Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is a program designed
to introduce religious liberty
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and religious
liberty developments
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around the world,
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into your thinking
to make you very aware
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of how dynamic that is today.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
editor of Liberty magazine.
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And my guest on
the program is trouble.
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No, it's my good
friend, Cliff Goldstein,
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once editor of Liberty Magazine
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and now causing
no, not troubled,
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you're doing a very good job
with the Sabbath school lessons
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that go out globally
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for the seventh
Adventist church.
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But let's get into
some real heavy stuff.
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Let's talk about the
philosophy of religious liberty,
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which of necessity.
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We'll talk about, you know,
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the philosophy of human behavior
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and where we are and who's God.
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And how do we relate to them?
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Well, I guess the
whole question comes in is
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did God originally
give us religious liberty?
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Did God...
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And I think, well, you
take the Adam and Eve story.
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God says,
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"Don't eat of the tree."
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Or you'll die.
Yeah, or you'll die.
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Okay. Now...
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Why did He give them
a tree? Yeah, why did...
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Well, see, this comes down to,
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you know what it
all comes down to?
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I believe it
comes down to one word,
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the word is love.
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If God...
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The God who created the cosmos,
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He can force every
creature in the cosmos
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to bow down to Him.
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He could force every creature
in the cosmos to obey Him,
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but He cannot force
any creature to love Him.
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If God wanted
beings who could love,
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He had no choice.
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He had to make them free. Okay?
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You see what I'm saying?
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He could not
force us to love Him.
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Now you could say, okay...
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Let's say you accept that.
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I think you're onto something.
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The love aspect
makes perfect sense.
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We have to be free.
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But the free will argument,
I think is more difficult.
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Well, no, no, no
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because let's take
this a little step further.
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Okay.
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So let me just follow
my train of thought here
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for few minutes and see if...
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And somewhere my
logic falls apart, stop me.
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Okay. So you say,
God has no choice.
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He wants beings
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who can love
Him and love others.
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So we have to create them free.
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But you say, okay,
God is all-knowing.
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And so God knew that
we were going to fall.
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There was going to
be pain, suffering,
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all whole wretched
thing we got to deal with.
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And then you think,
okay, He did it anyway.
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Well, if He did it
anyway, but God is all good,
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then we
ultimately have to believe
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that God is ultimately
going to bring good at.
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Well, an implicit in
what you're saying is that
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there was no other
way that God all-knowing,
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all-powerful could
produce the desired effect.
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Well...
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That's perilously
close to the fortunate fall.
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Well, no,
He's... No, no, no, no...
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I don't believe that at all.
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Evil never needed to happen.
It never should have happened.
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But when you create,
when God makes us free,
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it's really free.
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He knew the moment of creation.
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He knew what
was going to happen.
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That a naive couple
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from an unknowing arch...
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And that because
the same principle
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occurred in heaven.
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The most amazing text,
I think in all the Bible,
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listen to this.
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In Ezekiel, it says,
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"You were perfect in your ways
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from the day that
you were created."
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And the Hebrew
word Bara is a verb
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that is only God as its subject.
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So you've got a perfect viewer.
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You were created, you
were perfect in your ways
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from the day
that you were created
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until iniquity was found in you.
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So let me ask you.
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What you getting at and I
know you don't know the answer.
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Paul says, there's
the mystery of godliness
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and the mystery of iniquity.
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I don't believe without knowing
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the full compass of
God's origin and power,
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we can understand
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how co-existent
with that could be evil.
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Well...
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Because the simple thing is God,
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if He created
everything He created evil.
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But free choice, freedom,
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but the question is
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how could you have a
perfect being Lucifer.
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Bible says he was perfect,
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created by a perfect
God in a perfect heaven.
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The answer is that
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perfection included
the potential to do wrong,
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and that had to
be there for love.
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Okay? But
anyway, follow me anyway.
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God creates his free beings.
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He knows they're going to
fall and yet he's all-loving.
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He's going to
bring all good out of it.
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But that leaves
the final question.
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Well, how fair is this?
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God is up in heaven.
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The angels are adoring
Him and worshiping Him.
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And He's up
there, fine in heaven.
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And us poor schnucks
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are down here in the
blood, sweat, and tears,
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and God's going
to work it all out.
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That's not fair...
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I'm not a moviegoer per
se, but I like Clint Eastwood.
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And there's a
movie called Unforgiven
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where the sheriff,
who was a bad guy here,
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the sheriff who had opposed him
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and done some
bad things is lying,
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dying on the floor
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in losing the
gunfight with Clint Eastwood's,
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tough character.
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And he says,
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"I don't deserve this.
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You know, I was
just building a house,"
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and all the rest.
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And Clint Eastwood says,
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"Deserves got
nothing to do with it."
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Well, that's...
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Now at the end of the
day, if God is a sovereign God,
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we don't deserve to be saved.
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We don't
deserve... We think we do.
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The Bible says,
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you know, man thinks
he wasn't made to die.
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We were made to
die. No, we weren't...
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In the sense that
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we're fallible
creatures remembered...
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We were originally
created to live forever.
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But why... Evil came in.
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Evil came in. Evil came in.
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In Genesis, it gives the reason,
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God says we will
throw Him out of the garden
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and let's eat of the
tree and live forever.
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We will not in ourselves...
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But we didn't have
inherited immortality.
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No. Exactly. That's what I mean.
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But anyway...
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We are created creatures
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that we don't have life in us...
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No, no, no...
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We only ever had it through God,
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and we'll have it
again in an eternity.
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But anyway, come back,
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God had no
choice created us free
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because He
wanted us to love Him.
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Knew what was going to
happen, but He's all-loving.
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He's going to
bring good out of it.
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So we're back to this question.
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How fair is it
that God is up in heaven
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and we get it
all worked out here.
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That's a good question.
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Except I only know one
answer, Jesus on the cross.
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Yeah, you're
right. I think love is...
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Jesus on the cross.
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God said, in other words,
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"I know what these
people are going to do.
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I know what's going to happen,
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but love and the freedom,
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inherent was religious freedom
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is so sacred so fundamental
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to how I'm going
to run my government.
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That even though I know
that 4,000 years after this,
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I am going to come down.
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I am going to take on humanity.
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I am going to
live a perfect life,
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and I will bear in
myself, the sins of the world.
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That's how I
think it's answered.
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And the other thing too...
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One of my...
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It's funny, I have a...
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It's funny we can
learn from philosophy.
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Well, the philosophers,
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some of them were
religiously inclined.
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They were all using human logic
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to explain the condition
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and the best of
them come very close
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to what you just
outlined about God's way.
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But the philosopher
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was probably the most
anti-Christian philosopher
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in the past 200 years
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that I learned the most from...
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From who? Nietzsche.
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Nietzsche... Look, listen.
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Nietzsche had a line
in that says Zarathustra,
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which goes,
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"In the end one
experiences only oneself."
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Now think about this.
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We talk about the sum
total of human suffering
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but there's no such thing
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as the sum total
of human suffering,
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no human being in the world
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has ever suffered more
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than a single
individual has ever suffered.
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Remember when Bill Clinton said,
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"I feel your pain." It's a lie.
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He didn't feel our pain.
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Only pain we know
is our own pain...
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Well, we can have empathy.
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We can have empathy
but it's still only...
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we cry our own tears.
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We sweat our own sweat.
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You see what I'm saying?
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I know of just one exception.
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You read Isaiah 53.
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You know, the King James
has an awful translation here.
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I happen to like
the King James version.
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But when he bore our
griefs and carried our sorrows.
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First of all, whose?
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We say griefs and
sorrows are pathetic words.
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King Jimmy was too busy,
molesting his little children.
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He should have
been paying attention
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to those who
translated his Bible.
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But...
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One of them was
supposedly Shakespeare,
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, whatever, whatever,
King James was known pedophile.
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But don't tell that to the...
But anyway, the point is...
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And partly Scott so be careful.
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The point...
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But the point is he
carried our griefs...
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But the bottom line is
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somehow corporately at the cross
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God in the person...
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In Adams or in Christ.
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Yeah, felt
something, felt corporately.
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In other words, what I'm
going to say in the end is
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freedom, religious liberty.
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The freedom, inherent love
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was so sacred so
fundamental to God...
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That God would risk
His entire creation.
00:10:14.18\00:10:16.71
Christ got on the cross knew
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He was going to suffer
worse from the sin than anyone.
00:10:18.95\00:10:22.68
And yet, rather than
not give us the freedom,
00:10:22.72\00:10:26.22
he went to the
cross in order to do that.
00:10:26.25\00:10:29.62
And to me that's very heavy.
00:10:29.66\00:10:30.99
Ellen White writing
for Seventh-day Adventists
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I think gets to an
interesting aspect of this,
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Lucifer, who knew heaven
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and made a big mistake
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would have liked to
have been reinstated,
00:10:41.97\00:10:44.11
and the trick of
the plan of salvation
00:10:44.14\00:10:46.44
has how did God saved man,
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the simpleton who transgressed
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in a way that he
wouldn't have to save Lucifer.
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I think the
argument is very simple
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and I don't know
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how much we want
to get into this.
00:10:57.69\00:10:59.69
He sinned in the
full brightness of...
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Exactly.
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That's what we
do want to get into.
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Yeah, He's sending
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the full brightness
of the knowledge of God,
00:11:05.59\00:11:07.20
Adam and Eve
were relatively new.
00:11:07.23\00:11:09.23
They didn't know
what Lucifer knew.
00:11:09.26\00:11:11.30
And so...
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There's a book by Ellen White
the Seventh-day Adventist have
00:11:12.70\00:11:15.87
but most of them
don't know about it
00:11:15.90\00:11:17.31
called Confrontation.
00:11:17.34\00:11:18.67
Yeah, of course.
00:11:18.71\00:11:20.04
And to me, that's one
of the best explanations
00:11:20.08\00:11:22.38
into what was going on
with Adam and the new Adam
00:11:22.41\00:11:25.78
and the model that he provided.
00:11:25.81\00:11:27.68
But from the
point of literature,
00:11:27.72\00:11:30.29
I am very enamored
00:11:30.32\00:11:32.12
with John Milton's Paradise Lost
00:11:32.15\00:11:33.76
and paradise...
00:11:33.79\00:11:35.12
Where most of
this stuff comes from.
00:11:35.16\00:11:36.73
You know, the joke was,
00:11:36.76\00:11:38.09
they say He gave
Satan all the best lines.
00:11:38.13\00:11:40.93
And the other joke was.
00:11:40.96\00:11:42.76
Not wished it
longer, I think it was...
00:11:42.80\00:11:44.53
Yeah, Johnson, Samuel Johnson...
00:11:44.57\00:11:46.33
Great book, but it was a long...
00:11:48.14\00:11:50.37
But it's a seminal book
00:11:50.41\00:11:51.74
for really the English language
00:11:51.77\00:11:54.01
and a lot of theology.
00:11:54.04\00:11:55.44
People don't realize that,
00:11:55.48\00:11:56.91
that's in the US so
influenced by Puritan origins.
00:11:56.95\00:12:00.98
Milton is the
overshadowing presence.
00:12:01.02\00:12:05.55
So, you know,
there's some wonderful truths
00:12:05.59\00:12:07.69
right in the Bible
00:12:07.72\00:12:09.26
and they
undergird religious liberty.
00:12:09.29\00:12:10.89
There's no
question because, you know,
00:12:10.93\00:12:14.36
religious liberty is
all to do with conscience,
00:12:14.40\00:12:17.73
free will, lack of coercion.
00:12:17.77\00:12:20.30
And somehow God used
those same restraints
00:12:20.34\00:12:24.87
to deal with man.
00:12:24.91\00:12:26.24
Love is the foundation
00:12:26.27\00:12:27.61
and love the
moment you coerced love,
00:12:27.64\00:12:31.15
it's no longer love.
00:12:31.18\00:12:32.71
It's like a particle
in an antiparticle, boom.
00:12:32.75\00:12:35.88
They meet and they
destroy each other.
00:12:35.92\00:12:38.65
If He wanted beings to love Him,
00:12:38.69\00:12:41.29
He had to create them free.
00:12:41.32\00:12:42.96
You know, I use an
analogy when Tom, I love my dog,
00:12:42.99\00:12:45.36
but sometimes my
dog can drive me crazy.
00:12:45.39\00:12:48.23
Well, you know, you ca n
get a robot dog from Sony.
00:12:48.26\00:12:52.53
And people fall in love robots.
00:12:52.57\00:12:54.04
You could get a robot dog.
00:12:54.07\00:12:55.70
But let me ask you...
00:12:55.74\00:12:57.07
But it's hard to
an inanimate or...
00:12:57.11\00:12:59.87
I would if you're
were not satisfied...
00:12:59.91\00:13:02.44
If you wouldn't be
satisfied trading rover in
00:13:02.48\00:13:06.25
with fleas and bites and ticks
00:13:06.28\00:13:08.48
and pooping on the
carpet and all that.
00:13:08.52\00:13:10.79
Well, I would
guess. If you would be...
00:13:10.82\00:13:12.35
If you had moments,
00:13:12.39\00:13:13.72
but if you wouldn't be content
00:13:13.76\00:13:16.09
to do that and
trade it for a robot dog,
00:13:16.12\00:13:18.79
you understand a little bit more
00:13:18.83\00:13:21.83
why God was willing to risk
00:13:21.86\00:13:25.57
knowing it would
take him to the cross
00:13:25.60\00:13:27.74
rather than create robot dogs.
00:13:27.77\00:13:29.94
He wanted free moral beings.
00:13:29.97\00:13:33.38
Yeah, no, it's a
powerful subject.
00:13:33.41\00:13:36.24
And does lie behind
00:13:36.28\00:13:37.91
the religious liberty principle.
00:13:37.95\00:13:39.61
We'll take a short break
here and be back to continue
00:13:39.65\00:13:42.45
this serious discussion
00:13:42.48\00:13:43.82
because it is what
ultimately lies behind
00:13:43.85\00:13:46.72
everything we say
on religious liberty.
00:13:46.76\00:13:48.42