John Formsma

@DaveFlemingPB Nice to see behind the scenes how you guys commentate. Today while playing, my teammate was watching a hands battle on the adjacent court. He said, “The floor is lava.” I knew exactly where that phrase came from! 🤣

That’s WHY we love women’s doubles right there.

Jesus isn't so much King as Emperor - King of kings, Lord of lords. Empire is baked into Christology.

@Pickleball Atomic Pickle?

History has just been made... Chris Haworth def. Zane Navratil with the final score being: 11-0, 0-11, 11-0. What should we name this? ⬇️ Pickleball Scorigami? Triple Pickle?

@JoshuaBarzon Dirty hypodermic needles in the streets of San Francisco.

Name something you trust more than the government.

Not exactly. I see the latter chapters of Ezekiel as what could have been had Israel been obedient after the exile. It’s like other promises in the OT that were conditioned on obedience. What could’ve been their future was only until the Messiah. After the Messiah, the only temple that will ever be is the spiritual temple (1 Pet 2, Eph 2, etc). Having said the above, it is possible that Ezekiel‘s temple is a sort of bridge between covenants. Parts of his vision describe the spiritual temple but in physical terms. I.e., water flowing from the temple describes the knowledge of the Lord covering the earth, the water flowing from the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22, etc. The last chapters of Ezekiel are hard to interpret, so I might have a different opinion in a week or two. 🤣

Are Ezekiel’s future temple sacrifices literal and do they literally make atonement as they say?

@JoshuaBarzon Weekly

How often should church's observe the Lord's Supper?

@crwiley1962 Left

Another vote: same colors, different versions of Daisy, the protagonist in my children’s picture book. Which one do you prefer?

@KenDBerryMD Water. Then yerba mate and coffee

What is the first thing you drink each morning?

@DeaceProducer Very well done, sir!

The most important earthly work we do in this life is raise our children. Everything else we do, except for the worship of God, is subordinate to this end, and even the worship of God includes it.  Christian parents must recognize this. It does not matter how successful you are, how much you accomplish in work or ministry, how much wealth you accumulate, how many public accolades you get, how much fame you attain —  if your children turn against you and/or turn away from the Lord, it’s all for naught. What good would it do to have millions of dollars in middle age or in your later years, if your children hate you or hate the Lord? What good would a mountain house or lake house be if your kids are estranged from you or from Jesus? What good is a family vacation if your family ends up spiritually fractured? Obviously, in God’s providence, there are hard situations. I’m not trying to make Christian parents with apostate children feel worse than they already do. Some cases of children who grew up in Christian homes and later apostatized are tough because it can *look* like the parents did everything right. But I’m not concerned here with those difficult cases. I’m much more concerned with helping young Christian parents and parents-to-be focus on the task at hand so they can do it well and experience the full blessings of God’s multi-generational covenant.  Here’s what’s frustrating: Many Christian parents do not take their parental responsibilities all that seriously. And many churches do not help them take those responsibilities seriously. The results speak for themselves: all too many children raised in Christian homes are lost to the world. Given the reality that having apostate children is perhaps the greatest trial any Christian can deal with, it’s shocking that so many churches give so little time and energy to training parents how to raise their children biblically. Perhaps no other issue (other than marriage, which is equally important in this way) factors into our earthly happiness than our relationship with our children. “Once you are a parent, you can never be happier than your least happy child,” as the old saying goes. But how much teaching do most Christian parents get in their churches about the promises God makes to parents? How much teaching do they get on covenant succession? How much instruction is there about the multi-generational nature of God’s covenant? How much teaching do parents get concerning what it means to raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Or what the Bible says about education and discipline? Or inheritance? The stakes are so high, yet much of the church seems to invest so little.  Certainly a great deal of earthly joy is lost because so many Christians parents simply don’t know what they are doing. So much kingdom growth is lost, since when we lose our children to the world, the aim of creating Christian culture and civilization is made impossible. And of course, souls are lost through parental neglect.  In general, Christian parents need to be more diligent and more sacrificial. They need to be more conscientious when it comes to making decisions about discipline and education. And pastors and church leadership need to make teaching and preaching on wise and faithful parenting a priority. Parenting cannot be outsourced – God holds parents (especially fathers) responsible for how they nurture and train their children, and no one can take this task off their plate. But churches (especially pastors) have a responsibility to help parents as they undertake this massive work.

It seems the only way Israel could still be “Israel” today is by covenantal connection. If this logic is true, that connection would necessarily be through the covenant with Abraham. But then you have the Abrahamic covenant running right alongside the new covenant. The Abrahamic covenant would still have to be in effect! This doesn’t seem possible, since the new covenant incorporated all the previous covenants. Plus, the scripture specifically says: only those that are of faith in Christ are the children of Abraham. There is no other biblical option to be a child of Abraham than through faith in Christ. Only in the inter-covenantal time period would it be possible to identify two Israels with any claim to a covenant. One was connected to Abraham and Moses, and the other was connected to Christ. After AD70 it was clear which claim was proven valid. And that seems to be Paul’s point in Romans 11.

At the very least, their acceptance of the gospel in the future has to be commensurate with their rejection of it in the first century. Does "all" mean every last individual in some future generation? Perhaps. Or it could be more like Jesus' words, "If I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself." It will be a great enough number that we can say that finally "Israel was saved."

Why does the modern nation-state of Israel have a "right" to its land in the present day? Israel has a right to its land because the people who ruled it before them gave it to them. That's it. That's the sole rationale. And that's just fine. All nations have their land based on gift, purchase, or conquest. That's the way the world works. We can debate the wisdom of what happened in 1948, but what happened happened. Christian Zionists want to go one step further and claim that the Jews have a divine right to the land because of God's promise to Abraham. But this is a misguided rationale for several reasons: *The land God promised to Israel has much larger borders than the present nation-state of Israel, but this does not give Israel a right to take those lands from those presently living in them. God authorized the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites in Joshua's day; he has not authorized modern Jews to drive out the present inhabitants living in those lands around modern Israel. Israel, like any other nation, has a right to wage defensive and just wars to defend itself; it has to no right wage offensive wars to claim land belonging to others. Taking the land of others is theft - something Jews should recognize (cf. the story of Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21). *Further, even in the old covenant, Israel's right to possess the land pivoted on their faithfulness to God and the covenant he made with them. When they were unfaithful, he eventually exiled them, as he threatened in Deuteronomy. Possession was never an unconditional right. And when they returned to occupy the land in the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, they did so under the oversight and rule of Gentile empires (cf. Nehemiah 9:36), analogous to the way a Gentile empire granted them the land in 1948. Even if Zionists were right about the divine promise of the land to Israel, it would not apply to the modern nation-state of Israel, which, from a biblical perspective, is not a nation keeping covenant with God. *Most importantly, the restoration of the Jewish people in the Bible requires them to return to the Lord and the Messiah he sent them. There is no true restoration of Israel apart from repentance and conversion to faith in Christ. Modern Israel is a secular, Christ-rejecting people and nation. There are a few Christians there, to be sure, but it is decidedly not a Christian nation. The return of ethnic Jews to the land in 1948 did not fulfill biblical prophecy. It was not the restoration of Israel promised in Romans 11. Most Jews are still hardened to the gospel. The Bible does promise ethnic Jews will eventually be converted to faith in Christ (see Romans 11), but that hasn't happened yet. *The land promise to Israel did not expire in 70AD, but it was transformed in the new covenant. The land was typological of the whole world (Romans 4:13). The true Israel of God -- the church -- will ultimately possess everything (1 Corinthians 3:21-23) because Christ possesses everything. This obviously does not mean individual Christians can take what they want from others - that would be absurd and wicked - but it does establish an eschatological trajectory. Everything belongs to Christ right now and ultimately everything will belong to his bride, the church. The current land squabble in the Middle East is mostly between unbelievers and it is not going to last forever. The church can wait it out. The Arabs will someday be converted to Christ. The Jews will be too. The Middle East will have its own Christendom in due time (indeed, it had a kind of Christendom briefly in the past, though very imperfect and immature). Peace will come to the Middle East when those residing there turn to the Prince of Peace. *There is a tradition of Protestant theologians who believed the Jewish people would eventually return to their ancestral land -- John Milton, William Gouge, David Brown, and an assortment of other mostly British Christians. For example, Brown wrote in 1882, "As their sins were the cause, and their dispersion the effect, so their conversion, removing the cause of their present dispersion, shall be accompanied by their return, under the divine favor, to their father-land. The covenant-favor and the covenant-land go hand in hand." Brown and others argued a Jewish claim to the land could never be separated from faith in the God who promised it to them. In other words, their return to the land was never contemplated apart from the conversion of the Jews to Christ and entrance into the church. They envisioned the Jews as a Christian people dwelling in a Christianized Canaan. That's obviously not the case at present. The conversion of the Jews, after the fullness of the Gentiles have come into Christ's kingdom, will be the capstone of the Great Commission. Modern Christian Zionists believe Israel can lay claim to a promised land without trusting in the God who made the promise. *Of historical interest, it's worth noting that Jews debated amongst themselves in the 1940s what their new nation should be called. Some wanted to name it after Theodore Herzl because of his role in championing a Jewish homeland. Others wanted to call it Judea or Zion or The Jewish State or Ever/Ivri, which means "Hebrew." For various reasons, "Israel" won out, but that decision created a lot of confusion. Now we have to ask a question that pre-1948 Christians did not have to wrestle with, at least not in the same way, namely, "who is the true Israel?" If they had named it Herzl-land, we are probably not having these debates.

The argument is about Paul’s “present time,” and the “they” and “them” under consideration. It is bad exegesis to say that 2026 is the same “present time” mentioned by Paul. It is also incorrect to maintain the exact same distinction exists between the Jew and Gentile as it did in Paul’s day. That distinction isn’t the same—not in the slightest way. For a still future ingathering, the same situation of Romans 11 must also be in place. And it’s clearly not. There is also the difficulty of how long branches that are broken off could exist before they are dried up and burned. (John 15:6) The only way they could exist is if they are still a covenant entity. And they’re not. You’d have to have the Abrahamic covenant running alongside the new covenant. That cannot be, IMO. The new covenant incorporated all the previous covenants. I have no hostility whatsoever to Jews.

I am a preterist with respect to Revelation. I do believe AD 70 marked the decisive covenantal judgment on unbelieving Israel and the completion of the Old Covenant order. What is in dispute is Romans 11. Preterism teaches that AD 70 is the completion of the cutting off. The Old Covenant is finished. The temple is destroyed. Judaism, as a covenantal system, is judged. The branches are broken off. Romans 11 teaches a partial hardening, not a total one. Paul says the hardening is “in part” and “until.” He looks forward to a future ingrafting of Jews into their own olive tree. He describes it in language weighty enough to call it “life from the dead.” Romans was written after Pentecost. Thousands of Jews had already come into the church. Acts records conversions. Paul knew all of that. Yet he still speaks of something future. Something beyond the early trickle of Jewish believers. If you insist that Romans 11 was completely fulfilled before AD 70, you are forced into one of two positions. Either you simply assert that a large scale ingrafting happened sometime between the writing of Romans and the destruction of the temple, despite the complete absence of historical evidence. Or you redefine “ingrafting” to mean nothing more than the ordinary, ongoing conversion of a few Jews here and there, which empties Paul’s language of its force and grandeur. But there is a deeper problem. If AD 70 is the completion of the outgrafting, then placing the ingrafting before that moment creates a chronological contradiction. Paul presents a sequence: hardening in part, fullness of the Gentiles, then a climactic turning of Israel. You cannot coherently argue that the restoration is completed before the covenantal cutting off reaches its climax. That reverses Paul’s order. And once you collapse the future ingrafting into the pre-70 period, you are forced to say the fullness of the Gentiles has already come in as well. Now you are only a step away from hyper-preterism. The Great Commission is effectively finished. The major redemptive-historical movements are behind us. The future horizon of the church flattens out. This is not where historic Reformed theology has stood. The Westminster Larger Catechism explicitly teaches us to pray for “the calling of the Jews” in the Lord’s Prayer. Our confessional standards assume a future mercy toward ethnic Israel. To deny that is not a minor adjustment. It is a departure. What often drives this reading is not careful exegesis. It is ideology. It is political animus. It is, in some cases, a deep hostility toward Jews that cannot tolerate the idea of a future covenantal mercy shown to them. That is not biblical theology. That is an agenda looking for texts to support it. I affirm a real cutting off in AD 70. I also affirm what Paul plainly teaches: a future ingrafting of Jews. To deny that is to create a self-contradiction in the timeline of Romans 11, to flatten Paul’s language, and to step outside our confessional heritage.

100%

We are still living in the days of the early church. God promised through Moses he would be faithful to (at least) a thousand generations (Deuteronomy 7:9). Moses died around 1400 BC. If a generation is 40 years, Moses promised God would show faithfulness to his people for (at a minimum) 40,000 years. We have at least 36,600 years to go. Christians used to understand this and they thought in terms of generations to come, not just in terms of, say, 4 year election cycles. Medieval Christians began working on cathedrals they knew they would not live to see completed. But they were thinking long term, in light of future generations. When Christian entrepreneur Arthur Guiness started his brewing business, he signed a 9000 year lease on the land. He went of to built one of the best Christian companies in history. Older versions of the Book of Common prayer included tables for calculating the date of Easter out to 8400 AD. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy said, "Anything worth doing takes at least three generations." Elton Trueblood said, "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” Making present sacrifices for future generations is critical to building a great civilization. Church history is just getting underway. As Doug Wilson has put it, 5000 years from now, a seminary student taking a church history test will have a hard remembering who came first, Athanasius or Billy Graham. Christians have been at their best when they have been rooted in long term kingdom optimism. Time is on our side. The kingdom grows slowly, but surely it will grow to fill the earth. Jesus is not coming back anytime soon — so get to work building his kingdom.

@SteveDeaceShow I’m kinda thinking eliminating all the fraud might just help here. I paid my quarterly taxes the day after watching Nick Shirley’s first video about the Somali fraud. Not a good feeling had I.

No golly this is “let them eat cake” level messaging.

This is my favorite self-own in a while. They discovered borders and frickin love them 😆

Yet we’re told we must reduce the global temperature so we won’t be burned up. Make it make sense already.

Conservatives today are just progressives driving the speed limit. Or as Dabney put it, "conservatism is the shadow that follows liberalism to perdition." Conservatives have settled for being beautiful losers. They have conserved almost nothing. Conservative console themselves: "At least we loss with class. At least we were winsome." But they still lose ground. Conservatives don't lose because they "play by the rules." They lose because they lack courage. They lose because they do more posturing than fighting. They lose because the put all kinds of effort into gaining power, but do nothing useful when they have it. They are not indomitable. They have been conquered. The need of the hour is indomitable Christian conservatives, who can gain power and actually wield it to accomplish Christian cultural ends.

No amnesty. Thank you for your attention to this matter.