Open Lines on the Dividing Line

Okay, here's my question, aside from the fact that I can't see anything again. Here's my question. What if there is life on Mars? Did we just start an interplanetary war? For those of you who are watching delayed or something like that, wow, okay, I've still got it up here.

The Falcon Heavy test flight just took place, and we just launched a Tesla Roadster to Mars, and there's a dude sitting in the driver's seat. Well, it's not a dude. It's a mannequin in a spacesuit, but we're literally launching a car at Mars.

The thought crosses my mind, if there is life on Mars, they could take this negatively. I mean, those crazy people on Earth are shooting cars at us.

With lithium batteries in them, it'd explode. That's possible. Kaboom. I'm looking right now at the car. No, no, no. I need to do this with a different tone, kaboom.

That's true. I mean, haven't you watched War of the Worlds? They've got some pretty bad weaponry up there on Mars. So, I'm not really sure that a Tesla Roadster versus that thing that Tom Cruise had to take on is really

No, I'm a little concerned about this, but that was impressive. I don't know if you missed it. I'm sorry you missed it, but SpaceX just launched the Falcon Heavy, which is the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V booster.

I'm going to tell you something. I've been listening to a book called Man on the Moon. For example, Tom Hanks read that book very thoroughly in preparation for his role in Apollo 13. It is a good book.

It's quite interesting. It's sort of sad, to be honest with you, that once we started figuring I started listening to what it was that killed the rest of the Apollo missions after 17 and stuff. Same people that are messing things up in the United States today were messing things up back then, interestingly enough, the left.

It has really been sad for me that the United States has just fallen out of doing anything meaningful along those lines. Those Saturn Vs were just unbelievable. It's nice to see that same launch pad, 39A, from which the Saturn Vs were launched, used today to, okay, send a mannequin and a Tesla Roadster to Mars.

That's a little bit weird, but what can I say? Maybe there'll be more important stuff to send to Mars or to the Moon in the future, and that'll be pretty cool. Anyway, that happened just before the program started.

If you missed it, go online, check it out. The coolest thing, the absolutely coolest thing, was that the two boosters then turn around and come back and land, and just I mean, that was sci-fi. That was sci-fi.

I didn't get to see if the center one made it back to the ship, because that's really tricky. I mean, land that booger on a ship in the middle of the ocean, wow. That's pretty amazing stuff. That's pretty cool.

Anyway, I'm sure there are a bunch of folks going, that was all fake anyways, it didn't really happen, and we can't do that kind of stuff, but there you go. It's great. Well, I'm trying Oh, there it is.

877 -753 -3341 is something called a phone number. Now, I realize phone numbers are really old tech. I saw a video of some teenagers, they gave them a rotary phone and asked them to call out on it, and they're all sitting there with the handset down, dialing it, with the handset down, then picking it up and going, there's just a tone, what is that?

They didn't know how to dial out on a rotary phone. I can understand that if you've never seen one before, but it's just sort of, I don't know, just makes me feel really old that you might not have lived to actually have used a rotary phone.

But phone numbers, yes. Generally, they're not things we use much anymore. You just click and talk now. But if you remember how to use one, you can actually call into the program. It's really interesting, and we'll put you on the air, and we can talk to one another and stuff like that, and all you gotta do is call 877 -753 -3341.

We haven't done it for a long time, and people are whining. Rich is whining as well. So that's the main reason I'm doing it, is that Rich started whining, and I just can't handle whining. That's why Rich's office is on that end of the office and mine's on this end of the office, because we just can't do that.

So while we're getting a few folks lined up at 877 -753 -3341, and we're enjoying... If somebody in channel could let me know if they verify whether the last one landed appropriately. The Falcon Heavy side cores have landed at SpaceX's landing zones one and two, yes, but I don't see anything about the main core, whether it landed appropriately or not.

I mean, hey, getting the first two down would be a pretty major thing. If something went wrong with the last one, it would still be a pretty major success when you can return those things. So that was really, really cool, I gotta admit.

Pretty wild stuff. Anyway, I want to, while we're getting a few people... Oops, didn't want to do that. I did want to... The only problem here is I've got a problem. And the problem is that in looking at our church history stuff, what I've been doing on the program and where we are at PRBC right now is the exact same spot.

And so I got distracted by the Falcon Heavy launch and forgot to look and see what the last thing we covered was here on the program. Does anybody remember in channel? I'll just be, I'll just, I'll just drop back 10 and punt here.

We had been talking about Wycliffe and I think we talked about the Lollards, but I don't remember if we had gotten into Jan Hus or if we got into factors in the rise of the Reformation yet. We're at the, we're at the exact spot at PRBC.

And so I just, I can remember talking about a bunch of this stuff, but I don't want to necessarily repeat what I've, what I've said before. And unfortunately I just can't remember what that, where we, where we exactly were.

And nobody in channel seems to be listening to me anyways, so it doesn't really matter too much. So, no, yeah, honestly, I don't, I don't recall even putting on the website in the description where how far we had gotten or where we stopped in it.

And I don't think anybody else knows either. So tell you what, let's just, let's just pick up with a little Jan Hus, okay? We'll do some Hus and that'll take us toward the factors in the rise of Reformation material.

If I covered it before, I apologize. I just, I just don't remember. Don't remember because I've been teaching a lot on this and we'll just, we'll just pick up with Jan Hus. Jan Hus, the word Hus of course means goose.

He was from Hoosinet, Goosetown. And he, in the 1390s, he encountered Wycliffe's ideas. And so Wycliffe dies, what, 1384. So you know, it's, it's relatively soon, obviously from our perspective, it's years later and things are so fast now in comparison to the way things were then.

But relatively quickly, the writings of Wycliffe make it to Bohemia and into the hands of Jan Hus. In 1391, he was appointed preacher at Bethlehem Chapel and was made director of the University of Prague.

I've been told that Bethlehem Chapel's beautiful, hope to get an opportunity to be there sometime in the future. Most probably due to the influence of Wycliffe's ideas, he translated the Bible into Czech.

That was very much a part, very much a part of Wycliffe's thought, getting the Bible into the language of the people. He preached the doctrines of Wycliffe, was very popular in Prague, and he also confessed to like to play chess.

Theologically, he drank deeply of Wycliffe, denied transubstantiation, which they recognized at the time was a relatively new thing, only having been dogmatized in 1215. Taught justification by faith alone and said that Christ, not the Pope, is the head of the church.

As a result of these teachings, he was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 under a promise of safe conduct from King Sigismund. And that, of course, that safe conduct is going to become very much, very important to the background of what happens with Luther at Worms, because Luther went to Worms, likewise, with a promise of safe conduct.

Well, Huss came into town with a small army of supporters and protectors, but as the council dragged on, these men had to return home. They had estates to run and issues back at home, and so eventually they had to leave and so finally Huss was arrested and brought before the council July 6, 1415.

He was forced to sit during his farcical trial dressed in a black robe wearing a dunce cap with devils painted upon it, if you want to have a good example of how justice worked at the Council of Constance.

When you put the defendant in a black robe with a dunce cap with devils painted on it, I'd say the fix was in as far as the decision of the council was concerned. He asked repeatedly to be shown from Scripture where he had erred, again, it's going to sound very, very familiar, only, you know, 107, 106 years later, 106 years later.

His entreaties were ignored and he was condemned by the Council of Constance, which by the way obviously was not called about him. The Council of Constance was called to heal the Papal Schism, which we will talk about more in a little bit.

That was its primary purpose, but they did lots of things. Huss was led by an armed guard of 1 ,000 men to the place of his death, and then, I quote from Philip Schaff, it was midday, the prisoner's hands were fastened behind his back and his neck bound to the stake by a chain.

On the same spot sometime before, so the chronicler notes, a cardinal's worn-out mule had been buried. The straw and wood were heaped up around Huss's body to the chin and rosin sprinkled upon them. The offer of life was renewed.

If he would recant, he refused and said, I shall die with joy today in the faith of the gospel which I have preached. When Rickenthal, who was standing by, suggested a confessor, he replied, There is no need of one.

I have no mortal sin. At the call of the bystanders, they turned his face away from the east, and as the flames arose, he sang twice, Christ, thou son of the living God, have mercy upon me. The wind blew the fire into the martyr's face and his voice was hushed.

He died praying and singing. To remove, if possible, all chance of preserving relics from the scene, Huss's clothes and shoes were thrown into the merciless flames. The ashes were gathered up and cast into the Rhine.".

And so, thus, Jan Hus, the Bohemian pre-reformer, died, and obviously, 100 years later, when Luther is accused of being a Hussite in a debate at Leipzig, Johann Eck, a brilliant man, accused him of being a Hussite, and Luther goes, and somehow, some of Hus's writings had survived in the University of Leipzig library, and Luther was able to locate them and start doing some reading and come to the realization that, yeah, I'm a Hussite.

And this is when Luther really began to realize that continuing down the road that he was traveling would lead him to the conclusions that Wycliffe and the Lawlords had come to, and that was that the Pope was the Antichrist.

And that debate at Leipzig, as we will see, was also where Luther began to formulate his understanding of ultimate authorities, and that then would be relevant to the issue of Sola Scriptura. Now, it is very, very important to recognize, and I see we have a number of calls already, so we'll get to them in just a moment, very, very quickly here, it's very important to recognize the reality of the fact that, I've said it many times before, I would not have chosen Martin Luther to be the flashpoint in the beginning of the Reformation.

I would have seen much more benefit in someone like Wycliffe or even a Huss, but it was not time. And when history gives us the opportunity of looking back and seeing what factors were necessary in the beginning of the Reformation, this does help us to gain some serious insights into what the Reformation was about and to avoid, and this is something you're going to hear me talk a lot about, to avoid the cartoonish view of the Reformation that is, unfortunately, far too prevalent, even amongst good Reformed people.

There's a simply cartoonish perspective. And so, to avoid that, it is helpful to look at the most important factors that had to come together to give us the Reformation. And so, in the next section, what we'll do is we will look at what those issues were and just as in a preview sense, degradation in the papacy, so the Great Schism, the Avignon Papacy, the Babylonian Captivity, then the existence of two popes, then after the Council of Pisa, three popes.

This had gone on for nearly a hundred years. You know, the 14th century was a rough century. Think about it. You had the Papal Schism. You had the Black Death, the plague that took out minimally a third and in many places over half of the human population.

And very quickly, huge impact, huge societal impact. There were, quite interestingly enough, climate change issues going on during that century. Well, there had been a century and a century and a half before.

There had been a warming. It had nothing to do with human beings at all. People don't want you to know about that. But there had been a warming and then there was a cooling. And with the warming came more food and so you had larger population.

And once the cooling happens, you have as much food and people die. And that's sort of how it works. And so you had major issues like that going on. Then in the 15th century, you have the fall of Constantinople right around the exact same time you have the invention in the West of printing with Gutenberg's press.

And you have the rise of the Renaissance, humanism, and hence the printing of the Greek New Testament, a greater prevalence of knowledge. During this time, you have the first Hebrew grammars being written.

The language starts becoming being known again. Greek becomes somewhat better known than it had been before. And these all become vitally important foundational issues for the Reformation. So as we look back, we can see God's hand of providence guiding and directing.

And I mentioned on Sunday when I was covering this material, when we have people in our age that have this really unusual ability to look at trends today and see where they're going. Francis Schaeffer was like that.

He could see where things were going. He was warning about stuff that we're now seeing. And you know, he sounded a little bit alarmist, didn't he? I could never get that far. Well, actually, it can and it has.

And we look at those folks as almost having a prophetic capacity. What it really is, is an ability to see trends and to have enough perspective to see where they're going. There are very, very few people in the days of Luther that were sitting there going, I think it's time.

You know, they just would never have expected a little rural town that must have smelt like all rural towns did. There was a reason why Martin Luther talked about piles of dung. No one expected that that would be where the spark would come from.

But in God's providence, that's where it came from. So there you go. I will try to remember where we are, but I'm going to tell you right now, it's not good to be teaching two different classes on the same material at the same time.

You're just never going to remember where in the world you are. So all right. Been a long time. Does this stuff still work? It has been forever since we did this. And so I don't even know if it still works.

But still have the interface here. And okay. All right. So let's go to the phones, as they say, and talk with Nathaniel. Hi, Nathaniel.

G3. I missed the debate because we got caught in the storm or whatever.

Well, I'm sorry, then you really weren't at G3. Because if you weren't there for the debate, you really missed the exciting stuff. But hey, you know, weather happens.

I saw the two presentations you did. I'm sorry. I was actually looking for you because I wanted you to sign my Greek New Testament. Which I would not do. Which I would not do.

I don't sign Bibles. Yeah, when people ask me to sign stuff like that, I go, I didn't write it. So yeah, no. Well, then you got to write one. So I mean, you got to translate what's right. No, no, I don't think so.

What we've got is good enough. What we've got is good enough. I have a question about the textual of 18. In your debate with the guy from Eglinton and Crisco, he asked you about it. And you said you would be willing to go through it with him.

I was wondering, how would you go about that with somebody like that?

Well, I honestly don't think that Joe has done a whole lot of in-depth textual critical work. Basically, the INC guys will go with whatever works. That's why they were throwing out all sorts of different translations.

And they don't stick with one translation because there's going to be other stuff in that translation. Like they kept using the New Living Translation. But there are a bunch of places where the NLT completely contradicted them as well.

But they just wouldn't go with it at that point. So when you already know what you want the text to say, then you'll use different standards to analyze textual variants. That's one of the problems I have with my ecclesiastical text friends and people like that is they already know what the text is supposed to say.

And so they just handle each variant in such a way as to say it. So you can encounter a variant where it is just so painfully obvious what the original is. Revelation 16, 15. All the Greek manuscripts say the same thing.

But the King James goes a different direction because of a conjectural emendation from Theodore Beza. And so people say, well, there's some evidence that maybe a century earlier there was a Latin rendering that did that.

They will use one set of standards to come up with something that substantiates the King James or the Texas Receptus that they would never use anyplace else. If you were to apply to almost any other textual variant, it would result in a change in the King James.

They won't do that. They already have their text. And the INC guys, they already know what the Bible is supposed to say because their ministers have told them what it's supposed to say. And so it would be worthwhile only to people who have an honest desire to know what the text actually says, what the manuscripts say.

To walk through something like that. But it was obvious that Mr. Ventilacion, for example, at another point when we looked at Granville Sharp Constructions, oh, no, no, it doesn't really mean that. There's no consistency.

Their methodology could never have produced a Greek New Testament, could not answer the questions that need to be answered to actually produce something like that. So that's the difference between serious believing but serious scholarship and the abuse of the text.

And so when I said, you know, we could walk through that, the point being we can sit down and say, okay, let's notice something here. All the earliest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of John that contain this section, not all of them contain this section, but it is interesting that P66, P75 both contain the beginning of the Gospel of John.

And they both use the term theos of Jesus here. Now, one has ha monogenes theos, the other one just simply has monogenes theos. And so, you know, the only difference being whether monogenes has the article or not.

Well, theos has the article before monogenes. But both use the term God of Jesus in this text, along with the first hand of Sinaiticus manuscript 33, which has taken a, interestingly enough, over the past couple of decades has really been lifted up, exalted.

It's probably not the best term to use, but it's a 9th century manuscript, which you might say, well, it's not overly old, but it seems to really have been taken from an extremely early text, copied from an extremely early text.

Certainly church fathers, you know, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, P66, P75, the original hand of C .L. Cyriac, the Harklian and others, some parts of origin didymus have the word God and the vast majority of everything else has son because monogenes theos is normative Johannine usage.

Anybody who has memorized John 3 .16, you're familiar with hominogenes theos, the only begotten son, and that's what's found in the vast majority of manuscripts that contain John chapter 1. But all the earliest, the four earliest manuscripts we have of John are P66, P75, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and they all say the same thing.

And so that's sort of, you know, important from a textual critical perspective. I'll be really interested in seeing what happens when the ECM, the Editio Critica Mayor of John comes out. It's being worked on.

Not sure if it's going to be John first or Mark first, or I think one of the Gospels is going to be next in the ECM, but it will be interesting to see what happens with the application of CBGM to John 1 .18.

That will be fascinating, might give some perspective as to exactly how much weight to be given to CBGM. A lot of us have questions relating to that subject and the issue of the antiquity of texts and manuscripts and things like that.

But that's going to drag us way, way off base. But yeah, I could simply tell in the debate, and this is just the way it is when you're dealing with INC, they will quote any source that is favorable to them, whether they are consistent in doing that or not.

And the only way you can get away with that is if you're assuming that the people following you are not thinking critically and will not think critically. And if they do, you're willing to lose them. And that's the sign of a cult.

That's the sign of a cult. So that's why, for example, today it is fascinating to see the destructive impact on the Mormon church of the mainstreaming of information that only 20, 30 years ago, 99 of Mormons had no idea of, or even vociferously denied, or the church was vociferously denying, or things like that.

Joseph Smith's seer stone and the real history of Joseph Smith. Some of us, people like Gerald and Sandra Tanner, were talking about this stuff decades ago, and now everybody's talking about it, including Mormons.

And you're seeing, as a result, this massive shift in how that entire organization exists, or whether it will continue to exist, to be quite honest with you. The stuff going on in Salt Lake is fascinating.

But the point is, cults and isms use a totalitarian mechanism of authority, and they'll apply that to textual criticism and anything else. Just, we're your ministers, we tell you this is the way you're supposed to view this, so you view it that way.

That's all there is to it. Okay? All right. Okie dokie, sir. Okay, is there one quick question? We've been on for 10 minutes, but we'll see if it can be quick.

When are you going to redo the role-playing, where we can call in and you can be like a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon?

Well, you know, role-playing was fun back before YouTube, because I would actually get to go into churches and do role-plays where people actually thought that I was that. That's when it's really fun.

That's when you can get even junior high schoolers to pay attention, which is the biggest trick on the planet. So, but yeah, maybe we'll do something like that again, I don't know. I think one of the reasons that I sometimes avoid stuff like that these days, I have so many critics that no matter what I do, I get people that just accuse me of everything under the sun, and I could just see what would happen if I started role-playing something.

See, James White really doesn't believe the Trinity is relevant, and you've got 14 people writing blog articles about it. The insanity of the internet is pretty wild these days. But we'll think about it.

We'll think about it. Thanks, Nathaniel. No problem. All right, have a good one. Bye-bye. All right, let's talk with Bob. Hi, Bob. Hey, Dr. White.

Thinking about limited atonement and Calvinism, and I'm neither Calvinist nor Armenian. I'm kind of in the middle with the Mormon passages in the Bible, like John 3, 16. Then there's that, but you and I couldn't use the sovereignty.

You know, you're not one that's real argumentative on limited atonement, I don't think. But I've heard people on YouTube, cannot be anything but the sovereignty of God. You can't lift your little finger.

And I understand that. I believe in the sovereign passages of whosoever will in the New Testament that way. It's just like God becoming man. If he could do that. Why couldn't there be a two-person essay of man's choice?

Well, for the simple reason that the question has to be asked, the ultimate choice comes from whom? And if you posit that man has autonomous will, then you have two different autonomous wills in conflict with one another.

The issue is you're properly recognizing that God uses means and that man has a will. The problem is what you're not recognizing is you're putting man's free will and God's autonomous free will in the same category, and they can't be.

God's will, by nature, since he's God, has to be fundamentally different than the will of man. Man is a creature. Man is limited in time and space and knowledge. He exists for a very brief period of time.

And then as the grass of the field, he withers, or as the vapor, he disappears. So the nature of man's will cannot be made equal to the nature of God's will, who is eternal and who is working all things after the counsel of his will.

And so every creaturely will has to be subsumed under the decree of God. And so when you say free will, of course, that's not a biblical phrase. The only time the word free will appears in the Bible is when you're talking about sacrifices that someone can choose to give that is not based upon them having committed a particular sin, which is not what the Greek philosophical concept of free will means.

But the problem is the utilization of that terminology. It should be creaturely will. God has made man in such a fashion that man has a will and man is held accountable for the exercise of his will. The problem is the will makes decisions based upon the nature of the individual who has that will.

And so since we fell in our father Adam, the Bible tells us that we are unable to do that which is pleasing in God's sight. Romans chapter 8 makes it very clear that those who are in the flesh, who have not been born again, are not able to submit themselves to the law of God.

It's a direct didactic teaching. It's not, well, we can look over here and here's something said about false teachers and therefore that implies this. No, you have direct teaching from the apostle on the doctrine of salvation where he specifically says those who are according to flesh are not able to submit to the law of God.

And if the law of God is that we are to repent and believe, then obviously something must happen first, which is why you have the teaching of the Lord Jesus who says very plainly, no man is capable, is able of coming to me unless that person is drawn by the Father.

And if you, well, everybody's drawn by the Father, well, that means everyone's gonna be raised up. You just became a universalist because everyone that is drawn by the Father to the Son is raised up by the Son the last day.

So the reality is that when you say, well, why can't it be both? Well, the both, what you're smuggling into the both is an elevation of the creaturely will to an equal status with the divine will. And it simply was never designed to do that.

The Bible never teaches it. And so are there some people who go to extremes on both sides? Yeah, there are the hypers and those people who say that man's will is not even a part of God's decree, that man's will is just basically destroyed in the fall.

The Bible never teaches any of that. On the other hand, you've got the vast majority of man's religions which try to elevate man's will to the point of controlling the final outcome of salvation. They're willing to say that God does 99 of it, but the ultimate control has to be in man's hand.

Because if it isn't, then it is truly the Romans 9 situation. And you have people saying, well, why is he still find fault and so on and so forth. So man's religions always have to find some way of controlling the grace of God, whether it's by 1 or 10 or 20%, it doesn't really matter.

It all ends up having the same effect. And so I guess my answer would be that when you say, well, why can't it be God's sovereignty and man's free will? The Bible does not teach that man has free will.

The Bible teaches plainly that man's will is enslaved to sin. And when Jesus taught that in John 8, when he said to people who were following him, they had believed in him. Now, interestingly enough, it's a form of the word belief that in John never refers to saving faith, but they liked what he was saying.

And so Jesus said, if you continue my word, then you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. As soon as he said that, they got really angry. Don't tell me we need to be made free. We've never been enslaved to anybody.

These are people who were enslaved to the Romans at the time. We've never been enslaved to anybody. And by the end of the chapter, they're picking up stones to stone Jesus. And so my experience has been that when you emphasize to man his deadness and sin and the fact that he needs resurrection life to be able to even make that move toward God, that people find this to be extremely offensive, extremely offensive.

So that's my answer is that the Bible doesn't present them as two equal truths. I'm a compatibilist. I believe that man's creaturely will and God's holding him accountable for his acting on that will is a part of God's sovereign decree.

It is a part of how he demonstrates his justice. It's part of how we as human beings are distinguished from the animal. But man remains the creature. And in the final analysis, God is the one who accomplishes his will, not man's will.

So that would be my response.

Well, that's a good response. But I still think just like the thief on the cross, you know, when he got hung up.

Well, Bob, the last thing the thief on the cross would do would be a boast of his free will. I can assure you of that because when you're hanging on a cross, you ain't thinking about free will. There was a gracious act of God in that man's life that took place at that point in time.

But yeah, as Rich pointed out, then there's a guy on the other cross who is in the exact same situation, and yet he dies cursing Christ. What was the difference between the two? Was the one thief that was saved a better thief than the person who wasn't?

Was he more sensitive? Was he more spiritually enlightened and insightful? Or was God's grace granted to the one and it wasn't granted to the other? You know, it's pretty straightforward when you consider it on those lines.

What you're going to have to say fundamentally, if you take that perspective, is that the reason anybody is saved is because they are somehow different than somebody else. However you want to put it, more spiritually sensitive, more spiritually insightful, but somehow you're better.

And I say, no, we're not better. It is the sovereign act of the Spirit of God in quelling my rebellion. And the beautiful description of Scripture is that God takes out that heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh.

Well, I can guarantee you, no heart of stone has ever chosen to become a heart of flesh. Hearts of stone like being hearts of stone. It is the grace of God that changes a person's heart.

Now, you're the Scarlet James, the Medford lady or all that, how they could attack you on that. I have learned so much from you about what Muslims believe, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons looking back on YouTube stuff.

You have to know what these other people believe to find out, you know, to applaud you in doing what you're doing. Well, thank you, Bob. Take the flak.

Thanks, Bob. Thanks for your call today. Have a good one. God bless. 877 -753 -3341. And I don't have a pronunciation here, but Jamil? Yes, Jamil. Jamil, how are you?

I'm doing well. How are you, sir? Good. Okay, my question was, me and my friends, we were having a Bible study the other night, and, you know, we were going through some commentary, and it led us to Micah 7 -4.

All of us were using, you know, different translations. My friend has an NIV. I have a KJV and an ESV. Another friend, he was using, I think, a KJV as well. But in the translation of the NIV, it differed significantly, or at least it felt significant to us, from the other translations that we had.

We had our, you know, computers open, and we're, like, going through the NASV and how, you know, it translated Micah 7 -4, the ESV, how it translated Micah 7 -4, because we have, you know, our own Bibles on us.

We'd just like to, you know... The question pretty much is, how would we reconcile the way the NIV translated Micah 7 -4, where it says, "...the most upright worse than a thornhenge. The day God visits you has come.

The day your watchman sounded the alarm, now is the time of your confusion.". Where all the other ones say, especially where it says, "...the day God visits you has come.". Like the ESV says, "...the day of your watchman, of your punishment, has come.

Now the confusion is at hand.". We just... Just how could we, like, reconcile the fact that they put it much worse compared to everybody else?

Well, I only have the NASV up here, as far as an English translation is concerned, but I didn't, honestly, hear any major conceptual difference between the NIV and the NASV. What did you think was the...

I mean, other than, "...the day when you post your watchman, your punishment will come.". How is that different?

The fact that they use "...the day God visits you has come," versus "...the day of your punishment has come.". I mean, we're just like, why did the NIV choose to use "...God," versus just everybody else just "...of your punishment?".

We just wanted to reconcile that.

Well, that would require taking the time to compare English translations and on the fly look at whether there is... I'm not seeing, just looking at the Hebrew, I'm not seeing any textual variations listed, but I don't have the BHS apparatus up on my screen at the moment.

So that kind of thing would require a fair amount of time to answer in any meaningful fashion, to be honest with you, because you have to sit down. It's not the type of thing that you can just expect somebody to look at it and go, oh, well, it's X, Y, or Z.

I've never preached Micah 7 -4, so I've never translated it, and I'd have to try to look through various reference tools to try to find material. It would take quite some time, and it's really not something you can do just on the fly.

Okay. I mean, I appreciate you giving it a shot for us now.

Yeah, I just didn't see that there was a major conceptual difference between the translations or things like that. That's why I just wasn't sure what we're looking at. If for some reason I'm having a hard time finding my BHS materials here, because I wanted to look at what's there, and unfortunately I'm just not finding it.