Matt Slick Live

A previously recorded Matt Slick show. It's Matt Slick live. Matt is the founder and president of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry found online at karm.org. When you have questions about Bible doctrines, turn to Matt Slick live.

Francis taking your calls and responding to your questions at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Hey, everyone.

Welcome. It's me, Matt Slick, and you're listening on the radio here. Got things, bells and whistles going.

Hey, if you want to give me a call, as usual, the number is 877-207-2276. And I hope you're just having a good day. I've had an interesting day. I do a little bit of shopping, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, helping a friend out.

And he was helping me out. We kind of did some stuff. And that's what we're going to do sometime. I'm going to be tackling the website tonight.

There's so much to do always. Hey, if you are interested in learning theology, if you want to study, I really recommend that people study the Word of God. Now, when I talk about this sometimes, I just feel like pleading with people because we need to know that Bible. We need to know what the Bible says. We need to understand the doctrine of the Trinity.

We need to understand how many natures Jesus has. We have to understand what salvation is. We have to understand that sincerity doesn't bridge the gap between God and man. We have to understand that our works don't contribute to salvation, nor do they contribute to us continuing to be saved.

Our goodness has no bearing on our salvation. What we need is the blood of Jesus Christ shed. And if you don't trust in Jesus, you're lost and you'll face the day of judgment alone and naked before God without a defense, and you'll be condemned. And what I preach is Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead, and that through faith and trust in what he has done, you can have your sins forgiven. That's what I promote. That's what I teach. Now, that's what I want people to understand, that they have to understand the Word of God. They have to understand what the truth of God's Word is.

They should be studying the Bible. And so what I'm here to do is help you understand it better, biblical theology, apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith, and a lot more. So if you want to call me, all you have to do is dial 877-207-2276.

We have five open lines right now, so nobody's waiting. That means I'm waiting for you, and then we can have our calls. If you're new to the show, what we do here is answer questions on basically almost any topic, the Bible, Christianity, Roman Catholicism. We discuss all kinds of issues, Mormonism, atheism, evolution, logic, philosophy, information, and everything. So anyway, if you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276.

You know what? As I was just speaking there, it occurred to me to do a little bit of talking about the Catholic view of Mary. It's an important issue. So what I thought I would do is tell you what the Catholic Church says about Mary and why it's a promotion of idolatry.

And I'm going to just say this, but just jump right in, because there are things to talk about always and everywhere. And Mary is one of the topics in the Roman Catholic Church that needs to be discussed. Now, there may be some Catholics out there listening to me. And when I talk about this with Catholics, I've found that a lot of them get very, very defensive because it's like attacking their own mother. And it's a problem because Mary is not their mother. But the Roman Catholic Church has stated so many different things about Mary. One of the things I'll say is that she is full of grace. You've probably heard in movies and things like that, Hail Mary Full of Grace.

And I remember seeing Bill Crosby in some old black and white movies where the Catholics were the ones to go to full of wisdom. And now that I know what I know about Catholicism, oh man, I look at that and I think, what a shame and what a sham Catholicism is, it's false doctrines. But it teaches out of Luke 1 28, that Mary is full of grace, which is not what the Greek says, the New Testament is written in Greek. Because the full of grace is the Greek Plaras, which is full and karitas, which is grace. Plaras karitas, two words full of grace. And it's not there, but the words do appear in John 1 14, where Jesus is full of grace. And also in Acts 6 8, when Stephen was full of grace. And that's what it says, it says right there, the word that does appear in reference to Mary is kakaritomena, which means highly favored one, highly favored.

And she is highly favored. She was most blessed of women because she got to bear the Messiah himself. But what they'll do, the Roman Catholics, they'll say that Luke 1 20 is properly translated as full of grace, which just doesn't work.

But that's another topic we can get into. So I get even more depth, but nevertheless, and they'll drive all these truckloads of heresy through this. Because if she's full of grace, well, then if she's full of grace, she could never have sinned. Well, that would apply to Stephen, who was full of grace in Acts 6 8. He was full of grace.

They're not consistent. But they will say that she is the one who was full of grace in paragraph 7 22. And they say that she was not subject to corruption, and she's the all holy one. Now, you know, Mary is not the all holy one. She's not the one who's holy. God is the one who is holy. And they say that she's the second Eve.

What Eve messed up, Eve fixed this kind of a thing. And one of the things that I find really abominable is Vatican II, paragraph 420, or page 420. And I have the actual book, and it actually says worship. When she is the subject of preaching and worship, she prompts the faithful to come to her son.

And that's what it says. So they're supposed to worship her. And in paragraph 972, it says, after speaking of the church, her origin, mission, and destiny, we can find no better way to conclude than by looking to Mary.

Now, folks, I can talk a lot about this stuff. I'd like to teach a course on Catholicism. And it's aberrant theology, and it's so many topics to cover. But when they get into the issue of Mary, you know, they have statues of Mary in the churches, they bow to Mary, they do so many things, they pray to her. But when it says, in relationship to the church, her origin, mission, and destiny, they can find no better way to conclude them than by looking to Mary. That to me is such clear idolatry. And I mean, idolatry, pagan idolatry, un-Christian idolatry. To say that the best way to look is to Mary when considering the church, her origin, mission, and destiny. In other words, Jesus is not the best one to look to. Jesus is not the best, Mary is. This is idolatry. And I want it to be clear, idolatry, it's not Christian, it's paganism.

And this is what the Roman Catholic Church teaches, and that's only part of what it teaches. It's pretty bad. We've got some callers coming in, so that's good. Three open lines if you want to give me a call.

877-207-2276. Let's get to John from Raleigh. John, welcome. You're on the air.

Peace be with you. Thank you. Has anything changed with the downloads to the podcast?

The last one on My Heart Radio and on the other one that I use is Player FM. Only goes out to August 31st. I'm wondering, has that service stopped? I don't know. I wasn't the one who was doing those.

I'm going to have to look into it and see. And even Apple is the same thing. Okay. Okay, good, because typically that's my only outlet.

I've got everything back through a year now. Well, we do have them all on YouTube and also on Facebook. Everything's live on all the podcasts. Nothing's been updated since age 31. Okay, I didn't know that.

I will talk to my guy on that and see what the status is. They used to be there, right, till August 31st, and this is on what views? My Heart Radio and Player FM, and yesterday I checked the Apple podcast and that only went to 831. Okay, okay. I'll put this in right now.

Caller says last one is 831. Okay, there we go. I'll see if he knows about it. All right, so thanks for pointing it out. Thank you. The other thing was you talked about how you want to get into services again.

I wish that guy next to me wasn't playing his music so well. By chance, once a month, could you give us a service so that we could see what else our pastors should be teaching us, or maybe one from the other? I will be preaching online this Sunday and next Sunday. A friend of mine who's going to Africa asked me to fill in for two weeks.

I think it'll be 3 o'clock Eastern time is when I'll be online, and what I can do is put the URL up on the CARM Facebook or Matchlink Facebook. If people want that, they can watch. It's just me sitting here behind this chair in the room just preaching. I prefer a church with the people. I like to preach for people, but I can do it online, but if you want, if that's something you're interested in.

Yes, I very much would. I wish you would do it once a month. Let me ask you, because I have honestly been thinking about starting a preaching series online and or a teaching series online, because I need to teach. It's just in me to do it, and I love to preach. I miss the pulpit, and I haven't preached in a pulpit in a year or so. I just miss it. I love it.

It's funny. I'll be sitting there in the congregation waiting to get up there, and I'm so anxious to be up there. Just got to get up there to preach.

I just love it. I'll look into it. We'll check things out. Be good.

I'll try, man. God bless, buddy. Thanks.

We'll look into the podcast thing. All right. God bless. Talk to you later. Okay. All right. If you want to give me a call, folks, the number, 877-207-2276. Let's get to somebody from Godfrey, Texas, or Godfrey is from Texas.

I'm not sure. Welcome. You're on the air. Hey, how you doing? Doing all right. What's your name?

I'm from Chatfield. Okay. Hey, Godfrey. What's up, buddy? I had a quick question.

If you have someone in your household who was Christian and right now just seem to be falling away from the faith, going into spiritual ascension universities like astrology, chakras, looking at Wicca, things like that, I'm trying to think of which way to like approach how to approach this. We're kids and everything like that. So let me ask you some questions. You don't have to answer if these are too personal. You just want to say anything that's no problem.

I'm just trying to get a lay of the land. Is it one of your children? Because you said in the house. No, it's my wife. Your wife. Okay. Okay. Your wife.

That makes a little bit of a difference. We've got a break coming up. So what we're going to do is hold on and I'll give you some advice afterwards. All right.

After the break. This is important stuff. Okay. Hey, folks, please give me a call. 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking a call at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone, welcome back to the show. Godfrey, are you still there?

You still there, man? Yes, sir. All right.

So your wife is getting into the occult, spiritism and things like that. All right. Now, there's a lot of questions I could ask you, but it wouldn't be appropriate over the year. But let me just ask a few things, though.

Are you personally attending a church, a good Christian man kind of a thing? Not perfect, but you know. Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. Yes, sir. You have children?

Yes, sir. Can I just ask how old they are? Eleven, nine and six. Seven, nine and six? Eleven.

Eleven, nine, six. Okay. Okay. And how long has she been getting involved in this?

About the last couple of years. Okay. All right.

Okay. So what you're going to need to do is, the first thing, it's going to sound just like a, you know, of course, but you need to pray. And when I say that, I mean, prayer needs to be considered a weapon at this point.

A weapon that needs to be offered up to the Lord Jesus Christ. And you have to be ready for a spiritual battle because it was you, you're stirring the pot spiritually and things can potentially get rough in your marriage, your household, your children, your job, your finances. I'm not saying it's going to. I'm not saying that.

I'm just saying, hey, this is the kind of thing that can happen. And I just warn people that this is the case sometimes because the demonic forces are not going to appreciate you praying specifically for the situation. Now, what do you pray for? You pray for the binding of the evil one and all demonic forces from your life and every way, shape and form. You need to pray this every single day. Now, if you skip a day, okay, but you need to be praying about this. And you also need to get friends to pray about this. And you'd have friends that you commit with who will pray about this and pray over your wife to keep them informed about things.

And you need to take this very seriously. Now, as a Christian husband, your job is to guard your children from the occult as well. And what she's getting into, spiritism and this stuff, is occultism.

And there's demonic forces and attachments that can occur. And the reason I ask about how old your children are is because the younger they are, sometimes the more they can be influenced. And when they're very young, there's often, they can see things, hear things, et cetera, that's not uncommon. And so be ready to talk to your children if they say, yeah, mommy, I saw this thing in the hallway. Just pay attention and say, oh, what'd you see? They'll get wiggy out and start screaming down the hallway in the darkness. Just be nice and just be aware of things.

I would also suggest that you send your wife away for a couple hours shopping trip, movie, whatever it is. And pray through the house and anoint every single wall in the house. Bathroom, closets, doors, door jams, walls, just, you know, anoint and pray out loud in the process. You just get some oil, doesn't matter what kind of oil, cooking oil is fine.

Just dip the tip of your finger into it, rub it around your finger and thumb kind of thing. Doesn't have to be a whole bunch. And just, it's a ceremony is what it is. And this is what was done in the Old Testament.

The oil was a symbol of the presence of God and an anointing. And go through and just pray out loud. You know, that you bind the spirits, demonic spirits, and that you come against this in the name of Jesus Christ. And that you ask him to be the Lord in this house.

And it's verbal, you just talk like this and you just do it. For as long as it takes, you'd go through the entire house to do everything that needs to be done. She undoubtedly has brought things into the house that are demonically connected. And so these can be called, these are called doors.

And we want to make sure that the doors are closed. If you know of the things that she had, let's say, I don't know what she has or doesn't have. Let's say she's got a crystal ball she now has or whatever. It could be a book, books, you know, a pendant. Buddha statues. Buddha statues. Oh yeah, yeah, Buddha statues.

They're good for, you know, shotgun practice. I mean, Hinduism, the Hindu. Hindu stuff, yeah. Oh, that's really bad.

That's really bad stuff. So what I would do, hold on, hold on a sec. Okay, on here. Good. All right. So what I would do is also specifically seek all of those objects out and pray over them and don't go in with oil.

They belong to her. And depending on how the things are in your relationship, you know, me, I would not let anything like that in the house. But, you know, but on the other hand. The thing is, I was going that route and it seems like when I was shutting those things down, it got like she wanted to like leave, which I didn't want to get into that because I didn't want it to affect the kids.

So I had to pull back, but I was wondering should I have let her leave. Well, no, I was going to say that you have to be wise about everything. Because if throwing the Hindu statue stuff out will cause her to get infuriated, well, that's not our goal.

And so that's what I was going to say is you have to use wisdom in this whole thing. But what you can do is anoint the bejeebers out of them. Every time she takes off and goes someplace, I'd be praying over those things again. I'd be putting a little oil on my fingertips and saying, in the name of Jesus, I bind this and what this is and all things attached to it, et cetera. And another thing I would be doing is, this is going to sound a little odd, not witnessing to her.

What I mean by that is not overtly being so harshly Christian that it pushes her away. Oh, yeah. I don't do that. Okay, good.

So what it means is you need to be a servant and calm and prayerful and pointing towards the things that are good and questioning. Now, if she were to start teaching this to the children, at that point, that's what I personally I would say, I'd take her privately. I'd say, I will not allow that, period. You teach the children that we're going to have serious problems right away. Yeah.

And so that's what serious problems right away. Yeah. I just flat out say it.

I do devotional theology with them every night. Yeah. Yeah.

Can't happen. And if she says, I'll leave you, say that you need to go. I mean, you need to be prepared for that because you serve Christ over your wife.

Not that you want that to happen, but she may try and bluff you out and you need to be ready to be able to back it up because if she's going to start saying that she's going to start teaching the kids this stuff, that is not going to happen. Okay. You need to put your foot down and you need to be involved with the elders of your church. They need to know about this.

All right. You need to know, they need to know about this. And this is the plan you got to go through. And you just serve her and be as loving as you can to her. And she needs to see Jesus in you. And one of all, another thing you can pray is what's called an imprecation to imprecate means to wish a curse or something harmful to happen to somebody. Now people say, well, that's that math that you just can't say that that's, that's not true. I go, yes, it is true because the implications are in the Psalms. God didn't get them.

You can pray that the things that she's doing would, would upset her so badly that she wanted to run from them. That's what I mean. Okay, buddy. All right. Okay. God bless.

Let me know what happens. Okay. Thank you. All right. Folks.

There's a break. Give you call 877-207-2276. Be right back. It's Matt Slick live. Taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the show.

Please give me a call and we can blab 877-207-2276. Let's get to Sarah from Missouri. Sarah, welcome.

You are on the air. Thank you. Thank you for taking my call.

You're welcome. I'm calling to ask about if you've seen or been hearing about an uptick in the apostasy across the evangelical church community. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've been aware of it.

Our church has experienced the loss of our senior pastor in the associate now seems to be in charge of things and supporting the gospel coalition and maybe not black feel the black liberation theology, but definitely social justice, the political version of it that is differs from Christ. And there's quite a few of us concerned. And there seems to be quite a bit of support. The elders seem to be on board.

Okay. And he's an elder, which is a problem to me. And we have a missionary with campus outreach who's an elder, which seems to be inappropriate to me. So, okay, so some elements of social justice are biblical, some are not.

It depends on a few variables. I realize that. So what they often do is not understand the consequences of what they're teaching and preaching. So give me an example, you know, just summarize what's what's this guy saying from the pulpit? Okay, well, we've been in the process for the past two months of going through ecclesiastes. So last Sunday, we were at chapter eight. And he began his sermon and read a part of it.

It didn't even read the whole chapter. Okay. And then he launched into how we need to submit to all authority, regardless of what they're telling us to do, including inside of our church. And we need to be winsome, charming, like Jesus.

And submissive. He needs to give me a call. I need to talk to him and politely, lovingly correct him.

Because he's wrong. We submit to the government unless it violates scripture, not just in everything it says. That kind of teaching will open the path up to the presence of the Antichrist. And so very seriously. Absolutely. Now, let me ask you a question.

In his sermon, did he mention the crucifixion of Christ at all in the personal work of Christ, what he did on the cross during the sermon? Did he do that? No. All right. So he's preaching, then he's preaching moralism. See, let me explain what's going on here. If I were to, my wife just texted me, so I popped up on the screen.

Sorry. If I were to get up and give a sermon where I said, don't lie because lying is bad. God says, don't lie.

Lying hurts people, don't lie. And you know, amen. And everybody stood up. It was a great sermon. All these great illustrations and it actually made someone feel sad because of a lie that happened.

And I gave an illustration, you know, and they actually applaud, you know, it's a great sermon. No, it's not. If I were to say, don't lie because Jesus Christ purchased you with the blood that he shed on the cross. This is why we are not our own. We belong to him. We should not lie because it dishonors God. It's a sin against him. And we do not do that because we are no longer our own.

We've been purchased with a price. That makes it a good sermon. And the reason is because it's crystal centric. It's cross centric. The reason anything goes that we teach, believe, learn, correct, repent of is because of what Christ did on the cross. So if he's not preaching the cross and Jesus Christ crucified, then he's a bad preacher. He's preaching moralism. And here's one of the questions I'll ask people.

A lot of people I know are listening right now going, what? Well, think about this. Can the sermon that he preached be transported word for word over to a Mormon church and be preached there without any change? And if it can, then how is that a good Christian sermon?

Because a good Christian sermon should not be able to be preached word for word equally in a cult church. So you mentioned at the beginning of this phone call, you mentioned the apostasy in the Christian church. I am so aware of the apostasy in the Christian church. I have said so many times that the Christian church is moving towards apostasy.

Men are doing their jobs in the church. The elders, large numbers of elders don't know what biblical theology is and couldn't execute their way out of a wet paper bag. They don't know how to preach. They don't know how to teach.

They don't even know what half of the basics of the Christian faith are. I've talked to a lot of elders who don't know anything. Just because they're older or they've been around, they're nice, they have money or whatever, doesn't mean they're qualified to be an elder.

No, all our older elders quit except for one and the others are all fairly young. I would love to have a phone conference with them, you know, if they could just tell them. You go up and say, hey, there's a guy in the radio named Slick who'd like to talk to you guys about stuff, about getting a good pastor and good preaching. I'm sure that would go over really well. I'll pray about that.

Yeah, I think that would probably be really good. I'll pray about that. Pray really hard. They'd probably look at you then look at the exit and say you need to leave. Well, there are some, you know, very learned, very well respected people in our congregation that are also concerned like I am. I rely on them.

I bounce everything off them to make sure I'm not in error. I took a whack at this when we invited someone to do a conference at our church that blogs for the Gospel Coalition. And I said, wait a minute, if he's not supporting everything that the Gospel Coalition's spewing out right now, then why would he want his name associated with them? And if he is supporting it, then why are we inviting him to our church to do a conference?

Well, I got a big long letter back from this guy explaining about all the wonderful things that the Gospel Coalition does. You know, and that logic is sometimes very convincing. But to me, it's like, Satan will tell 99 truth to slip in one lie.

Or if your hands are still laying, you're still getting eggs. Why worry about the states in the henhouse? Right. Yeah, there's a lot to talk about there. But let's just focus on this guy. Is he going to be the new pastor? I suspect that, that we'll have a period of, well, we're looking, but we're kind of keeping in quiet what we're doing to, well, we've just decided to go ahead and promote him to senior. That's what I expect to happen. I don't know. And I have no special knowledge. So that's just my gut feeling.

Maybe totally wrong. Right. Don't know. I have an article on CARM on social justice. I read it today.

And yes, it's very good. Okay, good. Well, I should say there was nothing new and startling in there. Right. Well, I wrote it before all this stuff started. To pass on to some other people.

Yeah. Well, I needed to do a whole section on social justice. And some of the topics that I want to cover in there are going to be multitude in this, probably 10, 15 topics. I'm going to open up my file. I can read them to you. But it'll be like the woke, being woke, cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, which I've written on, critical race theory.

I saw that. What it means to docs, gender equality, identity, virtue, signaling, intersectionality. Let me get into all of this stuff. I have a reference for you that might be helpful for you. Sure.

I can't remember the website address, but the YouTube channel is called conversations that matter. Okay. Okay, I'll check it out. Yeah, I've got some other resources. His name is John John.

I can't remember his last name. But he has some amazing stuff on there. And it might be very helpful to pursue their his videos and see. Yeah. And yeah, all right.

Taking the time to talk to me. I still pray for you. I am so grateful because I certainly need it.

My wife would definitely confirm that I need lots of help. So you probably don't recognize my voice. And I don't want to get my last name on here.

But I'm the Sarah that used to live in Wyoming and then moved to the eastern Caribbean and almost went to work. Oh, hey, how are you? Well, email me. I just was wondering about you recently. I can't get through to you.

You're such a famous person. No, I'm not. No, I'm not.

I have sent you a couple of emails, but I'll try again. Okay, I recognize your voice. I remember you.

Yeah, I'm glad you're there. Try it again. Okay. And I'll just keep in contact. Okay.

Sounds good. Okay. All the best. God bless. You too. All right.

Wow, that's nice. Okay. Hey, let me get back on track here.

We have three open lines. If you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276. Let's get to Bruce from New Jersey. Hey, Bruce, welcome. You're on the air. Hey, thank you.

You're welcome. I'll get to my question in a minute, but I have an observation. Okay. That lady before, she bought into more of that stuff than she realized.

She gave an old wives tale that Satan will tell 99 truth, get one lie. I think Paul told us in verse 10 of the big four seven not to have anything to do with those. Right. But hold on, we've got a break.

You see how subtle it is? Just sneaking it in. Hold on, we've got a break.

We've got a break. Hey folks, be right back. Please stay tuned. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.

And we have three open lines, 877-207-2276. Let's get back to Bruce from New Jersey. Bruce. Okay. Yeah. Just one more comment. We have become a religion of cliches and myths.

I know what plans I have for you. And it's such, you're so right that most these pastors, they need to be fired, they need to get out. The people need the demands of these preachers teaching the Word of God. Well, they're too interested in getting people into the church. I say preach to send the church out, not to get more people in. You preach the gospel, let the power of the gospel do the work. Let the preaching of the gospel do the work of conversion.

Don't just try and get people in and give some program. It's all their ego. And the thing is, Matt, I'm seeing a revival because people are getting afraid of end times. They're going back to Dake's again.

And they're prepping like you wouldn't believe. But what is your opinion on Dake's Bible? I know he was a better Bible. Stay away from the Dake's Bible. Stay away from the Dake's Bible. Period.

Stay away from it. Yes. He was an adoptionist, a triteist, a horse of theology, kicked out of both the assembly of God and the church of God, and these people are sucking up to him. Yeah.

Hey, it happens all over. Okay, so that's why I teach and preach on this stuff on my website. Okay, do you have a question? Yeah, well, that was why I wanted to discuss the Dake's Bible. And even though he's pre-trib and people lean to it, they're not even aware of all his false teachings that he does. That's because people don't know the Dake's Bible. They say, oh, it's a Bible. They don't know the Dake's Bible is bad.

Just like the New World Translation. They don't know it's bad. They say, stay away from it. They say, an NASB with no study notes. Just that.

With wide margins and study yourself, folks. That's what I tell people to do. I'm no different than anybody else. I didn't know everything when I was born. I started studying.

Just start studying. And you'll learn, you know. But anyway.

I can't disagree with that. Then you, because then you'll have the right. And then, you know, if the Holy Spirit wrote that, he wants us to understand him.

And he is alive. And he will teach us. But, you know, I also believe in going to other brothers and sisters that have wisdom.

Read the Bible on by myself. And then when I have a point of contention or a misunderstanding, then go seek it out. But there's so much happening today, Matt. There is, I know. Trust me. I'm quite aware of it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking my call.

You're welcome. Well, God bless. Okay. Yep.

Oh, sorry about that. We have four open lines. If you want to give me a call, folks, 877-207-2276.

Tom from Florida. Welcome. You're on the air. Hey, man. How are you doing today, sir? I'm doing all right. How are you doing?

I'm doing swell. I watched your debate with Sonny Hernandez that took place in February 2020. And it was about compatibilism and determinism. And the debate was very interesting.

I had a couple of observations. One, Sonny refused to define his definition of free will and even the will. He pretty much always came back to God is a free will and we don't.

He didn't give in what is the essence of the will so that you could go back and forth with him. And the debate got hung up on that for a long time. Yeah. Remember what happened? I finally had to define it for him from what he had said. I collected notes and finally figured it out and told him, I should have had to do this for you.

You should have done this. Yeah. Remember that?

Yeah. It just kept getting hung up. And unfortunately the debate just kept coming to a roadblock at that point. But a critique on what you did whenever it came to your side of the debate, when it came to compatibilism, you pointed to Christology to prove that Christ had ultimate free will. And because Christ had a free will, therefore compatibilism is true. But the name of the debate was, does the Bible teach compatibilism? But I think a more beneficial name for the debate would have been, does it teach compatibilism with the human will?

That we could have got to that. Because I think he would never argue the point that Christ had a free will. Well, here's the thing. If that had been the title, which is fine, it still would have applied to Christ because he has two natures, divine and human. So therefore, it would have worked. And it would have gone into the hypostatic union, the communicatio idiomatum.

And then it would have gone into the incarnation and other issues. So Christ, of course, has one will. I don't know if you're familiar with what's called dietheletism, which is that he has two natures. So each nature has a will.

Di means two. Theleo, Greek will, two wills. So each nature has a will. So the proper doctrine is dietheletism. But it's manifested as a single will in a single person.

This is because of the communicatio idiomatum and hypostatic union. I would have gotten into that. I would have loved to have with them. It still didn't matter. And he could not handle the argument anyway, you know, with the issue of Christ's sad, free will. And yet he could only do what the Father told him to do, you know, John 5 19, John 5 30.

Yep. Unfortunately, all two ended up talking past each other in two different topics during the debate, and he couldn't engage in what you were doing. And he was talking about something completely different.

So I thought that was a shame. Yeah, part of the reason when that happens, I've had that happen before, it's because the opponent can't define their terms and doesn't, they don't know their theological or philosophical perspectives well enough to be able to carry them through to various topics. And so what I'll try and do is go sideways with them a little bit and try and bring them to the place of being able to understand something. But yeah, he and they couldn't think on their feet to answer your questions. They pretty much wanted the debate to go their way. And when they didn't, they just get frustrated and repeat themselves. You got that right.

It is so true. Yeah. So looking at the topic itself, to cover what the debate did, and I'm going to talk about the human will, since you're a compatibilist and trying to really understand what it means. How would you define the human will, and if it's free or not, and how would that differ from what an Arminian would say if there is any difference at all?

Well, you see, when you say I, as you're talking to me, you're asking one person with one opinion. But when you say Arminian, you're asking for thousands of people. So I can't speak for Arminians. But basic Arminian theology does teach total depravity and the restriction of the will affected by the fact and truth of total depravity. Their solution is to engage with semi-Pelagianism and prevenient grace.

Prevenient grace doesn't work. I call it kindergarten theology. So I define free will as the ability to act according to your own nature without being forced to do so.

The reason I do that is because I won't just use a humanistic position. I won't say let's exclude God from the definition. Let's start with man. That's humanism. Now, God's the standard of all things and righteousness and truth. So we have to have a definition that includes God because we're made his image, Genesis 1.26. So God cannot lie. And he can only do that which is consistent with his nature. And he is certainly free and there's no external force making him do anything. So free will, according to what God would say, as it appeals to God or applies to God and man, is the ability to act freely according to your nature without being forced. Real simple.

Real simple. Okay, how would that differ from like Thomas Aquinas? And if we believe in irresistible grace, doesn't that mean that God reaches in and changes our nature? Therefore, is our nature truly free? If he changes our nature, then what we are is in essence still is there. And when we say change of our nature, we've got to be careful what we mean by that. See, we're made new creatures, 2 Corinthians 5.17, but our nature is still human. And so when we say change our nature, that really is not an apropos of things.

It's not really what we should be saying. Because that would mean we're not human anymore, but we are human. What we want to say is, I can say more logistically, God regenerates us, which is another question.

What does that mean? Well, it seems to be understood to mean the very indwelling of God in a different way than just his presence, because he's everywhere, his ubiquity. But when he indwells, like John 14.23, the Father and the Son will come and make their abode with you and in you. This is what he's talking about, the indwelling of God.

This is what I think is the regeneration. Something happens to us where God is present in and along with us. It's not the Eastern Orthodox view of theosis, where we become God-like because of that union.

No, not at all. But so we're still the same in our human nature. It's just that restrictions on the human nature are removed.

Not completely, but we have a lot more freedom. And with regenerative form, which is by irresistible grace, which means at the time of regeneration, we cannot resist God's will. And then he regenerates us. And then because of regeneration, we are then enabled to be able to freely choose him.

And so we freely do. Okay. Do you believe faith precedes regeneration? I don't believe in temporal priority. I believe in logical priority. So if faith precedes, I'll use this as an illustration.

This is how I always use it. If faith precedes regeneration temporally, let's say by five seconds. I'll just use this as an illustration. If we have faith that temporally precedes regeneration by five seconds, we'd have a believer who's not regenerate for five seconds. That's a logical problem. If we reverse it and say regeneration precedes faith by say five seconds, we'd have a regenerate person who's not a believer for five seconds.

That has logical problems. So what I say is that faith or regeneration logically precedes faith, not temporally, but logically, which means they're simultaneous. The illustration I give for this is whenever you flip on a light switch, electricity enters the light bulb and the electricity and the light occur in the light bulb at the same time. So when electricity is present, the light is present. They're not temporally related in the sense that five seconds after the electricity is there, the light appears.

But technically there's a super micron second of ticks, but you get the point. So what we would say is that electricity is logically prior to the light. It must be there in order for the light to be there, but they're simultaneous. It's not the case that light must be there in order for electricity to be there. So we would say that electricity is logically prior and that's an issue of logic. It must be there in order for the other thing to occur, but they happen simultaneously. Regeneration must be there for faith to occur, but they happen simultaneously. That's my position. Thank you for that. And one last thing.

Sure. The reason why I believe a lot of Calvinists are resistant against the term free will is because it's so Arminian. I would say, why didn't this person come to faith?

Because they didn't will it. Everyone has the choice of salvation, but some people just don't exercise their free will to do it. Everyone exercises their free will. Everybody exercises their free will, unbeliever and believer alike. The unbeliever's freedom is restricted by his sinful nature.

The Bible says the unbeliever cannot receive the things of God for the foolishness to him. First Corinthians 2.14. He's a slave of sin. Romans 6, 14 through 20. He doesn't seek for God and doesn't do any good. Romans 3, 10, 11, and 12. His heart is full of wickedness.

Jeremiah 17, 9. So this is his condition. So therefore he's not going to be able to do anything that is going to be contrary to his nature. And his nature is restricted by the revelation of scripture to say that he's only going to choose wicked things. And he does. He has to be regenerated to be able to freely choose.

And so Calvinists do believe in free will. I just had to believe fast. Sorry for interrupting you, but I knew we were going to bow over. Dude, call back tomorrow earlier.

We can take more time talking about this because you have great questions. I wish I can. I'm on lunch.

I wish I could get them on lunch. Okay. God bless, buddy. Talk to you later.

That guy had great questions and great issues. Love to talk about it. Sorry to cut him off at one point.

You get to look quickly, but that would say how it is. Hey, we'll talk to you tomorrow. God bless. Goodbye, everybody.