In his lectures on Calvinism, Abraham Kuiper remarks that the central cry of the Reformation

was not merely that God is sovereign over salvation, but that he is sovereign over all

things.

Notice, though, that this is not the same as saying that God is sovereign over everything,

though both of those statements are true.

In our time, we are convinced that God is indeed the ruler

of the aggregate of all things, but we are not sure about the parts. We are like a boy,

standing in a messy room that needs to be cleaned up. The boy's mother has told him to get to

work, but in the clutter, the boy cannot imagine

how all the mess could be dealt with. In response, the mother grabs one toy and puts it away.

The lesson is clear. Understand that the whole is made of parts. Most of us are familiar with the

phrase, do not lose the forest for the trees, but in the current

evangelical landscape, it might be more true that we have lost the trees for the forest.

All right, gentlemen, good to be back with you again and looking forward to today,

talking about something that admittedly is going to be a little bit more heady initially,

but we're hoping to find some really great application and really hoping to provide a tool

that people can use to think, process, and determine between what is good and bad, right, wrong, moral, immoral.

And in order to kind of let you know where we're going, we're going, we're going to start a little bit with what prompted me to think about this article.

And so we're going to talk about two tweets by Owen Strawn,

and we're going to mention them here at the beginning,

and then after we talk about kind of the teleology argument

and the tool that we want to provide,

...