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 for answers.

Taking your calls and responding to your questions at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Everybody welcome. It's me, Matt Slick, and you're listening to Matt Slick live. Okay.

Hey, it is January 29th, 2021, the year of our Lord. And I ask that if you want, give me a call. All right. All you got to do is dial 877-207-2276 and we can blab. And there we go. So, oh, we have no callers waiting right now. That's okay. I'll fill in a little bit of time while they're calling.

Again, 208-440. I mean, that's my cell. I didn't get the whole thing out.

Oh boy, that's close. Let's see, 877-207-2276. Man, if I gave my cell out, man, I already had got enough spam. I got spam. You wouldn't believe. You know, we had it before back, the anti's, the haters. One of the things they did, I knew they did it for sure.

This is about 17, 18 years ago. They put my name, my email address, my name into all kinds of spam stuff. And I would get spammed emails all the time. It's always been that way. I don't know what the deal is. You know, I mean, we got people who hate what I do. They don't like freedom of speech, I guess. You know, maybe they're leftist, moron, wackos, cult members. I don't know. And they would sign my name up and spam out everything they could.

They would do stuff. You know, it just is ridiculous. And wow. So hey, that's just what it is. Okay.

Five open lines, 877-207-2276. All right. Now, hey, we're going to go to Israel. Lord willing, if people want us to go, I mean, if God wants us to go and you want to go and get enough people to go, then we'll go. So if you want to check it out and check out information, all you got to do is go to karm.org, not karm.org.

You got to go to karmisrael.com, karmisrael.com. And you can check out the information about when and where and stuff like that. I've been, and it's a great trip. It really is. I mean, I'm not just saying it. It's great.

You just love to experience where Jesus was and it's in great places. So anyway, check that out if you want. And also we have three online schools, if any of you are interested in checking them out.

The schools, you can go to KARM and in the navigation menu, or just type in the word schools in the search engine. You'll find it. We have had a problem with our navigation menu and the new site. We found out that there's a glitch and hopefully it'll be fixed this weekend or the first part of next week, because we put in a ticket, a fix-it ticket to the company that wrote that thing and say, hey, what's the deal here? And so, you usually respond pretty well, things like that, and we'll get it going. The web guy's on vacation. And let's see what else is there. Well, we had a caller coming in.

We lost him. 877-207-2276. Maybe some people in the chat room can type in some questions.

I can go from that. We got Murritt from London and we get calls from all over. In fact, one of the things we're going to be working on is Magaliese, Madagascar. We have an offer from someone who knows that language, lives there, I guess, and wants to translate the website into Magaliese, whatever it is, for Madagascar, which I think is just awesome. And we've already gotten Spanish. We've got it in Portuguese and we're going to be working on it in about a year.

We're going to be getting Russian and Turkish. And so, we're trying to expand in some various areas. Oh, and by the way, we do stay on the air by your support. If you're so kind as considering it or to consider it, would you please consider just supporting us? $5 a month is what we ask, $5 or $10. And then, that helps us make plans for budgets or things like that, what we can and can't do. And again, thank you to all of you who supported in the end of year matching funds donation thing. And we got our final number today on how much came in and it's really going to help us a great deal. So, thank you very much.

Really, really appreciate that. And one person said they thought they spoke French in Madagascar. I don't know. I've never been there. I'd like to be there though.

I think it'd be great. All right, folks, five open lines. Give me a call.

877-207-2276. All right. So, last night I was in Discord talking with some atheists and stuff. And let me just say that they could be quite difficult sometimes. And something interesting happened in that I tried to work what they want. Okay, let me put this right way. What they want is a proof for God's existence using the transcendental argument for God.

And they want it in a certain form. And I find it interesting that when I talk to them about the necessary preconditions for intelligibility, that the fact that the laws of logic that we use in debate, in argumentation, in writing, in thinking, that these are conceptual things. And so, I was thinking about talking about it a little bit.

This might hurt some people's heads, but there's what we call the transcendental argument for God's existence. So, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Get the phone number out and then people call in. And I'll talk about tag here a little bit. This might be a little bit heady, but I think I can make it simple enough for people to understand.

Because it does take a little bit to kind of get through it. So, the number, give me a call, 877-207-2276. Let's see. That's right.

I'm reading something from a text guy about Biden and China. All right. Okay. So, a transcendental is something that exists, has an existence, but is not relegated or not dependent upon space and time. So, that's really an interesting concept.

Are there such things that have existence, but they are not physical and are not properties of the physical? So, if we have a bowling ball, for example, we can take a bowling ball and we can weight it. See how much weight it has. We could check how much mass it has.

We could check its volume. We can check its color, reflectivity, things like that, its density. And so, we can measure these things. And the reason we can measure them is because they have physical properties. The bowling ball is a physical object and the properties of that object are measurable. So, baseball has properties of rock.

You've got your yard and you can pick up a rock. And you can lift it up in your hand and you'll know that it has weight. That's because gravity pulls on the mass and pulls it down and you can feel it. It has a certain density of material. It has a certain shape, certain volume, certain colors, and things like that.

These are properties of that rock. And so, the reason we can measure those properties is because they're physically related. So, what we see is that if we take a bowling ball, we can hold it in our hands. We can measure its weight. We can measure things because it's physically related. So, what they do when they look at planets and look at stars is they measure light.

They measure various things and gravitational effect of one body and another body because there's a physical quality to them. And physical qualities affect other things around them. And they have properties. Okay, so what about a thought? Let's talk about this. Does a thought fit that same category? Can you measure a thought? Can you weigh it? Can you take a picture of it? Can you see how hot it is, its density?

Well, the answer, of course, is no, no, no, no. Thoughts, for example, don't have the same properties as a physical object does in that the physical object can be measured. You can take a picture of it.

You can see how hot it is, how cold it is, how dense it is, whatever. But this does not apply to a thought. Now, people might say, well, thoughts take time. Well, a thought takes time to exhibit. But that doesn't mean that time is a property of a thought.

And so if a thought has existence, but it exists only in the mind, then the question then becomes, is a thought something other than the physical world? Because you can't measure it in any way, shape or form. It's not testable. It's not repeatable.

In this sense, you can cause it to be a certain way in a certain thing, like you can with a rock and falling and density. Okay, so now think about this. Two plus two equals four. Now, I just said that.

And if you were to think that in your head, you know what the answer is, because in your mind, you understand the concept of two and four and plus and equals. Now, I'm going to say a word. I want you to imagine it in your mind, the word chair. So you think of a chair, you can think of any chair you want.

Now, I'm going to have you think of a different chair, just a different look, a different size, different patterns of fabric or wood or whatever it might be. So you can think of a chair and I can think of a chair and others who are listening to this show can think of a chair. Well, what we're doing is we are acknowledging the idea or the concept of chairness, chairness, the quality of being a chair. And there's many kinds and there's many shapes and many locations in which the actuality of chairness is manifested.

This issue right here is a very important issue in philosophical discussions. How is it that you can recognize what a chair is and I can too? And yet we are in different locations and you are seeing something different than I'm seeing or you're imagining something different than I'm imagining. But we both realize, we all realize what a chair is. We're coming in contact with the idea and the concept of chairness.

And this works in all kinds of things, carness, duckness, milkness. We recognize various things and we have this ability to identify them. And the recognition of them is not dependent on our minds. What I mean is we see them, but the actuality of the quality of chairness is not dependent upon our awareness. What we do is we come in contact with a concept. We apprehend this concept of chairness.

It's out there. Now let's step sideways a little bit and talk about logic. So there are logical statements of the law of identity. Something is what it is and is not what it is not. The law of non-contradiction. A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time in the same sense in the same way. Then there's what's called the law of excluded middle. A statement is either true or false. True or false. These statements are abstractions.

An abstraction is something that occurs in the mind. You don't find the laws of logic under rocks or behind trees. You can't take pictures of them.

You can't weigh them with their abstractions. And here's what's neat about them. You use them and I use them.

You come in contact with them and I come in contact with them. Well then how is it that they have existence? This is the question. What is their nature? Is their nature abstract in that they require a mind for their actuality?

And the answer is well yes. Because we can't measure those laws. We can't take pictures of them. We can't find them and say oh here it is right here behind that chair.

It doesn't work like that. So a lot of philosophers who've been thought talking about this recognize the transcendental nature of these laws. They transcend space and time. They're not dependent upon space and time. That means they're not part of the universe. Because if the universe disappeared then they would be dependent on the universe. They'd be properties of the universe. But they're not measurable so they can't be properties. So what are they? They're abstractions. When we get back from the break I'll tell you how this connects into the idea of God.

It's called the transcendental argument for God's existence. We'll talk about this a little bit more. We have five wide open lines. Give me a call folks. 877-207-2276. Give me a call. Get in line. We'll talk to you later. It's Matt Slick live taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick.

Welcome back to the show everybody. If you want to give me a call we have five open lines 877-207-2276. Give me a call folks. And let me continue on this issue of the transcendental. I hope I'm not being too difficult. But this is really an important topic and I use it and I teach about it in various contexts. And last night I was discussing it. So these laws of logic. How is it that they have existence?

And I'm going to ask a question. What must be in place in order for those laws to exist? So what must be in place for my thought to exist? Well what must be in place is my existence and my activity of thinking. So what are what's called the necessary preconditions for the value of x? X being the laws of logic or x being that house is built or x being the coffees ready. We can say what are the necessary preconditions for it? Certain things must exist in order for other things to exist.

Or we could say other things must exist or have occurred in order for other things to exist and have occurred. If these laws, let's analyze these laws for a minute. They're universal. Apparently everywhere we go they're true. And there it depends and it does not depend on their validity on for when we are. So yesterday they're true, tomorrow they're true, today they're true.

They seem to be true everywhere all the time. So they have a quality of absoluteness and they have a quality of independence from us. That they're not dependent upon us and are not dependent upon the physical universe. But yet at the same time they are also abstractions. They occur in the mind and yet they're universal. They're in the mind, they're universal, and they're absolute.

They don't change. They're always true. And they're not dependent upon the physical realm or our minds. But the laws of logic are by nature concepts. They occur in the mind by necessity. So then what we could say is that these transcendental laws of logic are not dependent upon space and time, not dependent upon your mind or my mind, our minds.

They do not change. They're always true. Yet they are abstractions which requires a mind. Therefore it's logical to say that there is a mind out there, an absolute divine mind that is behind and is the necessary precondition for all of the laws of logic. It's the only way to account for them. If we were to say that we could explain the laws of logic without God, then I've asked atheists to do this.

Please explain how this works. And they can't. They can say things like the properties of the universe, but that doesn't work. Or they're things we observe and then we observe and then we develop constructs based on observations. But that's called begging the question and presupposing the law of identity. And I show how they're being inconsistent.

And so I've gone through this over the years and I'll tell you something. The atheists hate this argument and they say repeatedly it's been thoroughly refuted. And every single time I ask for the reputation, it's never produced. What I believe is that atheists are afraid of this argument because it's so good and so strong that they cannot defeat it. And so they will say, well, it's just been defeated. And when I ask for the arguments, it doesn't work.

They don't have them. Now, one of the things that I have been told is that certain propositions are trivial. And I was having this discussion last night and they said, well, this one person, a mathematician, philosopher, whoever it was, had a discussion with me about this and showed that it was not true. And I said, no, he did not show it's not true.

It showed that there was a certain construction in a logical form, he said, was trivial. This is how it works. You have a or not a, God or not God. So you have a or not a.

And these are the possibilities for something. So you have a or not a. So not not a is a negation of the not a, therefore a. I won't go into all those details. And so they say it's trivial. It just means that not not a is double negative, which affirms a.

So you have a and not a. Well, it's not not a, so therefore it's a, therefore it's trivial. And they say, see, that invalidates the argument. And I said, no, it doesn't invalidate the argument.

Triviality does not invalidate arguments. We have to go over this kind of stuff. So when we talk about this kind of a thing, to me, it's interesting. And this is what I do.

This is the kind of stuff I do at night when I have discussions like this and working through logical paradigms and things like this. So anyway, I thought I would do that because no one was calling. And so when no one calls, I'm going to get a little heady, I guess. And if you want to give me a call, we have four open lines, 877-207-2276. I want you to give me a call.

Please do. Let's get to Bill from California. Bill, welcome. Wait a second.

I hit the wrong button. There we go. Bill from California. How are you doing, buddy? Hey, man.

How are you doing? Oh, that's right. Hey, that's me again. Yeah, that's right. I recognize your voice.

You sound like my friend so much. So what do you got, big guy? Hey, talking to the King James only people, they'll bring up John 3.36. And I'm kind of driving now, so I don't have the first in front of me. Okay, I get it. But when it says, whoever believes in the Son has everlasting life, but whoever doesn't believe in the Son, I'm just trying to paraphrase it. But the New American Genesis... Right.

He who believes in the Son has eternal life, but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. Okay. And the King James has a different. Can you explain that? Okay, let me go take a look.

So text comparison. Let's see the New King. I'll do the night. No, I just want to do it this way. All right, so the King James 1900. Oh, that's wrong verse.

Come on, get back in there. All right. So, he who believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.

I don't see any real significant difference. So I'm going through and looking at New King James. Okay, go ahead. They said that you obey, you have everlasting life. Oh, the word obey. Okay, so I'm looking at the Greek.

Yeah, apotheo is the Greek word. Yes, okay. So, all right, all right, not to allow oneself to be persuaded or believe to be disobedient, spoken of disbelievers in many places, et cetera. All right, so the question then becomes why that word, and let me get into this, and let's see. Okay, now I'm starting to understand the problem, but he who does not. So why is it believe versus obey?

That's the question. Believe. Apotheo is the same Greek word, but they use believe in the King James.

All right, so tell you what I'm going to do. There's not a textual variant issue, so the word is 544. 544, it occurs 14 times, and all of them except for two places in the NASB are translated as disobedient. 1 Peter 2, 417, those who do not obey the gospel of God and do not obey. Yeah, and the other one, so there's no, and no, there's another one who says not obey.

I don't see any necessity for belief. Let me take a look at it during the break. We'll come back to you. We'll talk a little bit more about it, okay? All right. You're right back, folks.

You have three open lines. Give me a call. 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. All right, welcome back, everybody. We have two open lines. If you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276. Bill, you still there? Yes.

Yeah, so a little bit of research during the break. The word is apatheo, and the A on the front is the negator, like atheism or agnostic, and so it's the negator. It's number 544, so it means to be disobedient, to not allow oneself to be persuaded or to believe. It is to disbelieve, to be disobedient. The NASB translates it that way, or disobedient.

Let's see, and I'll do all Bibles, see what it says there. Disobedient is how it is used mostly, and not believing. So CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, it relates it sometimes as disbelieve. So disbelieve, yeah, so it can be both.

The NASB just does not believe, but when they say obey, the NASB says obey, and then it has the number 1 next to it, or believe. So both work. Okay. Yeah, it's okay.

Yeah, it's fine. It doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just, you know, if the King James people say it means that theirs is better, well, why?

Okay. The King James only. They'll say that's lordship salvation, nowhere found. He must obey and that's all they'll say. Well, the King James says do not believe, and that's correct, but we're supposed to obey the Son. He says come to me as a command, but love everyone.

We're supposed to do that, and so come to Christ and be saved, you know, so we'll obey what he says. So it's not a big deal. Okay. Okay. All right, man. All right, thank you. All right, God bless, buddy. All right. God bless, buddy. Thanks for calling. All right. Hey, folks.

Three open lines. 8772072276. Let's get to Joe from Australia. Hey, Joe.

Welcome. Hello, Slick. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you loud and clear. I appreciate you calling.

So are you there? Oh, hello. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you.

I hear you. And it went under beep, so I don't know what's going on, but I can hear you or for a minute. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you.

Uh huh. Oh, so sorry, mate. How are you?

I'm fine. I'm just sitting here doing radio, you know, in Idaho, and you're in Australia. Where are you in Australia? I'm in the temple of Australia. Okay.

I don't know where that is, but maybe we'll check it out. Yeah. All right.

Yeah, I'm a patron, so I've really been blessed by your ministry on how to defend the faith and give an answer for the fact that it's in me. Amen. Thank God. Amen. Praise God for that. By God's grace. Yes.

So what do you got? So the question I have is Genesis chapter 9, verses 22 to 25. Okay. I just don't understand why the brothers or the kids got in trouble for Noah's mistake. You mean seeing Noah naked? They got cursed. Yeah.

Yeah. In that culture at the time, it was very disrespectful to view your father in his nakedness. It was a sign of disrespect and humiliation before the father. And so in that, there was that issue.

And some commentators think there might have been a hint of the idea of the problem of homosexuality, but I don't really think it really carries much weight in that particular argument. But yet he was drunk. And so he blew it and they weren't supposed to see.

So that's it. But then why did the kids get cursed? That's what I don't understand. It wasn't their fault from how they did it.

Because even though Noah was the one who was drunk, apparently in that culture and at that time, it was, like I said, a sign of great disrespect to uncover your father's nakedness or to see that if you had known he was in that state, then they should have had the wife go in or they do is they go in backwards with a garment or walk and you cover to show that respect. Apparently that maybe that's not what they did, but not really what happened. I don't know.

It's a tough one. Because they did that. They said they laid a cover up on both their shoulders and walked backwards and covered the nakedness of their father.

And their faces were turned away. So I'm going to have to research that, because that's how you got me going. I'm more curious here.

Why would that be the issue? Walk backward the whole bit since they did exactly what I would have thought they would have done. I'm going to research it, okay? I will.

I'll research it. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, that explains it well.

God bless you and thank you for everything that you do. Yeah. I'm going to figure out what's going on, all right? And I'll write an article about it, answering it.

Put it on the car. Okay? No worries.

Sounds good. Thank you, buddy. Okay. No problem, man. God bless. All right. God bless. Hey, folks, if you want to give me a call, 4OpenLines, 877-207-2276.

We have 4OpenLines. Rob from Utah. Rob, welcome. You're on the air. Hey, Matt.

How are you doing? Appreciate your ministry of the gospel and defending the faith. Thanks. Well, appreciate that. Thank you, sir.

You're welcome. Thank you, sir. My question, comment, or thought for you is about the doctrine of the Scriptures and how we determine what is then preserved by God if we approach the Scriptures by faith that God has promised to give us His word and to preserve us His word. Like, for example, Jesus says, we should not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. So if we start with faith that God has said we're to live by every word, should we not, like, continue in faith believing that we will have every word in our generation? So you're saying that the issue of continuing in faith for the purpose of knowing that the word of God will remain and be true? Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. And where I'm coming from is if we approach God's word by faith, God's promise, then wouldn't we have to see that it's been perfectly preserved? And then if we have all these different versions, all these different readings, all these different renderings, at what point do we rely on evidence versus faith and look at how God has preserved His word throughout every generation? Well, believe it or not, faith can be based on evidence. We know that the evidence in the Scripture is that Jesus Christ died, rose on the cross, eyewitnesses wrote it. And these documents are accurately presented from then to now, and we have the faith that is reliable and the faith that we can't verify every single detail throughout history and transmission and all along the way.

So that faith and belief, obedience and stuff like that, and evidence are all interrelated. So it's an interesting thing because the Bible has not been perfectly preserved. And what I mean by that is that over the years, for example, in the New Testament and Greek, there are a few places where there are copies differences in some of the copies. And most of them are just like a spelling of a word or like a single word, like the word the, which is the O with a little comma over it.

That's the word ha, which is the word the. Well, that little thing can flake off on a document, in a parchment or papyri, being in a vase jar for 200 years, they pull it out, they open it up and a little flake comes off. It can happen. Then they copy that and then they don't put the flake on because it's not there. And so when we say it's perfectly preserved, well, not exactly. But the documents are something like 99.85% textually identical, all the ones. And where there are copyist errors or little flakes off or things like that, I think it's something like 98% of those are not even an issue.

And so there's only very, very few places where there's any differentiation of any serious consideration. Okay. So we have faith to know that God's word has been preserved. We have to have faith that God is certainly capable of preserving his word throughout the centuries and using various means to do that. And we have that faith because we know that God is great and God is omniscient and omnipotent, et cetera. And so we can know that he will preserve his word and he has. And he has done that.

So the evidence is there and we can trust it. So I have an extremely high view of the word of God, very, very high view. And I quote it constantly whenever I'm doing apologetics, even with unbelievers, I'll quote the word of God. Yeah.

Yeah. But what if, doesn't it seem that God has promised to perfectly preserve it though, when he says, live by every word, you'll keep them from this generation and forever. Psalm 12, heaven and earth shall pass away. My word shall not pass away. Doesn't it seem inherent that the promise is perfect preservation?

Not necessarily. And we can talk about that some more after the break. Okay.

We've got a break. Hey folks, please give me a call. Four open lines, 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. All right, everybody.

Welcome back to the show. Hey, just to let you guys know that we're going to try and get going. The Karm Karm trip to Israel next year in 2022. If you want to check it out, you want to go to Israel with me and a few others. Well, all you got to do is go to karmisrael.com. It'll forward you to another website and there's a survey there.

It's four questions. That gives us an idea of the interest that people might be having and considering going. And then if we do have enough, we can push it forward. And if we don't, we won't. And so we'll know that by around March, sometime in late March.

So just giving you some information, karmisrael.com and it'll forward you to another website. All right, let's get back on the phones with, let's see, it's Rob from Utah. I was going to say that this issue of the Bible, there's no promise that God will perfectly preserve the copies of the documents. Inspiration applies to the original documents.

People don't know that, to the autographs, but that's how it is. So when the Bible says that not one jot or tittle will pass away from the law, the scriptures, it's not saying that the copies themselves will always be accurately preserved. But what it's probably getting at is that the nature of God's word and the truth that is written there and what God has stated, none of it's going to pass away. It's all true. Now we have the reality of textual variants.

Well, here's something to consider. A textual variant might be considered to be on the same level as a translation problem. Because if the inspiration is of the original in Hebrew and Greek, and we're going to translate, say, the Greek into English, then we have to ask these kinds of questions. How inspired is the English version? What we would say is that we have an accurate translation of an inspired document. Well, then are the translations inspired? Well, no, they're not. They're not perfectly pure and great in every single detail all the time.

Well, then this brings up other issues then. Well, then what is the inspired word of God? And some say, well, the inspired word of God becomes inspired when you read it.

We don't want to go that way. We want to say that what God has done is written inspired documents through the prophets and the apostles, and that it's sufficient in its power and its scope that no matter what language that we translate it into, we can touch that inspiration. We can be affected by that inspiration that God carries with it and the power and the nature of his words, which is not limited by a translation. And so this is the idea of the inspiration.

The truth of God's word must apply to the originals and also the copies and even the translations in other languages. And so this is how that works. It's a big topic, believe it or not.

It really is. And tell you what, what we'll do now is get on the phone with Debbie from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Debbie, welcome. You're on the air. Hi. Hi.

Hey, Matt. I've got a question about 2 Chronicles 18. In particular, I'm kind of looking at number 19 and number 20, where the Lord sent out a lying spirit to Ahab to have him go to war with Israel and Judah. Now, the Lord said, who will go? He's between, he's up in heaven.

He's speaking between the hosts. And he said, who will go and tell a lie to the prophet? So they will prophesy a lie to Ahab. So why would God send a deceiving spirit? There came out a spirit and stood before the Lord and said, I will entice him. And the Lord said to him, wherewith? And he said, I will go out and bring a spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And the Lord, big ale, said, thou shalt entice them.

And thou shalt also prevail, go out and even so. So the Lord sent a lying spirit out from heaven. And what I want to know is, why? Why couldn't he just, you know, destroy Ahab another way? Why send out a lying spirit to his prophets and the prophets tell him a lie? Well, I don't know why God would do it that way. I don't know why. Because the Bible doesn't say why he would use that method when he could have gone another way.

Right. I mean, he's destroyed them for, like, you know, killing each other or they see a bright light or they hear a noise or whatever or thunder and they run. But he sent out an evil spirit and I was just wondering why. Was it because it was Ahab? And Ahab, you know, wouldn't believe his spirit. His prophets would tell him any good but tell him evil.

Maybe. But if you go up in the future. The thing is, it doesn't... The text does not tell us why. What the ultimate motivation is. But we know that he sent it in order to bring about a certain result. The question generally asked is, well, why would God send a deceiving spirit? Isn't that using deception himself? Well, then we get into the issue of what's called proximate and efficient causation. This may sound highfalutin, but the idea is that the actual act of deceiving is done by a false spirit. And God allowed that spirit to go forward to accomplish what God ultimately wanted to be done. A certain action to be brought about a certain way.

And so he's not the one. It's like water behind a dam. You know, the water is trickling out or whatever. If he takes the dam away or pokes a hole in it, the water's going to flow naturally.

He's not... No one's causing the water to flow. It's part of the nature of what it is. We're just permitting it to do what's already there. And so this is the kind of thing... But in verse 20, it says, I will go when the Lord says go.

The Lord could have said no, we're going to do it another way. Yep. Good question. Don't know why.

He doesn't tell us. All right. Well, thank you. Bye-bye. Okay. Wow. Yeah. That's just one of the ones that God doesn't tell us.

And so normally, like I said, we deal with the issue of responsibility and causation and stuff like that. Let's get on the phones with Elias from Massachusetts. Elias, you're on the air. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? Doing all right.

Hanging in there, buddy. What do you got, man? It's kind of like a two-question thing.

Hopefully the first question might be quickly answered. But I was just wondering, what's your take on four-point Calvinist? I know when I read online and YouTube, they say, oh, because I'm a four-point because John Calvin himself didn't say anything about limited atonement. I was just wondering what's your view on that. Okay. You said several things.

So which one, what do you want me to focus on? Basically, what's your take on people who claim they're four-point Calvinist? Yeah. They're called Amaraldians and they denied limited atonement. Yeah.

They're just, in my opinion, they're just inconsistent. That's all. Okay. Okay. And the second kind of question is, I was just wondering if I can get a clarification on, I remember I was watching a video of you with laying flowers, just talking about freewill and decreeing things. And I was just getting a clarification. Basically, God, because I remember you explaining about permissive decrees, where, you know, basically when evil comes about by God's decree, and obviously God permitted it to happen basically.

Is that correct? Okay. Let's just look at it this way. God can directly decree or indirectly decree. So God can cause something to happen. So let's say there's a boulder that's ready to roll down a hill and God walks up to that boulder and he pushes it and it rolls down the hill. He's directly caused it. Let's say God wants that boulder to roll down the hill, but he sits there and waits until the natural forces erode the foundation of that boulder and it rolls down the hill. Both instances, he wanted it to occur. He could certainly bring about erosion in a different place and time, a different rate to bring it about that the boulder would move at a certain time. So in the first one, he's directly causing it.

In the second one, he's indirectly permitting it. But even the indirect cause can only occur by God's will. Because in the sense, in the illustration of the boulder and the hill, the boulder's there because God wanted it there and the hill is there because God wanted it there and so is gravity.

Because none of them could exist unless God wanted them to be there. So when we talk about this kind of an inanimate thing, we can see, okay, it makes more sense how that would work. When we get into the issue of personal responsibility, free will and causation and decrees, it gets a little more complicated. What we would say then is, what if there was a person standing next to that boulder and God wanted that person to push that boulder over? Now in the first sense, God himself could make the boulder go down the hill. But what if he wants that person, that man, let's say, to cause that boulder to go over? And let's just say, that's what God wants. He wants him to do it. Can God put a thought in his mind to do it?

Yes. Can he cause a strain of gold to be underneath that boulder that the man sees and the man pushes it over to get more? There's lots of ways where God can bring about exactly what he desires by, so to speak, not violating the free will of an individual. And so he can bring about whatever he desires, whatever means he wants.

And so since he, let's say, puts the gold strand or whatever it is, a gold thing underneath that boulder, see, my hands want that gold, he pushes it over. So he's caused the man to freely act the way God wanted him to go. Do you see?

Are you there? You're right. So basically, when it comes to, you know, people with fallen natures, we obviously have free will within that nature, like you explained. We obviously, God permits us to commit a sin, because obviously, it's our nature that he gave us, correct?

Yeah, whenever anybody actually, your phone wiggled a little bit, but the connection did. But whenever anybody acts, believer or unbeliever, they have to act in a manner consistent with their nature. The unbeliever will act in a manner freely, act in a manner consistent with his enslavement to sin.

He will always act freely in a sinful way. Right. So he can refrain from doing one sin one day, but then maybe fall into temptation and into sin the next day. Yes, that applies to believers as well. Okay. The idea is that an unbeliever is a slave of sin, but a Christian is not. Unbeliever is not born again, a Christian is, and so we can choose not to sin and actually glorify God, where an unbeliever cannot, ever. Right.

Because they don't have the proper standard, which is the word of God, they don't do it through the sanctifying blood of Christ, so therefore their goodness is not goodness at all. Right. And I just, you know, I just wanted to say, I appreciate, you know, what you're doing in ministry, and you have certainly helped me understand, you know, just Reformed theology, because I've been, I'm actually recently getting into Reformed theology, and you help me understand greatly, especially with, you know, compatibilism, free will, and all that.

Yeah, it's not that hard. Once people get a few things down, they go, oh, it all makes sense, and it does. Right. And in that video with you and Lainton Flowers talking, speaking of free will, I noticed you guys acknowledge that, you know, either Reformed or non-Reformed, both sides are trying to, I don't know how it was worded, that you keep God holy and obviously not attribute sin to God.

Both sides are trying to do that as best as they can. So when, I think when someone hears someone say, oh, God decrees everything to come about, including sin, obviously it's naturally, if you hear that quickly, it's going to be like, what? You're attributing sin to God. So that's what I kind of got from it when I first heard Reformed theology, and it kind of gave me a setback, like, whoa. Right.

Right. And so they don't understand what we mean by it, because to be perfectly frank, Reformed theology requires a little bit more brain cell activity than other stuff. And it's not that, you know, if you're smart, you'll believe it.

If you're not, you don't. That's not the issue. It's just that we look at scriptures that are a little bit more difficult to analyze and try and put them together. And we see some stuff and that's it. And it takes a while sometimes for people to get to that level. And it doesn't mean they're not saved if they don't though.

You know, they love Jesus. That's what's important. That's all that counts. Okay. Right. And just to say one more thing. Well, we're out of time, buddy.

There's the music. Sorry about that. Call back on Monday. Okay.

Call back on Monday. Oh sure. Thank you. All right. Hey folks. Sorry about that. We're out of time.

Sorry, Robert from North Carolina and Joanne from North Carolina. May the Lord bless you and folks by God's grace. We're back on the air on Monday. Save your questions and call in then. Have a great weekend folks. God bless. See you. Bye.