Matt Slick Bible Study, 4/29/21, God as 1, 2, 3 persons, Trinity, Covenant, Christianity & Humanism

CARM

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:04

Well, if you guys want to go check, you could go check on either the CARM homepage might have it, CARM YouTube might have it, or CARM Facebook might have it, should have this video.

00:14

Hopefully it will. And I apologize for those who are watching. If you are watching this on my phone, and we're trying to get this to look good.

00:23

We've got some people here for the Bible study, and hopefully everything will check out and work out. So, all right, let's pray.

00:31

We're going to get started. Let me know if you guys can hear me in the other setup or whatever, if it works, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

00:36

That's it. Let's move on. All right. Lord Jesus, I just want to come before you and ask you,

00:43

Lord, for your blessing. And as we look to your word, look to you, I ask that you would anoint the words, anoint the hearing, and the truth that is your word.

00:54

I ask, Lord, for your mercy and your grace on the technology, and that you'd bless all the people here, and the blessing of the people who are listening.

01:02

So Jesus, we just give you thanks. We ask it in your precious name, amen. All right, so last week we talked about the nature of God.

01:15

We talked about the ontoss of God, and we talked about divine simplicity.

01:22

We talked about perichoresis, you guys remember that? The members of the

01:27

Godhead interdwell each other, perichoresis, the divine simplicity of God is that there's only one being who is

01:35

God, and that God is one thing. He's not parts. He's not part of the

01:40

Son, part of the Holy Spirit, not part the Father. He's not part good and part holy.

01:48

He's all one essence and one thing. And we call this divine simplicity.

01:54

And so out of that, and the doctrine of the aseity of God, remember, this was dealing with God's eternal non -contingency.

02:04

There was never a condition or never a time when the Christian Trinitarian God did not exist.

02:10

God has always existed as God, always as a Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

02:16

And there was an eternal time. I don't like using the word time, but what else are we going to do?

02:22

An eternal time when God was existing in fellowship and in union with himself in the inter -Trinitarian communion.

02:31

He didn't need anything else, and he wasn't lacking anything else. And as Dave, you were talking about that song, what was it?

02:40

God didn't want to have heaven without us, or he couldn't do heaven without us, something like that. Well, the implication is that there's a lack in God and the completeness of God is found in our existence.

02:52

This is an arrogance, and God does not need us. God chose out of the freedom of his own will to create us.

03:03

He's the one, there we go, we've got people watching, good. He's the one, let me check that, okay, good.

03:11

So he's the one who decided to create us out of the kindness and the goodness of his own heart and his mind. In fact, if you guys are in the chat room, if you could, you could just let me know if you can hear me okay.

03:23

I spent an hour, two hours trying to get this to work right, I'm literally on my phone, and hopefully the phone will last a while, because it's at 95%, it's losing 5 % every, about a percent a minute, so it might be about an hour.

03:35

So you hear me fine, perfect, Steve says good. All right, good, good, good, okay.

03:42

So in the doctrine of the Ascetic of God, a really, really, really, really important doctrine of God, if we understand this and the machinations of it, we can understand that God does not need us, this is really important.

03:57

God is eternally non -contingent, eternally self -contained, there's nothing in God that's lacking in any way.

04:04

He did not look into the future to see who's gonna pick him, he would look into the future to see what's gonna happen, he would look into the future in order to find some need of information somewhere, somehow, by extrapolation or for, as they say, foreknowledge, in order to find out decisions that would imply the back of God, the completion of God's essence, nature, purpose, design, character, work, helps for itself, and this is impossible, it's not the

04:29

Christian theological perspective. However, there are a lot of Christians who say, that stupid song lyric was, that God didn't want heaven without us, or he would imply the lack, well, heaven is where God is, and it's not an issue of not wanting, because that would mean, then, for eternity,

04:46

God was not wanting to be by himself without heaven, it doesn't make any sense. What happens when we have people like from Hillsong, the amateur theologians who then start to write into their songs, bad theology, and it's bad.

05:07

I've said this before, I'm gonna say it again, if you're reformed in your theology, about 90 % of the heresies that you might commit through ignorance are just not manifest, because in reformed theology, the election of God, the destination of God, the greatness of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God, you are centered by grace, he didn't need you, why would he pick you and elect you from the foundation of the world,

05:30

Ephesians 1, 4, over here, DG, and I wonder that, and because why would that happen, but I certainly wonder that about myself, why would

05:42

God pick any of us, we don't know, and he does not tell us why, it's not because of some characteristic in me, or in you, that would then say, oh, you know what,

05:52

I can see why God would pick me, because look what I can do, and it's not it.

05:57

Go to James 2, 3 -4, you'll find out that God is negating any idea of partiality,

06:04

God does not show partiality, now Romans 2, 11, God does not show partiality, clearly says that, but people will say, well, wait a minute, if God elects people and predestines people, then he's showing partiality, not the biblical partiality, the biblical partiality,

06:18

James 2, 2 -4, where God, where it says that a person comes into your home, your area, and he's got a nice car, nice clothes, good looking, or she or whoever, he shows favoritism to that person based on what that person has, and that's not the favoritism that God has,

06:39

God has the right to decree who he wants saved and who he does not want saved through his will, and it's not up to us, it's up to him, who opens the heart of the king where he wishes it to go,

06:48

Proverbs 21 -1, where he moves the heart of the king, and Acts 16 -14, he opened up Lydia's mind to understand the things that Paul was saying, and Luke 24 -39,

07:02

I think, I'm trying to remember, 45, one of those, I think it's 44, I don't know,

07:09

I've got so many verses in my head that are closely related, but Jesus opened their eyes to see the word, their mind, their eyes were opened to understand the truth, so the point is that God is the one who's doing this.

07:21

I go back to the issue of aseity, I want people to understand that God does not need us, he is not dependent on us, he doesn't need us, there's no lack at all if we don't exist, period, no lack.

07:40

If you get this down in your head, then when you're listening to songs, God needed us to love him, wrong, okay, or God will give you permission to come into my life, arrogant foolishness, which is a beautiful praise song, and they have those lyrics,

07:59

God will give you permission, he didn't give God permission, it's idiocy, and yet this kind of pervasive wackleness is in the church because they don't understand biblical theology, and what

08:13

I love to be able to do is have a church, get into chairs, where once a week

08:18

I teach for an hour on one topic, like the aseity, immutability, transcendence of God, just on that, go back and forth.

08:29

The next week on the nature of the Trinity, we talked about the Trinity last week too, discuss this, people need to get it in their heads so they understand who

08:36

God is. Yesterday, I was talking to my old professor from seminary, Dave Scheringa, and he's the guy actually who kept me in SEM, I was ready to quit, and he's great.

08:49

We're talking yesterday about the issue of God's greatness and why he would pick and why he wouldn't and who and what, and he was saying that the churches today, and I say this, the churches today don't know what's going on, they don't understand the truth, they don't understand the nature of God very well.

09:06

He said something that was very interesting, he said when he was younger, where he grew up, they were catechized.

09:14

Now, catechism is something normally you might think of in a context of a church. Well, the church,

09:20

Roman Catholic Church, excuse me, will catechize somebody, you have a catechism and you'll go through the catechism little by little by little, daily by daily, and he said that they did this out of reformed confessions, they would catechize out of reformed confessions, and by the time the children were ready for high school, they already understood their purpose,

09:46

God's grace, justification, sanctification, the Trinity, hypostatic union, they already had an awareness before they even got to college, they understood what the total is, but most

09:56

Christians don't know, and unfortunately, I've been getting this a lot lately, where people are saying to me,

10:02

Matt, you've taught me so much, I haven't learned this in church, I've never heard this stuff. How long have you been a Christian?

10:08

10, 15, 20, 25 years, you know, or more, and I haven't learned this stuff, and it's a shame, it's a testimony to the failure of the pastors and the churches to teach what needs to be taught, and because of it,

10:20

Christians don't have the anchor of the truth of who God is, and because of that, they'll believe all kinds of false things, like taught by Joyce Meyer, by Joel Osteen, by Kenneth Copeland, by Stephen Furtick, you know, they'll believe these guys, what they say in some things, and they don't have the discernment.

10:38

Grounding of the truth is in the personal work of Jesus Christ, but this emanates out of the very nature of God's existence and His character,

10:46

His holiness, and we talked about this last week as well. All right, now, we kind of went through this a little bit, so what

10:52

I want to do is talk about the Trinity a little bit more. We talked about it a little bit last week, but I want to talk about it some more.

11:00

I'm going to slow down a little bit and talk about why

11:07

God's a Trinity. We didn't do that last week, did we? Why? Okay, and I have a theory about why

11:13

God must be a Trinity, and what I'm going to do is try and make sense of something, and if it doesn't work, that's on me.

11:22

If it does work, great. Here, hold on a second. This is why I'm looking down like this, just my laptop, it's like that for the people, thumbs.

11:37

So, hopefully, everything's still working. All right, so Genesis 126 says we're made in the image of God.

11:47

We are an analogy of God. We are an analogy of God's characteristics, of his essence.

11:55

So, what I want to do for a bit is talk about what's called the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God.

12:02

Communicable and incommunicable, or communicable and noncommunicable. So, some noncommunicable attributes of God are such things as God is omniscient.

12:13

That cannot be communicated to us. We can't understand that. God is omnipresent.

12:20

We can't relate to that. We can't understand that. God is all -wise, called omnisapiens.

12:27

We can't relate to that, especially, but we cannot relate to what that means.

12:33

I'm going to pick on each one, except for the ladies. I can't pick on the ladies, I'll get in trouble. No sandwiches for me. Oh, they're digging a hole for myself.

12:39

So, God has these characteristics. He's the omni, but we can't relate to it.

12:44

How about this one? God is immutable. He's unchangeable, but unchangeableness also means eternal, because if he came into existence, then there's a change.

12:56

And if he stops being, there's a change. So, he is eternal. He's immutable. He's unchanging,

13:02

Malachi 3 .6. He does not change. We can't relate to that. When I look in the mirror, there's some change, and it's not for the better.

13:13

I mean, I look in the mirror. One time, I thought there was a monster in the house. It was me in a mirror in the morning without much light on.

13:20

And, you know, that's how it's going. And then this goddess walked by. Oh, there's my wife. You know, she walked by. So, she always looks good.

13:26

And so, making up for the sandwich comment earlier. So, keep trying, she says.

13:35

My wife says, keep trying. What? Sandwiches later. What's that? Sandwiches later. Sandwiches later.

13:41

We have two ladies here. Maybe we can have more sandwiches in a sandwich making contest. Oh, there's cookies.

13:47

That's right. You make good cookies too. So, notice, folks, these are not the things you're supposed to do with the ladies.

13:53

Say things like I do, which is stupid. All right. So, the communicable attributes of God.

14:02

The communicable attributes. God can think, we can think. God can love, we can love.

14:09

God hates, and we can hate. A lot of people are surprised, but God hates. Psalm 5 -5,

14:15

Psalm 11 -5, God hates all who do iniquity. And so, those kinds of things are communicated to us.

14:23

So, God's self -aware, we are self -aware. God's aware of others, we're aware of others.

14:29

So, we are an analogy, an imperfect analogy of God's essence, his perfection.

14:38

We are not holy in our nature and essence as God is holy. We're not omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.

14:44

We think, but we don't think perfectly. God does. We love, but we don't love perfectly. God does.

14:51

We hate, but we don't hate perfectly. God does. God is rational.

14:57

We're not always that rational. And things like this. God is aware of others, but when he's aware of others, he's aware of others in completeness and totality.

15:07

We are not. We have to learn about others and things like that. All right. Now, this is important because we can then see there's a relationship between God's existence and his personhood and ours as we can see the relationship between them.

15:21

Now, not a perfect relationship, but we get the point. That's what it means when it says we're made in the image of God.

15:28

Imagio Dei, image of God. We have this image of who God is in us.

15:34

Because of this, every person is worthy of honor and respect. Male, female, black, white, blue, green, orange, purple, tall, short, doesn't make a difference.

15:46

Even those with down syndrome, even those with birth defects, even those with autism, even those who don't look good.

15:56

So, they hate people who do. And so, because they have that image of God, theologically, we have to understand that respect is to be given to everybody.

16:06

Now, this is hard to do because we're prejudicial. We have incomplete knowledge.

16:12

You know, we have these things, you know, and you used to be a cop. So, I'm sure there's a lot of stereotypes you're familiar with and stuff.

16:19

And, you know, I'm a cult dude, you know, I'm the cult. So, when I see certain type of cults,

16:26

I have certain expectations. I'm not always right about them. So, there's an imperfection in our personhood, but by analogy, we can still relate to it.

16:34

All right. Now, so God is a person, but he's three persons, but sometimes he manifests as one.

16:44

That's bad, almost bad wording. He appears to speak to us as one person where God says,

16:51

I am that I am. Exodus 3 .14 says to Moses, within the father and the son and the Holy Spirit all speak and things like that.

16:58

So, let's talk about personhood, attributes of personhood. So, personhood attributes are things like,

17:06

I am aware of me. I'm aware of you. We can communicate. We can have fellowship.

17:12

There can be levels of intimacy, levels of exchange and ideas.

17:21

And the full scope of personhood is manifested in God in the

17:26

Trinitarian sense, where for eternity, he had fellowship, contemplation, intimacy, relationship.

17:35

This is the full and most perfect representation of personhood. We understand personhood that way.

17:44

If we were to take an individual and put this individual into a room and have no light and kept the temperature, let's just say it's 72 degrees.

17:55

So, it's not hot, not cold, river's perfect for that person. And there was a bed to sleep in and there's a toilet to go, water to drink and food gets put into a dark area three times a day.

18:11

No fellowship, no light, no communication with anybody else.

18:17

And that's their life. Would we consider that to be torture? Yeah, we would.

18:26

That'd be horrendous. In fact, in my novel, when Zeke, my novel,

18:32

Time Trap, Zeke was in just that kind of a position and it was torture for him.

18:38

It was torture. So, if God is a single person, then it would mean that if God existed as a single person, he would have existed eternally as a single person without fellowship, without love, without an object of love, without communication, without reciprocity.

19:02

When I insult Dave over there and he insults me back and there's reciprocity. We have fellowship and things like that.

19:11

Well, that's how guys are. We insult each other but the ladies are always perfect and beautiful and everything else. So, there's reciprocity because there's another person.

19:21

There's otherness there. If God is a single person for eternity, none of that is possible.

19:27

The question then becomes, how is he a person? Because if the full nature of personhood by the analogy that we understand personhood to be is fellowship, intimacy, aware of self, others, communication.

19:44

That's what we are by analogy, what we are in God. Well, then how could it be that if we're made in God's image, God's a single person?

19:50

There's a disparity there and it casts doubt on the legitimacy of the idea of God existing as a single person forever because there would be no fellowship, no intimacy, no communication, no awareness of self and others.

20:05

Now, self, yes, but no self and others and no reciprocity and we would consider that to be torture.

20:12

We would consider that to be bad and yet that would be the eternal state of God and so that obviously brings problems.

20:20

So, now let's talk about the idea of God existing as two persons and this gets more difficult to explain.

20:26

If God were two persons and you got to forgive me if I don't do a good job at this but I'm still practicing how to articulate this.

20:36

If God were two persons, then the issue of fellowship and reciprocity wouldn't exist because two persons, let's say the father and the son, they could communicate to each other, they could have love for each other, they could fellowship but this is where my thinking

20:58

I believe is a little weak in this. I'm still trying to get over this intellectual roadblock but I need to step aside here and talk about abstraction.

21:10

We talked about this last week a little. So, if I think the number two, two in my mind is a manifestation of the universal quality of two -ness which is a universal abstraction and it exists because God exists and it's a reflection of his mind.

21:29

So, that concept of two in my mind or the concept of two in your mind, is it an abstraction?

21:36

Yes. Now, here's a question, is the abstraction itself alive? And the answer is, well, no.

21:43

It's an abstraction and the abstraction itself, my thought of two -ness is not in itself alive.

21:50

It does not have self -awareness or awareness of others, doesn't contemplate, doesn't think. So, by definition, this abstraction is impersonal.

22:00

So, in my mind, if I'm by myself, I can think in an abstract form and I can experience.

22:07

Now, if God were a single person, then the abstractness of his contemplations would be part of his essence and I could see that.

22:20

However, since we see the single person issue has problems, the dual person issue becomes not as problematic but I'm seeing a problem.

22:31

I could see it but I can't articulate it in that the exchange of fellowship between, let's say, the father and the son and not the

22:39

Holy Spirit in a binatarian sense, it would seem that the essence of fellowship would have in itself an impersonal quality because there would have to be a perichoresis, an interdwelling of the essence and the personhood.

22:59

If these are to exist like this, there's an interdwelling, then one thought is another thought of another.

23:04

But that would mean that the exchange, not just the internal thing, but the exchange of thought itself is an impersonal quality.

23:15

And that would tend to mean that in the binatarian sense, an impersonal aspect of existence would be a necessary part of God to have fellowship.

23:29

But that's a problem because how can an impersonal aspect of God be part of his essence?

23:35

It's different when it's an internal thought in your own mind. But that's different than an exchange.

23:41

If I were to say, hey, how are you doing, Dave? You say, I'm doing fine. So that's different. And what we have here is an exchange of fellowship.

23:50

But you and I don't exhibit what we call perichoresis. We don't indwell each other's minds. In the nature of God, in the binatarian sense, there would have been indwelling and the exchange would be, it implies that the exchange itself is impersonal.

24:04

There'd be a necessary impersonal aspect of God's existence in a binatarian sense. And that's a problem because of the exchange.

24:14

In a trinitarian sense, what if the exchange of fellowship is facilitated by a third person so that the exchange of fellowship, the mutual perichoresis, a mutual indwelling in the

24:28

Godhead, the mutual indwelling then would not be impersonal, but the fellowship would be facilitated between any two by the third.

24:38

And that there would be then a complete personal interchange in relationship where there would not be an impersonal abstraction as the means of fellowship.

24:50

Now, if that hurt you, just take me trying to explain it. So, I don't know if that's making sense, but this is something

24:58

I've been wrestling with for a while and trying to figure it out. And I've talked to other people about it.

25:03

And one guy had written another book where they're talking about this aspect that I just said, and he was giving it to me, but I couldn't quite grasp it because that doesn't quite make sense.

25:12

And I've been working on this for a year or two now, trying to build on some of the concepts. But the idea of an impersonal aspect of God being a necessary part of his essence is a problem.

25:24

And so, the Trinitarian sense seems to solve that problem by implying that the impersonal thing that's exchanged would then be personal exchange, and we have a perfect communion where any two persons are mediated in their fellowship by the third.

25:42

So, between the Father and the Son would be the Holy Spirit, between the Father and the Holy Spirit would be the Son, with the Holy Spirit and the Son would be the

25:47

Father, as they do a mutual exchange of fellowship. So, I don't know if that makes sense, and I don't know if it's correct logically to think through it a lot more, but I want to have some discussions with some smart people, a lot of people a lot smarter than me, we can discuss these issues.

26:05

But I'm trying to solve just because I got nothing else to do, you know, why has God a Trinity, you know, and I've been working on that for a while.

26:13

So, people saying, ouch, Laura says ouch, Randall says here, Greg says howdy, love you, brother

26:18

Matt, you're a blessing, sir, thank you, Goran. And so, anyway, so let's just move on.

26:26

I hope that didn't hurt too much and cause people too much discomfort intellectually. I don't see any slobbering, so that's okay, no slobbering, no drooling.

26:38

But, you know, that's a good sign when

26:44

I don't see that, all right. I've never thought about that. About what, slobbering? Never thought about slobbering?

26:50

Never thought about the Pyrrhic Rhesus and her Trinitarian communion and why the nature of God is Trinitarian? Yeah. Yeah, I think about things like this.

26:59

No, that's cool. I think of other things too, like why does my wife love me? So, one, that's a mystery.

27:07

Dave's nodding his head vigorously. This is where Reformed Theology comes in because God predestined her to marry me because no one else would.

27:17

I mean, come on, there's some issues here, obviously. That's right. Right, hon?

27:24

Sure, she says sure. Whenever I'm on camera or anything, if I call my wife, she, hey, hon, you want to come on camera here and say hi to everybody?

27:32

Because you're a lot better looking than I am. This is how not get sandwiches.

27:40

Okay, all right. Now, let's move on a little bit. That was fun for me.

27:46

I don't know if it made much sense, but it was fun. Now, let's get into the Trinity. Now, let's imagine, do a little thought experiment.

27:53

So, God already has eternally known that he's going to redeem people. God has already eternally known he's going to create the universe.

28:04

God has already eternally known that he's going to become one of us, bear our sin, die on the cross.

28:11

God has already eternally known that he's going to create the universe in which all of this is going to be possible.

28:17

He's already eternally known going to create angels, third going to fall, etc., etc.

28:26

All of this is already eternally known. Now, in Hebrews 13, 20, it talks about the blood of the eternal covenant.

28:33

Now, what is that eternal covenant? Now, a covenant is a pact or an agreement between two or more parties, okay?

28:40

This is my water or yours? Okay, thanks. Hold on a sec here.

28:48

Since, oh, here's my book. Wait a minute. This is for the people who don't, this is the book we're talking about.

28:54

I was reading and Zeke is in here with the thing. Okay. So, a covenant is a pact or an agreement between two or more parties under 10 commandments or a covenant document, two documents, not one document with six and four or four and six or five and five.

29:15

It's 10 and 10 because if I were to write a contract with any one of you, you're going to want to copy the contract.

29:24

You're going to want to copy the covenant. We both know exactly what our responsibilities are. The two tablets went in the

29:31

Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, which is underneath the mercy seat, which is considered the footstool of God.

29:38

It's in his presence. It's also the presence of Israel because they had the tabernacle and the whole bit.

29:44

And so, the symbolism here is that God had the copy of the covenant and we have the copy of the covenant, 10 commandments,

29:51

Exodus 21 through 17. We'll talk covenant at a time. What was the sign of the covenant?

29:56

It was those commandments. What was the sign of the Adamic covenant? Tree. What was the sign of the

30:02

Noahic covenant? Rainbow. What's the sign of the Davidic covenant, which is prophetic manifestation of Christ and communion.

30:12

Covenants have signs. Here's my wedding ring covenant sign.

30:19

If I were mad at my wife sometime and I were to take my wedding ring and take it off and throw it in the trash, what am

30:30

I saying? I don't want the covenant to be in effect anymore. I'd be saying,

30:36

I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want this. To reject the covenant sign is a rejection of the covenant. All right.

30:44

So, God works covenantally. Ratenant testamentum, covenant, Old Covenant, Old Testament, New Covenant, New Testament.

30:52

So, God works covenantally and the covenant is ratified at the death of the testator. Jesus is the death where the covenant changed from the

31:01

Old Testament covenant time to the New Testament. That's Hebrews 8, 13, Hebrews 9, 15 through 16.

31:06

We're not going to get into that too much. What I'm trying to do is give you an idea what covenant is. So, what happens in the eternal

31:13

Trinitarian communion with the eternal covenant? The Bible doesn't say what the eternal covenant is, but I affirm in my opinion that the eternal covenant is the covenant in the inter -Trinitarian communion where the father would elect, the son would redeem the elect, and the

31:35

Holy Spirit would apply the redemptive work. Now, that's my opinion. I believe that's the case.

31:42

I'm saying it's my opinion because I could be wrong about that. But we do know, for example, in John 6, 37, it says, all the father gives me will come to me.

31:53

It does not say all who come to me the father will give to me, but all that the father has given me will come to me.

32:00

There's a group called the all that are given by the father to the son. And he says, this is the will of the father that all that he's given me,

32:07

I lose none. That's a great thing for eternal security. All right. Now, think in terms of God always knowing forever everything he's going to do.

32:27

And I think in terms of the eternal covenant of redemption, this would mean then that there was always the case that the father would send the son.

32:40

It was always the case that the son would, and the father would send the

32:45

Holy Spirit and always the case that the son would become one of us and die on the cross. So, let's look at the father -son relationship eternally.

32:53

This would then mean that it was always the case that the son was the son, right?

33:01

He would always have been the one who would be sent by the father, always be in that position, that relationship with the son having to be sent.

33:12

So, in this, we can see what's called the eternal sonship. He's eternal son.

33:18

Now, we're not going to get into the eternal generation issue. That's, I got to prep up on that one, because there's some issues there.

33:26

Because of the father, I mean, the son proceeding and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the father, it gets really interesting, and there's a lot of discussions over it.

33:36

So, I can't teach like this on the radio, even though I want to.

33:41

Maybe I should do it sometime, but anyway. So, if we were to understand the

33:47

Trinitarian communion in this sense, it becomes really interesting when we start seeing that God, well, he can't make any mistakes about who he elects.

33:56

The son can't make any mistakes about who he redeems. There can't be any change in the eternal decrees of God, because he's always known everything all the time, which necessitates election and predestination, which is taught in Scripture.

34:12

And it's taught in Scripture in Ephesians 1 .11, that God works all things after the counsel of his will. But Ephesians 1 .4, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we behold him blameless in love.

34:23

He predestined us to be conformed of his image. Now, look what it says. Ephesians 1 .4, it says, he chose us in him.

34:31

Now, I want you to get this. In him is a phrase that describes a federal headship.

34:42

1 Corinthians 15 .22, in Adam all die, in Christ all shall remain alive.

34:48

In Adam, in Christ. In Adam means everybody who ever lived. In Christ means just the people that were given to Christ.

34:57

So, when Jesus died on the cross, and was crucified, Romans 6 .6, Romans 6 .8,

35:02

it could be said that we died with Christ. We were crucified with Christ. And the Bible says that those who are crucified with Christ have died to sin, died to the world.

35:11

You can go to Colossians 3 .1 through 5 is good. And also Romans 6 .1, 2, and 3 talks about us dying.

35:19

We died to sin. This is only of the elect. And Jesus canceled the sin at the cross,

35:25

Colossians 2 .14. He didn't cancel it when we believe. Now, if we were to think about this, if we look at the issue of the eternal decrees of God, when it says in he chose us, in him we'll form the foundation of the world.

35:41

That means the father chose us in him, which means it was a simultaneous eternal necessity of God eternally decreeing and eternally choosing us in the eternal son to redeem us.

35:54

There was not a time when God said, hey, can I get an idea? Talking to other members of the Trinity. Yeah, what's that?

36:00

I got this idea. Oh, that's a good idea. It did not happen like that. Open theist maybe, open theist

36:05

God, God's going, you know, for a kabillion and he goes, hey, I got an idea.

36:11

You know, that's not gonna happen. The Trinitarian God, the true Trinitarian God. So this means then that the elect are eternally elect and they're eternally elect in him.

36:27

And they can't be elect unless they're in him. And they can't be in him unless they're elect.

36:37

Election is in Christ. And if we're in Christ, we're elected. There might be a logical priority and some get into superlapsarianism, inferlapsarianism.

36:47

It's gonna talk about this simultaneous eternal nature of existence and the eternal nature of God's decrees, eternal way that God has always known and decreed who would be the ones that he would elect and redeem.

37:02

He chose us in him. He chose us in him, Jesus, the fourth foundation of the world.

37:11

This is logically necessary from a being God who is, who possesses satiety, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnisapience.

37:20

All wisdom, last one. From eternity, who doesn't change, which means a Trinitarian nature is always existed and he has always been what he is and we've always been elect, always been elect.

37:36

Now, if you were to go, I don't have my Bible program open, but let's see if I can get it open here. If you were to go to Romans chapter eight,

37:45

Romans 8, 29 and 30, it says, here comes my wife with brownies.

37:57

Those are tempting. She tempts me with brownies, those are good. Romans 8, 29, it says, those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son.

38:09

And those whom he foreknew, he also called, I think it says, those who he called, he also, what does it say, predestined, what does it say?

38:17

Get the text. Justified, those who justified, also glorified, right? So it goes called, justified, glorified, right?

38:25

Now, notice what it says in Romans 8, 29. Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined.

38:32

Now, there's a little tangent. God does not know everyone. You go to Matthew 7, 22 and 23.

38:39

And then he will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, do we not prophesy in your name and in your name cast out many demons and in your name perform many miracles.

38:45

Get away from me, I never knew you. I never knew you. In Galatians 4, 8, when you did not know

38:50

God, you served by nature those which are not God's. But now that you know God, you have come to serve the true and living

38:56

God. It actually said, now that you know God or rather are known by him.

39:02

It's actually what it says. Now that you know God or rather are known by him. You're known by God, which means that God knows you, means you're in.

39:11

So it says that to know there is gnosko in the Greek. Foreknow is pro gnosko.

39:17

Notice what it says in Romans 8, 29. Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined.

39:23

It does not say those whom he looked in the future, in his foreknowledge of looking in the future, decided that those people are going to be saved and then he predestined those.

39:32

Nope. Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined are the same group. And that's what it says.

39:39

Those whom he predestined, he, what's the call?

39:52

In Ephesians 1, 4 and 5, calling precedes predestination.

39:57

Here, predestination precedes calling. They're both necessary with each other.

40:04

The elect are going to be the ones who predestine and only the predestined ones are the elect ones into salvation. But those whom he called, he also predestined and those who he predestined, he also glorified.

40:13

So the foreknown ones are the predestined ones who are the called. Now notice this.

40:20

Those whom he foreknew, past tense. He also predestined, past tense.

40:25

Those whom he predestined, he called, past tense. Those whom he called, he justified, past tense.

40:32

Those whom he justified, he also glorified, past tense. Now wait a minute. Glorification is a future event.

40:40

In the resurrection of our bodies, we're talking about being glorified. Now if he's talking about that sense of glorification, then that's what's really, if that were it, that were it, it'd be very interesting because then what's going on there?

40:54

Glorification out of 1 Corinthians 15, 35 through 45. And what we'll be seeing here, if that's the case, glorification of the body is yet future and yet it's spoken of in the past tense.

41:08

Now could it be that the glorification means that we are exalted in the sense of being glorified by God because we're in Christ and there's some relationship in heaven with him?

41:18

If that's the case, it's in the past tense also. Why is it in the past tense?

41:24

It can't be in the past tense if you can lose your salvation because if he's glorified you already, you might lose your salvation and go to hell.

41:33

Oh, we forgot the part B. And he unglorified some who of their own free will choice rejected him because they were keeping him.

41:42

Okay, that's out of the book of 2 Meronicals. I think there's an edition in there. So those of you who are new, he also predestined, same group, those of you who predestined, he also called, those of you who called, he justified, and those of you who justified, he also glorified.

42:00

Justification is a legal necessity. It means that we're made right before the law by the work of Christ and his act of obedience.

42:07

We'll get into this more probably next week. We talk about atonement and stuff like that in personal work of Christ. We'll get into a whole bunch of stuff more.

42:15

This is what's going on. Okay, now I want you to understand is the eternal nature of God, the eternal knowledge of God, the eternal decrees of God, the eternal election of God, the eternal predestination of God, the eternal glorification of us in God, in Christ forever, forever because of the

42:32

Trinitarian communion. This gives me hope.

42:38

It really does give me hope theologically that I'm going to go to heaven. The reason it gives me hope is because that means then

42:47

I have been elected from the foundation of the world, not dependent on my works or my ability or my sincerity or my goodness or anything, and predestined, because that means he knew what

42:59

I was going to be like, and yet he predestined me anyway, and he's called me. Okay, so he's called me, and I'm saved, and he's justified me, which is only because of the faith that God gave me,

43:10

Philippians 129. He grants that we believe. That's what power justified, you know,

43:16

Romans 3 .28 and Romans 5 .1 and Galatians 2 .16. This gives me hope because it means he took care of it all.

43:26

It was already set from the foundation of the world. I can't screw it up. If I could screw it up,

43:33

I would have. If I could screw up my salvation,

43:39

I'd have done it, and not just lately. I would have done it very quickly.

43:46

I would have screwed up my salvation. I'm thinking, and this is on a good day, I think

43:51

I could have lasted three to five seconds. I don't know, but I take comfort in knowing that God chose me from the foundation of the world, predestined me from the foundation of the world because I'm in Christ, who died on the cross and bore my sin in his body, 1

44:12

Peter 2 .24, and he says, I'll never leave you or forsake you, Hebrews 10 .5,

44:17

and he says that all the Father gives me will come to me, and the will of the Father is I lose none.

44:24

I rest in that, and it means to the critics, yeah,

44:32

I can go sin all I want. You better believe I can, but the Bible says in 2

44:38

Corinthians 5 .17, we're made new creatures, and we're born again, John 3 .3

44:43

-8, and God's in me. That's John 14 .23, and I don't want to sin.

44:52

I struggle with it because that's what it means to be redeemed. Sometimes when the critics of this position of eternal security, they'll say, oh, that means you can sin all you want, right?

45:03

That means you can try to sin. They're saying, they're usually saying, I keep my salvation by my works, and I don't need regeneration because I do it myself, and you, by my standard, you can go and sin all you want, and you're still going to be saved.

45:16

You liar, you hypocrite. You could be, they're saying, we keep our salvation by our goodness and our works. They're boasting.

45:23

They're arrogant fools. Yeah, this needs to be taught in the churches, too, that people learn.

45:32

He didn't pick you because of you. He picked you because of him. He didn't love you because of you. He loved you because of him.

45:38

Now go out and do the same to others, and be loving to others, even though they don't deserve it, and that's how it's supposed to be, and we learn this from God.

45:49

Now, I find great comfort in this truth. In the doctrine of the

45:54

Trinity and the eternal decrees of God, he eternally decreed what we would be and what would happen and how it would work, and I love that.

46:05

I need that because I know down deep how much of a wretched soul that I really am, and I'm not being humble.

46:14

I'm just being truthful. It's the truth, and I've told this story many times.

46:21

I was upstairs praying, praying, and praying, and praying, and I couldn't even think of anything else to pray.

46:28

Couldn't think of anything else to confess. I've been up here a long time. There was nothing else, just going over the same old stuff, and I was being humble as I could, and then

46:38

I added in the prayer, thank you, Lord, for not making me like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, just like the

46:45

Pharisees, the arrogant Pharisee of Luke 18, 9 through 14. Thank you for not making me like that tax gatherer, and I realized then the depravity of my own heart.

46:54

I don't even know the depravity of my own heart, and yet God does, and he loves me anyway. Why is that?

47:03

Because of the nature of his love. Now, this is not something we really talk about. Now, a lot of people think that love, you know, divine love, agape, agapao, the verb form, agape, the noun form, okay, that it means divine love.

47:19

This is a quality that God has. Agape does not mean divine love, not by default, because I think it's

47:26

Luke 11, 43, or 51, I think it's 43, but the Pharisees agape their high seats.

47:34

And, oh yeah, and I just released another article, and I forgot, there's other verses where like five more verses, four or five more verses, where the word agape is used of coveting of very sinful things.

47:46

People are surprised by this. You mean agape doesn't mean divine love? It does in one context. God so loved the world, but you love your high seats, and I love the praise of men, another verse, okay, it's agape.

47:59

What does it mean? So, I've altered my understanding of the word agape, and I think it means something to the extent of a complete and total commitment, giving over to.

48:11

Now, that's not all it is, because when God loves us, it's in a beneficial, gracious kind of awareness with emotions into it.

48:19

But agape, when they would love the seats, and it was used once in the scripture, it might have just been an exaggeration, you know, but I love these cookies, you know,

48:29

I'd marry them, they're that good, okay. And we use exaggeration, hyperbole, but when it's used several times, okay, something's going on.

48:38

And so, I'm not convinced that agape only means divine love, though in certain contexts, it certainly can, which apply with God's love to us.

48:47

And so, I see it as being more of including that in the semantic domain range of its definitions in different contexts.

48:54

I see it also as the issue of the brutality of commitment and giving over to.

49:01

And when it comes from God's heart, it's loving. When it comes to the unbeliever's heart, it's covetous, it's commit, you know, utter.

49:12

So, when I think about that, divine love in the utter commitment kind of a sense is what

49:19

God has for us from eternity. And think about this, the nature, they tell me, we'll be getting into it more next week.

49:28

We talk about Christ, and if we get there, because we're gonna talk about his natures and stuff like that, go into other things.

49:38

But if all of this is true, and it's biblical, and I'm giving you the scriptures for it, then it would logically necessitate that the love of God is so complete and so perfect upon the elect, and it cannot be thwarted.

49:50

Because how could God love someone to that level who he knows that he's redeeming and also will end up in hell?

49:58

Because he would also have to hate the person. Because Jacob, I love thee, so I hate it.

50:05

God loves one, hates another because of his discretion. He hates all who do iniquity. So, what would happen if we have an individual who claimed to be a

50:11

Christian, and then lost his salvation as some people teach? Well, God from all eternity, and he doesn't say he went and became a liar, thief, he does evil.

50:23

He just gave up on God, and he lost his salvation, he went and became evil. Then would God hate him? Yes. But if he was saved before then, would that mean

50:31

God loves him? Yes, in a saving love. But that would mean then that God simultaneously has to both love in a condemning way, and I mean, love in a saving way, and hate in a condemning way.

50:43

And it does not make sense from an eternal perspective. When you take the idea of God's nature, and you think about it, decrees, will, trinity, assidity, non -contingency, eternality, knowledge, wisdom, election, predestination, you start doing this with them.

51:08

You go, wait a minute, I don't see how they fit. I don't see how they fit. Then you go, oh, wait a minute. Okay, okay,

51:13

I got that. Oh, that goes, oh, now I'm seeing how it fits. Oh, it all makes sense.

51:19

I remember when I first started, when I was first a Christian, and you know, I'm 64, and I've been a

51:25

Christian since I was 17. So that's a long time. And I remember, I slid a little bit this and did that.

51:33

But when I started studying the Word, guess which book in the Bible stumbled me the most?

51:40

Absolutely stumbled my faith. I kept believing in spite of what was being taught in it. One book in the entire

51:46

Bible. You guys want to offer a little guess? Romans. Romans did.

51:56

Because I went into Romans with not a very good understanding of things.

52:04

And I remember struggling with a book of Romans for several years. You know, I'd casually read it here.

52:10

What? Why would he say that? That doesn't make sense. Romans 9?

52:15

Are you kidding? No, no, not Romans 9. Jesus is the blonde -haired, blue -eyed, Caucasian surfer dude.

52:21

That guy saw it just like yesterday when he was out there on the waves. And he's dressed in a Romans 9 gown.

52:27

Can I come in your heart, please? You know, it's up to you. And so this man -centered idea—remember we talked last week about Christocentricity or God -centered versus humanistic thought that's in the church.

52:42

It's coming out of a humanistic -based understanding of secular view and a large part of secular ideas inside the church, because a lot of people didn't know these things.

52:53

You know, I'm not blaming anybody. Maybe it was my stupidity saying something that's absolutely true that would have cured all my problems, and I'm just too stupid to listen, which is certainly probably the case.

53:05

Now, Romans tore me up until I started learning theology.

53:12

And then I went, oh, well, I get it now. Oh, okay, I'll just shut up because I thought

53:18

I had it understood. I'll just shut up and sit down now. I get it. Paul is smart.

53:25

Okay, he does know more than me. I was kind of wondering there for a little bit. And, you know, once I realized,

53:33

Paul is absolutely brilliant. And I love teaching the book of Romans. I love going through the book of Romans. It takes me a year to teach it.

53:39

I've done it a few times. I love Romans. I would marry Romans. Take a book of Romans and go, yeah, my chest.

53:44

Oh, that's good. That's good. Maybe we could edit that out later. So the book of Romans is good stuff because it's doctrine.

53:54

Now, you know, I'm autistic, and I like that kind of stuff a little bit more than emotional stuff like the other books.

54:00

I don't know other books are emotional. I can say Song of Solomon, but it's got some good stuff in it, you know, but it's another topic. So the thing is that when

54:09

I started understanding who God was, so many things fell into place.

54:15

But in order for me to understand who God was, I had to get rid of so many false ideas of who

54:22

God was. The more I divorced my idea of God based on my experience and my preferences and my common sense, the more the

54:34

Bible made sense. And once I grasped that concept, then

54:41

I got it. And then when I would start reading the Bible, things opened up quickly. And I'm not saying, oh, now

54:48

I have it all figured out. Of course not. But I'll tell you, it's like, oh, now I get it. That makes sense.

54:53

That relates to this. Now I understand it. And that's a real advantage when you're teaching Bible studies, you're on the radio, you're writing articles.

55:01

And that's what I want each of you to get to, is to get to a place where it's all interconnected.

55:08

You go, oh, I get it. That makes sense. I understand now why this is related to that.

55:13

Now it takes a while. And for some people, it'll probably take a lot longer than others, maybe, to get to it.

55:21

I don't know. It took me years. So we'll see. You guys on the camera,

55:28

I was insulting one of the guys out over here. So he's an ex -cop.

55:34

You can't arrest people anymore, can you? I can try. You can try? Uh -oh. I bet he'd be nice. He says he could try and arrest me.

55:44

So you're like it now. You don't seem to get any luck. So anyway, okay.

55:51

We've been going on this about an hour. So I want to ask, you got any questions? You got anything you want to talk about in relationship to this?

55:58

Because I can keep going in other areas if you want. It's up to you. Or in the chat room, if you got anything in there, you can ask stuff in there as well.

56:13

I'm assuming that the audio and the video are pretty good still, right? Sorry, the lighting's not that good. It's just what it is.

56:19

This is how it is. I'm using my phone. So StreamYard, I'm doing my StreamYard on my

56:24

Android phone. How's the camera look? Is the picture looking really good? Does it sound really good? Looks pretty good, people in there.

56:34

Laura Anderson, this has been good. We're praying for Bill about his job. Okay. God -centered as opposed to man -centered.

56:40

William P., that's exactly correct. In fact, I want to take that statement and work on it just a little bit more.

56:46

We talked about it last week. I want to talk about it a little bit more. In fact, I discussed this on my Patreon video.

56:52

I went over this again. I did a thing on humanism versus Christianity. So just because we go over it once doesn't mean we've all got it.

57:00

So let's go over this again. There are two perspectives to have.

57:07

God -centered, man -centered. God -centered, man -centered, period.

57:13

Different people will have different views and intensities on that line in between.

57:21

God -centered, man -centered. So let's say Christianity, atheism.

57:28

Okay, Christianity is God -centered and atheism is man -centered. All right, now let's do this. Let's take Christianity, expand this out.

57:35

Within the Christian circle, let's include Roman Catholicism, that bankrupt whore of Babylon.

57:43

So let's include Roman Catholicism in there. All right. Would there be any humanistic ideas in Roman Catholicism?

57:51

A truckload. A truckload. Semi -truck or like an F -150? Semi. Semi?

57:57

Okay, triple. You know, forget it. So some of the heresies are man -centered ideas in Roman Catholicism.

58:05

I could think of one big one. You got to follow the dictates of the church. Tradition. Tradition.

58:12

Tradition. Tradition is man's effort, man's work, man's history, man's recording, and then they have the gall to say that it's equal to Scripture.

58:24

What a bunch of arrogant twits. I am serious. Yeah, our church is a true church and our church is a tradition from God and our church is the thing you got to go to.

58:35

And you can have salvation outside of our church and our church has Mary and our church has a priest and our church has this and you got to come to our church, our church, our church.

58:42

Oh, Jesus? Yeah, him too. And humanism is man -centered where they use the reasoning of man.

58:53

I know somebody named Eric, won't say his last name, and I've had conversations with him. He's a good guy and he is heavily into philosophy.

59:05

Christian guy. We've had numerous discussions about open theism where that the future is open and melanism,

59:13

I believe it is, counterfactuals, God's knowledge of certain things dependent upon certain other things.

59:21

Anyway, and I said to him several times, I said, Eric, I said, you don't realize this.

59:27

I said, I'm quoting Scripture far more than you are. Not that it makes me right just because I quote

59:33

Scripture, but I'm quoting Scripture and you're giving me philosophy. And when you say something philosophical,

59:39

I go, well, what does the Bible say? Now, which one is superior? And he actually said, they're equal. I actually said they're equal because philosophy comes from God.

59:51

Same kind of thing, isn't it? No, they're not equal. Philosophy logic only is good if it agrees with Scripture and it must be subservient to the word of God, period.

01:00:06

Because God's word is what he has given. We talked about this last week, the nature of God's word, his speech, his inspiration that comes out of him.

01:00:15

That he is the one who's given it to us in the written form. It is our tendency to walk away from God and serve our own flesh, to serve our own self, to invite anger into our heart, to invite prejudice, to invite whatever it might be into our own hearts in order to justify our own feelings, our own emotions, our own desires, our own wants.

01:00:35

We do this to a heavy degree. We do it all the time. We do.

01:00:41

I'm sure glad God predestined me with the foundation of the world because if he'd look at me now, he wouldn't pick me, you know?

01:00:47

And so, hold on. If we can understand that there's a war between God -centeredness and man -centeredness, does this war occur in the church?

01:01:01

Yes, it does. Do we have wacko morons who are on TV and other places saying things like,

01:01:13

God told me, and I was in the house, you know, yesterday I was talking and God told me that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:01:19

Okay, I'd be in the house. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Was it an apple?

01:01:25

No. Was it like writing in the clouds? No, no. Was it, let's see, you spilled some rice on the ground and it was like, there's letters written?

01:01:37

No. How did it work? Well, you see, I had this impression in my heart. So, God speaks to you by impressions in your heart.

01:01:47

And how do you know it's from God? Because I just know. Can I check that with scripture?

01:01:54

God told me you shouldn't do that, you know, that kind of thing. And we get this, and what do people do?

01:02:00

Let me tell you this. Tell you about a new age convention I went to. What do people do in the church? That's amazing.

01:02:08

That person gets revelation knowledge like Joel, I mean, Joyce Meyer said. Kenneth Copeland said

01:02:14

Jesus appeared to him and said he never claimed to be God. Kenneth Copeland said this. Moron, get out of here.

01:02:22

No. Now, so what happens, I want you to,

01:02:27

I'm going to exaggerate this from a point, but I'm going to tell you about an illustration. People in the church, some guy gets up, yeah,

01:02:35

I'm Bishop so -and -so, I'm Apostle so -and -so, I'm the prophet so -and -so. And last night when I was talking to God, he told me in my heart, it's a gift to you today.

01:02:43

Oh, wow. This man talks to God. This woman talks to God. Okay. Years ago, before I moved up here to Idaho, we lived in San Diego and I loved it.

01:02:55

I went to a new age convention. It is much better than Disneyland. There's no comparison.

01:03:03

It's just no comparison. Disneyland or New Age Convention. New Age Convention. And my professor,

01:03:11

Dave, that I told you about, he and I went on one of them. And on the way home, you know, driving back, he said,

01:03:20

I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. And he, even the next Sunday, he preached about what he saw because it was incredible.

01:03:28

The occultist. Okay. I went into this one room where a woman was going to channel an ancient

01:03:36

Aztec, Greek, Samoan, whatever guy, you know, from the king, whatever, you know, it's gonna be something exotic, right?

01:03:48

And so I went in and I stood by the door area and these people had filled up the seats before this woman got there.

01:03:59

And New Age Convention, so much better than Disneyland. Different kind of puking, but anyway.

01:04:09

And so she comes in, there she is, same kind of thing you see in the churches, you know, there she is.

01:04:18

And then she's walking and she's talking and she sits down and she goes, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:04:23

Are you ready? I'm going to channel him now. You ready? Okay. And then she goes in and she goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:04:29

And everyone's going, oh, amazing. And I watched the expressions, the same kind of expressions

01:04:35

I'll see in audiences of Christians when someone, I get revelation knowledge. No discernment because they don't study the word of God because the pastors aren't teaching them what needs to be taught because they don't have the discernment themselves.

01:04:51

We, the Christian church, are supposed to be teaching truth. And the way to start the truth is by the study of God's nature,

01:04:57

God's essence. That's what we're supposed to do. God's a standard of righteousness. God is a standard of holiness.

01:05:03

God is a standard of truth. God is a standard of what we're to do in fellowship. God is a standard of love.

01:05:10

God is a standard of hate. God is a standard of righteousness and mercy and grace. God's a standard and the only way for us to be able to emulate those and to manifest those by studying

01:05:19

God. And the way he does that is by the scripture. And when we extrapolate from what we see of scripture, it's eternality, all knowledge, all wisdom.

01:05:29

He's never not existed. We can learn things from that. The eternal covenant, we understand the personal

01:05:34

Christ as a representation, his exact representation, the nature of God, Hebrews 1 .3. We can see this, we understand, we can learn who he is.

01:05:42

And by learning who he is, we learn who we are. Now, I like what I see when I see God.

01:05:47

I don't like what I see when I see me. And I want to emulate God. And when we study this way, then what happens is when we're in a church listening to a sermon and the pastor says,

01:05:59

God just wanted you in heaven with him because he thinks you're so wonderful. You want a

01:06:07

Frisbee or hymnal book at him, you know? And it sounds so nice.

01:06:13

It sounds so loving. It sounds so good, but it's not true. God would want us in heaven with him for his glory through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

01:06:24

It's always Christ -centered. And this is another issue. So, one of the things

01:06:30

I've said over the years is, oh, there's Dave Place. Hey, Dave, he's in Albania.

01:06:37

Thank you so much for your prayers, for your travel mercies. I talked to Bill a little later today. He said the company let him go through his beliefs.

01:06:44

God has a plan. We trust in his provision. All those times of persecution or blessing, I was hoping he was going to come by.

01:06:50

I got to talk to him anyway, Bill. Anyway. Okay, now.

01:06:57

So, if we understand the nature of God and we also understand when we get into the cross more next time,

01:07:07

I want you to think about this. A sermon. Pastor gets up and he says, don't lie.

01:07:14

And he reads right out of the Bible, thou shalt not lie. Don't lie. And he shows these examples where lying caused problems.

01:07:21

Maybe he goes to Abraham where he lied about his wife. And then the Pharaoh said, I'm going to take her.

01:07:27

And then there's a curse. Don't lie. See the problems? And he talks about lying and just shows you consequence after consequence after consequence.

01:07:35

Lying. And he says, okay, everybody, you got it. Don't lie. And so, the audience goes, that was a great sermon.

01:07:44

And he goes home. Well, it's a bad sermon. It's a horrible sermon because it's moralism.

01:07:54

Now, we're going to get into more about this in Christ and the nature and the essence of the cross, the atoning work.

01:08:00

The reason we're elect is because of the cross. The reason we're redeemed is because of the cross.

01:08:06

I can hear you. The reason we're elect is because of the cross.

01:08:13

The reason we're redeemed is because of the cross. The reason we're secure is because of the cross.

01:08:21

When a person preaches, thou shalt not lie. Why is it we should not lie?

01:08:28

Because we are elect in Christ, predestined in Christ, redeemed in Christ, bought in Christ, died with Christ.

01:08:37

Don't lie because you're no longer your own. You bought with a price, Acts 20, 28. Don't lie because you have been redeemed or indwelt by God.

01:08:48

And this is arranged and made possible by the sacrifice of Christ. Because if we were to understand, when we talk about the atonement and the person of Christ, we'll be getting to this later, next week, probably.

01:09:00

When we talk about this kind of stuff, we can start seeing, okay, God's a standard. Therefore, the reasons we do stuff is because of God, His character.

01:09:14

Not because being bad is bad, but because the standard of God is holiness, we're to be holy.

01:09:21

And lying is something God can't do, Titus 1, 2. And because we're redeemed, that's why we don't do it.

01:09:27

And so then we have the attitude of God's character and His nature, which is manifested in the cross.

01:09:33

And that's why we are what we are, why we stay what we are, what we do what we are, because of the cross, which then comes with the glory of Christ.

01:09:41

And this is a short version, we'll get more later. This is based out of the essence of God's existence.

01:09:47

This is why it's so important to study God. God is the foundation. God is the necessary precondition for intelligibility.

01:09:53

God is a necessary precondition. We talked about universals last week, remember? Redness, goodness, badness, mercy -ness, charitiness, the universals, abstractions that exist in the mind of God, a universal sense that we can apprehend.

01:10:07

And these things exist because of God, and we can only know them and experience them because of the cross. Now, I'm going to show you something here.

01:10:14

Are the unbelievers blessed by the cross? The ones who end up going to hell, are they blessed by the cross?

01:10:25

Yes, they are. That's correct. How so? Because there may be reactions with Christians and they're blessed from the

01:10:34

Christians. They can be blessed from the Christians. What we do to make things better.

01:10:42

How about this? Let's say the cross was never going to occur, and never did occur.

01:10:50

No redeemed. What might be a logical action, a necessary action of God right away if there's no cross?

01:11:05

For the sake of the cross, we have the elect. The elect are still being born, and the unbelievers participate in the blessing and the tolerance of God for the sake of the elect.

01:11:20

So they benefit also from the cross in that God does not exercise his judgment right away right now.

01:11:27

You're out of here. So the mercy of God is for the extension of the kingdom of God through the elect of God from eternity past.

01:11:38

We're still being born, probably because it comes back in a couple of days, you know, all that kind of stuff.

01:11:46

But we're still being born. We're still being redeemed because we can have elect people who are not yet Christians.

01:11:53

And so the unbelievers who could be elect and become Christians later are blessed from the cross.

01:12:01

And even those who end up going to hell are blessed by the cross and are benefiting from the cross because God holds back his judgmental hand because of the blood of Christ for the elect as well as the non -elect.

01:12:20

Everybody benefits from the cross. And the unbelievers deny it, and the unbelievers won't recognize it.

01:12:27

And what we're going to end up doing is, you know, maybe next week when we talk about Christ, I may get into the issue of the fall and talk about this relationship and what total depravity is.

01:12:40

Because this, I might do that. This depends. Because total depravity relates to the issue of the holiness of God and the contrast between them and the redemptive work, nonetheless, and why unbelievers are what they are, and elect are what they are, and things like that.

01:12:53

I don't know. We'll see. Hey, Chris Holds, haven't seen you in a long time. Chris Holds, that guy right there, when my wife and I were going to my aunt's funeral, our car broke down in the desert in Nevada, he bailed us out.

01:13:10

That's a short version. Great guy. He helped us out. He saved us. Good guy.

01:13:17

And so, okay, so let me kind of, I've been going for an hour and 15.

01:13:23

Now, last week we got into theology heavy. We're doing the same thing tonight.

01:13:30

Is this really helping you to understand these things, be exposed to these things? Just give me a little bit of feedback. It's helping me because it's bringing me more depth than a lot of what we're talking about.

01:13:44

I know it's parts and pieces. It keeps it fresh in my mind and just gives me a depth that I need.

01:13:54

You've got more depth. How about you, Mike? Are you going to move to Boise?

01:14:02

It's a joke. He's visiting. You haven't heard this before, have you, or have you, or?

01:14:09

Some of it. Some of it? Most of it, no. Okay, good. I know Dave Brock, Dave and I, we talk because Dave, man, he just loves reformed theology and loves deep theology about God.

01:14:22

It is. I do too. And I know this is, a lot of it's new for you too, right?

01:14:28

It is, but it's very, this is the stuff that I needed. The stuff you needed, right.

01:14:34

Yeah. The stuff in here that you're talking about right now, that makes a lot of sense.

01:14:39

Okay, good. You can't hear it, I'm going to repeat it again. That's why, except that you're hearing makes a lot of sense.

01:14:47

Well, when I debate, I'm in impromptu discussions on the internet.

01:14:54

I used to go to PalTalk for 12, 15 years. It's a place where you have voice and people would come in and they'd challenge.

01:15:02

So I spent thousands of hours over the years in there and in a place called Discord and other places, going over this stuff back and forth.

01:15:11

When you start teaching it, it starts interconnecting and you start seeing the broad scope, the broad picture.

01:15:21

And I've always enjoyed seeing more things that are truths about God. Oh, wow, that's,

01:15:27

I didn't know, I didn't think about that before. And it's just, it's a wonderful thing because God is so great.

01:15:33

God is so vast. And a lot of people think, unfortunately, that the scriptures are just this deep.

01:15:39

And once we get to stuff about God, the Trinity and Jesus, now let's get into the more important stuff.

01:15:45

Me, my relationship with God, my health, my wealth, my enjoyment at church.

01:15:52

And that's wrong. This is different. Because I think people should go to church to hear about God and what he's done and then be equipped for the work that we're to do based upon his revelation, his gifting and other areas, of course.

01:16:12

All right, basically done. So you guys want to ask questions or?

01:16:21

Do you ever finish? Do I ever finish? You said you're done, I don't believe it. Well, there's more, but then there's segments.

01:16:31

We're going to be getting into the person and work of Christ and the necessity of limited atonement, because it's going to tie back into election predestination and federal headship.

01:16:44

In fact, let me just get this a little bit. Let's get this into it again.

01:16:57

Praise God, Randall. Hi, Nancy. There's a really interesting verse that I came across years and years and years ago.

01:17:07

And for two weeks, I was by it. I was very puzzled by this verse when

01:17:15

I read it in the NASB. And I went to the King James. I went to NIV.

01:17:21

And it was only the NASB that gave me problems.

01:17:27

I'm going to introduce federal headship a little bit more because we're going to be discussing it next week or the week after.

01:17:34

I remember being at a restaurant or someplace with my Bible. I used to get it everywhere. I didn't care.

01:17:40

It's the place I go sit by myself. I like sitting by myself, my Bible open and start reading. And before I was married,

01:17:49

I was reading Romans back during that time when Romans was confusing the crud out of me. And I came across Romans 518 and the

01:17:58

NASB. Excuse me. But for one offense, there resulted condemnation to all men.

01:18:06

So also through one act of righteousness, there resulted justification of life to all men.

01:18:12

I'm going somewhere with this. That verse confused me because it says, and there resulted justification of life to all men.

01:18:23

Well, that's universalism. But in Mark 3 .29,

01:18:29

Matthew 25 .46, Revelation 4. I mean, 14 .11

01:18:34

and 20 .10, we know that people go to hell. So here we have a verse that says, the resulted justification of life to all men.

01:18:44

And yet people go to hell. You can't have both of those be true. This really confused me as one of the things that I'm going, okay, this doesn't make sense.

01:18:54

And so having recently been at a seminary, I knew my

01:18:59

Greek fairly well. And I went in and looked at the Greek New Testament. And I was looking into the Greek and I was reading through the

01:19:04

Greek and I go, wait a minute, this is interesting. So I'm not gonna give you all the steps I went through. I'm just gonna jump ahead. It took me a few weeks of study until it dawned on me what was happening.

01:19:17

What was happening, God was using the words differently than when I was using them.

01:19:24

It took me a while to get the concept that God uses words differently than we do. And we have to find out what the meaning of the word is by seeing how

01:19:33

God uses it, like the word apostolate, as I said earlier. He's divine love, right? Not necessarily.

01:19:39

Of course, it does. We've always been taught from pastors. Nope, not always. Let me show you the verses.

01:19:45

You know, two men in a field, one is taken, one is left. It's always the rapture, right? No, it's not. You know, and I learned, okay, don't just assume what they're telling you is true.

01:19:58

Not assuming they're evil people, but just don't assume. Let's go to the word. So I'm looking at the

01:20:03

Greek, and I had to do studies. I had my books, didn't have computers, you know, programs and all that stuff.

01:20:10

I got concordances. I had these books going through the King James, you know, King James basically sucked canal water at that verse, because it says the free came to all, you know, like the word free, the word gift, not in the

01:20:24

Greek, not there. So what is going on? Okay.

01:20:30

What I discovered was that the word all has different meanings in different contexts.

01:20:36

This really opened the door for me in other theological areas. What it literally says in the

01:20:41

Greek is two sentences joined by a conjunction, sentence

01:20:47

A and sentence B, through one transgression, condemnation to all men.

01:20:52

That's what it literally says in the first part of Romans 5 .18. The one transgression, condemnation to all men, because there's no verb there.

01:21:02

Verse B, so also through one act of righteousness, justification of life to all men.

01:21:10

That's what it says. So A and B are very similar. A is one man's deed.

01:21:17

Here's the result. B is one man's deed. Here's the result. So we have

01:21:23

A and B, sentence A and B and part A and B of both. So in sentence A, one man's deed, the result, condemnation to all men.

01:21:33

In sentence B, one man's deed, here's the result, one act of righteousness,

01:21:39

Christ's sacrifice, justification of life to all men. Okay, it's a parallel.

01:21:45

There's no verb. So the NIV and the ESV and the King James all soften this because they see what it says in the

01:21:54

Greek and what they'll do is they'll weaken the translation because they don't want to teach universalism, which

01:22:02

I understand. But by doing that, not letting the Greek speak for itself, they missed a point.

01:22:11

So through one transgression, what's the right verb? Condemnation to all men.

01:22:18

Resulted. We all died in Adam. Okay, that is the best word. That's what it means.

01:22:25

When Adam sinned, we all died in him. Romans 3 .23. Okay, we all died.

01:22:35

And so the proper verb to put in there is the resulted.

01:22:44

Well, if B says likewise, it's saying in the same way, can you take that verb, drop it down into B.

01:22:53

The second half of the verse, you drop it down. I mean, justification of life to all men.

01:22:59

That's the best way to do it. And that's correct. And ASB gets it right. ESV, at King James, NIV, all right.

01:23:10

What they do is they, instead of letting A govern B, they let B govern A. So it can't be that B is saying that the result of justification.

01:23:20

So it came to A. So it brings it, makes it possible.

01:23:26

So they put that there. But it doesn't make sense. You can't say it's possible that all men died. No, it didn't do that.

01:23:33

So they say it brought death to everybody and it brought life to everybody. That way, you don't have the resulting action of Adam's sin being the condition that governs the second

01:23:44

Adam's righteous deed. It's because their theology is getting in the way of their translation.

01:23:51

Well, if you were to go to, for example, 1 Corinthians 15, 22, it says, in Adam all die.

01:23:58

In Christ, all shall be alive. In Christ, all shall be alive. The all are those who are in Christ.

01:24:07

That makes sense. You got a verse for that?

01:24:12

And there's a verse for that. But before I get to it, have you died? Have you died?

01:24:20

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We've died in Christ.

01:24:27

We're crucified with Christ, Romans 6, 6, Romans 6, 8. We're crucified with Christ. We died with Christ.

01:24:34

We died with Christ, Romans 6, 6. We're crucified with Christ, Romans 6, 8. How's that possible? Only if election and predestination are true and the elect from eternity were given to the son and we were in the son.

01:24:48

So when he died on the cross, we died with him. Oh, now that makes sense. Now I can get how federal headship is important.

01:24:58

So there's two groups called the all. In Adam, all die.

01:25:03

That's everybody. In Christ, all shall be alive. That's only those represented by Christ. That's how it has to be.

01:25:12

So if I were to say to you, have you died? You say yes. Have you died to sin? Yes. Have you died to the elementary principles of the world?

01:25:18

You'll say yes. The love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all.

01:25:29

Therefore, all died. That's 2 Corinthians 5, 14. He died for all.

01:25:35

Therefore, all died. If he died for all and all means everybody who ever lived, then everybody who ever lived died.

01:25:43

And the death it's talking about is not Christ. One died for all.

01:25:51

That's the atoning sacrifice. He died for all. But for all died in Christ, that means they died to the law.

01:25:57

Because you can go to Romans 7, 1 through 4, you have died as freed from the law. If you're freed from the law, there's no sin.

01:26:04

And that's Romans 4, Romans 5, 13.

01:26:10

Without the law, there is no sin or sin is not imputed. If you've died to the law, sin can't be imputed to you.

01:26:16

If everybody who ever lived died with Christ in the cross, then the law doesn't apply to them.

01:26:22

They can't be held responsible for sin. This is theology. Okay. But the only ones who have died are the ones who are in Christ because he represented us on the cross, federal headship.

01:26:35

So there's two groups called the all, the all represented by Adam, the all represented by Christ. And if we were to go to, for example, if you were to read

01:26:44

Romans 5, 19, it talks about the many. Okay.

01:26:50

So Romans 5, 19 says this, for as through one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners.

01:27:00

Even so, the obedience of the one or through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.

01:27:06

He does it again. The all and the many. There's two groups called the all and two groups called the many.

01:27:12

This is what Paul the apostle is doing here. You would never have gotten that if you weren't examining theological perspectives.

01:27:22

If Romans for me, if Romans 5, 18 hadn't been there in the NESB, I wouldn't have said, would have figured it.

01:27:28

Oh, wait a minute. What's going on? And I didn't understand it. It took me weeks to figure it out. Light came on.

01:27:35

I get what's happening. I understand what's happening now. There's more theology here and it's right there in the words.

01:27:42

You've never heard this from any pulpit, any preacher, any teacher, right? Okay. Now I'm not saying

01:27:48

I'm great. I'm just saying, why is that? Why is it also two men are in the field, one is taken, one is left.

01:27:54

It's always about the rapture and it's not about the rapture. It's the wicked who are taken. Why is that that you don't hear this contrary teaching?

01:28:02

Because habitually it looks like they're not teaching the truth. They're teaching denominational norms, not doing their in -depth study and homework.

01:28:10

That's a problem because they're, they're thumbing their nose at theology and the necessity of deep theology.

01:28:18

And when you do that, you don't learn the deeper things of God. And I'm not saying, look at me, I've got great knowledge and they don't,

01:28:25

I'm better. I'm not saying that because they got a lot of responsibilities in churches. They can't do what I do in a lot of time, you know, with apologetics and learn these kinds of things.

01:28:33

But the thing is that we are called to learn the deeper things of God. And by having the foundation of God, the election, which leads to federal headship, then we get federal headship representation,

01:28:45

Ephesians 1, 4, and 5, you know, we can see Romans 5, 18. Oh, now I get what Romans 5, 18 is doing.

01:28:51

That fits in with God's election. It does. It fits in with federal headship. Oh, I see how they interrelate.

01:28:58

That's how you know you're on the right track theologically. When the more you know, the more they fit right in with the broad scope.

01:29:06

But the people who have bad theological perspectives, let's say you're going to lose your salvation.

01:29:13

How far can they go theologically and how far do they want to go theologically? Because if they're going to go to various areas like this, they're not going to want to tackle it.

01:29:23

And their worldview won't allow them to go very far. They're going to give up. This is a problem and it happens a lot.

01:29:34

So I'm blessed in fact that my mom and dad taught me, don't just believe everything everybody says.

01:29:40

And I'm not in a denomination. So I'm geared to accept what a denomination says, sign a dotted line.

01:29:47

And I'm good at upsetting people. So with that good combo, I'm able to figure things out and stuff like that.

01:29:54

Okay. Interesting. Okay. I have a question. Oh, no questions. What do you want?

01:30:00

Man. Can you, what you just explained also apply to John 3, 16. John 3, 16.

01:30:07

Is it applied to John 3, 16? How so? Because that's an interesting verse. For God so loved the world.

01:30:14

So I'm just trying to. What's the word world mean? God's loved the world. He gave his only begotten son that whosoever would believe in him would not perish but have everlasting life.

01:30:23

For God so loved the world. What's the word world mean? Was Jesus sent to the whole world?

01:30:32

No. No. Matthew 15, 24. I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

01:30:38

Covenantally speaking, the Messiah was only supposed to come for Israel. The Jews never thought that the

01:30:43

Messiah was coming for Egypt, for Syria. So why the term world?

01:30:48

I'm just trying to get that in my head. Not just, not just the Israelite people, but the whole world.

01:30:54

Not just a nation of Israel, but the whole world. All the nations. That's what he means by that.

01:31:02

God loved the world. Some people say, well, that means every individual who ever lived. That he gave his only begotten son, whoever believed in him.

01:31:09

Really? Show me that in scripture. That's what it means. How do you know? Furthermore, they'll say, well, it says whosoever.

01:31:17

It does? No, it doesn't. It doesn't say that. The word in Greek for whoever or whosoever, whoever is hos.

01:31:26

It's an omega with a sigma. Hos, the rough breathing mark.

01:31:33

Hos. And it means whoever. It's not there in the

01:31:39

Greek. What is there in the Greek in John 3 .16, whoever would believe is pos ha bestuon.

01:31:47

Pos, all. Ha, the. Bestuon, believing one.

01:31:53

All the one believing. All the believing one. So God so loved the world, all the nations that all the believing would have everlasting life.

01:32:05

That's what it literally is saying. But we don't talk like that. So they say whoever. And it's technically true.

01:32:10

Whoever does believe. But why do they believe? Because God grants that they believe. Philippians 1 .29. Grants them repentance.

01:32:16

Second Timothy 2 .25. Causes them to be born again. First Peter 1 .3. We're born again, not of our own will,

01:32:22

John 1 .13. So the whoever are the elect. Because they're the ones

01:32:29

God grants. What will happen is, now here we go, godliness, humanism.

01:32:35

God so loved the world, whoever would believe. That means it's up to your free will. And they say, well, how do you know that?

01:32:41

Because that's what happened with me. When I was little or when I was, you know, eight years ago, when

01:32:47

I went to church and they I decided to believe in God. What are they doing? They are deciding doctrine by experience.

01:32:58

I tell you what I did. I know I went up. Humanism, humanism, humanism.

01:33:04

Whosoever must meet anybody who ever believes because it's their free will choice to believe. And that's the bad version of Christ, which it's idolatrous.

01:33:24

Doesn't mean we're not safe. And so John 3 .16

01:33:29

is a great reformed Calvinist verse. People just don't know that it is because they think whatsoever automatically means it's just up to your free will.

01:33:39

And the Bible doesn't say that. But here's a question. Do we use our free will to choose

01:33:45

God? It's a trick question. You say no, you say yes.

01:33:52

No one's gonna raise their hand. What? Say it again. Say it again. I asked for it.

01:34:00

You asked for it. That's right. Do we use our free will to believe and choose God, choose to believe in God?

01:34:06

It's kind of a trick question. Yes. No. Yes. No. That's a good good thing.

01:34:12

Okay. So I'm going to show you something here. We're getting ahead of ourselves, but it's going to be good for later on.

01:34:19

All right. Free will is the ability to be able to make choices that are not forced, but they're also consistent with their nature.

01:34:27

The unbeliever's nature is a slave to sin. Romans 6 .14 -20. Hater of God who does no good, doesn't seek for God, doesn't do any good.

01:34:35

Romans 3 .10, 11, and 12. Cannot receive spiritual things. First Corinthians 2 .14. He's by nature a child of wrath.

01:34:42

Ephesians 2 .3. He's dead as trespasses and sins. Ephesians 2 .1. He's harsh, desperately wicked, deceitful, and cannot be trusted.

01:34:49

Jeremiah 17 .9. How does someone like that, who is a hater of God, doesn't do any good, doesn't seek for God, cannot receive spiritual things, is a slave of sin.

01:34:57

How does he just pick God? He doesn't. He's free will. He's free. He's just not able to pick

01:35:03

God. So we'll be doing all this again. Okay. So how does it work? Well, here's the analogy that I use for people.

01:35:11

We're going to talk about logical priority versus temporal priority. So let's talk about temporal priority first.

01:35:19

We have a person who will use five seconds. He believes, and then five seconds later, he becomes regenerate because God takes a little bit of time.

01:35:31

You believe? Okay, good. You're regenerated. Maybe it takes one second. Maybe it takes five seconds. Let's use five. But that's a problem because that would mean as a believer who's not regenerate for a period of time.

01:35:43

Five seconds. That's a problem. Let's reverse that. So they're regenerated before they believe.

01:35:50

They have to be enabled to believe by God. Because you've just been granted to believe. Leviticus 1 .29, right?

01:35:57

Cause to be born again. First Peter 1 .3. Well, that makes more sense. But wait a minute. If they're regenerated before they believe, let's say five seconds later, they believe.

01:36:05

Then you have a regenerate person who's not a believer for a period of time. That doesn't work either. And that's called temporal priority.

01:36:14

When we have something that occurs in a temporal realm, and then it occurs later on. Let's talk about logical priority.

01:36:22

This is logical priority. There's a light right up there. When I put the switch on, the electricity hits the light bulb.

01:36:31

And at the same time, the electricity is there, the light is there. Now, technically, it's not exactly true.

01:36:38

There's super small little divisions of second, microsecond. Okay. But the analogy here is that when the electricity is there, the light is also there.

01:36:46

They're the same time. Okay. But the electricity is the cause of the light.

01:36:54

The light is not electricity. So when they're both there, the light is dependent upon the electricity.

01:37:03

So the electricity is logically prior, not temporally prior. So it must be in place in order for light to be.

01:37:11

It's not the case that light must be there in order for electricity to be. So they're logically, they're simultaneous, but electricity is logically prior.

01:37:22

So generation logically is prior to belief. It occurred at the same time that God must regenerate us, enabling us to believe, and we freely do choose.

01:37:34

We freely do believe. We're doing pretty well. We believe in God, because God's enabled us to freely choose him.

01:37:40

He doesn't force us. That's what happens with regeneration. That's the theory. That's what

01:37:46

I hold to. When I say notice, I say, that's the theory. That's what I hold to.

01:37:51

It means I could be wrong about this. I'm just telling you flat out, but that's my position.

01:38:02

So this is about free will. Next week, what we'll probably end up doing is talking about the nature and extent of the fall.

01:38:08

We'll go through Genesis chapter three, verses one through seven, probably. Go verse by verse, the nature of the word,

01:38:14

God's word, as it reflects inspiration. Might talk about the idiocy of Roman Catholicism and the sacred tradition, and then

01:38:20

Eastern Orthodoxy too. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the fall of Adam and Eve, the atoning work set up by the pre -incarnate

01:38:27

Christ in what's called the Proto -Evangelium, the first mention of the gospel.

01:38:37

Okay. We'll probably get into that, and we'll move forward. We'll move forward, and we'll go into other theological areas.

01:38:46

We'll be done in a few weeks. There's not a whole bunch to go, and we're spending two hours at a time going through this.

01:38:53

Sometimes, yeah, two hours. So this is fine, because I think we need to spend that time in a group and putting it all together for people to go, oh, okay.

01:39:05

I remember that. That's right. You said that a half hour ago, an hour ago. I think they relate and interconnect. We'll probably go through this again.

01:39:12

We're going to repeat ourselves in some areas, and then what we'll do is we'll start expanding. I'll start asking you questions.

01:39:18

So how do you relate this, and how do you relate that? That puts you on the spot, because this is not easy to articulate, and I've been doing this for decades, okay?

01:39:28

So I don't expect anybody to do so, and if he doesn't do it, we'll, you know, the pressure's on,

01:39:34

Dave. So we'll go through, because I want you to be able to articulate it.

01:39:41

What I might do is raise some scenarios. What about this, and what about that? It's not to embarrass anybody.

01:39:47

It's not to do nothing like that, because these are tough concepts, and I'm throwing it at you not fast, but not slow, and there's a lot, and so the idea of learning how to articulate them is just good practice, and that's all, and as I said with this issue of the

01:40:05

Trinitarian nature, single dual Trinitarian aspect, I'm not sure how to articulate it.

01:40:10

I'm practicing, and that's what I was doing, because sometimes you got to talk until you know what it is you need to say, and then it comes out right.

01:40:20

You go, and we've done that before, all of us. Man, I said that, and it was great. I can't repeat it, but it was good, right?

01:40:29

It happens. It happened to me once. That's what I did. My wife goes, that was really good.

01:40:36

It only happened once in 34 years of marriage. Are you out there, Neek? Going to sleep?

01:40:48

My voice puts her to sleep, she says. That's right. All right, so any questions or comments?

01:40:56

Just throw anything out, because it's officially kind of over -ish, but we ramble anyway afterwards.

01:41:04

Give a simple rundown of Amillennialism. Simple rundown of Amillennialism is that the millennium is a figurative thing, because the word thousand in Revelation 20 is found in a figurative context, and that Satan has been bound.

01:41:21

He might have already been let loose, and because Jesus said he was bound in Matthew 12, 22 -32, when he's casting out demons, and so the

01:41:30

Amillennialists would say, because I'm an Amillennialist, would say that the kingdom of God is now.

01:41:37

The kingdom of God is among you. Jesus is king right now, which in my mind, goes even more towards evangelism.

01:41:46

We're in the kingdom of God now, let's go. That means if we move forward in his kingdom, we're moving forward according to what he wants.

01:41:52

Let's go. Things are going to work. Things are going to work, but not until the kingdom is later.

01:41:58

Right now, we're in Satan's kingdom, so it might not work. That's an oversimplified view of how

01:42:04

I see the relationship between those two. And then at the end of the thousand years, which is not literal thousand years, but is a figurative number because of its context, then

01:42:18

Christ comes back, and he has had an idea. The new heavens, new earth will be made.

01:42:28

The rapture occurs. The judgment of the wicked. The wicked are taken first. All of it happens on the same day. If you want, sometime in the future, we can get people online.

01:42:35

We could do this too. I can print up my information. You have to have a notepad or whatever it is, and we're going to have you draw where things go, and I can show you stuff and map out the millennium.

01:42:49

We've done it before in studies, and maybe I can get a board. We'll borrow a white board or something like that and set it up in here.

01:42:57

I don't know, and we can figure something out. But every time I've done it, every time

01:43:04

I've done it, nobody's been able to refute it, refute the all male position.

01:43:12

Nobody's. You've been in a couple of classes where I did it, right? It was pretty. It was pretty tight.

01:43:19

Pretty tight. That's right. That's right. High and tight, quick and slick. Did it convince you or?

01:43:24

Yeah. Yeah, it did. All right. I believed it before. You believed it on there before?

01:43:30

Remember that book I saw in my den one time when you did a Bible study or a house? Yeah, Amillennialism.

01:43:43

Amillennialism, okay. You said you'd met the guy. Oh, The Four Views? No, it's not

01:43:49

The Four Views. It's a blue -covered book, and he talks about Amillennialism.

01:43:55

Oh, what was his name? Kim Riddlebarger? Thank you. Yeah. I used to go over to Kim's house in Southern California, and we would talk theology and stuff.

01:44:04

I've read that book three or four times. He's good. Yeah, Kim knows his stuff.

01:44:11

Yeah, if he was teaching a class on Amill, I'd go. I'd go. Just teach. I got a lot to learn.

01:44:18

I know enough to convince people, but there's details. Let's get into some stuff. Yeah, it's a good book, but it's good to go through all this stuff anyway.

01:44:28

All this, like you're talking about, all this stuff comes together. It does. It comes together.

01:44:34

Let me ask in the room, in the chat room, can you hear other people talk? Because I have a lapel mic right here, and I'm just curious if you can hear anybody else talk in the room, because if not,

01:44:44

I'll repeat the questions and stuff. Oops. I was there in the class.

01:44:49

It was awesome. Dave Place. Oh, yeah. What place was that, Dave? The rambling part.

01:44:59

What'd you say? The rambling part. Your rambling part.

01:45:04

My rambling part is always good. We might ramble about rambling? Probably.

01:45:10

Oh, yeah, they can hear everyone when you talk. That's good. They don't have to repeat anything. That means they're hearing what you were saying.

01:45:19

And this stays on your website, by the way? This is going to be on Facebook. It's going to be on YouTube.

01:45:27

What about your CARM? Does it remain there? It's not on CARM, the website.

01:45:32

We don't have it implemented on CARM. It's on YouTube. CARM's YouTube or CARM's Facebook. That's where it's going out to.

01:45:40

Okay. But let's see. Can hear them but can't make out what they're saying.

01:45:46

Randall says that. He's a rambling man. Thank you, Laura. Appreciate that. And no cake for you at the wedding for that bad joke,

01:45:57

Matt. Yeah, great place. We'll do the wedding next week, next month.

01:46:05

Dr. James White used to ascribe strongly to Riddle Burger, Aumil, and Recommend. Now he is a Post Mill.

01:46:10

Surprising since he is not a huge fan of discussing or debating eschatology.

01:46:16

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it either. Do you think Satan being let loose would bring about a quick deception of all the earth?

01:46:22

Yeah, called Democrats. Or will it? And Pelosi is probably the Antichrist. And then

01:46:29

AOC might be the beast. I don't know. Biden? Yes, he is a beast. What would Biden be?

01:46:34

He'd be definitely the false prophet. Yeah, it's a false prophet, beast. Yeah.

01:46:41

Let's see. I mean, couldn't it be a few hundred years of Satan deceiving the nations? Yes, it could, Daniel. Yeah, it could.

01:46:49

Let's see. I hear all because I have a headset that Charlie Spine says. Georgiana Erasmus.

01:46:54

People are laughing. Can you explain? That's what Andrew Ristadter said.

01:47:00

Can you explain? That's all it says. And let some people laugh it out.

01:47:11

Some people aren't going to get that this is a joke, though. Let's see.

01:47:17

The clown. I hate clowns. Many Antichrists.

01:47:23

Biden is a follower, that's for sure. I went to one of the websites where they were playing

01:47:31

Biden's speech last night. We watched some of it. I couldn't do it. I was getting nauseous. Yeah, I was getting nauseous.

01:47:37

And I wrote, I thought President Harris was going to be talking. I don't think

01:47:45

Biden has enough of a brain. He is a puppet. Oh, yeah, he's a puppet. Yeah, because Melinda, he's only partially there.

01:47:55

Her last name is partial. Oh, yeah, like just a flurry of bad, bad jokes.

01:48:07

What's your thoughts on Stephen Furtick? Stephen Furtick, stay away from Stephen Furtick. He affirms women pastors.

01:48:14

He thinks T .D. Jakes, who denies the Trinity, thinks T .D. Jakes is great, calls him one of the greatest preachers. Oh, yeah.

01:48:24

Now, how many of you want me to start a church? This is for Esther.

01:48:33

Oh, man. Would you like it if you heard a preacher talk, preaching like this from the pulpit? Yeah. You want me to be honest about something?

01:48:42

No, don't want you to be honest. What do you mean? What? When you're talking and even going off a little bunny crap or whatever, you're going through this stuff thinking,

01:48:57

I'm getting fed here. Now, I've got decent base knowledge.

01:49:03

But even if I hear something again, I'm still getting fed. And we don't have it.

01:49:09

I haven't been to a church like that in I don't know how long. Every once in a while, you might get fed.

01:49:16

But every time we come here, I'm getting fed, which is what a church is supposed to do. Which is sad.

01:49:23

Not that I'm getting it here, but it's hard to find that. Yeah, I entertain the idea of starting a church because I want to preach and teach and want people to, you know, but I barely have enough time to feed myself because my wife won't make me sandwiches anymore.

01:49:44

I don't deserve them. You don't know why. The only sandwich

01:49:49

I get from her is a frozen sandwich and frisbee across the room. She can't do that anymore because of her condition.

01:49:58

So she hits me, she hurts herself. So, you know, I just sit here and she's been

01:50:05

I'm like, what? You hurt me. That does that someplace.

01:50:11

What was it? And I said something and she arm punched me. And I said to the other cashier, what did you see that?

01:50:17

Did you see what she just did? She was assaulting me. The cashier's cracking up because she's got my back.

01:50:25

What, Nick? Anyway, you know, the ladies are sick of each other.

01:50:32

They do. Joanne says, I'll mail you a brick sandwich. Thank you. OK, Andrew, is it for an expanded look at this topic?

01:50:43

Please see whatever that's a kryptonite. OK, give her an airsoft gun so she can hit you.

01:50:49

Hey, don't Christian uploads. He must be a computer tech guy. Upload.

01:50:59

So it's I'm trying to think of a name off of Brock.

01:51:05

Yeah, Brock. Brock, the rock, you know.

01:51:16

All right. So there we go. Can anybody in the chat room have any questions? Can we just kind of ramble now? What we do?

01:51:22

Kept my mouth shut while my wife had a cast on her wrist. There was a meme

01:51:31

I saw. A wise man once told his wife nothing because he was a wise man.

01:51:43

That's terrible. But do I hear an amen? Nick laughed at that.

01:51:50

If it's like that, she'll laugh. It's funny. She laughs. I laugh at this stupid guy stuff.

01:51:56

So I just like like it's funny. But it was good. A wise man once said to his wife nothing because he was a wise man.

01:52:04

That's right. I got a kick out of that. So I kept my mouth shut while my wife had a cast on her wrist.

01:52:12

Terrible, but true, Laura says. Our Internet is daily now. Comes back, quits.

01:52:19

OK. That could probably help you if I was out there. Check your messenger for something funny

01:52:24

I sent you. OK. I'm going to do that right now, but we will eventually. All my stuff up.

01:52:32

All right. No comments. Any comments or questions or anything? That's it. That's it. Your limit.

01:52:39

OK. Start leaking out if I take more. That's the leaking out. All right. OK. So it'll never leak out.

01:52:47

There you go. What goes in never comes out. Never goes anywhere. All right.

01:52:53

Let me just close in prayer then. And that'll be that. Lord, thank you for today and your word and the truth of your word.

01:53:02

I ask Lord that you would bless everyone here, me as well, as we seek to understand you better and apply the truth of you, your character in our lives.

01:53:12

Jesus, just thank you for your great work. Please bless us as we return. And hopefully,

01:53:18

Lord, we'll be able to do more for your glory. We ask this, Jesus, your precious name. Amen.

01:53:25

All right. You know, I can see the man as you trying to start a church. Yeah. I'm going to end the broadcast.