Calvinism Objectors

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Kassin, and Andrew Hudson.

We have another pair of questions that we thought would pair well together and we wanted to tackle them one by one so we'll start with the first one.

The question reads, how do you approach friends and family who want to argue because you're a Calvinist? Is it okay to divide over the issue?

Michael. So one of the things that happens is that friends and family are going to object to their understanding of Calvinism.

That's a good way of putting it. And you're going to be hard -pressed to get somebody who dislikes

Calvinism to listen to your educational offerings on Calvinism.

They're probably unsolicited. Yeah. They're like, they don't want to learn about it.

They just don't like the fact that you believe it and that you believing this and thinking those thoughts within their radar bothers them.

Or perhaps when you say things, no matter what you say, it comes out with a

Calvinist accent because they know you're Calvinist, so I bet I know what they mean by that. You know, and there's a concern.

So not much headway usually on trying to educate someone on Calvinism, though the joke

I think still stands that if seminary is too expensive, just go find a

Calvinist and start arguing with them and you will learn whatever you need to know about systematic theology.

This is why I am at where I'm at right now. Marketplace disciple.

So in that sense, the Calvinists do have a reputation of saying, you know, let me explain this to you.

And so you can learn, you can learn a whole bunch of information for free. So keep that in mind. But the friend or the family member who has an objection against Calvinism has it for some reason.

So it's far more profitable and I think probably a more biblical approach to show concern for their concern, to consider others' interest as more important than your own.

Okay. And so the why of their objection? Yes. What concerns you? What concerns you?

And in general, it may be a concern about evangelism.

I have a concern for lost souls. If I believe like Calvinists believed, then I wouldn't be praying for and laboring for my grandson.

And it kind of ticks me off that you are not passionate about the lost family members in your life and you call yourself a

Christian. But they have a caricature of Calvinism in their head and that's causing a concern. And so they're responding to that concern.

Maybe it's not the evangelism thing. Maybe it is concern. Are you trying to say that all of our actions are pre -planned and we don't have any control over them whatsoever?

And so you're just trying to find a way of saying, I can't help myself. Whatever I do, God made me do it.

It's a worse version than the devil made me do it. It's God made me do it, which turns God into the devil. And so then they object to that caricature of Calvinism.

They may have been very offended or annoyed by Calvinists in the past.

Thus, when they find out you're of that tribe, this is very bothersome to them. But what is it?

It could be any number of these things. And so, in general, if we can discover the concern and begin to speak to that concern and see, can we agree biblically about your concern?

And if you're agreeing with me about laborers for the harvest, if you're agreeing with me about how we are to pursue righteousness for the glory of God, if you're agreeing with me about how to teach and rebuke with all long -suffering and to give preference to one another, and if we're agreeing with all of that, then what was your concern?

You see? Yeah. So you have people who believe very passionately on either side of these, you know, this issue.

And that's not going to change anytime soon. But I think your advice is helpful to someone, especially if they've newly discovered this.

I mean, the joke is the cage stage Calvinists, you know, when they first discover it, lock them in a cage because they're dangerous.

And you got to let them calm down after a while because all they want to do is talk about it because they feel like this has been hidden from them for so long.

I'm reminded of, as you'd said, you know, be kind, you know, outdoing one another and showing honor or treating one another is more important than yourself.

You're referencing Colossians, referencing Corinthians and Philippians. Colossians also says, in chapter 4 verse 5, says, walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best use of your time.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to how you ought to answer each person.

And he's talking specifically, you know, people who are outside the church. You know, how should you speak to them?

Well, these are not your brothers and sisters. In fact, these are haters of Christ and you're supposed to be gracious but seasoned with salt.

I mean, it's still the truth, it's still the truth, that you may know how to answer each person. How much more should your speech be gracious and kind to your brothers and sisters?

You know, do good to all people, but especially those of the household of faith. In my case,

I have a mentor, really, someone I greatly respect and love, and they are, he and I are on different sides on this issue.

There's also an element of deference, respect to this person, and that goes a long way.

You're not going to necessarily convince them of your position, just be the strength of your argument, but being winsome can go a long way.

They can, you'll at least have a hearing, you can at least exchange things with them, and you may have some really good fellowship as a result, even if you end up not agreeing.

But there's, how do you deal with difficult family members? Well, first of all, don't be the difficult family member. Don't be the one causing that, causing the problems.

Try to tamp that stuff down, try to be, you know, put a little bit of water on that fire without compromising on the truth.

If you can convert somebody else in the family to Calvinism and let them go at it cage -stage, then eventually it'll get back to like, well, you taught them this and then you can be the winsome, sage -stage

Calvinist. Good backup, I love it. Yeah, and then you could like... You're playing chess while we're playing checkers.

You think it works out that way, but what usually happens in a household is, especially if it's like the elder brother, and they get the younger brother.

The younger brother comes and does it. You just pulled this example out of a hat? Well, yes, I wouldn't know anybody that has any experience with this, but then it's just like anything else.

They come to you because of what the younger brother's done and said, you see what you taught them? They learned that from you.

They jumped off the bed because of you. No, it doesn't always work out that way, sadly. All right, well that was just a theory anyway.

But I think what Dave's talking about too, one of the things we could be helped out with, because the question is specifically about family members.

Yeah, or friends, yeah. Yeah, or friends. Remember that you're talking to family members. You are not in a formal debate setting.

You're not dealing with, most of the time, you're not dealing with the militant atheists that have set up the conference room for all their friends to come and try and do a beat down on you.

This is a different battleground, and it's not something that's set up for those type of rhetorics.

I think one of my early mistakes, especially dealing with my brothers, is I was employing rhetorics that I was seeing in formal debates with militant atheists to him.

And at that point he wasn't a believer, but he wasn't militant toward me. He became militant after I was started using that type of rhetoric, right?

And I slowly learned, the Lord worked on me, I slowly learned to pare it back. But going right into it, we're talking about not being the difficult family member.

It's understanding at the outset that this is actually a family member, and they're of your own kin, your own blood.

There are things that you share that you don't share with the guy just out of one of his anthropology classes.

You know, this isn't open -air preaching where we've got to deal with open animus of that kind.

He's still your brother, they're still your sister, deal with them in that way. I think that's another cautious step to take, too.

Yeah, and the follow -up is there, is it okay to divide over this issue? Right. And I don't think you should be dividing from people over this issue.

If they're trying to divide from you, it's probably because of a lot of factors not actually relating to the doctrine itself, right?

Bad past experiences, poor understanding, you know, but we're trying to reach what is your concern, right?

I remember sitting down with a church member who was very against Calvinism, and I was preaching through the

Scriptures, and there's no safe verse in the Bible, as I'm preaching through, and I knew he'd have trouble, he'd have trouble, because I had to come across key terms and everything, and I had to preach what was there.

I got done, I went over and I sat down to him, right next to him, right away. I knew he'd be, but what we did on that occasion,

I tried to help him see that it really wasn't about, his concern really shouldn't be about, you know, the predestination and election, the limited atonement, irresistible grace, and all this.

I said, you know, I think the problem is way bigger than this, and I began talking about and commiserating with him about a bigger issue, that God is all -knowing and all -powerful, he's the

Creator, and he made millions, if not billions, of people knowing that they would not hear the gospel of Jesus Christ and turn to him to be saved, right?

Let's commiserate about that together. Yeah, and share the humanity. Who doesn't want others saved?

You know, this is, to me, this is like a bigger issue, more broadly, more broadly expressed, more fundamental than the details about how grace alone actually gets fleshed out.

And it's dealing with one of the strawmans, right? Like, most of the time that's the strawman, is you just want to be the frozen chosen, you don't care if anybody else gets saved.

That's right. But if you, if you actually show a heart for those who do not know the Lord, that kind of dispels one of those strawmen right off the bat.

Yeah, and so we could, we could sit there and commiserate together about that. And, of course, this is, again, addressing those concerns that lie behind the objections, you know.

And you just, you just never know what you might be confronted with, some zany objection or so on, but there was one that was actually paired with this one, where people are going to be looking in the passage, passages, the key texts, where they know

Calvinists like to quote from and go to, and sometimes they'll bring some objections from those texts themselves and say, this isn't about what you think it's about, right?

Calvin and all of them got it wrong, and you have it wrong. So we have a follow -up question on this, and it says, what do you make of the claim that things such as predestination or slash chosen people and spiritual blessings in Ephesians are referencing

Jews only and not Gentiles? So, Dylan, maybe, like, read some parts of Ephesians 1 here, and let's take a listen.

You want me to start at three, probably? Yeah, go for it. Blessed be the God and Father of our

Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us and Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which

He made us accepted in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace, which

He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure, which

He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth in Him.

Okay, now it's difficult to detect anything in that passage that indicates that God's choosing,

His election, His foreknowledge, His blessing, His sovereign arranging of salvation is for the

Jew only and not for the Greek. It's really hard to detect anything there. So why would someone propose that?

And I think it comes from some other passages that are being used to try to frame this passage in a way that would get

God off the hook of being so choosy, right, of being so sovereign over salvation and leaving that all -important idea of salvation squarely in the decision -making capabilities of the sinner himself or herself, so that when they're saved, this wasn't some sort of puppet job.

But again, I'm using basic caricatures and straw men that often are the concern of those who oppose

Calvinism. Now, the term chosen, or the term elect, which again is going to be a translation of, or a synonym of chosen, the

Greek word for the elect is going to gloss the Hebrew word for chosen that we see in the

Old Testament. We're going to find these terms used in both sides. Now, when we go back to the

Old Testament, we read about the people of Israel in Deuteronomy 7, verse 6, "...for

you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth."

Deuteronomy 14, 2, "...for you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord has chosen you to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the peoples who are on the face of the earth."

And so, having read this in the Old Testament, that God chose

Israel, then this term of chosen, this idea of elect, someone says, well, that that's obviously referring to Israel.

They're God's chosen people. Doesn't everybody know that? Israel is God's chosen people.

It says it again and again in the Old Testament. Therefore, when we come to the New Testament, if we see something about God's chosen people, then we must understand that is still talking about ethnic

Israel, the physical ethnic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, the benefit of choosing that particular approach is that, in the

Old Covenant, the chosen people of God were not all of them born again, saved, going to heaven, and so on.

And I think that the person who is using this approach would readily agree with that, because this makes election, or a chosen group of people, not definitive about someone's salvation.

It's definitive in terms of an identity, you have a responsibility towards God, you have special blessings from God, and that, of course, is

God's prerogative. But he's not going to, and he doesn't, tread upon that sacred ground of your will, making you be saved.

So any idea of chosen and election is simply about this group of special people, God's chosen people,

Israel. Group, not person. Right. So this is an example of taking a word, a term, an idea, in Scripture, and interpreting it with Scripture.

Okay, you're using Scripture to interpret Scripture. However, context is king. When we read this passage,

Ephesians 1, in connection with Ephesians 2, there is nothing here about that.

In fact, this is talking about the realities that have come to light in the New Covenant, and talking about something greater and grander than the shadow, that in Christ, the saved, the blessed, the born -again, those sealed with the

Spirit, those who make up the church, are both Jew and Gentile, and they were chosen by God, for ordained by God, selected by God, to be saved in Christ.

If you want to use Scripture to interpret Scripture, I mean, I get what they're trying to do. I mean, at least they're using our own words against us or not.

I mean, the analogy of Scripture, you do use Scripture to interpret Scripture, but they're using the Old Testament to interpret the New, while we would say that you'd want to use the

New Testament to interpret the Old. I mean, 1 Peter 2 .9 actually uses those words. It says, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.

So it takes those same words out of the Old Testament, and Peter applies it to the people under the New Covenant. And I agree with that, but the folks that would read

Jews only in Ephesians 1 would look at the beginning of 1 Peter chapter 1, and they would read that as an address to Jews only.

The Diaspora can't refer to Christians being scattered by the persecution that we read about in Acts 8.

This has to be... They're excluding that. The first time that that idea of scattered people was used was of the

Jews. Sure. So we can't use it of the church. It belongs to the Jews only.

So this particular way of interpreting the scriptures is one in which, again, it's not in agreement with how the scriptures interpret themselves, because we have many passages, 2

Corinthians 3, Luke 24, examples of the preaching in the Book of Acts, whether Acts 2 or Acts 7,

Acts 13, and so on. We have clear evidence that the Old Testament must be read in the light of the finished work of Jesus Christ for there to be proper understanding of what goes on here.

If they're basing it mostly off of Ephesians 1, that reading kind of forces them to cherry -pick, too, out of that passage itself.

They talk about the blessings and the spiritual blessings and chosen before the foundation of the world that that belongs to the

Jews, but he continues with other things. He continues in saying that we have redemption through his blood. Is that for Jews only, or is it also for Gentiles?

He says we have obtained an inheritance. Is that for Jews only, or is that also for Gentiles? So it kind of hems you in if you don't...

There will be some cherry -picking now. They would be probably clearly quick to say this is affirming what is true for the

Jews, not denying salvation to the Gentiles. That is chapter 2, and they'll be just fine with that mystery of the church that was completely hidden and absent and non -existent in the

Old Testament from their perspective. So the other side that would try to bring in reinforcements for this interpretation of Ephesians 1, of being

Jews only, is the history of how the church in Ephesus got started.

When you read in the book of Acts how the church was planted in Ephesus, you find folks like Aquila, Priscilla, Apollos, disciples of John the

Baptist. Jewish people. Very Jewish people. And Paul, preaching in the synagogue and so well received at the first, preaching in the synagogue, and even the people in the synagogue saying, please

Paul stay with us. He's like, no I gotta go to Jerusalem. And then Apollos going and preaching in the synagogue, and that went well.

And then Paul comes back to Ephesus, he's preaching in the synagogue again, until such time as it doesn't work out, and then it says he withdrew the disciples from the synagogue and was reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus.

So from by all evidences it looks like this church is extremely

Jewish, has a lot of Jews in it. Now there's nothing there that it says it was exclusively Jews, and there's nothing there that says that this letter is the letter to the church in Ephesus, by the way, right?

Because we don't have actually any address to, right, we don't have, we have the

Saints who are in Ephesus, yes. The Saints who are in Ephesus, I was thinking of another story, but it was this this letter is to those who are in Ephesus, but we're not told that the people in Ephesus are only

Jews, is the point. Well this also is a textual variant, they're in Ephesus for manuscript traditions.

Oh yeah, so they're starting to delve really into this one. So it depends on your manuscript tradition, whether you have these are in Ephesus or maybe this is the letter to the church in Laodicea that Paul mentions elsewhere, but speculation is not going to win the day here.

When we read the book for ourselves out loud, we discover Paul is addressing

Jew -Gentile relations in a very deep way. The idea from Ephesus that you get is that there are

Jews and Gentiles here, and Paul is telling them how to get along and how to love one another. And even when he appeals to holiness, when he appeals to righteousness, when he appeals to living towards one another in the way that they ought to, all the way through chapter 4, he never appeals to the law.

So I think it's very significant given the full reading of the letter that this is not an exclusively

Jewish book. Now I'll tell you right now, when we read this question, I had never heard this particular view of Ephesians.

I mean, you go to chapter 2 and he actually references, you know, and remember that at one time you

Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision, you know, talks about that and they talked about how they were reconciled and everybody's brought together in Christ, you know, they're parts of the covenants of promise and all these things, you know, bringing them together, new man.

That's what I thought Ephesians was about. I mean, when I hear different, you know, chosen groups, chosen tribes,

I'm thinking Romans 9. You know, that's the one that usually people go to where it says, you know,

Jacob and Esau. It says, well, those are those are tribes, not individuals. You know, that's usually the one. I never have

I heard this particular objection or this particular view of the book of Ephesians.

I did when I was in college because they were a Wesleyan Arminian tradition and they were so anti anything sovereignty of God whatsoever that in our inductive

Bible study classes that we went through and you had to like study whole books of the Bible and use the inductive

Bible study method to go through them. In Romans, we went chapters 1 through 8, we skipped 9 through 11, and went back to our inductive

Bible study in chapters 12 and following. Redacted. Yeah, just just straight up. We're not gonna do, we're not gonna even study those passages.

To be honest, that was my experience growing up in a Southern Baptist Church as well. It just wasn't talked about, strangely enough.

That had the reverse effect and made us all very, very curious. Yeah, the best way to get people to read something is something they're not allowed to read it or don't read it.

Yeah, yeah. Have you watched Inception? I've never seen it. Okay, that's, there's a theme.

The idea of like implanting ideas like, hey, don't, don't think about this. Now you're thinking about that.

Don't look at the guy behind the curtain over here. Nothing to see here. Yeah, so I think that at the end of the day, how do we respond to objections or concerns or who want to argue and so on?

You can address them. What are your concerns? What can we agree on? If they point to something in the

Bible, I'd love to read the Bible with you. Let's, you know, let's see what's there.

And it's come together at that same table. So you don't divide over it, but I do think you have to be patient about it. Most people will agree if you start from a position of, let's read the

Bible for ourselves. It's authoritative. Yes, I agree. Scripture should interpret Scripture. Yes, but then you will start to diverge if you have particular traditions that take

Old Testament in isolation versus New Testament. They don't allow the New Testament to interpret the

Old or later revelation and the Old Testament to interpret earlier. So you may, you may have to work to figure out if their operating assumptions are different than yours, but you can at least have the same starting point that the

Bible is authoritative and true and it shows them respect for, it shows respect at least for their view that they love the

Bible and that they love Jesus and you can at least agree upon that starting point. Yeah, I guess a good analogy would be that if someone's complaining about your driving because you're driving reckless and fast and in their perspective, okay, it would be good first to, you know, make sure that they're buckled up and then find a way to slow down gradually, right?

Meeting where they're at. Okay, the only way to divide is if you slam on the brakes real fast, they're not wearing the seatbelt, they will be divided from you.

Okay, so you find a way to care for the person, to love the person. You're not gonna solve a lot of these questions and concerns in a night and there may not be any agreement, but there may be improved understanding and there might be an improvement of relationships through the course of it.

Yeah, that makes me think of one of our family members on Heather's side and he's a guy that just likes to to spar, right?

So it's actually made me more endeared to him and him to me just because I'm willing to sit down and talk to him for, you know, his three or four hour sparring sessions that he likes to do and nobody else wants to do them anymore.

He's an unbeliever. He doesn't agree on hardly any of this stuff, but he grew up with it so he's able to argue it and he understands it,

I think, to a certain degree that makes it a little more challenging than somebody who's just got straw men in their head, but he realizes, hey, this is somebody who who's willing to put the gloves on and go at it for a little while and then say, all right, good night, see you later.

So sometimes you have the guys like that in your family too that you gotta be, you really just have to be aware of who you're dealing with most of the time when we get in these discussions because it can go sideways quick, but it could also be very, very productive, very fruitful as well.

Good. All right, why don't we move on to what we recommend, Michael? I recommend an exegetical and theological study of Romans 9, 1 through 23.

Now that's just the subtitle, so this is a, you know, it's not exactly a Puritan work, but the title is

The Justification of God, second edition by John Piper. This one was written way back, 93, back in the 1900s, so I don't, you know, you might, it might be so old it might be in the public domain now, folks.

So I hope you can find it. The Justification of God goes through chapter 9 and goes into very careful detail all the way through, showing the connections, answering objections, working through the implications, and it's a great read.

It's also a good exercise in seeing the kinds of questions and the kinds of approaches you should take to Scripture and being very careful and thinking things through.

I think that was, did that start off as a thesis? Yeah. Of his, okay. It's been made more robust and so on and so forth, so, and usually, usually the second edition is always better.

You know, second edition Kingdom and Covenant by Gentry and Wellam, better than the first edition.

This one, second edition, it's pretty good. Dave? All right, this is a book on Ecclesiastes by Brian Borgman.

I have been enjoying this book for several weeks and I have been using it in my family's study of Ecclesiastes that we have been going through.

Just, you know, when I'm gone some people will be able to read a chapter. We don't do it every night, but a couple of times a week we have a, we're reading a chapter of Ecclesiastes together and this book is called

Don't Waste Your Breath, Ecclesiastes and the Joy of a Fleeting Life. The word that's translated vanity or meaninglessness in some translations could be better translated, the

Hebrew word is habel or habel, could also be mist, vapor, or breath.

And you start to read it in that context, now it has elements of emptiness, worthlessness, this word, like it talks about vain idols.

Sure, it's not just short, it's not just vaporous, it's compared to the glory of God which is quite weighty, these are very light.

But when you understand that this word has a little bit as a different context,

Ecclesiastes truly takes on a different meaning. It is a verse -by -verse exposition, at least paragraph -by -paragraph, and he highlights the real issues that a man who is observing humanity sees and what things he's seen in his own life and perhaps in his own family.

And then he says in almost every chapter, and this is why you should enjoy this short life, there are things you're gonna see that are confusing, there are things you're gonna see that don't make sense.

And he establishes very clearly in chapter 3 the sovereignty of God over all things, that God has appointed a time for this and for this and for this, and you can rest in that.

But he wanted to read one bit out of Ecclesiastes, especially since some of the things we've been talking about tonight, this is out of chapter 8 verse 14,

Ecclesiastes, there is a vanity that takes place on the earth, so there's righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous.

I say this is also vanity, meaning you're gonna see this in your short life, I have seen it.

So I commend joy. For man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and to drink and be joyful.

For this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. And you see him returning to these themes.

He knows that the wisdom is good, but there are limits to it. He's seen that, yes, you should obey your rulers, but sometimes those rulers are evil.

Yes, the righteous, living well and taking care of your family and being wise, yes, you should have a better, more prosperous life.

That's as normal common sense. I mean, Ecclesiastes is filled with common sense, as you would expect from Solomon the preacher, but things don't always work out the way you want them to.

And you can rest knowing that God is in control. And even if there is a wicked ruler, this life is short.

Even if you have these difficulties, don't worry, life is short. But also, enjoy your meal.

Enjoy your bread. Drink your wine. Enjoy your life with your wife. It actually says that in the next chapter. Enjoy that because this life is short and when it is over, it is over.

So don't waste your life. Don't waste your breath. By Brian Borgman, Ecclesiastes and the

Joy of a Fleeting Life. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Awesome, thank you. Andrew? I was asked a while back, what are some content that I could enjoy with my family?

At that time I gave a recommendation. There's a YouTube channel by a guy named Joel Kramer, Expedition Bible.

This guy grew up in the Middle East and he's a quote -unquote biblical archaeologist. He has a book.

I'm not gonna pitch the book, but on his YouTube channel, he goes around the Middle East looking at biblical sites and discussing the historicity and authenticity and the the attestation of the veracity of what the

Word of God says actually happened. We can uncover these things. Recently we watched the video of Peniel where Jacob wrestled with God.

In the Sunday school class that I was teaching, we had just gone over that passage. I think sometimes people learned different ways and some of those ways are seeing pictures of where this is, not just reading it on a text or even necessarily looking at a map.

Maps are great, but the topography of the river and the the two sides of the river, how there was this the large place, a vantage point to see the north, the advancing from the west -northwest of Esau and his men.

These things are often lost in just reading. The Bible is rich and I think what he does a great job with is bringing it to life.

That's a great recommendation. I like that a lot. My recommendation for this week is a book called

The West of the Imagination. It is a book that categorizes from the birth of our nation up to Manifest Destiny and the expansion west.

It takes the prominent artists who those days of each in that time period and how they would go out as civilization moved west and they would paint depictions of that West.

A few of the artists that were featured are George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, Fredrick Remington, and I even like toward the end of this time period, he wasn't featured in the book, but Julian Onderdonk.

He's a Texas artist and he does like Blue Bonnet Fields and stuff like that. It's in a similar vein, but Bierstadt, he's the dude.

Remington, for me, holds a special place because he's a cowboy painter, so he has all these scenes of famous battles or cowboys chasing down buffaloes.

The movement of his stuff is just wild. It's one thing

Heather and I have talked about. There's just tons of movement with it and we've actually incorporated. We have a digital picture frame up on our wall, so we have a lot of stuff of our family like videos and pictures and stuff like that, but then she was like, we should put

Bierstadt's stuff up there, like John Constable's stuff, and I was like, yes, so we've been adding that stuff as we come across some of that and Onderdonk as well, but that book, it has like some analysis of the period, like what was done wrong, what was done right.

I don't really listen to any of that and this is literally me going through a book for the pictures and I don't do that very often at all, but this is me judging the book by its cover and going only to the pictures.

It is a picture book for Dylan Hamilton, but the one that I have is a copy that was given to me by a man who died who was a friend, but it's a beautiful orange cloth cover book, so I have it on display up in the living room because it's just like it's got like the gold lettering on the spine and it's the orange cloth cover and I'm just like, yes, that's going next to the green and the red.

I like to have the colorful cloth cover book, so that's my recommendation. If you can find a copy of that, nab it, because it's just a fascinating look, not necessarily a fascinating read.

What are we thankful for this week, Michael? I am thankful for spring -like weather in the middle of February, sorry, early

February to enjoy, to go out and just walk around at the zoo and spend time outside.

It's just been very, very pleasant. I'm also thankful for my brother because it is his birthday today and for just a little while he'll be two years older than I am, so anyway.

So you're saying happy birthday, older brother. Yeah, so he keeps pretty busy, but I'll see him

Friday and I'm thankful for him as well. Dave? I also am thankful for the beautiful weather today.

I got back from out of town Saturday morning and then Saturday was very busy and then

Sunday tends to be pretty packed with stuff as well and this morning I was able to get up and open up the doors, open up windows, and just have this wonderfully cool breeze blow through.

I think we left the doors open most of the day and after morning reading time,

I was able to make breakfast and my daughter came out and she's like, what are you making?

Because she could smell it. She could smell that that bacon frying and I was like, this is what I'm making and do you want this, this, this, maybe some toast?

And I had sausage going here and I had a couple of these farm -fresh eggs that, you know, the kind we actually had to wash the bloom off, you know, and she's like, yes, but do you want all that?

And he goes, sure. I went, here we go. So we just, we just tied it on and had a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of food and I got to have breakfast with her this morning and I know that those times are fleeting and they will, they will soon be gone or it'll be very, very few and in between.

So I'm glad that I got breakfast with her and we just got to chat about the weekend and about her day and what she's got lined up for this week.

So it was just kind of a very special time this morning. Amen. Andrew? So I think

David said something about like why me in one of the previous episodes, but when you,

I had brought this up and I didn't interject whenever you were finishing our discussion on the last podcast, but in Ephesians chapter 2,

I'll start in verse 4, it says, but God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even though we were dead in offenses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you are saved and he raised us up together with him and seated us together with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.

Why? To demonstrate in the coming ages the surpassing wealth of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

The idea, I thank the Lord, the idea that I will be an object demonstrating his grace, the wealth of his grace for forever.

That's something to be thankful for. You're being thankful for being objectified. Yeah, you'll be able to point to us.

Exactly. Like that's how much, that's how wealthy he is in grace.

He he was, he poured it out. Mm -hmm. On this vessel. Yeah. Well I am thankful this week for my father -in -law who recently had,

I believe, triple bypass surgery, heart surgery, and is recovering well, doing well in Florida right now.

He's gonna come and visit here in Oklahoma sometime in February. I can't remember what the dates are exactly.

I know it's coming up soon, but apparently he's healing well, gaining strength back pretty well, and I'm really hoping, he had some issues prior to this that were causing him some respiratory issues, and we're really hopeful that this actually fixed like the lingering issue as well, and not just that immediate heart attack issue that he had back in January.

But we're thankful for him, and that the Lord has brought him through, and that he is, especially something so serious, so severe, and can go either way with chances on stuff like that.

We're thankful that he's here, and he's here to continue to love us, our grandchildren, and dispense wisdom on us that we don't yet have ourselves, but the

Lord has placed him in our life to do so, and he does so faithfully, and every time he shows up, so we're thankful for Julian Horner, and that the

Lord has brought him through. Praise the Lord. And that wraps it up for today.

We are very thankful for our listeners, and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with HavingNotRead.