Living in Two Worlds, then, A Full Response to a Muslim "Revert"

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday. Let me start off first.

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We're going to be doing a review of a video that I was pointed to, I think, just this morning, as I recall.

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And the subject is going to be Islam and the deity of Christ and issues like that, so I hope that will be useful to you and a blessing to you.

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But before we get started, I fully understand if you feel like you're living in two different worlds right now.

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In the old world, you're still thinking about yard maintenance and stuff that has to be done around the house and a trip this summer and doing stuff with the kids, grandkids in my case, planning down the future like you were

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Thanksgiving of last year. But then there's the new reality where you get up each morning and you see new, amazing things that you just never dreamed you would see in your life.

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Well, you saw them in dystopian movies, you saw them in Mad Max, you saw them in Snake Plitskin, was that his name?

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Whatever. The one I did. Yeah, Escape from New York.

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Didn't he do Escape from Los Angeles, too? Okay, alright. The sequel, okay. All these, you we've seen it movies, but literally this morning you you wake up and you see an article about BLM training military groups to attack police and to patrol black areas.

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And I remember, I was really young, but I remember back to the

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Black Panthers and to revolutionary groups like that. But they were on the fringes and now you fire up almost any one of the major corporation websites and they're donating to these people.

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They're supporting these people. All of the NFL and NBA and Major League Baseball and anybody who's anybody is out there chanting

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Black Lives Matter. And you've had three funerals for the same man so far and now he's got a halo.

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Is that not religious? Is that? How did, how did that happen?

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I mean, we've had presidents die that have not been treated in this way and none of these people knew the guy.

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So you know that there's something else really, really going on here. He's been turned into a a symbol that has no connection to the reality because nothing has a connection to reality anymore.

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I mean, it's and so you see all that stuff and you don't know which world to live in.

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I mean, you still want to go to work because you still got to pay bills, but how do you plan for the future?

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And you know, how do you live in these two different worlds?

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And I, if you're sitting there going, okay, we're waiting for the answer, sorry.

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All I'm doing is saying to you, I know exactly how you feel. If, when

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I, when I did a lot of grief counseling back in the day, I would see people in the lost support group that I would bring up.

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Well, for example, I bring up how many widows struggled with a feeling of anger toward their husbands who had died because there were so many things they didn't know how to do it.

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He hadn't prepared them for. And I just, I'll never forget this, this one woman.

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It was like, I had just discovered her deepest, darkest secret. She was like, because she thought she was the only person that it ever felt that.

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And she felt so guilty about it. And just realizing that she wasn't the first and wasn't the only made all the difference in the world to her.

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And now she could actually deal with it and think it through, but she couldn't even deal with it because she was so guilty about it. Once you find out you're not the only person feeling this way, then you can talk about it with others and you can, you can move forward.

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And we're all feeling that way. It just doesn't, it does not seem real. Because right now, anyways,

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I can still pretty much go for a jog in my neighborhood. And I'm not,

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I'm not really concerned yet. About that. When night falls, okay, you know,

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I'm keeping an ear out a little bit more than normal. And like a lot of you, there's a lot of firepower within short reach.

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And there's a bunch of you that never got around to doing that. They're discovering you can't do that now.

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And you're probably wondering if the rest of us will share our bounty. No. Anyway, I get it.

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I fully understand. And so I walk in here with a topic to cover. And it's not about guerrilla warfare and downtown

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Minneapolis looking like a war zone or defunding the police.

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It's not, it's not about, she looked like she was about 35 years old, that woman from the

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Minneapolis, uh, uh, city of Minneapolis. It was asked that question yesterday.

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So if someone's breaking into my house, who do I call? Well, you know, that question really comes from a position of white privilege.

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And you just wonder where these people, what planet they live on. Um, but those are real questions that, that, that need to have real answers.

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And we look at this kind of stuff and, and it's hard for us to put together these two worlds where we need to continue seeking some level of balance.

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And it's not going to be easy to do. It's not

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I don't, I don't have all the, uh, I don't have all the answers to that, but, but this one thing I can be assured of, well, a couple of things

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I was, I decided this morning to turn on some, um, scripture memorization.

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And then I was, where was that? I was up in, I think South Dakota, North Dakota.

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I was up in one of the Dakotas when I was given some CDs of a group of there that had done a bunch of the

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Psalms in contemporary music. And, uh, they're really neat together with all that integrity music, all the scripture memorization stuff.

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I just have to avoid, I just have to, you know, not get upset every time someone goes Psalms something. Uh, sometimes they get it right.

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Sometimes they get it wrong. Anyways, I was listening to that. I wanted to hear scripture. And, uh, at one point

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I, one of the scripture passages, it was from the Psalter. I was going to look it up. I didn't have a chance to, I was in a bit of a hurry, but, um, the spoke about,

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I will lay down and I will sleep in peace without fear.

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And it was because the Psalmist knew who his God was. And so we know in our heart of hearts, we know in our minds of minds, we know theologically that God has a purpose.

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He's going to accomplish his purpose. And as a result, um, our days are numbered.

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He's, he's written them in his book. And that should be, if you trust

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God, a great comfort. I can certainly see why in a random world, that wouldn't be overly comforting, but God has determined these things.

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And no matter what situation he brings us into, um, he's not going anywhere.

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I, I remind you of the, the story from the hiding place I told a couple weeks ago about how even

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God can use fleas to bless his, his children. So even in the deepest, darkest places,

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God is there. So we, we know those things are true. But the thought

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I had this morning was, we're going to be talking today in response to a

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Muslim video about who Jesus is and how you have peace with God.

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And one thing I know for absolute certainty, no matter what happens in this culture, the truth on that subject is going to be true one day after whatever crisis point is reached in our own history.

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If someday history records the great monuments in Washington, as we've already done it in movies,

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I don't know how many times, how many times we've blown up the White House and the Capitol and space aliens do it, terrorists do it.

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I mean, it's, we, we've all seen it, but it, we've always known it was not real.

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But what if someday that's the reality and history records the smoke rising from the ruins of the

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United States Capitol and the experiment that was the United States of America no longer exists?

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I, I hope and pray that's not the case. I hope we pray the only thing, the only thing that could possibly save this culture now is a society -wide revival.

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Society -wide revival. I mean, think about it. You, you listen to all the politicians, they have no solutions.

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They got nothing. They're either bowing themselves down and submitting and in fact, leading into slavery, or they're just repeating the same mantras in the past that aren't accomplishing.

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They, there is no secular solution for the situation we face because the divisions that have now been created by a destructive anti -human ideology called critical theory, intersectionality, all of which assume a

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Darwinian worldview, resulting in abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism, again, all assuming a

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Darwinian worldview. We're just animals. When a revival takes place, people realize who they are in the sight of God.

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And when you know who you are in the sight of God, then you can't have animosity in your heart.

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You can't have hatred in your heart toward others who are also made in the image of God and are just dependent upon God and His grace as you are.

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That's how you have unity. That's how you heal these schisms and it requires a revival of the

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Christian faith. That's the only hope. Can God do that? You better believe He can. Do I pray for that?

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I pray for that. Do I recognize God is under absolutely no external constraint to do that?

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God, look, think, think how many, think how many nations, kingdoms, and empires have risen and fallen since Jesus rose from the dead.

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Think of the fear that gripped people's hearts in the Roman Empire as it was collapsing in the 5th century.

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That's why Augustine wrote the City of God. We have an abiding city and this this really introduced the

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West into a linear way of thinking of time and things like that. Very, very important, vital stuff, but the fact is that when the

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Council of Nicaea met in 325, in hindsight there were already great signs of the decline, obviously, at this point.

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Yes, definitely, but most people figured, well, we'll get through this, and the great battles that were fought to help define and defend the truth of the deity of Christ, the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, the person of Christ, the hypostatic union fighting against Nestorianism, Antiquianism, Apollinarianism, these all took place while there were great, huge, civil upheavals taking place as the

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Roman Empire was in its dying decades, and yet people didn't stop thinking about eternal truths because of what was going on around them.

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And I'm just wondering if we as Christians have not become so accustomed to being so focused upon, well,

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I'll speak to American Christians, America. And when I travel, which

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I may not get too much of in the future, but when I had that blessed opportunity and got to be with dear brothers and sisters in other lands, they were focused on what was happening in my country, sometimes more than people here were.

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Divine truth is not dependent upon this nation and this culture. And the divine reality that Jesus is homoousius, he's of the same substance as the

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Father, was true when

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Jesus said to the Jews in front of him, Ego Aimi, Pen Abadon Genesai Ego Aimi, before Abraham was,

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I am. It was true then, it was true when that was recorded, it was true when that was transmitted, it was true at the

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Council of Nicaea when it was believed and formulated over against denials thereof. And it remained true when the barbarians marched to the gates of Rome, and it was true when they left.

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It was true when the walls of the Colosseum began to crumble, it's true today.

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And it will be true if, in God's providence, someday there will be a picture, not a

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CGI picture, though these days they're so real who's going to know which one's which, but a real verifiable picture of a destroyed

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United States of America capital. You know what'll still be true that day? That Jesus is homoousius with the

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Father. That'll still be true. Divine truths transcend cultural experiences.

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And therefore, if we are wise, we will seek to, in a balanced fashion, maintain our growth in the grace and knowledge of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Does it mean that we do not take proper precautions, preparations, we have to be thinking through very deeply what our faith means, what we are called as Christians to be at this time?

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No question about it. Are those simple issues? They are not.

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They are not simple issues. Will we all come to the exact same conclusions? We will not. We will not.

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But despite all of that, we cannot simply turn off all eternal truths and focus only upon – we can't meaningfully wrestle with the current issues if we don't have the eternal foundations upon which to stand.

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So, for example, if we say to our society, Jesus is Lord, he commands this, and the society says, who's

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Jesus to us? When we say he's the one that gives you every beat of your heart and breath of your mouth, we better have an understanding of why that's true, because there's a lot of people on the other side who are apostates.

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They can really come after you if you're not ready to give an answer for the hope that's within you.

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So, that's what we're going to be doing. And I understand there's this strange feeling, almost like, well,

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I need to be completely focused upon all this bad stuff that's happening. Well, actually, it'll be better for you if you don't.

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You mark it, you take it seriously, you do the proper preparations, but you can't live your life in that kind of a context.

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And if it gets really, really, really bad, and we're all just rummaging for food, okay, that's happened before, too.

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But till then, there's no reason to be at that level, at that that situation.

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So, a little bit of apologetic for dealing with this subject, though it's a subject we would do all the time on this program anyways.

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But in the context that we're in, in the time frame that we're in, it is important to continue.

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So, here's what happened. I'm not in many Facebook groups. I'm in a few.

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Love that stuff. I never thought I would. My son hates it.

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Even the smell of it. But that's my apple cider vinegar, club soda.

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There's this stevia -based stir stuff. I either use the lemon or the orange for a little bit of a flavoring type thing with lots of ice, nice and cold.

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It's good stuff. Good stuff. Anyway, I'm not sure how good it is for my voice, but it's good stuff.

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It keeps me going. Anyway, I have not had a single

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Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, nothing like that since about the 20th of February.

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And I forgot to weigh in today. Yeah, forgot to weigh in today, but I'm assuming

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I'm right at 16 and a half pounds down since then. I don't know if you've noticed, I don't take up quite as much of the screen as I did before.

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I'll be honest with you folks, those diet things make you fat. I could give you this story about it, but we won't worry about that right now.

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Anyhow, this Facebook group is a presuppositionalist

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Facebook group, and someone posted this video. And so I clicked on it and I saw it's pretty well made.

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I have not listened to all of this. I clicked at the beginning and it was running for maybe a minute while I was getting the

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URL to grab the video and stuff like that. And then once I had it downloading,

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I clicked a little bit farther on and it was talking about some historical stuff about the Council of Nicaea and stuff.

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It was really historically bad at that point. That's not uncommon. Our Muslim friends have a lot of really bad history when it comes to Christian history especially, but I have not listened to all of this.

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So this is sort of a, you know, this is sort of how you get a chance to listen in to, you know, if I was on the train in London or, man,

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I hope I get to do it again, if I was, you know, on an airplane going someplace, whatever, and this was the kind of conversation that came up.

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Now, my understanding is since he reversed himself as a revert to Islam, my assumption is,

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I don't know, but my assumption is he was a Muslim who became a Christian who went back to being a

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Muslim. So my gut feeling is we're probably going to run into some, a number of places we're going to have to correct some misapprehensions as to what the

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Doctrine of the Trinity actually is, which would say something about what the conversion initially was about anyways, but we'll see.

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We'll see. So like I said, the production quality was good, so it's like, all right, let's just do a live response, listen in, give a response, and we'll go from there.

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So here we go. I would like to share something with you guys today that is very much a cornerstone to my reversion story.

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I doubt he has blonde hair. That's what these,

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I don't know, what do you call these types of things? These cartoon, they're not really cartoon, but I mean, that's sort of a very stylized thing there, which is cool.

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It's better than staring at me. You know, I'll definitely give it that, but and every time

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I talk about this, I say, we got to do stuff like this. And we get a bunch of people to contact and say, I'll help you,

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I'll help you. And then we never get around to doing it. So, but, and because I've got some great music.

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I forgot to tell everybody, because I was going to use it that day and I didn't, but Seb Goldswain has recorded a music bed for me that I can use for teaching videos.

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We've just, the world's been burning down. So I just haven't felt like that was really appropriate, but I'm going to have to get that queued up and we're going to have to do this.

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But anyways, I'm not going to stop at every few seconds like this and make completely irrelevant comments.

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As to why I decided to accept the concept of the almighty creator defined within the Holy Quran as Tawheed and reject the concept of the

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Trinity. Okay. So this is absolutely the central issue,

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Trinity versus Tawheed. How many debates have I done on that? I've lost track. But if you're new to the program, or if you haven't thought about these things, or maybe, maybe you've always sort of put the

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Muslim stuff off. I'm not gonna be real. I'm not really interested in Islam.

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But you've just for some reason kept listening today. What you need to understand is Tawheed comes from the

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Arabic word Wahad, which means one, to make one. And so Tawheed is the central affirmation of historic

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Islam. It is not simply monotheism, that there is only one

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God. But I think, functionally, it has become as it has been applied and interpreted, especially in regards to another concept called shirk.

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It has become Unitarian monotheism. Monotheism means there's one being that is

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God. Unitarianism would be there's only one person that shares that being that is

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God. Christians, of course, are Trinitarians, so they are monotheists.

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There's only one being that is God, shared by three persons, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is the central issue.

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Certainly, issues of authority are part and parcel of the discussion.

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Quran versus the New Testament versus the Old Testament. Transmission issues, all sorts of things like that.

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But when it comes to the central affirmations of our faiths,

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Trinity and Tawheed, very much the issue. Now, in the Holy Quran, in chapter 112 verse 124, the

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Almighty Creator is defined as Now, this is Surah Al -Ikhlas, and those of you who have listened to my presentations on the subject of Islam, oh, starting, oh,

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I probably put the first PowerPoint together on that in about 2006, maybe.

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So, over the past about 14 years or so, almost all my presentations include a fairly lengthy discussion of Surah Al -Ikhlas,

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Surah 112, and especially the third ayah of Surah Al -Ikhlas. The ayah is a verse of Surah Al -Ikhlas, which says that God is not begotten, nor does he beget.

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And most Muslim scholars to whom I have spoken, I think historically this would be the case, recognize that this is a specific repudiation of Christian belief.

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That doesn't mean the author of the Quran fully understood Christian belief, but certainly attempted to provide negations of Christian belief in different ways.

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The Quran has a really strong emphasis on the uniqueness of Allah, and that Allah does not have a consort or a wife, because in the

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Kaaba, in Mecca, which you've seen lots of pictures of in the Great Mosque there, you had allegedly in history 360 some odd idols, and many of them were a male -female pair with an offspring.

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And the Quran seems to have the idea that that's what the

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Trinity is, a male -female pair, Allah and Mary, and their offspring

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Jesus. That's certainly what Surah 5 would indicate to us when we look at it.

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But that's some of the background that you have. Here is Surah Al -Ikhlas, Surah 112. Say, he is

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Allah, the one and only, the absolute and eternal. He begets not, nor is he begotten, and there's nothing like unto him.

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Now what this concept means is that there's only one true almighty creator, and that there's nothing beside him in equality.

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What this also means is that this creator is not begotten by something, nor does he beget, create something like unto himself, and that everything that we perceive in this life cannot be this creator, for there's nothing like unto him, that he is unseen.

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Now through my comparative study in the Torah and the Gospels and the Holy Quran, I've found that there are a lot of similarities regarding this creator.

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To give you an example, in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4, Moses, peace be upon him, says to his followers, and he says that,

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Here is Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now I just want to point out, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad.

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The name Yahweh, which we pronounce in a subpar fashion as Jehovah very often in English, but Yahweh is not a word that has any type of importance to Muhammad and to the

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Quran and in Islamic theology, even though it's the name of God in the Old Testament. It's the name of God in the

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Hebrew scriptures. He had the Torah, didn't necessarily call it the Hebrew scriptures, but he called it, you know, the

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Torah. The Torah technically is normally associated with the Pentateuch. The problem is here that the author of the

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Quran, the Muslim assumes the author of the Quran is Allah and that Muhammad has nothing to do with it.

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The problem is that when you ask a simple question, does the author of the Quran show an accurate understanding of the content, canon, teaching of either the

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Old or New Testaments? Does he even recognize what the difference between the Torah is and the

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Nevi 'im and the Ketuvim? These would have been terms that Jews themselves would have been using. Does he think the

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Torah is the entirety of the Old Testament? Is he using the same distinctions that the Old Testament itself gives us of the law, the prophets, and the writings?

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Did he understand what was in the New Testament? This one, there is no question. There's zero evidence.

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There's just nothing from the life of Muhammad, even in the content of what's called the

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Hadith, the sayings and actions of Muhammad collected hundreds of years after his day, um, that gives us any reason to believe that he was meaningfully familiar with the theology of the

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New Testament that he'd ever heard someone read, recite Colossians 1 or 2 about Jesus or any of these types of things.

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And so, when you have someone reading Deuteronomy 6 .4, it's interesting, it's important to point out to this gentleman that that term

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Yahweh, Shema, here, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh, there's the word,

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Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh Echad, Yahweh is one. That phraseology is used by the

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Father and the Son. And the New Testament writers utilize that name

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Yahweh. They use passages that are specific about Yahweh in the Old Testament, specifically about Jesus in the

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New Testament. That's something really, really important to recognize and to understand.

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Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, also confirms as to which came before him and which came after him in the book of Mark, chapter 12, verse 29, where he says that,

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You are Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Even to the very concept that this

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God is unseen and that there is nothing like unto him, echoed in the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verse 3 to 5, as it is said that nothing in the heavens above, the earth beneath, or the water beneath the earth will ever resemble this

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God. And we're not allowed to make any images of this God likened to it, to anything that we perceive.

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Yes, that is all true. Yahweh is transcendent. Yahweh is not circumscribed by his creation.

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He is absolutely unique. This is repeated over and over again in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, places like that, especially

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Isaiah. But those same texts also identify man as the imago dei, the image of God.

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And that man is made in that image, male and female. So, there is that element that has to be included if we're going to have a complete, fair analysis of what is revealed in the

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Tanakh. Tanakh is a good term, Torah, Nevi 'im, Ketuvim. The law, prophets, the writings,

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Hebrew scriptures, Old Testament can sometimes sound prejudicial when you're talking to Jews.

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And it's actually two different things, because there's an Old Covenant and there's Old Testament. So, Tanakh is nice and easy. The same message is also in the

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Gospels, in the book of John, chapter 5, verse 37, where Jesus, peace be upon him, says, while standing in front of his followers, the

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Pharisees and his disciples, and he says that you have never heard the voice of God, neither have you ever seen his shape.

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The same message is also in the book of Timothy, in 1 Timothy, chapter 6, verse 16, where it says that God is immortal and that nobody has ever seen him, that you cannot see this

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God. It's an interesting translation, but you also have to deal with the fact that the elders of Israel were said to have seen

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God, that Isaiah saw Yahweh sitting upon his throne, Isaiah chapter 6, and that in the

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Gospel of John, which is quoted from chapter 5, John chapter 1, says that no one has seen

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God in any time. Hamadagnes theos, the unique God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

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So, there is an exegesita, an exegesis, a revelation of the

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Father by the Son as the managanes theos, the unique God, right there in John 1, 18.

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So, you can't just quote from John 5 and then skip John 1, 18, and then the application,

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John 20, 28, when Thomas sees the risen Lord, he says, my

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Lord and my God, and Jesus' response, because you've seen me, if you believe, blessed are those who have not seen, yet have believed.

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Jesus does not rebuke the fact that Thomas refers to him as his Lord and his God. The Greek does not allow the my

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Lord, my God absurdity that is frequently used by less well -read and thoughtful Muslim apologists or Unitarian apologists as a whole.

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Both words are addressed to Jesus, there's no question about that in the original language. But that's the message of the

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Gospel of John. So, you can't take 537, isolate it from everything that comes around it, to come up with something beyond that.

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Having discovered these similarities, everything started to kind of make sense to me. Now, wait a minute.

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Now, I'm confused. Having discovered these similarities, that sounds like would be something that the, okay, that's done.

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That sounds like, from his perspective, this would be something that Christians would not be aware of, that this is foundational, fundamental

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Christianity 101, that God is unique, God is one, we're absolute monotheists, we have to quote

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Isaiah 4310 and Deuteronomy 6 -4 and Deuteronomy 4 -35 and Isaiah 44 -24 and all the rest of our favorite texts when dealing with the

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Mormons, for example, who do not believe that God is one. They believe there are many gods and do not believe that God is unique. There are many gods before God.

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They're extreme polytheists. And so, we have to quote those texts all the time. And so, to say, well, discovered these things almost sounds like,

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I was a Christian and didn't know these things, and then I discovered them. Well, then with all due respect, your knowledge of Christianity was extremely deficient, horribly deficient at that point in time.

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And if you're a revert, which would mean at one point you were a convert, my question would be, what caused you to convert?

38:09

Because it doesn't sound like there was a real substantive understanding of what the message of Christianity was in the first place, if you're discovering this at this particular point in time.

38:22

There was still something I had to define, and that was the concept of the Trinity, because it was something that I wholeheartedly believed in.

38:29

It was something that I propagated, but having started... Okay, if you believed it and propagated it, then the idea that God is one, that there is only one being of Yahweh, that he's not to be likened unto his creation, that he's not limited by his creation, because none of those things are contradictory to the

38:54

Trinity or to the incarnation. Yahweh existed in triune form long before creation and long before the

39:02

Son voluntarily took on a human nature and entered into human flesh.

39:07

He didn't cease to be God. This was the intention of the Father, Son, and Spirit in eternity past. So, again, how would...

39:17

How were you promulgating something if you didn't understand it? Now, maybe, like I said,

39:23

I'm just listening to this as we're going along, because these would be questions I'd be going, huh? And these are things we'd have to be discussing as we were moving along.

39:33

Comparative study, I found that I could no longer believe in it. Now, it's important for us to first define as to what this

39:39

Trinity means and what it is defined as. The Trinity means that there's only one true God, and that this

39:45

God is defined in three different personalities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that all three of these entities are one.

39:52

They are co -equal and co -eternal. They are omnipresent. They are all -powerful and all -knowing.

39:58

Okay, hopefully, we can all see that there's a problem right from the start and that this is not a fully functional definition of the doctrine of the

40:09

Trinity. As soon as someone says personalities, you should immediately be concerned about, is this a language issue?

40:21

Is English not this person's mother tongue? So, for example, when

40:26

T .D. Jakes uses the term personalities rather than person, there's a reason for that.

40:31

It comes from his history. It comes from his background. I was going to do something. I totally forgot

40:37

I was going to do it. Oh, well, another point in time. I just looked over there. I don't want to ruin the binding of that book.

40:43

So, there is only one true being of God, and this being of God is shared by three co -equal and co -eternal persons, the

40:59

Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That all these—see, the next line is just confusion—and that all these three entities are one.

41:10

One in what way? You just used another word, entities, rather than personalities.

41:18

So, are you saying that all the persons are one person? No, I don't believe that. They are three persons that are distinguishable from one another, but they each share fully the one being of God.

41:30

That being of God, since it is eternal and without limits, can be shared by three divine persons.

41:36

A human being cannot be shared by multiple persons because a human being is limited, creaturely finite.

41:44

So, and that all these three entities are one. Well, the orthodox definition would be these three persons share fully in the one being that is

41:56

God. Person and being are not the same thing. This definition does not define what person and being are, therefore it is horribly deficient as a definition and is indefensible or is very useful for strawmanning the doctrine of the

42:11

Trinity. They are co -equal and co -eternal. They, as in Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are co -equal and co -eternal, but they are not identical to one another.

42:23

They are distinguished in their relationship to one another. They are distinguished especially and most importantly in what's called the

42:30

Economic Trinity, that is in the different roles that they take in the redemption of mankind. So, the

42:35

Father has one role, the Spirit has another role, the Son has another role, and only one becomes incarnate.

42:42

The other two do not become incarnate. They are omnipresent. Well, the

42:47

Spirit of God is omnipresent, and as they participate in that one being of God, therefore, yes, they are all -powerful and all -knowing.

42:55

Yes, the being of God is all -powerful and all -knowing. Each of the persons, therefore, are all -powerful and all -knowing.

43:01

However, in the Incarnation, for example, to be able to function as the Messiah, there are certain attributes.

43:08

So, what this means is that... I must have touched something. So, to function as the

43:15

Messiah, the Son has to be able to lay aside the exercise of certain attributes.

43:22

And so, God is all -glorious, but Jesus is not going to be able to function as the

43:28

Messiah if everyone is struck blind by looking at him. You know, if he glows in the dark as he walks through the streets of Jerusalem at night, it's sort of, you know, dead giveaway type situation, and it was not

43:41

God's intention that the Messiah would... The Messiah would have to be one who is rejected by his people so as to bring about that atoning death.

43:50

And so, if he descends from the clouds with lightning bolts, zapping his enemies, that's not going to demonstrate the love and grace and mercy of God that you end up seeing at the cross.

44:07

So, I just have a feeling, done this a few times before, that this is what's coming, is that there's going to be some confusion about that.

44:18

And so, yeah. Gerhardt All three of these entities have absolute power at the end of the day.

44:24

But if we study the Gospels, and on a theological basis, we find that we can no longer believe in this concept, even beyond the fact that God is only one and that nothing that we ever perceive could be like unto him.

44:36

How is that an objection to the Trinity? I hear the statement, but how is that...

44:44

If you think that's an objection to the Trinity, you don't understand the Trinity. Because you are functioning...

44:52

God is only one. One being or one person? One being or one person?

44:59

You may not like that we are differentiating between the terms, but you live that way. You function that way.

45:09

When, in a sane society anyways, I may not be commenting about our society right now, but in a sane society, if a person picks up a rock and throws the rock and hits someone in the head that results in their death, we do not arrest the person who threw the rock and the rock and charge both with murder.

45:38

Now, we'll collect the rock as evidence, but when the trial's over, the rock could end up in someone's lawn.

45:44

No one cares. Why? The rock has being. That's why it was able to kill someone. It has mass.

45:50

It exists in the space -time universe. God made it. It's of material stuff, but it's not personal.

45:58

It has being, but no person. God has being and person.

46:04

So do we. We're made in his image, but his being is infinite and unlimited. Ours is finite, temporal, limited to time.

46:12

So, his being can be shared by more than one person, and the Bible reveals that there are three divine persons that are differentiated from one another, but each identified as Yahweh.

46:24

That doesn't work for us because we are finite. And so, we believe God is one.

46:29

There's only one Yahweh. There are not multiple Yahwehs. There's only one Yahweh. So, how is

46:37

God is only one? How is that an objection? Unless you're trying to smuggle into it the conclusion of your argument, which would not be a valid form of argumentation.

46:51

Therefore, Jesus, peace be upon him, is already out of the equation. Why? Why? Why would the infinite being of God not be able to be shared by one of the persons who becomes

47:05

Jesus, who takes on a human nature? He doesn't cease being God. He takes on a human nature.

47:11

So, why is that? Jesus isn't already out of the equation.

47:19

And I would think, again, if a person were promulgating these things, they would know that. They would know at least some of the answers to some of these objections would be.

47:27

In order to understand the Trinity, let's dissect it a little bit. Now, all three of these entities are said to be omnipresent, meaning that they are everywhere at once.

47:36

But Jesus Christ... Now, see the problem. What is actually omnipresent regarding God, his being?

47:45

So, the person's partaking of that being can partake of omnipresence.

47:55

And the argument here is going to be, if there becomes a localization of the

48:04

Son, specifically, is what the argument is going to be. I mean, I'm assuming this. I didn't listen to this.

48:10

But my assumption is that the argument is going to be, how can

48:15

Jesus be God? Because Jesus lived on earth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it is interesting that there's a textual variant in John 13, 13,

48:27

I believe, off the top of my head, where the Son of Man on earth speaks about the

48:33

Son of Man who is in heaven. And so, there is some interesting discussion as to the continuing reality of the

48:47

Son's omnipresence, despite there being what we would refer to as a localization or a focus in regards to the person on earth.

49:00

And I could definitely see how that would work. So, but at the same time, there is a regular recognition that God does have the ability to withdraw his presence of fellowship, withdraw his presence of comfort, withdraw his presence in the punishment of the wicked.

49:24

There's all sorts of language like that that has to be allowed to speak to a full doctrine of biblical omnipresence and what that would require in each instance.

49:41

It says in the book of John chapter 8, verse 40, that here I am a man in front of you and you're looking for a way to kill me.

49:48

So, what translation is this? This looks like a really periphrastic translation, not overly literal.

49:58

But yes, Jesus is I am man, because we believe that. The word became flesh. The word became flesh and dwelt among us,

50:08

John chapter 1, verse 14. So, as I expected, the idea is if there is a localization, if in other words, the second person in the

50:17

Trinity, who was directly involved in the creation of human nature in the first place, takes on a perfect human nature, that this somehow is contradictory to God's omnipresence.

50:30

It is not, obviously, but that's what I sort of expected.

50:36

Christ is saying that he is a man whom is bound by flesh. However, Christian missionaries would argue that once...

50:42

Uh -oh. Uh -oh. Look at that. What does that guy look like?

50:51

Look, it's Elder Young.

50:59

Well, it can't be Elder Young, because he's got a cross on his Bible. So, there you go.

51:07

So, I'm not sure why there's a name tag there, because that really makes him look like a Mormon. But Mormons aren't going to have a cross on anything, because besides that,

51:16

Mormons are polytheists, too. Christ died upon the cross. He turned into a spiritual being, and therefore, he is omnipresent.

51:24

Whoa, whoa. A little more heresy here, that when Jesus died upon a cross, he became a spiritual being.

51:32

Is that what was just said? Hold on a second here. That was in between things. Let's back it up.

51:39

Because Christ died upon the cross, he turned into a spiritual being, and therefore, he is omnipresent. Okay, back it up a little.

51:48

However, Christian missionaries would argue that once Jesus Christ died upon the cross, he turned into a spiritual being, and therefore, he is omnipresent.

51:57

Okay, no. That would be, that would be a confusion with Jehovah's Witnesses, maybe.

52:04

I'm not sure what your... This guy may have had a very interesting experience. I don't know. I don't know who he is.

52:10

Sorry. I'm trying to be respectful and kind and truthful at the same time. I hope you hear that.

52:17

But where did you get this? The Jehovah's Witnesses deny the physical resurrection of Jesus.

52:23

They do not believe, they believe his body was removed in the tomb, but then it was either, it's either on display someplace in the universe, or it was dissolved in the gases.

52:30

But he was turned into a life -giving spirit. But they don't understand the meaning of the

52:36

Greek term anastasis, resurrection. It's that which died coming to life again. And so, no.

52:43

The whole idea, the problem with your thesis here is that you're assuming that to possess a body of flesh and bone means automatically that you are limited in the sense that the

52:59

Son can't take on that human flesh without ceasing to be God. We're talking about the

53:05

Son, who has eternally existed, who is omnipresent, not the human nature of Jesus.

53:10

Now there is, there are some Christians, and I won't defend this,

53:17

I'm just letting you know this so that if you run into it, there are some Christians, and you guys have different viewpoints on a bunch of different things, all sorts of different understandings, even of God's hands and things like that, have appeared throughout the history of Islam.

53:31

So you realize this on your side as well. But there are some who believe in the ubiquity of the body of Jesus, that there is a, in essence, a transfer of attributes from the divine to the human, so that Jesus's body is technically ubiquitous or in a sense omnipresent, and this underlies some people's idea of the presence of Christ in the

54:02

Eucharistic bread, that he exists above, under, and around the

54:08

Eucharistic bread. So you may run into someone like that, it's not overly likely, possible, but that's certainly not been the widely held historical view.

54:19

I will ask yourself as to what the differentiation between us and him is then, because when we die, our spiritual also let free, and therefore, according to their definition, we would also be omnipresent.

54:31

No, okay, so you're dealing with, first of all, an inappropriate radical understanding, and secondly, being spiritual does not make you omnipresent.

54:43

There are all sorts of spiritual beings that God has created that are not omnipresent. That is an attribute of the creator who transcends creation, because when we die, our spiritual also set free.

55:00

Again, I assume this means the spirit leaves the body, and therefore, we become omnipresent or something.

55:08

Again, this doesn't have anything really to do with biblical Christianity, or historic

55:14

Christianity, or orthodox Christianity, or any other kind of Christianity. But the other two points are slightly less unambiguous and less philosophical.

55:23

Now, all three of these entities are said to be all -knowing. You know what's coming, right?

55:29

I hope you know what's coming. If you've done almost any study whatsoever, what we're going to get now is no man knows the day or the hour.

55:36

You're going to have the question of the incarnation. It's a shame that our

55:44

Muslim friends don't recognize the two categories of dealing with, because we say that God has been triune from the beginning, but they focus their attention primarily upon an issue they don't see is the same, they don't recognize is different, and that is the incarnation.

56:04

The nature of the incarnation, the voluntary self -humbling of the

56:09

Son, Philippians chapter 2, for example. He made himself, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on the cross, and making himself a servant, and that's what he did.

56:21

And so, there are certain aspects of his glorious nature that for a season are laid aside, hidden, masked, or whatever terms you want to use, so that he can function as the

56:38

Father, Son, and Spirit intends the Messiah to be, and bringing about our redemption, and doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

56:48

But that's an objection against the incarnation, it's not really an objection against the

56:53

Trinity. It would be helpful if you all recognized what those differences were.

56:59

Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, says in the book of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 36, that of the final day and hour knows no one, not the angels in heaven, nor the

57:08

Son, but only the Father. And once again, we've gone over this a number of times before, but let me just point out, the

57:14

Muslim does not believe Jesus ever said this. So, they'll say, it doesn't matter, it's your

57:20

Bible, so we'll use it. Okay, fine, but you don't believe Jesus ever said this, because the

57:27

Son here, you don't believe that Jesus ever referred to himself as the Son in this way, in it, because this is unique.

57:33

This place is the Son above the angels in heaven. And so, that idea, which is all through the

57:43

New Testament, is rejected by the author of the Quran. Now, why he objects to it, what he thinks sonship implies, that's a different issue.

57:53

That's an important issue, because I think the author of the Quran was incorrect about that, is incorrect in his understanding of what

58:01

Christians believed about that particular subject. But once again, we have a situation here where the

58:11

Son lays aside the exercise of certain divine prerogatives, and for some reason, the knowledge of that day and hour is seen by the

58:22

Father, Son, and Spirit together to be something that would be inappropriate for the Messiah to possess during the time of the

58:29

Incarnation and his ministry. And so, does the Son know today?

58:34

Assuredly. The resurrected Son most definitely does, but he's speaking as the

58:40

Incarnate One. And it also emphasizes that it is the Father's authority that has set that specific time.

58:49

That is, that the very fabric of time itself, when these things are going to take place, is all the result of the

58:58

Father's will that then becomes the fount of everything. In Ephesians chapter 1, if you take a look at what is said there. Therefore, he is defining that the

59:05

Son himself, who is himself, does not have all the knowledge. And even if you ask

59:10

Christian missionaries, okay, but is the Son still Jesus Christ? They would define yes, because all three of these personalities are separate from one another.

59:18

But here, the Son himself is defining that he doesn't have all the knowledge. The final point being that they are all powerful.

59:25

Now, if you read the book of John, chapter 5, verse 30, Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, says that, out of my own self,

59:32

I can do nothing. As I hear, I judge and my judgment is just, because I seek not to please myself, but only him who had sent me.

59:40

Therefore, he is defining that out of his own power, he can do nothing. Now, I'm not sure why, again, what translation this is or anything like that.

59:51

You can see now why we have, in the past, done entire programs just on John chapter 5.

01:00:00

I've lost track of how many of those that we've done, where we have walked through the text and demonstrated that the emphasis in John chapter 5, remember, starting in verses 17 and 18, is the fact that Jesus healed on the

01:00:13

Sabbath day. And when the Jews objected to this, his answer was, my father's working until now, and I am working.

01:00:21

The Jews understood that God continued to uphold the universe, even on the Sabbath day.

01:00:26

They had two different ways of understanding that. Either he just wasn't subject to the Sabbath rule, or if he was subject to the

01:00:32

Sabbath rule, that all the universe is his house, and therefore, you can move around your house all you wanted. It wasn't counted against your steps for that day on the

01:00:39

Sabbath, which is an interesting way of looking at things. The point is that Jesus' claim resulted in the

01:00:46

Jews seeking all the more to kill him, because he not only was loosing the Sabbath, but he was calling

01:00:51

God his own father, making himself equal with God. And so, that's what 5 .18

01:00:56

says. 5 .19 and following, then, lays out the relationship of the father and the son.

01:01:03

And so, while they are distinguished from one another, the son plainly says he is sent by the father, he speaks the words of the father, he does the will of the father.

01:01:14

He also says the son has been given to have life within himself, that he raises the dead, and that all are to honor the son even as they honor the father, none of which does any

01:01:24

Muslim believe, which is the big problem. That's the big problem right there, is no

01:01:30

Muslim actually believes that to be true. And I think what

01:01:35

I'm going to do when I get done with this, and remind me, if I start rattling at the end,

01:01:41

Rich, remind me to do this at the end, because that's what I was going to do earlier, but it'll actually fit better.

01:01:48

It'll fit right in here. So, Jesus, what

01:01:55

John chapter 5 is talking about, is the perfect union that exists between the father and the son.

01:02:02

Jesus is not some separate deity out trying to get followers just for himself. He is doing the will of the father so that all would honor him even as they honor the father.

01:02:15

That's what John chapter 5 is teaching. And so, the question I have for my

01:02:21

Muslim friends is, do you honor the son even as you honor the father? You don't.

01:02:27

You're precluded from doing so. Do you have any reason for believing that the author of the

01:02:35

Quran had ever read these words in John chapter 5? Because I don't.

01:02:41

I don't. I've read the Quran many times. I've read

01:02:46

Bukhari and Muslim and portions of Jamia Tirmidhi and lots of sources, honestly looking for anything that would give me a reason to believe that the author of the

01:03:02

Quran had ever heard these words, had ever heard what we're going to read in John chapter 8 later on or John chapter 5 or whatever.

01:03:08

I don't see any evidence that he did. There's certainly no attempt to argue against these things.

01:03:14

Let's just put it that way. I think that's an important thing to consider. All the miracles that he performs, and he mentions this countless of times, are testament to the power of God and not his own power.

01:03:24

And this is defined as well within all the other prophets that came before him. Even if you look at Moses, Ezekiel, David, Elijah, Solomon, all of their miracles, they always gave the glorification to God.

01:03:36

That's not quite the case. When Jesus raises

01:03:46

Lazarus from the dead, he does so by the power of the Father, but he does so so that people would see who he himself was.

01:03:56

When Jesus is worshipped by the blind man when he heals him in John chapter 9,

01:04:02

Jesus does not refuse that worship. When the disciples worship him after his resurrection, he does not refuse that worship.

01:04:10

There are numerous times where Jesus exercises divine power, not in contrast to the

01:04:18

Father, ever. There's always perfect harmony. But there are numerous times when the exercise of that power is specifically intended to demonstrate who

01:04:29

Jesus truly is in a way utterly, utterly unlike any of those prophets that were just mentioned.

01:04:40

Let me give a challenge to the serious -minded Muslim in the audience. Take the words of Jesus when he says things like, come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

01:04:53

Take my burden upon you. See that it is light. Did Moses ever say anything like that?

01:04:59

Solomon, David, did any of them say, come to me, bear my burden, be baptized in my name, bear my name?

01:05:14

Did Moses ever say, I am the way, the truth, and the life? No one comes to the

01:05:19

Father but by me? No, nor could they, nor would they. Jesus says things that, now he was a prophet, but not only a prophet.

01:05:33

So, Jesus says things that no other prophet could ever say because he's absolutely unique.

01:05:39

Since when Moses, peace and blessings be upon him, struck his staff and the sea separated, he didn't say

01:05:44

I did this in my own power. He said that I was inspired to do this by God, and this is a testament to his power.

01:05:52

Now, this is not the only place within the Bible that this is mentioned. In the book of Matthew, chapter 12, verse 28,

01:05:59

Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, also says that I, with the Spirit of God, cast out demons.

01:06:04

In the book of Luke, chapter 20, verse 20, he says that I, with the finger of God, cast out demons.

01:06:10

So, whenever he performed a miracle, he said that I'm not doing this in my own power. It is a testament to the power that is flowing through me from God, and it's a testament to his might, and it's a testament to his glory.

01:06:22

And it's a testament to the absolute unity of the Father and the Son because those same scriptures say that Jesus is the perfect representation of the

01:06:30

Father in a way that no other prophet ever was. Did any other prophet said before Abraham was,

01:06:38

I am? Did any other prophet allow them to be, themselves to be worshipped?

01:06:44

In the book of Revelation, when John is shown tremendous things that are shortly to come to pass, he bows down and attempts to proskuneo, worship the angel that is shown in these things.

01:06:57

And what does the angel say? Do not do that. I am the servant of God. Worship only God. And yet, in that very same book, who is worshipped?

01:07:05

He who sits upon the throne and the Lamb. Jesus is worshipped. He's called the Almighty God, the book of Revelation.

01:07:12

He's the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the first and last. So, when Jesus is worshipped, it is true and full worship.

01:07:20

Even when Jesus stood before the Jewish leaders at his trial in the book of Mark, he quotes from the book of Daniel, and he identifies himself as one who has people who worship him in the highest form of worship.

01:07:35

And that's why the Jewish leaders tear their robes and say, blasphemy. So, again, it's not uncommon.

01:07:43

I get it. But if this person was a Christian, I would think that they would have been able to find, there are plenty of really, really good books that address every single one of these objections and do so in a very consistent fashion, going into the background and exegesis and the original languages and all these things.

01:08:04

So, if you're, I hope you understand, if someone forwards this, and I would hope if someone does know who to forward it to,

01:08:12

I would very much like this gentleman to see this response. But if you claim to be a, and I'm just assuming, okay, all

01:08:29

I can tell is by, through the use of the term revert, that you had been a convert and that you said you were promulgating and teaching and believing the

01:08:40

Trinity. So, I, that's the only thing I can go on. And so, when someone says they believed something and then they don't accurately represent it,

01:08:51

I don't really have any reason to believe that they ever really believed it. And I'm, I'm consistent at this point.

01:08:59

When people leave Islam but then don't accurately represent

01:09:05

Islam, I've got a track record of going, I don't think so.

01:09:11

I would recommend you go back a few years to a guy named Ergen Kaner, who was making quite a name for himself as a former

01:09:18

Muslim, but plainly did not understand Islam and was misrepresenting

01:09:24

Islam. And we were one of those groups that exposed him.

01:09:31

So, I think I'm consistent at this point. And so, I think the same thing needs to go the other direction.

01:09:37

I've just, sorry, I've watched enough episodes of the

01:09:42

Dean Show where they've had former Christians on that were just saying really absurd things about the

01:09:52

Christian faith. And I'm just like, okay, that doesn't, that pushes me away.

01:10:00

It doesn't draw me to, obviously. I want to hear someone who really knows what they're talking about. And that's why I appreciate certain

01:10:06

Muslims with whom I have had dialogues who are either willing to learn and accurately represent, or if they're a former

01:10:15

Christian, at least are accurate in their representation of what they say Christianity was. I think this is vitally important.

01:10:21

It's just a matter of being truthful. So, ultimately for me on a theological basis,

01:10:27

I found that I could no longer believe in this concept. But that was not enough for me. I had to understand exactly where everything was implemented.

01:10:34

And what I discovered is that for the first 300 years after Jesus Christ, the concept of co -equality between the father and the son was non -existent.

01:10:43

Okay. This is where the history starts getting wonky. Like I said, I heard a little something later on about Nicaea that's uber wonky.

01:10:51

We'll get to that in a second. But this is just simply untrue.

01:10:58

And when you start getting into this, it just seems to be, I don't know if our

01:11:04

Muslim friends just pass around a particularly bad file or just what. But this just isn't true.

01:11:14

And it's easy to prove this to be untrue. And I didn't bring any of this up.

01:11:24

But we could look at a number of early sources.

01:11:32

I don't have them in front of me. I'm just gonna give them to me off the top of my head. But for example, when

01:11:38

Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was on his way to Rome to be martyred around 107 or 108

01:11:43

AD. So that would be what? You said 300 years. So this is within 20 years of the death of the last apostle, maybe even 10 years of the death of the last apostle.

01:11:56

Very first years of the second century. He writes letters to various churches and individuals.

01:12:03

And in those letters, he identifies Jesus as God at least unambiguously 10 times, maybe 14 times.

01:12:12

He speaks at one point in this beautiful passage about God's salvation being accomplished by the

01:12:21

Father and the engine. It's literally mekanes in Greek.

01:12:28

The engine being the cross and the rope that lifts us up being the

01:12:34

Holy Spirit. So he uses Father, Son and Holy Spirit in this type of a situation.

01:12:40

So this idea that it did not exist is just documentably untrue.

01:12:48

And I just wonder, where are you guys getting this stuff? You're not getting it from reading the

01:12:54

Apostolic Fathers. You're not reading Clement. You're not reading Ignatius. You're not reading the

01:13:00

Didache. You're not reading Justin Martyr, who in the middle of the second century is identifying

01:13:07

Jesus as Yahweh. You're not reading the actual sources. You're reading secondary biased sources, maybe watchtowers or something.

01:13:17

They've grossly misrepresented this stuff for years and years and years, but they've been refuted in doing so.

01:13:22

So just a question for you. Why do

01:13:27

I read the earliest histories of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham?

01:13:41

Why do I read those early sources and then Bukhari and Muslim and the others? But you won't read our early sources.

01:13:51

Is there a reason for this is a question. There's not a single church father that says that the father and the son are co -equal with one another.

01:13:59

Not true. They're only taken in a dual nature that you can only get to the father through Jesus Christ by following in his footsteps as all the other prophets before him were in that.

01:14:09

Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. All the other prophets said the same thing. No, they didn't. Jesus's claim to be the unique representative of the father is absolutely unique.

01:14:24

None of the other prophets did anything like that. None of them said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. None of them said, if you've seen me, you've seen the father.

01:14:35

I'm not sure where this is coming from, but to deny the uniqueness of Jesus's claims is just not really honest.

01:14:46

Now, the concept of the Trinity was only instituted in the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 by a

01:14:53

Roman emperor named Constantine. Remember, now

01:14:59

I hope that we've developed a good enough relationship that he wouldn't get upset at this, but there was a young, zealous Muslim apologist back in about 2008 maybe, maybe even earlier than that, when

01:15:15

I really first started engaging Islam after my debate with Shabir Ali at Biola in May of 2006.

01:15:22

Somewhere in there, there was a young Muslim apologist who wouldn't do this now, but he put up a video, this is,

01:15:31

YouTube was just starting to really start rolling back then, and you can only do 10 -minute videos and stuff like that back then, but put up a video talking about how at the

01:15:44

Council of Nicaea, the Gospels were chosen by putting all these like 65

01:15:50

Gospels in a room overnight, and when they came back in the morning, there were only four Gospels left on the table, all the rest had been knocked down, and that proved that these were supposed to be the four canonical

01:15:59

Gospels, and this was a story that the earliest example was from like 500 years after Nicaea.

01:16:10

I mean, it's just mythology, and so I pointed out that the Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of scripture and stuff like that, but there are few things that are more mythologized than the

01:16:24

Council of Nicaea, and here is another mythology.

01:16:31

Remember something, let me try to help my Muslim friends out with a little bit of church history here. The Christian faith had been illegal up until 313, so 12 years earlier, and in fact, the worst period of imperial persecution against Christians was from approximately 250 to 313, so that's six and a half decades or so.

01:16:56

Many Christians have lost their lives, and what you need to understand is the Council of Nicaea, many of the bishops are there, bore in their bodies the scars of their beatings that they had endured for following Jesus only a matter of years before that, so you're seriously going to tell me that these people who had lived under Roman persecution only a few years earlier now are so enamored with the emperor of the nation, the empire that had been persecuting them, that they gave up what they used to believe, because evidently what you're saying is no one believed this until this point in time, and adopted a whole new belief because the emperor said to do so, even though if you read

01:17:46

Justin Martyr, you read the people before this, you find repetitive references to the very thing you say they didn't believe, the deity of Jesus, the deity of Christ.

01:18:02

It's there from the very start. The most primitive sources, well, it's in the

01:18:09

New Testament first and foremost, and then it's in the post -apostolic sources as well, all up to the time of the

01:18:17

Council of Nicaea. Now, there is a specific question that had arisen in the teachings of Arius, but you would have rejected

01:18:26

Arius too. You wouldn't have believed what Arius had to say.

01:18:32

Arius said Jesus was the greatest of all of God's creations, not just a mere prophet, and that he had pre -existed.

01:18:44

You would say Arius was wrong, but the question that they were addressing was

01:18:49

Arius' teaching that Jesus was homoousius. Well, he was heteroousius, but he sort of danced around the issue because he would refer to Jesus as God.

01:19:02

He would use that term, but he's using it in a little different way, and so the issue is that oousius is what makes something what it is.

01:19:10

So, the Orthodox are saying same oousius. Arius is saying hetero, different, but then there are people in the middle who are going homoious, like, and this was the issue at the

01:19:25

Council of Nicaea. What's more, if you know your history, and I don't get the feeling that you do, the

01:19:33

Council of Nicaea solved nothing. It solved nothing. The Arians used politics to take over for decades after Nicaea, and in fact, as one writer in the next century put it, the world awoke into a shock to find itself

01:19:49

Arian. So, even though Nicaea had affirmed the status of the sun, there were councils afterwards that denied it and anathematized those people.

01:20:01

There's a great defender of the Council of Nicaea, who was not a bishop at the time of the Nicaea, became one very shortly thereafter by the name of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and he was kicked out of his church five times over the next number of decades for refusing to abandon

01:20:17

Nicaea. Now, the Arians all ended up turning on each other because they, when you use politics, hey, you guys know this.

01:20:26

You Muslims know this because I know your history well enough to know how deeply embedded politics has been in it, even in theological development.

01:20:36

You know that. You know how many people have ended up getting imprisoned and beaten by the next caliph and how that's had impact upon theology.

01:20:45

Well, politics generally isn't the best way to promote truth. I think we'd all agree with that, right?

01:20:52

And so, since the Arians had primarily used politics, their system fell apart. They turned on each other, and the reality is the greatest argumentation, because the

01:21:04

New Testament teaches it, had been in defense of the Council of Nicaea, and so it is reaffirmed in its formulations at the

01:21:17

Council of Constantinople in 381. But there's almost 60 years in there. There's about a 35 to 40 -year period where Arianism reigns supreme, and there are only a few voices,

01:21:30

Athanasius being the primary one, that stands against that. Even the Bishop of Rome, Liberius, gave in.

01:21:38

God's truth isn't determined by multiple, by votes anyways, so we're good on that. Himself was a

01:21:44

Mithrat. Now, I would like to make another video regarding that, but just to give you a little bit of a brief history of Mithraism.

01:21:52

Mithraism believed that the Sun... Ah, here we go. The Mithra myth.

01:21:58

This is probably derived from just a lot of bad YouTube videos, I guess, but Mithraism, in all probability...

01:22:07

Well, first of all, almost all the sources that people use for Mithraism today are much, much later.

01:22:13

They're not contemporaneous. If there's any connections to any of these issues, they're probably the followers of this particular

01:22:23

Roman -ish religion, borrowing from Christianity, not the other way around.

01:22:29

There are references, for example, to the birth of Jesus somewhere between...

01:22:38

The earliest references are to January 6th, but as early as December 25th, that exist before Mithraism even existed on this planet.

01:22:48

So, I get the feeling here's where we're going to get all the alleged parallel stuff that is part of the zeitgeist movie.

01:22:57

It is historically impossible to substantiate. It's really doing history as poorly as you possibly can.

01:23:08

And guys, you don't like it when people do that to Muhammad. You don't like it when people mythologize

01:23:15

Muhammad. Let's just put it this way. If you utilize the same standards you're using here to try to draw parallels to Mithraism with Muhammad, you would have to reject all of the

01:23:29

Hadith as having anything to do with him. You would have to bring in all sorts of external sources of influence to define his teachings, rather than any type of divine revelation, if you were consistent.

01:23:41

I've just not found any of you guys who are. I just have yet to find any. Once you start doing this stuff, you're just not being consistent.

01:23:49

And I've got to call you out on it. Lovingly, respectfully, I got to call you out on it.

01:23:54

Muhammad would send down his son, Mithras, to die for the people, and they would eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to attain salvation.

01:24:02

They would also be baptized. The religious day of worship would be on the sun day in resemblance to the sun god.

01:24:07

And his birthday would also be celebrated in the winter solstice. I'm really not sure that being bathed in bull blood is quite the same thing as baptism.

01:24:18

But again, when you start trying to create parallels without really knowing what the original was, you end up with some really weird stuff.

01:24:29

It's on the 24th of December. So all these similarities is also being found within this concept of Mithraism and Christianity.

01:24:36

And the pagans during that time actually wrote out against the Christians, and they said that you guys are stealing of our doctrine.

01:24:42

I'd like to see where that is. Could you show us a contemporary document? See, Mithraism arises right as Rome is collapsing, and Christianity has already become extremely popular.

01:24:58

And wouldn't it be much more logical that if you're trying to get something new started, that you'd tap into what is becoming popular in the society?

01:25:07

Because again, I can give you earlier than Mithraism all of this stuff.

01:25:13

You can't give me anything earlier than the rise of Mithraism to provide any historical foundation for this.

01:25:19

Why were Christians doing these things? Mithraism didn't exist. Then Mithraism comes into existence, and all of a sudden, the

01:25:25

Christians are allegedly copying it? What? Where are you getting this stuff?

01:25:32

Even some of the church fathers, like Tertullian himself, said that Satan preempted this religion in order to overthrow

01:25:39

Christianity. So if we look at... Which religion? Because they're already dealing with Gnosticism at that time, and the

01:25:47

Gnostics were a far greater, far, far greater threat to the early church than Mithraism ever was.

01:25:55

But which religion? There are no references given here, so you can't check out the original sources.

01:26:04

If you're going to make these types of... When I said the

01:26:13

Quran says X, Y, or Z, I gave you the references. When I said the Hadith says this,

01:26:19

I gave you the references. When I said Muslim sources, Ibn Ishaq, whatever, I gave you the references.

01:26:26

No references here. You could have put them down the corner or something. I didn't see anything on the video on YouTube that said...

01:26:34

And here's all of our references and stuff like that, because I'd really love to see them.

01:26:40

I'd love to examine them. We do things like that in this program. By the way, I've been searching for some of the phraseology in the

01:26:48

Bible quotations. I've been googling them. Oh, should I find the translation? I cannot find what translation he's using.

01:26:56

I even looked at Islamic Arabic translations into English of the Bible, and I looked at the most liberal ones

01:27:03

I could find. I can't find it. Yeah, because this sounds really... Yeah, it's weird. Left -winging paraphrase stuff.

01:27:11

Anyway. History itself, there's already all these connections that we can find, but this is not where it stops.

01:27:17

In the year 381, at the Council of Constantinople, that was the very first time that the

01:27:23

Holy Spirit was added or included into the concept of the Trinity. Except that Ignatius did that in 108, right?

01:27:31

Right? If what you're saying is, well, by 381, since the homoousius issue had been settled, now there were two other sets of questions that needed to be formulated in light of that, and that would be the

01:27:49

Christological issues, which are going to eventually eventuate in the Council of Calcine 451. So, Polynarianism, Eutychianism, Nestorianism, the relationship of the divine and human in Christ.

01:28:01

And then, obviously, the role of the Holy Spirit in his relationship to the

01:28:08

Father and the Son. So, if you're saying, well, then they turn to this particular set of questions and address these issues, okay, fine.

01:28:19

But that's not what you said. The first time that he's articulated, no, was from the beginning. In New Testament and in the earliest writings outside the

01:28:27

New Testament, already there, the issue was dealing with controversies as to what certain terms meant, issues along those lines.

01:28:35

So, only once this had occurred was the Trinity fully fleshed as we understand it and as it is implemented within the

01:28:43

Church today. Except the definition you have isn't really an accurate one, even with what's on the screen.

01:28:51

It was the first time that the word Trinity itself meant what it means today, that the Holy Spirit was also added in this occlusion of co -equality.

01:28:59

Now, Jesus, peace be upon him, also makes it unambiguously clear that he's not God within the Bible. For instance, in the book of John chapter 17, verse 3, he says that this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true

01:29:10

God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Yeah, and then he continues on.

01:29:16

First of all, you don't believe he ever said that, because if you read the whole thing, this is eternal life, that you know two persons.

01:29:28

Jesus makes himself the mechanism whereby you have eternal life.

01:29:34

You must have knowledge of him. And then, only one verse later, he identifies himself as having eternally existed in the presence of the

01:29:44

Father, and that he prays the Father would glorify him with the glory which he had in the

01:29:52

Father's presence before the world was. You don't believe any of that. And if you take one text and ignore what comes, not only in the entirety of the book, which starts off saying, in the beginning was the

01:30:04

Word, was with God, Word was God, the Word became flesh, he is described as the monogamistos, he is described as the

01:30:13

I am, he is worshiped by Thomas as Lord and God.

01:30:18

But then, when you ignore in the one chapter of John chapter 17, Jesus' own words of his eternal existence in the presence of the

01:30:27

Father, if you don't allow all that to speak, you're not dealing honestly with the text. I never did that with the

01:30:34

New Testament, especially as someone who claims to have once been a Christian. This would be a question that if we started talking on a plane,

01:30:45

I'd be looking you in the eye right now going, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?

01:30:51

Therefore, Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, is sent by none other than the only true God. And therefore, even if we call him

01:30:58

God, he himself is saying that he is not the true God, that he has been sent by the only true God. Therefore, assumption being

01:31:05

Unitarianism, rather than the biblical assumption that the

01:31:11

Father sends the Son, the Son comes freely and voluntarily,

01:31:16

Philippians chapter 2, he makes himself of no reputation, he empties himself, those are reflexive pronouns in the original language, to bring about the glory of the

01:31:27

Father, Son, and Spirit in the accomplishment of redemption. That's the consistent biblical presentation.

01:31:33

It's important for us to understand that we cannot worship him. Now, during this time... So, why did the disciples worship him?

01:31:39

Why do angels worship him? Why does Hebrews chapter 1 say that all the angels of God worship him? Why does he bring him into the world so that all can worship him?

01:31:46

Why does Revelation 5 specifically say that every created thing worships he who sits upon the throne and the

01:31:55

Lamb? Why? And when you were a quote -unquote Christian, why didn't you know these things?

01:32:03

You must have answers for them now, right? I mean, that's... I had to make an exclusion between these two concepts.

01:32:14

Am I going to follow man, the inclination, the implementation within history, how they define the scriptures itself?

01:32:20

For instance, John 1, chapter 1, where Jesus, peace be upon him, the Word is called Hothios, and not

01:32:26

Tontheon, which means the only true God. Oh, no.

01:32:34

Okay. Sorry, brother, but you need to understand why...

01:32:42

Well, first of all, this is not the book of 1 John. This is a gospel John. The book of 1 John is a little epistle that you're not quoting from.

01:32:49

So, you've got a graphical error there. Secondly, the reason

01:32:56

I reacted as I did is if you will go back and watch the debate that I did with Joe Ventillacion.

01:33:04

Joe Ventillacion is with a church called Iglesia Ni Cristo. It's a cult out of the

01:33:11

Philippines. They only have a few verses to deal with, and one of them is

01:33:18

John 17, 3, and then one of them here is in John 1, 1, and they make a huge distinction, like you just did, between Tontheon and Theos, which only proves that neither they nor you read

01:33:31

Greek, because Theos is simply the nominative form of the

01:33:41

Word, and Theon is the accusative form. It's just a grammatical ending. It's how it's functioning in the sentence.

01:33:46

It has zero, nada, no meaning in itself as a form.

01:33:54

It's just the difference between the functioning of the subject functioning as a direct object. That's it.

01:34:00

So, no one who understands the original languages would ever make this argument. It's a bogus argument.

01:34:05

It's empty. It's laughable, but it's made. It's on a lot of websites, and so may

01:34:12

I just strongly suggest you might want to completely revise this entire thing in light of history and in light of the truth of this matter.

01:34:24

So, let's back it up just a second here, so we can, here we go, all right. History, how they define the scriptures itself, for instance,

01:34:33

John 1, chapter 1, where Jesus the Word is called Hothios, and not Tantheon, which means the only true

01:34:41

God. The same is also in John 1, verse 18, John 20, verse 28.

01:34:47

All these definitions is Hothios, and the same can be found in 2 Corinthians 4, verse 4, in reference to Satan, where Satan is also called

01:34:57

Hothios, which means a god, a divine. Okay, no Greek lexicon on the planet says this.

01:35:06

This is completely bogus. It's completely erroneous. I don't know how else to say it, but it's indefensible.

01:35:13

It's completely wrong. Needs to be withdrawn. You don't have to apologize for it. Just use better sources.

01:35:21

Theon is simply the accusative of Theos. Okay, the one

01:35:26

God is described in Revelation chapter 4, it's Theos. Okay, so you're making that a god.

01:35:33

I mean, you clearly have never read the New Testament in the original language, so my suggestion would be not to attempt to go there.

01:35:42

Or if you're going to try to actually make an argument like this, check it out with some people who know. You know, I've made a few arguments based upon Arabic.

01:35:49

I studied it for a number of years, but I still run it by people who know it a whole lot better than I do.

01:35:55

This is completely bogus. This is untrue on any level. You could never, ever translate the

01:36:02

New Testament if you follow this type of thinking, because it is simply untrue. It doesn't mean that they are

01:36:09

Tantheon, which is the god, the divine, the creator. So, I had to make the separation.

01:36:15

I had to decide that I'm going to submit myself to the one and truly almighty creator God, and I'm going to follow him and his prophets only.

01:36:23

And I'm going to move away from the inclinations of man. And whenever somebody tells me something, I'm going to look as to what

01:36:28

God has to say about it. And I hope that that gives a clarification as to why I accepted the concept of Tawheed and the concept of the creator defined in the

01:36:37

Quran, chapter 112, verse 124. Assalamu alaikum. Okay, I think we were very fair.

01:36:43

I would very strongly suggest to our friend that you reconsider much of what you said in light of our having provided a response.

01:36:55

I do not know why, as a Christian, you would not find people who could have given that information. I'm not the only one who knows these things.

01:37:02

But we'd love to hear from you as well in regards to that.

01:37:08

So, let me finish off with this. I was gonna do this beforehand, but this works actually better. And this is for you, the gentleman who made this video, this is for you.

01:37:20

I'm going to pop up here. No, remind me later. I do not want to update anything.

01:37:30

Let me see if I can. Well, no.

01:37:40

Yeah, I'll just go ahead and blow this up. You can put it down in the corner if you want. I'll make the type a little bit larger if you want, if you want to try to follow along.

01:37:49

I'm going to do something sort of strange here. This is a book

01:37:55

I got a little while ago. It's called the Vaticanus Bible, the Gospels. This is, give you a little background.

01:38:03

We have numerous early manuscripts of the New Testament. And our first rather complete manuscripts come from around the time of the

01:38:14

Council of Nicaea, approximately 325 to 350. We have fragments, collections of like Paul's writings as early as 200, some gospel manuscripts in the late second century, and some fragments as early as 125.

01:38:27

Some people would argue there's one or two fragments that may be first century, but that's highly disputable. Anyway, Codex B is called

01:38:35

Codex Vaticanus because it's in the Vatican library. And it has been for hundreds and hundreds of years where it came from originally.

01:38:43

No one knows, doesn't have any marks on it. What they're doing, it's really neat, is they, now that's what is over here on the right -hand side.

01:38:53

This is Vaticanus over here. The one in the center is Urnesiolon 28th edition. Over here on the left is the

01:38:59

New American Standard Bible. So here is what you have. And you'll notice that this looks different than this.

01:39:05

And the reason this looks different is that it is written in unsealed text or maguscule text, all capital forms.

01:39:15

There are spaces between the words here, but there are not spaces between the words in the printed edition because there are no spaces between words.

01:39:26

Well, here, let me show you. Oops. There it is. And here.

01:39:35

And we blow it up like this, like that. There you go.

01:39:41

So there is what Codex Vaticanus looks like. There you go.

01:39:47

And so you can see no space between words. This is just long lines of the capital forms, maguscule forms of the

01:39:58

Greek language, and that's how it was written back in that particular day. So let me get out of that and go back to where we were, which is there.

01:40:08

So that's what over here. And so what is in here is what you saw on the screen just a few moments ago, all written in unsealed text.

01:40:19

And it's extremely difficult to read because of that.

01:40:24

I mean, until you get used to it. But I want to read you just two verses from Codex Vaticanus.

01:40:31

Why? Because Codex Vaticanus was written approximately 300 years, between 250 and 300 years before Muhammad spoke for the first time in history.

01:40:47

You see why? Your Quran says that the

01:40:54

Al -Anjil, the people of the gospel are to judge by what is written therein. This is what they would have had.

01:41:01

This existed before Muhammad, existed centuries before Muhammad.

01:41:09

And so Surah 5, Surah Al -Maidah tells the

01:41:15

Al -Anjil to judge by what is found in the gospels. So let me give you what is found in the gospels.

01:41:27

So specifically verses 23 and 24 is what we'll be looking at.

01:41:36

And he was saying to them, so he's, in this context, by the way,

01:41:42

Jesus is talking to Jewish individuals who are questioning his teaching.

01:41:52

By the end of the chapter, they're going to be picking up stones to stone him. So this is a tense situation in John chapter 8.

01:42:04

And he says to them, Humais ek ton kato.

01:42:14

You are from below. You are from below.

01:42:22

I am from above. Ano. I ek to ano.

01:42:29

I am from above. You, Humais, ek to to to kasmu.

01:42:40

You are from this world. You are from this world.

01:42:47

Esta. Ego, I, uk, I am not, ek to kasmu.

01:42:55

I am not from this world. Now, just immediately, I just point out to my

01:43:01

Muslim friends, could the Muslim Jesus say these words?

01:43:09

Could the Muslim Jesus say these words? These words, I'm reading to you what was written hundreds of years before Muhammad ever said a word.

01:43:18

But I remind you, I've never seen any evidence that he would have had any firsthand knowledge of what would be recorded in something like this, like this manuscript.

01:43:28

I don't see any reason to believe that he had this type of knowledge. Okay. So, that is the end of verse 23.

01:43:41

Verse 24, let me roll it up here because they're not, this one, because of the formatting.

01:43:52

Oh, good. The rest of them got up with it, but it takes up more room because it's, I don't know, there's more blank space in it.

01:43:58

I'm not sure why there's more blank space in it. Okay. So, therefore, I said to you, hati apathanestai, you will die entais hamartiais, in your sins.

01:44:23

I don't know about you, but when Jesus says to you, you're going to die in your sins, that's a fairly, you need to listen because even though you reject

01:44:36

Jesus's deity, you believe he was a prophet. And so, if he says to you, you're going to die in your sins, you need to listen, right?

01:44:42

And most of you, I'll be honest with you, have never read this before. And I'm just simply reading it to you as it existed, again, centuries before your prophet first spoke.

01:44:55

You will die in your sins unless, because you want to find out what the unless part is, right?

01:45:05

For unless you what?

01:45:11

Now, it uses may here. It uses the negative, but that doesn't come across in English.

01:45:18

So, we translate it a different way, but for unless you believe, pistuseta, that's the standard term for pistubo, for faith, for belief.

01:45:33

For unless you believe what? What do you need to believe so that you don't die in your sins? Hati ego aimi.

01:45:43

Hati ego aimi. So, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.

01:46:01

You will die in your sins. Now, here's a prophet, right? The prophet is saying to you, unless you believe ego aimi,

01:46:12

I am, you will die in your sins. Now, some of these people, it's said, believed in him.

01:46:24

And so, Jesus said to them, if you continue my word, you're my disciples indeed. You should know the truth. The truth shall set you free.

01:46:30

And they didn't like that. They didn't like the idea. They need to be set free. And so, they begin to question him.

01:46:41

And so, we get down to, I'll scroll this down, sorry about that, the end of the chapter.

01:46:52

And Jesus has said to them, Abraham rejoiced to see my day.

01:46:59

He saw it and was glad. Now, I'd ask you, when did Abraham ever see

01:47:04

Jesus' day? I would respond that he's actually walked with Jesus in Genesis 18, 18 and 19.

01:47:15

Because Yahweh and two angels came and visited Abraham. And Yahweh walked with Abraham.

01:47:23

The two angels went down to Sodom and Gomorrah. Yahweh walked with Abraham. Jesus is

01:47:29

Yahweh. And eventually, Yahweh on earth rains fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah and destroys it.

01:47:37

A story that's told at least three different times in the Quran. Not without an understanding of these things, but it's told three times in the

01:47:44

Quran. And so, in verse 57, verse 57, the

01:47:55

Jews are saying to him, I'm 50 years old. You've seen the day, you've seen

01:48:00

Abraham? Please notice Jesus' response. He said to them, amen, amen.

01:48:13

Here, it's right here. In fact, it was right there. See? Amen, amen.

01:48:20

Truly, truly. You know that term. You use it. There's a similar phraseology in Arabic, the repetition of the verily, verily.

01:48:32

Amen, amen. I'm just reading it to you from a manuscript that we know was written at least 250 years before Muhammad ever said anything.

01:48:57

Before Abraham was, I am. And what does it say?

01:49:05

The Jews picked up stones to cast at him. Why? Because they know who the

01:49:12

I am is. They know that Ego Aimi is used for a name of God in the book of Isaiah multiple times.

01:49:24

So, they knew what Jesus was saying. So, here's my question for you.

01:49:31

Do you know Jesus? Oh, you say you do. In fact, you might even be one of those Muslims that say, oh,

01:49:37

I'm a part of the religion that teaches people to love Jesus. The second largest religion in the world that teaches people to love

01:49:44

Jesus, right? I've heard that one a number of times. But if you had been standing there in John chapter 8, which group would you have been with?

01:49:58

Which group would you be with? The ones who believe Jesus and believe he's the

01:50:05

I am or the ones who reject as blasphemy his claim to be the

01:50:12

I am, the name used for Yahweh. The film that we just, the video that we just reviewed, sorry film,

01:50:23

I'm old. The video we just reviewed comes from the perspective of those who would pick up stones to stone him.

01:50:31

I don't want you to remain there. It is truly and deeply our desire that every

01:50:39

Muslim person come to know the true Jesus, the mighty Savior, the

01:50:46

I am, and with Thomas to be able to say, my Lord and my

01:50:51

God, because he's the only one who can save. A Jesus who's just down in one of those little lower levels of heaven, a

01:51:01

Jesus who makes birds to come alive because of some gnostic gospel, but who does not give his life on Calvary's tree doesn't exist, didn't exist historically, and can save no one.

01:51:17

And so I would strongly, strongly exhort you to think about what the

01:51:24

New Testament really does testify and that it testified this before Muhammad came along.

01:51:31

He tells me in the Quran as one of the Al -Anjil, judged by what is in the

01:51:39

Anjil. Fihi, there it is. This existed before the Quran. When I judged by that,

01:51:47

Muhammad did not understand. He was in error. To follow him is to follow him into error.

01:51:57

So we call you to the truth. We proclaim the truth to you. And I appreciate your having to take the time to have listened to my response to your video.

01:52:06

Again, I was thankful. It has, I think, a very high quality to it in its production, but it just has some serious errors in it that I would hope you would be willing to correct and to reconsider.

01:52:23

Yes, sir. You have a microphone in front of you. Just as you wrap up, just a couple of announcements along the way.

01:52:33

Has something been going on? Did the world melt down while I was talking? No. It was sort of fun to actually forget about everything for a little while and actually focus on something else.

01:52:44

Tomorrow, this is Tuesday, June 9th. So tomorrow,

01:52:50

June 10th, somewhere early in the morning. Assuming no nuclear wars, things like that.

01:52:57

The infrastructure of the United States remains intact. A man makes his plans on his website. That's right.

01:53:03

Psalm 33. There you go. So we are hoping to, Lord willing, and the internet doesn't crash, we are hoping to unveil the new version of AOMEN .org

01:53:16

tomorrow. And the big thing that we wanted when we started going down this road several months ago was we wanted a much more user -friendly and informative website.

01:53:26

It's going to be a lot busier of a website, but the point is it's going to present the user with a lot more information than just the four columns that the previous version presented.

01:53:42

And you don't have to do a tremendous amount of digging. You're going to be able to find categories. You're going to be able to find current events.

01:53:49

You're going to find a lot of old stuff, too. And so new graphics, the whole nine yards.

01:53:54

We're going to what we call a newsy -ish approach. Newsy -ish. Newsy -ish.

01:54:00

Newsy -ish approach. And you'll have to wait and see tomorrow morning at AOMEN .org,

01:54:07

and you'll see the... Camera angle's all wrong. The camera angle is all wrong.

01:54:12

Oh, yeah. That's terrible. Well, first of all, you can't see. It's behind a microphone. Well, that's with me. It's right up your nose.

01:54:19

So that's not a no. You need to go. It needs to go. Well, we'll work on that, too. So, but I did want to mention that and go from there.

01:54:29

Gotcha. All right. New website tomorrow. I predict problems, but that's because that's always what has happened in my experience in the past.

01:54:39

It's just like, you know, when you try to put together that R -Y you want for your bedroom, you know, it should only take so much amount of time.

01:54:48

Then there's a part missing or something, you know. I was like, yeah, that's so... I'm just Debbie Downer.

01:54:53

That's the way it is. Okay. So it could just stand up and just be perfect first shot. We'll see.

01:55:01

From what you are seeing, that is correct. All right. Yes. So hopefully we'll be here on Thursday, Lord willing, and we'll be able to work and function and do all sorts of stuff like that.

01:55:16

Thank you once again for watching the program today. We will see you next time, Lord willing. God bless.