Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network.

If you want to give me a call, dial 877-207-2276. Now Ernie, when you say subscribe, subscribe to what? You mean the newsletter? Or what?

Just write it out there and I'll get it. So we have, this goes out, the show goes out over the radio waves out in several states. But also we are sending it out to Twitter, to Facebook, to, it was YouTube until I got penalized for saying something. That I'm not supposed to say. There's only so much freedom of speech. Then they have this thing called misinformation.

They don't tell you what the truth is, what you should or should not say, and things like that. Something about vaccines, I said. Now I just mentioned the word vaccine. I'm not saying good or bad about them. I've actually had vaccines. So anyway, you've got to be careful what the people tell you to say and believe.

That's bad news. Alright, so you can also watch me on Rumble, rumble.com forward slash Matt Slick Live, one word. Matt Slick Live and I'll give you the right information. We're also still producing the one minute videos. I do want to get some feedback from anybody if you've seen those videos, what you think. If you want to call me up and just say, yeah, I really like them or rather pretty good or whatever, or do some on this or that.

Let me know. And I'm working on one now for the hypostatic union that Jesus Christ is both God and flesh in one minute or less. And not easy to do sometimes. But it's a good thing I'm slick.

Then it makes it easier. All right. We're also live on Clubhouse and I used to do it on Discord, but that keep that up. All right. So I'm going to hear from him to give me a call. OK, now, on Fridays, what I'll often do is hate mail and wacko mail and OK. And so, wow, look at that.

God has conformed the authority of the mother of what? Yeah, someone sends an email. And then they have all kinds of stuff. You know, some people I'm telling you, I'm looking at this stuff.

Sometimes you just wonder, you just wonder what's going on. So I won't get into that right now, but we do have some hate mail we could get to some wacko mail. We have any hate mail left? I don't know if we have any hate mail left. I think we've got two.

Maybe I haven't gone over or not. We have a lot of radio questions. We can do that as well.

All right. Hey, but in the meantime, let's get to Dave from Salt Lake City. Dave, welcome. You are on the air.

Hi, Matt. So my question is, you were talking to a caller, I think it was last week, about the Bema Tida judgment and being in the presence of the Lord, and kind of like, OK, here's her life being presented by the Lord. And like, I guess, I don't know, all the other saints are also going to be witnessing that experience, if that's clear in Scripture. Well, what are you asking? No, that's OK. What are you asking?

Sorry, I'll get to it. So my question is, will we feel shameful of the sins that we've committed? The way that I understand it is that there will be rewards of certain positions potentially in heaven that we'll have based on the way that we lived our life here on earth. Is that a fair statement based on what we know from the Bible? Well, there's different theories about what the judgment seat is, what's going to happen on it. But basically, we have passed out of judgment, 1 Corinthians 8.1, or is it Romans 8.1, because we are in Christ, we have died with Christ, and we will no longer and are not subject to that judgment of salvation, because that's occurred already and we're saved and we don't lose our salvation. And we know we have eternal life, 1 John 5.13. However, there is a judgment seat that we're going to all face, we're all going to need before, and basically the idea is that in that judgment seat that Christians go to, they're going to have a reward and a loss of reward for how they were as Christians and what they did for the Lord and did right, did wrong, things like that. So, there you go, alright, and it's not for salvation, it is for reward and loss of reward.

That's basically what it is. And will we be embarrassed? I don't know about you, but I'm going to be. Because there's some stuff I don't want out there, I don't want it public. I don't know about everybody else, but I'm glad I'm saved by grace, because that's all I got. And I agree, the stuff that I don't want out there that I am ashamed of now as a mortal human being, but I just wonder, like, he'll wipe away every tear, right? So, maybe he'll have to wipe away some tears, because he'll be so ashamed of some of the things I've done, and here they're out in front of, you know, a righteous Lord who has grace and mercy. I mean, heck, I get doped up about that now, thinking about his grace and goodness and the things that I've done, right? So, I just think it's interesting to think, okay, in the presence of the Lord and the joy of the moment, but yet, I don't know, it's interesting.

So, I just wanted your take on that. So, as always, Matt, I've called in before you, I don't know if you recognize my name, but I appreciate your ministry and just being able to listen in on my commute home and continue to grow and learn. Well, good. What's the, are you in Salt Lake area? I am, yeah. Okay, what's the weather like? I live in Washingtonian from Seattle, but I've lived here in Salt Lake since 2000.

Okay. So, what's the condition, road conditions? Are there a lot of snow? Is it pretty bad or pretty good? Right now, it's great.

It was really bad. We had a couple of, they call them squalls, right? We had a couple of bad squalls earlier in the week that hit right during the evening commute, and we're getting a rain snow mix right now, and there's been a heavy duty next storm, I think it's supposed to be tomorrow from what I understand.

Yeah, we're getting a hit here. I was going to come on down there this weekend, but because of the snow conditions going up to the pass between Idaho and the Utah area up there, we decided not to go because we don't know what those conditions are going to be like. Yeah, the Blue Mountains in particular, as I'm sure you know, can get pretty hairy through there, right?

Yeah. So, I am going to be down there, Lord willing, I think on, I don't know what day it is. Yeah, I'm going to be down there on the 10th of February. So, I'll be driving down on a Friday, probably the 9th or something like that, and speak at... Are you speaking at a local church? I'm going to speak at Bill McKeever's, Eric Johnson's MRM ministry in Sandy.

They have the new building there. I'll be speaking there at 9 o'clock in the morning. So, that's the scheduled time. We'll see what the weather permits, but that's it, okay?

Right. Cool. Thank you, Matt. I hope to meet you one day.

Maybe I can get out there and meet you in person. So, again, thank you and have a great day. You too. God bless. All right. Hey, if you want to give me a call, all you have to do is dial 877-207-2276.

And Fridays are sometimes slow. That's just the way it works, and that's okay. So, I do have some radio questions and some wacko mail. Now, which one do I feel like? I think I'm going to do some wacko mail because I just feel like wacko mail. Now, for those of you who don't know what this is and might be listening to me for the first time, my name is Matt Slick.

Last name is Slick, S-L-I-C-K. And as we do Matt Slick Live, I'm a Christian apologist. And what that means is I answer questions about biblical theology, debates, people, trying to get people out of cults, false religions like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Christian Science, you know, Islam, and things like that, and debate and teach on those things. So, people will write me sometimes, and they will have varying degrees of excellence, let's just say, regarding what it is that they say, and they do.

And so, sometimes, just, you know, it's a very nicely written hate mail, and sometimes it is kind of a wacko mail, all right? And, okay, so, you just sent me eight inches expected. Ooh, that's a lot of rain. I mean, a lot of snow. Okay, yeah, good thing I'm not going down there tonight.

All right, down to Salt Lake, because I live in Idaho, so it's only a five and a half hour drive. So, no big deal. All right, so I'm going to do some wacko mail, just because, hey, wacko mail. So, let's see, here's one. My hope for you all is to become saved. There's thousands of unsaved pastors and millions of unsaved believers. Oh, I think we did this one already. Sometimes people will, what they'll do is they'll email me the same kind of information at different emails at different times. So, we kind of go over these sometimes. Jesus never started a new denomination called church anatea, so we'll get over to that. And, yeah, okay, let's try this one.

Let's try this. Dear friends, the equinox time is here, a time of change and a reminder that planet earth is constantly moving in space along with other celestial spheres. But planet earth is unique with an abundance of life. The Lord's word brings forth two very important points. First, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Second, all are without excuse regarding the existence of God. Okay, so why is this in here? Why is this in here in a wacko mail? I don't know, let's put that in there because it's pretty good.

So, some of you just got misdirected, which certainly can happen. Okay, here's one. Whatever you do, don't ask God for immortality. That is not everlasting life. It may seem immortal, but everlasting life means a long and blessed life. Immortality can do more harm than good since it does not have any rules or laws prohibiting the concept. What? If I am immortal, then I can get away with whatever sins and wickedly.

I can think of and not be punished for my crimes. Yeah, that's not great logical stuff. Let's see another one. I have a new concept for you guys to check out. And that is the world religion of Gliocus, which is Gaelic for wisdom. I've given you the core beliefs of my previous emails. So, he's giving us a new world religion called Gliocus.

And that being said, God created the universe and diverged into 96 personal gods with a sovereign deity, the mad goddess Jezebel and the void. Now, this is officially wacko mail. This person goes on, but I got a break coming up, so I'm going to keep reading this one and we'll do some Q&A from a lot of the emails. If you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276, we will be right back. Please stay tuned. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the show. I hope you're having a good time listening. I'm going to jump over and do some radio questions, get right into those.

We don't have anybody waiting on line. If you want to give me a call, all you got to do is dial 877-207-2276. All right, here's a question. I was wondering what you make of 1 Kings 22, 19 through 23, where Yahweh sends a deceiving spirit to Ahab's prophets. Would this not mean that Yahweh can directly lie as long as he sends a member of his divine council to do it for him? Now, there's a couple things here. One, his divine council, and this is from, what's his name?

I was talking about him just yesterday, and I can't remember his name, so I'm going to type it in for me. And the divine council, I have a problem with this because it leads to some serious problems, but it drives me crazy. All right, so the person moves on and says, this kind of reminds me of the Quran passage that says, Allah is the greatest of deceivers. That's actually out of Surah 354.

It says, deities, even creator deities, being able to directly or indirectly deceive is not an impossibility to me personally, but what do you think? All right, Heiser. Thank you, Michael Heiser. That's right.

The Unseen Realm, and I don't recommend that book because he doesn't define his terms well enough, and he leaves enough room for people to come up with the idea that there's other gods besides God, the true and living God, even though he says there's only one true Trinitarian God. And so I'd like to interview the guy and ask very, very specific pointed questions. But nevertheless, so which video is that, Ernie?

Oh, that reminded me. And before I get to answer this question, we want you, if you guys are out there, would be so kind as to subscribe to the Rumble channel. So if you go to rumble.com forward slash matzleklive, you can subscribe there. But there's also, I think there's a Rumble channel we have that's just karm.org and stuff like that.

I don't know which the right URL is to. Maybe Arnold will type it in for me in the private chat there and where he wants to go, because he's the one who does all this. He's the one who knows all this stuff. Ernie does a good job helping us out at the KARM Intergalactic Headquarters. So please subscribe, and also just to let you guys know that we have a newsletter. I don't push this very often, but we have a newsletter, and if you are interested in signing up for the KARM newsletter, we put it out once every week, once every other week.

Just go to the KARM homepage, karm.org, and bottom of the page. And there's a newsletter. Just put in your email if you want to see our newsletter stuff. We talk about upcoming events. We talk about devotional sometimes.

Just different things. It's not that big a deal. But if you do want to subscribe to Rumble and or Twitter for karm.org and some other stuff, there's a lot of stuff to subscribe to. I think if you go to karm.org forward slash social, I think it's all you've got to do is karm.org forward slash social. And you can check it out. I'm going to do that right now, and then I'll go back and answer the questions, because it's going to take a little bit of technicality to answer that question about God sending a deceiving spirit. Yes, if you go to karm.org forward slash social, you'll see the list of things and places that we go to, Facebook, we have forums.

We have Gab, MeWe, LinkedIn, Odyssey, Rumble, Twitter, USA Life, YouTube, Getter, Instagram, Sermon Audio, Truth Social, and we'll be getting into TikTok soon. So there's a lot of stuff that we're doing. All right, having said all of that, why don't I just get back on and answer this question. So God sent a deceiving spirit. So what I'm going to do is go to 1 Kings 22, 19. I'm going to read this so that we can see exactly what it says, and we will take a look at it.

We're going to answer. So this is 1 Kings 22, 19. Micaiah said, Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of heaven standing by him on his right and his left. The Lord said, Who will entice Ahab to go and fall at Ramath Gilead?

And one said, Well, another said that. When a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord and said, I will entice, and the Lord said to him, How? He said, I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of his prophets. And he said, You are to entice him and also go prevail.

Go and do so. All right, now does that mean then that God is a deceiver? So we're going to have to get into a little bit of logic, and what I'm going to do is go to the Quran.

I'm going to relate this. I'm going to go into Surah 4, 157. And this is what Surah 4, 157 says. And they said in boast, We killed Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah, but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them. And those who differ therein are full of doubt. So it was made to appear that Jesus was crucified. Now, sometimes what I'll say to the Muslims is I'll say in Surah 4, 157, according to the tafsir, now a tafsir is a commentary done by a scholar, a Muslim scholar, and so the different tafsirs will say that Allah is the one who, by his direct hand, is the one who caused someone to look like Jesus, to be crucified. And I'll say, Well, if that's the case, then Allah is a deceiver.

And so sometimes what the Muslims will do is they'll come back and they will bring up 1 Kings 22, 19 through 22. And they'll say, But you can't complain because your God, they'll say, sent us a deluding influence to deceive people. And I'll say, Okay, now let's talk. So what I'm going to do is get into the issue of what's called culpability or responsibility, moral responsibility. And we're going to get into what we call efficient cause, proximate cause, and ultimate cause.

And when we go through these slowly, then hopefully we'll have an answer to this. Did God actually, the true God, Yahweh, did he deceive anybody? And the answer is, No, he did not.

And I'll explain how. So there is what we talked about here, ultimate proximate and efficient causation. Ultimate causation is God created the universe and the galaxies and the solar system.

Okay. Proximate causation has an event, is an event that occurs in a certain context. So Adam sinned, but the context of that sin was in the Garden of Eden, and there were two trees, and God allowed the serpent to come in and speak to Eve, who then gave the fruit to Adam, and then he sinned. So Adam is the one who chose to sin of his own free will. Therefore, he is what's called the efficient cause. Efficient causation means, in this context, that Adam is the one who decided of his own free will, without being forced, he decided to go ahead and act in a certain way. And so he is now responsible for his own action. He is the one responsible for his failure, for his sin.

God did not make him do it, but God is the one who is responsible for what's called the proximate cause, or the proximate condition. And when we get back to the break, I'll go through this again and show you why one is responsible, the other one is not. Let me go in and look at this, and then we'll answer the question more directly, and hopefully that'll work. So hey, we'll be right back after these messages, folks. Please stay tuned.

If you want to 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, everybody, welcome back to the show. So please hold on, and we'll get to this. I'm going to give a couple of announcements here.

We want you to, if you would, be so kind to go to rumble.com and forward slash user forward slash karm.org, and then that's where we want you to subscribe if you would do that. So let me get back to this issue of causation and stuff like that. I've written on it, and I have an article where I go through that, but I'm going to have to do another article that explains this a little bit more in the context of this. I don't know if I've written a specific answer to that specific one.

I'll have to look. Nevertheless, I talked about ultimate cause, proximate cause, and efficient cause. Now, the proximate cause is the condition that must be there in order for an event to occur, and the efficient cause is the action of Adam's sin. So the efficient cause is the agent of the event. It's the one who did the event. The proximate cause is the condition where the event occurred. The ultimate cause we call is the foundation of the event.

So we have this issue here. For example, Adam, he chose to sin freely. No one forced him, so he is his own efficient cause. He is the agent of his event, but the condition of his free agency was the Garden of Eden and the serpent. So God allowed the serpent to come in. It was the will of God to allow the devil to come in to deceive Eve, and then by proxy he deceived Adam. So is God the one responsible for this?

No, because he is not the efficient cause. He is not the one who is doing the deceiving, but he is the proximate cause in that God has arranged the conditions by which the agent can then do what he or she desires within that context. So when we look at 1 Kings 22, 19-23, what we're seeing here is that God is creating the proximate cause, the condition in which another agent is able to go and perform an action of the deception. So God is not the one deceiving. But in Surah 4, 157 of the Qur'an, he is the one doing the deceiving. He is the one by his own direct hand. So this means that in Islam, Allah is a deceiver by his direct hand, and in Christianity, no.

God is the one who arranged the proximate cause or the condition in which the deception was allowed to go, but he is not the one who caused it by his direct hand. All right, let's get to, oh, look at this, Ernie. Hey, Ernie, what's up, man? What do you got, buddy? Hey, man. Hello. Yeah, can you copy? Yeah, gotcha. Okay, all right.

This is Ernie. He volunteers for CARM. Yeah, he volunteers for CARM.

Go ahead, squint. I was just going to say, there's two things I wanted to say, but if you go to RUMBLE and you go to the search and you type in CARM-ORG, it'll go straight to it. For some reason, because it's a username, it puts that user in there unless it's a channel, but we only have 433 followers there, so they're kind of scattered, and it'll be redundant, but it'll help us in the algorithm. Okay, sounds good.

So if you just search CARM-ORG, you're going to go straight to it, and everything we have is there. All right. Anyway, on a secondary note, the thing you're talking about, I'm pretty sure this gentleman is somebody I was talking to in YouTube, on the one-minute reel that we uploaded there that you did on Islam about being the deceiver. What his point, what he was trying to do was point to that, and what I kept doing in my research, and I want you to help me, because if I'm wrong, I want to be fixed here, but the way I understood it is, prior to Christ's ascension, there was a point where, like in Job, Satan was still able to go into the courtroom of heaven and bring charges against God's people. After a certain point, he was no longer, he was kicked out. So even after he fell, and this is some Chuck Missler stuff too, so you know, even after he fell, he was still able to go, but at the point where Christ ascended and he was given all authority, that was shut down.

Some people will say 70 AD. That part doesn't matter. What I'm really wanting to go after is the spirit that was volunteering to go and do that, from what I've heard, was not an angel or a spirit from God. It was an evil spirit who volunteered to go do that.

So do you have any insight on that part? That's just one of the conjectures about that. That's the position I hold to, that it was a deceiving spirit. It was an evil spirit, and God gave it permission to go do its job, what it would naturally do.

So you kind of feel that way too then? Yeah, that's the position I hold, because that's what makes the most sense logically. We can't have an angel, it wouldn't make sense to say that a good angel goes and then becomes a liar, or induces lying.

That's a problem. So what we would say is that a deceiving spirit went out, and God said, gives them permission. Just like God gives permission to the demonic realm to do various things, because they can't operate outside of God's sovereignty.

So this seems to be one of those things in the Old Testament that is there. So yeah, I know that Muslims like to bring this up, and they don't understand the issue, and I have to kind of help them out a little bit to understand causation and responsibility, or it's called culpability in efficient causation, not proximate causation. So that's what I do. I talk to them about that, teach it to them. Most of them don't care. Okay.

All right? No, they don't. He was going in circles with me, but he kept going back to that, and he was trying to ride that like that was going to prove, well, if your God is also a deceiver, and it's not the way that that's written. Anyway, when they say that, when God's also a deceiver, I say, oh, so you admit your God's a deceiver.

And they'll say, well, you're admitting yours. I never said that. You just said he's also a deceiver. That's your opinion, which means you believe that your God is a deceiver. You know, some of them are coming back at me. They're coming back at me saying that they're okay with their God being a deceiver. That's right. And then when they do that, if that happened to you, I just say, well, then how do you know he's not deceiving you about the truth of Islam?

Yeah, exactly. If he's a deceiver and you go to Surah 354, where some translations say he's the greatest of deceivers, well, then wouldn't the greatest of deception for you be that Islam is true? And what are you going to do at that point? And I've used this with them many times, and they're stuck at this point, because they, you know, well, it's okay. Well, then okay.

You have no problem with your God being a lying deceiver, and the greatest of deceivers is Surah 354, so therefore the greatest of deception would be that Islam is true, and you're right in the middle of it. So that's what you're going to get, and that's what's going to happen to you on the day of judgment. Yeah. Okay. All right, man.

So yeah. All right, thanks. All right, man. I appreciate that. All right. God bless.

Okay. That's Ernie. He does a lot of the social stuff. We do videos, send them out.

He does stuff like that. So we have people that help. And I'm so grateful for the help of Ernie and Laura, for example, and Laura does SEO stuff, search engine optimization stuff. She'll take a look at the articles, and she will kind of modify them a little bit in SEO value, and that's very helpful. We have Charlie also who sends stuff out in Hootsuite, going out to social areas, and he does some work with the missionaries, and we have Joanne who helps with the prayer ministry and in Clubhouse. So we have a lot of people who are helping, and I won't forget my wife. She does a lot of work behind the scenes, and she is not interested in being in the public at all. I wanted to get her on the radio and talk about her health issues and how she keeps her eyes on Christ.

I think it would be very beneficial for a lot of people, but she's just so embarrassed. I don't know what, you know. But hey, she says, you have the gifts of gab, not me. So we have a lot of people who are helping us and even more that are behind the scenes. May the Lord just bless them all. So, okay, let me get back to some more of the e-mails, and we'll deal with that. All right, let's see, let's see. So here's an e-mail.

Hello, sir, happy blah, blah, blah. What is meant by the food of wickedness and the wine of violence? There's no reference. I'm reading through this. I get a chance to hear it, the food of wickedness and the wine of violence. Maybe it's something out of Psalms. Let me see.

Maybe just a, let's see, wine of, yeah, oh, I see. Oh, it's Proverbs 4.17. I probably went to a verse, because I don't have the Bible memorized, I'll tell you. But that's what that is out of Proverbs 4.17. For they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.

Who is that? The path of the wicked. And proceed, don't go with the way of evil men. Avoid them. Turn away from them. They cannot sleep unless they do evil.

They're robbed of sleep unless they make someone stumble. For they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence. That's out of Proverbs chapter 4. So there you go.

That's what that was. All right. And it's referring to gossip and swearing.

Just generic evil that people do. All right, let's see. How about that? Not sure if this is appropriate for on air, okay.

But wondering if there were certain doctrines that Matt has changed his view on as he got older and studied more. Yes, there are. And I'll talk about those after the break. All right, we'll be right back after these messages if you want to give me a call. 8772-0722-76. We'll be right back. . It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. All right, and welcome back to the show.

If you want to give me a call, 8772-0722-76. All right, going through some questions and emails people have sent in. And so I'll read this one again. Not sure if this is appropriate for on air, but wondering if there were certain doctrines that Matt has changed his view on as he got older and studied more.

And the answer is yes. The last doctrine, so to speak, that I kind of changed my view on was about, I don't know, five years ago or so, three, four, five years, I don't know, where I then adopted the view that the wicked are taken first at the return of Christ. Before it always taught that the first ones taken were the good until I read Matthew 13 where Jesus says allow both the tares and the wheat.

Allow both to get to the end of the age and I'll say to the reapers, first gather the tares. And so out of that I started studying it and I started adopting that view that the return of Christ, the first ones taken are the wicked because that's what it says. I really can't think of any doctrine that's changed prior to that except for about 30 years earlier, and that was on the nature and extent of the atonement, adopted limited atonement. That was about 1991 when I did that. I remember the day when it happened and how it just made sense.

That's another thing. So other than that, prior to that I pretty much had most of my theology figured out because I'd always been studying a great deal and a lot of times I wouldn't formulate any ideas until I studied them thoroughly. And having heard the greats of like Walter Martin, for example, and studying under Chuck Missler, so when you're just absorbing information you just figure things out.

So those are the ones that I remember in the last 30 years. I'm 67, so I'd already studied a great deal before that time. In college my professor, I went to a Lutheran college. I'm not Lutheran but I went to a Lutheran college and I took all these seminary courses, pre-seminary stuff, all the theology stuff. And the professor said I knew more going in than most of their pre-seminary students did going out after all the study. And I studied a lot. However, there are a few new doctrines that I've discovered in the past, let's say within the past 10 years, where I've learned more about them.

And one of them was perichoresis. And I've already known about this but I learned the term, learned the concept more in depth. Perichoresis deals with the doctrine of the Trinity and how the three persons of the Godhead are related perichoretically. That means a mutual indwelling and interpenetration of one another because God is one substance. And so that was a good clarification on something I'd already known but became aware that that was the name of that doctrine. And then another one which I would say within the past five years is called inseparable operations. And that means that in the Trinitarian communion what the actions of one person are experienced, known, done by the others.

So that's not exactly the right way to say it but it's close. Because of the perichoresis, because of the mutual indwelling of the persons within the Godhead, then we're going to see what we call the perichoresis, which is that they act as a single agent in creation while their operations are distinct. So Jesus dying on the cross, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. So it's not that the three persons cooperate in their work with one another since this implies polytheism, but in their divinely simple nature of one essence and perichoretic relationship to mutual indwelling for our redemption, the Trinity works as one agent through the incarnation of Christ.

The Trinity is one being and acts as one being, etc. So there are some interesting things, scriptural support for this. One of the things I like when I started studying this doctrine is, for example, John 5.19 where Jesus says the Son can do nothing of himself unless it is something he sees, present tense, sees the Father doing. So he can do what he sees the Father doing. That is a statement of his deity.

And people don't realize that but it is. And in John 5.30 Jesus says he can do nothing of his own initiative but he can do what he hears. He wants to do the will of him who sent him. So the will of him who sent him is talking about many places. So what we're seeing here is that Jesus, what he's doing, is he is seeing and hearing what God the Father is doing live.

It's live. It's not like I heard it a million years ago and I'm carrying out his word. It's present existence of knowing and experiencing that work of the Father that Jesus had while he was on earth.

He was experiencing it. So that's called inseparable operations. And that the members of the Godhead there, that the triune persons act as a single agent externally while internally their operations are divided. There's a lot of interesting ways of discussing this. And so anyway, that's a new thing that I was getting into. But having said that, there's also something else I'm getting into and thinking about. And I'm going to read the scriptures that are causing me to think about this and have a comment. And most of you will go, well, yeah, of course, what's the big deal? But here's the thing. Genesis 1, 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

All right. And Romans 1, 20, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they're without excuse. Okay, these two verses are sticking in my head more and more because as a Christian, as a Christian, when I do apologetics, when I do preaching and teaching, when I do evangelism, when I do whatever I do, it is the truth that God is the creator and that his attributes are known in creation. God is a trinity. And because the trinity is the creator and the trinity has his invisible attributes, eternal power, divine nature are known in creation, then because God created the heavens and the earth, that means that what exists exists because of the work of God.

So this divides existence into two categories. Pre-universe and before the universe. Before the universe, God existed by himself. And then within the universe, when he created everything, then everything within it has its footing and its reasoning and its foundation and the creative work of God.

So it's something as simple as me talking on the radio. That is only possible because of God's creative work and the revelation of himself in the world, in that the world is regular, the world is standard, there's repeatability in it, so people could learn scientific principles that God has embedded in creation, because God himself is regular, immutable, he doesn't change, and the creative work of God in the created order reflects his regularity, so Christians then are the ones who invented science. People don't know that, but that's the case. They are the ones who went in and understood, based on that principle, that God had created and embedded within the created order regularity.

So that's interesting. But not only that, to me there's something else that is equally foundational, and that is what the heart is. I don't want to say too much too fast and blow people's brains out, but this has to do with what's called universals and transcendentals and particulars and things like this.

And so this is the area I've been thinking about more and more. So God is a necessary precondition for all intelligibility, and what that means is that nothing exists, even transcendentals, without God being the condition by which they can have their existence. So a transcendental, for example, is something that is not dependent upon space and time for its actuality. So the number two, or goodness, or roundness, these things are not dependent upon the mere physical created order.

So when we talk about this, we're talking about the kind of things that deal with the mind. So these abstractions like logic, like two, like seven, like roundness, all of these things have their actuality because they exist in the physical realm of which God brought into existence. So even the fact of transcendental necessities have their necessary bearing in the created order and work of God, and that they can have no existence apart from him.

Furthermore, since these transcendentals are not dependent upon the physical realm, they rest in God's mind. So the idea of a chair or circles, everybody knows what a circle is. If you draw some circles on a chalkboard or on a piece of paper and you erase one of the circles, circle-ness is not destroyed, just a particular instance of it. So the concept of what it means to have a circle be a circle or circle-ness exists, but we only discover it.

What must be the case in order for a circle to have its quality and truth value of circle-ness? God, because it rests in the mind of God. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and there are great Christian philosophers who have been working with this for years. They've passed away.

They've already got this, like Cornelius Van Til. Well, in my not-so-bright capacity, I'm having to think through these, but I think of them a little bit differently than these highfalutin guys do. I think of them, whenever I think of any concept like this, I think of, how can I teach it?

How can I break it down for others to make it more understandable so they can understand better concepts? So there's another concept. It's touching the stars because you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

So these giants are there. I'm able to read their material. Oh, I get it, after I read it 15 times.

Oh, I see what they're saying, and then try and break it down for the average Joe, and I'm still working on how to do that. Anyway, so this is what's going through my mind now, and it basically comes down to stuff like this, that all facts have a context, and all facts are interrelated with other facts because all contexts are not eternally independent. All contexts derive their existence from a prior cause, which is another context, and all prior causes or causal chains, all events, derive their existence through the causal chain that traces back to the single beginning, the terminus, who is God himself, the necessary precondition for intelligibility, that is, the triune being. And only in the Trinity do we have the equality and the equal ultimacy of the one and the many, and with that we can get into universals and particulars, the concept of a circle and drawings of circles all over the place. And the only way to make sense of all of that is with the Trinity.

This is stuff I've been thinking of recently. I hope I didn't hurt you guys too much with that one. May the Lord bless you. Have a great weekend. We will not be on the air live on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, so we'll be back on live on the air on Tuesday next week. So may the Lord bless you. I hope you all have a great weekend, everybody. We'll talk to you later. God bless.