There is clearly overlap, but Israel is the locus of the covenant people of God under the terms of the Mosaic covenant, and indeed earlier, under the terms of the Abrahamic covenant until it is fulfilled under the New. That is to say, the locus of the people of God is this covenantal community. That does not mean that everybody in that covenantal community is redeemed. so that increasingly you have a theme of the remnant being built out of this. That is to say, in the time of Elijah, God says with respect to the Israelites, yet have I reserved 7,000 whose knee has not bowed to Baal, and so forth. The Church, by contrast, is the locus of the covenant community, not identified by race or anything like that, drawn from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, primarily in biblical language under the terms of the New Covenant. Now, there are one or two places where the word church is actually applied to the covenant people of God in the Old Testament, but it's relatively rare. It's more commonly tied to the locus of the people of God under the terms of the New Covenant. Now, you can see the relationship between the two in several different ways. In one sense, historically, the church succeeds Israel in one sense, but in another sense, you can think of Israel as the central tree onto which Gentiles are added. And then Israel extends beyond mere racial Israel to all those who share Abraham's faith. And then Israel itself becomes a way of referring to all of the redeemed people of God, including Jews and Gentiles, including Gentiles who are grafted in. You see, that's part of the olive tree metaphor in chapter 11. In other words, the language varies a bit from chapter to chapter. from writer to writer, from book to book, as to exactly how you construe the relationship between the two, because, in fact, the relationships operate at several different levels, and so forth. And sometimes we have got mixed up in our ecclesiology and in our eschatology because we've taken one of those genuinely biblical patterns and absolutized it, and then failed to see how there are contributing models and metaphors and structures on the relationships between the two. Overlap. Not completely separate, not totally identified. In terms of meaning, in terms of semantics, that's right. Fair enough. Second question, similar to that. What is meant by all Israel will be saved? Romans 11, 25, 26. I can answer that. I preached on that a month ago. Get the tape. Okay, that's fine. Far be it for me to criticize the preacher. Give us your answer. This is a test. Well, that one is disputed, too, as you can well imagine. There are some who think that all Israel will be saved refers to racial Israel and and see this in terms of a premillennial returning to the Lord or something like that. Still, others think that all Israel is understanding Israel in this in this typological way that I mentioned before. After all, already as early as Romans 2, we are told he is not necessarily a Jew who is one outwardly, but who is one inwardly. And they are not all Israel, which are of Israel. And so as a result, people start saying, don't you understand, the real children of Israel are not those who are genetic Israel, but the whole people of God. So what that means in that reading of the text, all Israel will be saved, is simply to say all of the elect will be saved. But, In my view, you have to shape your understanding of that passage first and foremost by the most immediate context. In other words, when you start appealing to context, you give greater weight to the immediate context and then lesser weight to farther and farther out context. And in the immediate context of chapter 11, which is where this olive branch language comes from, Israel is the olive tree, and then some branches have been lopped off and others have been grafted in and so on. That entire discussion, especially in verses 12 and 15, makes it pretty clear that in this movement of God in handling of Israel, the chapter is still making a distinction between racial Israel and everybody else. Thus, for example, Did they, that is the Jews, stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. You see, you've got a distinction there made between Israel and Gentiles. You cannot say that Israel in this context really means all the truly elect or something. It means the Jews. But if their transgression means riches for the world and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring? Now, that seems to be suggesting that if the loss of salvation in substantial part to the Jews has resulted in a great flowing out of the gospel to the Gentiles, how much greater will the flow to the Gentiles be when there's a substantial gain among the Jews? You see, in the context, it sounds as if there's going to be some great gain amongst the Jews before that happens. Do you see? And something similar down in verse 15, if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? So in that light, I think that what is going on in 11, 25 to 26, but I acknowledge that many fine people have argued something different. Is that it is picturing a kind of movement in the sovereign sway of God in which Jews are substantially rejected. But then large number of Gentiles come in and then large number of Jews come in and what will that mean. But finally heralding in life from the death it's like from death itself. And I think that it is in that context that all Israel will be saved is picturing a final glorious intake. Now, for those of you who want a label for the system, you can, with a little effort, squeeze that into a pre-mill, an awe-mill, or a post-mill view of eschatology. So stick that in your eschatological pipe and smoke it. A plus, young man. High marks. So far, so good. Number three, what do you think of the English Standard Version of the Bible? It is a more direct translation than some. In my view, that has both advantages and disadvantages. I think that one of the reasons why some people like it is precisely, why some preachers like it, is precisely because they don't know Greek and Hebrew very well. So it becomes a crib. That is a more direct translation, like the NASB. It's very much like the NASB in that regard. It becomes more of a crib to those who don't know Greek and Hebrew very well. I think that it is likely to be more acceptable amongst more conservative parts of the country than in less conservative parts of the country. It's not going to become the standard Bible for evangelism in the universities. I'll tell you that right now. But on the other hand, in more culturally conservative parts of the country, it will have its niche. No translation is perfect. None. That's why we still teach Greek and Hebrew at seminary. Number four, what translation do you like best? Because I do my study out of the original, I don't feel so crippled by it. Let me tell you a story. I was brought up in French Canada. I'm a Canadian, and my accent betrays me, but I'm also an honest-to-goodness frog. I was brought up in French, do you see? And it was bilingual turf. I was brought up with both languages. I don't remember learning either. And in our part of the world there were so few Christian preachers and teachers around that I started doing my bits and pieces in my late teens. And I discovered something then, that if I prepared a message in one of those two languages, that couldn't be readily preached in the other. Because in the first language it was too tied down to the particular language of the particular Bible I was using. It was probably a bad message. That is to say, it was too tied to a particular form of words to a certain kind of cleverness. So I resolved when I was that young and still not knowing Greek and Hebrew, I began to learn some Greek at that point. I resolved that I would not preach any sermon in English or French, but I could not equally easily preach in the other language. Because it was a way of keeping me independent of merely clever dependence on a particular form of words. Do you see what I mean? And French, incidentally, at that time had its own conservative Bible translation, the Louis Sagan version that French Protestants used, and the conservative English circles in which I moved, people were still in the King James version. And so both sides wanted their side to be the control, but because I was bilingual and knew them both as our family was, I couldn't quite buy into an absolute mystique for one or the other because I was working in the other language. Do you see? When you ask me what translation do I prefer, it's easy to tell you what translation I use predominantly. I use predominantly the NIV. The reason for that is, worldwide, in English-speaking circles, it is by far the most widely used English-language translation today. And because I speak worldwide, I want to use the Bible that most people are using. Do I think it's perfect? No, no translation is. Do I think it's quite as bad as some of its critics say? No, I don't think that either. But in any case, when I'm preaching, I'm referring to the original text. And where I think that something different must be said, I make sure I say it. But I also say it when I make reference to the SV too, where I've also found some remarkable bloopers that should not have got through. No translation is perfect. It's the way it is. And that's why we still train preachers and teachers in the original languages. Someone has written us a book with four chapters in it and it's all typed out in advance. Somebody came prepared, said, hunting for bear tonight. Number one, a question about the decrees, decrees of God. I have not heard a reformed explanation of why God would decree that Christians sin. This does not appear to redound to his glory, nor does it seem compatible with his great love for them. 1 Peter 1 3 says his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness. And yet if the ultimate cause of our sin is his decree then he has not given us the one thing we really need the decree that we would stand firm under a given temptation. The problem seems particularly acute when you think of Christians who die without repenting and being restored to fellowship with God. Why would God decree that to happen. Part of our problem is in the language of decree. When some people use the language of decree, they mean no more than God remains finally sovereign. Nothing happens outside the outermost bounds of His sovereignty. And in that sense, you see, because God has not ruled otherwise, if it happens, then in that sense it is decreed. But when we hear the word decree, it sounds too much like a direct causation. You are now being introduced to some of the most difficult questions in language about causation. I see no way around this but by plunging ahead a wee bit. Theologians who have thought long about this often speak of double causation, double causalities. So that there is a sense in which, for example, Job suffers because he is afflicted by the Chaldeans coming in and swiping all his cattle. There's a sense in which he suffers because a terrible storm takes down the house and he loses his ten children. But beyond that, there's a sense in which he suffers because Satan's out to get him, to test him. And there's a sense beyond that in which even Satan himself cannot possibly escape the outermost bounds of God's sovereignty, so that Satan can only do what he does by God's own sanction. Now, who caused Job's suffering? You see, if you simply say at that point, God caused it by his decree, The overtone in the language is failing to recognize the complexities of the situation. The fact of the matter is that God's decree, understood in this broad, providential sense, always operates, always, this is very important, it always operates in such a way that all good is finally traceable directly back to God. But all blame for evil is finally traced back to the secondary causalities only, even though they happen within the framework of God's absolute sovereignty. You see, otherwise you have a situation where God is amoral. That is to say, he stands behind good and evil equally. He stands behind the good deed that is done, and he stands behind Adolf Eichmann, equivalently. Well, it's equivalent in the sense that God's sovereignty remains intact either way. But it is not equivalent in the sense that the deed itself, or its formative structure, or its credit line, can be traced equally back to God. Now, that brings up some of the most difficult questions in understanding causality. There are all sorts of theological debates that are tied to the nature of God and time and eternity and the like, the nature of human accountability before God. It is important to recognize that the God of the Bible, who is said to be sovereign, is nevertheless said to be good. And you cannot come away with the Bible's picture of God unless you swallow both of those at the same time. You see glimpses of this in many, many passages, don't you? One was mentioned this morning by Dr. Kurt Daniels in his exposition of the openness of God. In Genesis 50, 19 and 20, with respect to the evil brothers selling Joseph into slavery, Joseph says, you meant it to me for evil, but God meant it to me for good. Now notice carefully what the text does not say. It does not say God had intended to send me down to Egypt in an air-conditioned limousine. But unfortunately, you mucked up his plans because you threw a monkey wrench into things that he hadn't foreseen. And as a result, I landed there as a slave. Nor does it say, you guys sold me into slavery, but thanks be to God, he came in at the last moment and rescued me on this white charger. In either case, it's not presented as if first there was an initiative and then somebody mucked it up, or first there was an initiative and somebody came in as a saviour. Rather, in the one event, you meant it for evil and God meant it for good. You cannot read the entire Joseph cycle of stories without seeing that God was working providentially to get Joseph down there, teach him some humility, and ultimately preserve the entire messianic line. You cannot help but see that God was acting sovereignly in it all. But nevertheless, there were huge components of evil in it which are traceable in that passage to the secondary causalities. I meant it for good, you meant it for evil, God says in effect. Do you see? There's a distinction in the way the two causalities stand behind the one event. Now, there are scores of passages like that in scripture. Perhaps the most important one, there are scores and scores and scores, which present the same sort of way of looking at the universe, but perhaps the most important one of all is found in Acts chapter 4. At this point, Peter and John have been facing their first whiff of trouble with the Sanhedrin. After further threats, they're released. The Jewish authorities could not decide how to punish them. We read 4.21, because everybody was praising God for the miracle that they had performed. Then 4.23, on their release, Peter and John went back to their own people, that is to Christians. So then the Christians start to pray. Listen to their prayer. Sovereign Lord, so they begin with a confession of God's sovereignty. Sovereign Lord, they said, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them. So there's a confession of God's sweeping authority in creation. And then in consequence, over the whole thing. And then in scripture, you spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father, David. Why do the nations rage and the people's plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his whole anointed one? Indeed, verse 27, get this. Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in the city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed. Where's the evil? It's in all the authorities. Pagan and Jewish. A conspiracy, a wretched conspiracy to corrupt justice and put Jesus to death regardless. Verse 28. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Unless you swallow both of those things, you cannot make sense of the cross. You see, if you believe that God stood behind all of the evil of the cross in such a way that the evil is finally charged to the cross so that you therefore can't blame Herod or Pilate or anybody else. Well, if you can't blame them just because God is sovereign. Then there is no sin in the universe at all. So what on earth was the point of Jesus death? If, on the other hand, you believe that Jesus death came about simply because of this conspiracy and God was asleep at the switch that night, maybe going for a walk or having a snooze. Oops, didn't see that one coming. Then you're forced to the conclusion that the crosswork of Jesus was an accident of history. Which then means that the entire pattern of typology in the Old Testament sacrificial system doesn't make any sense. Rip out the passages in Revelation that speak of Jesus as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the earth, and on, and on, and on. You see, you have to say that in this most horrendous act, the secondary causes were profoundly guilty, profoundly evil before God, but God, nevertheless, in his providential, sovereign wisdom, was bringing about his own good purposes, namely the redemption of men and women, in that very evil act. To learn to speak of this double causality and to see how it works out pastorally is immensely important for the stability of your prayer life, for your ability to think through questions of suffering and evil. for your ability to be outraged at evil while still trusting God's sovereignty, for your handling of history, it is immensely important. And it, in my judgment, is one of the toughest things that Western culture faces, because it's not the way we think. This is a way of thinking that is endemic throughout all of Scripture, and it's a way that has to be renewed and refreshed and restored in every generation of Christians today, or we lose it. If you're a reader, I laid some of this stuff out in a sort of a semi-popular vein with respect to suffering and evil in chapters 11 and 12 of my little book, How Long, O Lord? Christian Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Let me add just one extra thing of a practical nature to this specific point why God has decreed and does allow sin to continue in His people. Matthew Henry, the Empirican, said, well, ultimately it's for God's final glory, but approximately it's for our good. How? Well, good old Matthew Henry said both. God allows sin in us to keep us humble and make us long for heaven all the more where there is no sin. I hope that that will suffice. If not, well, Go read his book. Number two, a question about Christology. And we'll have to breeze through because we got about 30 questions. But you want to shift to another author, too, so you don't take all the questions from one author. I'll go real quickly. When Jesus, I think you can answer this real quickly. When Jesus was a boy and went to school, if his teacher had asked him to draw a map of the world, what would he have drawn? In other words, did God the Father keep him from all error as far as human nature went? Did he never make mistakes in math class? Do the answers to these questions help us in any way as we think about the nature and accuracy of historical slash scientific slash geographic slash medical references in the Bible? Parenthesis, I imagine that the boy Jesus stumbled while learning to walk just like every other child. And this is not an error. It is sort of like the grammatical errors in the New Testament that he's thinking of revelations of Greek, especially that do not count against inerrancy. Inerrancy does not mean perfection on all counts. Presumably, Jesus spoke some languages with less than perfect grammatical accuracy. OK, take a step. And you want this one fast. Two sentences, Max. No can do. Give me three or four minutes. I'll have a stab at it. Begin with Luke two fifty two. There we are told, according to Scripture, Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. And in favor with God and men. You see, it's put quite dramatically about whether Jesus knew, you know, the differential calculus at the age of three. But you could equally ask, you know, as soon as he was born, did he sort of wake up and start propounding the mysteries of predestination to his mother or. What you're doing is coming very close to the mystery of the incarnation. And historically there have been two ways of thinking about these things that remain faithful to the biblical evidence. One is the way favored by Warfield and a lot of others. If you haven't read his book on Christology and these sorts of things interest you, start with Warfield. And what he does is works through the gospel narratives distinguishing between Jesus' human nature and Jesus' divine nature. Jesus himself says he doesn't know the time of the day at the end, only the Father knows that. So he works through the passages in the Gospels and makes distinctions all the way through between Jesus qua human and Jesus qua divine. Now that can be worked out in highly sophisticated ways. The difficulty with the approach, the danger, unless it is sophisticated, is that it begins to sound after a while like, I mean no disrespect, a schizophrenic Jesus? A two-tiered Jesus? Almost two Jesuses? A divine one and a human one? You want to say that there are two natures, but one person. And while you keep stressing that there are two natures, pretty soon it sounds like two persons, if you're not careful. So if you're going to go that route, you've got to be very sophisticated on the handling of the nature-person thing. The other way is to have some kind of, the word is kenosis, emptying. But then, too, you have to be careful of major errors that have been introduced in the Church. Do you remember the passage in Philippians 2? That he emptied himself and made himself a nobody and became made in human likeness and being found in human likeness humbled himself yet further to the death of the cross wherefore God has highly exalted him and so forth. What does this emptying consist in? And there have been any number of speculations along those lines. For those of you who are interested in reading theology, an orthodox reading of it, you'll find in a Scottish theologian a century ago called H.R. Macintosh. I don't agree with everything he said there, but it's not heretical. And he's trying to explain some of these things in terms of an orthodox reading of his self-emptying. What does the Eternal Sun restrict himself to or empty himself of? You see, it's not merely in the area of knowledge, it is every area. The Eternal Son, like God, is omnipresent. But when Jesus is in Jerusalem, He's not in Jericho. When He's in Jericho, He's not in Galilee, and so forth. In every domain this question arises, you see? And it's why liberals have kept saying that the whole notion of the Incarnation is inconsistent, it's incoherent. But those who remain biblically faithful want to say, no, no, no, no, no. The scriptures keep insisting that Jesus is truly God, genuinely 100% God, but that Jesus is also genuinely, truly a human being, a thorough human being, not a half human being or a fake human being or an apparent human being. And there are only so many ways you can work these things out. Those are the two tracks historically along which they've been developed. And there are dangers both ways if you push either of them too far. Question about the future, Jesus said that he did not know the date of his second coming. But does that mean that he did not know much about the future at all? Because if he knew the events of AD 200, 1200, 1950, and 2002, but nothing after that, then he would have known the date of his return. Or did he know the date of his return in his divine nature, just like he knew everything else, but just chose not to access this knowledge while on earth? I've already answered that one in principle in the last one. I mean, how you would answer that specifically, you've got to go one of those two tracks. Lastly, from the books, how can we reconcile Paul's view of Christ's return, resulting in resurrection and the destruction of death, the last enemy, and, 1st Corinthians 15, a view of history in which men will die during the millennium after Christ's return, Revelation 20. And we are premillennial, you and I. I don't know about them, or the person that asked this, I think he is presupposing a pre-millennial return with death during the millennium. And how can that be if Paul says second coming ends on death? Well, everything depends on whether or not you think that any one particular text that describes the end is an exhaustive description of all that takes place. Let me put it another way. There are passages in the Old Testament that anticipate the coming of Christ, and some of them anticipate the coming of Christ in terms of the coming of the King, the great Davidic King, without saying anything about the suffering servant. There are other passages that focus entirely on the suffering servant. He is a lamb slaughtered. He will see the travail of his soul and be satisfied, but it doesn't lay out the whole sequence of events. So often biblical prophetic apocalyptic passages look to the end in a kind of summarizing sort of way. So I can say very boldly when Jesus comes, death will be no more. Now whether I have subsumed a millennium in there somewhere or not, it still remains a true statement. The question is whether or not that is meant to be taken as an exhaustive statement to everything that must happen in an instant right away, or whether it's a summary statement of what finally is true and does rightly characterize the end when it comes, however complex. You see. And it seems to me that the authority for reading the biblical text that way is precisely that that's the way we have to read them with respect to the Old Testament. When we look to the coming of Jesus in the New. I don't think it's being too clever by half or anything. It's just learning to read the the Old Testament in the light of the New. And then we read the very end in the light of the New Testament. We'll see the underlining in his Bible. OK. Open theology. And we'll try to gallop through these pretty quickly. Open theology. Is this just another form of Gnosticism? No. Many errors have overlapping domains in some sense or another. The kind of overlap is that most Gnostic understandings of God make him finite, or make several gods finite. So there is some sort of overlap. But Gnosticism is primarily characterized by a way of salvation that turns on esoteric knowledge of some sort or another. This is just not the issue in openness theology. In openness theology, it's primarily thinking about the God of the Bible, but in finite categories, with all of the entailments that spill out into every domain of theology. A seminary student wrote this, Revelation 4.4, are elders presbuteroi or unguloi? I don't have my Nestle-Allen edition 27. How did you arrive at this determination? Well, the determination of whether they're presbyteroi or angeloi is simply by reading the Greek text. They're presbyteroi. But that doesn't solve anything. The question is still what they represent. I mean, right through, you've got Jasper and you've got crowns and you've got a head like an ox. Do you really think the throne of God actually has a head of an ox on it? And so on. You see, they're symbol-laden in some sense. The question is whether or not these elders are in fact functioning as a high order of angels in the whole book. And in the afternoon session, I gave the reasons why I think that the most probable answer is yes. But there are some fine Christian scholars who disagree with me on that point. And if you want to be among them, go in peace. Be an Arab. A proviso, mine, not his, of the angels of Revelation 2 and 3. Pastors or angel angels? Oh, that's tough. That's a really tough one. That's one of the toughest ones in all of Bible scripture. I've gone back and forth on that, I think, but I'm not quite sure. I reserve the right to change my mind on this one. I'm committed to writing a book on Revelation in due course, but it's several years down the road, so I have time to change my mind. A few times, in fact. I think, if you push me, that they are angelic beings who are the counterpart of the churches on earth. So that what you have is the exalted Christ speaking to the angels as the counterfoil to the message coming to the church below. I think that's what's going on. Now, there are complex reasons for that, but I think that's what's going on. There's something in there. Oh, that's encouraging. Passages such as Exodus, where God changed his mind in response to Moses pleading with him not to judge the Israelites, purport to convey that though God is sovereign, I am the Lord, I change not, and immutable, nevertheless, what we do counts and makes a difference both historically and eternally. Agree? Disagree? Why? Oh, I better read that one again. I'm not sure what I'm being asked to agree or disagree with passages such as Exodus, where God changed his mind in response to Moses pleading with him not to judge the Israelites, purport to convey that though God is sovereign and immutable, nevertheless, what we do counts and makes a difference. In other words, is there a real interaction between God and man? You know, everything depends on what you mean by what we do counts and makes a difference. You see a lot of openness. Theologians will say, yes, that's exactly the point. What we do counts and makes a difference. It makes an absolute difference. God becomes contingent. If that's what you mean, then I would want to disagree. I want to say that these passages do something more than that. They do something more than that. Partly There is a danger of translating these passages the wrong way. If I had time, I think I could show you that the two dominant Hebrew verbs that are used for this don't have much to do with repentance as we think of it. It's why some translations have relenting rather than repenting, which is a little closer. It's a way of saying that God interacts with us in such a way that precisely because He is interacting with us in His great condescension and mercy in our location in time, Therefore, if we do this, he does this. If we do that, he does that. If we do this, he genuinely interacts with us. That's why all of Christian orthodoxy has simultaneously affirmed, one, that God is absolutely sovereign, and two, that he's personal. It was one of the great, great turning points. in my young life as a 15-year-old or this sort of thing, to start reading Francis Schaeffer and think these things through at a sort of consistent level. That is to say, God must be seen as sovereign and yet personal. If he is sovereign and not personal, then pretty soon you slip into some form of deism, where he's the absent wonder, he's the sovereign way out there somewhere, but he has no personal dealings with us. If you make him personal so he interacts with us, but he's sort of only one of us, only a little bit more souped up, so that he doesn't transcend anything, then he becomes the God of finite openness theology, do you see? But the God of the Bible is simultaneously sovereign and interactive. And because he interacts with us as a person, and condescends to do so where we live, which is necessarily in a finite existence. He's interacting us with where we are. Therefore, all of his acts of revelation and all of his communications with us are always, without exception, acts of accommodation. If you read in this area, read, for example, Calvin's Institutes, who thought about these things a great deal, his section on accommodation. He speaks of God lisping in our language. Let me put it this way. Imagine an eternity past. How did the Father and the Son communicate? Did they speak in Hebrew? Did they speak in any sense the way we speak? See, all of our notions of speaking in any language entail passage of time and sequence. What does God look like as the Father communicates with the Son in eternity past? And don't give me the answer that a lot of Christians give at this juncture and say, well, to God, everything is eternally present. How do you know that? Present is a temporal category. I don't know that everything is eternally present to God. I don't know what it looks like to God. I think it's far better to admit what we don't know. But that means, you see, that when God does speak to us in space-time so that we can hear it at all, he must do so in sequence. He must do so with words. But we don't understand what he's talking about. And he must do so in a language that we understand. All of that is accommodation. Not because God could not communicate intratrinitarianly in eternity past without all of our limitations. But because God is now, to use Calvin's language, lisping our language. Talking baby talk to us. Do you see? Now, it's the same sort of thing that goes on in all of the dimensions of God interacting with us. He's a personal God who interacts with us. And in that sense, even when he's immutable in his purposes, in terms of bringing us to glory, in terms of leading us to holiness, in terms of forgiving us our sins, because he interacts with us in our narrow existence, when we sin, he comes down on us with judgment. Then by his mercy, we repent. And he relents. In that sense, quote, he changes his mind. I don't like the translation, he changes his mind, because that has overtones for us that I don't think it's God in the text at all. He relents and changes the direction he's going in because in his own wise purposes, by his grace, we have changed the direction we're going in. You see, has he changed in some sort of fundamental way? I don't think so. So part of it is how you handle all of those passages within the framework of what else the Bible says about God. Let me mention one other passage in this respect. I think it's very telling. Genesis 3. You see, what Greg Boyd does, and most of the openist theologians, including John Sanders and Clark, Pinnock, and all the rest, they come to these passages in which God relents or allegedly changes his mind or the like, and they milk them for all that they're worth and set up a grid to move out other kinds of text, to eliminate them. Methodologically, that's what they do. But what they say is that God cannot know The results of future decisions made by free individuals. That's what they say. But they do claim that God knows all that is going on at the moment. So when they find a passage where God asks about what will be going on in the future, they say, you see, this proves that God doesn't know. But when Greg Boyd comes to Genesis three and Adam is sinned and the Lord calls out, where are you? Greg Boyd answers. Of course, God knows where Adam is, because God knows everything that's going on at the moment. God does not ask, where are you? Because dear old God doesn't know. He asks rather because he wants Adam to respond. But you see, if where are you does not necessarily mean that God doesn't know here, where Boyd's theology requires that God does know, because it's something that happens in the present. Why is Hoyt so sure that when there's a question about what God doesn't know in the future, that their God actually does know? Do you see? It hurts, doesn't it? Good point. Good point. The second part of this is in my field of expertise. You can give a very quick answer. God's will can be seen as twofold, a moral will or revealed will, that is, the Bible, and a providential will or secret will, that is, what comes to pass in history. Can it be said then that God's moral will is that all people be saved, But in his providential will, only the elect will be saved. Yes, I understand your question. I would add a further distinction. I think the Bible will sometimes speak of God's will in terms of God's desire. In which case it's very close to these sorts of categories. But sometimes it speaks of God's will in terms of God's effecting of things. And then no one can stand outside that will whatsoever. That's why you do say it. It's another way of saying that there is a way of speaking sometimes to of God's permissive will and his decretal will. There are various axes in which you can cast the will language of God in the Bible. Three questions touching on postmodernism, so I'll read them all out because there is some overlap. You mentioned in session one that you could tell us what the next generation would look like. Please tell us what you think this humanistic and pluralistic culture will evolve into if Christ doesn't bring revival. In your book, The Gagging of God, you stated that postmodernism had made some positive contributions to the theological discussion. Do you find any positive elements in the openness theology position? What advice would you give the local church in this post modern. All twenty five words or less. The next generation is going to be more polarized. Interestingly enough, there is beginning to be a kind of reaction amongst some university students and others where they're just sort of fed up by the open bounds and they become more culturally conservative. It's why in various scans to sometimes now under under 25 Christians are actually more conservative than over 40 Christians. You wouldn't have thought it, but it's almost as if as if they're they're so burned out by all this stuff. They don't know what the rules are anymore. And so they hide into a more culturally conservative pattern. There is a reaction coming. What it will mean long haul, I don't know, but there is a reaction coming. I see it with my own kids. I got two kids at university. And my daughter's a fourth year up in Ithaca, New York. Did you know that the original name of Ithaca was Sodom? Did you know that? Yeah. When that town was founded, it was Sodom. Is that right? He's not my people. How interesting. Well this one was called Sodom and when it was first founded it was designed to be a frontier post where there would be orgies and absolute sexual freedom and all the rest and witches, covens and the whole bit. And then eventually, of course, it became the so-called burned over area after the Sinaite revival movement. So I think it's always been a tough, tough, tough place. There is a higher percentage of openly practiced homosexuality in Ithaca than in any city in the world, including San Francisco. And of course, the home of Ithaca College and Cornell University and others and so on, so on, so on. But it's a very interesting place. And in that kind of frame of reference, you watch Christian kids and they draw lines or they fold up. I mean, they draw lines in the sand or they fall. It's certainly true for my daughter. Do you see? And so there may be something of a conservative swell coming back in some of the lower numbers of the lower ages of Christians coming again. But in terms of where the culture is going, the culture is cut loose from the Judeo-Christian heritage and roots. We're heading into an era of rising biblical illiteracy, huge biblical illiteracy, and with it a rootlessness that is going to appeal pragmatically for endless freedom of choice where the one wrong thing to say is that anybody is wrong. That's the one wrong thing to say. I give public lectures in universities sometimes under the title The Intolerance of Tolerance, which always causes a lovely stink. But those are some of the dangers that are coming down the pike. This means that on the long haul, in the church and in the world, we are increasingly going to have to re-educate people as to the basics of the Bible. It's a bit like preaching the gospel in Thailand or India to complete biblical illiterates. You see, 30 years ago, when I started doing university missions, if I were trying to evangelize an atheist, he or she would be a Christian atheist. That is to say, the God disbelieved in would be the Christian God. Which is another way of saying that the discussion was still on my turf. But you can't count on that anymore. That's all changed. And as a result, it becomes necessary in our evangelism to think through the structure of creation and fall and something of the storyline and so on. New Tribes Mission, when it begins to preach the Gospel in some new place, it does not begin with the Gospel of John or the Gospel of Mark. It begins with Genesis. It runs typically six months or so before it gets to Jesus, precisely because it's trying to lay out the Bible's storyline within which alone the Bible's account of Jesus makes sense. And as we face risingly biblically illiterate people, we are going to have to reestablish the foundations again in our churches, and in our culture, or we will become increasingly and increasingly and increasingly marginalized, just a right wing sect. That is what is going to happen one way or the other. Either God is going to deal with us in judgment or in his mercy. We are going to find the power of God releasing us, empowering us to teach the whole counsel of God and not little sub bits in it. Is that that's fair enough. I think it covered all basis. I think we can get to this very quickly. Did Catholics add intertestamental period books to the canon or did the Protestants drop them? Oh, the Catholics added them, but the issue is a bit complicated, too. You see, Paul writes that to the Jews were given the oracles of God. And the Jewish Hebrew canon, so far as we can see, never included books like the Maccabees and this sort of thing. But the Old Testament Hebrew canon was translated into Greek starting about 250 BC, give or take. And then there was one whole version finished before the New Testament period, two versions done after that. And as those Greek things have come down to us from 4th century manuscripts, some of them have had these other so-called apocryphal books in. But no record of the Hebrew canon ever included them. Their whole descriptions of Second Temple Judaism lists of what belongs to the canon and what doesn't. They're described as books that make the hands clean or books that make the hands unclean and so forth. And none of those Jewish accountings in Palestinian Hebrew thought ever included those books. They never did. Another fundamental difference between the Catholic and Protestant view is that Catholics would say the church determined the canon, whereas the historic Protestants would say, no, God determined it, Christians recognized it. Is it possible that evil originated from God? It doesn't seem like evil would have come from man's sin, because it was already in existence before the fall. You're back in part to these questions of causality, but in part it's a question of how you think of evil. Evil does not exist before someone actually rebels. Evil does not exist before Satan rebels. It does not exist before... Evil is not a thing that's out there. Evil is first and foremost the rebellion itself with everything else that flows from it. So to say that God created evil, I don't even know what that means. In the abstract, a great big chunk of it, you know, two by four maybe? It doesn't make sense. Are you really saying simply that in God's sovereignty, He knew and incorporated it into all of the purposes of his glory through redemption that would ultimately come for his own people and so on. Within that framework, that the fall of Satan and the fall of human beings was foreseen and ordained by God? Yeah, in that sense, I suppose you can. But then you've still got to preserve all the distinctions in causality that I mentioned before, lest you ever get close, even within a whisker, of trying to say that God stands behind good and evil symmetrically. As soon as you do that, you have an amoral God, and there's just no way the Bible will allow you to do that. And though God permitted it, He did not originate it out of His holy stuff. Two questions on evangelism. Could you give us two or three thought-provoking questions you ask a non-Christian to increase his awareness of the holiness of God when they do not recognize this concept of the concept of repentance for sin either? And what approach to evangelism do you feel is best in today's context, personal versus mass, relational versus non-relational? With respect to the last question, the answer is yes. And that's not meant to be a smart answer. By all means, you need to be doing all kinds of evangelism. But partly it's because the culture is so incredibly diverse nowadays. When you are evangelizing secular Jews in Manhattan, or you're evangelizing failed Catholics in St. Louis, or you're evangelizing secular hedonists in California, of the sheer flexibility of Jesus as he confronts people. You see? He does not say to the woman at the well, you must be born again. He does not say to Nicodemus, go fetch your husband. So part of it is finding out where people are and learning to deal with them in order to move them to Christ. Now within that kind of framework, I would want to say that there is a drifting necessity in the contemporary world to train more people in evangelism that gives more of the Bible storyline. If you're into reading again, I edited a number of papers that came out of a Trinity conference in 1999 called Telling the Truth, Evangelizing Postmoderns, and some of the tools and experiences and so on of serious Christians, many of them from the Reformed tradition, but others as well who are doing some of this sort of thing in the whole Western world are in there with their sources and their websites and this sort of thing. So you can find a lot of those sources and begin to train yourself in some of these ways. I thought you were also available. Oh yeah. Two or three thought provoking questions to get them to think about holiness. And it depends, again, on a bit on who they are. But a lot of my evangelism is nowadays done with with with university students. So that's the kind of framework in which I work. And I wouldn't necessarily do this with a blue collar chap working at the Mitsubishi plant or something. You know, I mean, there are differences that you have to think about. But for someone who who who is bought into a real postmodern view of things so that there's no ultimate difference between right and wrong. I will sometimes push them to say something by asking questions like this. I don't know how many times I've asked this question. Do you think that there is any moral difference whatsoever between an Albert Schweitzer sacrificing his life to bring medicine to ill people in Africa and Adolf Eichmann pumping six million people into the ovens? And if so, what is it? You see, what you're trying to do is get them to acknowledge some difference between good and evil in the first place. With respect to many postmodernists, they simply don't believe that there is any difference. It's all a matter of sociological control. We can pick up on 9-11, too. Well, that's right. But that sort of thing is precisely what's being said. I mean, do you remember what the what the head of the news division of ABC said at his lecture at Columbia University a few days later? He says, as a journalist, I do not feel it is my prerogative to pronounce on the moral propensity, on the moral, on the moral probity of whether or not it is right or wrong to crash an airplane full of people into a building. He later partially retracted or rephrased that. But he did that only because everybody landed on like a ton of bricks. That's exactly what he thinks. That's exactly what he thinks, you see. And Stanley Fish in the New York Times a few days later then argued, he's a well-known sort of semi-pop proponent of postmodernism. He argued that you cannot now stop these terrorists in the name of right and wrong. You cannot do that because it all depends on your point of view. From the point of view of Sharia, from the point of view of the Wahhabi, Muslim sect, these people are right. They're heroes. That's why you have dancing on the street in Jordan. From their point of view, they're right. It's we that are wrong. It's we that ought to repent. So it all depends on your point of view. You can't say there's a right or the wrong. So you ask Stanley Fish, well, should we go after them or should we not? He says, well, yeah, I mean, I would say yes, because I'm an American. So from my tribe's perspective, I want to go after them. So now we have war to eliminate this stuff, not because of right or wrong, but because my tribe doesn't like what your tribe does. My country. I mean, is this an improvement on things? So sometimes you've got to prick. You've got to prick people's pretensions and show the emptiness of this way of thinking before you before you can even get to first base. A great deal of contemporary evangelism with thoughtful. postmoderns involves getting across notion of sin. And when you talk to university evangelists today, there aren't a lot of us around, but those of us who do itinerant missions in universities today, we're not in the room for five minutes before we bring up, and how do you get across the notion of sin? We swap stories, we swap illustrations, we swap how we do it, and so on, so on, so on. It's a challenge. How do you view the work of the spirit under the old as opposed to the new covenant? particularly concerning the indwelling of the Spirit and the overall experience of the Spirit by believers under those respective covenants. I think this should be the last one because this could go on and on and on. Three or four have one word answers, OK? This is not, again, something that could be answered easily. Because there is one branch, probably the major branch of Reformed theology, that tries to argue that there is no difference in experience whatsoever. The only difference is one of knowledge, of information. We know more about how it works. But in fact, what Hezekiah experienced, or what David experienced, or what anybody under the Old Covenant who was a genuine believer experienced, was exactly what we experienced, you see. I don't think that that's correct. I don't think that you can make sense of the Old Testament passages to do with a pouring out of the Spirit on the last days. Passages, for example, like Joel, which are then connected by Peter to Pentecost, which is itself the fruit of the crosswork of Christ. I don't think you can make sense of Ezekiel 36 and related passages, which are tied by John's gospel to the new birth, which is itself dependent upon Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection. I don't think you can do that. So I think that there are some differences. But on the other hand, if you make the differences absolute, then you start wondering, well, Anna, how did they get converted in the Old Testament? What's going on, you see? And then you have to face another factor, that because the Old Testament covenant, the Mosaic covenant, was structurally mediatorial, and the New Covenant is not, some of the differences in biblical language about the Spirit turn on that factor. Now that's a huge subject. Let me just hint at it. Under the old covenant terms, prophet, priest, and king had certain mediatorial functions. Their functions included, for the priests, the sacrificial system, and the organizing of the tabernacle, and the temple, and so on. But all of them, prophets, priests, and kings, had the responsibility to teach the people the way of the Lord. And the Spirit was poured out upon them in some special degree. They had a special mediatorial function. And thus, when David cries, take not your Holy Spirit from me, he's not talking exactly as a post-Pentecost Christian. What he is thinking of is what happened to Saul. You see, the spirit marked out on David was in function of his role as the Davidic king. And God had promised that if someone in the Davidic line sinned, God would not remove him from office the way he removed Saul, but the dynasty would be continued, protected. But now David has sinned so grievously, he cries out to God in sheer terror, take not your Holy Spirit from me. He doesn't simply mean preserve me in my Christian life. He means don't remove me as king, you see, because the gift of the Spirit is bound up with his mediatorial function. So some of the language that is bound up with the prophet, the priest and the king in connection with the Spirit in the Old Covenant is bound up with their peculiar mediatorial role. But when you come to the New Covenant, all those mediatorial roles are gone. That's why you see in Pentecost, you have the Joel prophecy quoted, in that day I will pour my spirit on all flesh. Young men, old men, young women, old women. You see, it's part of the function of the new covenant that the Spirit is poured out indiscriminately upon all the people within that covenant. And there are huge implications of that. And then there was also something we talked about at supper, a ratcheting up of the language as you move across canon as well. We could show that in several domains. And then this has got to be teased out in various ways in biblical theology. But that's why answering that question is not a one-liner, I'm afraid. It is a bit of a complex. Has anybody in this church ever asked easy questions? We hear some. What offer has been most influential to you? I can't answer that question. What are your favorite theological authors? I just don't think in those terms. People have asked me that often, but what I've discovered is that authors change with time. You see, the first serious book I read theologically was Watchmen Need a Normal Christian Life. I was 14. It was an enormous incentive to holiness, and I'm profoundly grateful to God I read it. Its actual exegesis and theology are appalling. But I didn't know that at the time. And meanwhile, it was an incentive to holiness. What can I say? It influenced me at the time, even though its actual handling of the text of Romans, I later discovered as I learned more, was pretty bad. Do you see? So God has used all kinds of really crazy things to move me in all kinds of ways that have been very helpful at one point or another. I tend to be one of these people who finds another author, reads an awful lot of stuff on them, then move on to the next one, then the next one, the next one. And so as a result, I just don't think in terms of the most influential. I just don't. Sorry about that. Another weakness, what can I say? Who will be closer to the throne of grace? John Calvin or John Wesley? He did that. Gary, that's yours, Gary Gilmore. He did that. George Whitfield. No, no, no, no, no. Not business, not my business. I suspect that, let me put it this way. I suspect that when we get anywhere near the throne, we're not going to be worried about who's closest to the front. We're going to be looking for a place to hide in the corner of the back. Lastly, what will you be speaking on tomorrow? In Sunday School, Psalm 1, first of all, as a kind of... Psalm 1 and then a topic. Psalm 1 as a kick-off to thinking about absolute demands from God over against structures of grace in Scripture. There will be a discussion time in the class as part of it. I will talk for half an hour and then I'll throw it open for discussion. In the morning service, Ephesians 1, 3 to 14. The ones that we were not able to cover, we do apologize for, for time's sake. You could ask Dr. Carson yourself personally. We're about to end in prayer. We do invite you to visit the book room, help yourself to various free handouts, stay around for a little fellowship. We will need some of the men from our church to help us rearrange the furniture after a little while, but do feel free to stay for a time of fellowship and take some if there are still any refreshments.