Get well soon! I’ll be out of town and unavailable next week, but will definitely catch the recorded study. God bless!

@Dominic Enyart , I love your point 1! That's exactly what I thought when I read it, except that isn't just communist, it's any form of collectivism where people take what they haven't earned from those who have earned it. It's all just legalized theft. The difference is only a matter of degree. I personally say socialism is the most dangerous because it fools the most number of people into thinking its a good thing. It's worse than communism for the same reason HBO is worse than the Playboy channel. Verses 24-31 (verse 26 in particular) struck me as well. It reminded me of Hebrews 10:31. It's also one of those passages that can't help but make me wonder about what a Calvinist does with, "Because I called and you refused,". I need to try and remember this passage for the next time I encounter a Calvinist who is talking about irresistible grace.

I don't know how to start new threads on this site but I figured we could just keep going with Proverbs here... The thing that stood out to me in Proverbs 2 is how directly wisdom is connected to the way a person actually lives. Solomon does not treat wisdom as merely knowing a lot or being intellectually sharp. He tells his son to seek wisdom, treasure it and pursue it, and then says... “Then you will understand righteousness and justice, Equity and every good path.” - Proverbs 2:9, NKJV In other words, wisdom produces righteous behavior. The more a man understands what is true, the better equipped he is to recognize what is right, avoid what is evil and walk uprightly. Of course, this is being written from a Jewish perspective, under the law. Solomon is an Israelite, instructing his son in how to live rightly before God, and the end of the chapter even speaks in terms of the upright remaining in the land while the wicked are cut off from it. So the dispensational setting matters. This is not doctrine written to the Body of Christ. Even so, the basic point is hard to miss: wisdom is not merely something that improves the mind, but shows up in how a man actually lives. For us in the Body of Christ, the practical result of seeking wisdom is much the same, but the motivation is different. We are not living under Israel's covenant system of blessing for obedience and judgment for disobedience. Our walk is motivated by grace and love. And, ironically enough, love was the motive God wanted all along.

Is there a recording available of the last Bible study?

After listening through the study, I just wanted to toss in my two cents on the phrase "from my mother's womb" that was discussed during the study. When Paul says in Galatians 1:15 that God had “separated me from my mother's womb,” the expression itself was a familiar way of saying “from birth” or “from the beginning of my life.” The same language is used in Acts 3:2 and 14:8 of men who were lame “from their mother's womb,” meaning from birth. So Paul's wording does not, by itself, amount to the extraordinary claim that God examined the future, or even Paul's DNA, and chose Paul before he was born. It could very well have been simply a common figure of speech that basically meant "from the very beginning" or "my entire life". At the same time, the expression may have been more literally true than its ordinary use requires. Paul was, after all, an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin named Saul, just like Israel's first king. The parallels are striking and have been noticed in one form or another for most of Christian history. It is therefore entirely possible that God really had set apart that particular child for a purpose from the womb, even though the expression itself does require that. In other words, I think it plausible to think it's both. The phrase may carry the ordinary sense of “from the very beginning” while also describing, quite literally, something God had actually done while Paul was yet unborn. In no case is Galatians 1:15, nor any other biblical use of the phrase, evidence for the Calvinist doctrine of exhaustive foreknowledge or predestination. Those ideas have to be read into the passages not gleaned from them, which is a discussion for another time! 😎

@Dominic Enyart No. Those that the gospel hasn’t reached only have to know what can be understood because of the nature of the created order, which includes the nature of their own minds and the relationships between people and other things that aren’t explicitly physical objects like the Earth and stars. Such a person would need, it seems to me, to believe that there is a creator consistent with this creation, to conduct his life accordingly, to realize when he has failed to do so and to and repent from those failures, even if he’d not have the words to call it “repentance”. God will then judge him accordingly.

@Lisa Meeks Well, Lisa, you ask great questions! Questions that can hardly be answered properly in such a setting, but I'll give it a shot! Yes, I think that you'd touched on exactly the distinction that has to be made.We can hear what a person says and we can observe what he does, but neither gives us direct access to what he actually believes. Ultimately, God knows the heart in a way that we simply do not. There is an important distinguish between a profession of faith and faith itself. A person can repeat the right words, recite the right prayer and even intellectually understand the propositions involved without actually trusting in Christ. Saying, “Yes, I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose again,” is not a magic incantation. The words themselves do nothing if the person speaking them does not actually mean them. You cannot lie your way into God's heaven. At the same time, I would be a little careful with saying that your dad understood those things but “had not acted on them.” I know what you mean, but I would not want to imply that he needed to clean up his life, stop drinking or otherwise reform himself before he could be saved. The action called for by the gospel is to trust Christ and call upon Him for salvation. The changed behavior that may follow can give us reason to think something real happened, but it is not what makes the faith genuine or what saves him. That is why I find the change you saw in your dad encouraging. Calling your mother his wife instead of degrading her certainly sounds like something had changed in him. Does that prove to us beyond doubt that he was saved? No. We cannot see his heart. But neither do I think we have to shrug and say there is no reason at all to draw conclusions from what followed. His profession of faith, together with a noticeable change in the way he treated your mother, gives you very good reason to believe that what happened between him and God was real. And I think that gets to your larger question. We cannot know another person's faith with absolute certainty. We can know what the gospel requires, we can hear a person's profession and we can sometimes see evidence consistent with genuine belief. But the final judgment about whether the person actually believed belongs to God.

My name is Clete, which is short for Cletus. Not even my own mother calls me Cletus, and never has. Does that make Clete my nickname? I was born and raised in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, spent about ten years living in Oklahoma City, and moved to the Houston, Texas area about twelve years ago to do home inspection work and I’ve owned my own home inspection company for almost five years. I’ve studied the Bible for my entire life, with Bob Enyart’s teaching accounting for the bulk of what I know. My favorite thing to do is teach people. Whether it’s about the Bible, how a house works, or whatever else, I’m eager to teach anyone who wishes to learn about anything I know something about. My weakness is a weary impatience with any form of intentional mindlessness. Having said that, I don’t imagine I’m going to have much to teach this particular group, and I certainly don’t expect any mindlessness here! Given how many of you knew Bob personally, studied under him directly, or are members of his own family, I feel a little like a sophomore who somehow wandered into the professors’ lounge. I can’t wait to listen, learn, ask questions, and hopefully sharpen my own understanding of Scripture.