The Sean McDowell Show - Live Q&A with Sean McDowell

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

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For over 30 years, Point of Grace has shared music, faith, and friendship with listeners across the country. Now Denise Lee and Shelley are inviting you into their circle. Welcome to Circle of Friends. The podcast is Point of Grace. Each week they're talking real life, current events, stories of true friendship, wisdom from God's word, and all their favorite things. If you're looking for a little company, a few laughs and a lot of Jesus to hold it together. Circle of Friends. The podcast is waiting for you.

Subscribe now wherever you listen or watch podcasts. And Circle Up with Point of Grace. Life Audio. All right, friends, welcome to the Sean McDowell Show. We are going live to take your questions. We have not done this in a long time. I used to do this almost weekly for a while. We wanted to bring it back to you.

We're thinking about calling it Talbot Tuesdays. Today I'm here solo, but I could bring on if it's helpful to you, a different Talbot professor. Right now, for these three months, we're going to go Tuesday and Thursday, the second and fourth Tuesdays. And we want you to let us know, is this helpful? Each week, I'm to bring on a Talbot. Professor will take your apologetic, biblical, theological questions. And if this is helpful, we're going to keep it up. So please, I just told my team before we started that we're going to read every comment. We want to know if this is helpful to you. We want to help this

interesting. What would you change? Do you want it every Tuesday? Would you engage if that's the case. So if you're listening to this on the audio later, you can email me, Sean at shon macdowal.org or head over to the YouTube page and comment there. All right, we got tons of comments, dozens of questions. I'm going to dive in. And then we're also going to take some live ones if we can. If you post your questions in the live chat, I see him coming up here on the side. I will take some of those live questions as well. All right, let's jump in. The first one, no big surprise right at the top is free will versus predestination. We could spend the entire time talking about this and we won't, but a couple comments.

One, this is not just a challenge uniquely for Christians. Every worldview has to find and make sense of whether everything is determined and whether human beings genuinely have free will. Christians will differ on this. some lean more heavily into free will and might be an Armenian-type position, some lean more heavily into what would be called a Calvinist worldview, and there's greater and lesser degrees that people hold those, leaning more in towards God's sovereignty and having a different perspective of free will.

My take, if I had to pick, since I'm an apologist and a philosopher, I find middle knowledge pretty compelling. I've interviewed William Lang Craig on this. And basically, God has four knowledge of not only what will happen, but what would happen in any conceivable situation. And he places us in the world knowing and in a sense sovereignly controlling towards his ends, but we freely act according to our own desires and will. Now, this raises a million other questions, obviously.

but I tend to find that most intellectually satisfying, and I think it matches up with Scripture. By the way, last point on this is that some people say, well, there shouldn't be tensions within scripture when it comes to something like this. We should have a clear answer. And my question is, why should that be the case? When you look in things like physics, light acts as a particle, and then it seems to act as a wave. We don't know why there's a paradox, there's attention there. There's some deeper truth that we're missing.

So the older I get, while I find middle knowledge interesting and promising and one way to make sense of human free will and God's sovereignty, it bothers me less that we can't perfectly solve it, given that in other worlds like physics, there's also areas like light that seem to operate in different ways. If you disagree, chat, give me your comments, throw them in there, and we'll take your questions. I see people from Bakersfield, Singapore, Jamaican, New York, awesome. Love it. Let's take one here from Phyllos Theos that says, Dr. McDowell, what are your thoughts on on oneness Pentecostals? Now, I'm not going to speak specifically on on oneness Pentecostals, but from what I understand of oneness Pentecostalism is a view that there is, it's a rejection of the Trinity that God is triune.

Now, let me just combine this with a question that somebody posted earlier I saw as I was skimming through this before we started. It says, this is from Steve, and he says, explain Trinity to an unbelievers the toughest one to me. So I think in explaining what I think the Bible teaches about the Trinity will be a general response to, Oneness Pentecostalism. Now, a few things about the Trinity, the word Trinity is not in the Bible, obviously. Friends, that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. There's a lot of truths about God that the scripture teaches where we don't find a word for it in the Bible. For example, the word aseity is not in the Bible. That's actually a word for God's self-existence. but many philosophers and theologians will point towards like Exodus 3, where God reveals himself to Moses.

He says, I am who I am, meaning God is the self-existent, eternal, uncreated being. That affirms as a sayity, even though we don't have the word assaity. The same is true with Trinity. It's not the word that matters. It's the doctrine that matters. So where does the word Trinity come from? I believe in a church historian could correct me. I think it was tortullian, maybe the end of the second century around that time, who first coined the term.

He's an early church father. And it's a combination of two words. Try, meaning three, and unity comes from unity. So the Trinity is meant to be a word that captures what the Bible teaches about the character of God, that there's threaness in God, so to speak, and there's oneness in God. So oneness Pentecostals get the oneness, right? But as far as I understand what they teach, would miss the threiness part. So what do we mean by the Trinity?

So actually, let me take a step back, if that's okay. Fascinatingly, the earliest philosophical problem that people wrestled with, and this is according to Frederick Coppiston's history of philosophy. He said it was the problem of the one and the many. What accounts for the unity in the world that ties everything together? And what accounts for the difference? So early Greek philosophers are like everything is water and air and fire and dirt arranged in different fashion. So there's unity, but there's difference maybe how it's arranged.

So when we look in the world, we see a lot of there's one body, but there's many parts. There's one nation, but different members. There's one cluster of grapes, but different grapes. E pluribus unum. There's one nation, but different states. E pluribus unum means out of the many one. So what unifies the world and what accounts for the difference? The Christian answer is it's found in the character of God.

The oneness is that there is one God who exists in being and nature. That's the oneness. the threeness or the try is there's a distinction in persons one god who eternally exists as three persons so i was just teaching my class here and i walked over my undergrad class at biola and i was talking about the trinity and if i said there's one god and three gods that would be a contradiction if i said there's one person and three persons that would be a contradiction that's not what the bible teaches it affirms that there's one God in being, and yet the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each divine.

Now, no one debates that the Father is divine. I won't go into the passages about Jesus, but you could point to John 1-1. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the word Jesus was God. So the word Jesus is God, he's divine, but he's also distinct from the Father. So Father's God, the Jesus is God. And I've been reading this morning I read in Acts chapter 5, where Ananias and Sapphire are told by Peter, when they lie to the Holy Spirit, and they specifically lied to God. So the Father's divine, the Son is divine, the Holy Spirit is divine. But there's one being in essence. there's three persons who are divine.

Now, the person who wants to explain it to an unbeliever, I've given up trying to use perfect illustrations for the Trinity. When I taught high school years ago, I'd have students come up with them. And I kid you not. I had one student, never forget it. He goes, Mr. McHale, I got it. A peanut M&M. He goes, there's the shell, the chocolate, and peanut.

And part of me is like creative. The other part of me is like, are you serious? We are comparing the character of God with a, peanut M&M. There's not a perfect illustration because we're talking about the character of God that is unique. I don't think we need a perfect illustration. To an unbeliever, I might say, and this comes from Millard Erickson's book, he says there's one what, God, and three whose. There's one being who is God and three persons who share that divine essence. And the try is the threanus of persons.

The entity comes from the unity. So, yes, it's difficult to understand. Yes, it stretches our imagination. But I believe that because this is what scripture teaches. And I think it actually helps make sense of the oldest philosophical challenge, namely the one and the many. All right, I see a ton of questions come through. My goodness, here's some practical ones.

here's a ton. I love this. This is fun, by the way. Let me take one that was submitted earlier. Why did Jesus choose the time period he did to reveal himself? That's a great question. Let me pull up here. Galatians 4, I think gives a sense of this. Of course, Paul's letter to Galatia. He says, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law. And of course, the question is what's meant about the fullness of time? I think there's a lot of pieces of this. Of course, theologically and bivocally, we could look back about how God progressively revealed himself over time through the patriarchs, through the person of Moses, through the prophets, during the United Kingdom, God is slowly revealing his desire and his will for the people. That's the importance of the story of the Hebrew scriptures.

But of course, if Jesus is the Messiah, the divine Messiah, then the Old Testament is preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah. So there's a certain biblical, theological building that's taking place for Jesus to come. But I also think what's fascinating is there were certain structures in place where the message could get out to the world in a way it couldn't centuries later or, much earlier, namely the Pax Romana. You had peace in Rome. You had a way for people to write letters and deliver them, hence Paul's letters. You had transportation that was possible around the world. So not only was there biblical and theological precedent and the expectation of a Messiah,

and there's people who know this far better than I do, but historically, there was a very unique window and I looked at this in my work on the apostles because I remember thinking, do they even have the ability to get around the world? And there were maps of ships that went out and roads that went out around the world from the Middle East. It's like it all kind of culminated in that moment theologically and practically for the message of Jesus, like it says in Acts, take it to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. They actually had the ability to get that message out at that unique moment. So I think God was preparing and orchestrating all those things sovereignly for his message to get out. All right, let's take a couple more here and we'll look

live. I see a bunch of these coming in. This is fun. Thanks for joining us. Again, those of you just joined us, we are giving this a shot to see if you enjoy a live Q&A here from Talba School Theology. I'll be completely honest with you. Thaddeus Williams professor was supposed to join me, but I texted him the wrong date. This is completely on me. My plan is to have another Talbot professor here with me, and we will take your questions together, and we're thinking about calling it Talbot Tuesdays.

So let us know if that's helpful. If that's interesting to you, let us know. And you can even let me know what Talbot professor would you like me to have on. There's a chance I could get maybe J.P. Moreland, the legend to join us. Maybe. I don't want to make any promises.

All right. Let's see, man, a lot of questions are rolling in here. My thoughts on on oneness, Pentecostals, predestination and Calvinism, of course. Let me go back to this questions here. Honestly, I'll be really honestly, some of these questions are really nuanced and I'd have to prep to answer some of them. So maybe in the future, I can look at some of the questions that are written and give you my two cents on it. Let's see. here's an interesting one. How come we don't have any stories about Jesus growing up? Was it not as

important as part of the gospel? Do you think we could have learned things about adolescents through his own story? Now, of course we could learn things about adolescence from the story of Jesus. I wish we had stories about this. When you get into the kind of the second century and the third century, you have these apocryphal accounts coming, which are invented fictional stories about Jesus, like claiming to be God, doing miracles as a child. I think there's a story. Maybe it's the infancy gospel of Thomas of turning a pigeon into clay or the opposite. I'm forgetting off the top of my head.

These are invented stories because people are asking this question in the second century, what was baby and young Jesus like? I think the main reason why we don't have more of these stories is just the nature of how ancient biographies were written. So the Gospels are understood by most scholars, and in my assessment of this, I would agree with it, as an ancient form of biography.

They're not mythical accounts. Hence, Luke begins his gospel by saying many have undertaken a drop and account of the things that have happened among us. And it talks about investigating carefully and talking with eyewitnesses, so Theophilus

and his... Hey, this is Chris. One of the hosts of the Salvation Army's weekly podcast, Words of Life. Throughout this month, we're in a series with a panel of believers discussing how deep Bible study has impacted their walk with God. And beginning in February, we'll be launching a series discussing the power of the written word. And that's why we need everybody who's called to write to write. We need your perspective. No one prays like you. No one writes like you. Follow Lord Jesus and bless his church and bless him by offering this gift.

And I decided to try writing my prayers and then waiting and listening for any responses and writing those responses in another color pen. So now I can go back and see actual conversations I had with God and his words in response to me. And it's such a blessing. Listen to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit WordsofLifepodcast.org. audience can know the certainty of things that have been written. These are historically based accounts. Now, the difference is in that time, they didn't just write books chronically in the story of the Caesars, chronicling the story of prophets.

Like our biographies today, if one of our presidents writes a biography, we want to know his childhood. We want to know all the things of their life. the way biographies were written in the ancient world typically and generally was to only include a part of somebody's life if it advanced the theme of the book that it was contained within. So I think of the one story we do have a Jesus of course in Luke chapter 2, Matthew Mark Luke, and this is where he's in his father's house. I won't read the whole thing, but it's in Luke 2, 41 through 50. and his family leaves for a day, come back, can't find him for like two days. It's like three days Jesus is on his own. And at the very end of this story, when they finally find him, they're worried.

It says, why are you searching for me? He asked them to his parents. Didn't you know that it was necessary for me to be in my father's house? But they did not understand what he said to them. So this story is included because it's teaching something about people not understanding the person of Jesus. and the identity of who Jesus is. Samantha Mark, Luke and John, as interesting as those stories would be, felt that it wasn't necessary to tell earlier stories of Jesus.

Hence, they tend to introduce them like the baptism when its public ministry began. I think that's really what's at stake here. All right, man, some of these are tough, some of these particular verses. Here's one. This is a good question. Key of my identity. Then I'm going to switch back to the live stream here for a second and see what questions.

Oh, man. Good questions. Let me see here. Some of these are tough. Aloha from Hawaii. Nice to have a year. What do you think about the Brean standard Bible translation? I've never read it.

Didn't know it was a thing. Sorry. Wish I could comment on that one. I did hear in class that Scott Adams passed away. I don't know the story of what happened at the end, just did a video last week about him, where he said he was planning on coming to the faith, and part of me wants to pause,

even though he's passed and just pray that he really, in fact, did come to the Lord and repent and understand what the gospel is, but I don't know the answer to that. Okay. Let me see here. Which person of Trinity should I pray to? Oh, this is actually an interesting question. Okay, and then I'll come back to the ones that were posted earlier.

Which person of the Trinity should I pray to? Each one for different things. So in principle, if it's helpful to you, Fred Sanders is a teacher at Biola. He's one of the leading Trinitarian scholars in the world today. Wrote a book in the Holy Spirit. If I remember maybe six, eight, ten months ago, I interviewed him about this, and we broke it down. doing my best to remember what he said in his book in the Holy Spirit. But I think what he said, and my understanding of Scripture is if the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each divine and God,

it doesn't seem to be wrong in principle to pray to Father, pray to the Son, or pray to the Holy Spirit. I don't think that's a wrong thing you do, theological, you're biblically speaking. Now, if I'm missing something posted here that I'm not thinking off the top of. my head and I'd be happy to revisit it. But I do think we see a pattern most consistently in the scriptures that we tend to see the model of praying to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus. That seems to be a common pattern that the name of Jesus has given us access to the Father. We pray through the power of the Holy Spirit and we pray to the Father. That's the pattern that I think we consistently see, but I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say it's wrong for somebody to pray to the Holy Spirit who is God, pray to Jesus.

In fact, I think we have an appeal to this, maybe in this story of Stephen, if I remember, we kind of prays and appeals to Jesus. So I think that's more of the norm than I consistently see in the pattern, but I don't think there's something wrong in praying to the father or the son or the son or the person. the Holy Spirit since each one is divine. But post and comment, let me know if you see that, if you see it differently. Let me see this one. Okay, here's an interesting question. Actually, I promised I went back to earlier ones, then I'll come to that one. Sorry.

Let's see here. Wow, there are some tough questions here. Okay, let me take this one. VM sushi, great name, by the way. it says is scripture truly the word of god if so why is it open to interpretation shouldn't it be timeless also i believe that there's an intelligent design to the universe but how does that lead to the bible okay this is two separate questions let me take the second one first i do believe there's intelligent design i've written a book on this come to think of it with william dembski it doesn't take us

all the way to the biblical God. I don't think it's meant to. So there's different arguments, for example, the Kalam cosmological argument. What every begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. William Lane Craig lays out, and I think he's right,

that if there is a cause to the universe, this cause must be uncaused, this cause must be changeless, must be immensely powerful, seems to require a level of intelligence to bring this in. I'm not certain Craig makes that argument, but I think you could make that point. Spaceless, I can't remember if I said timeless or not.

I think you could make a case that is personal because other non-physical things that are timeless like numbers or laws of physics don't have causal powers. Persons have causal powers. Now, that doesn't get us all the way to the biblical God. hence many Muslims use the Kalam cosmological arguments. In fact, many of them formulated it early on. Now, some people say that's a critique of the Klam.

It's not. It's natural theology. It critiques pantheism because it's a personal cause. The universe had a beginning critiques naturalism because it points to a cause outside of and beyond the universe. It points to God consistent with the Judeo-Christian Christian. tradition you could point towards fine-tuning clearly also an immaterial cause because it's fine-tuning the universe as a whole uh also very intelligent i think when we point towards things like uh intelligent design in the dna points towards a cause that itself is immaterial and minimally

incredibly smart and intelligent that can only take us so far it's not a criticism to say it doesn't take us all the way to God of the Bible. It's not meant to. All right. So back to this point, is Scripture truly the word God? If so, why is it open to interpretations? One of the most important distinctions I learned in grad school. And let me tell you the backstory, if I remember this correctly. It was in a class I took when I was here at Talbot in my philosophy of religion program with Gary Deweis on the philosophy of science. And for some reason, I think I asked him the question. related to right and wrong. And there's a question about how do we know we can have certain,

how do, oh gosh, live I'm fumbling this a little bit. It was a question about how we can know there's a right and wrong when people differ over what's right and wrong. And he said to me, he said, Sean, I think you're confusing metaphysics with epistemology. Now don't lose me here. this distinction is really, really important. Metaphysics, or sometimes called ontology, relates to what is.

It relates to being. Pistomology is how we know what is true. So metaphysics, ontology, the study of reality, the study of being. Pistomology is the study of knowledge. There's a difference between whether something is right or wrong, true or false and our ability to know whether it's right and wrong, true, or false. So something could be true, but we have no way of knowing it. The mere fact that we can't know it doesn't mean that it's not true.

So scripture truly the word of God, my answer would be yes. Now, I'm not going to lay out a case for that here. That's not the question. But if scripture is truly the word of God, we mean that God is ultimately the source. and he penned it, so to speak, through about 40 different authors. But it's truly the Word of God if God is the source behind it. And of course, pastures like 2 Timothy that talks about scripture being God breathed and useful for teaching and rebuking.

Pastures like 1st Peter 120 and 21, I believe it is, about scripture. Let's pull this one up. Let me see why I find this right here if I'm getting this right at 1 Peter. 20. Wrong, invalid. Oh, 1 Peter, 2.20, of course. Nope, is it 2? Embarrassing.

Why am I not thinking of this one? All right. Now I'm killing myself. Is it 120? Oh, there it is. Found it. Second Peter 120. Known this, first of all,

that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of, of man, but men spoke from God as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit. Now, I'm not making an argument here. I realize I'm using Scripture to explain this, but this is a Christian view that Scripture, in fact, is the Word of God. It says, then why is it open to interpretation? Now we've moved from metaphysically, Scripture is the Word of God. God is the author behind it, but then now when we talk about why is it open to interpretation, now we're talking about epistemology. So we can't, just because something's the word of God doesn't mean we can't

disagree about it. If it's open to interpretation, people say, I interpret it this way, I interpret it that way. It doesn't follow that there's no proper interpretation, and it doesn't follow that it's therefore not the word of God. I mean, look, if the Holocaust really happened, why do some people deny it? Well, if some people deny the Holocaust, for whatever reasons, maybe their psychological reasons, maybe their worldview reasons. Does that follow that the Holocaust didn't happen? Of course not. So we have to look at which interpretation of the Holocaust of a biblical passage is most reasonable.

So if Scripture truly is the Word of God and God has written it to instruct us and to guide us and to invite us into conversation and God has given us free will, I would expect there to be differences in interpretation. In no way do differences in interpretation take away from the fact that the Bible is the Word of God. All right, let's go back to question and answer here. I came to your school last year to speak. It was amazing. Thank you, Kate.

That's really fun. I appreciate that's wonderful to hear from. All right. Let's take this one live and see if I can help it. it says question, is it reasonable to believe that God set the universe in motion and allows it to run according to its own laws without actively intervening in events? Is it reasonable to believe this? If I understand the question clearly, this person is saying, this is kind of an deistic view of

God, that God exists, set the universe in motion, allows it to run. run according to the laws that God set up and doesn't intervene in these events. That's a deistic view. Some people, there's a range of different people that have held deism. For me, where I would agree with deism is I think there's an intelligent designer. I think the evidence points towards a mind behind the universe, a mind and a purpose, and exquisite, even within the laws of physics and cosmology themselves as we move into fine-tuning are exquisitely within parameters to allow life.

So I think that I agree with that. Where I differ with deism is, I would say, two things. First off, sometimes I've seen deism explained in a way that if God sets up these laws, then he's kind of limited by these laws and can't intervene. I've never fully understood that. Because if God is the one who speaks, brings something to existence from nothing, God creates the universe. And he makes these laws, and these laws seem to be contingent.

They didn't have to be set the law of, say, the cosmological constant or the strength of gravity. If they're contingent and God is the one who set them up, then God could obviously. given what it means to be God, change or adapt them if he wanted to. Or God could act through them if he wanted to. I see no in principle reason why God could not act through the laws that God creates. But the main reason I'm not a deist is not philosophically. I'm not a deist because I think Jesus really did miracles. I think he really walked on water. I think he really healed the blind.

I think he really healed lepers. I think he actually rose from the grave. So a Jewish-Muslim Christian position rejects deism and says we have an involved God. But the reason I am a Christian and I don't stop with the laws being kind of set themselves is because I think there's a God who answers prayers. and I've done full videos on this. You can see with Candy Brown and make up your own mind

about the data pointing towards prayers. I've done specific videos, did one just a few weeks ago, on God doing miracles. Hey, this is Chris, one of the hosts of the Salvation Army's weekly podcast, Words of Life. Throughout this month, we're in a series with a panel of believers

discussing how deep Bible study has impacted their walk with God. And beginning in February, we'll be launching a series discussing the power of the written word. And that's why we need everybody who's called to write to write. We need your perspective. No one prays like you. No one writes like you. Follow Lord Jesus and bless his church and bless him by offering this gift. And I decided to try writing my prayers and then waiting and listening for any responses and writing those responses in another color pen. So now I can go back

and see actual conversations I had with God and his words in response to me. And it's such a blessing. Listen to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit Words of Lifepodcast.org. In the past and in the present? So you can believe that. But I think the miracles from the Old Testament and in practice today seriously challenge this claim towards theism. I hope that helps some. All right, let's take a look. Number one, I don't know, are people voting on these? I don't know what these number ones mean. I guess I got to figure it out.

That's my bad. I will get on that. It says, is struggle with sin a good reason to doubt your salvation, or is the struggle the sign that you are indeed saved? That's a really interesting question. I don't let me think. So my thoughts on doubt is I understand why people doubt. People can doubt morally. People can doubt intellectually. My response is not to judge you and say stop doubting. I would point towards the passage in Jude, I think it's 122, 121 or 122 that says have mercy on those who doubt. It can be painful. went through in my own life a period and I was like really seriously questioning if I thought Christianity was true the Bible was true if I wanted to follow Jesus and I felt it it was painful

so people can doubt for a lot of reasons it can be intellectual it can be the will that we just don't want to believe it can be morally because of sin so in some ways if you're going to sin it's natural that you would doubt because of it So it's not so much that it's a good reason to doubt, but it's understandable that if we're involved in sin, it's going to make us question certain things about God and be likely to reject it. My obvious response in this case is I would, I'd encourage you strongly to, number one, don't keep it to yourself. Share with somebody. You have doubts. It can fester like a cancer, and it can wreck just your.

freedom and life, and it can really deconstruct to the point of deconversion. So share it with somebody who trusts. Share it with somebody who will listen. And don't let that sin if it goes unaddressed. And the Bible has really strong things to say about sin leading ultimately towards death, sometimes physical death, relational death, and spiritual death. So I would get to the root of it. If that's the sin that's going on, confess it and repent.

know that there's a God who loves you and forgives you and will restore you and make you new. Sean, the numbers mean top commenters. Got it. Thank you for communicating that to me. My bad. Feeling like a boomer here. All right. Does God get tired of the same prayer?

Here's one of the interesting things. I don't know what it means for. God to get tired. A lot of human language is used, what's often called anthropomorphizing language, to describe God, like say, regret. But God doesn't regret the way that we do. I think these are hooks that are somewhat analogies to get us closer to understanding God, but they don't perfectly match on to God.

So does God get tired of the same prayer? God doesn't get tired. He doesn't get worn out. And in some ways, I want to say, what kind of prayer is this? A sincere, heartfelt prayer to the Lord? I can't imagine God would get tired of that. I mean, we're taught how to pray the Lord's prayer. Would God get tired of that same prayer? Not necessarily.

I think the question is less what does God get tired of, but what are we praying and why are we praying it? I think that's the bigger question. So if I use a rope prayer and it's lost its meaning, then clearly I'm not able to connect with God and cry out to God and relate to God in the same kind of way. So that might be the time to change the prayer. Sometimes if I'm not connected with God,

use a fixed pre-planned prayer like the Lord's Prayer. or of course in John chapter 17 where Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray and sometimes and pray it. So on this question, this is really interesting. I've never actually thought about this. Does God get tired of the same prayer? I would encourage you to think less about God getting tired and more about our heart and our posture before the Lord. If we can be sincere and trusting of God to him with the same prayer, then keep it up. If that rope prayer is getting in the way, then shift your game plan.

All right. Third question about Calvinism, I'm going to shift away from that one for right now. So here's a good one. All right, I'll give some thoughts on this one. This one is tough. how is Jesus omniscient if he does not know the day or the hour? This is a fair, tough question. I remember the first time I really wrestled to this.

Again, it was actually a class in my master's program here with Gary Deweese. And it's first time was like, wait a minute, Jesus God did he doesn't know certain things. How do I reconcile it to? And maybe I'd heard it before when I was younger. It was the first time it really hit home with me. and of course the challenge is is that we believe Jesus is God which the scriptures clearly teach. I've been reading Acts in the morning and I think Acts 2028. I'm just going to make this point and then come back to it.

I think it's a great example of verse I just committed myself to memorize. It says, oh Luke, no wonder it's not there losing my mind. John X 20 versus 28. it says, Be on your guard for yourselves and for all the flock which the Holy Spirit is appointed you do as overseers

to shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood. Now, Jesus died is purchased by God because Jesus is God. So, John, as I mentioned earlier, clearly teach Jesus God.

We have it Luke. Of course, it's all over Paul. How can he not know? The key to this is what we mean by Jesus taking on human flesh in the incarnation. Jesus is divine, but he's also human. So the tension we see in the scriptures is sometimes Jesus knows things. It's seemingly only God can know.

He knows things about the woman in John, chapter 4, the woman at the well. He knows things about what the religious leaders are thinking in Mark chapter 2 with the paralytic. So he has divine insight, but he also says he doesn't know the time and he doesn't know the hour. And I think what's going on here, my best is that Jesus doesn't seize being God. He has that knowledge as God, but he chooses to take on certain limitations to access that knowledge in his humbling himself, hence Philippians chapter 2, 5 through 7, as he takes on human flesh. So not a perfect analogy, but one that comes to mind is if I chose to, well, my son's 13 now, so he's a pretty good athlete, actually, and I'm turning 50 in spring. But if I chose to compete with somebody and tie my feet together, I limit certain powers that I have.

I still latently have them, but I've chosen to limit them to compete with somebody who has less powers. In some ways, I think this is what Jesus is doing is God doesn't seize being God. That would be heresy, but willingly submits himself to the Father to access and use certain things that he knows as God. There's no contradiction that is there, and I think it's in fitting with what the scriptures teach. Boy, that's a tough one. All right, let's go back to some of these live questions here. boom boom uh let's see here

uh oh gosh some of these you're going to get me on the record I'll just be honest with you and I might backtrack when we're done so you're getting me live in this one uh BK sample says again I've never thought about this this is what makes this fun

is on a scale of one to ten how important is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy now when we say how important is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, we have to say important for what? If the question is, on a scale of one at ten, how important is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy for salvation?

I would say zero. You don't have to believe in biblical inerrancy to be saved. In fact, again, maybe I'll backtrack this. I think you can reject biblical inerrancy directly and still be saved. The way to be saved is to recognize my sinfulness, to recognize who Jesus is, cry out in repentance and ask God to forgive me if we believe in that way we are saved. So in terms of salvation, I don't think biblical inerrancy matters at all. Now, for Christian living, that's where I think biblical inerrancy is very important. Now part of me, since I teach at Biola and Talbot, I'm tempted to say it should be a 10,

but I don't know if I'm quite ready to land there. I don't know because I know a lot of Bible-believing faithful Christians who love the word and live it out in their life and aren't biblical inerrantists. So if it's not a 10 and it might be, I'd put it awfully close to that. Because I don't want to crack open the door and say, well, there could be an error here, could be an error there, it starts to remove the authority of God in our life and put the authority in us to pick and choose. That makes me nervous, biblically speaking. I don't see Jesus doing that. I don't see Paul doing that. I don't see people doing that through the history of the church.

So I would put it pretty close to attend for consistent, faithful Christian living off the top of my head. Very interesting question, by the way. Oh, somebody goodbye park said, please people press like button. Only 51 likes. Let's go, folks. Get the likes going. And again, oh, we'd love to see Sean and Wes Huff together. I would love to get Wes Huff on.

He's a friend. I think we're at the event coming up with Ruslan KD. I will be at that event together. I don't think we're doing something on stage together. I might be doing something with Gavin Ortland there. I think we're figuring it out. But I'd love to have Wes on. He's a rock star.

He was just on the Sean Ryan show. Amazingly check it out. I haven't had a chance to watch it. But we'll get him on here in due time. Honestly, I didn't ask him for a while to come on because everybody was asking him after Rogan wanted to give him a break, but definitely want to get Wes Huff on here for sure. Did you have any good resources? Another interesting question.

Oh, by the way, make sure you hit like, please. And comment. I told my team before I'm going to read all of these. Is this helpful? Do you want these live on Tuesdays where we could just take your questions or we could take something that happened in the culture that day and talk about it or respond to it? My plan is to have a Talbot professor here with me every Tuesday. And there's some Talbot professors that are some of the leading scholars in the world like Clint Arnold on Acts. I mean, one of the leading in the world on spiritual warfare, we have some top-level scholars.

Let us know. Do you want this every Tuesday, Talba Tuesdays? What would you change? Let us know how helpful this is because we want this to serve you. All right. Resources on biblical inerrancy. I'm not an expert on that, but I would definitely say Norm Geisel has done a lot of careful work on biblical inerrancy. I hosted a debate recently with John West and Mike Lacona because we're seeing a certain debate, or I don't know, I don't know, fractures the right word within the evangelical world and scholarship about how flexible is the term inerrancy. And a number of scholars point towards more flexibility in it in the authors changing and adapting things for their theological ends. And then there's others that are more conservative.

So John West took kind of a traditional classic view. Mike Lekona pushed back from his perspective based on his recent book. So that might be one. Hey, this is Chris, one of the hosts of the Salvation Army's weekly podcast, Words of Life. Throughout this month, we're in a series with a panel of believers discussing how deep Bible study has impacted their walk with God. And beginning in February, we'll be launching a series discussing the power of the written word. And that's why we need everybody who's called to write to write.

We need your perspective. No one prays like you. No one writes like you. Follow Lord Jesus and bless his church and bless him by offering this gift. And I decided to try writing my prayers and then waiting and listening for any responses and writing those responses in another color pen. So now I can go back and see actual conversations I had with God and his words in response to me. and it's such a blessing. Listen to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit WordsofLifepodcast.org. You could watch and that would help you kind of

make a decision there about biblical inerrancy, but I think Geisler has a ton of stuff. People watch this stuff. Gosh, here's a good question, and I feel like I'm not going to give you great answer to this one. What blind spots do, Western apologists often have when speaking to Asian or honor shame cultures. You know, I think one big thing we, one big blind spot is I think we tend to see things so

individualistically about me and my relationship with Jesus. And especially in, in an honor, shame culture, there tends to be a real collective understanding of identity. And I've seen this, as I've traveled in places around the world. Like I've seen this, I go to Philippines, go to Singapore, go to other countries.

This Western, rugged individualism, me and Jesus, seems to be really common. And we've all got to go out and define ourselves and really find her own identity is more of a Western thing. And we shift that and fail to read the Bible

through the lens of honor, shame, even things like the death of Jesus and how we often talk about the physical pain, which I talk about, and it's horrific. And I think the physical pain highlights the depth of sin and the cause of death. But you've got to realize, crucifixion was the most painful and shameful death imaginable. Typically, strip naked, put out publicly to be. shamed in front of the world. That was one of the worst things imaginable in an honor shame culture.

So I think in general, to answer a question, there's probably a lot of Asian and individuals from honor shame cultures who could answer this way better than I could. But I think we look at things individualistically and we miss the narrative what it means to be a part of an honor shame culture and kind of read different things into the scriptures like it's me and Jesus. If I miss something, tell me. I'd love to know. Okay.

Let's look at some other questions here. Get a good microphone to make consistent content. Is this microphone not good? I thought I've got a pretty good content here. Let me know if I need to get closer or get louder. It's not a good mic. I'd happy to work on that. What would you like to see?

Let me keep going here. Man, some interesting questions from the East, which I love. Let's go here. One is Pentecostalism again? Uh, hope someone's defending that. Fair enough. Maybe I'll let me know if you want me to host a conversation. I'd be happy to host a debate between somebody who believes the Trinity and a oneness,

Pentecostalism. That might be an interesting conversation to have. This is very helpful and cool. Awesome. Thanks, Laura. How would you best dissuade someone from being a new age Christian? Well, I would say two things. First off, I would encourage that so-called new age Christian.

to listen to my friend Melissa Doherty. She's a wonderful YouTuber, former New Age New Thought, has a wonderful book out on this, had a chance to interview her about her. It's a great interview. She talks about this a lot. And so I would encourage this New Age Christian. I'd say, watch Melissa Diderty and tell us what you think.

The second thing I would do is if I was speaking with a new age Christian, and you'll find that I do this in a lot of my conversations, ask questions. Jesus asked between the Gospels and Acts 540, I'm sorry, 340 questions. In Paul's writings, we have 262 questions. In the Gospels, there's 3,000 questions. Questions, questions. So if I have somebody, and they are a New Age Christian, I'm going to say, tell me what you mean

by being a Christian, and tell me what you mean by New Age and how you reconcile the two. Clearly, this person doesn't really believe New Age, or this person really doesn't believe the gospel, because they are irreconcilable belief systems. So ask a lot of questions, understand, try to just understand where the person is coming from, and then get to the heart and say, since you describe yourself as a new age Christian, a Christian is a follower of Jesus, help me understand what Jesus taught that you think would line up with New Age beliefs and go to the texts. There are none that in the right context actually teach New Age ideas.

And that's because in New Age you find that human beings are a part of God or have divinity within. Jesus taught like in Mark 7, he taught. really clear that's out of the heart that comes sloth and wickedness and pride and lust and all sorts of sins. So New Age and Christianity have a different view about human nature. New Age and Christian also have a different view about the understanding of God. What did Jesus believe about God? Well, he clearly believed in the view of God as held through the Jewish scriptures expanded in him being God in human flesh.

Jesus believed in one God. Mark chapter 12, the Lord our God is one. New Age. What's the New Age view of God? God is not a personal being on New Age. God is a force. So I would ask this individual, since you're New Age Christian,

do you believe humans are naturally good and divine as we see in a lot of New Age thought? You think good human beings are sinful and corrupt as we see in Jesus. Do you think we are all a part of God? It's this energy essence that lives? Or is God a tri-personal being, a personal being who exists outside of us, who we can have a personal relationship with?

There are other differences. But the bottom line is I would ask a lot of questions. I want to know this person means by New Age Christian. And I would try to untangle what it means to be New Age, what it means to be Christian, show the tension. between the two and invite the person to follow what Jesus really taught. That's how I think I would approach that one. All right. I love this type of Q&A. Thank you. Awesome to hear. Let me keep going here. Man, there's a ton of questions. I'm sorry if I miss your questions here. Again, I might have time for one or two more

here, but let us know how helpful is this. Do you want me bring in Talbot professors? Would you love this every Tuesday if we did Talbot Tuesdays live Q&A with you would you attend would you prioritize it what should we do differently you can comment here on youtube or you can email me sean at shahm macdowal.org and my team will take a look we are really trying to serve you in 2026 that is christian skeptics others etc all right uh did you see that the guy that you did a testimony video on Dide. I think that person is referring to Scott Adams, maybe. That's possible.

I'm not sure if it's somebody else, send me a note. If I missed it, I'd like to know. Let me go back towards the top here. What questions am I missing here? Oh, here's an issue one. Hi, Dr. McDowell. Love what you do. A question I have is, what is a pervasive heresy you see in the modern church currently.

All right. Here we go. Are you ready? I think one of the earliest heresies, or at least false views that was challenging the church, is Gnosticism. It's Gnosticism. And Gnosticism saw the physical world as bad and corrupt and true identity being in the soul. And salvation evolves leaving this fallen physical flesh behind and entering into a spiritual, meaning non-physical state.

I think the Protestant church is complete, it might be overstated. I think it's deeply influenced by Gnosticism. Randy Alcorn talks about this a ton in heaven that we have when it comes to the afterlife. We have a Gnostic kind of platonic view that were just spirits and we're not fleshly and we're not physical.

You see that in heaven? Maybe I'm jumping the gun here. I hope it's okay. but my next book coming out. I'm co-editing. It won't be out for a year. We're actually going to start right in my first chapter tomorrow, to be honest with you, is co-writing it with John Stone Street.

Recallment at reframing sexuality. And the idea is that it's a Protestant evangelical theology of the body. I think Catholics have a much more robust and arguably biblical. and consistent theology of the body against Gnosticism. Now, this doesn't mean I'm going to agree with Catholics on everything when we get to birth control and some of those differences. It's not my point. That's a separate conversation we could have.

But I think a big heresy in the church when it comes to sexuality is we really downplay the body. And I'll keep this vague because it's not the conversation. I don't know if kids are listening. When it comes to certain sexual behavior, I've asked a lot of evangelical experts, and the answer is kind of like if you pray about it and if you have a clear conscience in your mind, almost anything you do physically with your spouse is okay. When I hear those kind of answers, I think this is kind of a Gnostic view that ignores the fact that the body means something.

It's been designed for a certain purpose. We actually communicate more with our bodies without words than we do with words. So the reason I think this is an important heresy in the church is when it comes to issues like transgenderism today, which roots identity in my soul. So somebody would say I'm a man trapped in a woman's body. My soul defines me, not my body. That's a certain Gnostic kind of belief. So I think the Protestant or evangelical church has had a lot of interaction and thought. about responding to certain transgender ideas, but we've bought into many, let's just say,

gnostic ideas about the self, and it's left us without a robust way of responding. So there's plenty of other heresies, but that's one that comes to mind and one I'm writing on and thinking about more and more. All right, friends, I see a ton more questions here. Thank you for watching. Thanks for your questions. Seriously, please take a minute you watched and you join me. Even if you watch this later, not live and let me know, are these kind of live Q&As helpful?

Would you like me to bring on other Talbot professors? We will be doing this for the next three months every other Tuesday, the second and the fourth Tuesday, January, February, and March. In two weeks, I'm bringing on my colleague Thaddeus Williams. We'll try to bring on Scott Ray. We'll try to bring on Eric Tonus. We'll bring on Matt Williams. We've got some others. But let me know.

Would that be helpful every other Tuesday? Is this something you'd want every Tuesday? How would you do a Q&A on this channel? How would it be helpful to you to serve you, whether you were a believer or not? Don't forget to hit subscribe. We've got – here's some of the shows coming up. I've got a show coming up specifically on some new – Archaeological digs on Jericho.

Super interesting. My son had a pretty radical, how do I describe this? Well, my son, I want him to put it in his own words, but for a while became hooked on pornography and came out of it a number of months ago and experienced pretty radical transformation as faith.

I have never in my life seen somebody change more dramatically. He's only 21 years old, and he asked if he could share his story. So I interviewed him. I'm going to put that up next week. We've got a Muslim coming on to talk about the Trinity. We've got a lot of other interviews coming on. Make sure you hit subscribe and follow us. And we're doing this live from Talba School Theology.

We would love to have you join us. Of course, I teach in the program on apologetics. We have programs on marriage and family. We have programs on theology, Old Testament, New Testament, etc. In person and distance. Last thing, if you're like, I'm not quite ready for a master's degree. We just totally rebooted our certificate program.

And this is a program where we get some of the top apologists to lecture. We just kind of walk you through to learn apologetics formally. And if you look in my live stream below, I have a significant discount below, 25% off for those who want to do the certificate program. All right. Don't forget to hit subscribe. Don't forget to hit a like or leave a comment. That would help. And please let us know. Leave a comment. My team is going to watch all of these and try to respond. Hey, friends. If you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet. And it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs in apologetic, spiritual information, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today. And we will see you when the next episode drops. Ever walked away from a conversation thinking, wow, now that was exactly what I needed?

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