Hayden Carroll's Claims, Then Jeremiah 18 and the Potter's Freedom

Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Lines. Good to be with you. I'm wearing a Coogee vest today because this morning when I opened the windows there was a breeze blowing through at 64 degrees, which for Phoenicians is a reason for tremendous, tremendous celebration and rejoicing.

Our first sub -70 low temperature since probably, you know, this year was not bad. This year was not bad, but it's five in June and it's going to get back up into the 70s here next week, you know, for the low and then, you know, high in the 90s.

But that's the first little whiff of the fact that we'll have a few weeks off. That's the best we get here. That's just how it Anyway, so I'm going to go into the big board pretty quick. I just was noticing a quick response to me from Hayden Carroll and I had said, well, you might want to tune in.

Mormon Claims About Sonship and the Nature of God

I'm going to talk about, yeah, right here. He had made a statement. Here we go. I just, these threads. I said to a guy named Systematically Systemic, Peaceful Jogger. He had responded to a Mormon by the name of Guy Incognito and we'll go ahead and do this.

Then we're going to do Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9. But this Mormon that I've gone back and forth with a few times quoted 1 John 3. Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.

Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.

And so the Mormon is using this to say we're the sons of God. God has a body of flesh and bones and he has heavenly wives, many of them, and he has celestial sex with them and even though they are spiritual, they have physical bodies, or no, even though they are physical, bodies of flesh and bone but no blood, they have spiritual offspring, and then those spiritual offspring are placed into physical bodies here on the earth, and so on and so forth.

And, you know, most Christians hear that and they're like that's not what John was talking about. In fact, it specifically says, behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.

We're not the sons of God by nature. We're not the sons of God because God procreated us in a spiritual pre-existence. This is due to the gospel and due to redemption and it's not a natural thing as it is in Mormonism.

And so I responded, you know, a Christian said, do you guys ever respond to complete a discussion before moving on to another verse or question? Yes, believers are being spoken to here. Those who have faith in Christ become children of God through adoption.

Not all are sons of God. We are his creatures, not his literal children. The guy is exactly right. But I just decided to comment to the Christian. I said, Mormons begin by denying the most basic fundamental assertion of the scriptures and the Christian faith.

One eternal God, creator of all things. The result is the Bible becomes a disjointed mess of texts that can be used in whatever fashion they please. There is no consistent means of exegesis when you start with polytheism.

And it's true. And this is something, you know, Irenaeus pointed this out. We've talked about this many times in the past. When Irenaeus talks about apostolic tradition, he's not talking about what Roman Catholics have called apostolic tradition or Eastern Orthodox called apostolic tradition.

When you dig into Irenaeus, the apostolic tradition is what he is saying is this is what the apostles taught at the start. And nothing in scripture will make any sense unless you start here. And that is there is one God, the creator of heaven and earth, who's eternally been God.

That's the most basic level. That's what is assumed by every biblical writer. And therefore, if you don't start there, the Bible becomes this mass of jumbled text you can put together like some kind of messed up jigsaw puzzle and make it say anything you want to say.

And so Irenaeus was putting that out a long time ago. And it's still true today. Well, so when I posted that, Hayden Carroll, who I've criticized many times on this program, I don't see him responding to that.

But that's, you know, neither here or there. I mean, you would think that he'd want to, but he's much more into getting clicks on his stuff, I guess. He says, James can't even justify his own standard that he uses to condemn everyone else.

Make it make sense. Now, he's just a cheap shot artist. I'm sorry, Hayden, you're just a cheap shot artist. That's all you are. We've talked out there in Mesa and you've got your little hyper skepticism stuff and you just talk over folks.

And I don't see any serious ability on your part to know anything outside of just the stuff that you go after. You go after Christians, you know, you're doing these video things where you go after Christians on stuff that they don't expect to be running into.

So you're a lot like Shabir Ali in that, as a Muslim, that's what he would do. Each group gets its, you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses had their little group of guys and they'd go out and get strange stuff to throw at people and they throw you a curve and you don't know how to answer.

You've never heard of stuff like this before. Shabir would use the liberals, as you do, the people on the left and throw that kind of stuff out. And it's, you know, I have no respect for it. I really don't.

I don't see any. You are one of the biggest epistemological hypocrites I've ever seen in my life. The standards you use against biblical Christianity make Mormonism look like a laughingstock. Mormonism cannot survive the critical analysis that you want to try to borrow to go after Deuteronomy 32, which we'll talk about later in the program, and demonstrate that you were, well, just way off base, again, as you normally are.

But it's the hypocrisy, man. It's the double standards. It's using standards to attack Christianity that, if applied to Mormonism, would triply refute, quadruply refute Mormonism. Mormonism cannot stand.

That's why it's falling apart. That's why it's mutating. That's why you've got Blake Osler's out there. That's why you've got Mormons regularly. I had a guy this morning on Twitter. Well, you know, it's in the King Follett discourse, you know.

In fact, it was in one of the threads where I had responded to Hayden Carroll. This Mormon, you know, says, well, you know, white never puts anything substantive up. What happened real quickly, you know, I just, since Hayden Carroll does two-line little bloops, then I'll do two-line little bloops back.

No one cares that there's no substance to what's being said, but why not? And so I was pointing out, as I normally point out, what I point out to Hayden Carroll is when he tries to bring up all these issues about theodicy and stuff like that, he has no dog in the race.

The Mormon God is not the ground of anything. The Mormon God became a god because he's subject to laws and principles, okay? And if a Mormon man becomes a god, then he was once subject in the same way.

He's not the origin and source of these things, so he doesn't have to answer the big questions that real gods have to answer, okay? He's just an exalted man dude, and so you don't get to ask him questions like, well, where did the priesthood come from?

Where did the eternal law of progression come from? The power of the priesthood and the power of procreation, huh? That's what makes a god? Okay, where do those powers come from? What's their origin and source?

They can't answer these questions. They can't even start there. They're not a part of the theistic debate table. They've got to sit over at the polytheist debate table with the pagan tribes out in Africa someplace, or the South Pacific, or something like that, and argue about their little gods or something like that.

But they're not at this table, and I keep pointing that out. And so I talked about gods from Kolob, and everybody went crazy as if I didn't know what the book of Abraham actually says, and all the rest of that kind of fun stuff.

And they're just ignoring what the real issue is, because they can't deal with the real issue. The real issue is your deity became a deity because it's subject to time, and it's subject to things that it did not create, okay?

So you don't get to even ask these questions. You can pretend, and oh, how could your god do this? You don't have a god in the conversation, Hayden. Oh, how can your god create people to go to hell? I can imagine a much greater deity.

You've got an exalted man that lives on a planet somewhere that's near unto Kolob, and in your own hymnal, dude, you've got, if I could high to Kolob. It's still there. I looked it up. You all can look.

If I could high. H-I-E. It's an old English word for hasten. If I could high to Kolob, look it up. Go to the, put it in Google, and it'll give you. In fact, I think I did. I posted the direct link to the LDS hymnal online.

You can look it up yourself. I wasn't making anything up. I was making a point that you have a god who is subject to time, and subject to external things he did not create, so he's not in the conversation.

You're just not even at the table. And so, anyways, that's what I, so I mentioned this, this guy. Oh, he never posts anything, substitutes, stuff like that. Oh, yeah, right, okay. I'm sure you've been reading my stuff on X.

I started in X in 2010, as I recall. So, yeah, you know, 16 years. Yeah, I've never posted anything. In fact, what's the, what's one of the main objections to me? Your posts are too long. You can't win for trying, as they say.

So, I asked this Mormon a question. I said, do you believe that God became God by obedience to gospel principles, rules and principles? And he wrote back and said, yes, Jesus did. And I, and I, I meant, I said, no, I'm talking about God the Bible, God, God the Father.

Well, Jesus is God of the Old Testament, he said. And I wrote back and said, and I said, and I gave you about five paragraphs. It was a substantive post. And I said, well, actually, there's only one God in the Old Testament.

It's Yahweh Elohim, or Jehovah Elohim, as you would slaughter it in English. And I quoted Deuteronomy 4 .35 to you, to show that you might know that Jehovah, he is Elohim, the Elohim. There is none besides him.

Now, I was kicked out of the Mesa Visitor Center many, many decades ago now for showing two missionaries Deuteronomy 4 .35 in their own Bible. But Mormons don't understand that Jehovah Elohim is a compound name for God used over 500 times in the Old Testament.

In 1916, they, the LDS Church, First Presidency LDS Church, put out this statement, so 110 years ago now, identifying the Father as Elohim and the Son as Jehovah. Now, whether Joseph Smith believed that or not is a valid dispute in LDS, amongst LDS historians.

Like I've said many, many times before, Smith was evolving so fast, changing so fast. If he had lived two more years, there would be no Mormonism today. It would have gotten so wild, so crazy, and so self-contradictory that no one could have made heads or tails out of it.

And there would be, you know, there might be some little group in the inner mountain west someplace, but there wouldn't be the Mormonism that exists today if he had not been murdered in the Carthage Jail in 1844.

So, anyway, so I point this out to this guy, and then he had said at one point, well, you know, there's, you know, the King Follett funeral discourse, you know, that's not really official, you know, and I don't necessarily hold to it.

So he's a Neo-Morm. He's a Neo-Morm. And I pointed out the sermon that is quoted more times by the general authorities of the LDS church than any other sermon throughout the history of the Mormon church, go through the doctrine, the general discourse, et cetera, et cetera.

What sermon is cited more often than any other by the actual leaders of the LDS church? The King Follett funeral discourse. And you can throw in the Sermon on the Grove. They're normally squished together because they're from the same time period.

Anyway, the one was sort of backing up the other. So, anyways, and so, you know, I just respond to the guy, like, the quote that I gave you is from Achieving the Celestial Marriage manual, copyright, Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

For at least two decades, that was used to prepare people for celestial marriage by the church itself. You can't get any more official than that. If you can say, well, I don't know, I'm sorry, there is no way that the LDS church can teach anything anymore if that's not official.

If it says the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and for decades in a row, here, read this before you go through the temple. This is what we believe. Well, you know, hey, I don't know, I might like it, might not like that.

If that attitude continues and it is growing, there will be no Mormonism in 10 years. It's shattering. The foundations are cracked. It's coming apart. And I think social media is helping. It's creating all these little mini-prophets.

All these little mini-prophets with their own little take, their own little perspective. And, you know, Mormonism never had that kind of objective foundation to stand upon in the first place. It always had that deep level of subjectivity to it and things like that.

And, of course, it's, you know, Scriptures cannot stand up, I mean, the Book of Abraham, oh my goodness, the Book of Mormon, oh my goodness, cannot stand up to any kind of meaningful objective analysis.

And certainly not the standards that these guys like Haight and Carroll are trying to apply to the New Testament. Totally destroys their own Scriptures. They don't care about that part. It's that double standard that drives me crazy.

But it survived for as long as it did because it was pretty much located for a long time in the Intermountain West. I mean, Utah was sort of a nation unto itself. Didn't have a whole lot of interaction with the rest of the world.

And you had a very strong central authority structure. You know, you've got things like the Danites and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, things like that, sort of in the background of that. But you have a strong authority structure and isolation.

And so that allowed Mormonism to sort of develop and didn't have a whole lot of schisms. There were some differences of opinions on intelligences and stuff like that, but pretty much went along the same direction until, you know, sort of as it's illustrated by Bruce R. McConkie.

I mean, you know, bulldog, you know. He reminds me a little bit of Ratzinger for the Roman Catholic. And now look at how unusual McConkie looks in a very brief period of time, because that isolation has ended.

And the Mormon Church is partially responsible for that. They are the ones sending their guys out to get PhDs here, there, and everywhere. And now they're bringing that methodology back, and Mormonism can't survive it.

Foundations are crumbling. It's going to go every which direction. It really is. So when Hayden Carroll says, James can't even justify his own standard that he uses to condemn everyone else, what standard?

You mean monotheism? You mean the entire trial of false gods, Isaiah 40 -48? Hayden Carroll, you are incapable of dealing with that text on your own, and you know it. You cannot read Hebrew. You cannot read Greek.

You have not done the work to be able to deal with texts like that, and you know it. You are going on secondary information. You know you are, and I'll demonstrate that with the Deuteronomy 32 stuff. And so I said, oh please try to back that claim up, Hayden, and he said, you are officially and formally invited on my show to discuss.

Will you accept? No. You can come on mine, and we'll have a moderator, and we will debate, and we'll do it right. But you can't do that, because your big thing is to talk over people, and your big thing is to scatter gun and shotgun.

So if you want to do monotheism, we can do monotheism. But we're not doing it on your show, or we're going to have a moderator, and it's going to be a proper format. Because I know what you do. I know what your friends do.

One of your friends tried doing that with me in Utah. In cross-examination. Didn't work real well for him, did it? No. And it's not going to work well for you either. Because I'm going to take you to the text.

I'm going to make you open it up. I'm going to go ahead and tell the story. We're going to get to it. It's up on the screen. I'm going to tell you the story. See, you're not anything new, Hayden. You're just repeating the old stuff.

You're doing what people have done before you. Farms was doing it. All those guys back in the day. It's just now we have so much access in social media. So let me tell everybody a story. I was going to wait for this till later on.

Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Qumran Textual Variant

But hey, keep it all together. Don't remember what year it was, but back in the 90s, let's see, would have been, okay, 86 plus, yeah, late, late 90s. It was the general conference where my son came up with me.

So it was the one we were wearing the Rush Limbaugh ties. And that's when I gave a track to Senator Ornhatch. And so I was invited to go into studio. Actually, I did two programs. Now, I think about it.

It was Van Hale and then Martin Tanner. So it was like two or three, may have been four hours in a row because their programs were back to back as I recall. And we were staying at a luxury hotel in Salt Lake City called Motel 6.

And I remember so clearly, in fact, I just noticed I still have the bag that I had back then, the book bag that I had back then. It's in my office. We were getting ready to, I was packing up and I was thinking, what am I going to need in the studio?

Because you didn't have this in 1999. I think that's when it was. You didn't, you know, one terabyte. Okay. Didn't have this kind of thing. You had books, paper. And so what am I going to, what do I want to have with me?

Because I'm going to be on the air in Salt Lake City with Mormon show hosts taking phone calls primarily from Mormons in Salt Lake City. And so I remember looking at this, this very volume. Had it with me.

You might say I've never seen one like that. That's because this was one of those that I had bound by a Jehovah's Witness. We knew this Jehovah's Witness guy who did bookbinding. And we sort of used it as sort of a witnessing mechanism.

And this is the small Biblia Hebraica Scriatensia. I actually turned to the text today and I can see enough to get to the right page. But once I get there, there it is, Deuteronomy 32. You know, if I sort of do this, yeah, no, I need my old man glasses.

Definitely to see this stuff anymore. Here's what happened. I, I almost didn't bring it because the book bag was full, but I stuffed, I decided, you know what? Let's do it. I stuffed it in the side pocket and it looked goofy, but who cares?

It's the last 20 minutes of what was at least two hours. I think it was three hours. I think one of the programs was one hour. The other program was two hours. Do we have that stuff? Oh yeah. Okay. So it's, it's yeah.

Someone can find it on Sermon Audio, find out how long it was. Yeah. KTKK I think was the station. Algo is saying 1997. 97? I'm thinking it was further back. Well, see, I thought, I thought, I thought Josh was 13.

He was born in 86. So, and I remember he came with me. So that's why, that's how I was dating it. But anyway, it was the last 15, 20 minutes of a marathon answering questions and objections and, you know, being completely outnumbered,.

Which is what we did. It was so hot in there. There was no air conditioning. You weren't in there. I was out in the, in the outer room. I was with you, but I was in the other room.

Well, anyway, it's right toward the end, you know, and Bill calls it. That's, that's all they, that's all they said. Bill from Provo calls it. Well, Bill from Provo knew Hayden Carroll's stuff. Of course, this was when Hayden Carroll was a kid.

And Bill from Provo threw out the alleged textual variant. Sorry, when Westhoff texts you, it's always good to look, you know. So, yeah, I ordered a, hmm, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to look at this after the program and respond to that.

I'm getting a couple more of the things here. Worst thing is I just got an email that they're putting out a page from P45. And you all know P45 is the one in the background in the other studio. And so they could put a P45 one out.

I'm stuck. He said he was slipping something else in with my order. So that would be, that would be really cool, Wes. I love, love P45. That's actually what's on my arm over here. So, yeah, I'll have to tell him that's, that's what's on my arm.

And that way he'll feel guilty if he doesn't send me one. Anyway, so what were we talking about? Oh, yeah. So Bill calls in and he throws out Deuteronomy 32 .8. And he's saying, well, actually, you know, the more ancient reading of Deuteronomy 32 .8 shows that there are gods above Yahweh, Jehovah.

And I'm like, what? So while he's digging that up, I open this very text. And what I'll do, I wasn't going to do it this way, but I had this queued up and all I need to do is I just need to add a parallel real quick here.

Here it is. Oh, my goodness. There. All right. Drag this over here. Now here's Deuteronomy 32 .8. And so by using this over here, I wonder if this will work. Whoa. Hey, that's even better. I didn't want that, but that worked even better.

In fact, let me see if I can. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There you go. There you go. Okay. That was a mistake on my part that worked out real well. All right. What you see right here, which is actually big enough to see, is what is in micro fine print right down there, which is what I was looking at in the studio back when micro fine print and me were still friends, which we're not anymore by any stretch of the imagination.

So I'm looking at it. And so thankfully, I can read this. Textual criticism is sort of something I've been doing for a long time and even had been doing back then. And so I'm sitting here going, well, wait a minute.

But what do you mean the more ancient reading? And so he's talking about there is a fragment, well, scroll, in the fourth Qumran cave. So it's a 4Q number, as I recall. And it has the Hebrew reading that evidently is underneath the Septuagint variant reading.

So when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. The sons of Israel. So Bene Yisrael in the Hebrew.

And yet the, well, I'm afraid that this is going to close that down if I go over there to show you what the Septuagint is. But I'll close this down in a second. Maybe it'll come back up. Anyways, you can see Bene Elohim, Bene El, probably Bene Elohim, sons of God, as the reading that is being translated as Angelon Theou in the Greek Septuagint.

So I was able to respond and I'm like, but the text isn't saying what you're saying it's saying at all. And so let me see if, here we go. Yeah. Okay. So you'll see the Septuagint here. According according to the numbers of the angels of God.

And so what the BHS textual apparatus was saying is Bene Elohim would probably be the background for what the Septuagint is translating because there are places where the Septuagint is following a different tradition than the Masoretic text.

It's rare in the Pentateuch, but it does happen. And this of course has come up with all sorts of because there are few, very few, well, few, relatively few, but look, if you want to get published, especially in Old Testament stuff, you've got to come up with a new thing.

Old Testament's been around a while. And so what you've got are some people who will argue that Elion, right here, so when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, and so what they will do is they will say, well, Elion is one God, and then Yahweh is a different God.

Now there's absolutely nothing in the text that even suggests it. The easiest reading, the most simple reading, the reading that would be consistent with the Deuteronomy and the fact that Elion, which is fairly rare, is almost always used in reference to something that has to do with Gentiles.

So in other words, the Most High, because the Gentiles have their own gods. Now, they're idols, they didn't create anything, if you accept, if you read the Old Testament the way Jesus read the Old Testament, which these guys cannot, Hayden Carroll cannot read the Old Testament the way Jesus did.

No way. Not the stuff he's buying into, not the stuff BYU's buying into, but they don't care. They don't care. Consistency? Who needs consistency? If you read the New Testament, the Old Testament, the way that Jesus did, then when it says the gods of peoples are idols in Psalm 96, and when Jeremiah says, if you didn't create the heavens and the earth or perish from under the heavens and the earth, in Jeremiah chapter 10, those things all come together to tell you about who God is.

But for the vast majority of Old Testament scholarship today, the Old Testament is just a mishmash of self-contradictory garbage. I mean, just stories, it's not inspired, they don't view it the way Jesus did, and I will be absolutely, I don't care if someone thinks, oh, you're just showing charity.

I don't study the scriptures for any other reason than the guy who rose from the dead treated them like the Word of God. I think that's the best reason to do it. Have you ever thought about it that way?

Maybe, just possibly. So, anyway, if you read this in that context, the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, so that's God, and He set the boundaries of peoples. I mean, that's Acts 17, same stuff going on there.

But Yahweh's portion is His people. So, the point is, His portion is Israel. He gives Israel to Himself, and that's the basis of why Israel's rebellion and Israel's stiff-neckedness is such a horrific thing, because they have been given such a privilege to be Yahweh's portion.

There is nothing in this text, nothing in this text, in Qumran or anything else that distinguishes between El Yon and Yahweh, and says, that's one God, and this is a lesser God, or anything. Nothing. That is a misreading that is very helpful in getting papers published, because it's nice and unique, but it doesn't come from the text at all.

And by the way, even someone like Michael Heiser, and he's big into this section because, you know, the heavenly counsel and all the rest of that stuff, even he goes, well, El Yon and Yahweh are the same person, the same God.

It's not like multiple gods running around. So, this happened with Bill calling in, all right, on KTKK radio. All right, so, back over here for a second. So, with this Hebrew text, I don't know how we figured this out.

I don't know if someone contacted us. I just don't remember. But, guess who Bill was? Bill was Dr. William Hamblin of Brigham Young University, one of the farms guys, one of the main farms guys. In fact, it was him, and who was the other guy that I was in studio with?

Hamblin and, was it Peterson? Maybe, I know that. Well, Martin Tanner was the, Martin Tanner was the host. There was four of you in there. No, no, no, no, it was Tanner and two BYU professors, Hamblin and I think it was Peterson, against me.

That was a different show. But, so, yeah, I did a few of those shows. Everybody says, oh, he wouldn't take on our good people. I've done it many times before, and when you guys were in diapers. Anyway, it was Bill Hamblin, William Hamblin.

If he had said William, then it might have given him away. He was the one calling in and presenting this thing. And, so, I have a video, and I'm not going to have time to play it now, unfortunately, because I've already gone way, way, way beyond my time.

But, I have a video of Hayden Carroll throwing this at some Christian, and Hayden Carroll can't read what I can read in there. He can't read this text, but he told this guy that the Quran, the Qumran scroll says that there's one God and then another God, and it doesn't say that, Hayden.

And, if you were to actually debate me, I'm going to pick this up, and I'm going to stick it in front of your face and say, Read it! Show it to me! In this! And you can't. And you know it. And you know it.

You say, Boy, you're being, you're being really mean. I don't like deceivers, and Hayden Carroll is a deceiver. When you use information like this, that I can tell is being misused, and you used it to cause confusion in others, you are a deceiver.

That's all there is to it. So, yeah, when I see someone throwing that kind of stuff out, and I can recognize what the problems are, yeah, that's, you know, you can say, Well, he's just been deceived by his leaders.

Nah, he's past that. He's past that. So, we've been taking them apart. We've been showing stuff, putting it up, refuting it. We're going to keep doing that, because he doesn't have all that much. He's only got a certain range of stuff, and it's useful to refute it.

All right, weren't, weren't going to do that, but X got me again. That, that post popped up, right, right as I was getting ready to start the program. It's like, okay, all right. Now, interestingly enough, earlier today, someone in our chat channel posted a, something, I'm not going to mention names, this particular person's name.

This particular person scares me, not because this particular person could in any way, shape, or form refute what I'm saying, or engage me in any meaningful fashion, but this person's just unhinged. And so, unhinged people, it's best to stay away from such people.

Jeremiah 18 and the Nation of Israel

Anyway, the conversation came up about Jeremiah chapter 18. And so, the fellow oversees, you know, I really want to try to find some way, you know, because all these people are saying, Nah, this fellow doesn't exist.

This is all AI. And he says, No, in fact, I saw something he said, uh, not only am I not AI, I am typing this on my phone while sitting on the toilet. Well, that's something AI would say to prove that it was, it was actually human, I suppose.

But I would like to see if it would be possible to set up some online discussion of some of the key texts, because I've spent a lot of time responding to this guy. And I haven't seen a whole lot in the way of response.

He's being used by the D'Souza crowd as, Oh, this guy's just great. He's just blows everybody away. But I never see them talking about the responses at all, ever. And I don't see him responding either.

Instead, there's these long, long, long, long, very long posts saying stuff that has been said for a long time from that perspective, but it's really not anything new or unique. And so in regards to Romans chapter 9, he had posted this big, long thing, and part of the argumentation went back to Jeremiah chapter 18.

And this is what you're going to find with Leighton Flowers and with all the rest of these folks. And so I decided a couple days ago, let's walk through this. Let's do this in the right way. It could be very useful to folks in the long term, because a lot of different people use Jeremiah 18 as a way to say, Well, all Romans 9 is about is nations.

And Jeremiah 18 says that if a nation will repent, then God will relent of the judgment. Or if they cease doing good deeds, then he will bring the judgment to bear again. But that's all the potter thing is.

The potter and the clay, God has the right to judge nations, but then he can withhold judgment when they repent, and that's all that's being spoken of. Now, that happens to have absolutely nothing to do with Romans 9, but that's what they say.

And they say, See, Paul is clearly drawing from Jeremiah chapter 18, therefore, and here's the key, therefore, whatever application of the potter and the clay in Jeremiah 18 is, it can never be anything other than that.

I know there are other places in the Old Testament that use that, that don't have that application, but we ignore that part, and we say there's only one way to talk about the potter and the clay, and it's national, and it has nothing to do with God forming people for honor or dishonor at all.

Okay, so let's, um, um, da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum, um, where is this thing? Oh, that's keynote. Okay, there we go. All right, just had to select it so it knew what was going on. So, let's look at the text, grab your Bible, um, it's gonna be hard to do in that time period, but I'm gonna do my best for you.

Grab your Bible, and, um, let's see what we've got here in, uh, Jeremiah chapter 18. We need to read that first. Jeremiah chapter 18, beginning at verse 1. I'm not going to be putting it up, you need to be reading it, I can't have that and this up at the same time.

The word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh saying, arise and go down to the potter's house, and there I will make you hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house and behold he was making something on the wheel, but the vessel that he was making of clay was ruined in the hand of the potter.