it mean? One of the analogies of love in the

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Bible is to know something, to know it intimately, and that's the idea here. God is saying of Jeremiah, before you were born, before you were created, before you were even a microscopic little tiny thing there,

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I knew you, meaning I set my affection upon you. I chose you from before you existed,

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I set my affection on you. I knew you. I knew what you would do,

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I knew who your parents were, I knew everything about you. Why? Because I chose that for you. I placed you here.

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Let's see what the unauthorized, I like to say the unauthorized, I mean I'm sure the

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MacArthur Study Bible is probably similar to that, Jeremiah, Jeremiah 2 comes after 1.

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Okay. Jeremiah 1, let's see if there is a note here, yeah, he says,

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God's creation and election of Jeremiah belong together for the verb know in the sense of choose.

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This setting apart before birth is the ground of Jeremiah's prophetic standing.

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Compare also Moses, whose birth narrative in Exodus 2 has the same meaning, Paul, Galatians 1 .15,

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and then he says it is not possible to refuse God's sovereign commissioning.

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I mean, even if we just think about, you know, what's the ultimate example of somebody trying to say, yeah,

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I know what you want, God, but I'm going to do something else. It's Jonah, right? Go to Nineveh, that great city, and he says, yeah, you know what?

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I'm thinking this time of year, the south of Spain is pretty nice, I'll go there instead. And God denied that request, denied.

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But that's the idea. Good question, but it has to do not just with for, to put it this way, it's not just God for knowing, but God for loving, putting his affection, his choice on somebody.

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So other thoughts, questions, concerns? Okay. Number 35, true or false, the son receives from the father what he, the father, received from his father, true or false?

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That's obviously false. That's so false, it hurts. As mentioned, the son does not receive what the father received from his father since the father had no father himself.

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I mean, that's one of the things, you know, Mormonism says the father had a father. He was once a man on a planet who perfected himself and became

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God. And you can do the same thing and become, you know, a father that eventually people will pray to and you'll have your own planets and all that kind of stuff.

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Of course, that only applies to men. The ladies basically are stuck in spiritual childbirth forever.

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I don't know why that attracts people to Mormonism, but you know, whatever. But God the father has no father.

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It does not follow, however, that the son is born out of nothing, ex nihilo, as the

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Aryans insisted. In other words, the Aryans insisted that Jesus was a created being, that he didn't exist and then

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God brought him into being. And he says about that idea, he says, if he was brought out of nothing, he would be no different than the rest of creation.

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But the son is no creature, yes, he is begotten, but he is not made. That's the counsel of Nicaea.

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Let us not confuse the two rather than the son being born out of nothing, says Aquinas, he is born out of the substance of the father, generated out of the father.

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Aquinas, necessarily, then the father is begetting the son, oh, in begetting the son, did not pass on part of his nature to the son, but bestowed the whole nature upon him with only the distinction based on origin remaining.

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In other words, the difference that exists between the father and the son is, again, the father is ungenerated, he is uncaused, and the son is generated from eternity.

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Since God is not made up of parts, it's not as if eternal generation involves a portion of his divine essence being broken off, and we've mentioned that.

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That eternal generation is one from one, that is, God going forth from God. Or as the

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Nicene Creed says, the son is true God from true God. The son's existence did not take its beginning out of nothing, but went forth from the eternal.

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As Turetsyn says, the same numerical and singular essence can nevertheless be communicable to more than one, because infinite.

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Okay, so, given to the son, and given to the spirit. Number 36, true or false, because we are adopted in Christ, our sonship is exactly like that of Jesus.

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That's false. That is false,

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I had to check the inspired highlighter, it's false. But this is true, only if Jesus is the son of the father by nature can we boldly approach the throne of the father by grace.

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In other words, he gives us entree, why? Not because he's like us, only better, but because he's eternal.

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The eternal son always has access to the eternal father. That's their relationship.

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He says, what's the difference between the son's sonship and our sonship? His sonship is by nature, eternally begotten from the father's essence, whereas our sonship is by grace.

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As Hilary of Portier says, for he is God's true and own son by origin and not by adoption, not by name only, but in truth born and not created.

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The nature -grace distinction also affects how we define love. Is Christ the son because the father loves him or does the father love him because he is the son?

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The latter must be true if he is the son by nature. In other words, how could the eternal son not be loved by the eternal father?

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Impossible. Number 37, true or false,

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I remember this one when we did this one before, true or false, God does not rest on the

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Sabbath. See, who else remembers it?

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God does not rest on the Sabbath. How can you possibly defend that answer?

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Because the world would fall apart. I mean, it seems true, right? Because he created everything in six days and then he did what?

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He rested, and that's the model for a Sabbath rest. So how do you explain that? How do you explain that obvious contradiction?

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He doesn't rest because if he rested, the world would fall apart, and yet for six days he created and on the seventh day he rested.

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How do you reconcile those two things? He rested after he created, okay, but he didn't...

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Well, that one day was special. I kind of want to say yes to that because it's right, but I want to kind of add to it, right?

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If we look at it this way, in six days he created and then on the seventh day did he create anything? No. So we can say he rested from creating.

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But if he rests from sustaining, if he rests from upholding, then what?

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What Janet said. Everything flies apart and you'd be like, hmm, I probably shouldn't have taken that day off.

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I mean, I used to feel like that. I'd take a day off, come back in, and the whole building would be falling apart, and I'm like,

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I shouldn't have taken that day off. A little bit different, you know, if the God of the universe takes a day off, we have a problem.

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Barrett says he created the heavens and the earth and then rested on the seventh day, but since he is God, he alone can sustain the universe.

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He alone has the right to do so on the Sabbath. That is his prerogative.

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So when Jesus said that his father is working until now and so is he, he was making a divine claim.

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My father is working until now and I am working. And then

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Barrett gave us the analogy, if you haven't read this book, I really commend it to you, because he does this thing where he introduces a fictional character, a woman by the name of Zipporah, or Zipporah, you know, check my pronunciation, write

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Dr. Barrett and ask him, and it's kind of like a first person, you know, take, taking you down into the experience.

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And he says, the Jews were ready to kill him in this scene, in John 5,

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Jesus that is, and not, not just ready, they were tracking Jesus down, looking for the right opportunity.

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I know because I was there, I saw them. Here's what happened. I was walking home and as usual,

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I passed by the pool called Bethesda, the pool where the blind and paralyzed linger.

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They believe that if they can get into the pool when the, when the water stirs, they might just be healed.

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I don't enjoy passing by this pool, it can be depressing seeing so many crippled people there with little hope.

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I mean, like it's when you pass by a homeless camp, you go, I'd like to help these people, but I don't have enough money to straighten all this out.

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I know people have been there at this pool since they were children, nothing changes.

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But one day, something did change. Jesus walked up to the pool, turned and made eye contact with a crippled man, a man

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I'd seen at the pool for 30, 38 years now. With a word,

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Jesus commanded him to get up and walk. I laughed to myself, I mean, come on.

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What's going to happen? Nothing ever changes here. But to my shock, the man stood up and started walking.

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The woman to my left, who knew me from synagogue, shouted in disbelief, did you just see that zebra?

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I know that man, he's been lying there for, well, forever. Look at him, he's walking.

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But when I turned to the man on my right, a rabbi in training, I discovered he was not in awe, but outraged, puzzled.

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I asked him why. He gave me a heated response, because it's the

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Sabbath. Don't you know the law? Jesus is breaking the

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Sabbath, telling this man to pick up his bed and walk. But I thought to myself, doesn't that miss the whole point of the law?

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Jesus said, in another setting, he said, you know, which is more important, Sabbath or man?

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Was Sabbath created for the man, or man for the Sabbath? And obviously the answer is,

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Sabbath was created for the man. So here he is, working, quote unquote, on the

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Sabbath, by doing what? By healing this man. One person, without all the religious training, sees it and is happy and thankful and overcome.

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The other person, with the religious training, obviously a Pharisee in training, is angry because it's the

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Sabbath. Number 38, true or false, there is no text that teaches eternal generation.

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There is no text that teaches eternal generation. I mean, now, you know, you're starting in Genesis 1 -1, and you're going to Revelation, the end of Revelation, 28 -21.

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You're going to say false. What is the text? What does in the beginning mean?

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I think in the beginning actually indicates, yeah, time, when time began, right? In the beginning of what?

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In the beginning of creation, in the beginning of time. If I could put it this way, at the time where timelessness stopped, how about that?

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And time began. So I'll just read what

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Barrett says. He says, sometimes critics will object. Eternal generation is the stuff of theologians, something imposed on the text.

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Name just one verse where eternal generation is taught. And there's a problem here, and we started kind of hinting at it yesterday.

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Is there a verse that teaches the Trinity? You could say yes, but does it really?

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And here's the point, and then I'll get back to what Barrett says. There's something called biblical theology.

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Who knows what biblical theology is? Like as a technical term, does somebody want to briefly explain it?

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Okay. How about this? I mean, just off the top of my head. Biblical theology is... Oh, go ahead,

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Anthony. Yes, you only... I mean, that's pretty basic, right? It's an attempt to kind of systematize theology, but it's only using the

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Bible. So what's the difference between biblical theology and systematic theology?

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Okay, that's good. Systematic theology tries to fill in the gaps with human reasoning, which is why not every systematic theology says exactly the same thing.

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Most biblical theologies should ultimately say the same thing.

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They don't, but they should. But systematic theologies are going to use logic, reason, necessary inferences from the text and try to piece things together.

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For example, the Trinity, right? They would look at texts and say, well, obviously the Holy Spirit is

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God because he makes choices, he can be offended, you know, etc.,

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etc., etc. So he's not just a force. He's clearly a person. He's clearly

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God because he does things that only God can do. The Son is clearly God because he does things only, you know, etc.,

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etc., and the Father, etc., etc. So we're left with this conundrum that we have three persons who are

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God, and yet we know from Deuteronomy 6 -4 that there's one

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God. So how do we resolve that? We resolve that with the doctrine of the Trinity, and then we would sort of work backwards and make it make sense.

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I mean, because the contradiction, you could also walk through contradictions.

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Well, why must the Trinity be true? Because the converse can't be true. And you just walk through all that, and so that would be a systematic approach.

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So when somebody says eternal generation is the stuff of theologians, well, there's truth to that.

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Is that bad? No. Because we have to use logic and reason to sort of figure out, piece together all of what

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God has revealed in a comprehensible way. So Barrett says, such an objection misses something almost too simple to say.

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Eternal generation is intrinsic to the very names Scripture reveals, Father and Son.

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He says far more persuasive than a proof text are the biblical names by which God himself reveals his eternal relations of origin.

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To be a son is to be generated from a father. That's the essence of sonship.

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It's a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes a son from a father. Generation communicates that a son shares the nature of his father, and at the same time, he is distinct from his father.

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Otherwise, a father need not be called a father, and a son need not be called a son. The titles would be meaningless.

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The biblical names give away the person's relations to one another. That is by design.

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The father is only the father if he generates the son. The son is only son if he is generated by the father.

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In that sense, it is impossible to choose between son and begotten.

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The two define each other. One cannot be understood without the other. As Augustine says, when we say begotten, we mean the same as when we say son.

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Being son is a consequence of being begotten, and being begotten is implied by being son.

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So, even though there's not a proof text, the Bible is replete with it, because otherwise, why would he be the son, and why would the father be the father?

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Questions, concerns, comments? Number 39. And this is, if you know me, this really bugs me about the

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ESV, with all due respect, which means

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I'm about to launch. I have no respect at all. No, no. Number 39, true or false, it is of little import that the word monogenes was translated one way for 400 years.

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And that one way, by the way, is only begotten.

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True or false? It's false. It's of a lot of import.

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There's a theological truth here that when, you know, the

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ESV, if you just look at John 1 .14, and I mean, there are times when

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I want to have laser focus and burn these words. It's awful.

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And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the eternal word, the eternal son.

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And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth.

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And the reason that bothers me is, it might be a reasonable translation, but it's not a very, you know, this is a theological book.

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And if you have a theological book, you want to use a theological translation. And only begotten tells us more than only son.

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And it tells us that from all eternity, he was the only one.

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I mean, I think a lot of Aryans might like that one, might like that translation.

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One reason Bible reading Christians today find the language of begotten so foreign and strange is because unlike all

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English readers of the Bible before them, they've been fed new translations of the

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Bible that remove the word begotten from the gospel of John. He says, no, I'm not a stubborn skeptic, always grumbling, that's me.

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That they don't make translations like they used to. I am for the most part happy with contemporary translations.

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And I use contemporary translations such as the ESV and NIV when preaching and lecturing.

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However, when it comes to the gospel of John, a misstep has been made and it's no small one.

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He says, here's the problem. All the Bible translations I was given to read and memorize, NIV, ESV, RSV, HCSB, which is the

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Holman Christian Standard Bible, I mean, we have a plethora of English translations.

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They excised only begotten from John's gospel as well as from his first epistle.

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For over four centuries, those who translated the New Testament from Greek to English translated the word monogenes as only begotten.

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The King James, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever,

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I mean, in other words, his eternal son, the one who was with him before time existed,

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I mean, it just says so much more. First, John 4 .9

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in the King James. Only begotten language again. And, you know, he lists several places where that happens.

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However, in the 20th century, scholars erased only begotten from John's corpus and replaced this with only or unique instead.

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Starting with the Revised Standard Version, translators followed suit. God so loved the world that he gave his only son or his unique son.

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Whether it was intentional or not, generations of Christians were never introduced to the concept of eternal generation.

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Okay, number 40. And last, and won't be confessed, because we only have two minutes.

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True or false? Without the submission of the Son, the Trinity cannot exist. I hear a false.

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And I don't have the inspired highlighter, so I'm waffling here, because I don't know why, but I didn't highlight it.

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It is false. There's a position that we're studying on Saturday morning called eternal functional subordination or eternal subordination of the

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Son, one or the other. For EFS, eternal functional subordination, it's the idea that Jesus always submitted to the

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Father. The position of supremacy written within the Trinity belongs to the

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Father alone, not to the Son. I even read yesterday morning to the men, Wayne Grudem saying, this is what

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Nicaea always, always taught. Well, it's false.

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You can read it for yourself in the men's room. Yeah, that is true.

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But yeah, this idea of eternal subordination is false. You know, what is the subordination of Jesus or as theologians, including

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Sproul, call the humiliation of Jesus? What is the subordination of Jesus to the Father? It's in his humanity.

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When he says, not my will, but your will, people say, well, how can that be? You know, you say there's only one will of God.

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Well, as a man, Christ had his own will.

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So he's, you know, even as the book we're studying on Saturday morning is called,

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The Son Who Learned Obedience. Well, he didn't have to learn it as deity because he didn't need to obey anything.

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He had to learn it as a man. So anyway, that's false and we need to close and I'll answer any questions afterwards.

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Father, thank you for this time. Lord, we thank you for the gospel. We just think about the

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Lord Jesus Christ voluntarily and for our sake, coming to earth to rescue us, to live the perfect life, to die a substitutionary death that we deserved.

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We deserve to be nailed to that tree and yet he did that for us. And then he was raised on the third day by the triune

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God, Father, Son, and Spirit, that we might know by the words of your

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Holy Scripture that all of our sins are forgiven, paid for by the Lord Jesus Christ, so that we have pardoned from sin, but we also have, according to 2

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Corinthians 5 .21, righteousness imputed, his righteousness, his obedience imputed to us, the righteousness without which we could not enter heaven.