What's the Difference Between Calvinism, Arminianism, Molinism & Open Theism?

In the realm of siriology, there are many terms and positions on various issues, and sometimes it can be pretty confusing. So today, we're going to look at the difference between Calvinism, Armenianism, Mullanism, and open theism as it relates to sotiology.

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Welcome to the show, everybody. You're listening to the Dance of Life podcast, and I'm your host, Tutor Alexander. Welcome to this important episode as we continue our salvation series. Today's going to be a little more theologically intense. So hopefully, you have a notebook. Hopefully, you are paying attention. You're going to be writing things down because these things can get a little heady sometimes. But I'm going to do my best to make them as simple as possible because I believe in simplicity. I think it's important to be simple, not, uh, not ignorant, but simple and simple-minded, simple understanding, having appreciation for simple things and the basics. I think this is what matters in life is having an understanding and appreciation of the principles that govern a particular thing.

When it comes to sotiology, there are lots and lots of terms and ideas and conjectures and philosophy and positions. And are you one of these? Are you one of those? I'm one of these, but I believe in this, but not that. It can get really crazy. At the end of the day, it's actually quite simple. It's really quite simple. And that's the goal today is to really make all of these things very simple.

Now that we've had quite a few episodes on a variety of very core topics in sotiology, like predestination, like evil, election, free will, all of these huge topics. So again, if you're just joining us, make sure that you are going back to the previous episodes because we are now towards the end of this series. There are many, many episodes on many big topics that we've now set up, and we can proceed into kind of more of a bird's-eye view, which is today. Now that we have the context, we can differentiate between things and start to look at these various ideas.

This topic of satiriology and and how these different positions is are different is a very vast topic, and it's easy to get lost in the weeds with terminology and philosophies and different things. And some channels spend their entire ministry and their entire, you know, time talking about these things. That's not me. My goal is to make something very comprehensive that you have as a resource. But nevertheless, uh, it's not my thing to be focusing on all of the distinctions and theories when it comes to sotiology because again, to me, it's actually very simple, and hopefully, you'll believe the same thing.

Now, if you like this kind of content, make sure you subscribe. Leave a comment of what you learned after today's episode. Are you an Armenian? Are you a Calvinist? And if so, did this episode, uh, edify you in any way? Are you, if you're an Armenian, are you not an Armenian anymore? That's my goal. That doesn't mean I want you to be a Calvinist either. So keep that in mind because that's an important distinction.

If you want to support my work, please go to the website. That's danceoflife.com. You can participate there many ways. You can be a paid member if you want. It's five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. Gives you plenty of perks. You can check out the merch store or you can donate if that's something that you feel called to do.

There's lots of episodes on monism that we've covered now. So, I'm going to assume that you, the viewer, I was going to say the listener, to the viewer because sometimes you can listen to this without having a video if you're listening to it on Spotify or iTunes. So, you as the listener or viewer, I'm assuming that you have context. So, I'm going to work as if you have that context. If you don't have the context, please make sure you review the previous episodes.

Today's video is not an introduction on these topics. It is not an introduction on what is Calvinism, what is Armenianism, what is, you know, mullanism, opism, so on. We're going to look at what they are for sure. We're going to use that and what they are. But the conversation assumes that you already know some level of this stuff. You know what these are. Probably most people haven't heard of molanism. We'll have a whole episode dedicated to that. But nevertheless, uh, the idea is really that you have some understanding because this is going to be a big picture view, and we're building on previous things.

Mostly, we're going to look at the dichotomy between Calvinism and Armenianism. Uh, and in the future, like I said, I have a whole episode dedicated to mullenism because it's, it's very confusing and it needs its own video. Open theism is pretty obviously heretical. We'll look at, we'll look at it today. But nevertheless, it's, that's an easy one to to say it's a heresy because open theism basically says that God doesn't know the future fully. He's not truly omniscient. And so obviously, that's pretty easy to refute with the Bible. God is omniscient. God predestines things. This is a pretty clear teaching. But of course, we'll look at open theism as well.

So, what is the real issue? What is the real issue? And again, if I can leave you with anything from these episodes, it's to have an appreciation for the basics and to be able to break things down into simple ideas, simple things, because that's really what it's all about. If you sit in the weeds of complicated theories and philosophies, you're going to get lost very easily. And this is the problem with all of this stuff. You have to get down to the real issue.

And the real issue when you get into these debates, when you step aside from all the terminologies and conjectures that people love to use, the real issue is who is doing the saving? Can God save you with or without your cooperation? That's the head of the snake, folks. That's the head of the snake with this debate. Can God save you with or without your cooperation? That's the real issue.

If you believe that God saves you without your cooperation, then you are a biblical monarchist. Of course, there are people who drift away from that, like we looked at last time with hypercalvinism. So that's why I'm not a Calvinist. I don't believe I'm in Calvinism. I am a believer in the Bible. I believe in modernistic salvation. Biblical modernism is a mysterious reality. But nevertheless, it's a reality where you are saved without cooperating with God. God makes you cooperate with him. Doesn't mean that you don't have any works or fruits or evidence of your faith. It actually means that the evidence of your faith is produced by God, which is a profound mystery. It's the dance of life.

Any deviation from that where there is some level of cooperation, and there's a million and one ways that this could happen, that is synergism, synergistic salvation. And there's many versions of synergistic salvation. So, if we go back to our little handy-dandy chart, this is available in in the series folder in the library. Also, if you get the USB, the four views of human ability. This is a nice little chart, and you can see that basically, there's only one view where it says that God can save you without your cooperation and does save you without your cooperation. And there's a million and one ways from Sunday where basically, uh, you know, you are saved with cooperation of some kind.

On the very end of that spectrum, there is a very heretical, obviously heretical belief called Pelagianism, which people don't really believe. I mean, there's some, I'm sure there's some out there. But when Pelagius was around, we talked about this a while ago, but when Pelagius was around, I believe in the, what is it, third or fourth century, somewhere around there. Pelagius believed that basically man is doing the same. So Pelagianism is actually monogistic. So, a little quick caveat, when I say monergism, I'm referring really, the understanding is that God is doing the work and saving you. Most people when they hear monergism, that's what they think of. However, Pelagianism is also monogistic, but it's monogistic in the opposite direction in the sense that Pelagianism is, you're just saving yourself. There's no, God's not really involved. Man is perfectly good. No grace is necessary. It's solely the work of man. Monommon, mon means one. So, who's doing the work? There's one person doing the work. It's, in this case, it's mankind. It's not God. And of course, Pelagianism does have expressions today. It's not like it's gone away. The new age, humanism, atheism, secularism, occultism, all these things believe that man is basically good. There's no need to have a relationship with God. Uh, you know, this is the forbidden fruit. But that forbidden fruit carries over into other less obvious heresies, but they're still heretical, which are semi-Pelagianism, Armenianism, all the different variations of cooperation.

So, Pelagianism is the lie from the Garden of Eden. Very obvious lie that man is inherently good. And that has influenced the idea that basically man can still choose free of influence. Even though we're totally depraved, we can still choose free influence. We can choose, you know, basically to believe in God. And the question is, what order of cooperation or how much cooperation do you have? If you're semi-Pelagian, although I call pretty much anybody who holds to synergistic salvation a semi-Pelagian. I think it's an accurate description. But nevertheless, the semi-Pelagians say, "Man is sick. The grace is assisting grace. I can, but God must assist." It's synergistic because man works, then God. The modern expressions would be, you know, hyper-charismatics. N, probably religions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy are in there as well. So, grace is necessary, but not sufficient. In the same way, Armenianism says the same thing. Grace is necessary, but it's not sufficient. So, you have to understand that the wide road is very wide for a reason because there are a million and one ways to make a particular claim when it comes to cooperation. You could have 99% and 1% cooperation. You could have 80% and 20% cooperation. You have a million ways to do it. There's only one way where God is doing all of the work, and that's monergism.

Armenianism says man is mostly dead. It uses the idea of prevenient grace where God works and kind of gives you the ability to choose free of influence and choose him either through the atonement or, you know, even maybe some people believe in regeneration before faith, but you still have to choose to believe and that kind of thing. It's synergistic because God works, and then man. The modern expressions would be Protestantism. They, they put Catholicism and Orthodoxy in here. So, yeah, don't be dogmatic about these. Again, you know, it's very easy to look at this chart, you know, where there's so many qualifications and labels and things. Don't get crazy about it. Go up here. This is the, the main thing. Man is sovereign. God is sovereign. Which one is sovereign? Is it God or is it man? If man is the one that is contributing to the outcome, or if you're a full-on Pelagian like an occultist and you don't believe that God is even necessary, man is sovereign. Do you get it? That's what unites Pelagianism and synergism.

Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism and Armenianism. Fun to roll that one off the tongue. Are not very obviously heretical. They're heretical once you see the truth. You know, it's like, okay, I, I can see these pretty clearly. They're not as heretical obviously as Pelagianism. Pelagianism is is straight up occultic heresy. That man is inherently good. You don't need God. Obviously, that's evil. Semi-Pelagianism and Armenianism say that, "Oh, grace is necessary. We're desperately sick. We, we need God's help." But we're actually the ones responding to God and choosing God and therefore determining whether God gets glorified or not. And God can do nothing unless mankind chooses. And God can do nothing if you choose to stop believing God and lose your salvation. Therefore, man is sovereign.

So, who is sovereign in this equation? Is it man or is it God? There's only one way articulated to you through the Gospels, through the New Testament, through the entire scriptures. There's only one way where God is sovereign, and that is monergism. Biblical monarchism. There are a million ways where man is the determiner of the outcome. Some of those ways, like for example, Pelagianism, are very obviously evil because they point man, they put man on a very high pedestal. Other less subtle ways, like Armenianism, like champion God's mercy, but in fact, are actually subverting God's sovereignty by putting man as the determiner of the outcome. But it's not as obvious as Pelagianism because there's a mask, there's a mask on top of the the pedestal and the platforming, and that mask is, "Oh, well, you know, we're depraved and we need God. Grace is necessary, but it's not sufficient." So, it's a, it's a subtle way to basically deny God's sovereignty because there's a mask of championing his mercy and saying that, you know, grace is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Whereas monergism tells you grace is necessary and sufficient. That is the important conjunction, and, and sufficient. If you want to use the word but, then you have a problem.

So, these are the four views of human ability. There are more than four for sure because there's a lot of people in between these, and some people have some from another, you know, and so on and so forth. But nevertheless, uh, this is the, the point. So, most people say, uh, with cooperation when they're asked, you know, who is doing the saving? How's, how's the saving happening? They say, "Oh, cooperation. God does something, and I do something." That's what most people believe. And, and they unwittingly sacrifice their own peace and security in salvation. And they unwittingly also rob glory from God by believing that. And hopefully today, you will understand why some people believe we do none of the work and God is doing the work through us for his glory. And those are, would those would be the Calvinists.

However, some within Calvinism also distort God's sovereignty into an extreme situation where it compromises his goodness, and those are the hypercalvinists, which of course, they themselves consider themselves just logically consistent Calvinists. And this is the problem with these dialectical things. Arminian, Calvinist, you need to get beyond labels and see the truth, which is much more narrow and mysterious. So, biblical monergism is without a label and the narrow road between all of these dialectical things because it's very simple. It's very simple, and yet because it's simple, it's also very mysterious. That's why I want you to gain, gain an appreciation for simple things because simple things are very mysterious.

Armenians will often respond to this conversation that faith isn't a work. Faith isn't a work. And of course, the never-ending debate ensues whether faith is a work or not. But that's not the issue. It's not the issue at all. It's, can God save you with or or without your cooperation? Doesn't matter whether faith is a work. That's beyond, that's beside the point. Does God save you with or without your cooperation? That's the real question.

Of course, you also have open theists who are, you know, just like the Pelagians, basically, who believe that God doesn't know the future. So, man is basically sovereign. He's co-creating reality with God. And then somewhere in between all of this, you have the Molinists, who are super confused, more confused probably than anybody, and they're trying to reconcile predestination with free will and and come up with this hodgepodge conjecture that's based on possibilities and probabilities and multiple realms and philosophy. I mean, it's just such a mess. Such a mess. That's like, that's why I said you basically need an entire episode just for Molinism because it's so confusing. And we'll make it not as confusing, and you'll see why it's wrong. Even though it's full of conjectures and it hides behind pretty language, you'll see why it's wrong.

So, basically, towards the right, towards conservatism, you have, you know, monergistic salvation with Calvinism. And on the left, you have various synergistic views of salvation that are more liberal. Armenianism, obviously, is the, the main umbrella. True biblical monergism is beyond dialectical labels. It's in between because it's very mysterious. And I'll show you in just a second here. If we look at this sotiology map, hopefully, you can see it. I think you can see it. Let's see. Can you? Let me just move this. Oh my goodness. It's just, uh, let's see. There we go. I think you can. For some reason, it's not picking up this edge right here, but you can see the words. Anyway, so here's that narrow road graphic. Again, if you're listening to this, you can download these things in the presentation folders for the various studies, or you can look on the page on the website, uh, for this series. All, all the graphics are posted there so you can see what I'm talking about. But it's like a picture of a road, the narrow road. And that narrow road is monergism. But on the left, on the right, you have basically various ways that the devil gets you with various deceptions. And there's a line that cuts through this road, you know, in a perpendicular way that is a like a spectrum so that you can understand how two opposites, two opposing things that are complementary are dancing together in a very mysterious way. Because if you leave that mystery, if you leave either to the right or to the left in favor of one of these sides over the other, you run into a problem.

So, for example, on the left, you have goodness. On the right, you have sovereignty. Goodness and sovereignty have to be balanced together in a very mysterious way. If you go towards goodness and you highlight God's goodness and you imbalance in that direction, which is what the Armenians do, although these synergists do, God is so merciful, he wants to save everybody. Universal atonement, conditional upon belief. That's highlighting God's goodness. But it's pushing on God's goodness so much that the cost is God's sovereignty. You get it? God is not sovereign in that model. He appears very politically correct. But as a result of the imbalance, you've drifted away from the narrow road and you've compromised on sovereignty.

On the opposite end of that, you have the hypercalvinists who have pushed the scriptures and their interpretations so much towards the right, towards God's sovereignty, that God is sovereign over everything to where he's the primary cause, the immediate cause of all evil and sin everywhere, even in the believer's life. So, basically, he's causing the believers that he's indwelling to do good on one day and to sin on another day. He's the cause of their sin directly, which of course is blasphemous and inconsistent with what the scriptures actually say about sin and evil and everything else. We talked about that in the previous episode, but nevertheless, what happens? They push so much on God's sovereignty that they get away from God's goodness. Do you get it? This is a dance.

And so, in the middle, how these two things are reconciled, and they are reconciled, and that, that's a real dance of life, especially with the problem of evil, to reconcile God's sovereignty. He's sovereign over everything that happens. And if that's the case, that includes evil. So, how do we reconcile his goodness? Well, you need very important distinctions like primary and secondary causes, immediate and remote causes. You need to understand that evil is the absence of good, not something in and of itself, that there's no such thing as free will, etc., etc., etc. Very, very important. But that's a dance.

Another duality that you have is political correctness on one side and political incorrectness on the other. The majority of the world wants to be politically correct towards men. And as a result, they abandon God's sovereignty and they are afraid of political incorrectness. On the other hand, you have the extremists who are so politically incorrect that they result in a fatalistic attitude where there's no moral agency for mankind whatsoever. Secondary causes loses its entire meaning to the hypercalvinist. Because if God is puppeting you and basically causing you to do both evil and good, then there's no point to existence. Morality is relative, evil is meaningless, you have no moral agency, there's no such thing as secondary causes in practice. And so you have a fatalistic attitude. It's too politically incorrect. Does that make sense?

These things are are balanced out in biblical monergism. And anytime you push one or to the other, you end up with an imbalance and an error. Another one is comforting and humbling. The messages of the gospel's universality. The gospel is universal, meaning it's for everyone. Doesn't mean that everyone has been atoned for. It doesn't mean that everyone is going to choose Christ. It means that it's for all kinds of people from every tribe and tongue. That's true. That is very comforting, right? There's very comforting words. There's also very humbling words about God's sovereignty that we looked at in many, many places where you are nothing but dust. You're like grass in the field. You are just a vessel. And vessels don't control basically what they're, what's happening in their lives. But somewhere in between these two, there's a very fine mystery.

If you push and push and push on the comforting messages of the Bible at the cost of the humbling ones, you go into error. Look at progressive Christianity. How they weaponize the comforting messages of the Bible for license to sin, license to basically do whatever you want, and God still loves you because he's tolerant, and he, you got to tolerate everybody. That's an imbalance. And of course, again, the hypercalvinists, the people who focus so much on the humbling verses that they forget the comforting and to comfort others with important good news and reminders and things like that. So, these two things are very important, very important to balance them.

One of them is man-centered and God-centered. Throughout this series, we've looked at how to look at the Bible from a God-centered perspective. However, again, I'll go back to the reality that this is a mystery. The reason I've pushed so hard on God-centered is because most people are man-centered in their understanding. Do you get it? They're, most people are man-centered. And so you need to bring people back to the middle because if they're over here, you know, push, push, push them over here to the middle. But once you get to the middle, you need to understand that there's both man-centered and God-centered situations. There are perspectives in the Bible that have to do with man and the choices that you make and, and the first-person ground-level perspective that's in the Bible very clearly. And then there are perspectives from God's view, sitting on top of the circle of the earth as the most high and predestining reality and having total peace about that. That's a very different view. It's a bird's-eye view. And both of these two views dance together in a very interesting and profound mystery.

So, once you get away from the man-centered doctrines of the world, it's very easy for the devil to push you towards solely God-centered doctrines to where the point where you ignore man at all costs, which is what the hypercalvinists do. There is no sense of comfort. There's no sense of moral agency, nothing. It's all about God's sovereignty, which again, I'm all for God's sovereignty. But there is a dance that the Bible presents you with, which is a very mysterious thing.

Another way to look at it is self-determinism and determinism. These two things have to be balanced. There is a sense that we need to take opportunities and we need to take, you know, actions and, and do various things. This is true. The Bible has many, many imperatives, especially in the New Testament. You must do these various things. And then there is the perspective that God has predetermined everything that happens. How does, how do these two things dance together? That's a very profound mystery.

The people who can't handle this mystery go either to the left or to the right. Most people can't handle it and they go to the left. They say, "Well, no, that, that just makes us puppets. So, there's some little bit of determinism that we have in our own lives, so we have to have free will." They can't understand primary and secondary causes. And they can't understand a mystery. That's really what it's about, folks. It's about a mystery. People can't stand mysteries.

Of course, you have the other crowd, too, that goes to the right and says, "Well, everything's determined. God is basically forcing you to sin, and you can't do anything about it because God's sovereign." Which, of course, is completely irrational and nonsensical, as we have clearly discussed in the previous episode, which was over four hours long, on why hypercalvinism is wrong. So, this is the problem, folks. You have two things that are opposing with one another, and yet they're complimentary, and they're in this dance. Self-determinism and determinism. You must take responsibility. You must confirm your election. You must do good works. You must do these various things. And yet it's the reason you do those things is because God is determinate. Nevertheless, you must participate. How does that work? How can God command you something that you must do authentically? Do you see how that's a mystery? You can't, like if you command somebody, like, "Love me, you need to love me. You need to genuinely be with me." That doesn't make sense because a genuine participation is something that is done freely, right? Of course, there's no such thing as free will, choosing free of influence. But the really, the underlying idea is that you must desire to do this. I can't command your desire. I cannot command your desire. You must desire to do this genuinely. That doesn't mean you have free will. It just means you have, you must have this desire to do this because if you don't have this desire, then you're doing it inauthentically. And yet God commands you to do something that you must desire. Why? Because he provides that desire for you. We are not the origin of our desires. So, that's a very mysterious thing because it's a balance between these two things, between self-determinism and determination.

If you do not handle that mystery, then you're going to go one way or another. Hypercalvinists cannot handle the mystery. So they collapse everything into God's sovereignty. Armenians can't handle the mystery. So they collapse everything into, well, God is over here. He's still the primary cause, but I'm a primary cause, too. I'm determining my life, and God can't do anything about that because there's this line that he can't cross because of free will. Of course, the final, you know, duality here is synergistic and monogistic. Calvinism and hypercalvinism are monogistic. There's not that many variations of monergism as there are of synergism. But you can see that we, even on within monergism, there are people who believe certain things that are not biblical, like the hypercalvinists. But most people are synergistic in their thinking. This is, this is the real problem of today is that most of the world, Armenian, Molan, Molanism, Armenianism, open theism, religion, occultism, you put all the isms together, and they all have something in common, and that is that they are synergistic. But monergism, true biblical monergism is the dance between these two things.

Now, again, I'm not arguing for moral relativism. I'm not saying that there's room for us to cooperate with God in the sense that God depends upon our cooperation for the outcome. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that, that the truth that walks in between these perspectives is how these two things go together. There is a time when you need to focus on taking action and being in the world, taking responsibility, making choices, being in that synergistic mentality because otherwise you'll never do anything. At the same time, simultaneously, you must keep in your mind monergism and the fact that God predestined these things and he's working through you. How these two things dance together is a profound mystery. It is a profound mystery.

Now, most reformed perspectives align with biblical monergism, like Calvinists, but not always because there are hypercalvinists. Some people also who are Calvinists often get lost in the intellectual aspect of predestination and get lost in the various terms and things, and they don't appreciate the mystery of the first-person perspective. The mystery that you are here in the present moment, experiencing one moment at a time, making choices, going along life as if you are making those choices freely, having desires, and all of that is predetermined by God. That is such a profound mystery, and even the people who aren't hypercalvinists but are Calvinists, because of the nature of this debate and how these things work, they get lost in the intellectual terminology and the various, you know, like, I, I know Calvinism has, for example, like five different, it depends who you are. Some people believe in three different wills of God, five different wills, the prescriptive will, the decreed will, the, you know, permissive will. I mean, it's like you get so lost in the intellectual aspect and you, and you drift away from the mystery. That's why I put Calvinism on that graphic to the right of the narrow road. It's closer to the truth than hypercalvinism, but it's not the full truth because a lot of these people are very lost in their conjectures and their own traditions of their own, you know, traditions from Protestantism and everything else.

So, the truth is very mysterious, folks. The truth is monogistic, that God is saving you without your cooperation. But it's a mystery. It's a mystery. It's the dance of life. It's what I named my podcast after.

Now, Molinism, which I put on here on the on the left because it's synergistic, essentially, even though it acknowledges predestination. Remember, Armenianism acknowledges predestination. It's almost right. Molinism also acknowledges predestination. It's even closer to, you know, monergism than Armenianism is, but it's still synergistic because it acknowledges free will. So, it tries to rectify this problem, this balance. Molinism is like a counterfeit monergism. Do you get it? Molinism is counterfeit monergism. Gosh, if I can get all these words right. Molinism is counterfeit monergism. It tries to reconcile predestination and free will, and it seems very intellectual and, oh, very, you know, fancy and all this kind of stuff, when in fact, it's really trying to put God in a box over here and man in a box over here. It actually steps away from the mystery, even though it appears very mysterious. So, it's just counterfeit because it was made by a Jesuit. But we'll get back to that in a future episode.

So, this is what happens when you don't have a narrow belief. This is what happens. There's only one truth, yet there are endless permutations of lies because the devil's very clever at pushing people to the right or to the left. He doesn't care. He doesn't care if you're a hypercalvinist or a progressive Christian. Just get somewhere off the narrow road so that you can be destroyed. Only the monergistic gospel has a truly sovereign God because monergism alone says that God saves you without your cooperation. 100% work for God and 0% work for man. Everybody else compromises on God's sovereignty somehow with some variation of cooperation. Doesn't matter what the amount is, you compromise on God's sovereignty because of that. Because remember, I'll say this again. If you have two people and they're cooperating in order for the outcome to happen, right? If I need to cooperate with you and you need to cooperate with me in order for us to get to XYZ, then the outcome requires mutual cooperation, and therefore I am dependent on you, and you are dependent on me. This is the problem with any version of cooperative salvation. It doesn't matter how pretty of a wording or language you want to use about total depravity and predestination and election and yada yada yada yada yada. It doesn't matter. What matters is, does God save you with or without your cooperation? If the answer is with, then that means that God is dependent upon you, and God depends on nobody because that means that God would not be sovereign, and there would be no point to being alive.

So, this is the problem, folks. Some people are very obvious, like open theists, while others are not so obvious and very confusing and full of conjectures, like Molinism. But since you're dealing with an absolute, which is God, that's what makes things very easy. Any compromise from the absolute is wrong. And when you meditate on the absolute and you try to reconcile the absolute because God is absolutely sovereign, there's nothing outside of his control. Jesus says that not a single bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing about it and basically being part of that situation. Whether that bird was hunted, whether it fell sick, whether it was killed by another bird, whatever else, it fell to the ground because God had predestined it to fall to the ground. That is true. That is a biblical position.

But now God's sovereignty calls into question his goodness. Why? Because there's evil happening. So, is God causing his evil directly? Well, that's where you need distinction. And in the, in the process of creating distinctions, you arrive at a mystery. You arrive at the mystery of primary and secondary causes. You arrive at the mystery that evil is not something in and of itself, but rather the absence of good. So, when God restrains a situation, good happens. When he doesn't restrain a situation, evil happens. So, evil is the result of God not doing something. That's a very profound mystery in and of itself because God is sustaining the world physically, and yet spiritually, he's withdrawing his influence and fluctuating that influence through time to reveal certain things. That's a very, very profound mystery, and this is what you're dealing with. And if you can't handle these mysterious truths, you drift off into apostasy.

But the problem is, if you're going to reject a mystery, then you might as well not be a Christian because Christianity is a mystery. The gospel is a mystery. The incarnation is a mystery. The, uh, Trinity is a mystery. Physical life is a mystery. Creating something from nothing is a mystery. How the world was created, that's a mystery. How did God rest on the seventh day? If he's sustaining all things, the Jews struggled with that one for centuries. It's a mystery. It's a very big mystery. How is God multi-personal and, and physical in the world, like through the Angel of Yahweh, and yet he exists in, you know, heaven somewhere, omnipresent, and yet he's also localized? That's a mystery. These are mysterious things. Would you expect anything less if you're dealing with an infinite being, with a self-existent being? These are mysterious things.

So, if you're going to abandon the mystery and say that, "Well, it doesn't make sense. You can't just chalk it up to a mystery." Well, okay. On what basis do you, do you abandon a mystery when you accept, as a Christian, as you should, countless other mysteries that are unexplainable? So, on what basis can you say that one more mystery of how God's sovereignty and goodness are reconciled through primary and secondary causes, that mystery, on what basis can you say that one more mystery added to the mix is improper or that you shouldn't be able to do that? On what basis?

So, this is the problem, folks. This is why the road is very narrow because you're dealing with an absolute. God is absolute, and therefore the road and the truth is very narrow. There are many variations of synergism, like Armenianism, Catholicism, open theism, Molinism, paganism, Islam, Judaism, occultism, Hinduism, etc., etc. There are many isms. There's only one truth. And the fact that all of the things that I just listed off are in the same group of ideologically, you know, foundational things. There's one foundation that rules all of these isms, and that is cooperative salvation. Man can choose free of influence. That is what rules these things that I just listed, which tells you everything. So, if you are part of one of these things, like if you are in Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Armenian Protestantism, why do you all believe the same thing essentially about salvation and about mankind? That's a big red flag because the Bible doesn't teach that whatsoever.

Important to realize that people also compromise in the other direction, as we've mentioned before, like with hypercalvinism and hyperdeterminism. These aren't as many as the people who compromise towards the left, but nevertheless, they're also important because the people on the left will accuse you, as a biblical monarchist, of being a hypercalvinist. That's why people get so offended and toxic when it comes to predestination. It's because of the hypercalvinists, who, of themselves, they are basically or in, in, in themselves, they are deceived, and they have misrepresented predestination. They have turned God's sovereignty into something monstrous because they conflate primary and secondary causes and they can't handle the mystery. So, it's important to understand that fringe so that you can defend true biblical monergism to people who are compromising, uh, towards synergistic ideology. We talked about hypercalvinism in the last episode.

But the mystery of faith is the balance between two things, and particularly in this conversation, is between sovereignty and goodness. Sovereignty and goodness. You must maintain that God is sovereign. And you also must maintain that God is perfectly good. Evil creates a real problem for these two to be reconciled. If evil did not exist, these two things would be perfect. You would not need a mystery to reconcile sovereignty and goodness. Do you get it? You would not need a mystery in order to reconcile sovereignty and goodness. But because evil exists, because of the cross, the cross is predestined. Evil exists. Now you have to reconcile these two things with a mystery. You need a mystery to reconcile sovereignty and goodness. And that's done through primary and secondary causes. By being true and faithful to the text, you arrive at a mystery. By being true and faithful to the text about Jesus's divinity as God, as fully God without any difference from the Father in terms of his ontology, you arrive at a mystery. Because if you're also honest with the other verses where the Father is distinguished from Jesus, and so is the Spirit, lesser so, but still distinguished, you now have a real problem. So, people compromise and say, "Well, I can't handle that. So, Jesus must be less than the Father somehow. That, that, that makes sense. We'll put him here and put the Father here." Or, you know, "There's only one God, and Jesus was just kind of like a prophet or some kind of messenger or created being." That's Unitarianism. So, people compromise, and they can't figure it out. Or they go in the other direction and say, "Oh, there's only one God, but he's just phasing in and out of different persons." That's, that's how it makes sense. Ah, now it makes sense to me. Which is modalism, or an even more confusing one, kind of like the Molinism. How, how Molinism is to soteriology, inseparable operations is to Christology and to the Trinity. I'm not going to talk about inseparable, inseparable operations. I talk about it in my Trinity series. It's a very confusing, very confusing ideology trying to explain God's actions in the world. Why? Because people can't handle the mystery. They can't handle the mystery of one being existing simultaneously in three persons. They can't handle it. They can't handle it.

So, this is the problem, folks. This is the problem. It's balancing two things. Being honest with the scripture. The scripture shows you one thing, and it shows you another. And these two things are contradictory. It seems, doesn't make sense. Yes, God is completely sovereign. You cannot deny that. And God is completely good and loving and steadfast and merciful. How the heck do these two things work when there is so much evil in the world? How do they work? If you can't handle mystery through primary and secondary causes and be mature in your spiritual thinking and understand that you are not the primary cause, that you are a cause, you are the secondary cause, you are the immediate cause of the evil in your life, but you're not the remote cause of all things like God is. So, you are a cause. If you can't understand it, then you will drift into one of these errors. This is the problem.

So, you need mysteries. You need to appeal to a mystery in order to walk in the truth with all things. There are so many mysterious aspects of reality, of salvation, of God, of creation, of everything that you accept already without questioning them. You accept the fact that you woke up this morning and you never thought to yourself, I'm guessing, probably you didn't sit, you know, by your bed for like a few minutes and think, "How the heck am I alive? How am I being sustained? How does my heartbeat just work like this? How the, how the heck does my breath come in and out of itself and it just happens automatically? I don't have to think about it. I'm being sustained. My body is doing this thing. It's filtering the kidneys. It's digesting. It's, you know, pumping blood and moving things, you know, here and there. It's the immune system is growing. It's killing things. My muscles are repairing. All of these things are happening to me. They are automatically happening. And I am just there participating and observing and noticing these things." That is such a profound thought. You probably didn't think of that this morning, did you? Well, now you have. So, meditate on that. And when you can understand that, then you will understand primary and secondary causes. Until then, you can understand it to an extent. Beyond that extent where it starts to get murky and mysterious, the point is for you to marvel. The point is for you to marvel and go, "Wow," and to give glory to God.

Same thing goes with salvation. Marvel at the predestined plan of God that he has an elect people that he's chosen to save before time began, and there's nothing you can do to be lost. What a marvelous joy. Marvel at the fact that that plan is being manifest by giving you genuine desires to participate in that plan as if you were freely choosing to do so yourself. What a profound and total mystery. Philippians 2:12-13: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure." The reason you do what you do is because God is doing it in the first place. Doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make any sense. And yet you have the dual perspective within that verse. Beautiful verse.

So, very important to understand that you need mysteries. People don't like mysteries. So they always compromise. Armenians compromise on God's sovereignty and go towards goodness. So they become politically correct. Too politically correct. Hypercalvinists compromise on God's goodness and go towards sovereignty to become too politically incorrect and fatalistic. So, as always, if you can't handle a mystery, you will always drift into error. So, learn to discover the mysteries and meditate on them.

Now, let's talk about the history of Calvinism and Arminianism specifically. Now that we have some basic ideas of what these beliefs are, I want to look at the main ones, obviously, which is Calvinism and Arminianism. These came into being a couple hundred years ago, around the 1700s, from two main theologians that had very differing views on salvation. Jacobus Arminius is what Armenianism is named after, and John Calvin is what Calvinism is named after. So, if I can pull this up here, this is, we're going to look at a few websites just to kind of get an idea. This is the five-point Armenianism, the five Armenian Articles of 1610. This is from a site called holyjoys.org. You've likely heard of the five-point Calvinism popularized through the acronym TULIP: Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. Armenians, especially Wesleyan Armenians, agree that man is totally depraved and thus unable to choose Christ. But in the logic of the five-point Calvinism, this means that God simply predestined certain people to be saved, unconditional election, sent his son to accomplish the salvation, and there is alone limited atonement, and causes them to be born again in such a way that they will not resist him, irresistible grace, but will press on to final salvation, which is perseverance of the saints. Absolutely biblically correct.

What few people know is that before the five points of Calvinism solidified at the Synod of Dort in 1618-19, came the five points of Armenianism. So, just in case you thought the Calvinists, Calvinists came up with these five points and drifted away from Protestantism, the reality is that the Armenians were the first to suggest five points of soteriology to which the Calvinists responded to to reaffirm the biblical monogistic faith. In 1610, one year after the death of Jacobus Arminius, the Armenians, or Remonstrants, published the following articles.

Article one: Predestination is God's purpose to save in Christ. And we looked at these before, like through latent flowers. I'm just going to go through them. We'll, we'll go in more specific on the next one.

Article two: Unlimited atonement applied only to believers. In other words, universalism, but conditional, conditional universalism.

Article three: Regeneration necessary for right use of free will. In other words, God is the one regenerating you in order for you to use your free will. So, you could choose him, but then you still have to choose him, otherwise you're not going to make it.

Uh, article four: All is of grace, yet not irresistible. In other words, you have resistible grace. It's not effective. And, uh, perseverance through assisting grace. So, God helps you, but at the end of the day, you know, he's not really sovereign over whether you, uh, remain in the faith or not.

Here's another website called thirdmill.org, and you can look.

This is up. This is in the presentation notes, but we're looking at now the basic points of Calvinism and Armenianism.

The origin of the five points. To understand how and why the system of theology known as, known to history as Calvinism, came to bear this name and to be formulated into five points, one must understand the theological conflict with, uh, which occurred in Holland during the first quarter of the 17th century. So let's read protest and Armenians. Let's see if we can maybe make this a little bit bigger. There we go. So you can see it. Okay.

The protest of the Armenian party in 1610, just one year after the death of James Arminius, uh, a Dutch seminary professor. Five articles of faith based on his teachings were drawn up by his followers. The Armenians, as his followers came to be called, presented these five doctrines of the state of Holland in the form of a remonstrance, a protest. The Armenian Party insisted that the Belgic Confession of Faith and the Heidelberg Catechism, the official expression of the doctrinal positions of the Church of Holland, be changed to conform to the doctrinal views contained in the Remonstrance.

The Armenians objected to those doctrines upheld in both the catechism and the confession relating to the divine sovereignty, human inability, unconditional election or predestination, particular redemption, in other words, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. It was in connection with these matters that they wanted the official standards of the church of Holland revised.

The five points of Armenianism. Roger Nicole summarizes the five articles contained in the remonstrance as follows.

Number one, God elects or reproves on the basis of foreseen faith or unbelief. So God chooses based on what he sees in the future whether you're going to choose him or not. So God, instead of being conditional, he is, or unconditional, he's completely conditional.

Number two, Christ died for all men and for every man, although only believers are saved. So you have universal atonement for everybody and not particular atonement, and you have to accept that atonement, which is completely unbiblical. It's universalism that is ineffective.

Number three, man is so depraved that divine grace is necessary unto faith or any good deed. So they acknowledge depravity, but number four says, this grace may be resisted because you have free will. So do you see this is the almost right? It's not Pelagianism where it's like, no, man is, doesn't need grace. Obviously, that's so heretical. This is very slightly heretical. It's still heretical, but it's, it's masked under good intentions.

Whether all who are truly regenerate will certainly persevere in the faith is a point which needs further investigation. The last article was later altered so as to definitely teach the possibility of the truly regenerate believers losing his faith and thus losing his salvation. Arminians, however, have not been in agreement on this point. Some have held that all who are regenerate by the spirit of God are eternally secure and can never perish.

Now, really quick, if you believe in eternal security and you claim to be an Arminian, you cannot consistently be an Arminian because if God has regenerated you, the basis for the regeneration is Ezekiel 36. I will cause you to walk in my statutes and obey my rules. The causative effect is God. God is the one causing you to do new behavior against the will of your stubborn flesh and the world and the devil and everything else. So, you don't have free will. You don't, you're not freely choosing to stay in your salvation. God is causing you, forcing you to do good, giving you the desire, and you experience it as your own, but you're not choosing free of influence. Therefore, you don't have free will. So, you're not being sustained of your own will. You're being sustained by God, which is monergistic. So people who are Arminian do not, you can't be consistently Arminian and believe in eternal security. You can't see the philosophical basis of Arminianism.

J. I. Packer, in analyzing the system of thought embodied in the remonstrance, observes the following. The theology which it contained, known to history as Arminianism, stemmed from two philosophical principles. First, that divine sovereignty is not compatible with human freedom, nor therefore with human responsibility. Second, that ability limits obligation. From these principles, the Arminians drew two deductions. First, that since the Bible regards faith as a free and responsible act, it cannot be caused by God, but is exercised independently of him. Second, that since the Bible regards faith as obligatory on the part of all who hear the gospel, ability to believe must be universal. Hence, they maintained scripture must be interpreted as teaching the following positions.

Now, really quick, before I continue with these positions, do you notice how the Arminians could not stomach the mystery of faith? You can't, you can't handle the mystery. God is sovereign and he empowers you to make the right choice, and you experience that choice as a free will choice. But the cause of your desires and your choice is God. And that means you are intertwined with God in this little dance, the dance of life. How does that work? I don't know. It's a very mysterious thing. You can't draw a line between where you are and where God is when it comes to doing good. When it comes to doing evil, you can draw a line. That's pretty clear. But not when it comes to doing good. Just like you can't draw a line between the human nature and the divine nature of Jesus in the incarnation. They are dancing together in a perfect dance. In the same way, in a, in a kind of a, you know, mirror kind of reflecting kind of way, we are, God is in us, and you can't draw a line at the resurrection when it says that God will be all in all. You will not, that's kind of like a fulfillment of the incarnation in our lives. Do you get it? God is incarnating in us. He'll be all in all. You will not be able to draw a line between where you are and where God is. What a beautiful thought that you will be like God. God will be all in all and cause you forever to be like him, to think only good things, to live forever, and everything else. He will be flexing his power 100% in everybody that he's chosen to save. And you won't be able to draw a line. That's a very mysterious ending. You're not headed, you're not headed to a black and white ending, folks. You're headed to a profound mystery. Do you get it? The, the thing that's on the horizon, the good news on the horizon of the resurrection is a profound mystery that you will not be able to distinguish between where God is and where you are because God is working through you, and you are experiencing that as your own choice. And people can't stomach that mystery. You see, and so they have to put things in boxes and say, "Well, therefore this and that and free will and whatever else." This is the problem. And by the way, I think that some of Jacob Arminius's students were probably trained by Jesuits or maybe even Jesuit infiltrators themselves. Nevertheless, moving on.

Let's see what are their five suppositions.

Number one, man is never so completely corrupted by sin that he cannot savingly believe the gospel when it is put before him. So off the bat, the very beginning, they deny total depravity, or they should say that the word depraved, but we're not totally unable, which means that you are totally able.

Number two, is he ever so completely controlled by God that he cannot reject it? Meaning, you can lose your salvation.

Number three, God's election in election of those who shall be saved is prompted by his foreseeing that they will of their own accord believe. In other words, God chooses you because you were likely to choose him, which makes him the most conditional, you know, biased being in history.

Number four, Christ's death did not ensure the salvation of anyone, for it did not secure the gift of faith to anyone. There's no such gift. What it did was rather to create a possibility of salvation for everyone if they believe. Christ's death did not ensure the salvation of anyone. Do you understand why this was declared a heresy and rightly so in the 1700s or the 1600s when it was put forth?

Number five, it rests with the believers to keep themselves in a state of grace by keeping up their faith. So you can lose your salvation. Therefore, you must, you must work to maintain it. And now you're one step away from Catholicism. Those who fail here fall away and are lost. Thus, Arminianism made man's salvation dependent ultimately on man himself, saving faith being viewed through, as throughout, as man's work and because his own, not God's in him. So, it's man's work because ultimately it depends on you. You can say that God helps you all day long, but as long as it depends on you and you're the linchpin, then it's man-centered salvation.

The rejection of Arminianism by the Synod of Dort and the formation of the five points of Calvinism. A national synod was called to meet in Dort in 1618 for the purpose of examining the views of Arminius in the light of scripture. The great synod was convened by the States General of Holland on November 13th, 1618. There were 84 members and 18 secular commissioners. Included were 27 delegates from Germany, the Palatinate, Switzerland, and England. There were 154 sessions held during the seven months that the synod met to consider these matters, the last of which was May 9th, 1619.

The synod, Warbertton writes, had given a very close examination to the five points which had been advanced by the remonstrance and had compared the teaching advanced in them with the testimony of scripture. Failing to reconcile that teaching with the word of God, which they had definitely declared could alone be accepted by them as the rule of faith, they had unanimously rejected them. They felt, however, that a mere rejection was not sufficient. It remained for them to set forth the true Calvinistic teaching in relationship to those matters which had been called into question. This they proceeded to do so, embodying the Calvinistic position in five chapters, which have ever since been known as the five points of Calvinism. The name Calvinism was derived from the great French reformer John Calvin, who had done so much in expounding and defending these various views.

No doubt it will seem strange to many in our day that the Synod of Dort rejected as heretical the five doctrines advanced by the Arminians. For these doctrines have gained wide acceptance in the modern church. I wonder why. In fact, they are seldom questioned in our generation. But the vast majority of Protestant theologians of that day took a very different view of the matter. They maintained that the Bible set forth a system of doctrine quite different from that advocated by the Arminian party. Salvation was viewed by the members of the Synod of Dort as a work of grace from beginning to end. In no sense did they believe that the sinner saved himself or contributed to his salvation. Adam's fall had completely ruined the race. All men were by nature spiritually dead, and their wills were in bondage to sin and Satan. The ability to believe the gospel was itself a gift from God bestowed only upon those whom he had chosen to be objects of his unmerited favor. It was not man, but God who determined which sinners would be shown mercy and saved. This, in essence, is what me, is what the members of the Synod of Dort understood the Bible to teach.

So it goes on to talk about the five points, and we have another site here that we can compare these two because you have basically the, uh, five points of each. So we can just zoom in here a little bit. Let's see what it says. Here's the comparison chart basically of these two five points. So number one, five points of Arminian. The first I'm going to read is Arminianism. The second one is Calvinism. How do they differ?

So number one, free will or human ability. Although human nature was seriously affected by the fall, man has not been left in a state of total spiritual helplessness. God graciously enables every sinner to repent and believe, but he has not interfered with man's freedom. Each sinner possesses a free will and his eternal destiny depends on how he uses it. So, you're the one that's sovereign. Man's freedom consists of his ability to choose good or evil in spiritual matters. You can choose between good or evil. Sound familiar? His will is not enslaved to his sinful nature. The sinner has the power to either cooperate with God's spirit and be regenerated or resist God's grace and perish. The lost sinner needs the spirit's assistance, but he does not have to be regenerated by the spirit before he can believe. For faith is man's act and precedes the new birth. Faith is the sinner's gift to God. It is man's contribution to salvation. So man contributes to God. And if man does not contribute to God, God cannot be glorified. Therefore, you are sovereign. You can be just like God. You can choose between good and evil. You can determine what makes left or right.

Now, Calvinism, total inability or total depravity. Because of the fall, man is unable of himself to savingly believe the gospel. The sinner is dead, blind, and deaf to the things of God. His heart is deceitful and desperately corrupt. His will is not free. It is in bondage to his evil nature. Therefore, he will not, indeed, he cannot choose God over evil in the spiritual realm. Consequently, it takes much more than the spirit's assistance to bring a sinner to Christ. It takes regeneration by which the spirit makes the sinner alive and gives him a new nature. Faith is not something man contributes to salvation, but it is itself a part of God's gift of salvation. It is God's gift to the sinner, not the sinner's gift to God. True.

Now, we have election. Arminians are conditional. Calvinists are unconditional. God's choice of certain individuals unto salvation before the foundation of the world was based upon his foreseeing that they would respond to his call. Got to think, you got to think your claims out very clearly, folks. He selected only those whom he knew would of themselves freely believe the gospel. Election, therefore, was determined by or conditioned upon what man would do. The faith with which God foresaw and upon which he based his choice was not given to the sinner by God. It was not created by the regeneration of the power of the Holy Spirit, but resulted solely from man's will. It was left entirely up to man as to who would believe and therefore as to who would be elected unto salvation. God chose those whom he knew would of their own free will choose Christ. Thus, the sinner's choice of Christ, not God's choice of the sinner, is the ultimate cause of salvation.

Really quick pause. If God chooses those who choose him, what does that say about God? It says that he's partial. Do you get it? He's choosing based on something outside of himself. And Romans 9 tells you that the, uh, the choice of God between Esau and Jacob was done before they were ever born, before they did anything right or wrong, i.e., believed or not believed, so that it would be based on God and not on man. Arminianism denies that and says that God chooses according to what we do. Then therefore, we are determining God's choices. Do you get it? And God is responding to his creations and subject to what they do rather than his own counsel.

Unconditional election. Let's read what that's all about. God's choice of certain individuals unto salvation before the foundation of the world rested solely on his own sovereign will. His choice of particular sinners was not based on any foreseen response or obedience on their part, such as faith, repentance, etc. On the contrary, God gives faith and repentance to each individual whom he selected. These acts are not the result, not the cause of God's choice. These acts are the result, not the cause of God's choice. Election, therefore, was not determined by or conditioned upon any virtuous quality or act foreseen in man. Those whom God sovereignly elected, he brings through the power of the spirit to willing acceptance of Christ. Thus, God's choice of the sinner, not the sinner's choice of Christ, is the ultimate cause of salvation. And if that's the case, you have good news. If it's the other one, you don't have good news.

Now, the one that's probably the hardest one for people to accept, and we'll have a whole episode on this in the future, but universal redemption or general atonement. You can call this, uh, yeah, universal atonement. Christ's redeeming work made it possible for everyone to be saved, but did not actually secure the salvation for anyone. So blasphemous. Although Christ died for all men and for every man, only those who believe on him are saved. His death enabled God to pardon sinners on the condition that they believe. But it did not actually put away anyone's sins. Christ's redemption becomes effective only if man chooses to accept it. Do you see how the atonement is denied by Arminians? It's denied. Of course, there are many flavors of Arminianism, but this is the ultimate point is that they deny the power of the atonement.

Limited atonement or particular redemption. Again, don't get lost in these terms. Don't you have to memorize them, but you have to understand that the question is, who did Jesus die for? Did Jesus die for everybody? And what does that mean if he did? Or did Jesus die for the people that the Father gave to him? Which is the biblical response. Christ's redeeming work was intended to save the elect only and actually secured salvation for them. His death was a substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners. In addition to putting away the sins of his people, Christ's redemption secured everything necessary for their salvation, including faith which unites them to him. The gift of faith is infallibly applied by the spirit to all for whom Christ died, therefore guaranteeing their salvation. Christ did not die for everybody, folks. If he died for everybody, there's no reason to have the final judgment. The reason the final judgment happens is because the wicked are not atoned for. And God had to decree them for his purposes, but he's not going to pay for them, otherwise they'd be saved. So Jesus died for the people that were given to him, his sheep. "My sheep know my voice. I give my life for the sheep." Does he give life for everybody? No, he gives his life for the sheep. For the sheep.

Number four, the Holy Spirit can be effectually resisted. The spirit calls inwardly all those who are called outwardly by the gospel invitation. He does all that he can to bring every sinner to salvation. But inasmuch as man is free, there you go. Inasmuch as man is sovereign, he can successfully resist the spirit's call. The spirit cannot regenerate the sinner until he believes. Faith, which is man's contribution, precedes and makes possible the new birth. Thus, man's free will limits the spirit in application of Christ's saving work. Do you understand again why this was declared blasphemy and heretical? How can you, as a created being, limit God? Doesn't make sense. The Holy Spirit can only draw to Christ those who allow him to have his way with them. Until the sinner responds, the spirit cannot give life. God's grace, therefore, is not invincible. It can be and often is resisted and thwarted by man. Well, then I guess God isn't sovereign. Not much of a God if he can be resisted by his own limited creations.

Irresistible grace or the efficacious call of the spirit. In addition to the outward general call to salvation which is made to everyone who hears the gospel, the Holy Spirit extends to the elect a special inward call that inevitably brings them to salvation. What good news. What good news that is. The external call which is made to all without distinction can be and often is rejected, whereas the internal call which is made only to the elect cannot be rejected. Yeah. "Many are called, but few are chosen." Right? It always results in conversion. By means of this special call, the spirit irresistibly draws sinners to Christ. He is not limited in his work of applying salvation by man's will, nor is he dependent upon man's cooperation for success. The spirit graciously causes the elect to cooperate, to believe, to repent, to come freely and willingly to Christ. God's grace, therefore, is invincible. It never fails to result in the salvation of those to whom it is extended. What good news, and how people rage against these things. So sad.

Last one, falling from grace. Those who believe and are truly saved can lose their salvation by failing to keep up their faith. All Arminians have not been agreed on this point. Some have held that believers are eternally secure in Christ. That once a sinner is regenerated, he can never be lost. Which again, you're not consistent. If you believe that as an Arminian, you are not consistent.

Perseverance of the saints. All who are chosen by God, redeemed by Christ, and given by faith, the spirit are eternally saved. They are kept in faith by the power of almighty God, and thus persevere to the end. Rejected by the Synod of Dort, reaffirmed by the Synod of Dort. So these things were rejected when they came out, and for good reason, uh, because they're heretical.

So, conclusion. Most people think that Calvin came up with the five points and the five points of Calvinism just kind of came up, and it's heretical because people always believed in free will. But this is not, not the truth, folks. The people who wrote the Bible do not believe in free will. The Protestant Reformation did not believe in free will. That was the whole basis for the good news. It was actually Arminius's followers that protested orthodox beliefs of their time, and their beliefs were declared heretical because they are, they lead to blasphemous conclusions about the nature of God, about his power, about his sovereignty, about the atonement. So Calvinism arose as a defense to the Arminian protest. However, today Arminianism has gained popularity, and it is the dominant paradigm. How does that work? It works because the Bible prophesied there would be a great falling away, great apostasy. People would seek out teachers to scratch their itching ears, you know, believing all sorts of fables and so on and so forth. You also have the counter-reformation which was already in play by that point in time from the 1500s. Uh, which of course, if you know anything about the Jesuits and how they infiltrated the Protestant movement with various doctrines, it's not a surprise that Arminianism, which is one step away from Catholicism, is the dominant paradigm in Protestantism. Some have said that Arminius was a Jesuit himself or that his followers were. I personally haven't found convincing evidence yet. However, I would not be surprised. I would not be surprised with the fact that even after his followers established that if more and more Jesuits probably picked up on what was going on there and basically infiltrated to to promote the Arminian belief system because it could have died out. It could have died out, and yet it didn't. So that to me is very suspect.

Synergism and synergistic ideology is the ecumenical link between all of the religions and Mystery Babylon. All of her daughters are going to return to her and be integrated because of synergistic ideology. Protestants rejected the sacramental system through the Reformation. However, as a result of Arminius and beyond, they failed to reject the fundamental foundation that the sacramental system is based on, which is free will ideology, synergistic ideology. That's what makes the sacramental system possible. Do you get it? If people rejected free will, you wouldn't have a sacramental system. But if you believe in free will, then the sacramental system seems okay. Sure, there is something I have to do, right? Because I have to maintain my salvation, otherwise it's, I'm going to lose my salvation. That's the whole point. So the sacramental system is not the problem. The problem is free will. That's the major deception. The philosophy that believes that you must cooperate with God and that God is dependent on you is from the devil. It's from the very beginning. If you missed the episodes on free will, go back in the series and the 20-somethings with the forbidden fruit, how the Bible and both science agree that there's no such thing as being able to choose free of influence and what free will truly means. There's like four episodes on this. Go check it out. Four or five episodes. But this is why synergism and synergistic mentality is going to unite the world under the beast and bring the final counterfeit, which will be the new world order in a Catholic garb. The, the religions of the world are all synergistic. Protestantism, charismatic movement, N, you know, various denominations like Seventh Day Adventists, all of these are synergistic. And one way or another, the devil is going to get a prod, a pin in you and hook you into his system. A case in point, a lot of the Adventists, all Adventists are synergistic. In fact, we'll talk about one of them today because one of them was the main contributor to open theism. So it's no surprise. But Adventism is synergistic. And because Adventism is synergistic, they're very susceptible to ecumenism. Ironically, because they're the only denomination that's still pointing the finger at the Pope. But nevertheless, they've been so infiltrated that now you see a bunch of these Adventists that are liberal, that are all about climate change, and they're starting to basically move their way towards the beast through climate change and climate Sunday and all this kind of stuff. So whether he's going to get you with climate change or charismatic nonsense or legalism or whatever else, the synergistic pin that's underneath all these things is always going to hook into you one way or another. You have to reject synergism. You have to stand on the absolute, which is that God saves you without your cooperation. And you have to embrace being politically incorrect. And you also have to embrace a mystery, because it's not hyper-Calvinism. It's a mystery, as we've talked about over and over again. So, make sure you review the episode on the mystery of faith because it's a very good one. Nevertheless, that's another can of worms. If you are new to those end times-esque eschatological conclusions, please watch my various end times series. I have lots of them, uh, and get edified.

But the five points of Calvinism in response to Arminianism are total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. Some of these are pretty controversial, like limited atonement. But we, uh, we have to put the man-centered doctrines to the side and understand that there's an explanation for them. If we indulge a mystery, if we indulge political incorrectness and and be true to the text when we view the Bible from a God-centered lens, none of these things are actually contradictory. They're not. They're very consistent with what the Bible says. They're not politically correct with the world, but they're consistent with who God is.

Now, I didn't pull this up, but we're going to compare what I just said with the, um, Arminian TULIP, which is what I want to show you because I didn't pull it up, but I'm going to do it now so that my, we have closure on this. Come on, you silly thing. My gosh, I'm trying to drag this thing. There it is. Okay. All right. So the Arminian TULIP is also TULIP, and this is a meme that's available in the, you know, in the dance of life presentation folder. So the Calvinists have TULIP, you know, you have total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. But the Arminians also have a TULIP. Also, total ability. Man is 100% able to choose despite being depraved. That's what it boils down to, folks. You can talk about total depravity all you want, but if man is still able to choose and he is the determiner of whether things happen or not, then what you are actually arguing for is total ability because you're dealing with absolutes, black and white. The U is for universalism because that's what it is. It's a universalist gospel. Everyone is called and everyone can be saved if they choose. So what you have is conditional universalism. Whereas the Bible tells you that there's no such thing as universalism. God has chosen people to save, and those people will be saved. The other ones will be destroyed. L is limited atonement. Wait a minute. I thought limited atonement was for the Calvinists. Actually, no. Limited atonement is also for the Arminians. You know why? Because the Arminians also limit the atonement. Do you remember how we read recently that the free will of man limits the actions of the Holy Spirit and therefore can resist the grace offered to him? So guess what? The Arminians also have a limited atonement. Why? Because they limit the atonement by free will. As a monergist, as a biblical monergist, I'm okay with being politically incorrect and saying that the atonement is limited by God's choice and will. God is the one who limited the atonement. Okay? He chose a certain amount of people. He gave them to Christ, and only those people are atoned for. That is a limited atonement. If you have a problem with that, then too bad, because that's the truth. And if you're going to reject that, guess what? You're still going to limit the atonement. You're still going to limit the atonement. You think that you have an unlimited atonement, but it's not, because it's limited by free will. In this case, the only difference is that man is the one limiting the atonement, not God. That's the only difference. The atonement is still limited. Do you get it? Very, very important point. That's probably the most important point. Ineffective grace. So instead of irresistible grace, you have ineffective grace. Grace cannot effectively save anyone without their cooperation. Unless you do something, God can't finish the race, man. He can't finish the race in your life. And he also can't be glorified. And the last P is political correctness because that's what you get with all of this conditional universalist message that sounds nice but denies God's sovereignty under the guise of proclaiming God's mercy. Hey, everybody wants every God wants everybody to be saved. God is so merciful. Yes, he is merciful. But that mercy has to be put in context because if you push that mercy again too much to the left, what do you get? Well, you get universalism. And you have to make it conditional. Because otherwise, if you're honest with what the Bible says about God's power, it leads to universalism. Do you get it? It would be obvious heresy if you're arguing for universalism. Everybody's going to be saved. Don't worry. That's not true. Oh, well, there's free will, so everybody has the opportunity to be saved. There you go. That's that's slightly less offensive, but it's still heretical. That's still blasphemy because it basically says that God is incapable of saving anybody he wants to. So the TULIP is very important to understand both for the Calvinists and for the Arminians. Again, I don't consider myself a Calvinist, but it's important to understand that the five points of Calvinism were a response to the five points of Arminianism. And the Arminians also have their own TULIP, including their own limited atonement. That's something that they need to understand.

Now, what about open theism? Well, here's an article on open theism. We'll read a little bit about it. Um, let's see. Did I read, did I highlight this? Also, open theism, also known as openness theology, is a theological movement that has developed within Christianity as a rejection of the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. It is a version of free will theism and arises out of the free will theistic tradition of the church, which goes back to the early church fathers, which, really quick pause. They were largely subordinationists because they were Greek pagan converts. They were philosophers. Okay, they were subordinationists, so they had a lot of things wrong. So you should never really use the church fathers as your basis for anything. Open theism is typically advanced as a biblically motivated and logically consistent theology of human divine freedom. Human and divine freedom in the libertarian sense with an emphasis on what this means for the content of God's foreknowledge and exercise of God's power. Now, all of this pretty language, you're going to realize why it's obvious heresy. Open theist theologian, open theist theologian Thomas J. Oord, identifies four paths to open and relational theology. Following the biblical witness, following themes in some Christian theological traditions, following the philosophy of free will, and following the path of reconciling faith and science. This is really what it comes down to. It's the philosophy of free will. That's the common denominator which affects all these other ones. Roger Olsen says that open theism triggered the most significant controversy about the doctrine of God in evangelical thought in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Now, do you think maybe that some of the Jesuit infiltrations have been part of this? H, we're at the end of the end, folks.

Exposition of open theism. In short, open theism posits posits that since God and humans are free, they're not, but that's what it posits. God's knowledge and is dynamic and providence is flexible. In other words, God doesn't really know the future, and the outcome of reality is flexible. It's flexible based on what mankind does. So, you're co-creating reality with God. Whereas several versions of traditional theism picture God's foreknowledge of the future as singular and a fixed trajectory, open theism sees it as a plurality of branching possibilities with some possibilities becoming settled as time moves forward. This is where this kind of stuff and Molinism, it all fixates on possibilities, which of course, there's no such thing as possibilities if you have a sovereign God. Thus the future, as well as God's knowledge of it, is open. Hence, open theism. Other versions of classical theism hold that God is fully determined, God fully determines the future, entailing that there is no free choice, the future is closed. Yet other versions of classical theism hold that though there is freedom of choice, God's omniscience necessitates God's foreknowledge. What free choices are made, God's foreknowledge is closed. So there's a million ways to cut this in in different ways, but remember that the basics are all that matters. God is absolute, and you either believe that or not. Open theists hold that these versions of classical theism do not agree with the biblical concept of God, the biblical understanding of divine and creaturely freedom, and or result in incoherence. Open theists tend to emphasize that God's most fundamental character trait is love. There you go. Remember where I told you that the spectrum? You push it towards goodness and what do you get? You compromise God's sovereignty. And that is, and that this trait is unchangeable. They also, in contrast to traditional theism, tend to hold that the biblical portrait is of a God deeply moved by creation, experiencing a variety of feelings in response to it. So they're anthropomorphizing God and making him to be a man. Whereas the Bible tells you God is not man that he should change his mind or, you know, vacillate in any way.

Historical development. Contemporary open theists have named precursors among philosophers to document their assertion that the open view of the future is not a recent concept but has a long history. So again, where are they getting this from? Philosophers. They're not getting it from the Bible because the Bible was not written by philosophers. It was written by Jews. The first known post-biblical Christian writings advocating concepts similar to open theism with regard to the issue of foreknowledge are found in the writings of Calcidius, a fourth-century interpreter of Plato. So there's your source. Of course, these things go back way, way back to the Garden of Eden. There's nothing new under the sun. It was affirmed in the 16th century by Socinus and in the early 18th century by Samuel Clarke and by Andrew Ramsay, an important figure in Methodism. In the 19th century, several theologians wrote in defense of this idea, including Isaac August Dorner, Gustav Fechner, Otto Pfleiderer, Jules Lemaître, Adam Clarke, Billy Hibbert, Joel Hayes, T.W. Brent, and Lorenzo D. McCabe. Contributions to this defense increased as the century drew to a close. Also important to understand that in the 19th century, in the 1800s, after the French Revolution, there was a massive, massive wave of satanic activity in the world. Massive wave after they initiated and opened the bottomless pit basically with their sacrifice and their French Revolution. Everything else, there was massive satanic stuff. Satanism, evolution, uh, false prophets like Ellen White, Joseph Smith, occultism, so many civil war burnings across the United States, lots and lots of satanic activity. Very, very important to understand. So, if we are looking at the 1800s when this arose, then we know that at the very minimum, there's a risk of compromise. And of course, you understand that it's already compromised. The dynamic omniscience view has been affirmed by a number of non-Christians as well. Cicero, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Philo. God's statement to Abraham, "Now I know that you fear me," was much discussed by medieval Jewish theologians. Two significant Jewish thinkers who affirmed dynamic omniscience as the proper interpretation of the passage were Ibn Ezra and Gersonides. Now, again, these were in the 12th century and the 14th century. By that point, you had Talmudic Judaism. These people were neck deep in the devil's soup and very deceived. So what do you expect? The Jews who wrote the Bible were monergists. By the time Ibn Ezra and Gersonides came around, you had the Talmud, you had blood libel, you had all sorts of nasty things and synergistic attitudes and different views on the afterlife, different views on the atonement, all sorts of things that I talk about in many places with Judaism. So, you can't take these things as, uh, evidence that this is the truth. Sergey Bulgakov, an early 20th-century Russian Orthodox priest and theologian, advocated the use of the term panentheism, which articulated a necessary link between God and creation as a consequence of God's free love and not as a natural necessity. His sociology has sometimes been seen as a precursor to open theism. David Larson claimed in 2007 that in less detailed forms, the basics of open theism have been taught at Loma Linda University for about 50 years, beginning at least as early as the time as Jack W. Provoncha started teaching at Loma Linda about 1960. So the Adventists were all over it because they're synergistic. Millard Erickson belittles such precursors to open theism as virtually unknown or unnoticed. After 1980, the term open theism was introduced in 1980 with theologian Richard Rice's book, The Openness of God: The Relationship of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will. So this is the point. This is where we come from with Richard Rice is a famous SDA theologian. So he's still alive, I believe. Um, but nevertheless, you have lots of arguments here. But you can see that this has been a long time. From the very beginning, Satan did not waste any time. Whether it was through people like Marcion or Pelagius or these other guys, these philosophers that were influencing people to think that God is not sovereign. God is not sovereign. God is no man. Man, man can do this, man. And there's so many ways that this can go. Whether God is not sovereign at all, or you have an Arminian or a Pelagianist or an occultist, they're all different flavors of the forbidden fruit.

So, conclusion. As you can see, uh, philosophy will only lead you astray, unfortunately. So do not base your views on philosophy and philosophies and conjectures, but base them on the Bible. Build a case for your beliefs and be honest with the text because it's always going to eventually lead you to some sort of, some sort of mystery. People get caught up in so many conjectures with these kind of things because why, why do people go for these types of ideologies? Why do they go for Molinism, Arminianism, uh, open theism, all these different directions? Why do they go? They go because they can't stand a sovereign God. They get offended at that idea, and or they do not have the humility to see themselves as secondary causes. They're not mature. They're not spiritually mature. They're spiritually children, and they believe that they are the primary cause of things, and determining, and and giving that up is just nightmarish. So, they can't stand that, and or they can't entertain a mystery. One of these three, or a combination of the three. They can't entertain a mystery. They can't stand God's sovereignty. And they're not spiritually mature to be able to see themselves as secondary. They can't.

As confusing and heretical as open theism is, and as obviously heretical as it is, it's the only consistent position for a synergist or an Arminian. So the SDA Richard Rice and the people like him and and other people before him, like the Orthodox priest or whoever else, they're synergistic. And okay, I would say you're consistent. Kudos to you that you're actually consistent in your beliefs. Because if you're an Arminian or a synergist and you believe in free will, the only position that is consistent for you is open theism because that is only the only position that's consistent with the idea that man can choose free of influence. That would mean that God doesn't know the future all the way. And then you reconcile the problem of evil. Do you get it? Evil is the thing that creates the need for a mystery. Because remember, let's go back. There's God's goodness, God's sovereignty. These two things are opposites, okay? And yet they're complimentary and they're interwoven because there's a mystery. If there was no evil in the world, God could be completely sovereign. He could be completely good, no problem. But because there's evil in the world, now we wonder, is God sovereign or is he, you know, perfectly good and not sovereign? Which one is it? Because if there's evil in the world and he's sovereign, is he causing the evil like directly, or are we causing the evil? Okay. Thank God now God is still good in this model, but then now God isn't sovereign. If you want to say that God is causing all of the evil all the time, he's the immediate cause. Now how can God be good? So there's no way to reconcile that. The only way to reconcile that is through a mystery, which is primary and secondary causes, remote and immediate causes, all the things we talked about in the previous episodes. But now if you want to believe that man is free and he can choose free of influence, and you have the problem of evil, and you want to say, you know, man is free, and God is good. The Bible says that God's good, you know, he's not an evil God. Okay, he's a good God, and man is also free, and you're not willing to let go of the free part. The only thing that you can possibly do is compromise on God's sovereignty. I say the only way to solve this problem of evil. God must not know the future. God must not know the future. We're doing all these things, and he's kind of just cooperating with us, and we're all steering the world in different directions, and he's there, you know, detached. He's not really sovereign over everything that happens. He's stronger than us, but he's not really sovereign, and we're just kind of co-creating with the divine. Okay, you're consistent in your beliefs. You're dead wrong. You're a heretic, but you're consistent. An Arminian who wants to say they believe in free will and they also believe in a sovereign God. You're equivocating on what sovereign actually means because sovereign doesn't mean it's sovereign like over here, and then there's a line that he can't cross with my free will that, you know, that doesn't work. You can't have a sovereign God that can't do something. Okay, a sovereign God is a sovereign God, and that creates the problem of the mystery again. So people don't handle the mystery, and so they say, "Oh, you know, I believe in free will or whatever, and this is what it is." But they're inconsistent. An Arminian who believes in free will must be an open theist. And then I'll say, "You're a consistent person. You're wrong, but you're consistent." As an Arminian, if you claim that you believe in in a sovereign God, you are inconsistent. As an Arminian, if you believe in eternal security, you are inconsistent. What you're basically doing is you want all the comforts of a sovereign God when it suits you, but you don't want to deal with the uncomfortable conclusions or the wrestling that's involved with the mystery that's involved when it comes to other problems like the problem of evil or salvation. You don't want to deal with that. You want to have credit for your own salvation, and you don't want to basically submit to God as the sovereign over evil, and you want to give man the credit for that. So, you are inconsistent. You're inconsistent. And this is the problem. So open theism, as heretical as it is, is the only consistent position for anybody who abandons monergism in favor of synergistic attitudes. It's the only consistent for you. One of the big names in open theism was an Adventist. And of course, Adventists, if you count the people before that, like the 50 years at Loma Linda University, Adventists were synergists. The original Adventists denied the Trinity. They were subordinationists. And of course, all subordinationists.

In history were legalists. They were always focusing on free will, on the works that you need to do to emulate Christ. He was just a a teacher, a role model.

What do you expect if from the very beginning, Adventism has a false prophet? They deny the Trinity. They're synergistic in their attitudes. They're still synergistic today. Why do you think people accuse Adventists of being legalists? Because they are. In in practice, they manifest with anxiety and legalism.

I've heard Adventist pastors preach some great things on the gospel. But it's so inconsistent because if you believe in free will, you have to be an open theist. You cannot preach about a sovereign God and still believe that man is free to choose of influence because that means he can choose free of God's influence and therefore God cannot cross the line of free will and force you to believe or force you to stay in that belief which is the entire point of the new covenant. I will cause you to walk in my statutes. I will cause you to obey my rules. And that's why it's good news. He will cause you to do it. That's why it's good news. You can't do it. That's the bad news. The good news is he's going to cause you to do it.

So, this is the problem, folks. Now, back to the basics. Who's doing the work? As I said before, it's easy to get lost in endless philosophical debates and terminologies and, you know, theological terms and all this kind of stuff. The the real issue is very simple. It's very simple and it always comes back to the sovereignty of God. Do you believe God can save you without your cooperation? Do you believe that God must save you without your cooperation because you're spiritually dead?

At the fundamental foundation of all of these belief systems, the synergistic belief systems is the forbidden fruit that you can be like God. You can choose between good and evil. You can choose free influence. Therefore, you are inherently good. You can choose and govern yourself. That's very obvious in Pelagianism. It's very obvious through that belief system. It's very obvious through Freemasonry and the occult and new age. Yeah, that's super obvious. It's not as obvious when it's hidden when that poison is hidden with a nice little mask on the top on the front. A mask of religion like Catholicism or Orthodoxy or a mask of Protestantism like Armenian Protestantism or whatever else or even open theism, although open theism is pretty obvious, I think. Nevertheless, you see the point.

So, this is how the devil repackages his lie from the very beginning. It's always about whether God can choose you with or without or save you with your with or without your cooperation. So it comes back to how we view ourselves and how we view God. How do you view God? How do you view man? I'm willing to compromise on mankind so that my view of God can be accurate. Most people because they're not spiritually mature, because they hate the sovereignty of God, because they can't entertain a mystery. Remember those three points. Because one, two, three, or all all of the above. Because of that, they drift away and they can't handle the truth. So, they compromise on God and elevate man. I'm willing to compromise on mankind to have a right view of God. People are not willing to do that. So, they want a distorted view of mankind and they're willing to compromise on God.

This is the problem. And Satan's lie from the very beginning was designed to overinflate the human ego. That you are life in yourself, that you can choose free of influence, and therefore you are good inherently. You're just like God. You can choose what's good and evil. You can be the determiner of your life. You can be the one that basically sets the rules, moral relativism, and you can govern yourself. You don't need God. That's the point. So, you pursue free will. You believe that you basically can make the difference in your life, that you're self-determining. And as a result, you actually enter the matrix. That's the profound truth with all this, folks. That the the lie of the forbidden fruit, the free will delusion is that you think that you're free. In fact, you're actually enslaved.

And the devil is manipulating everybody with this carrot of free will and manipulating them with all these dialectics and situations. Climate change, wars, and rumors of wars, political dramas, voting, all these things that pluck and hook people in with, "Oh my gosh, we got to do it or else. We got to do it or else. The deep state is coming. We need to vote them out or else." Whereas if people remember that God is the one in control of all things, good and evil, God is the one who appoints powers to judge other powers, you just you just let it pass in front of you. It doesn't matter because I know it's going to come to pass and God is going to be sovereign over the situation. Whatever that happens, God's in control. I don't care. I don't care about voting. Voting is an illusion. It's a delusion. But if you believe in free will, then you believe that man is basically creating the outcome with God. Most people believe that co-creating because they believe themselves to be the primary cause and what we do matters and and what we do God's going to basically act in response to that that the future is not fixed and yet the fact that the future is fixed is the best news possible. Do you get it? Because God is the one in control of it. So don't believe the matrix. Don't get into the matrix but get out of the matrix and submit to God. That's the great paradox here. Another mystery. To be free, to be truly free. To be truly free, you have to surrender to God. To be deluded into thinking that you're free, but you're actually a slave. You have to believe that you can choose free of influence. Ain't that profound? That the lie is that you're free and yet you're a slave. Whereas the truth is that you are a slave and that results in your freedom because you're either a slave to righteousness or a slave to evil.

So, so far you've seen countless verses in previous episodes that paint a very clear picture that God is 100% sovereign in all that he does. Whether it's good or evil, he he prophesies. He come brings it to pass. He's completely sovereign. And also that we are spiritually dead. And we cannot make the move towards God. That's a fundamental idea. It's not total depravity, but you can still choose God and you have free will because that's not total depravity. That's total ability is what it really is. But it's masked with total depravity. Total depravity means total depravity, total inability. We cannot move towards God. We need God as the outside actor to act and act upon us and to cause us to live so that we can act towards him.

But a quick refresher just for the heck of it on why the Bible says that God is the origin of faith. 1 Corinthians 8:3, "But if any man love God, that the same is known of him." Oh, this is KJV. No, KJV, old English. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God. So that means that God knowing you results in you loving God. That is the order of faith. Not you do something and then God responds. Romans 8:28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for the good. Those who are called according to his purpose. So those who are called according to his purpose are the ones who end up loving God. By the way, also uh for those whom he forneew, he also predestined to be conformed the image of his son in order that he might be the forceborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. That means the people who are justified, i.e. paid for through the atonement, were the ones who were called and predestined. Not everybody in the world. This is not universal atonement. This is limited atonement. In fact, again, the Armenian version is still limited atonement. Depends on who is limiting it. The Bible tells you that God is the one limiting it because he is the one that is doing the limiting and the calling and the predestining and the justifying from end to end.

Acts 2:47 praising God and having favor with all the people and the Lord added to their number day by day those who are being saved. God is the cause of the people who were being saved and turning to the gospel. Acts 11:18 when they heard these things they fell silent and they glorified God saying then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance to that leads to life. So they realized that God has also granted the Gentiles to understand and to repent and to believe the gospel. Acts 13:48 same thing. And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. And as many as were appointed to eternal life believed. As an Armenian, you have to force yourself to read this to say, as many as believed were appointed to eternal life. But that's not the order of operations, folks. Very clearly so. As many as were appointed to eternal life believed. That means the appointment time before time, calling in time, space, justifying, etc. results in believing.

Philippians 2:12-13, one of my favorites. Therefore, beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. So, the first part is religion. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. The second part is the mystery. If you didn't have the second part, you would have religion. And that's why the second part exists. Verse 13 tells you it is God who works in you. That's why you should work out your salvation fear and trembling because God is working in you both to will meaning to give you desires and to generate desires and to work and to generate actions and to cause you to do things for his good pleasure for his glory for the joy of glorifying God. God is working through you to glorify himself. That's the God- centered view of salvation.

Second Timothy 2 verse 25. Come on now. Correcting his opponents with gentleness, God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth. Who is the one that is the source of the repentance? Is it free will? No. God grants them repentance. So, this is a situational situation. He's saying, "Correct your opponents with gentleness. Be a certain way because in that moment, God may open their eyes sovereignly and they may believe." Therefore, the origin of faith is not man. It is God.

1 John 5:1, "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him." So if you believe, that means you've already been born of God. Do you get it? That means that the birthing of God happens before you believe in Jesus. It's not believing results in being born. That the the order of events here is consistent with everything else which is that the being born results in believing that of course you're not in charge of being born. So that's the mystery.

One more John 6:44. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. The word here should be drags because the word is a forceful effective type of drawing. It's not a everybody's called but you know he's to you to basically choose. No, no one can come to me unless is an absolute statement that makes God in this case the Father the prerequisite the one that is the determiner of whether you come to Jesus or not and also important clause I will raise him up on the last day that means that everybody who is resurrected to glory can credit their reality and their eternal existence to the Father drawing them to Jesus draw dragging them to Jesus against their stubborn will.

Is now million-dollar question. You got to be honest with the with the conclusions. Is everybody resurrected to glory at the end? The answer biblically is no. Most people are not. That's by design. So that you know it's God's will that determines salvation. Because if most people were saved in history, it would be very easy to credit mankind with the uh victory in that sense, right? But they're not. That's by design. That's why there's more wicked than than saved. That's by design so that you know it's God who basically picks people and chooses them for his purposes. But this tells you that there's nobody that can come unless the Father draws that person and that person has to be resurrected. That means that the coming and the resurrection are all connected. You have a golden chain like many other places in the scriptures and not everybody's resurrected to glory. Therefore, not everybody was drawn. That is the conclusion that you derive from simple inference. There is no situation. I've heard so many Armenians who have been brainwashed and their brains been melted by people like Leon Flowers that oh well this drawing actually is like this really you know they have the calculations you know coming through their face and well it's actually a drawing that basically happened you know it happens to everybody but they're it's up to you to choose whether you can be drawn or not and act on the promise and then yeah you know they just go so into conjecture and you're reading so much into this that is not there. Nobody and unless are absolute terms, folks. This one verse refutes the entire Armenian proposition. It refutes Catholicism. It refutes Orthodoxy. It refutes so many synergistic positions, all of them, because it it tells you that the origin of faith is not man and the origin of faith is God.

And if that's the case, what's the nature of the true church? What's the nature of prophecy and and the events unfolding? What's the nature of my peace of mind with my salvation? I'm eternally secure. Therefore, I'm not manipulated by the sacramental system or these various shenanigans of the devil. This is everything. And if you don't stand on it, then you'll be deceived. So, the Bible's very clear on these things. If God does the entire work, then he gets 100% of the credit and the glory, and we get 100% of the peace of mind. That's the exchange. Okay? There's an exchange here. People are so afraid to give God the glory, but they don't realize the exchange that they get is total peace of mind and not being manipulated spiritually. But they're so hungry to hang on to that free will because they're spiritually immature that they they deny God's glory. They do not give God the glory that he deserves as the sovereign being. And as a result, then you don't get the peace of mind because that's the exchange. That's the dance of life. If you give God the glory for 100% of the credit, then you get 100% of the peace of mind that comes with that.

If God does the work and we have to cooperate in any way, whether it's 99% and 1% or 80% and 20%. It doesn't matter what the proportion is because shared is shared. Sharing means dependence and we are dependent on God and God is dependent on us and God is dependent on nobody. That's the problem. You have a dependent God and that means God is not sovereign and there is no good news. There is no good news. Evil is inherently meaningless because he didn't predestinate. You can lose your salvation. So that means that when evil is happening to you, God is not able to be testing you. And if he is testing you, he's really just tempting you because you can apostatize, right? If he's presenting evil to you, but he can't preserve you through that situation because of your free will. Then really what he's doing is tempting you. Do you get it? God is tempting you with evil and suffering so you can apostatize. And James 1:13 says, "God tempts nobody." So Armenianism is a confounding conjecture hodgepodge belief system just like open theism, just like anything else because they deny God's sovereignty. And if you go off the narrow road, then you're going to have to compensate with philosophy and conjectures and things. And it gets more complicated the way the more you go. You'll see with Molinism, same thing. It's very, very complicated, but it's it's all false.

Couple things to consider. Countless people will be in hell at the final judgment. And the question is, what distinguishes them apart from the people who are saved? If it's God's grace that distinguishes the people who are going to be destroyed in hell and the people who are resurrected to glory, if that's what's distinguishing these two people, then we can say that God was the one who is responsible for that situation. God is the one who's responsible for the people who are saved and the people who are not saved because it's by God's grace. Do you get it? That's the gospel. God showed grace to some people. He didn't show grace to others. It was based on God's prerogative and his own wisdom. And that's the gospel. It's based on grace.

However, if you're going to say, "Well, those people chose to reject the gospel. They did this. They did that. They were this, you know, evil and so on and so forth." Now, you are basing it on man's actions. It's no longer on grace. Grace is no longer of the fully grace because it's conditional based on your choices. God based his choices and it's even worse actually with Arminianism because Armenians say that God's looking down the corridor of time and responding to people who respond to him or let's say you reject that you say I don't really believe in that whole idea but let's say still God is responding to people who respond to him regardless in time and space it's whoever happens to choose the right choice then God is responding to them and regenerating them either way you cut it God is conditional and basing salvation on performance and if what put people in hell at the end of time is not God's grace but rather what they did i.e. They didn't choose to believe in Jesus. Now it's not based on grace. It's based on the condition of performance. And again, the Armenians will come here and say, "Faith is not a work. Faith is not a work. You can't really argue that." That's not point. That's not the point, folks. Do you not see that Armenian philosophy is conditional salvation? It denies the grace of the gospel and perverts it into lasciviousness and all kinds of other things which of course what the Bible warns you about that people will come in and bring in destructive heresies that will pervert the grace of God. And this is exactly what happens. It's no longer based on grace. The people in hell are based on their performance. They didn't do something. And the people in heaven, of course, you don't go to heaven. You come here and you resurrected earth. But let's say the people in paradise, they're there because they chose to believe. They did something. God responded to them and his condition of salvation is based on what they did. It's meritorious salvation. It's not grace.

True grace salvation is everybody's consigned to disobedience so that he can have mercy on all. Right? Romans 11 or something. I think he's consigned all to disobedience so he can have mercy on all. It doesn't mean all like everybody in history. It means all kinds of people because otherwise he would save everybody because he's perfectly effectual in his calling and salvation. So God has consigned everybody to disobedience so that he could pick out people and show you his power of redemption. That is true grace. Everybody deserve to be destroyed. And out of everybody, God picked some people to save and passed over others. Therefore, it's based on grace. But if you want to say that the people in hell is because of something they did or whatever else or the people in the paradise is because they chose God, now you're putting the anchor of salvation on man's performance. It doesn't matter whether faith faith is a work or not. It matters that cooperation requires codependence and God is not dependent on anybody. And God also is impartial. He's not conditional. Whereas Armenian synergistic philosophy makes God conditional. He responds only to the people who respond to him, which makes him not merciful, but biased. Therefore, it's not grace. You can call it grace, but it's not grace. True grace is unconditional, undeserved, not based on any performance whatsoever. And this is the problem.

But Armenians will keep on the free will train because they can't stomach God's sovereignty. They can't stomach a reality where they are second. They can't stomach a mystery. And as a result, they rob themselves of peace. Because if God does the work without your cooperation, you can't lose your salvation because it's for his name's sake, for his glory. And you can trust in that because God is going to pursue his glory. But if you have to cooperate on any way, it means that you can stop cooperating at any point in time. And you must work to maintain your salvation. And if you are believing that you can lose your salvation, therefore, you are now put and primed into an anxious position in relationship to your relationship to God and and to salvation and you have to basically strive and and you're exiting the mystery, right? You're not present with God anymore. You're not trusting in God. You're not resting in the mysterious reality that God has saved you before time began. You're not resting in that. So, you're being pushed with anxiety that you could lose your salvation, lose your salvation, and now you're working to to maintain your salvation. And pretty soon, religion, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, all these things become more appealing and they seem like the truth. And that's why today so many people have been deceived and duped and are going back towards religion. They're going back in the opposite direction. Why? Because most of the world is secular. Atheism, for as much as it rejects God, it still believes in free will. Do you get it? Doesn't matter that it rejects God. The beast knows who are his and they're going to be all integrated through the forbidden fruit of free will. Whether you're an atheist or a Protestant or a Hindu or a Muslim, they all believe the same thing about man that he can choose free of influence. And that's the glue to bring everybody back to the mystery religion. Why? Because Satan gave his throne in power to Rome. And that means Satan is going to coalesce and condense all of his mystery scops into one scop towards the end. And that's why people are going towards religion because they're deceived on synergistic ideas. So modernism is unique to the gospel and Armenians cannot argue for eternal security because it's not possible with synergism. You cannot argue for free will and then no will when it comes to being kept saved. Do you get it? You can't argue for being able to choose free of influence and you somehow generate degenerate faith despite being depraved. And then you can't lose your salvation after that. That's not consistent. It's not consistent belief system because if you believe you entered salvation, you also believe you can exit salvation. I believe I did not enter salvation. I was brought into it. Therefore, I know that I am not going to be brought out of it because I trust God's character. I trust that he's sovereign and he's doing this for his name's sake. That despite my stubborn will, my my broken flesh, he is going to maintain and persevere me and bring me to the end for his name's sake. That's what I trust in. And that's what you should trust in as well because you either get the God who saves you and keeps you against your will or you get the God who offers salvation to you but can't keep you saved. Make your choice, folks. You know, this is what the Reformation was fought over because if you believe in the politically correct God, you have no good news and you are ripe for the picking for the devil's religious schemes and operations and scops in the world. If you believe that God saves you and keeps you saved, you are immune and you are inoculated to all of this nonsense. But if you want to cling to that precious, precious, sweet little baby free will, that delusion, the the baby's bottle, then you are going to suffer the delusion of synergism, which is gripping the whole world. So let it go regardless how many challenging questions it comes up. Understand that there are answers and eventually you'll have to be okay with a mystery in certain aspects like primary and secondary causes. You have to understand how they work, but ultimately it's mysterious. So you have to be able to walk in a mystery because truth is mysterious. I'm not saying anything occult here, but it is a mystery. Nevertheless, you have to be comfortable with that if you want to walk in the truth.

Now, of course, the objection that is always brought up is faith isn't a work and it always comes into the picture as a philosophical way to get out of the real issue. Do you get it? Again, if people in hell and he in paradise, the difference between them is their performance of whether they believed or not. No, it's based on performance. It's not based on God's grace. It's based on what man did. Man is the lens by which that is interpreted. Right? Heaven or hell, which one is it? Well, man is one that causes these two, not God. If it's God that causes these two, then it's by grace. It's not some arbitrary definition of grace. You can't equivocate on the term grace. If it's grace, then it's not based on performance. And this is the problem. And of course, the argument to that is, well, faith isn't a work. Faith isn't a work. But the real issue is God's sovereignty. Do you believe that God is capable of saving you without your cooperation? Because if that's the case, then he can be gracious. Then he can be merciful. Then he can be revealing his grace and he can be sovereign. Then he can be revealing the gospel. But if God is not capable of saving you unless you cooperate, then there is no grace. It's based on merit. It's based on performance. It's based on conditions because God chooses only the ones who choose him. That's not grace at all. That's a legalistic framework dressed up in the gospel. That's why I said I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people in the Armenian camp who were promoting these theories early on were probably Jesuit infiltrators or Jesuit educated.

Do you believe that God is loving enough to take over your dead body and give you life without your consent? Do you believe that? Do you believe that mankind is desperately wicked and dead? And do you see yourself rightly as a dead spiritual being that needs to be resurrected? And do you believe that God is loving enough to do that for you and to keep you? Do you believe that you're totally unable to reach out to God because you're dead in sin, just as the Bible says many times? Or do you believe that you can choose for your influence, including God's influence, in order to choose to stop believing and apostatize? These are the real issues, folks. It's not whether faith is a work or not. Don't get lost in the debate on faith being a work or not. This is just philosophical gymnastics that people like to do with lots of Bible verses and ideas and conjectures. The real issue is cooperation. Do you believe that you can be saved without cooperation? If the answer is no that you do not believe in a sovereign God and the conclusions from that no are very serious both for your understanding of evil and your own plan your own plan with God your own life your own anxieties and your understanding of who God is as a sovereign Armenians bring this up all the time as a smokec screen to say that they don't work in fact because faith is not a work so therefore it's still God working in some way again these are just so conjecturefilled So conjecture, so easy to get lost in philosophy. If God is able to save you without your cooperation, then he is sovereign. If he's not able to save you and he's dependent upon your choice, he is not completely sovereign. End of story. That's the head of the snake. So you don't have to be a theologian to participate in these discussions. You don't have to be some super smart person. That's the real issue. The head of the snake is cooperation. What do you believe? Cooperation or not cooperation? If you believe in cooperation, realize that there are a million one ways for the snake to take that and repackage it in different ways. If you believe God saves you without your cooperation, there's only one way really, which is modernism. Some argue about the origin of faith, like is it God or is it us? And of course, there's variations on this too, like for example, does God work in the past or does he work after I respond to him? But there's still free will. There's so many points of contention. The real issue is a little deeper than this though because the Bible presents God as the origin of faith, not man. And even more profound than that is that we are not the source of our desires. The real issue is even more fundamental to the ontology of a human being, the human nature, the human condition. And that is the source of our desires. What is the source of our desires? Are we the originators of our desires? That is a profound question. And the answer, of course, is even more profound, which is no, we're not. We're not the origin of our desires. The flesh, the world, the devil is the source of our desires before we're born again. We are born into the momentum of our parents' choices, into the place that we were born into, the socioeconomic status, the political upheavalss of the time, the genetic, you know, roll of the dice that we have. All of that predetermines how you're going to be. And you are from the very beginning set on a path to destruction. You do not choose free of these influences. Every choice you make is based on everything you did before and everything that comes ahead that you're looking forward to or dreading. Therefore, you are completely contingent. And if God does not rescue you from this matrix by sovereignly invading your life spiritually and giving you new life and resurrecting you, you are guaranteed to be destroyed. Guaranteed 1,000%. That is the good news of the gospel because that means if you have been saved then God is not going to let you go. So we are not the origin of our desires because when we are in the world we are not choosing free of influence and therefore the desires that we have are generated by these various components of the antichrist system. Yet when God sovereignly takes over our life and gives us new desires, we are also not the origin of our desires. I never I've said this many times. I never in my life in my not even close thought that I would be doing a Christian YouTube channel. Not in my life, bro. I was competing as a professional ballroom dancer. Very worldly. I was doing new age personal growth. I was doing all this stuff. I wanted to be like a guru. Not in a million in a thousand million years would I ever think that I would end up doing a successful Christian YouTube channel doing Bible studies and end times events. Not in a million years. Not in a million years. I can tell you that right now. And yet here I am. And it's been very enjoyable. I'm very grateful to God that he's given me a new life and given me a new direction. Give me the motivation and the knowledge and the awareness and the skills to be able to put all these things together for you to be edified in these final days. So, we are not the source of our desires. I do not take credit for any of this. I have been there every step of the way, slaving away at the computer, reading, squinting my eyes, dealing with technological issues, dealing with sleep issues, dealing with all kinds of nonsense, having to redo my work because stuff gets deleted over and over again. I was doing that and I was very much motivated and participating and freely chose to do these things. However, looking back on the corridor of my life, I cannot take credit for these things because I recognize the mystery that these desires are not my own and yet I experience them as desires.

So, this is a profound mystery of faith, folks. And if you understand this profound mystery of faith and you're okay with the mystery because it's so mysterious and beautiful and simple and yet so mysterious. If you're okay with that and you're not offended by a sovereign God, then you realize why Armenianism is nonsense, you realize why hyper Calvinism is nonsense, why open theism is nonsense, why religion and Catholicism and Orthodoxy are nonsense. Because they've traded something so beautiful for a delusion. They've traded the spiritual beauty of this invisible dance of life. You know, I was reading the other day Matthew 6 or Matthew 7 where Jesus talks about prayer and how the hypocrites are praying. Do not pray like the hypocrites, but go into your room, shut the door, and pray in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. He sees in secret. What a profound mystery because it means that the Father is right there with you in your room at night when you're praying before your bed or in the morning. In that little intimate moment, God is there. God is there always. What a profound mystery. He's in there. He's secret. And that secret truth that is so mysterious and so invisible and so profound, people trade that for religion.

Second Thessalonians chapter 2 says that God sends them strong delusion by way of all of the power of Satan. Why? Why does he do that? Because the wicked, the reprobate, did not love the truth. What's the truth? The truth is mysterious. There'll come a time when you'll be worshiping God in spirit and truth because he's spirit and truth. You're not going to be worshiping him with temples and physical things and relics and all this kind of stuff that they do today. Worship in spirit and truth in the secret place, in the place of your heart. When you're out taking a walk and he's there with you, or when you're praying and your mind is on God and you feel his presence in your room, even though he's not physically there, like you can't he's not manifesting physically with fire and lightning, but he's there. You feel it. What a profound and mysterious truth. Such a profound truth. And people give that up for the sake of free will, for the sake of, oh, glorious buildings and architecture and sacraments and traditions and all this other BS. They give that up for nonsense, for the counterfeit, and so they will be destroyed. So do not give up the truth and be okay with the mystery. Be okay with the profound dance of life that is between you and God. And that dance is never going to be pinned down into a box. You're never going to put God over here and man over here. You can't in certain situations like evil. You know that when you commit evil for sure, it wasn't God forcing you to sin. He was withdrawing his restraint and revealing your evil flesh for his purposes. We've talked about this many places. But when you do good, when you choose to do well and to help others or to walk in your calling, whatever else, you can't draw a line between you and God. And again, the beautiful profound mystery that's on the horizon is that you will have an eternity. You will have an absolute eternity where you will never be able to draw the line between you and God ever. Right now, we can do that with evil because evil that happens is evil. It's not God forcing you to sin. It's you. It's your evil flesh being revealed because the restraint is being pulled away. But at what point when we're going to be glorified where God go when Jesus returns and the world's renewed at that point forever, you will never draw a line between you and God again. The dance of life will be forever. For absolute ever. And you will marvel like I marvel with my YouTube channel. The fact that all this stuff happened in such a short period of time. Even though again, I was working there every day. It's not like I was just sitting back and it was manifesting. Nevertheless, I know that God was doing it. I marvel at that. And that is just a lesser to the greater because you had those situations in your in your own life too. Hopefully, you have those situations you can look on where you know like, okay, that was God right there. That little taste, that's a taste. That's a taste of eternity. Because in that moment, you can't draw a line between you and God. You can't. You're you. You experience your own desires and your own, you know, thoughts and everything that you and actions that you do. But that was actually God. Philippians 2:12-13. Well, that's a taste. That's a taste of the future that's on the horizon that's coming. That future is forever where you will never draw a line between you and God again because there's no more evil. So, you're going to have an identity. You're going to have a self, but it will be God in you. That's a little scary at first, but you remember that God is perfectly good. He's perfectly sovereign. He is the perfect standard. So, that means you'll be perfect, too. What a profound thought. What a profound thought that you are going to be one with God in that sense. And yet, you're still going to have a sense of yourself and your identity. You're not going to be brainwashed. You're not going to be wiped your memory clean or whatever. You're going to have a self. And yet, that self will be completely restrained by God in a perfect way. That is the mystery. That is a profound mystery. That is the destination of the gospel. The gospel is a great mystery of the ages says Paul and it is the destination of the gospel is another great mystery which is the eternal state where God is in all in all. So if you can't handle the mystery and you have to have things in boxes then you are going to you are going to go the way of the wind and go towards heresy. I'm not calling people who are Armenians unbelievers, but if you're an Armenian, please realize that it is a heresy because of the conclusions that you come to with your beliefs. There are many heretical things that people believe and they're still genuine Christians, okay? So, I'm not calling genuine Christians unbelievers, but this is a search for truth. This channel, my desire is to give you the truth as best as I possibly can. And that means to be honest with what is. And most of the world believes in synergistic salvation. As a result, they're moving towards the counterfeit and going to be destroyed. So I hope that's not you and I hope that's not people around you. So we are not the source of our desires. And remember that it's always one or the other. Either you are a slave to the world or a slave to God. You are never choosing free of influence. And also God's sovereignty and man's sovereignty and free will and self-determination cannot exist in the same space. Either you compromise on one or the other. I prefer to compromise on self-determination and man's sovereignty so that I can have the peace of mind that God is sovereign over my life. That even when I fail and make mistakes and I don't understand the evil that's happening or the suffering that's happening in my life, I know that God's not going to let me go because he's sovereign and he's doing it for his name's sake. I prefer that exchange. If you prefer to go with man's sovereignty, you are going to compromise on God's sovereignty. And also remember, you got to remember this part. The exchange is that you don't have peace of mind. You don't have eternal security in that system. And that makes you ripe for the picking for the devil. So when people bring up faith is not a work, tell them that that's not the real issue. It's not the real issue. The real issue is God's sovereignty and what you actually believe about God's sovereignty. Because if you equivocate on that term and you want to say he's sovereign, but then no, not not really here. Not over salvation or evil, he's not actually sovereign. Sovereign means sovereign. So any form of synergism compromises on God's sovereignty. And you need to understand that.

Anyway, break for me and we'll be back with total inability and total depravity.

[Music] [Music] Heat up [Music] [Music] All right. Well, welcome back. I want to go through a couple of main points like total depravity, election, predestination, all these things that are different between these various views and kind of comment on them. So the first is total inability versus total depravity. We we have looked at this question before and it's important to understand that there are nuances here. After Pelagius who basically said the man is inherently good and obviously that's heresy. Nobody is ever going to openly embrace that doctrine. Nobody's ever going to say that, oh yeah, man is inherently good and he can choose, he doesn't need God. Nobody's ever going to say that. So this is why any form of synergism is basically semi-Pelagianism because it boils down to uh the most fundamental thing which is that man can choose fear of influence and therefore he can choose the good. It's wrapped up in a lot of humility and oh we're depraved and this and that but really ultimately because of this or because of that man can still make the choice. What it really comes down to is man is totally able and this is the problem. There's countless theories about how much cooperation we need to have and also when God acts whether it's before or after it doesn't matter but they're all based on the same fundamental principle that mankind could choose free of influence and therefore he could choose the good and you know govern the situation. So an Armenian will say that they believe in total depravity but they don't actually believe in total depravity. It's just like how Mormons believe in Jesus Christ and they say they believe in Jesus Christ but they don't believe you know in actually Jesus Christ. So you you always have to ask what do you mean by that? You have to ask what is your qualification of that? How do you define that? Because a lot of people in these various views equivocate on what it means to be totally depraved. They equivocate on terms meaning they use wrong meanings for terms. They use different meanings for terms. They're very confused on a particular term. They're not very clear. It's just like the hyper-Calvinist. We looked at this last time. The hyper-Calvinists equivocate on what it means to be a primary and secondary cause. That's why you need better distinctions when you're dealing with hyper-Calvinists. You need remote and immediate cause. Yes, God is the primary cause of all things and there are secondary causes, but that's not enough sometimes because if you're dealing with somebody who is a hyper-Calvinist, they'll say they believe in primary and secondary causes. But what they actually believe is that the primary cause, God, is both the remote and the immediate cause of all things all the time. Which basically means that there's no purpose for the secondary cause. Do you get it? God is the remote cause of all things and he is the immediate cause of some things. When it comes to evil, he is not forcing people to sin. Sometimes with the reprobate as judgment, he causes them to be obstinate and prideful and arrogant, which is a sin. So they can be destroyed. But that's judgment. He's acting outside the law as the executioner. But he's not causing believers to sin. There we now have a distinction because believers are now the immediate cause of the sin in their life. So they're the secondary cause. There's some moral agency. Doesn't mean you choose free of influence, but there's something we can attribute to man and there's something we can attribute to God. And making sure you have those categories correct is very important. The hyper-Calvinists will equivocate on these terms and they say them but they don't actually mean them in practice because the hyper-Calvinist there is no such thing as a secondary cause. There's no such thing as moral agency for mankind. God is causing everything all the time which of course has a lot of problems. So in the same way Armenians also equivocate on total depravity. They say man is wicked but then because of grace or the atonement or whatever he can find the goodness in himself and make the right choice free of influence and choose God. So the Armenian version of total depravity is actually total ability in practice. However, the total the Bible teaches total inability. We are dead in our sins and we're not able to exercise faith in God. True total depravity is total inability. It's not total if there's an asterisk to it. Do you get

it? It's not total depravity asterisk except you can choose in this particular situation. Total depravity means total inability. You are not able to come and that puts men in the proper seat and God in the proper seat. This is why the origin of faith matters and why God is the origin of faith.

Armenianism opens the possibility for man to choose free of influence and choose the good and that makes man the origin of faith. Modernism is absolute. We're unable to choose God and we are totally depraved. Therefore, God must choose us and he is the origin of faith. So when it comes to faith, if God acts before regeneration and he chooses you, he you know basically grants you uh in time and space the second birth and cause you to believe that's monogistic. If God acts after regeneration and chooses you after you choose him, then that's synergistic.

Of course, there are many ways that people spin this. You have to be very sometimes it can be very tricky with people that are very educated and very clever with their wording because the Armenians will say, "Well, there's also predestination and God chose people." But their version of predestination is very different as we saw in a previous episode on election. But generally, God is choosing according to what you do in synergism and in modernism. A better way maybe to put it is that God is choosing according to his own will and his own standards, his own purposes. There's no consultation of what his creations are doing. There's no consideration of consider what his creations are doing in in response to the choice to save them. God is choosing according only to his purposes in the modernistic gospel. And that's good news because you know you can trust being sustained. If God is choosing according to your performance, then you have a real problem.

So, Armenianism teaches something called prevenient grace where God's grace is basically this thing that happened and it healed part of original sin and depravity and kind of brings us closer to the ability to choose him free of influence. We're still to we're still totally depraved, but you know, we have the ability to uh make a free will choice and and basically counteract total depravity, which is all a conjecture, folks. That's not what the Bible teaches whatsoever. is a conjecture inferred from cherrypicking v various verses through a man-c centered lens. In other words, the cross made you be like God to be able to choose free of influence. Do you see the difference? Do you see the forbidden fruit, the the mystery religion poking his head through the veil of the gospel that they're they're covering it with that basically the cross afforded mankind the ability to choose just like God. You can choose free of influence. You can choose free of your evil nature and you you can choose the good and therefore you can govern the situation. It's not about governing yourself on the on the forefront. It's about governing the situation because you're the one governing whether God acts or not. Do you get it? You're the one governing whether God acts or not. And of course that makes you the governor and God the follower which is not true.

Now let's talk about election. Election is another way that synergistic doctrines differ from modernism. Remember that Arminius did not deny predestination election. He had his own ideas of them. He accepted them, but he had his own variation on them because the Bible's obviously very clear about predestination and election. So the question is always, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by predestin predestination and election? The modernistic view is that God chose people unconditionally out of the fire to basically redeem them and he passed over others. So there's the repbate and the elect. The synergistic view is that people most people don't choose God, but God responds to who chooses him. But we all have the ability to choose God. It's just most people most people don't. And again, the big question is with hell, why are people going to be destroyed in hell? Why are people going to be in hell? If it was God's intervention that determined whether people are in hell or not, then God is the one who decided to save them and also not who to save. It is all on God. God is the one responsible for this outcome. If it's their choices and what they did or they didn't do, then it's not based solely on God. And salvation is cooperative. Why are people in hell? They didn't choose Christ. Okay. Well, then it was based on something they did. But faith is not a work. Again, you go in the rat race. It's not about faith whether being a work or not. It's whether God can save you without your cooperation and whether God is actually consistent with his own word about being impartial, being unconditional like Romans 9 and so on and so forth. So we have to be consistent with what the Bible says. Monarchism teaches that God chooses unconditionally before time began based on his own counsel alone. Not based on some arbitrary timeline where he's looking at say let's see this person's likely to choose me. So I'm going to choose them as he elect. That's not what's happening. If God chose unconditionally, then it wasn't based on anything we did. Pretty simple. And it's totally based on his grace. So his grace can be revealed because there's no condition to your salvation. It's a free gift and that gift is preserved by God because it has his name on it. He doesn't just give you the gift so you can throw it away because he doesn't give that gift to everybody. So he gives you the gift. It's a peculiar gift. It's for you. It's got your name on it, but it's also got his name on it. Very, very important. Dance of life.

Synergism teaches that God chooses conditionally based on people's choices. Obviously, there's many interpretations and possibilities as we've clearly discussed because synergism is a spectrum. It's the wide road whereas modernism is very narrow. Do you get a very narrow belief system and then there's the spectrum of multiple options. Armenianism within that spectrum says that God responds to you after you make a free will choice to believe in him. Although again, people are very confused. Some say you know God works in your life and then you must make a choice or you know whether you make a choice and God works in your life doesn't matter. there's some version of cooperation. Doesn't matter, folks. It doesn't matter. Cooperation is cooperation. The order in that point doesn't matter. The order matters when you believe there's no cooperation. That's why it matters. But if you believe there's cooperation, it doesn't matter what order you put it in because there's still cooperation. God is dependent on you. And of course, molanism is on that spectrum also. And it says that God looks down the quarter of time and he chooses based on the people who are most likely to choose him based on probabilities. So that he God creates the most probable world where the most people will be saved and he looks down the quarter of time with these uh various middle knowledge is called it's very confusing but we'll we'll make it simple hopefully next time. And he chooses based on these qualities and he chooses who to predestin and save and so on. People often have a mixed view of ideas based on these various belief systems when it comes to election and predestination. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What matters is that there's cooperation involved and this is the issue. All of them as a result are man-c centered and not god- centered because there's cooperation. All of them make God to be the most partial being in human history because he chooses based on what we do, not based on his own counsel and grace. Salvation becomes not a gift but just a reward for basically your external qualities. Right? God is not giving a gift to people who are doomed for destruction. God is choosing people who are the most qualified for the reward and giving them that reward. Therefore, they are being paid their wages. They're not being gift given a gift. Of course, it results in legalism and performance-based salvation, which is disguised as a politically correct version of the gospel. And that's why ecumenism is very synergistic. You can't have ecumenism unless you have synergism. Do you get it? Because if you're set apart and you walking on the narrow road, there's nothing to ecumenize with. All of the other religions and wide road perspectives are of the devil. So, you're set apart. But if you're a synergist, you suddenly now have entered the wide road. And pretty soon, with all the the shenanigans of the devil in the world, he's going to erode, erode, erode at you and bring you into his final trick.

Unconditionally, election is the only way to reconcile God's goodness and God's sovereignty. Christ's atone for the people the father chose to give to him. That group is limited by God. It's limited in number, not in scope, because the atonement is complete. It also means that God is going to preserve these people and give them eternal security which is at the heart of the gospel. God is sovereign and he's also perfectly good in that situation. If God is choosing based on the things that he sees in the quarter of time is you know this person Jack is very likely to choose me. So I'm going to choose him. He's sovereign. Obviously he's sovereign. He's the one doing the choosing. But he's not perfectly good. Do you get it? He's not perfectly good. He's completely biased because he's only choosing the people that are most likely to choose him. That's not goodness. That's just bias. That's what we all do. So God reveals his goodness by consigning all to disobedience and choosing them unconditionally uh before time began.

The Armenian synergistic view is called universal atonement. They call it universal atonement. Although some people may call it different, you know, different ways just to basically avoid the universalism connection. But it's universal atonement. Christ died for everybody. But the atonement is actually useless unless you receive it for yourself. Unless you choose to believe in it. The atonement actually didn't provide any forgiveness of sins for anybody, which of course is totally Catholic at its core. And of course, this causes many problems which we'll look at in future episodes. But the atonement by the Armenians is denied. They deny the atonement. Because if you believe that it rests on me to accept the atonement in order for my sins to be forgiven, what that fundamentally means is that the atonement did not actually forgive any sins. Do you get it? The debt is paid by Jesus Christ. It's paid in full. It is done. It is finished. That means here's the debt and it got moved into a paid situation. Now, the way the Armenians have it is the debt went into escrow. Do you get it? It's into an escrow account. And where you or when you say, "Yes, I believe in it. Now, your sins are paid." So, the debt, the the cross didn't actually pay any sins. Didn't pay for any sins, which is blasphemy and heresy. It didn't pay for any sins. It just put Jesus's payment into an escrow account and basically people have to, you know, say they believe and then their sins are forgiven. So inherently the atonement did not pay for any sense. And if nobody in history believed theoretically the atonement would have paid for nobody's sins. That's your blasphemous doctrine. Armenians that's your blasphemous doctrine on under the guise of political correctness and basically you know seeming nice and and placating free will and all these stupid things.

People take offense to these types of things because we live in a very individualistic society based on all the satanic lies of the devil over the last thousands and thousands of years through the occult, through the enlightenment, through secularism, through Catholicism, religion, it's all just different versions of the forbidden fruit. But you know what? The Hebrews who wrote the Bible, whether it was the Old Testament or the New Testament, who believed that God was sovereign over everything, both good and evil, who believed that every cast of the lot was from God. They believed in a modernistic salvation. They did not believe in libertarian free will.

The modernistic view of grace is a living, active, and intimately personal thing in your life. It's such a mysterious thing, and it's incredibly personal. The Armenian view of grace is completely impersonal. It's some sort of impersonal provision and it's contingent upon what you do, but it's totally impersonal. The monogistic view is that Christ came into the world to save you, a precious person who God the Father gave to him before time began. Not because of anything you did, not because you were more likely to believe in him, but because out of his mercy, he chose you out of the fire. There's nothing you can attribute to his choice. And you'll never understand that choice because that's not a choice you can make. It's not a choice you can make. Remember those thinking exercises we did a couple episodes ago. If you can understand how something is created from nothing or when God chose when when is there's no such thing as when before time began. There's no such thing as where before time began. There's no such thing as how. How did God choose? Or why why did he choose? He's perfectly happy. He doesn't need anything. Why did he choose? You can't understand these things. There's no why, how, when, where. He just chose. He brought it into being. What a profound thought. What a profound thought. We can't understand that. And you will forever marvel at that choice. But the Armenian view of grace is very impersonal. And as a result, it's politically correct. But there's no peace behind it. There's no peace. There's no strength. There's nothing. There's just a politically correct m message that dresses up as the gospel, but in fact actually blasphemes the atonement in the gospel.

Modernistic election is truly unconditional. And as a result, it shows God's grace. And synergistic election is always conditional. No matter what version of synergism you want to believe in, election is always conditional. And that makes God looks partial and biased, not merciful. There's no mercy. There's no grace if election is partial and conditional. So how is the synergistic view of God conditional? Well, if God responds to people, then it's not by grace. And it's the most unfair thing in history because he's biased.

God's power is being able to raise the dead and justify the ungodly. That is the way that God's power is revealed by justifying the ungodly. In Romans 4:5 it says, "And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." So God justifies the ungodly. Meaning when we were sinners and ungodly, we were justified. There is nothing that you can credit if you are an ungodly person. There's nothing you can credit to your salvation if you are ungodly and you're doomed for destruction. There's nothing you can credit. It's not that God looked in the quarter of time and said, "Oh, this person is less ungodly than that one." That's nonsense. Everybody's ungodly. And if you're ungodly and you're before a righteous God, you are doomed to destruction because you're guilty of death. Everybody is equally guilty of death. Doesn't matter. There's no rank of ungodly or less ungodly. You are either ungodly or godly. one of the two and everybody is ungodly. So God chose these people out of the fire to save them. It's not God justifies the best likely to be justified, which is the Armenian or mullenistic view. God justifies the ungodly and that's how he shows his mercy.

Now compare this to the Church of Mormon. This is a chapter from the Book of [ __ ] 10:32. And we're going to go to see what they believe. Verse 32 says, "Yay, come unto Christ and be perfected by him and deny yourselves of all ungodliness. And if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness and love God with all your heart or with all your might, mind, and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you." Do you get it? That by his grace you may be perfect in Christ. And if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, he can in no wise deny the power of God. So if you do this thing, if you shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, how can you do that if you're ungodly? How can you deny yourself from ungodliness? Ungodliness. If you are ungodly, the point of being ungodly is that you can't deny yourself of ungodliness. And God needs to save you. He needs to justify you. If you do that though and the love of God and love God with all your might, mind and strength, which you cannot do, which is why we have the new covenant, then his grace is sufficient for you. How can his grace be sufficient if you're doing all of the heavy lifting, my friends? This is coming from a false prophet. So the point the point is Armenians are aligning with this philosophy. Do you get it? Mormons who are very far off the truth. They believe in a false prophet. They believe in a false Jesus. They need to be evangelized and saved. These people are very far off the truth. And yet you have the same sotiological perspective.

In the Bible, it says Luke 6:32-36, "If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them? And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same? And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. But love your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return. And your reward will be great. And you will be sons of the most high for he is kind to the ungrateful, to the ungrateful, and to the evil. So if you want to be a son of the most high, you must follow in the footsteps of the most high because God loves his enemies. Do you get it? God loves his enemies. How do you know that? Well, he sustains the wicked. He doesn't owe them a dime. And yet, he sustains them for his purposes. Eventually, he destroys them, but he doesn't owe them life. He doesn't owe He doesn't owe them good experiences and food and provision and all the things that he gives the wicked. Nevertheless, he loves his enemies. But this doesn't make sense. These statements do not make sense. It's it's hypocritical for God to ask you to love your enemies if he only chooses to love the people who who respond to him. Do you get it? You cannot be the son of the most high if you are loving your enemies and you're I should say you're being asked to love your enemies, but then God actually doesn't really love his enemies. He loves the people who are most likely to love him. That's not the God of the Bible, folks. The God of the Bible loves his enemies. He justifies the ungodly. He picks the people out of the fire that are his enemies and causes them to walk in his statutes and commands you to love your enemies because he does so as well. That makes sense. But it doesn't make sense if you're an Armenian or a molist or any kind of other flavor of the wide road.

1 John 4:1 19. We love because he loved us first. He first loved us while we were ungodly in parenthesis. So therefore, we love because he loved us first. That means that the cause of our love is because he loved us first. Was there any reason for him to love us? No. Completely unconditional. So conclusion, conditional election is not consistent with what the scriptures say about God. Conditional election is the only possibility for synergism and that's the problem. So synergism is therefore wrong.

Now let's talk about eternal security. Modernism teaches that God is doing the work and God chose unconditionally and God is completing salvation for his name's sake, for his glory. That means that he gets 100% of the glory and we can trust in the outcome and we get 100% of the peace. That's the exchange. But if you have free will and you can lose your salvation because you entered salvation. There is no eternal security possible, my friends. You can try to finagle and conjecture it all day long. It's not possible. This is valid for opism, Armenianism, molanism, or any version of ism on the synergistic spectrum.

The Armenian argument is how can you reconcile God's love with predestining evil? That's the that's the big conclusion that they all come to all the time. It's a favorite attack of theirs. And they always uh propose that against the people who believe the Bible when it says that God is sovereign over everything, both good and evil. And they they love to get the the gotcha questions like, "Do you believe that God is the author of sin?" Gotcha. Are you saying God is the author of sin? Gotcha. Well, what do you mean by that? Do you mean that he's the immediate cause or the remote cause of sin? If he's the if we're talking remote cause, then yeah, God is the author of sin. God predestined the cross and the cross was sinful is the most sinful thing in history for man to crucify its own creator. But God predestined that. He authored that. So therefore, he's the author of the story. He's the author of sin. But what Armenians mean when they say author of sin is that God is the immediate cause of sin. That God is possessing the Roman soldiers and the Pharisees and everything and causing the evil immediately in their lives. Which is not true because they don't uh appreciate the ministry the mystery. They reject the sovereignty of God and they don't understand primary and secondary causes. They don't understand that. They can't see themselves as secondary. And because of these three issues that I keep repeating, they always conflate and create problems by equivocating on these terms. God is the author of sin in the sense of a remote sense because he's the author of the story. He's the creator. He is the one who who predestined all of these things including the cross which was the most evil thing in history. It was also the the best and highest good in history which is profound which shows you that both evil and good are intertwined in the cross. Just like justice and mercy, man and divine, you know, uh heaven and earth, life and death, all of that is intertwined beautifully in this magnanimous event in history. So we are nobody to question God's purposes. So modernism actually is the only way to reconcile God's character and the predestined reality and evil. the only way.

Armenianism has many problems. Synergism says that evil is inherently meaningless and also that you can lose your salvation. Any form of synergism has to acknowledge this because there's cooperation. And obviously, if you believe that, then that calls into question God's character because why is he letting this evil happen? And if he's testing you, then why is he testing you with meaningless evil that could make you apost? Doesn't make sense. It also questions God's sovereignty because he's not really sovereign over the evil that happens. He can't really intend things for the good. He can't keep you saved. He's not powerful enough to do that. And as a result, it questions your own peace and security because you have no security in your salvation. And you live in angst and anxiety and religion is one step away there with her arms wide open saying, "Come back. Come back home to mother and the sacramental system." So you can feel that you're getting all this stuff in your life and you're doing all these religious works and you can feel much better about your salvation because you have all this tradition behind you.

Our response would be the following. How can you reconcile God's love with letting people apostatize? So next time when Armenians say, well, how can you reconcile God's love with predestining evil? You can. Yeah, you can with a mystery and with primary and secondary causes and with humility. You can. The question I have for you is, how can you reconcile God's love that you love to proclaim with letting people apostitize? People just like, "Oh, because he gave us free will. He loves us so much that he lets us destroy ourselves." Oh, yes. That's not the true God of the Bible, folks. That's not a loving God. A loving God that lets you apostitize knowing that the So, you have two realities. There's destruction and eternal life in God's presence, which is the highest moral possible, pleasurable thing you could ever experience forever. That's the two possibilities. Destruction or eternal life. God is perfectly wise. He's omniscient. He knows what you're going to do. So, he knows that the best, most possible, best, awesome thing in the world is to be in his presence forever. And that is what you want. You don't want to be destroyed. And yet, he lets you destroy yourself. That means that God is not perfectly good. Do you get it? If God knows that the best possible experience exists in his presence and outside of that there is no possible experience, you get destroyed. Then it is immoral for him to let him to let you lose your salvation. It is immoral for God to rest salvation and his glory by the way on his created beings and give them the ability to trump his efforts and basically lose salvation. If God is loving, he is going to maintain your salvation and bring you to the end because the end is infinitely valuable and infinitely good and the alternative is terrible. It's destruction. So for God to let you apostitize in that model because he wants to respect your free will and he wants authentic love and he wants genuine stupid. There's no such thing as choosing free of influence. Being authentic in a relationship means you have the desire to be with that person. It doesn't mean you're choosing free of influence to be with that person. Authenticity is desire. If you desire something and you do it, you're being authentic. If you want to do something but you don't do it, then you're not being authentic. If you're doing something and you don't have the desire to do it, you're also being inauthentic. So desire is the issue with authenticity. It's not free will. Those are a conflation of terms because people believe in free will. There's such thing as free will. And guess what? God gives you the desire to be authentic, to love him. So it is immoral for God to let you lose the best possible outcome for the sake of what? For the sake of glorifying man's free will. doesn't make sense. There's no reconciliation.

If your child was going to do something, you know, would kill them. You absolutely knew it would kill them. And if they didn't do it, they would have an amazing life, would you let that child do something to kill themselves? If you were in a position to stop them and you know what they're doing is going to lead to death, would you stop your child from harming themselves and killing themselves? Yes or no? If you're an honest person, you would say, "Damn, yes. I would do anything in my power to stop them from killing themselves. I would do anything in my power because I love that child." If you say, "No, I want to respect their free will," then you are a monster. You are an absolute monster. So the question is if that's real for us who are wicked. If you who are evil do not give your son or daughter a scorpion when they ask for an egg. Imagine how your father in heaven gives you the Holy Spirit. So if we who are evil do this for our own children, how can you say that the father of all things does the opposite that lets his children apostatize and destroy themselves knowing full well what they're missing out on and knowing that they will destroy themselves. How can you say that? You say that because you're afraid of acknowledging the truth, which is God's sovereignty. You say that because you hate God's sovereignty. You say that because you can't stand a mystery and you have to put things in boxes in your own understanding. You say that because you don't have the humility to acknowledge primary and secondary causes. That you are not the primary cause of all things. That you are secondary in this existence. That's why you say that because it's irrational. It's completely inconsistent. It is completely and utterly inconsistent. The Bible says we become children of God upon adoption or being born again. And we are now in the family of God. And the question is, does God let his children damn themselves just for the heck of respecting this conjecture of free will? And if he does do that, then God, how can you reconcile God's goodness? How can you reconcile a good God when he knows exactly what the people are missing and that they're going to be destroying themselves? He's completely capable of altering the outcome. And yet, he doesn't. You can't reconcile God's goodness. The only way to do that is to compromise and say, "He can't do anything. He can't. He really wants to and he loves you, but he's sitting there, oh my gosh, I can't do anything. I want to save you, but I can't." And if that's the question, or if that's the reality, then is that the God of the Bible? Is the God of the Bible the Bible that can't save you or bring you to salvation or bring you out of a desperate situation? Is that the God of the Bible? No, it's not.

If you're honest, here's another big question for the Armenians and the synergists. When do you lose your salvation? When do you lose your salvation? And how do you know? How do you know if you've lost your salvation? What is the objective marker that once you've crossed, you have now lost your salvation? When when's the objective marker? A follow-up question is, if salvation isn't absolute because of free will, why is losing salvation absolute? Right? How do you know if you've lost salvation? Because if you've crossed over into lost salvation, why can't you just cross back with your free will? In theory, people can choose free of influence according to the Armenians. So they can always come back from apostasy. Why is it that once you enter apostasy which is depravity? You can't come back. But you can enter salvation from depravity. It doesn't make sense. Completely inconsistent because this is a conjecture. In any version of synergistic thinking, there is no eternal security because man is cooperating with God. No matter what flavor of cooperation you have, there's no eternal security because you have an inconsistent belief system and it's a hodgepodge of conjectures putting together through a string of philosophy, not the Bible. You cannot appeal to God preserving you or keeping you saved or whatever else because keeping you saved and preserving you goes against your free will. Again, sovereign God, sovereign man. can't have two cooks in the kitchen. You got to compromise on one or the other. Hopefully, you're compromising on man so that you do not compromise on God.

Now, another problem is the problem of evil. There many episodes on the problem of evil that we've discussed in the series, lots and lots of hours. So, make sure you review those because this is a very expansive discussion. It's not one I'm going to recreate here necessarily, but I do want to touch on it because today is about seeing the problems with these various views is how they compare to modernism. Every belief system has to have an answer to the problem of evil in the world because evil exists and that's a problem. Modernism says that evil has a high purpose by God to reveal his glory, his wrath, his justice, his mercy, to shape the elect, to be more like Christ, etc., etc. There's many purposes for evil that have been predestined by God and intended for good things. So, the evil that happens is highly purposeful and it is for the greater good.

Synergism of any kind has no inherent purpose for evil because evil is not being predestined by God. It's being generated by Satan and the demons and humanity. We are just generating evil. Evil isn't decreed by God. Therefore, it has no inherent purpose or meaning. God is just reacting to the evil that happens and using it for the good like a milled armed octopus. Move here, move there. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. At the same time, there's still evil happening. So the question is, why is God letting it happen? If God is omnisient and omnipotent and perfectly good, why is God still letting all this evil happen just to respect free will? Why? When he's perfectly good and and sovereign and loving, if he's loving, he wouldn't let it happen. He would do everything in his power to stop it from happening. You can't say that, oh, well, he wants to reveal this or reveal. He can't reveal anything because he's not sovereign over the evil. The evil that's happening is inherently meaningless. And he knows it's going to happen. Therefore, we now have a real problem. You now have a major major major problem. Either he doesn't want to stop it, which means he's not perfectly good. He doesn't know it's going to happen, meaning he's not omnisient, which is open theism, which is why I said the only consistent position for Armenian is open theism. or he's not capable of stopping it, meaning he's not fully sovereign or omnipotent or whatever else. Those are the only ways to be consistent with a free will theology. That's why open theism solves the problem of evil. If you want to believe in free will, again, it's completely wrong. It's completely heretical, but it solves the problem. You have an explanation. It's a wrong explanation because it's not accurate to the Bible, but it's an explanation. God is not knowing what happens in the future. He's just kind of co-creating with with us. And so evil is just happening from us. And okay, well, God can't be blamed for the evil then. God can't be blamed for why he's letting the evil happen because he doesn't really know what's going to happen. He doesn't know what's going to happen. Okay, that that's relatively consistent. It's wrong. It's dead wrong, but it's consistent. You can't say, "Oh, God is sovereign. God is sovereign. God is sovereign." But he didn't predestin evil. That's that's man that's doing that. Okay. Well, now you have a real problem. You have lots of problems, actually. So, synergism of any kind has no inherent purpose for evil. And this is a really big problem. And of course, we've talked about these quite a bit, but another one is also testing. Again, testing. The Bible says to rejoice in suffering. And also that God is testing the elect and and using, you know, various situations to test people. Well, none of those two work. If evil is inherently meaningless and you can lose your salvation, that means that every time you suffer evil and and suffering, there's a chance for you to apostatize. So what is there to rejoice in if the evil that is happening to you is inherently meaningless? And you can lose your salvation. How can you possibly follow the Bible's advice and rejoice? I can rejoice because even when I don't understand or like or can deal with something that's happening to me, I can remember that God is sovereign, that he's predestined this thing for the highest good and he's working it for the highest good. He's testing me, he's conforming me, whatever else, right? Because there's a purpose behind it. If you deny that because it's offensive to you, now you're stuck with a real problem. You can't rejoice when suffering happens to you because you might apostitize. This might be it. This might be it. And if you want to say that God is just testing you, on what basis can he test you? On what basis can he test you if he is not intending that evil for the good before time began. He predestined in his plan. He's not sovereign over anything. So he can't claim to be testing you with evil because the evil that you're doing is happening just happening. It's not something that he predestined for it to happen. He's not sovereignly involved in that. So how can he claim to be testing you? And if you want to get over that and say, "Oh, there's some conjecture here and there and he's actually testing you this way." Okay? And if he's testing you with evil, that's meaningless and you can lose your salvation. He's not guaranteeing your salvation. Then every time he offers you an evil situation, he's actually tempting you to apostitize. He's actually tempting you to apostitize and leave the faith. Which means that God is tempting you into destruction. And God's character, we're back at the same problem, is not redeemable. Do you get it? This is you got to you got to follow the claims out to their fullest, you know, expression. Nobody seems to go all the way because when you go all the way, you realize how blasphemous these things really are. They really are. We've talked about them many times. God decreeing evil intentionally for a purpose he will use perfectly because he's perfectly wise and good reveals that he's completely sovereign that he's omnisient. He knows what's going to happen and he's 100% good because he intends and controls it for a very high purpose. Therefore, evil is very necessary to us to a view of the sovereign God. You cannot reconcile these things without a monogistic perspective. God reacting to the evil that we create that is inherently meaningless and not stopping it from happening means that God is not sovereign. God is not omnisient and God is probably not 100% good because he's allowing it for an agenda of some kind if he's capable of stopping it. So synergism has major problems with evil. It doesn't actually solve the problem of evil whatsoever.

Modernism also separates God decreeing evil as part of history from God doing evil because of primary and secondary causes. remote and immediate cause. Very important distinctions. Modernism is mysterious. It separates these two things where God is decreeing evil and God doing various things separates them. Very important separation. That separation is important for reconciling God's sovereignty and God's goodness. If you don't have that separation, you're going to be a hypercalvinist and compromise on God's goodness, or you're going to be a Armenian and liberal and compromise on uh God's sovereignty. One way or another, you're going to compromise. You need a mystery. You need two things dancing together, which is primary and secondary causes. So, modernism does that. It has these two things in in perfect balance. There's countless times when God is transparent about great evil that he brings about in judgment that he himself will cause. Countless times when God sends evil spirits or allows the devil to do evil in in history so that God's glory can be revealed. There's countless times when God appoints a wicked person or a wicked army or whatever to do evil in judgment on another wicked. Only God knows what is truly evil or good because success can also be evil. We talked about that before. But God is not the immediate cause of evil most of the time. He causes it to happen through his decree. But evil is the absence of good. So therefore, he also chose in that moment when he decreed that he would not restrain evil from happening so that it can happen for his purposes. That's how you understand evil and God's sovereign decree. He's the remote cause of all things because of his predestined decree. He is not the immediate cause of all things. Again, hyperalvinists twist God's sovereignty and blur the lines because they think he's the immediate cause of all things, including the sin of believers. And as a result, because of these extremists, the majority of people who are Armenians think that that's all modernism. When you talk about predestination or election or you say that you believe in the five points of of the tulip or whatever, you suddenly be accused of being, you know, a hypercalvinist or being making God to be a monster because people don't understand true modernism. True biblical modernism, which is a very mysterious thing. Armenian philosophy cannot separate God decreeing evil from being evil himself. Because Armenians again for the fifth time people who are subscribing to these beliefs in general are not very spiritual im they're not spiritually mature they are spiritually immature. And so what does maturity require? Maturity requires that you are separating yourself from reality a little bit and believing that you are the secondary cause. A child runs around and believes I'm me. I'm me. I'm the center of what's happening. You can't explain predestination to a child because a child is a child. The same thing a child in the faith. If you're spiritually immature, you are not going to understand primary and secondary causes. That's number one. Some of them also really hate God's sovereignty. They can't stand the fact that God would be sovereign over evil. They can't. And practically all of them cannot stand believing in a mystery. They can't deal with a mystery or a mysterious thing. So they have to put God in a box somehow. So because of these things, they can't separate God decreeing evil from being evil himself. They don't understand that God decreeing evil as the remote cause doesn't mean that he's there as the immediate cause possessing people and forcing them to sin. They don't understand that. Like children, they can't see the difference between primary and secondary causes. They can't see themselves as secondary. And therefore, they see that God decreeing evil must therefore make him evil. And they can't accept predestination and God's sovereignty when it comes to evil. They're judging God's actions and purposes as a result because they anthropomorphize God. They project humanity onto God. because they also see themselves as the primary cause. The free will delusion makes you believe that you are a primary cause. Oh, God is primary cause too, but I'm primary cause. So, if you have two primary causes, what do you get? Well, you get this cooperative dance, which is the dance of death. It's not the dance of life. It's a destructive dance. Modernism says that you are the secondary cause. Of course, this is very humbling. So, if man and God are primary causes, then God decreeing evil seems like a violation of your sovereignty. It seems like God is forcing you to do something that you otherwise would not do because you have free will to choose free of influence. So God decreeing evil in your life seems like he's forcing you to do evil or causing you to sin or whatever else. But this is not true. You are not the primary cause. And if you realize that, then there's no problem with God decreeing evil.

Very important to understand that biblical predestination is also grounded in God's pursuit of his own glory. It's not just fatalistic fate, determinism. It's biblical predestination which is that there is a sovereign being who is perfectly good who desired to reveal himself and pre-ordained all possible events to do that in the most effective way possible including evil. And each event is sovereignly chosen by God to reveal his glory. Most of the evil that happens in our lives, we don't really understand, especially in the heat of the moment. In the heat of the moment, you don't understand what's happening. You don't have a sense of grandiose purpose from God. Maybe you do. Maybe you do. Maybe God has revealed that to you in that particular situation. But most of the time we don't. That's why it's about trust and faith. So modern Jism says that you're a secondary cause and it's a very humbling position. And as a result, we can reconcile goodness and sovereignty because biblical predestination is based on God's pursuit of his own glory, which is the highest good. And that reconciles goodness and sovereignty because he is sovereign over salvation. And he reveals his grace by picking the ungodly and justifying them without any condition. And you can rest in that outcome. God's glory has infinite value. So anything that is against God's glory is evil. Anything that is for God's glory is good. And God is the one sovereignly appointing these various things. God revealing his glory through any means because it's infinitely valuable is justified. Why? Because God is perfect. He can't make mistakes. He always chooses the most optimal situation, the perfect situation. The thing that being revealed is infinitely more valuable than anything else because it's God's glory. God God is being revealed. Therefore, the ends justify the means. And God declaring sin as a means to reveal his glory. The glory of his wrath, the glory of his mercy, the glory of his power, the glory of his omniscience. All of these things are revealed through sin and evil and death. God declaring that as a means to reveal the end which is infinitely valuable does not make God a sinner or evil actually makes God very merciful and good. An example would be God predestined David's life. Even David was very well aware of that when he wrote in Psalm 139 that all of his steps were fornown by God even before he took them. They were written in his book very clear that God or David was very aware of God's predestined plan in his life and he marveled at the monistic truth of that situation. David knew that God had intimately chosen him that predestined his life and that God took ownership of his life and basically his actions. However, when it came to evil, when he slept with Bath Sheba and, you know, uh, murdered Uriah, her husband, by sending him to the front lines, he didn't blame God for that. He didn't say, "God has made me do this." Can you imagine? That would be the hyperalvinist.

So, when you're talking to these people, you can use these examples as reputations. When, was it the prophet Nathan, I believe, came to to David and rebuked him with the parable of the man and the the sheep and everything else. And David didn't say, "Well, God made me sin cuz, you know, let's let's both acknowledge that God's predestined reality. He's, you know, he's the one that's in charge of everything." Yeah, they both believe that. But when it came to evil, they took ownership for their own evil. Why? Because they knew that God doesn't cause you to sin. God doesn't force you to sin.

In that moment, God restrained didn't restrain David. And as a result, his flesh did the driving and evil resulted. And God chose not to restrain David in that particular instance to move along the plan of salvation for various reasons. God did not blame or David did not blame God for forcing him to sin. David knew it was him that was doing the sinning. David was a modernist. David believed in predestination very intimate relationship with God. Yet he knew that there was a line very clearly between where God is and where David was when it came to sin and evil. God is not forcing David to sin because that would make God duplicitus.

So what that means is David understood primary and secondary causes. He understood because in Psalm 139 and many other places, David marvels at God's predestined intimate choice of himself in his life. And yet he takes ownership for the evil that he created. Which means that David understood there's a primary cause who's sovereign over all things obviously. But when it comes to evil, the thing that I do, I'm doing these things. I'm secondary. Why? because God did not restrain me in that moment. So there's a dance. There's a dance. It's very interesting dance. If you don't understand that dance, then you'll go the way of the wind.

So evil happens most of the time because God does not restrain it from happening because evil is the absence of God's restraint. It is not something in and of itself. Arminionism gives evil self-existence. Evil just happens of itself because people are choosing freely and from nothing to do evil. the devil is choosing from nothing to do evil and he's committed to that because he's freely choosing to be evil. When in fact, the Bible tells you that the devil was predestined just like the cross and the demons and everybody else because they're villains of the story and they're doing what their programming is telling them to do. We are predestined. Our evil deeds are predestined. And before you're saved, God has consigned you to disobedience. He's not restraining you. You're committing evil. And then he invades your life. He gives you desires. He restrains you. He gives you the ability to believe and then from there on to the end there's a fluctuating influence. There's a fluctuation of God's influence in your life. Obviously you never lose salvation but there's this fluctuating influence. Sometimes he draws back a little bit and you and the flesh and the natural desires that you have are revealed and all of that has a purpose but you're never lost. The point is that these things are conforming you one way or another because God is sovereign.

God predestined David to fail. But what does it mean that God predestined David to fail? It does not mean that God appeared invisibly somehow in the background when he was looking at Bath Sheba and kind of planted that desire in David and kind of tempted him with that desire to have an affair and murder Uriah. That's not what it means. This is what Armenians want to make predestination mean because they have no distinctions and they're spiritually immature and they hate God's sovereignty and they don't understand how to disting distinguish between these two things and and rest in a mystery. What it does mean is that God predestined his own involvement in David's life by choosing when to restrain David from sin and when to not restrain him from sin. God predestined David to exist in time and space. And part of David's life, God also chose very meticulously and and intimately when he would restrain David, when he would not. And God's choices of whether he would restrain David or not painted the topography, the ups and downs of David's life. When David was obedient, when he wasn't, when he was obedient, when he wasn't. That's all because God's choices. Everything comes back to God first because he's the primary cause.

Armenians will want to say, "Well, you couldn't, you know, couldn't he have brought Solomon and uh around another way? Couldn't he have done it differently?" Right? Because basically, Ba'ath Sheba ended up leading to Solomon and so on and so forth, right? So, it moves the plan of salvation forward. Very interesting. Well, who are you to judge God's story? Who are you to judge God's story and the means he has chosen to bring about the story of Jesus and the redemption and so on and so forth? God chose what is foolish in the world. He chose adulteries, mixed, you know, relationships, uh, you know, with Ruth, for example, and, um, and Boaz and all of these people who are part of the story of redemption. Uh, what's his name? Not Joshua. Um, Jacob. Jacob, a little mischief maker with with basically fooling Esau into his giving him his inheritance. Jacob was Jacob was a deceiver. And yet God chose that for a purpose because he chose the foolish things to shame the wise.

When Jesus comes to Nathaniel and Nathaniel, was it Nathaniel? I think it was Nathaniel said, "Uh, could anything good come out of Nazareth?" Nazareth, if you didn't know, Nazareth was like a country bumpkin town. is a very like ghetto, low economy kind of town. So, you know, people from Nazareth were like, you know, to be avoided. And Jesus was born in Nazareth. Do you get it? God chose the low things of the world so that so that there's no room for boasting in mankind. Go Jesus didn't come from like Jerusalem or the capital, you know, he came from a very low situation. And his story is filled with all sorts of silly situations with Jacob and Tamar and Jacob and Esau and Ruth and Boaz and you know um David and Bath Sheba. These things are designed by God on purpose to reveal his qualities, his mercy, his justice, his interactions, his heart and also so that there's no room to boast in mankind whatsoever because God uses the foolish things to shame the wise. So all of these things have been predestined. So we are nobody to judge the means whether that is sin or evil or death that God has predestined as a way to reveal his end which is God's glory.

Now open theism and evil are also something we should talk about very briefly which is that I've said before that open theism is the only consistent position for any synergist. Open theism says that God is not omnisient and doesn't know the future fully. So, it's a dynamic situation. And of course, this is consistent with human free will with the idea that we can choose for influence. If man is free willed and God doesn't know the future, then you can solve the problem of evil. But there's no good news in this reality whatsoever. God cannot be blamed for what he doesn't know will happen. That's true. He's just trying his best to manage the universe as best he can, but it's, you know, it's too too much and too complicated. He's not omnicient, so he can't be blamed. Again, however, there's no good news. There's no good news in this situation. It's obviously heretical, but the real issue is there's no good news. There's no good news in a god who can't keep you saved, that doesn't know the future, that, you know, doesn't sovereignly exercise power over evil and intend it for good. There's no good news in that.

So, Armenianism dresses up their arguments with all kinds of conjectures and philosophy to try to finagle eternal security sometimes or whatever else, but you can't. You can't. There's no consistent argument for an Armenian to say that they have the good news. You can't. There's no good news in Armenianism. Even though on the front it seems like, oh, it's such good news. God wants to save everybody. He's so politically correct. He loves everybody. He wants everybody to be saved, which is not true. The synergist, because there's no consistent argument when it comes to the problem of evil, has to be an open theist. Either God is sovereign and absolute or sovereignty is shared between man and God, and God is not omnisient. That's what you get. Those are the only two options. If you want consistency, because of course, you can have all sorts of positions and not be consistent. But if you want consistency, either God is sovereign and there's no sharing of responsibility or there's some level of sharing of responsibility, but God as a result is not omnisient or omnip omnipotent. Some sort of compromise that you are honest with. The Armenians are not honest with their compromise. They say, "Oh, we believe in the sovereign god. We believe in total depravity. We believe in this. We believe in that." You don't. You're not being honest because the true path of the synergist is that the god they believe in is just like any other god in history. He's not sovereign. All the false gods in history that had you do all these various works is because they're not sovereign. Do you get it? God's sovereignty. The reason you can rest on the seventh day is because God is sovereign. God is going to provide for you. There's no God in history that could do that because they're not sovereign. No God in history can provide for you. So you must work. Therefore, legalism and works-based, performance-based mentalities, realities are intimately tied to the mystery religion of the counterfeit faiths, the the devil, the fallen angels, all of these principalities that received worship, they made their their workers work. And the way to justify that slavery, because it is slavery, the way to justify that slavery is to gaslight them into thinking that their slavery is actually freedom. Do you get it? That's where free will comes into play. The devil can't provide for you. So, he has to deceive you. Because if he told you, "Listen, I can't provide anything for you. You just have to be you have to be my slave." Well, you'd be like, "Well, get out of here, devil. I don't want to be your slave." But if you but the devil can appear to you as an angel of light and tell you, "Well, listen, you know, you're actually just like God. You're so beautiful. You're so amazing. You're you're just this amazing creature. You're just like God. You have the divine spark in you. You can manifest your reality. Oh my gosh, that seems so good. Thank you, devil. You're just such a great adviser. I'll listen to what you have to say because it seems like, you know, you're really flattering. This is the point. So, the entire mystery religion is based on legalism and works and performance because those gods, quote unquote, little gods are not sovereign. God is sovereign. The real God is sovereign. He doesn't need your work. Your work could never do anything to impress him. He's the one who works. And you participate in that, and you receive the work. So, there are two different ways to go. and one of them is the broad road and one of them is the narrow road. But if you are an Armenian, if you're a synergist and you believe in free will and you want to hang on to that, the only consistent position without you being contradictory is open theism. Be consistent and say I'm an open theist. But nobody wants to do that. You see, they don't want I don't want to compromise. I don't want to look like a heretic. Okay, then then be a monarchist and let go of your free will ideology and be a monarchist. These things were recognized as heretical many hundreds of years ago for a reason. But today, unfortunately, they're dressed up with politically correct messages and philosophy and metaphors like latent flowers. And they're very popular because people love man- centered teachings. They love man- centered teachings and they hate God-entered teachings. They really do. Unfortunately, also the reason they hate God consider teaching is because of the extremists who pervert God's sovereignty into into a monstrosity because they don't understand a mystery. So hopefully I'm doing a good job to paint for you the narrow road with all of these things so that you can walk a more narrow very profound and simple faith because faith is simple. It's very profound but it's simple. Don't get lost with all these conjectures and ideas and philosophy and terms and sotiology and regeneration and you know this kind of stuff. Don't worry about it. It's important to know. It's important to study. It's important to have distinctions. But at the end of the day, it's very simple. Does God save you with or without your cooperation? Armenians hold contradictory positions because Armenianism's conclusions are heretical. Okay. Armenians conclusion Armenianism's conclusions are heretical. So the only way to make it work is by having contradictory positions. That's how you know it's of the devil. Universalism based on conditional choosing whether you, you know, basically choose God or not and denying God's sovereignty over salvation and evil are heresies. Universalism is a heresy. Denying God's sovereignty and, you know, control over all things is a heresy because that's not the God of the Bible. But if you can dress it up with conjectures and say, "Well, it's based on your free will and free will this, free will that," then it seems like, you know, you can kind of make up the difference. But it's really not. Because as you question the implications of these claims, they result in heresy. They result in a god who is not good, who is not omnipotent, and who is not omniscient. One of the three, or a combination of the three. So be an open theist. Be an open theist. And just be honest, at least if you refuse to acknowledge God is sovereign, be an open theist. Join the other heretics and be honest. Leon Flowers, I think, would be an open theist if it wasn't considered a heresy, if it wasn't so obviously evil. I think he would be. I think he would be very friendly to that particular belief system. But either way, final thoughts. There are many things to debate on this particular topic, and it's very easy to get lost in the weeds with phil philosophy and conjectures, but in the end, it's always about the basics. Is modernism true? Is it true or is it false? Can God save you with your cooperation or without your cooperation? Which one is which one is the situation? Is it with or without? If modernism is true, then the five points of Calvinism that were brought up in defense to the Armenian rebellion hold up. The they are consistent with biblical teachings and you have a consistent theology. It's not politically correct, but it's consistent. If modernism is false, then the Bible can't be trusted and we don't know what the nature of reality is. God is not sovereign or maybe God doesn't even exist and maybe we're some multiverse and there's some, you know, computer that's controlling it all. This is what people believe today because they don't have a view, a correct view of God. The Bible teaches a completely sovereign God over salvation, over evil, over everything that happens. The Bible does not teach that man has the ability to choose free of influence, including the influence of God. Seeing salvation rightly as a monarchist gives you eternal security and a God- centered view of the gospel which inoculates you against the the deceptions of the devil because if God is doing the work, then you have 100% certainty and peace and he gets 100% of the glory and you have a right relationship with God. If the outcome is 100% certain and we can basically trust that, then we can do the work of life with joy because God is always there with his hand underneath our lives. But if you don't have that hand, because you can lose your salvation and evil is inherently meaningless, then you have nothing. You have nothing. If you're a monarchist, when you achieve, you can remain humble because you know that God is working through you. And when you fail, you know that God is there to rescue you and to bring you back regardless of how desperate situation seems. But if you don't have that and you want to cling like a little child to her bottle to that free will and if the outcome is not 100% certain and we don't know we we don't know until the very end then you live life with anxiety. You don't live life with discovery and discovering God's will. You live life with effort. That's your fundamental paradigm is effort is striving anxiety. When you achieve, it is impossible to avoid boasting or pride to some degree because the credit goes in part to you. When you have an achievement, on what basis can you say, "Oh, that was God doing that." Well, that means that God subverted your free will and caused you to do that as he says in Ezekiel 36. But you can't claim that as an Armenian. That's why it's inconsistent because in as an Armenian, you'd say, "Well, God gave me, you know, the new life, but really I'm choosing to do these good things." You can't say there's a mystery. You can't appeal to a mystery. So, it's more of a passive thing that God did in the past and the rest is really you doing these good works and a performance situation. And if you stop performing, then you lose your salvation. And of course, when you fail in this model, there's nothing to hang on. You can't say you're being tested. You can't say God is working it for the good. You can't rejoice. You can't do any of that because evil is inherently meaningless. God is not intending it for anything. It's just happening. And you can lose your salvation. So every time you suffer, there's an opportunity to lose your salvation, apostateize, and be destroyed. Which again, who where can you lose your salvation? What is the mark? What is the objective mark? Because if you do lose your salvation, can't you just come back? That's nobody's able to answer that. If we're sharing the work with any way, it it robs God of glory, and it robs us of joy, peace, and freedom. Any proportion of sharing is making God out to be dependent on his creations. And God is not dependent on anybody. Cooperation is codependence. If I have to cooperate with you to achieve the XYZ outcome that we are codependent on each other can't get away from that. This is the easy thing. This is the basics. Head of the snake right here. If is cooperation. Cooperation means co-dependence. Co co- together. So codependence. Is God dependent on anybody? No. We're dependent on God, but God's not dependent on us. So synergism is false. Consider also this important set of conclusions. Very important, which again, the Armenians are all about God's love and God's political correctness. But consider these important sets of conclusions. A God who cannot save you unless you cooperate with him is not a loving God. He's very biased and he's narcissistic. A God who only responds to people who respond to him is not loving but an egoomaniac. A God who can't keep you saved even though he knows the highest possible good is to be in his presence and prefers to let you to your own self. He can't keep you saved after you come to him is no different than any other god in human history. No difference my friends. The thing that makes the gospel the good news, the thing that identifies God as the god among the other lesser gods is monogism. a god who cannot keep you saved but offers you something and then you have to participate in some sort of rat wheel whether you think it's protestant Armenianism or Catholicism or whatever else or mullenism and you're doing something you could lose your salvation you got to maintain it this is a slavery situation and God is just offering you something he's no different than any other god in history who offers certain things to its followers I offer you wisdom but in exchange for wisdom you must uh go up the 13 levels of Freemasonry and and achieve godhood I offer you power and you must go through these various rituals and do it. There's always an offering and then you must do it because it's slavery. The thing that makes God different from all of the other false gods is that God is doing the work through and through. Thank goodness that the gods I just described are not true. That's not the God of the Bible. Thank goodness otherwise it would be no point to existing. But thank goodness that's not true. There's only one true God and that God is loving because he saves you without your permission, without your cooperation. and he maintains you to the final outcome for his glory because he is sovereign. That's why he's loving. God is love. And because he's loving, he's not going to let you go. I hope you learned something new today. And I hope you tell your Armenian friends to abandon their free will delusion. We'll see you next time. Take care and God bless. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]