Introduction to the Trinitarian Faith Course - Session 9

So we're it's the penultimate session, so last one next month.

And I think I was talking to Malcolm.

I think I haven't been here for 2.

So last time I was in Italy at the Waiwan base there having a

good time. And then the month before I

think was the month I forgot tried, yeah, tried to tried to

make it work. So I thought tonight the topic

is the Apostolic vision of Christ in John and Paul.

So the Pauline writings, Johanna and writings, and particularly

looking at why it is that the main emphasis begins with Christ

as creator and sustainer. So we can get into that and I

want to get into that, but particularly because I haven't

been here for two months, I'd be quite interested to hear where

everybody's AT and just maybe freewheel it and see where we

end up. And that can be we'll, we can do

stuff specifically on the topic for today.

But I'd also like to begin maybe by just opening it up.

And that's why I've got that other microphone if you're happy

for that to get on the podcast. But before I do that, we do have

the conference next weekend, which is here on Saturday.

It's going to be all day here on Saturday with Baxter and Jason

Clark from the rethinking of with Tacos podcast.

So I'm, I'm about to be up with them in Edinburgh from this

weekend. And then they're, they're coming

down. We've got another event on the

Friday the 29th, but on the 30th we're here.

And as I said, did I just say Baxter will be here Sunday

morning as well? So he's, he's preaching at

church on Sunday morning. I I really could do with two or

three more volunteers for the day, particularly someone who

can do PA systems. I do not have APA operator.

So if anybody is willing to step up and PA operate, that goes for

anyone listening on the podcast as well.

I would appreciate it. But also, if you're not away on

holiday, you really should be here.

I mean, I, I really mean that you should be here.

If you're away, then you're away.

He's in Greece and you can, yeah, come back for it.

But yeah, we've got, we've got 100, about 150 books in already.

Actually, very few people from Hope are booked in.

And I don't know if that's because people from Hope are

going to book in late or because they're just thinking they're

going to turn up or because they don't want to come or I don't

really know. Sorry.

Well, if you've done the course, I'd say that's like a double

reason to want to come. So we'll start at it's 10:10 AM,

start in the morning. We've got sessions that will run

up to 630, but we'll have like an hour after that also for sort

of discussion and connection time with obviously breaks in

the day. So.

So it's a it's a day programme on the Saturday, but basically,

yeah. Yeah.

Just the mic. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you, Esther.

Much appreciated. Grand.

And if anyone's got anyone who does an instrument who wants to

play in the band as well. Grace asked me to say that if

anyone wants to join in for a jam session, when we do worship,

we do jam sessions. Just so you know.

I mean, for anyone who doesn't, Grace and I have, we, we've done

ministry together. In fact, our second date was

running a healing meeting and then we went out for dinner.

So we, we've been doing ministry together forever.

And if when we do, when we do the like the worship stuff,

it's, it's a jam session really. It's not the sort of classic in

the can type thing. So it's, it, it, it's good fun.

So you can turn up with the harp or trumpet or a pair of spoons

and see what interesting spontaneous creative thing comes

out. Well, maybe, maybe you could get

that, that anointing, you know, from who are the two guys?

The first people who it says they were filled with the

spirit. Is it bizarro?

And who's the other guy? The two guys and they were, they

were the creative types, right? So they couldn't do anything.

You get the idea that they, they just can't do anything.

And then they get the Holy Spirit.

Now suddenly they can, they can like go create these incredible

sculptures and things like that. So yeah, if you want, if you

want to claim that one, come on, Malcolm, it's the age of AI.

You should be able to do it. Like, surely

Tuvan throat singing. Tuvan throat singing.

Well, there's Mongolian throat singing as well.

Yeah. There's all these disciplines of

throat singing. Yeah.

Kun Hortu. Any Kun Hortu fans in the room?

So I was. I'm always too aspirational with

these things, you know, Tuvan throat singing.

Not were not for the podcast. I will ask me again after I

finish the recording. And I'll do.

No, I don't know. Oh, was it?

Oh, there we go. OK.

See. Pop culture references.

I think Khun Hrutu are from Mongolia.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you're halfway there. A Cossack of course, on the

recording. At the moment people can only

hear my side of this conversation and just for the

benefit of people listening at home, there is a very random and

hilarious conversation going on. You just have to take my word

for it and laugh. We used to do that Again, those

of you who don't know, I trained as a conference interpreter so

when we we would do interpreting.

Most jokes are untranslatable you know somebody says a joke

how do you translate it? Certainly in the moment, most of

the time you can't. So the trick we always teach

students is if somebody tells a joke, you just say the speaker

right now just told a joke. It was extremely funny.

If you all laugh, you'll do me a good favour and they'll think

they told a good joke. And then everybody laughs and

the speaker thinks that, oh, my joke landed really well.

And it's, it's one of those sleight of hand tricks of the of

the interpreters. That's something an AI

interpreter won't do for you anyway.

So, yeah, next week, just talk to me.

I'll give you details. Can we do?

I'd like, I just like. I'm going to pray while I hand

this mic around for feedback. Hugh is in the middle of telling

an interesting story, so maybe he wants to start.

Yeah. Thanks, Father.

We receive what you have for us tonight.

Thank you for your recalibration, your paradigm

shifts, and your unveiling of the exceedingly good news.

Amen, Hugh. Well, it was simply that we, I

have a friend who lives near London and we just became aware

that we're on a similar sort of journey, same sort of questions.

So we just started connecting once a month, praying for each

other, sending each other little messages and that sort of thing.

And he, I actually read this this morning and I saw this is

one of the ones that I sent to him, which was this is from some

I'm reading, me and Susie both reading John together at the

moment, trying to look at it through this sort of lens.

And this scripture came up this morning, which was from John 12,

John 12:24

verse 24. So this is very truly, I tell

you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it

remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many

seeds. Anyone who loves their life will

lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will

keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow

me, and where I am, my servant also will be.

My Father will honour the one who serves me.

So my reflection was that previously I'd always shrink

away from verses like this, partly because I love to love

life, and anything that taught me that I had to hate my life, I

would kind of think, well, if Jesus is telling me that I don't

want it really. I mean, I think that's probably

a, whether you call it subconscious or whatever.

Do you see what I mean? It's something.

And I suppose if you hold that, then the natural follow on from

that is to say, well, I can't give Jesus my whole self because

it's a bit scary because I have to lose the life that I that I

want. Not that I just that I love, but

I want to love. Does that make sense?

It's about wanting to love life and live life.

So actually, if you read it from the lens of actually, and this

is what I said to my friend in the message was actually I'm

reading it like Jesus wants to give us life and life in all its

fullness. The life that he's offering is

an abundant and overflowing life.

And he's sharing with us that actually a bit like the sermon

that Bill preached the other time.

If you, if we learn how to die now to the life that is

perishing, that is futile and pointless, hopeless and

completely of this world and of nothing else.

If we can learn to die to that now and pick up the life that

Jesus has for us, that isn't hating life, that's loving life

and loving the best life. And that's what Jesus wants to

lead us into. So it's completely recalibrated

verse, that verse, those verses and verses like it for me.

Yeah. So the 20.

Three, just wanted to jump on that because I've been reading

John as well, quite deep a lot and and having the same sort of

experience of like reading things in new ways and finding

scriptures that previously would have felt a bit heavy, feeling a

bit light, lighter, a bit more exciting and had moments where

I've been reflecting with all the people.

And it's it's been fun because I've sometimes been reflecting

with them and they've been like, Oh my gosh, that makes it sound

so much more like a life giving and so much more exciting.

So I think for me, like a lot of the fruit of this journey a week

going on has been the, the scripture is giving me my is

speaking to my heart more and giving me life in a way they did

do before. But it, it, it was a bit more

intermittent and a bit more scattergun as to you know, what

you what you're going to get. I do have a question.

I don't know if now is a good time for a question or do you

want more? Reflection depends if if anyone

if anyone else wants to chime in first, I think they want you to

ask the. Question OK, so my question is

based around Gethsemane because it's the only only like it's the

it's the one part where I'm not not one part, but like it's just

been and it's something that I've come back to and gone.

I don't know why this fits in the story of what we're talking

about, because if Jesus only does what he sees the Father

doing and then prays something that where it's like, father, if

you want this or if, if you're happy to let this happen, can

you let it happen? But then the father obviously

doesn't. Well, there's, there's a,

there's a, the conclusion that Jesus comes to is now I'm going

to the cross. And I do believe that that

wasn't a reluctant decision, that that was for the joy set

before him. And he did, you know, that was

what Jesus wanted to do. I don't think he didn't want to

go to the cross and the father did.

But I still don't really know how to read that conversation

and that interaction and what was going on there.

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up because evidently this

was a question for the early church, because in, if you

recall, in John's version of the Garden of Gethsemane, he doesn't

say that. He says, and what should I say

now that my hour has come? Should I say let this cup pass

from me? By no means so if we understand

in the church tradition that John wrote the Gospel last, in

fact, perhaps even the last book to be written in the New

Testament was the Gospel of John.

And that he wrote it in part to make some theologic, not exactly

theological correction, but correction to the understanding

that people were taking from the stories that we're circulating

about Jesus beforehand. That this, that's a very

deliberate point that he makes. Equally, he makes the point that

Jesus carried his own cross where you see and, and maybe all

of the others, at least some of the other, I think at least

Matthew, you have Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross

because he falls, he's not able to carry himself.

And John makes the point of saying he carried his own cross

to Golgotha and those the the contradiction, if I put it in

those terms between those was not unknown to anybody.

Like this was very obvious. It's not like a gotcha.

Sometimes you get atheist guys will be like, ah, you see it

contradicts. Well, yeah, we we have always

known that. Actually it's just the

fundamentalists who pretended that these didn't contradict.

But everybody always knew there was a reason why that there are

two two different lights are being like light is being shown

from two different directions on what's happening here.

So I think what you see in Jesus expression in the garden, let

the cut pass from me, It's it's an extension of my God, my God,

why have you forsaken me? This is him entering into the

fullness of the Adamic experience.

That's him associating himself fully with our suffering.

He, he doesn't not feel what's going to happen to him.

So he suffers on the cross. He's not impassive.

This was a problem, incidentally, in the whole Aryan

controversy because this idea of, well, God is impassive.

God can't suffer anything because he's so transcendent.

He's so above and beyond, he can't suffer anything.

So here you have Jesus suffering.

So therefore he must be less than God.

So there's this idea that God cannot inhabit or come into

human suffering because that would be less than, it would be

lower than. And hence the Aryan controversy.

This is well, Jesus is a supreme being, but he's not God.

He's a creation, part of that. It's not the only reason, but

it's part of that. So you, you have John coming at

things from another angle. He he is really emphasising the

divinity of Christ throughout this.

So when Jesus carries his own cross, he's making a point of

saying the the existential and epistemic weight of the whole of

human tragedy throughout all history is being carried by him

alone. But in the eyewitness account,

physically he has someone else. He falls as someone else

carries. But that's also part of the

story. He's pushed beyond his limit and

he and he must be pushed beyond his limit because if he's not

pushed beyond the limit, then there still might be a limit

that he hasn't gone to. So I think that again, having

having a window on that helps us to grow up a little bit in how

we understand the Apostolic witness and what's going on

here, rather than thinking about it in again, the the well

meaning but misguided fundamentalism that just says

like a mathematical equation. All of these things add up

literally in the plain black and white text.

And then you, as long as you put them together right, then you

get something that is completely perfect without any and anything

that doesn't sort of seem to fit together.

The New Testament doesn't work like that.

And hopefully we we're comfortable with that as an

idea. But that that certainly is the

case. The the early church was

comfortable with this because they were they were very close

to it. They could read the original

language. Yeah, obviously there are there

are differences in emphasis and in some instances differences in

description, but these are really not even Origin talks

about this directly. He, he addresses it and, and

sort of has a, he takes, he takes a low view of those who

get really get really hung up on or was it 1 Angel or two at the

tomb and all these sorts of things.

And that this is really not the, this isn't the point.

So in, in that sense, we're seeing different, we could, we

could understand we're seeing different sides of the mystery

that is Christ fully man and fully God.

So yes, when he's in the garden, he is expressing the full heart

of the Father. But at that I don't, I think

that what he's trying to show us is he's he's not there in the

garden feeling very happy. He's not there in this sort of

serene, blissful state like I'm about to go to the cross.

That would be kind of anti material.

And particularly John in other parts of of the gospel is very

keen to show that that's not the case.

So he has Jesus eating, cooking and eating fish after his

resurrection to show he's actually physically raised.

He's not just a spirit being or something.

He gets hungry, you know, he gets tired.

So there's, there's a theological thing that's

happening there. Yeah.

If that's sufficient to answer it.

I mean, you notice there are other things in the passion

narrative in John. It's much longer in John than

anywhere else. It's a substantial part of the

gospel is the passion narrative. You get this The part where the

the Roman soldiers and the emissaries from the Sanhedrin

and they all turn up in this massive crowd and three times

they ask him, we seek Jesus of Nazareth and he says I am and

they all draw back and fall to the ground.

You know, they get wiped out and you don't that's not listed in

the other gospels. So it's listed there for a

reason. It's not just an extra detail or

you guys miss this out. This is John again.

We accept the the credible tradition, you know, despite I

think attempts, you know, every all these different critical

Bible scholars try and come up with a different angle to prove

their justify another book. You know, let's argue about why

it wasn't really John or why it was this or why it was that.

Actually the the the church tradition is a pretty solid

church tradition as to how we ended up with something like the

Gospel of John. So I think we can understand

that John is drawing out certain key things to make a spiritual

point, which is what Irenaeus says about it 22 generations on

from John, direct spiritual lineage.

You know, John Polycarp, Irenaeus and Irenaeus is the one

saying This is why John wrote the Gospel.

So you'd have thought he would know because the guy who

mentored him was directly mentored by John.

So you'd have, you'd figure that if there's any integrity to this

tradition at all, he would be a credible source on that one.

Yeah. Thank you.

I really liked the the session 9, the the I think it was the

first one actually that I thought, OK, I kind of I kind of

understood Baxter or got and I got it a bit more, but two

questions. So 1 was so it was the one with

the cups. Yeah, you talked about the three

cups. And so I think I, I think I, I

think I enjoyed it because when I liked it, because I like, I, I

think it felt like all the way he was talking about, you know,

everybody, Jesus being in everybody for me, for me.

Any which way you split kind of separation and hell and all of

those things is there's an element of fear and A and a

difficultness in. In selling that story and, and

it, and it felt like, OK, I, I can see that this is truly a

gospel of grace in the way that he was talking about it.

So I, I was like, I was like, great, I'm, I'm on for that.

But one question was, so he talked, he talked from

Colossians, I think Colossians 29.

And he talked about because I'm guessing, I'm guessing like in

the room here, there would be a lot of us or some of us who

would say, like, I'm on for that idea that Jesus is in everybody

before they've made a decision. And some of us, some people

would say, I'm not on for that. And I'm guessing that one of

one. So Baxter talks about South

Colossians 29 in Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives in

bodily form and in Christ you have been brought to to

fullness. So he was talking about I think

he he talked about have been like past tense.

So and I guess so first question is, I'm guessing some people

would say, but Colossians is talking to the church.

So he's talking to people who are already in.

So that was question mark. So that's my first question.

And second question was? And second question was he was

asked a question about universalism and it like, I

guess it felt a little bit like you've not fluffed the answer,

but a little bit really. And it, and it so it feels to me

like, so I don't have a problem with that label or that tag, but

it doesn't feel like in these discussions, we're owning that.

And I'm guessing my question is, are we not owning it because

from our evangelical like roots, that word, liberal word are bad

words. You know, we, we, we, we, we, we

see them as not words we can that don't that don't have

integrity as in biblical integrity or so is it 'cause we,

we don't want to like make divide or.

Yeah, well, I can, I can, I can answer that very directly from

three different perspectives. I can answer it from my own.

Like I I'm on the record of having owned that.

I mean, I've been very public in, in debates and things on

various podcasts and different positions, even in my book are

very overt Baxter from I, I look, Charlie's asking about the

concept of universalism and I said, I've been very overt about

owning that and saying, yeah, this is this is the logical

conclusion of the New Testament testimony.

And I've also been very overt about the problems I have with

it. Again, if you've read my book,

you'll know good plug there. But the, as far as this, the

course itself goes, it's not really the, the, that's a,

that's an eschatological question.

So that's about eschatology, right?

Where, what, what's the end direction?

You know, how, how, where does this all end up?

And I think that the, the, the point of this course is to

reframe how we consider these questions and to, to couch them

more properly according to the Apostolic witness and to get

free from some of the baggage we've inherited from the Western

system. It's quite often people want to

fast track to secondary or tertiary sort of downstream

doctrinal conclusions. So eschatology is a downstream

doctrinal conclusion. The creature says he's coming

again to judge the living and the dead.

That's it. There's no, there's going to be

a millennial reign, there's going to be this, there's going

to be that, you know, all of that stuff.

This is all downstream. It's not, it's not there in the

central point. And so the, the purpose of this

course is not primarily to address the issues downstream,

it's to help equip us to be able to address those downstream for

ourselves in our own way. And people might come to

different conclusions on those sorts of questions.

So we sometimes talk about this, this is a Christological

recalibration or a Christological correction.

Then inevitably the question does arise.

So I can say again, Baxter was 3 weeks ago on the, on the podcast

of a mutual friend of ours, which if anybody is particularly

interested in this topic, it's the podcast is called Grace

Saves All the Necessity of Christian Universalism.

And run by a friend of mine in the US who basically has

interviewed and continuing to interview more or less anyone on

the planet scholarship wise, pastorally or anything who is,

is coming from anything in that sort of direction.

And Baxter was on, I've been on a couple of times on that

podcast. I've been on the debate on that

podcast and he, Baxter was on really addressing again, this

question very directly. And then so for the Third Point

is from Baxter's perspective, he and I again will I, I, I agree

with this. The, the point is not like

universalism is another ISM. It also could mean 100 different

things depending on where you're coming from with it.

And so it's not necessarily that useful a word given that you

have no idea what somebody's talking about when they mean it.

One of the points he makes in the in the lecture is, well, if

you believe that all are inheritors of original sin in

Adam, then you are a universalist because you believe

something happened in Adam that universally took everybody, you

know, on the wrong side of the line.

So that that is itself a type of universalism in the sense that

the impact is universal. So the, the bigger issue here,

from my perspective, is the framing of our soteriology has

been in this Western legal, in our innocent guilty mindset.

And that again, that's a downstream doctrine, which is

why we take seven weeks before we get to the subject of the

atonement. So week 7, I know I wasn't here,

but the, or month 7, the, the, the question about the cross,

because there's a lot of this foundational stuff needs to be

put in place before we can then begin to look at the cross.

We've inherited so much baggage from how we begin to, you know,

engage with these things. So I think then the, the issue

with what the word means is a problem.

It's a trigger word for some people and for others it's not.

And then you get into, well, why is it a trigger word for you?

And often the, the, the, the bigger problem there is people

haven't even been able to have a forum to be able to explore

their own issues, dissonances and concerns around the whole

equation, the whole soteriology equation.

Many, many people. Soteriology is what, what is

salvation? How does salvation work?

So a great many people are in that, in that space where it's

not even a conversation that's safe to have.

Because as soon as you start having that conversation in a

lot of churches, immediately people are terrified by it.

And they're probably terrified with it about it because they've

got their own dissonance around the issue too.

I had one pastor, after sitting with a good friend of mine, sat

with him for a couple of hours over lunch one day.

And towards the end, he said, well, you know, if I didn't

believe I was saving people from an eternal hell, I wouldn't be a

pastor. So his whole, his whole frame of

his calling, his ministry and everything, he was honest enough

to say that the way this doctrine has been framed to him

of judgement is ultimately the when you boil it down, it is the

decisive factor as to why he has made the decision to pursue

being a pastor. Now with no I'll intent towards

him at all. He's a he's a good friend of

mine. I understand that.

But how terrifying is that? And then you take he was he was

willing enough to to be honest about it.

How many people are not willing enough to be honest about it or

haven't even been honest about it with their own selves and

they are their pastoring churches, hundreds of them all

over. And I've had a lot of them in my

counselling chair when it all breaks down because the the the

dissonance and the pressure around what I'm supposed to be

preaching a message of the the love of God is something I've

experienced for myself. But actually within this

ecosystem of this, of the message that we're we're

propagating, it kind of doesn't really work, does it?

And then you get the Calvinist thing and you get the Armenian

thing, all these attempts to try and square the circle, which

frankly don't work. They're not, they're not

logically, they're, they're nonsensical.

So this is complex, it's deep waters, it's got lots of layers

and it's very emotional. So I think that the word itself,

for many people, it's just, it's a, it's an inflammatory word.

When I'm travelling around and ministering, sometimes I will

get up, depending on the audience, I will get up and I'll

say, I'm going to, I'm going to preach Hellfire to you tonight.

I'm going to preach judgement. I'll use that language because

it actually relaxes them. They're so, they're so used to

it. If you're not using that, they

start getting, they start worrying.

Oh, what are you saying? Are you saying that it doesn't

matter that we sin? Well, they ask the apostle Paul

that too. So sometimes I say it and it

just relaxes them. I've done it with Jehovah's

Witnesses too. So do Jehovah's Witnesses.

Don't worry, I believe in one God, Jehovah.

I'm a Jehovah's Witness too. I believe in one God, Jehovah.

I just don't come to your organisation, but I believe in

one God. Like, let's pray together.

We'll just pray to Jehovah. Don't worry.

Nobody else. And it relaxes them, It chills

them out. It's the only time I've been

able to actually have really meaningful dialogue.

One of the only times really meaningful dialogue in the

Jehovah's Witness community was by adopting that approach.

Because if I come in and say why believe in the Trinity,

immediately walls are up because Trinity is a trigger word for

that community. So a lot, a lot of this is about

sort of pastoral, you know, handling.

And also by the way, if you look throughout the church fathers,

they had the same conversation. You look at Gregory of Nyssa,

for example, saying very overtly, well, of course, we all

know that Christ is ultimately going to save everyone, but we

can't communicate this to the masses because they will not

know how to handle it. We need to keep it amongst those

of us who are educated and who understand how our

responsibility as, you know, presbyters and pastors within

the church that we're trying to look after people who can't

handle, you know, they, they don't even know how to read.

And if we start getting into this, we could really, we're

afraid it's going to go wrong and they're all going to start

thinking, oh, well, it doesn't matter what we do.

And that's not what we're saying either.

So you actually have this record of the conversation more than

once, different key Saints and figures of the of the early

church key to forming the Nicene faith who who actually have this

very discussion. Again, it's not new.

So and then you have others like origin of Alexandria who say,

look, I'm not coming to preach a doctrine about this, but I am

coming to speculate if we understand this is who Christ is

then, and he says I'm I'm flagging this as speculation.

I might be thinking about this the wrong way, but let me show

you my working. And he goes on to say, well, we

should suppose that all if all things means all things, we

should kind of see this is my paraphrase.

I can't remember the exact wording, but he's saying he says

we should see on the eschatological horizon the

reconstitution of all things, including satanic fallen demonic

spirits, right. Even he he gets into this

discussion in in in his in his writings and an origin basically

is the progenitor of all Bible study.

It comes back to him. You know, he is he is the one

who who's teaching was the amongst the most Seminole of the

early church. I think he's called a doctor of

the church. We weren't even calling them

church fathers at the time. So again, these conversations

are not those conversations could be had within that

environment. A lot of the evangelical space.

The conversation can't be had, even though I know for a fact

because again, I've been around. I was at a conference with, I'll

say he Roger Forster, who's gone to glory now, founder of the

Ichthus Fellowship. Roger and Faith.

First time I met R.E.M., we did quite a bit of work together

some years ago in the China space.

The first time I talked to Roger, he said, what

denomination are you connected? I said, well, I'm an Elim.

He said, what did Elim think about, about the doctrine of

hell? You know, do they believe in

this eternal conscious torment thing or I said, well, I think

they're pretty much in in that direction.

And he said, you know, we sat with the heads of all the major

or the majority of the major Evangelical Alliance

denominations a couple of years ago.

And the question was put to them, does anyone of you in this

room actually believe in an eternal hell in like burning

hell? It's not a single person said

that they did. In fact, they all said, no, we

don't believe in that, but don't tell our denominations because

we'd get lynched. So there's a there's a political

problem here around even having the discussion.

So I think that the, the point Baxter makes in that podcast, I

do recommend listening to is very, very good.

He's very, very articulate on this subject and very clear.

The the podcast is called Grace saves all.

David Ardman is the the podcast host and he's say he's he's

become a good friend of mine and he's it's a really very

comprehensive resource across all sort of dimensions on the

subject. But Baxter makes the points as

we do not preach universalism because it's an ISM, we preach

Christ. And that's to say that none of

this is to be removed from its relational context and placed

into some sort of principle that says this is a philosophical

principle, that everybody is saved.

That's not what we're preaching. We're preaching all are included

in Christ. Now, what are you going to do

about it? Because that demands a response.

This sort of shallow, what's this kind of pop shallow

universalism that gets thrown around that basically says,

well, all dogs go to heaven and everything's basically fine.

It's like evidently everything is not fine.

So this is a, this, this is not how it's articulated to us in

the New Testament. It's not how it's articulated to

us in the, in the Church fathers or really at any point in the,

in the, you know, Orthodox faith.

It's not put in those terms. It's put in terms of, look, God

is a consuming fire and you're in relationship with him,

whether you, whether you like it or not, he's relating to you.

You're in him. You have no life or being apart

from him. So the question then is we'll

project that forward. What does that mean?

And I think if you want to, if you want to take it from the,

the just the back to Bible verses, we want to play the

proof text game. I, I mean, I sometimes say to

people, all right, plug that into every knee shall bow and

every tongue shall confess in heaven and earth and under the

earth, Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Like take that, take that verse and plug it into your framework.

Like, what are you going to do with that?

Because it's possible to work your way through the new Tasman

picking certain verses and end up with a fully universalist

position. Or you can pick verses and end

up with like an annihilation position, or you can pick a

bunch of verses and end up in a everyone's going to burn in

literal fire for eternity conclusion.

So which way you navigate through that, which path you

navigate through the Scripture is going to end up somewhere

completely different. And again, that's also why with

this course, we're trying to encourage you not to do it like

that. Actually, let's take a step

back. What are the first principles

here? The first principles are the

revelation of God in Christ. It's Christological.

Who is Jesus now from, from that point?

It it's, we're not looking for shallow doctrinal agreement or

persuasion about any ideas. We're looking for life and

reality. Well, of course we're using

Scripture. Yeah, of course I'm not saying

abandoned Scripture, but I'm saying don't.

I'm saying we can take an approach to the Scripture that

says we're going to, we're going to sort of take step a stepping

stone pathway through this verse and this verse and this verse

and this verse and this verse. And then we've constructed A

doctrine out of those. That doctrine might be

completely divorced from the revelation of God in Christ, but

it might be completely biblical, like the snake handlers in the

Haitian snake handlers in Brundage.

Sorry. Well, but again, this goes back

to my point about how do we read the Scripture?

The Scripture is the Scripture is multi layered, dynamic.

It's turbulent. It's not this linear.

Here are the ABC's of it's not, it's not a manual, right?

It's not a legal text. What we tend to get in the

fundamentalist space is we say the Bible, or I mean, I don't

people say the Bible is the literal in the literal

infallible inspired word of God, and everything about it in its

original text is completely true in in all, in all ways, and

therefore it is the source of authority and everything.

But that's a statement. I don't want to be too negative

on those guys. They were, they were trying to

do something. This is Princeton theology, you

know, turn of the 20th century. They're trying to put something

down that recovers confidence in the scripture when it had been

completely wiped out in the sort of late stages of post

enlightenment thinking in the 19th century.

So they're trying to recover that.

So I'm not, again, I'm not trying to slam them, but I'm

trying to say that that doesn't really stand up when you subject

it to scrutiny, including the conversation we know we're

having with Sam earlier. Well, did Jesus carry his own

cross or not? Because one guy says he carried

his own cross. One guy said he didn't carry his

own cross. So now if we're standing on, on

the, the doctrine that this must be infallible and the literal

dictated word of God, like like Muslims believe the Quran is a

literal dictated word. If if we treat it in that way,

we have major problems from a faith point of view.

It is, it is reliable, but it's reliable.

But but what does it say about it's reliability again?

And this is where we, it, it, it defies our attempts to find

shallow certainties, right. So you have the Apostle Paul,

who's we know wrote the majority of the New Testament talking

about his own writings. And he says people make a big

deal about having a letter from me, but you are my letter.

So when he asks the questions about what even is the writing

when that's up for debate for him.

And Peter calls Paul's writing scripture, right.

So when when he is even addressing this issue of all

right, we have a written word that gives us an answer.

He says, actually the real writing is in you.

It's personal, it's relational. It's not something that can be

distilled down into black and white pages, you know, ink, ink

on a page. It is it's only seen through the

the, the continuity of the family of God working this stuff

out in the Holy Spirit. And that includes the scripture

is central to that, absolutely central to it.

But if we think that it stands alone by itself, it doesn't

because the Scripture even says of itself the letter kills.

So if we, if we're trying to be really biblical about it, the

Bible itself starts turning the gun back on us, you know, if we

adopt that approach. So to me again, this is this is

a hermeneutic problem. Just go back to the the early

church. They never read it this way.

That was not how they were approaching it.

They they were not under any illusions that it was not a

collection of scriptural writings that that could just be

taken as well. God said it.

I believe that that settles it. It's there.

And again, we see over and over again the story happening in the

New Testament is Jesus addressing this very problem.

And that is alarming to us because we've come from, again,

it's a Western thing. We have this this idea that

objectivity is something out there that we can get a hold of.

Well, as long as it's objectively there in the book,

at least I can say that's true. Maybe I don't understand it, but

it's true and it's there. It's this objective thing and

again, this divorces it from relationship.

This makes it that concepts that ideas and that has no life in

it. And actually a lot of that's

about fear and control. When the Bible itself also says

the one who thinks he knows something doesn't yet know as he

ought to know. Well, what the heck am I

supposed to do with that? I thought the Bible's supposed

to give me the answers to the questions.

Well, if I've got an answer to the question and then I read the

next page and tells me if you think you've got the answer,

that's the very moment you don't have the answer.

Well, OK, I'm screwed then. You've just sunk my battleship.

You've drilled a hole in the hull, put me to the bottom of

the Sea of Galilee. What am I supposed to do with

that? Of course it's supposed.

It defies the shallow certainties.

I think a lot of the conversation in the the kind of

universal space is frankly is just very shallow.

I think that they're a they're a really solid and disturbing in

many ways takes on this disturbing in that it will it

cannot leave you complacent stuff that really upsets the

apple cart from some astonishingly gifted voices in

in George MacDonald being one of them.

So I would say in terms of getting into the broader

conversation around the what our eschatology is, where do we see

all of this headed? I think the best way to do that

is it's a it's a really important question.

It's a great one to be hanging on to, but it's very easy to

just say, well, we've got an answer to that and we put that

answer over there. I don't want that to happen.

It needs to be get into the fire with Jesus.

What does it start to do to you when you begin to see the nature

of how things really are? How does that begin to transform

the way you behave? How does it transform the way

you see people? How does it transform what you

pray for, how you treat them? And what what judgement is that

landing at your door right now? Not what's happening to so and

so down there. So what's happening to you in

the fire of this message? That is like going back to

Hugh's point from the beginning says actually whoever wants to

save his life will lose it. So there's there's something

quite extreme in all of this that is taking place.

So. So I think again, a long answer

to a direct question and people are trying to jump in.

I see lots of lots of people trying to jump in.

So let me, I I said Sam, Hugh and Malcolm all wanted to say

something. As I said, oh, OK, OK.

I try and wants to come back. Yeah, No, it's not on.

I'll answer shorter for the next.

Paul Young would tell me off. He'd say we don't answer, we

respond. Sorry, Paul, if you're

listening. Thanks.

So you mentioned about origin, yeah.

Could you just just describe briefly one of his impact on

early church and who he was in relation to?

Different yeah. Origin of Alexandria, also known

as origin Adamantius, the Iron Man because he was so strong in

his debating ability against the, you know, the heretics,

right. So origin he his main

contributions are hermeneutical method.

So understanding how to read the scripture.

So he would he would effectively I'm again, I'm really

oversimplifying this, but and maybe in another sense, I'm not

oversimplifying it. The point of the scripture is to

reveal Jesus. If it's not revealing Jesus to

you, you're reading it wrong and you're projecting your own

dysfunction into it. So that would be 1 and the other

would be beginning to put down a a coherent mystical Christian

mysticism, you know, as a framework amongst a whole bunch

of other things. But a lot of what we have the

most significant stuff that he wrote, we don't have it doesn't

survive, but he his extensive commentaries on the 1st 6 books

of Genesis are referred to and are are seen really as being

amongst the most influential in I think origin was second

century, middle 2nd century or late 2nd century, if I recall.

So he's, he's quite early, but he he has an extraordinarily

outsized influence on the the formation of early Christian

thought. And any good books too?

So you can get his book on 1st principles, which is quite, you

can get that online for free in translation.

Translation is pretty good. It's reasonably easy to follow.

Some of these ones can be difficult to follow, but that's

quite a good one. And that goes through

effectively. It's his.

You'll see his Christological method is in the first section

and then in the later section he goes into what he calls

speculation, which is where he starts talking about eschatology

and the relationship between angels and demons and all these

other kind of things is in there.

But he's careful to flag that as as a speculation rather than

doctrine and. Just quickly did he did he fall

out of grace with with kind of modern theologians?

What was he? He fell out of grace several 100

years later in there were so again is in the successive

councils over the hundreds of years, particularly following

Nicaea, you get these increasingly nitpicky, in my

opinion, increasingly nitpicky anathematizations of people.

You know, the, the church begins to get it, it, it's, it starts

narrowing and it gets political and you have these anathemas

that are issued against the originists hundreds of years

later. But it's interesting the, the

that's usually held up as an example of how the church in I

forget which council it was, they anathematize that they

declared heresy. The idea that everybody would be

saved is called apocotasasis in the New Testament, the the

restoration of all things into Christ apocotasis.

But particularly it's, it's not, if you actually look at what

they say, the thing that they're condemning is a kind of a form

of pantheism where it says everything is God and God is in

pieces and God is being brought back together.

So, and that's not what origin teaches.

You go and read origin. He doesn't say anything of the

sort. So whatever they're critiquing

is not the origin that we know of or have any record of.

So, but in the hundreds of years in the intermediate space, lots

of stuffs going on and and politics are in in the mix as

well. So yeah, it's the the early

church is by no means a, a nice convenient way to to just kind

of claim something. I mean, in the sense you can,

you can get into the fathers and find almost anything if you look

hard enough. A little bit like the Bible, but

perhaps even worse. Yeah.

Thanks. One of the things that's been, I

guess not weighing on me, but just I guess recurring for me

over the last few months of doing this is kind of where,

where kind of spiritual warfare fits from.

You know, there's a there's AI guess we we're talking about

Christ being in all, all creatures, all of the created

and that he's the first thing everything is created

thereafter, which we've touched on loads of times.

So that that's there's a lot of creatures beyond the physical

realm, you know, of, of many different types of which we

don't have a a lot of scripture about.

But there's there's there's certainly a reference enough

that we can agree there's a there's a pretty significant

spiritual realm of which and there are fairly well documented

kind of fallen creatures of various descriptions from the

watchers of of Genesis pre flood through to, you know.

The watches of First Enoch. Yeah.

But well, all of all of, I mean they can be referred of

referring to of those times pre Noah kind of flood times.

And then you've got whether that's through Babel and

through, you know, right through all of history outside of it.

We've got lots of groups that are worshipping, worshipping the

spiritual realm, which which seems pretty demonic.

Where does that kind of fit where, where does it?

It feels like that's something that's a part of history that

with regardless of where we look at the Bible, we just look at

look at history, look at look at the towers and monuments through

history that have built worshipping all sorts of whether

that's RAR or whatever else. There's something going on with

that in the spiritual realm, influencing thought of people to

worship stuff that feels pretty satanic, pretty demonic of all

in, in different with different masks on where, where does that

fit into our kind of we talk about things like universalism.

Where does that fit into? Where's Where's?

Well now, well, now, well now you're doing what Origin did,

which is get the Christological foundation in.

And then he says, OK, now we've got to speculate.

So that's exactly what he did. And many others have done the

same thing, which is all right. Now, how do we, how do we

navigate the fact that we've got this invisible spiritual world?

How do we process it? How do we fit it into a

cosmology? I think it's conspicuous.

The New Testament doesn't actually give us a cosmology of

these things. It assumes some to a degree.

You have this conversation about that.

He's come to destroy the elemental powers and it talks

about him disarming the Archons, the the powers and

principalities and the the Archons of the the is an idea of

these powerful spiritual beings that are responsible.

They they govern sort of different levels of reality.

And you get these various levels of complexity in the

demonologies and angelologies of the particularly the 2nd 3rd

century BC rabbinic mysticism, which is where first Enoch comes

from. So I said the conversation about

the watchers. But anyway, apologies for those

of you who are complete. We're completely off piece here

in first Enoch. It's a book that's quoted

multiple times in the New Testament.

It's a book that is riffing off of Genesis 6.

This idea of why did the flood happen and So what?

I would just put it into the you, you have all kinds of

different opinions on this from all sorts of different people.

The New Testament takes a really minimalist approach on it.

You have no named demonic powers in the New Testament.

They're just unclean spirits. And there's no attempt to

formulate any kind of systematic hierarchy of demons or powers or

anything. You have Hebrews one says,

what's man? That you're mindful of him, the

Son of man, that you even think of him for you made him a little

while lower than God or lower than the Elohim, lower than the

angelic beings. You have crowned him with glory

and compassion and have sat all things under his feet.

And then it says, yet we do not see all things under the feet of

man. So Hebrews 1 poses this

question. There's this part of the Bible,

it's starting there, part of the Bible that says there's this

whole complex world of powers and all these things, and you've

created man and you've crowned man with glory and compassion,

and you've set him above all of these things.

But actually we don't see that. We're oppressed by demonic

powers left, right and centre. We're oppressed by political

powers. We've got disease, we've got

disaster. We've got all this stuff that's

happening, right. It's the problem of evil.

Yeah, precisely. It's the problem of evil.

And so the right of Hebrews acknowledges the question and

then gives an answer which you might find extraordinarily

frustrating. It's probably supposed to

frustrate you because the writer says, yeah, we don't see that.

We don't see man above everything, he says.

But we do see the man, the son, who for a short time took on a

name that was a little lower than that angelic, but now has

ascended to inherit a name that is higher than them all.

And we see all things under his feet because he is the one to

whom the Father said, Sit at my right hand until I make your

enemies a footstool for your feet.

And then you plug that back into Ephesians where Paul says, and

God raised us up in Christ and seated us in him in the heavenly

places far above all rule and authority, power and

principality in every name that can be named.

So the New Testaments articulation of this is like,

look, however many powers, God's beings or anything that there

may be, whatever probably you might be having with them.

I'm going to remind you of the only thing that matters, which

is crisis already ascended, disarmed, disempowered, all of

that stuff sat up on the throne of the universe and you have

been put into him and sat on that throne as well.

Go stick that in your pipe and smoke it like that's that's the

New Testament's answer. Deal, deal with that.

Like what we get in the a lot of the spiritual warfare

conversation kind of invites us to come down to the level of

phenomena. Well, how do I deal with this

thing? How do I unseat this demon?

How do I cast this thing out? The New Testament, it's really

conspicuous. It's not there.

None of that stuff is there in the in the Apostolic writings at

all. There's never you, you get them

saying angels long to look into these things that you're you get

to, you get to understand like they're they're watching and

marvelling with the gospel that you get to dine out on.

So again, take your pick. You can find anyone who's

attempted to create some sort of angelology, demonology,

cosmological system on this has come up with a different one,

and they all have their own angle on it.

The popular thing at the moment is to make it all about aliens

because that fits the mythology of our current time.

So people would draw from these mythological accounts to try and

make sense of experiences. And I think there are

experiences, there are experiences of spiritual

phenomena. Things behave as if they have a

personality, like money. Jesus calls money mammon.

He gives it a name and it behaves as a, it behaves like a

person. It's not a person, but it

behaves like it has a mind of its own.

So there are these disembodied, you know, psychic,

transpersonal, malevolent entities that are around there.

How do we deal with them? Contemplation of Christ, right?

We see Jesus. It's like turn your attention

right back there. Where are you seated?

What has he done? From that fountainhead flows all

life and for me that life flushes all the turds down the

drain, whatever shape or colour or variety of turd they might

happen to be. So to me it's simple and I had

an experience. I talk about it in my book was

in in Taipei a few years ago with Grace, Taipei City in

Taiwan. And we went to the, the Dragon

Mountain Temple, which is a very active temple in central Taiwan.

When you go in, if you want, you can take a little number to

there's like a ticket tape like in the supermarket to go to the

deli counter. And you're not taking a number

to go to the deli counter. You're taking a number to go and

see the medium, you know, the resident medium who's in, in the

temple if you want your fortune told, right, Very, very active

temple. And so we're just wandering

around and I'm showing Grace around.

She's never been in a in a any kind of place like this, right.

And so anyway, and then we were walking around and at a certain

point I'm standing there and there's a woman and she's

lighting incense and she's kowtowing to the the the the

deity, the idol that's, that's in the temple.

And I'm there and I just start asking the question.

So Jesus, you are everywhere. Where are you here and what are

you doing? Yeah.

So I just, that's my question. So I just begin So and I'm, I'm

listening and I'm watching. What is it?

You're drawing my attention to Holy Spirit, and I can see this

golden statue over there that's lifeless and inert, can do

nothing. Maybe, maybe it's nicely

created. Maybe it's, well, it's pretty

well it's nothing. It's a piece of inner matter.

And then I see over here the woman who's lighting the incense

and praying to this thing. And as I'm looking at her, the

thoughts going through my mind, there's only three reasons why a

person comes to a temple like this and lights incense and

prays the way that she's praying.

So reason #1 she or a member of her family are very sick and she

wants healing. Reason #2 the, the children have

some problem and she's worried about them.

Maybe it's to do with exams. A lot of it's about that they go

because they want success in the exams and they're worried, you

know, that it's not going to go well or #3 they're starting a

business and they need to know if it's the the right time.

So these kind of very real and human, human things, right?

And also you're supposed to go once every 12 years for

astrological reasons. So it might have been for that,

but that's unlikely. It's probably one of those three

things. And as I'm standing there

watching her, I was thinking that here, here you have

whatever's going on for her. And she represents one of

millions of people who's doing something virtually identical to

this in temples all over the, the, particularly the, the, the

Eastern world. And she's here because something

or someone she cares about is in trouble and she can't help them.

She hasn't got an answer. She's there's some desperation

and the only thing she knows to do, because the only thing she's

inherited is you go there and you lie into this.

And they're hoping that there's some kind of answer is going to

be there, right. So now what I'm saying I'm

actually what's happening is I'm the veil is beginning to draw

back and I'm actually seeing her as she is.

I'm not seeing, I'm not just seeing a person.

I'm not seeing a, an idea or a concept.

I'm seeing a real person in a real place at a real moment.

And as I'm seeing at a bang, there's the flow of compassion.

Like, wow, the Holy Spirit. And I got so drunk in the

Spirit, I was whacked in the Holy Spirit.

And I was like, and I went and found grace.

I said, did you just feel that? And she said, yeah, I just felt

it said bang. It's like suddenly the manifest

presence of God. And I said to her, it would be

so easy to start ministering in here.

I said, you want to work, You want to flow in Word of

knowledge, you want to flow in healing.

It would be dead easy in here. Right now.

What you've got is a room, a temple full of people hungering

and thirsting for righteousness. And the Bible says blessed them,

they'll be filled. Of course, if we started doing

that, we would have a riot very quickly.

The same thing that happened in the New Testament.

The riot would happen because it would be so disturbing to the

status quo. It would just be, it would be a

crazy upheaval. So I said to, you know, if we

ever moved to Taiwan, maybe I should volunteer as a medium in

the temple because it would be they're just volunteers.

You know, anybody can volunteer, right?

Well, maybe I should volunteer and I can just like Jesusify

everybody who comes in. And I was think, think of the

publicity. No, no point in history has a

white guy who speaks Chinese sat in any of these things and done

this. And they're doing it like in the

name of Jesus. And people are getting whacked

with this kind of flow of grace. I thought I could see in that

space, I could see how ethicists got turned into a war zone by

the Apostle Paul being there a couple of days and behaving that

way. Now the Taiwanese church won't

touch it with a barge pole. You can't go in there.

There are demons. In fact, we were in Turkey on a

mission trip and we're talking with friends of ours who are,

who are from the Turkish church. They'd been out to Taiwan.

And good friend Ihan, you know, he says, Oh, well, you know,

gosh, he said, man, the temples are so demonic.

He said, we even got near them and I started getting dizzy and

I started getting spun out and all these things.

I was just like this oppressive feeling.

And he said, it's not like here. He said here in in Turkey, if

people come and they want to visit a mosque, we'll take them

to the mosque. It's no problem.

You know, we can we'll show them around.

It's not like that at all. So he tells me, and I'm

thinking, Holy Spirit, I need a word of wisdom, which is like

one of my most common prayers, right?

Word of wisdom. How do I answer that?

So I told him that story. This is let me tell you what I

experienced. I had.

I said, well, this is what happened to me when I was in the

Dragon Spring Temple, which is like, it's a heavy duty temple,

it's not a museum. And I said, and he was like, oh,

he was obviously challenged by the concept.

And he said, well, you know, I do.

I find that I find that really difficult.

You know, OK, you know, I've got to, I've got to think about it.

And I said to him, here's the deal I had.

I said if I had to stay out of any building that was full of

demons, that would exclude 99% of churches.

And he sort of stopped. He goes and then he laughed.

He goes, Oh yeah, he goes, oh, but it's not the same.

It's not the same. I said, I, I know, I know it's

not exactly the same. I'm being a bit naughty, I said,

but on the, on the other side, why is it not the same?

Like people are people. And if we can recognise Christ

everywhere, then what we're going to be able to see is going

to be different. What we, how we frame, what

we're able to see, we'll change everything about the way we

interact with it. And I think This is why the New

Testament does not present a systematic demonology.

It will tell you how do you deal with this demon or that demon or

all these other kind of things, because that actually just

simply re empowers and re engages and agrees again with

the very things that Jesus has come to dissolve and undo.

And I don't even know what they are.

And I had a week long, literally a week long debate whilst

travelling with Baxter and John Crowder on this very subject.

Because, you know, I'm saying, well, are we, what are we

dealing with, you know, personal entities that are created good

that have then become bad? Or are we dealing with kind of

a, a corporate psychic manifestation that has a human

origin that ultimately is like a shadow.

And when the lights turn on, it just disappears because if it's

a thing that has its origin in Christ, it also is included in

Christ. It is not a thing.

It's a shadow. Then it's then when the light

comes on, it disappears because it's not a thing, right.

And I don't know the answer to that question, but I know that

we can just listen to the Holy Spirit and pray.

And again, Athanasius, if you, if you read on the incarnation

in that book, he talks about it, right?

He says it's one of his apologetics.

He's done his whole, you know, reason, OK, This is why we

believe. And he's like, look.

And at the end of the day, if you still don't like what I'm

saying, why is it that whenever we make the sign of the cross,

anyone who's demonised just gets set free?

And if there are any river spirits, he said.

I think it's funny, he says that if there are any river spirits,

they get sent off. And if there's anybody dead,

they just come back to life. Why is it we just make the sign

of the cross and that happens? You know, evidently this guy is

tracking with something that like we're not tracking with

right. And and then his his final

conclusion on that is, and if none of that persuades you, the

bottom line is none of our people are afraid of death.

And that's the most unnatural thing you can imagine.

So that how can they possibly be not afraid of death if Jesus

hasn't risen from the dead? This is his final argument.

You know, in the book why you should be a Christian.

You know, he, he starts with a philosophical theological bit

and then he gets into and yeah, we just make the sign of the

cross. And why?

How could the cross possibly be so powerful to basically solve

any problem when we do it? You know, maybe he's been a bit

hyperbolic, but you get the sense that he's seeing stuff

going on all the time. And then he tracks into and none

of our people are afraid of death or martyrdom or anything

else. They're invincible.

Yeah, it's for the recording. For the recording.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, anyway, so I guess I guess it's like a sorry, yeah, yeah,

I'll pass it. I just wanted to close that one

off. But I think, you know, I, I

spent a long time in the, the deep end of the prophetic

spiritual warfare kind of world for, for years and the inner

healing and the deliverance world, You know, I mean, I

remember being 3:00 in the morning and my friend's caravan

is 16 years old, having him vomit ectoplasm up into a

bucket, you know, for hours. That was like a fun Friday night

for us, right? So I think there's a better way

actually. And more to the point, let's get

the gospel straight. Let's get the vision of Christ

straight. Then we just ask him what to do

when when we come up against things.

As far as the eschatology goes, again, if you really want to get

into that subject, George MacDonald #1 The Unspoken Sermon

is also his book Lilith, which is actually his.

He he even really explores this question of Satan, like what

happens to Satan at the eschatological horizon.

I find George MacDonald completely unimpeachable in his

in his theology, extraordinarily powerful.

And David Bentley Hart, if you want something that is

contemporary but pretty heavy going in terms of you, you need

you need to listen or read slowly.

And he uses a lot of philosophical terms, but again,

unimpeachable from a theological point of view.

So I would I recommend them if you if it's if it's a subject

that you you kind of want to dive into.

But otherwise, you know, I mean, I'm with my friend Bruce Walkup

from Australia. I quite like the way he does

things, you know, and he, he's very been in that very sort of

mystical, you know, prophetic space his whole life and

ministry. And he, he, he's a tropical

disease medicine specialist was going into the, he's been going

to war zones and all these kind of things, really crazy.

It's got a lot of crazy experiences of demonic this and

that and the other. Whenever he does a meeting, he

prays and he invites the powers and principalities to believe in

Christ. I mean, he basically evangelises

the air, right as part of his prayer.

I kind of like that. I'm like, yeah, I'm cool.

I'm cool with that, Bruce. That's a nice way to do it.

Right. So it's an it's an invitation.

It actually the Bible says preach the gospel to every

creature. If there's a creature, it should

have the gospel preach to it. Jane.

And then Sam and Hugh in the queue as well.

But please. Yeah.

Just flick the button up. OK, because it's a bit

confusing, so I don't really want to anyway.

But so you said keep going back to the fire, the fire of God.

Yeah, fine. And my experience is, so this is

a personal thing. I've really grasped the

theology. No, that's not true, but it's

grafted to me now. I now I kind of see it and I've

seen it in action. I really have seen it in action.

Just a bit of a testimony, you know, I go to a Truckers cafe.

This guy, you know, I see him. He's he's not a Christian.

He calls himself an whatever, you know.

Yeah, like a in the woods, you know, a a Pagan Pagan.

So we, we had a great conversation.

But I saw Jesus, God in him because he takes care of widows.

Isn't that interesting? I'm a widow and he takes care of

very difficult widows. And he, he's got a wife and

she's a widow and blah, blah, blah.

And I just like you are Christ in the flesh.

Yeah, you. You really are.

Of course, I didn't say that to him, but we're having a she's

really exciting. So exciting because it.

Well, I know, but it's so exciting.

However, I feel this is just a personal feeling thing.

It's not, you know, I kind of now can just go and the bits I

was reading John and there's bits that contradict and I

think, oh, I'll stuff it. I don't care.

You know, I can really cope with that.

Now that doesn't speak of that is not Speaking of God.

Therefore there must be a problem, but I'm not worried.

So that is really hard. But I really, this is the bit

that instead of love, I find myself flipping jealous, angry,

upset. What's the bloody point?

Sorry, I really do. I feel, I feel the I feel the

uselessness of church. I feel the pointlessness, the

what are we doing feeling? I feel all this feeling

feelings, you know, you know, like, you know, like for years

believe in this rubbish about the Father and all your

experiences tie into that rubbish.

And I think of all those people that have had Christianity,

judgement, Christianity thrown on them.

And I just, I just feel this lost piece of oh, God, what now?

What now? I feel what now?

And yeah. Thanks for sharing that, Jane.

So some years ago this this is maybe it's easier if I speak to

my own story rather rather than to yours like at this point.

And obviously we can continue to talk and pray and all the rest.

But I at a certain point I was like, gosh, what on earth was I

doing for all those years and felt a sense of man.

I made some crazy decisions based on some faulty

assumptions. I think that's a natural place

to come to like the if, if the light that you're getting now is

not causing you to ask questions about where you were before,

then you're not growing right? There's no, where's the

momentum? Like if you've reached the

pinnacle, then you've got it all sorted at that point.

Even this comes up in the, in the, in the lecture, in one of

the questions in the video this week, someone asked us some of

the not exactly the same, but similar.

And Baxter said, well, I've been how why is it taking me 65 years

to figure this out? You know, and he's like, we'll

put it another way, isn't it incredible that it only took you

65 years to figure this out? Imagine how you're gonna feel in

500 years. Can I just stop you there?

Yeah. And that's OK, right?

I don't know Baxter. OK.

We should put that on the recording.

I don't know why you're doing it.

Everyone's going to think Jane's saying something horrific, but

she's not. Just for the sake of the

recording. It's not.

It's not OK, but it's also not on you.

So I think that I think that the point is what we see in the

cross is you have already done the worst thing that you could

ever do, which is crucify Jesus, right?

Anything you did that was bad was not as bad as that.

So if you can own the cross, you can see why Paul can say nothing

can separate us from the love of God, right?

So I just dial right, like go back to the cross, hang on a

second. So it's a, it's a natural

response, like when we've, we've ever mistreated anybody or got

something wrong in any way, we can only do that when we're not

really seeing them for who they are.

We're seeing some facade, you know, some 2 dimensional

invention of the false self. Well, Love's transformative when

we're, when we're actually immersed in that stream of love

that radically transforms how we see everyone.

This is why I say resolutely, we see everyone after the spirit,

not after the flesh, which means to see them in the spirit, which

means to see them in Christ, which is not a pretend thing

because God doesn't ask us to pretend about anything.

He asks us to agree with the truth.

So when we do that, suddenly, how do we see everybody?

And then it's a completely right and understandable thing that at

a certain point we might wake up to, oh, hang on a minute.

That means when I ignored that person or when I said that bad

thing about that person, or when I did this over there, I, I, I

skimmed past that very quickly in my life and I didn't give it

a second thought. But now in the light of what I'm

saying now I'm horrified by it that that's a, that's a good

sign. Like that's not a good place to

finish, right? But that that's a sign of

growth. That's not a sign of regress.

That's not a sign of getting lost.

That's a sign that the, the, the flow of compassion is actually

the dots are joining up and it's beginning to make sense.

Like the whole scheme. And now we see why is the coming

of Christ, the breaking of the entire world?

Because if you start to extrapolate that out, it's when

Jesus says in John, now is the crisis, now is the judgement.

Now the Prince of the world stands condemned and I, when I'm

drifted, lifted up, will draw all to myself.

You start to see that judgement is happening right now in me

like I'm Ground Zero of that. And in that Ground Zero, all

those things are happening at once.

The judgement of the world, the condemnation of the devil, the

Prince of the earth, right is in there in in that scheme.

And the lifting up of Christ, which draws all to him is all

happening in it's it's ever present and presenting itself in

US. And that's what it feels like a

lot of the time. It's like, Oh my gosh, what,

what did we do? How do we direct our energies,

our gifting, our faith to be able to do something about this?

And now we start to see, I think a line between our relative

relatively comfortable Western, you know, existence, some line

between that and the guys in Athanasius this time where he's

like, even the young girls, 5-6 years old go happily to the

lions and sing gloriously to Jesus as they get devoured

because they have this invincibility of the, of the

resurrection life in them. And you think, well, that feels

like 1,000,000 miles away from me.

But actually when you start to track with that stuff, you

realise, but it's not a million miles because you begin to see

the, the, if we recognise the extent to which we are able to

live in and accommodate and operate in love and the extent

to which we're able to recognise that doesn't come from us, that

comes from the person of the Spirit within us, right?

Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them.

That is the very manifestation of the presence of God.

Now if we don't recognise that, we won't know how to identify

it. We just kind of carry on.

Oh well, maybe that's just me or whatever.

When we recognise, oh hang on a minute, that is not coming from

me. That is coming from the very

ground of my being, which is also the very ground of the

whole of creation. Now it's OK that that is a that

is a deep, deep sea. That's not a little trickle.

And if I begin to yield to that, and if I yield to that long

enough, what on earth will that do to me?

To back to Hugh's point again, like what begins to happen?

What, what, what does it feel like for the apostle Paul when

he says I would that I myself would cut off from Christ for

the sake of my brethren, that they would know him?

Like, what drives a man to say that, you know, particularly.

Yeah, that's that's a disturbing place to be in, right?

That's not a complacent Christianity.

That is a radical world overturning faith that blasts

through absolutely everything. That's the kind of thing where

you can see Jesus saying I'll build my church and the gates of

hell will not prevail against it, because this is the church

that says we cannot sit on a cloud with a harp when our

brothers and sisters are down there behind those gates and we

have to go in. And this is George MacDonald.

So George MacDonald's position again, how the, the the ones who

are most like Christ, who have become most like Christ in the

way of their being in that heavenly reality are those for

whom the exclusion of any being is the least tolerable.

But the one who's become the most compassionate and like

Jesus is the one who cannot even he, he says who who he talks

about again, I can't get the wedding right.

It's a Florida Victorian English, but you can go and read

it. But he says you know to they

they it talks about them forsaking the glory of heaven to

go down and sit with the the most wretched Judas of his race,

because that's the same love that compelled Christ out of

heaven right to say that he didn't consider equality.

We got something to be maintained made himself nothing

took on flesh and the been found in form of a man.

He came down well, if that if that is the manifestation of the

nature and the character and the person of God and we are growing

to become like that, then what do we do with those who are in

the dark, those who are in the in the prison.

It compels us to go there and it compels us to go there over and

against, especially over and against the ways in which we

weren't compelled to go there before.

It it, it's transformative. But within that there's a need

to remember that that the, the absolution of the cross covers

all of these things. So or we can find that we can

start then measuring ourselves against some sort of an

arbitrary standard. I think part of this part of the

healing of the soul that comes in the gospel is you're not

grading yourself against the standard anymore.

It's not like how well am I doing with prayer or this.

It's actually the the complete abrogation of that way of

thinking altogether. So there is no standard.

It's not the knowledge of good and evil anymore.

How good am I doing? How bad am I doing?

All of that's gone. It's dead, it's disappeared.

That's my old life. It's disappeared.

I can recognise it was left in the grave.

This new creation life that I'm in.

It's OK, I'm I'm, I'm growing. I'm growing in my capacity to

love others and to receive love myself and live in that and

manifest that and walk in it. And I will still be growing in

my capacity to do that in 1000 years.

Because it's a limitless ocean. There is no bottom to the

infinite Trinity. This that is a bottomless ocean.

So by tracking into that, what we're doing is we're embracing

the fire. I was saying I'm not trying to

hide from the fire. I'm not trying to hide from what

the presence of God does to me when I'm because the presence

causes me to be unable to ignore those around me when maybe I

want to ignore them. I'd rather hang out with my

demon drinking buddies, right? I want to go back and hang out

with my demon drinking buddies. Call them up, you know, Hey

Asmodeus from the 7th circle, Do you want to come around and you

know, have a have a cold one and you know we can.

You know, say, and we can hate people and we can be embittered

about them and we can have those who we don't like, we want to

gossip about, you know, or, or not think about or say, well,

it's all their fault. They're in that problem.

What's it got to do with me, right?

Get my demon drinking buddy and you know, get him round.

Like I want to do that sometimes, right?

So we but the presence of God doesn't allow us to do that, not

because of any coercion, but because the lights show the

truth of what already is, reveals the truth of who we are.

And that's why the father often sounds like that's not really

you, is it? The correction from the father

often sounds like that's not really you.

You're right. It's not really me.

Why am I inhabiting it? It's kind of silly, childish in

the wrong way. We're going to grow up.

And I think again, as an editorial on this, one of the

reasons I'm so passionate about this message is not just because

I believe that it's true, but also because having spent many,

many years going around all kinds of churches and seeing

people who've sat for 20-30 years in the same Pew or the

same seat and basically have made no spiritual progress

whatsoever. In that time.

They prayed to prayer, they got baptised and they sat down and

was like, here I am. And that's it.

Like, what's going on? And then they've been, they've

been mis sold an equation that says, well, you got your ticket

to heaven, so you're all right. And then there's nothing else.

And so they're bored is lifeless and there's no danger to it.

And I think that part of the issue is that the theology and

no part of that, I don't think I am, I will categorically state a

big part of the issue is that the theological container cannot

take them any further. They're stuck because they've

been told, told some people are in, some people are out.

So those people you've got a problem with, well, they're

obviously the out people. Well, if you've got that, if

you've got that in your mind, you can't, you can no longer see

them as in, and now they're the very people God's inviting you

to love and growing to kind of connectivity and engagement

with. So all of that is just a very

Christian thing I think that you're describing.

But I would say, Jane, I need you on there.

Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. You know, it's and it's just to

kind of become aware of just how sick it is as a child, you know,

sin. Sick, but but then we can just

let it go and. It.

Yeah, we're we're at half past, but there was I've asked the

question. Just sorry, quick, quick,

quickly if you, if you want to carry on, I'll carry on.

Anyone who wants to kind of chime in, if they haven't chimed

in already, then you know, I'm I'm happy to do that quickly.

I mean, again, sorry, Sam and Hugh, you guys had your hands up

like an hour ago. But and we we haven't dived into

all of this stuff, but I'll and no one, no one.

Malcolm, you looking at me? No, I think that we need to have

some grown up conversations like this about a lot of the stuff.

My experience of many years in the church is this kind of

conversation has almost never happened.

There's almost no space for it, right?

And that's also why this is important because we have a way

to that enables us to talk about it that doesn't fire off all of

this unresolvable dissonance. Does God really love us or

doesn't he and all these other kind of issues?

So I am again, back to Charlie's point, I'm on the record of

saying like from a, from the, the correct and logical

conclusion of what the, the New Testament and the Apostolic

wince of the church says. I think that the only answer

that makes sense is we're, we're all, we're all going to Jesus.

So he's going to sort that whole thing out.

But I will also readily confess I have a problem with that.

I have a problem with it because I cannot imagine how that is

going to work for person A, person B, person C, you know,

these other kind of issues. But that's the crisis on me,

right? So that so rather than saying,

oh, well, I guess I must be wrong because I can't imagine

how it would work. Instead, it becomes I now have

to follow the invitation of the Spirit, say, or I need to look

at that. I need to see you there, Jesus,

and you need to show me what you need to show me.

I need to grow to be able to accommodate that person and I

need to participate in that to do it.

Like if I hideaway and don't, then I'm not going to grow, but

I want to grow and we want to grow.

That's why we're here. So we want to be able to expand,

to engage more people, be able to embrace more of the world

than we have been able to. So that the that it's not enough

to say that, well, one day in the distant horizon it will be

OK. It becomes not enough to say

that it says no, it needs to be OK right now.

So the love of Christ compels us, as Paul says, right?

So then we have a compulsion and it's something within us.

It's like we have to do this. We have to reach people and

reaching them means bringing the, the, the knowledge of

Christ to them, right? It's not not just taking care of

some external factors. We should do that too, but it's

also coming with the gospel that has the power to deliver the

heart. So there's our evangelism,

there's our mission. We're wrapping up.

All right, we're out of time. We were 5 minutes over.

Cheers everyone.