The NXR Podcast - August 31, 2022


DAILY TRUTH - Does God Change His Mind？

Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Jamie White Joseph Boot Sam Rinehan Gary DeMar Joel Webin
SUNDAY SERMON - The Dangers Of Minimizing Sin ｜ Psalm 32 QUESTIONS - How Do You Defend The Sabbath In Light Of Romans 14_5？

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

184.09

Word count

1,485

Sentence count

127

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Pastor Joel Webin explains why God is not a man that should repent or change his mind, and why God does not fluctuate in his emotions. God is the infinite one, the immortal one, and the unchanging one. He has decreed the end from the beginning, and he is the omniscient one that never changes.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Big news, really big news.
00:00:03.200 Our next Right Response Conference is in the works.
00:00:06.620 We've got a number of things already lined up
00:00:08.800 and organized.
00:00:09.980 This is what we've got so far.
00:00:11.380 The whole conference, three days long
00:00:13.920 on post-millennialism and theonomy.
00:00:17.020 And the speakers, Dr. James White,
00:00:20.140 Dr. Joseph Boot, Gary DeMar,
00:00:22.960 and of course, yours truly, Pastor Joel Webin.
00:00:25.700 We've got a great lineup.
00:00:27.620 We've got great topics.
00:00:28.680 If you want to find out dates and location and registration and anything else, go and
00:00:34.860 visit our website, rightresponseconference.com, rightresponseconference.com.
00:00:43.200 Jesus said, man cannot live on bread alone, but from every word that proceeds from the
00:00:47.980 mouth of God.
00:00:48.920 You're listening to Daily Truth.
00:00:53.160 The Bible is clear.
00:00:54.540 Look at Numbers chapter 23, verse 19.
00:00:56.340 God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent. Hath he said,
00:01:04.340 and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? So did God repent
00:01:11.180 or regret making man? No. No. But this is what I love about Numbers chapter 23 verse 19.
00:01:21.200 did God lie? See, Numbers 23 verse 19 is perfect because it says, it protects us on both sides. It
00:01:27.820 says, God's not a man that he should change his mind, that he should repent of something. He has
00:01:34.420 decreed the end from the beginning. He knows all things. He's the omniscient one, the immutable one.
00:01:38.620 He never changes. But look at what it also says in Numbers. It says, he's not a man that he should
00:01:43.160 change his mind. He's also not a man that he should lie. So this is what we have. Verse six of our
00:01:48.260 text. It feels as though we only have two options. It's either a literally true one-to-one ratio
00:01:53.020 statement, or it's a false statement. But Numbers chapter 23 verse 19 protects us because it says
00:01:59.580 God's not a man that he should lie. So we can exile a false statement. Verse six of our text
00:02:04.120 can't be false. But God's also not a man that he should change his mind or repent. So we know it
00:02:09.520 can't be a literally true statement. So what other option do we have? Well, the option is that you can
00:02:14.620 make a statement that is true without it being literally true. So it's neither a false statement,
00:02:19.740 but it's also not a literally true statement. So there is a sense in which, as it were,
00:02:25.160 God regretted making man. As it were, God repented. In a sense, these things are true. In a literal
00:02:32.320 sense, no, because God's omniscient. How can you repent? How can you change your mind when you have
00:02:38.960 decreed all things from the very beginning and you knew exactly what would happen, right? God is not
00:02:43.240 in process. God's not surprised. And God is not emoting. We need to understand that God is not
00:02:48.260 a teenage girl. So he doesn't see things happen. And then he emotes and says, that made me sad.
00:02:53.480 And that made me mad. And God is not flying by the seat of his pants. He's God. He is the infinite
00:02:59.400 one, the immortal one, the immutable, unchanging one. And for God to fluctuate in emotions
00:03:05.700 constitutes change. God does not change. He does not change. And I believe that it's most faithful
00:03:13.120 in Orthodox Christianity, especially in the Reformed tradition, not just to say that he 0.69
00:03:16.480 does not fluctuate in his emotions, but it's safer just to say he doesn't have them.
00:03:21.420 He is God without passions. That's the doctrine of impassibility. Sam Rinehan has a great book,
00:03:26.760 God Without Passions, The Doctrine of Divine Impassibility. If you'd like to do more study,
00:03:30.700 I recommend that to you for your personal study. God is not fluctuating. God is not emoting.
00:03:37.400 God is not showing his hand that, hey, you know how I say I'm omniscient? I actually am not. You
00:03:41.720 know how I say, I do not change. I actually do. Then you know how, you know how I, I, I, I decreed
00:03:46.760 the end from the beginning. Well, I actually, this caught me off guard. I was surprised. I'm this
00:03:50.360 God, God is not showing his hand. There is no weakness in God. He's God. So then, all right.
00:03:54.860 So we can, we can chop off. We can write off literal true statement, but, but God cannot lie.
00:03:59.820 So we can't say it's a false statement. So what should we glean? All right. Almost done. What should
00:04:04.780 we glean? What is the truth? God is communicating to us in his word, because it's his word. He's
00:04:09.500 saying something that we need to know. So what truth is God giving to us in verse six and verse
00:04:14.440 seven of our text? I think in a small sense, he's given us a truth about himself. Let's look at
00:04:19.400 Ezekiel chapter 33, verse 11 says, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather
00:04:24.900 that the wicked turn from his way and live, turn back, turn back from your evil ways. Why then will
00:04:31.200 you die? Oh, house of Israel. So in a small sense, I think verse six and verse seven of our text is 0.99
00:04:37.360 telling us a truth about God, that God grieves, as it were, in regards to sin. That God does not
00:04:47.780 take delight or pleasure that the wicked choose their own demise and peril rather than repenting
00:04:55.340 and obeying him. That's the thing that I think it says about God in a small sense. In a large sense,
00:05:01.280 I believe that verse six and seven of our text says a lot about man. I don't think primarily
00:05:07.040 that what's being communicated here is something that we can understand about the nature of God.
00:05:10.600 I think it's the exclamation point. This is my theory. Verse six is the exclamation point to
00:05:17.200 verse five, which is a statement about man. So verse five says, man's really, really bad. Every
00:05:21.900 intention, every thought, all the time, only continue it. Man's really, really bad. Verse six
00:05:26.000 says, yeah. Verse six is the confirmation. It's the exclamation point to verse five. Think about
00:05:33.000 this. It would be sinful for a man to do this in his finite self. He would probably be doing this
00:05:39.240 motivated out of sin at some level. But if a man was married and he found out that his wife had
00:05:43.980 betrayed him in adultery, and upon finding this out, he speaks to his wife and he says, I regret
00:05:49.620 ever marrying you. Now, again, the analogy falls apart because he's a man. And so it's very likely
00:05:57.800 that there's sin involved in that statement, right? That he's just trying to hurt her because
00:06:02.480 she hurt him. Or he's saying that infidelity, I won't continue my covenant vows with you.
00:06:10.000 But there's something else he's trying to do. What he's trying to do is he's trying to help
00:06:14.940 her see how severe her betrayal really was. He's trying to say by saying, he's in a sense, he's
00:06:22.340 saying, this was so grievous that despite all the good moments that we had together, despite
00:06:29.640 all the loving memories we have.
00:06:32.220 This was so grievous.
00:06:33.680 I wish that I never married you.
00:06:35.820 I wish I had never met you to begin with.
00:06:38.380 I think that's the truth
00:06:40.400 that we're supposed to glean from verse six
00:06:42.380 and verse seven of our text.
00:06:44.480 Verse six and seven,
00:06:45.240 I don't think are primarily telling us something
00:06:46.620 about the nature of God.
00:06:47.760 I think it's the exclamation point,
00:06:50.080 telling and confirming once again,
00:06:52.400 something that we need to understand
00:06:53.400 about the wickedness of man.
00:06:55.960 Verse five, every intent of his own.
00:06:58.380 every thought, only, ever, wickedness, continually. Really? That bad God? Yeah, so bad.
00:07:07.340 I wish I never even made him. I don't think the truth is, oh, so God is like, what we should be
00:07:13.680 gleaned from this verse is God's not omniscient or God's not immutable and he changes, he fluctuates
00:07:17.660 and God repents and God regrets and God grits. You're missing the point. The statement, God is
00:07:22.400 using human language under the banner of analogy because we're human beings and we need to
00:07:26.420 understand. So he's using, he's condescending and using our language to, to confirm what he just
00:07:32.740 said in verse five, because verse five is so bad that our natural default when we read it is like,
00:07:39.540 nah, really that bad. So then we have verse six and verse seven to say, yeah, really that bad.
00:07:47.400 Thanks so much for listening, but real quick, before you go, do us a small favor,
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