Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. 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. I forgot to hit the uh take the mute button off. Hey, how you doing everybody?

This is Matt Slick listening to Matt Slick live and today's date is December 8, 2023. If you want to give me a call, all you got to do is dial 877-207-2276. It's real easy, you know, and if you want to email me, you can do that too. All you got to do is dial, just email me at info at karm.org info at karm.org and uh just put in the subject line there. Put in something like a radio topic, radio question, and then we can get to it.

All right, all right, all right. So we also, if you're interested, we have um we have, let's see, how is it? We have uh StreamYard.

Oh man, I got so many things going on. StreamYard. Now we feed from StreamYard out to Facebook and Twitter and uh Rumble and if you want to watch in Rumble, just rumble.com forward slash Matt Slick live.

If you want to watch in YouTube, it's just youtube.com forward slash Matt Slick live and you can you can watch me sitting here and that's what I do and talk and stuff like that. We got uh callers if you want to give me a call 877-207-2276 and uh that's about it. We got some and I like to do hate mail on uh on Fridays, but we're getting low on hate mail.

Oh man, what am I doing wrong? I'm getting low on hate mail and uh let's see also, hey, I just gotta let you guys know, all right, that we stay on the air by your support and I know Christmas is often a difficult time for a lot of people and I get it. I just want to ask you to be so kind as to consider supporting us at five dollars a month.

It's not a whole bunch. This is just five dollars a month. If you could do that, that helps us out a great deal and if you do, uh then it's matched. We have a matching funds drive at five dollars a month, ten dollars a month, whatever it is that you would do.

So we're just asking that you would consider that and to do that all you got to do is go to karm.org c-a-r-m dot o-r-g forward slash donate. I just want to give you a heads up on why. Look, let me tell you something. We just had our Friday meeting. We have a weekly Karm Friday meeting.

We talked to our guy in Malawi, Africa and we talked to our guy in Nigeria, Africa and in Nigeria something interesting is happening. He's been going around spreading the gospel and feeding the flock. He's been using the Karm statement of faith which is rather lengthy. It's kind of a succinct systematic theology. It just has the basics but it's if you print it out probably I would do that sometime. I should print it out to see how many pages it's going to be which I can just know but at any rate it's it's very good even if I do say so myself and he's been printing it up and distributing it at churches and preaching the true gospel and two more groups now out of the additional three have come out well that's cool have come out of out of the false churches because they're teaching the prosperity stuff and come out of there and um or now they they want to start a church now I'm not saying we're going to start it but they want to get a fellowship group to get a fellowship group going and they want to be under the Karm authority because they don't because he said it's really big deal there to be under the authority of someone it's just how they are that culture and so he asked could we be under the Karm umbrella and okay I don't see problems with that we have to work out some logistics and things like that and it looks like I think if I understand five groups now are leaving Bible study groups are leaving their respective churches and they're coming to faith in Christ believe in the gospel if you like that kind of stuff if you want to support that kind of a thing please consider supporting us we really could use that at the end of the year especially we support the missionaries we have a missionary in Portugal not Portugal he speaks Portuguese and in Brazil and uh we you know we we support him and he feeds children as well as pastors a church and he works in the Portuguese version of Karm translating everything into Portuguese and it's reaching thousands and thousands and thousands of people in Brazil and in Portugal there's millions of people who speak Portuguese all over the world and they're using the site we have Carlos in Bogota Colombia and he's very good at uh theology and he has translated thousands of articles in thousands or hundreds I don't know how many hundreds of articles in Karm and he's fluent in English fluent in Spanish knows the theology and he has been doing the schools Bible studies teaching pastors and working through a university down there and we're supporting him you guys if you are supporting us that goes in and helps support them and you get to even realize how many different uh avenues of support are being reached and we need to tell people more about that in certain newsletters and things like that so I'm just letting you know if you want to support us 877 yeah I mean uh if you want to support us just go to karm.org c-a-r-m dot o-r-g forward slash donate everything you need right there even the p.o box address and stuff like that we do appreciate it and one last breath about that is that we're doing matching funds drive for the month of December whatever you donate whatever is postmarked in the p.o box by December 31 midnight and whenever you go in and do is also um appreciated and doubled all right let's get to diego from California welcome diego you're on the air uh hello hello thank you for allowing me to be on the air so I wanted to ask you a question regarding open theism so at my high school my bible teacher has been he teaches a world view and apologetics class for seniors and his goal is meant to make sure that those going off to college and into adulthood would be able to adamantly defend the christian faith from other religions and false ideologies however despite his efforts he himself has unfortunately fallen into deception about god's relation to time to start off he believes that god cannot be outside of time and will often assert that and I quote time is not a place is something we experience outside of time is non-starter is nonsense end quote and thus when he debates with people like me in my class about it he will make this point along with saying if god or any being that was outside of time if they were it would be static but since the person trying to can commune with one another this means god experiences a duration of events meaning he is in time secondly he also believes that god does not know who's going to be saved and does not know all the actions individuals would make in the future he then points to first samuel 1535 where god regrets making saw king and asserts that this can only make sense if god did not know what he was going to do he denies the use of anthropomorphism being used for god in the bible believe me it's adding something that is not there and he was teaching all this and going over different views about the relationship between god's sovereignty and man's free will such as calvinism armenianism and melanism calvinism in particular he seems directly opposed to he has openly said it when asked by me if you're a monist that he's not a monist did not state the name of the view of which believes god's in time was however it's very clear that he is espousing opentheism in his class though he has never explicitly spoken of the term opentheism directly so my first question is how do you respond to opentheist and how would you respond to my bible teacher's claims for god being inside of time okay first of all i'd like to offer my services that if uh you know i'll challenge this guy to a debate tell him that i challenge with the debate that he can have in his classroom and we can have a live discussion and we go back and forth okay i'll do it over oh well thank you for that i'm serious okay skype and i will be glad to destroy opentheism and it you know it's depending on how long the classes might want to do two classes you can offer it publicly in the class if you class hey i know a guy blah blah blah who says he'll challenge you right you know in the class he'll come online and you guys we can all hear it about opentheism and what you're saying and you want to debate calvinism that's great yeah you tell them and say this guy's very knowledgeable on calvinism and would be glad to debate you on that also i mean okay and i'm gonna say if you want i'd be glad to meet online with any of your fellow students outside of the classroom who want to fire questions and i'll answer them for them and i'll show why opentheism sucks canal water okay i mean just yes there you go all right no i'm serious okay i'm serious good for you you have prepared a statement and i like i took some notes out of it here's one of the problems he says god cannot be outside of time okay all right so if i were discussing this online with him in further class i'd say what does it mean to be outside of time what does it mean well how's he going to answer it he doesn't know what it means to be outside of time then how are you saying god cannot be outside of time because you don't even know what the term means you don't have any reference for it but yet you're going to say there's a concept outside of time which you don't know what it is and god can't be outside of time which you don't know what it means so how would you know that he can or cannot do about something you cannot define and know what it is first mistake of logic he cannot do it his whole premises then falls apart from this right there if he says god is in time well then i'm going to ask him is he a pantheist or panentheist and it's a trick kind of question because a pantheist has god in the universe or one in the same a panentheist says god is in the universe well if he's in the universe is he then subject to the laws of physics and what time is another thing i could do is ask him well what is time and what theory of time do you hold to a theory or b theory okay it's everything always happening in sequence and none things aren't known or does everything happen all at once and god is simply knowing that we're experiencing them sequentially a theory b theory he doesn't know probably he doesn't even know what those things are and he doesn't know who's going to get saved well then how can you impute the sins of people to christ because if the open theist as lame as that theological position is well first peter 224 says he bore our sin in his body on the cross what sin did he bear for my sin born two thousand years after christ what sin did he bear if he doesn't even know i'm going to be born or know what sins i'm going to commit how could he cancel the certificate of debt the sin debt at the cross colossians 2 14 how does he do that if he doesn't know what sins you've committed and if i have not committed a certain sin abc but i have committed a sin xyz well then which one of those need to be atoned for well he won't know because god doesn't know what's going to happen he doesn't know what jesus is going to do because jesus is human has free will how's he going to know is jesus going to go to the cross i don't know but you know what the god of open theism says a lot of times you know what he says he says things like this whoops oops i didn't know about that oh i didn't that's that's a surprise that's the god of open theism how does such a god decree that eternity is going to happen in all things how does he know that the crucifixion is going to happen well the open theist comes back and says things like well he just pushes the generic movements of big things to bring about what he wants oh so now he knows how people are going to react in certain situations he's is the omniscient does he know all things present and we get all these things it's just so many so many things he doesn't know about first samuel 1535 he denies open uh anthropomorphism right away but look i take him to genesis 3 so i say does god know everything some open theists say he does everything noble right now in the present good all right so did he know where adam and eve were in the garden when they hid themselves of course he did then why do you say where are you because he's speaking anthropomorphically that's how god works and for you to be so dismissive of anthropomorphism is nothing more than an exegetical and logical failure on your part if he wants to get into calvinism with them i would politely just say i'd warn him you don't want to do that i know this topic very well but if you want to speak against it i can respond to you and i can ask you questions you can't answer and i'd be glad to do all of it in front of the classroom because i do not like it when teachers claim the name of christ and then teach stuff that injures the faith of people that i don't like i want to put up with it and i'd be glad to tackle them okay uh well thank you for speaking me uh speaking to me about this i would definitely tell me because he actually runs a podcast called educate for life which you can find on youtube we're gonna break hold on hold on hold on we gotta break we gotta break i want you to say this after the break okay sorry buddy we gotta go hold on hey folks we'll be right back after these messages we'll talk to diego i wonder if he's in san diego anyway and california be right back please stay tuned it's matt slick live taking your calls at eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six here's matt slick all right everybody welcome back to the show let's get back on with diego diego where are you in california just curious uh i'm in like alcohol it's in the san diego county area yeah i know i know alcajon i was i've been here many times just live in escondido so you're uh diego from almost basically san diego i'm just checking all right it's all good okay so you were saying you were saying he's got this this podcast channel right uh yeah i can email information you about that afterwards and i'll definitely talk to my uh teacher about that because he loves this kind of uh stuff i don't know if he'd be willing to but i definitely need to talk to him and i'll let you know if he's interested in debating you regarding this topic sure and see if you can talk to the kids i call them kids i mean i'm old but uh if you know fellow students you can say to them hey look got this guy named slick on the radio we'll talk about this you can fire questions go over your house or whatever it is and you do a phone thing laptop whatever it is and i'll just go like find them in just fire questions and i'll show you why open theism doesn't work and how bad it is if they're interested okay yeah okay and then i have one last question so why do people believe in open theism and what do its parents think makes it beneficial like is there some sort of way they believe that it's easier to get people to turn to christ through it or what what what do they gain from believing it well they gain error but i don't know what the motives are because they vary from people but generally speaking here's a generic principle biblically speaking god is the sovereign king over all things humanist philosophy elevates man's freedom man's thinking man's rationality open theism is the exaltation of man's free will god cannot know the future because man must have free choices therefore god can't ordain what man chooses because man has to be free it's a humanist philosophy that's been woven into christian theology and the combination is uh heresy okay uh well thank you for speaking me thinking me about uh this topic i was emailing eric johnson who runs the moral research ministry about this topic he said it would be great to talk to you about it so i'm glad that i did uh thank you for your time so are you you're definitely alcohol because he was too and you know i know eric and bill mckiever and stuff like that so what church is this down there that this is happening at or at school yes well he's not uh part of the church my teacher he's not part of the church but the uh church where my school's at is uh shout mountain that's what i thought for the area yeah yeah the shadow mountain shouldn't let him teach if he's going to teach open theism you might want to go to the staff shadow mountain supposed to be pretty good okay and eric i know still has connections there so uh at any rate uh the guy needs to be corrected i'd be glad to fly down there and do a public debate on open theism with this guy okay fly into you know just drive over there on the eight get out to el cajon and go for it all right i can do it all right i'm serious i don't like heresy yeah i'll let him know yeah thank you all right man god bless buddy all right that was dego from san diego hey how about that i used to live in san diego county all right let's get to carol from greensboro north carolina welcome you're on here hello hello hi yes hi um i have a question about uh the morality before uh the flood and um how do people know about morality was it just word of mouth was it written down was it innate in them and they just decided to ignore it okay first of all that's a good question and second uh the morality was begun by god and the revelation of it by god of the tree the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat okay and so that was a moral statement and so it was from the from god right there from the beginning now adam and eve are very very wise they're very competent of course they blew it and they had children they would have undoubtedly excuse me to cough there they would undoubtedly have taught their children but the right and the wrong they had learned from the tree of the knowledge of good knowledge of good and evil so they would have had that knowledge from that and they would have um taught their children now they were redeemed because the lord uh the pre-incarnate christ was in the garden and shed blood killed an animal covered them with animal skins in order to cover them so they were atoned for so that would be just the basic answer of where morality was it came from god revealed uh you know more specifically through adam and eve than children plus when you go to roman chapter one it talks about uh if you read read romans 1 18 through uh 32 you can see that it talks about those aspects of knowledge that are innate in people they know the truth but they just they deny it so the law of god is written on the hearts of people and you go to romans 2 for that as well okay all right okay so in other words well in other words uh i guess because you read about right before the flood you know and noah was trying to tell these people you know the world's not going to be good to stay in and they just ignored him and there was nobody but noah and his wife and his three boys and their wives and that was it and it just there was a lot of people sounding to me there's a lot of people they got there's a lot of people yes yeah everybody everybody did except for noah's family yeah and that the law of god is written on the hearts of people you go to uh john smith romans 2 15 that the work of the law written on the hearts and so they know what they're just suppressing it in their own righteousness and so judgment comes upon them like a romans 4 romans 1 and so god wiped them out and there's more to that story than just that but that's where we're at right now for that topic okay and it's and it's it's ongoing now that's the way that people want to ignore it now the same way that they do we're ignoring oh yeah yeah people ignore the truth of god's word all the time they do i talk to atheists regularly they ignore it i talk to mormons joe's witnesses roman catholics they ignore the righteousness of god yeah for their own own false religious beliefs okay well thank you so much i appreciate it okay you're welcome god bless all right that was carol and we have three open lines if you want to give me a call eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six scott from spokane welcome buddy you're on the air hey matt it's good there it's good to talk to you i can i can tell you're in a particularly good mood today am i right i was till you showed up but i guess i'll shoot it i'm sorry well yeah man i just wanted to give you a call sorry i'm stuck behind a train here so it's not too loud but um i just had a quick quick question and the first is in amos uh three seven and i'm using the lfb uh you know i know the verse so yeah so it says surely lord yahweh does nothing unless he reveals his secret counsel to his slaves the prophets and so my question is you know i know there's other verses that talk about the secret things belong to to yahweh and things like that uh and i really question this only because i from what i understand the lsb is supposed to be the most accurate word for word and uh this just seems a little you know what i'm saying it's it's uh you know he doesn't do anything unless he reveals the secret council but i just wonder how this correlates with that's it under the old testament covenant under the old kind of music going under the old testament covenant he worked through the prophets to reveal his word to them it's equivalent to the apostles in the new testament how you reveal something written down and be known by the people hold on man we got a break all right so hey folks if you want to give me a call eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six we'll be right back it's matt slick live taking your calls at eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six here's matt slick all right everyone welcome to the show welcome back if you want to give me a call to open lines eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six let's get back on with scott hey scott all right buddy welcome back hey uh yeah so um i just have one more question and uh sure it's sort of broad but um so you know i imagine harm is a 501c3 is that right yep that's correct yep okay so my question has to do with with that sort of and you know it might have been so far back you know 30 years or whatever that it might not be relevant but i'm actually in the process of beginning stages of wanting to start a ministry and i was just wondering if you had any tips for me when it comes to you know any any tips at all really that would help me with the legal stuff or you know anything like that well i'd recommend you stay away from 501c3 if you can oh really a lot of yeah i wish i'd never done it but uh you know you don't there's just lots of extra legal things that you got to go through and hoops you got to jump through and it's not fun but uh if you can do a for-profit that's what it's called just you you just you know you just do what you got to do but the idea is with 501c3 there's lots of legality and hoops you got to jump through but at least people can get a deduction tax deduction out of them where if they if you don't have a 501c3 then you can't now some people say well that's you're under the control of the government no you're not it doesn't work like that and i can say anything i want about politics like biden is a is a horrible president you should not vote for him uh the next election if he runs you know i could say things like that and that's whatever it's my opinion i can speak and so uh there's advantages and disadvantages for it but we've we've got an accountant who knows the topic well and he does the karm taxes he's usually a year behind every year and once he quits uh we're gonna hustle to find somebody else and it might be one to two thousand dollars just to have our taxes done for the for the ministry and because it's 501c3 uh i have a record for example of uh every i think it's every single expenditure i try to do every single one sometimes you might miss one or two every single expenditure for the entire year and i've got probably 40 50 and a running total and it's on the date and the amount spent and what it was for i try not to spend too much you know so uh just things like that uh domain names and and payment for mid journey to create uh copy right copyright copyright free graphics things like this um you know mid journey mid journey yeah it's just it's it's ai stuff you know and uh just various things you know so you keep records on everything and it becomes a pain you know one more more a little more specific and uh you know i was just wondering you know i wasn't always a safe regenerate man i i used to be involved in a lot of crime and so i have a felony on my record a theft charge from six years back and i'm just wondering will that hinder me if i do decide to get 501c3 should not do i would it's just a filing procedure and you have to have certain laws and certain things i would hire a lawyer to do it and it may cost a little bit too much or not or whatever but it's just it's easy it's we did it in california and it wasn't that difficult to do we went in online and just asked and uh was it online i don't remember how we did it anyway we figured it out and then we moved the uh the uh headquarters so to speak from california to here in idaho that took a couple of years just to go through the process really slowly we didn't push it you know we just kind of did it here and there and uh you know we're a 501c3 so people can get tax deductible stuff it's just it's a pain on our end and another thing we got to do for example is next month my wife she keeps records of all the stuff that we that people donate she has to keep records of them and she does i'm glad she's doing it because i hate that kind of stuff of course i love radio she hates their radio you know so she does that and what we have to do is then develop it's hard to explain but this way we have to send an end of year uh official letter that has our tax id number fed id number stuff like that with their name and how much they donated to this ministry for the year so that they can file it with their tax tax uh people we have to provide that for hundreds of people each year and it's usually a pain but we have a friend who helps me run through stuff in a certain system that we can merge otherwise one year we had to literally do cut and paste took my wife two days of a few hours a day cutting and pasting information into a template and hitting send in uh in gmail i mean you know it's what it is it's just stuff like this is what happens people don't realize how much work is behind the scenes uh to run this ministry um like today i i've only been able to do productive development work on karm for less than one hour as far as writing material goes just for one hour i had to do a several other things in meeting and then that's fine no complaints me and going to the p.o box and the returning phone calls and just taking care of stuff i haven't even gotten to the emails today you know and it's just it's just how ministry is it just takes work and it's like any job you have there's just lots of stuff to it praise god you just need to know what you're getting into and that's what it is okay all righty well thank you very much and i will uh talk to you soon have a merry christmas friend you too buddy all right man god bless all right well that was scott and we did a thing he and i another guy went down to uh salt lake city and did a an outreach down there a few months ago it was fun oh yeah that's right michelle from california welcome you are on the air thank you hi um i'm sure you're familiar with this um story about the blind man um who jesus healed so there's those three accounts where the gossip of the gospels that tell the story about the healing of two blind men by jesus around jericho and i don't know if you're familiar with people who said and i read that luke says the healing occurs as jesus was entering jericho mark and matthew recorded happening as jesus left jericho and then jesus also they also says that the blind man um uh where was that spot um there was two men and one of the accounts says there was one i mean you probably have heard that right so can you explain it well off the top of my head i don't remember but uh it's uh mark 10 you said right i'm trying to see if i have written well oh i've got a number yeah it's mark it's mark matthew and luke and luke it's luke 18 um and i believe it's mark um hang on i know i should have had it already for you that's all right i'm seeing if i have if i've already written on it that's what i'm looking for my bible it's mark 10 okay and then luke let's see i don't see it in mark luke 18 um and yeah how many blind men did jesus meet you know at mark 18 35 i've written on that two boy and one blind man one there's no contradiction uh matthew 20 20 on 230 makes it clear that jesus was leaving jericho that there were two blind men sitting by the road if there were two blind men and there's certainly at least one as well because one plus one is two and you know sometimes the gospel writers don't mention only one even when someone else is there that just doesn't mean it's only one uh the one focused on was bardameos both called out for healing perhaps mark and luke focus on bardameos account because he was the loudest the most determined a point we're focusing on for spiritual reasons god wants us to be persistent in laying our needs before him so that's one possibility the other possibility is that there's two accounts uh that he could have healed someone going into jericho as well as coming out of jericho there's certainly a possibility there and by the way i've been to jericho been there twice and it's really cool to walk through and literally i've literally walked on the walls that fell it's just awesome but at any rate so getting in and getting out uh could be that all right so all right so uh that's one of the possibilities okay my son-in-law is was presenting those to me as you know the bible is not accurate so i didn't know why it would say that okay uh i can do more research on it but uh when people okay we got okay we got nobody waiting so we can talk about this uh generally they're critics of the bible they're often atheists and they go to a website that often takes things out of context and just puts things in juxtaposition to try and make a contradiction occur when one isn't there so one of the things i would do is i'll ask him go ahead he's actually a bible student at brian college in tennessee brian college in tennessee and he's saying the bible's corrupted he's saying he's he's trying to get me to i don't know what he's doing he's like on this quest to prove something i don't understand why he would say that okay um yeah i don't know either but we got a break coming up so let's talk about the logic of contradictions and things like that we'll be right back okay hey folks be right back after these messages please stay tuned so it's matt slick live taking your calls at eight seven seven two zero seven two two seven six here's matt slick all right welcome back to the show let's get back on whoops there we go let's get back oh i hit that thing right there all right michelle you are on the air yes okay all right so uh all right so there's like i said there's different possibilities and i'm going to get into some logic stuff in a minute one theory is that there's two jericho's okay we could talk about that and there's some issues there another one is that he healed one going in and another coming out so that's the possibility and a third possibility is that um is that the gospel writers were focusing on something specifically and there's some evidence about a gate in jericho that can be perceived as leaving and entering other research that's more so here's one of the things i talk about with uh with the critics or people say the bible's got contradictions i'll ask them can you define for me what a contradiction is it's first question i'll ask them and they will say well you know one guy says this another guy says that i said okay i said let me give you an illustration of something and say yes i'd say he and i i'll use him and myself are at an intersection and we're across the street from each other diagonally and there's an accident that occurs right in front of us we're both looking into the intersection and there's a black car and a white car and they just have a mild fender bender in the middle of intersection and the police come and no one's hurt and they just you know taking our our statements not a big deal and i say and i just tell the person i say you say that one person got out of the white car and i say two people got out of the white car is that a contradiction and the answer is no it is not people can see different things from different angles if the person said i saw one person get out of the car another person says i saw two people get out of the car that's not a contradiction it's a contradiction if one person says there was only one person in the car and the other person says there were two people in the car now both those statements cannot be true at the same time because if there's one person only one it's not possible to be two now we have a contradiction and we have to get to the facts so if one person said well i saw one and the other person says i saw two it's not a contradiction and this is a point of logic that a lot of people just fail and i say show me why it's a contradiction in the scripture now i want them to say well one says going into jericho is one another one says going into jericho it was two okay say all right does it is it a contradiction because does it say that there was only one that he dealt with going in no so logically speaking it's not a contradiction is it see it's just it's simple they don't like that they don't like me using logic like that with them and they'll say i don't care what you say it's a contradiction i say well if you don't care what i say you don't care about the logic and the truth that's related to this then why are you even asking because you have a belief system that is unassailable and when logic is presented against it you don't care so you're not interested in truth are you okay and then another thing another thing i'll do is say why are you bringing this up what's the reason you're bringing this up but sure the bible's not trustworthy and i'll say let me ask you a question that's your question let's say you have a recipe book and it's 500 pages of all kinds of recipes on this one recipe for baked chicken you have this recipe for baked chicken and uh there's a typo a typo in there instead of half a cup it says 25 cups of flour okay it says 12 cups instead of one slash two you know it's a typo right does that mean that the whole recipe is not valid no okay well then what's the problem here if you want to say there's a contradiction of the bible which it doesn't exist there then you have a reason you're trying to undermine but you're saying if this isn't accurate that therefore the whole thing is false because that's called the fallacy of composition the fallacy of a composition is is like this you open up the the engine of a i mean the hood of a car and the engine is blue it's all been painted blue and you say well the engine is blue therefore all of the car is blue what's true of the part is true of the whole that's called the fallacy of composition well that's not logically true so if there's a so to speak contradiction in the bible which i don't grant there is but they say there is does it mean the entire bible is not trustworthy because that's a fallacy of composition if they therefore say well no it's not but it claims to be inspired then i'm going to bring up another topic i'll say do you know what inspiration means and what it's in reference to this is where they you know you got to teach them right see inspiration deals with right and i educate people inspiration deals with the originals not the copies you can understand something i say a lot of christians don't know this i'll tell them this i say let me explain the autographs are the original documents penned by the um by the the writers of the bible whatever they wrote originally is absolutely perfect without any error whatsoever that does not mean that there aren't copyist errors because there are copyist errors and then sometimes they'll say well that means the bible is not trustworthy does the recipe mean it's not trustworthy if there's a typo in it the whole thing's gone of course not so you're overreacting out of the thousands of manuscripts the new testament for example that are in greek like six thousand or like 99.85 percent textually identical there are variants that occur and the three major variants are the comma johannium of first john five seven the woman caught in adultery in john eight and the ending of mark mark 16 nine through 20 and so these are the three major issues and there are textual variants and i say to the people you know why they exist i try and use these to support the bible they don't realize you know why they exist because they really are that old they really are from 2 000 years ago and they really were distributed all over the mediterranean area and so the real people did copy them and you know what they did make mistakes because like for example the word the in greek is a o with a little comma over the top of it it's like our word a you know i went and picked up a picture the word a is a single letter well in greek the word the is a single letter that's an o well what happens if you copy a document and the letter a which is the word of that document falls off because the old document gets you know it's flaky literally it flakes off or a smudge it's gone does that mean the entire document's not trustworthy well of course not so i say why are you saying then that it has to be like this where did you get this and it means the word of god isn't trustworthy where did you get that and so i teach them while i challenge them and then i'll i come back and say so did jesus rise from the dead ask you so whoever that is ask him that did he rise from the dead or not if he denies he rose from the dead then he's not a christian he's a heretic working he's an anti-christ and if he says yes he did say well then how do you know well because the bible says so oh so let me ask you are you trying to show the bible has problems and yet you believe he rose from the dead explain to me how those two apparent opposing views work together i'm curious okay yeah like that makes sense yeah yeah it does thank you i appreciate the explanation it helps yeah so just remember there are copies to errors in the bible it's a fact fact okay so much redundancy and it's a fact there's so much redundancy in the scriptures that uh here let me give an illustration of something this is just like i like to use this as a teaching uh tool let's say john wrote the gospel of john and of course 100 of everything is perfect and let's just say that two copies are made of john and what's interesting about the gospels in greek is and it works in hebrew too but we'll focus on greek in greek they only have one set of characters that they use for both numbers and letters we have two sets one two three abc they only have one set alphabetic gamma delta and these are also the letters are also numbers so they're writing letters you're also writing numbers the reason that's important is because when they would copy a document the original document was written what's called a codex which is a page like we have in our books they call it codex c o d e x and they would write these uh the original would be written like that okay so that means then that you could take a piece of paper parchment whatever it is you'd use and add up the letters of each row and have a mathematical value the total it's a mathematical check and you could do each letter like that and you could have these verified and have as a template next to that particular codex page that these have been verified by three people these are the exact mathematical values of every letter then you copy that codex that one particular page a scribe would do this then what they would do is add up those letters on that copy and if any of them had a discrepancy what they would do is either go in and do a marginal correction or cross something out and make a thing or start the whole page over again well what would they do then let's just say the word the ha the o is missing i don't want to it was at the end of a line and he forgot to put it in he looked he was tired and so now you have a copy that's missing this one letter does it mean the entire thing is not trustworthy no it doesn't because particularly how greek works the nominative singular and all that i won't get into that and so okay so then what they would often do is put a in a margin they would write ha and uh at the next to a word that was supposed to be next to and they would take that codex and they would use it as a teaching page and it wasn't uh like to be preached out of it was to be taught out of because you knew that little error uh copies there was right there but it wasn't a problem too because this was expensive to do and time consuming they felt like hey we'll take a picture and i'll email you the picture of the page doesn't happen like that you have to get right you have to get the paper the the light you have to get the ink you got to get the pen you have to get me and then you have these guys who are trained in copying because their profession uh dealt with this and depended on their accuracy so then you'd have these copies the word ha is in a marginal variant now and then it would be used for two three hundred years well what happens you know you're just using it now for two three hundred years it gets puts away put away in a in a clay pot and gets forgotten about and then archaeologists later find it there's a copy and it can be dated by the pot and the type of ink and the type of paper and they can say that comes from the second century from this geographical area and we have a variant the word the and so people say see that proves the bible is corrupted no it doesn't it just shows that it really was uh ancient and that real people were involved with copying it but the new testament documents we match everything like if you were to take all the documents and put overlay them the variants like less than a half a percent and nothing in ancient history even comes remarkably remotely close to the accuracy and then if you have the two documents with the word ha missing the word missing and another document it's there two documents it's there you know it belongs there it's a variant but it's not a problem this is how all this stuff works okay well ask your well i'd ask him yeah i didn't know how to answer clearly i didn't i couldn't explain it the way you did to him so i was dumbfounded and couldn't explain it so yeah there you go i hope that helps and have him call me on the show that helps okay that's a great idea okay thank you so much i appreciate it all right well god bless hope you have a great weekend thank you all right you too bye-bye okay all right there's the music perfect timing folks we do need your support please consider supporting us if you like this you want to continue just go to karm.org c-a-r-m dot o-r-g forward slash donate whatever you donate the month of december will be doubled it's a matching funds drive may the lord bless you by his grace i'm back on your monday have a great weekend everybody another program powered 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