Transcript: Episode 0050

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm still woe. On today's

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Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of dispensationalism. This is

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something that's been discussed pretty widely online. We're going to link in the show notes to

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a number of other podcasts from other Lutherans that we commend as not merely companions to this

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episode, but in a way completion of some of the things that we're going to discuss here.

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We are going to spend an hour and a half or two hours today covering what could easily be

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a three-part series. We refuse to do a three-part series on dispensationalism.

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Frankly, it's just not worth it. We're going to have three chunks inside this one episode that

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by themselves each could be a fully fleshed out episode. The other podcast I mentioned,

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there's going to be a brief history of power with Adam Coons and Willie Grills. Recently,

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just this week, did another specific on dispensationalism. Willie Grills also has another

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probably now defunct podcast called A Word Fittley Spoken that has three episodes, one dealing with

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Cyrus Schofield, one dealing with eschatology, and one dealing again with dispensationalism.

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We will recommend you listen to at least the first two of those, one from Behop,

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one from Word Fittley. If you want to listen to all four, they're all great. They're all

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worth listening to, but they are going to include more fleshed out stuff than we're going to get

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in here today. There are three parts to discussing the subject of dispensationalism,

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and the reason that we're mentioning these other episodes from other podcasts is that

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they left out one of them, and we think it's the most important part. It's the part that we want

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to tackle here today. When you're looking at a subject specifically like dispensationalism,

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and not to break the lead, it is a heresy, full stop. There is nothing Christian about

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dispensationalism, so we'll make that case today. But when you're looking at a subject like this,

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there is the historical context of the thing. Where did it come from? It was a genealogy of

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this idea, and the case from Dispies came about in the 19th century. There are bits and pieces

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that were floating around before that for a couple hundred years, but there were newly

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injected false teachings that appeared 200 years ago and have followed in our contille today.

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It's brand new theology, which if you're a stone choir listener by itself, that should tell you

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full stop, this is not something that's Christian. If you were a Christian, it would have been believed

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before 1830. We're looking at a situation where that's simply not the case. The history of the

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subject, even without getting into the theology of it, tells you a great deal about what is going on.

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There are names and dates and timelines and events. The other episode is about dispensationalism,

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as well as the Cyrus Schofield episode from word Philly. We'll get into more details. Incidentally,

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the sort of Christ book review that we did recently also has a chapter about Schofield,

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precisely because it's so important to the arc of things today. The second portion of the episode,

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which again will hopefully be fairly short for us anyway, is going to be on the theology.

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We're not going to go into debunking dispensationalism line by line. We're going to give you a few of the

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highlighted, just brazenly false things that they teach that are necessarily incompatible

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with Christianity full stop. We're going to go into some of the Bible passages that one must

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necessarily reject in order to be a dispensationalist. That's pretty much going to be the extent of our

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theological treatment because one more needs to be said. If you have to disbelieve the Bible in

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order to believe this teaching, you know it's not Christian teaching. We're going to make that case

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in the second part. And then the third part that is not discussed elsewhere is the question of

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the impact of this stuff. Where and how is it actually playing out? Because most people,

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when they want to tackle these subjects, just want to treat it historically, kind of neutrally,

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don't want to pick fights or really call people too bad. Or you just want to deal with the Bible

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verses and wrangle it out as though there's possibly a Christian view on both sides of

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the thing. And so you trade shots with Bible verses or whatever. The reason that this is a

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live issue and the reason that a bunch of people have been talking about dispensationalism recently

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is that unlike disagreements about baptism or election or some other things,

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dispensationalism in particular has geopolitical consequences. People are dying in the Middle

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East today because of dispensationalism. Marines are going to be dying next month in Lebanon

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because of dispensationalism. So this is unique in heresies in terms of getting people killed on

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the ground. We did the baptism episode, probably quite a few of you disagreed with some of our

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conclusions about baptism. If we disagree about baptism, people don't get killed today. There's

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no downstream state action as a result of those disagreements. Anyone who is a dispensationalist

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is going to be rapidly in support of the extermination of anyone who gets in the way of the state of

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Israel. So the reason we're discussing it right now, the reason it's timely and that everyone is

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talking about it, is precisely for that reason that if you believe that the state of Israel,

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as it exists today, is the Israel of the Bible, that was the whole point of the invention of the

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thing. So that's the case we're going to make today. 200 years ago, a new doctrine was inserted

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falsely into really just the Western church, basically America and Britain more or less.

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That has been bearing fruit in the last century in such a way that it makes it possible for the

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modern terror state of Israel to kill people pretty much with impunity. And a significant portion of

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the American electorate not only gives it a thumbs up, but will send their sons and daughters to die,

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will give all their money for it, and will shout you down if you disagree. Why? Because they're

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defending their God. And so the theology coming out of history impacting geopolitics is why this

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is a live issue now and is an ongoing live issue for the church and for the world. So we're going

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to get into it first with the history as dispensationalism today was born in the West.

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And so to start off, we of course have to start with John Nelson Darby. Born in the year 1800,

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died in the year 1882. He is even by dispensationalists called the father of dispensationalism,

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which does in fact sort of give away the fact that this is a modern heresy. This is not an ancient

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teaching of the church. This is not something that you find in the church fathers. And I'll get

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into that a little bit more in a number of minutes here. There are some who will argue the church

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fathers spoke of dispensationalism, they did not. They spoke of economies and sometimes dispensationalists

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attempt to conflate the terms economy and dispensation. These terms have very different

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senses as used by the church fathers and used by dispensationalists. Now Darby was an early

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member of the Plymouth Brethren. Essentially, they were a group that attempted to get back to what

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they thought were the early roots of Christianity, a simpler church with less hierarchy. There have

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been a number of groups that have cropped up in church history that have rejected hierarchy,

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rejected the formal institutions of the church. This has never been a marker of solid true Christians.

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We are told not to forsake the gathering together of the saints. This does not just mean in your

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small local group, because there is a larger church. There's a wider church. There is,

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at least there used to be, Christendom. And the church itself does have earthly institutions

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in hierarchy. I'm not saying they cannot air, obviously they can. We're recording this on

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Reformation Day as Lutherans. By all means, we know that the church as an earthly institution

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run by men can air. But that does not mean that you reject all hierarchy within the church.

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So anytime you see a group doing that, you should be on your guard. Something is wrong there.

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But to get into sort of what Darby started to teach here,

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actually, before we get into what he taught, we'll talk a little bit about Darby himself,

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just very brief biographical sketch, as it were. He was born into an Anglo-Irish family in London,

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I already said in the year 1800. But he supposedly had a profound conversion experience in 1825.

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This is something you'll see with a number of dispensationalists and other men who propped

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themselves up as teachers like Darby and Schofield. Schofield incidentally also had such a supposedly

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profound conversion experience his in 1879. I will not go so far as to say that this sort of

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conversion experience is necessarily a bad sign, is necessarily an indicator that something is off.

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But I will say that this is not the standard. This is not how things are usually done,

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this is not how things were designed by God. Yes, there are exceptions, obviously.

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You have the most obvious being Saul, who became Paul. A special case, as Christ actually appeared

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to him to call him to be an apostle. A little different from what happens today, certainly.

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But the standard for Christians, historically, and what the standard should be, and we've made

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this case in previous episodes, is that you're raised Christian. You're baptized as a child. Go

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see the baptism episode. And as you are raised as a Christian, you don't have this profound

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conversion experience. You don't have a sudden moment. You don't have an epiphany. And in that

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moment come to be a Christian or come to understand all things or whatever it happens to be, whatever

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the claim is. And so if you ask a Lutheran, for instance, if you ask either of us, although

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notably I was raised sort of half Lutheran and half not, I've explained that elsewhere

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and before. But if you ask someone who was raised as a Christian, he will not have this

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conversion experience because it's not part of the normal Christian life. It's not how things

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are supposed to go. If you were not raised a Christian, then there will be a conversion process

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because God will use the means he is instituted to reach out to you to give you faith. That will be

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the word. It will be baptism, depending on the order of things. We've discussed this previously.

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But there's a conversion process. It's not this instantaneous epiphany.

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And so that is not necessarily, again, a sign that things are off or bad. But you should perhaps

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want to look more carefully at these sorts of claims because it's not the norm. This is not how

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things are supposed to go. It's notable that at this time and in this place, Charismaticism was

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also emerging, where there are preachers saying that the solution for the modern problems are

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people speaking in tongues and having direct revelations from the Holy Spirit. And lo and

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behold, within a few years, that's exactly what the market began producing, what the preachers

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demanded that the people in the pews began to produce. They began having these experiences

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just as they'd been taught to. And unfortunately, a lot of theology is then downstream from

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this sort of self-fulfilling. I mean, it's not prophecy. They were taught you should be babbling

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and they started babbling. And everyone said, look, it's a new stage in the evolution of the church.

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That ties in very deeply with Edward Irving, who was a Scottish clergyman. He was an early

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influencer of the Plymouth brethren. He was an advocate for this revival of Pentecostalism.

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And this occurred in and around Port Glasgow. There's another name that I'll bring up

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in a moment here who is particularly relevant to this entire narrative. And those who are

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familiar with the subject will probably already know which name I'm going to mention. But

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subsequent to the supposedly profound conversion experience that Darby had,

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he traveled extensively spreading this new dispensationalism, which he had been working on

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this particular view of scripture, this Isegesis. But the name that I said I would mention

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is Margaret MacDonald. She is involved in this because this young woman supposedly had visions

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revealing certain truths about scripture and particularly eschatology. And it happened in

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this Port Glasgow area and the Pentecostalism that was active in the area at the time latched onto

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this. Edward Irving was one man who thought that she had indeed seen something given as a vision

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by God. In her vision, or visions, she saw a two-stage return of Christ, first a secret return

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that would see the church taken from the earth, then the tribulation, and then the final judgment.

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I don't personally understand how you can have a secret return of Christ in which

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some number of millions of people disappear. That doesn't seem very secret to me.

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But nonetheless, this is where we get the pre-tribulation rapture idea, which is, again,

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simply the idea that before the period of tribulation spoken of in various points in

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scripture, particularly in Revelation, faithful believers will be taken from the earth,

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then the tribulation will take place, and then Christ will come back, and I'm not going to get into

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the various ideas of where the millennium, literally in this case, slots into the timeline.

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But eventually, Christ will return, which isn't really a second coming at that point. It's a

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third coming because the second coming would be for the church, and scripture doesn't speak of a

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third coming. But at any rate, Christ returns, and then you have the final judgment. That's, in

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essence, the pre-tribulation, or really any of the various rapture ideas. It just depends on

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where, in relation to the tribulation, this supposed rapture takes place as to which term

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they use, pre or post. And obviously, pre or post millennium is just referring to

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their incorrect interpretation of the Thousand Years in Revelation. We'll get into that later

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in relationship to where the rapture takes place.

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I think it's important to note just briefly that all three of the acumenical creeds

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specifically speak about the end times, and they all use exactly the same sequence of events.

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I'm just going to read it from the Apostle's Creed.

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This is the ascension, which was being confessed because it's in scripture, and this is judgment

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day, which is being confessed because it's in scripture. There are no other points of activity

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from the second person of the Trinity in any of the creeds, apart from he ascends into heaven,

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sets to the right hand of the Father, and comes again to judge a living and the dead.

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The fact that all of these other details that have emerged in the last few centuries are omitted

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from the historic definition of the Church, of the faith, I think is important. If you take

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seriously what the creeds were capturing, if there were other steps for God, they would have

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mentioned them. Again, we'll get into some of the theology and the history down the road,

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but I think it's just important to note that as these things are emerging, these things from

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Charismatics and Pentecostalists, incidentally, who today are the groups most predominantly who

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hold to dispensationalism, it is an over-denial of the creeds by adding a bunch of stuff that

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the Church has never believed. The reason that the Church has never believed it is that scripture

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doesn't contain it. To some extent, it's an argument from silence because there's a lot of

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things in the Christian faith that are not included in the creeds. They're specifically crafted,

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as we've said before, to dispute previous heresies. They never needed to dispute any heresies about

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this stuff because they were not live issues. It's just notable that when you look at the historic

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definition of the faith, it leaves no room for this sort of thing unless you imagine that Jesus

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is just super active doing these really important things, and we just forgot to talk about it when

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we define the Christian faith itself. In order to ward off, although it will probably not succeed

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in doing so in all cases, but in order to ward off a potential critique here, and in fairness to Darby,

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Darby later in life did reject and declare that the visions of Margaret McDonald were demonic.

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However, by the time he had done so, they had already become part of the foundation of dispensationalism

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and the damage had already been done. This is a part of the history of dispensationalism,

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and his later in life condemnation of this did not change the reality of that fact.

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This remains part of the history. It remains part of the teaching, most importantly.

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That condemnation was good. It is proper for a Christian man, if Darby was indeed,

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it is proper for a Christian man to condemn false teachings to which he has held earlier in his

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life when he recognizes that, but that does not mean that the harm will be undone.

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And so the next man who is relevant is a name that is probably better known, more widely known,

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for various reasons and very obvious ones. Cyrus Ingersen Schofield, usually just called C.I.

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Schofield. I'll start the same as I did with Darby with a very brief biographical sketch before we

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get into what Schofield did and why it matters. Schofield served, actually, for the Confederacy

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during the Civil War. However, he was a deserter. He deserted to the North. He eventually became

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the U.S. District Attorney for Kansas. He was forced to resign due to political corruption,

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including bribery. At the time he also faced charges of forgery and desertion of his first wife.

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The latter one, at the very least, is historically proven. He very much did do that. He deserted

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his first family. As mentioned earlier, he also supposedly had a profound conversion experience,

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his in 1879. Subsequent to this, he became a congregationalist preacher in Dallas.

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Subsequent to that, he would then take over the Congregational Church of Northfield, Massachusetts,

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a church he had attended. This church was founded by D. L. Moody, a name that will be familiar to

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some. There is a Bible college named after him, after all, one of the hellmouths that spreads

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dispensationalism to this day. And so, Schofield becomes truly relevant, historically, because

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his name gets attached to the Schofield Reference Bible. Many of the notes in this Reference Bible,

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many of the ideas come from Darby and some others. James H. Brooks was an early mentor of Schofield.

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He is the one who arguably introduced Schofield to dispensationalism. And so,

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notes and ideas from these various other men are distilled into the Schofield Reference Bible.

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And as we mentioned in the previous episode, Reviewing the Sword of Christ,

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the problem with this is that they were appended to the King James Version, to the King James

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translation of the Bible. And because of the archaic nature of that language, which was deliberately

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archaic when it was translated in the 1600s, because of that language that is increasingly

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difficult for modern readers to understand, modern readers increasingly rely on the footnotes,

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on the annotations, on the comments added to Scripture by Schofield.

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I am not condemning study Bibles. Study Bibles are fine and good. It depends on the quality of

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the notes. Scripture is always good. Notes written by men may be good or bad. I have on

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my desk right now a Lutheran Study Bible. I can recommend it for basically any of our listeners.

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There are a few notes with which I would quibble, but very few, which is impressive for a work of

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the size and scope of this Study Bible. Schofield Study Bible, on the other hand,

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was chock-full of heresies, and these heresies over time became the standard understanding

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in certain parts of Christianity because the men reading the Bible, reading the King James,

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could not understand the English of the King James, so they just repeated the notes. They

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just repeated the footnotes. You will even find cases where they are citing the footnotes

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basically as if they were Scripture, as if these were words from heaven interpreting

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God's Word, because they could not read the actual words of Scripture, which is why we have been so

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very clear in previous episodes and will continue to be so, that the most important thing you do,

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yes, first and foremost, read Scripture. But equally important, read a version in a language

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you understand. We had this fight historically. This, I mean, again, this is Reformation Day.

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When we are recording, we don't attempt to be topical as it were, but it's relevant here.

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One of the major fights was over the use of the vernacular.

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Scripture should be in a language that is understood by those who are actually reading it.

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Using Latin in the Middle Ages when the peasantry no longer knew Latin was ridiculous.

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Using the English of the 1600s today is ridiculous. Get a modern translation.

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There are many reliable ones. Understand what you're actually reading.

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Another name here that is very important related to Schofield is Untermeier. This gentleman

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was a Jewish lawyer, financier, slash banker, who funded the Schofield Reference Bible.

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He also helped secure connections for Schofield, got him into many prominent clubs and circles,

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propped up his name, built up his name, and got him the publishing contract he would need

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with the university press that put out the Schofield Reference Bible.

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Untermeier was a prominent member of the Zionist movement. He, in fact, was one of those who helped

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organize boycotts against German goods in the latter part of his life. He died in 1940. He was

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born in 1858. You can see all these men. There's a lot of overlap here, but it's all mostly taking

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place in the middle of the 1800s into the very early 1900s. And so we see this connection

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between dispensationalism and Zionism very early on. It is Zionists who are funding dispensationalism,

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and there's no wonder for that. It's very obvious why they would do that.

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Dispensationalism is the necessary prerequisite for supposed Christians in the West to support

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Zionist aims with regard not just to Israel, so-called, but to the world in general, for the

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world, because Zionists have aimed certainly beyond the historical borders of the Old Testament

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state of Israel, as we see from their rhetoric today. But this forms the basic outline of the

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foundational history, as it were, of dispensationalism. There are many other individuals involved.

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There's one more man that we will, a few more men will mention, but mostly in passing, one more

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will get into what he has actually taught, because he is more relevant today and gives a real summary

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of what dispensationalists believe, what they've taught, why they do the things they do.

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But I mentioned that Moody Bible College is one of the institutions spreading this particular

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heresy. There are others we could mention, but one in particular is worth mentioning,

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and that is Dallas Theological Seminary. Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924.

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The first president of Dallas Theological Seminary was Louis Schaefer. He was a student

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of Schofield. The second president was John Walford. He is the gentleman who is largely credited

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with the development of the sort of intermediate or revised version of dispensationalism.

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There are essentially three kinds. We're not going to get into the details, but

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just for the sake of letting you know what they are. There's so-called classic dispensationalism

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or classical. There's revised and there's progressive.

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Various dispensationalists fall into one or the other of the schools.

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They don't always disagree, but in large part, they do. And we're speaking in generalities here,

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because we're not getting into the specifics of dispensationalism. That's not the point here.

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We're not attempting to study the minutiae of this heresy. We are simply highlighting

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why and how it is wrong on a higher level, on a scriptural basis, on a foundation of

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why this conflicts with what Scripture teaches and what the Church has always believed in professed.

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One other very interesting overlapping name that popped up in looking at this was one of the

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men who was taught as a child by John Nelson Darby was Alistair Crowley. Crowley's childhood

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pastor was Darby. And so he was raised in an environment where this stuff was taught. Now,

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I'm not blaming Darby for how Crowley turned out. That's what a man does with what he's taught.

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In many ways, completely independent from the teacher. So I just thought that was an incredible

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overlap because Crowley separately went on in a parallel direction to achieve some of the same

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spiritual and political ends that Darby helped to set in motion along different lines. So their

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paths crossed early on and then they sort of went in different directions, but not nearly as different

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as you might think. Before you get into the theology proper, I just want to name a couple

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more names that are of modern teachers just to give you a sense of how common this stuff is,

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because not everyone necessarily knows who is pushing what. And not all these men necessarily

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have all the same beliefs about everything, but when it comes to the basics of dispensationalism,

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they are in agreement. John MacArthur, Charles Ryrie, Jerry Falwell, whom everyone knows,

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John Hagee and Hal Lindsey all were working towards the same ends in living memory. Several of them

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are still alive today. I think one of the interesting things to me, coming at this from a Lutheran,

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looking back at some of these things is that the vast majority of people who have fallen

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for dispensationalism were Baptists, not all, but some Baptists. A lot of Pentecosts listen,

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a lot of Charismatics. As we mentioned, the Pentecostalist and Perek Charismatic movement

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was also the genesis for dispensationalism itself, produced other things, but they occurred at the

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same time. The reason that struck me is I know that this will probably come across as insulting to

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some, it's not intended that way. It's simply a demographic fact. You can look at some of the

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Pew data, but within Baptists, Pentecostalists and Charismatics, you find some of the least

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intelligent, least educated people in the West really. I think that's very much kind of what

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we see today. When you look at the folks who are pushing dispensationalism, not necessarily the teachers,

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but when you run into someone who is a Bible thumping dispensationalist and will get to

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what the Bible thumping stuff is about, people accuse me of thumping a Bible and I wouldn't

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even reject that. It's not necessarily insulting, but when these guys come along today, they're

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generally not intelligent, well-educated men. There are few, but it's rare. These are denominations

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that, again, Baptists means a lot of different things. A lot of guys that we would characterize as

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Baptists call themselves non-denominational, but really when it comes down to a non-denominational,

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pretty much just means Baptist without some specific affiliation, it's very much a product

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of the same theology. They're absolutely Baptists who reject dispensationalism. There are also a

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lot of Baptists who are fully on board with it. The reason that's relevant today is something we'll

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get into in the third part of this because, again, this isn't simply a historical quirk that became

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a theological question. This also has modern geopolitical ramifications. The fact that

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teachers today and there are a lot of people that believe this stuff, again, it's actually

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getting people killed. This is very consequential theology. The fact that it's erroneous explains

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the nature of the downstream consequences. The one additional name that I said I want to mention,

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not just in passing, we'll already said the name, but that is Charles Ryrie.

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The reason I want to focus on him for a moment here is because he really pushed this forward

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in, I believe it was mostly the 60s and the 70s. I don't remember when his study Bible came out,

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but he produced a study Bible that was essentially an updated version of Schofield's Bible. He wrote

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a number of books, including Dispensationalism Today and Basic Theology, which was unfortunately

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anything but. But he gives a definition of dispensation that is useful and with which

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I believe most dispensationalists would agree, and then I also have a quote to read from him

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from an article of his. I will put the article in the show notes for those who want to go and

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verify the quote or simply read the rest of the article. But his definition of dispensation

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is a dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God's purpose.

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Now for those who are more familiar with the subject, you're already going to see a red flag

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there. He's playing games with the word economy, and the reason he's playing games with the word

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economy is that dispensationalists have to do this to attempt to tie themselves back to the

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historical teachings of the church. Because if you can conflate dispensation and economy,

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you can try to argue that some of your ideas are present in the church fathers. And I will go over

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just briefly two of the church fathers who are often claimed by dispensationalists to have taught

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a form of say proto dispensationalism. Very obviously they did not when you actually look

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at how they used the Greek word economy, which is what he's attempting to do here.

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But now I'll read a quote from him from this article because it touches on

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many of the issues that we will be addressing in the remainder of this episode.

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Progressive revelation is the recognition that God's message to man was not given in one single

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act, but was unfolded in a long series of successive acts, and through the minds and

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hands of many men of varying backgrounds. God's truth was obviously not given all at one time,

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and the varying stages of revelation show that he has worked in different ways at different times.

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The Bible interpreter must observe carefully this progressiveness of revelation,

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and dispensationalism helps promote accuracy in this regard.

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The distinguishing characteristics of the dispensations are,

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1. A change in God's governmental relationship with man,

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2. A resultant change in man's responsibility, and 3. Corresponding revelation necessary to

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affect the change. What marks off a man is a dispensationalist. What is the sine qua non of

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the system? 1. A dispensationalist keeps Israel and the church distinct. The dispensationalist

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believes that throughout the ages God is pursuing two distinct purposes, one related to the earth

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with earthly people and earthly objectives involved, which is Judaism, while the other

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is related to heaven with heavenly people and heavenly objectives involved, which is Christianity.

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This is probably the most basic theological test of whether or not a man is a dispensationalist,

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and it is undoubtedly the most practical and conclusive. A man who fails to distinguish Israel

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and the church will inevitably not hold to dispensationalist distinctions, and the one who does

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will. 2. The distinction between Israel and the church is born out of a system of hermeneutics

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called literal interpretation. 3. To the dispensationalist the soteriological or saving program of God

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is not the only program, but one of the means God is using in the total program of glorifying

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himself. Scripture is not man-centered as though salvation were the main theme,

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but it is God-centered because his glory is the center.

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The basis of salvation in every age is the death of Christ. The requirement for salvation in every

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age is faith. The object of faith in every age is God. The content of faith changes in the various

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dispensations. There are a lot of problems with this quote. We will be touching on them in

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the remainder of this episode, so I will not go over them specifically now. I will however

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highlight that last part is important. The content of faith changes in the various dispensations.

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That is simply not Christian. The content of our faith does not change, and this is related

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of course to his contention that God has progressively revealed the faith over time.

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That is simply not true. We see that in Genesis 3.15. Adam understood the fullness of the faith

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back in Genesis 3.15, even if today we may not be capable enough to understand it from those

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verses, although notably we do have the advantage of looking back and seeing it in the context

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of living after the crucifixion, after the resurrection, after the ascension. Adam,

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who was undoubtedly our superior intellectually and otherwise, knew what God was telling him

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when he spoke to him in Genesis. But now I will address just two. We will do two of the

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supposed church fathers in whom dispensationalists contend that you can find the early roots of

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dispensationalism. They claim others as well. They claim origin and Eusebius, and even Augustine,

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they try to claim. But we will go over Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Starting with Justin Martyr.

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In chapter 41, Justin Martyr speaks of the economy of human birth, in reference to Isaiah's

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prophecy about the virgin birth of Christ. In this he argues that the prophecy is about Christ and

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not Hezekiah. There's no way in which you can interpret that as being a dispensation,

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as relating to dispensationalism. And so in chapter 56, Justin Martyr mentions the economy

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of the suffering of Christ, while discussing prophecies in the Psalms. Again, economy, the Greek

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word, does not relate to dispensations. Skip ahead a little bit, chapter 84. Justin Martyr

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discusses the economy of the Christians in contrast to that of the Jews, referring to the new covenant

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and its distinctiveness from the old. Now perhaps the dispensationalists will go, aha, here we are.

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This is clearly a dispensation. These are different treatments, but they're not.

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If we are distinguishing between the gospel and the law, that is simply proper Christian exegesis.

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No one was saved by the law. That is the teaching of Scripture. The Jews were not saved by the law.

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The ancient Israelites more properly than Jews were not saved by the law, because by the law

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no man will be justified. They were saved by belief, if they were saved at all. The same

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as every single man throughout all church history. And that is what Justin Martyr actually teaches,

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if you read the rest of the chapter. One more example from Justin Martyr before we move on

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to Irenaeus. In chapter 126, he describes the economy of his suffering. That's a paraphrase.

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In discussing how Christ's sacrifice surpasses the sacrifices of the old covenant.

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This is speaking of typology. This is not a dispensation. There is no way you can interpret

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this to be dispensationalism, to be an early form of it. The only way you can get Justin Martyr

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to seem like some sort of proto-dispensationalist is if you twist his words. Which is the theme that

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we will see throughout this entire subject when dealing with how dispensationalists argue

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and how they treat both scripture and the church fathers.

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And so second amongst the supposedly proto-dispensationalists we have Irenaeus,

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from his book Against Heresies, from book 3, chapter 11. Irenaeus speaks of God's economy

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in becoming man. Quote, The word of God our Lord Jesus Christ who did through his transcendent love

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become what we are that he might bring us to be even what he is himself.

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You cannot possibly read that as dispensationalist. It is a use of the word economy, but again,

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unless you are practicing isegesis, unless you are trying to be deceptive, you cannot

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conflate the words economy and dispensation. They are not the same thing. And so book 3 again,

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chapter 18 this time, Irenaeus speaks of the economy of incarnation, explaining how the

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Son of God became incarnate for the salvation of humanity. This Greek word economy, again,

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at risk of ad nauseam, does not mean dispensation. I will get into the actual word in a second here

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to give you a better idea of the scope of the Greek term. Two more examples from Irenaeus

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first, though. From book 4, chapter 20, Irenaeus mentions the economy of the Lord's passion,

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referring, of course, to the salvific purpose behind Christ's suffering and death.

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Again, cannot possibly be translated or conflated with dispensation.

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And finally from book 5, chapter 1, he speaks of the economy of the Son of God in reference to

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the divine plan which culminates in Christ's incarnate life and redemptive work.

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At this point, I hope that I don't have to say that's not a dispensation.

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But to define the word economy from the Greek, economia is the actual Greek word.

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It has in essence three senses. Pull these from B-DAG, the definitive dictionary for these things.

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The first is responsibility of management, typically of a household. That's what the

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term really means. The second is the state of being arranged, ordered, or planned.

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And the third is that it can refer to a program of instruction.

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Now, the argument from the dispensationalist is that according to these first two definitions,

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they attempt to say that the whole of creation is God's household, which isn't necessarily wrong.

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To some degree, it's an abuse of the term.

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But yes, everything belongs to God, and so he is the manager over all of it. But the argument is

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instead that God has created a plan and that he has made man the manager of that plan,

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and that his plan changes over time.

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Well, this is a problem, first, because God doesn't change. Second, it is a problem because

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God's plan in Scripture very clearly doesn't change. It is the same from beginning to end,

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beginning with Genesis 3.15, the proto-gospel, the proto-Ivangelian, all the way through to the end.

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There is only one way to the Father, and that is through Christ. Scripture is abundantly clear on

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that point. And so you can't have this change. You can't have the different dispensations,

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which is what the dispensationalists are arguing, what is central to their theology.

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It is the idea after which it is named. And so what it actually refers to in the Greek

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Fathers is that responsibility of management of the household when speaking of men,

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as we are stewards in creation, that is what we are called in Scripture. We are God's stewards.

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We are His icons, His idols in the proper sense of the term in creation. But it does also refer to

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that state of being arranged in the specific substance of being God's unique plan of salvation,

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or God's arrangement in nature if they're talking about the natural world.

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And that is what we saw from the selection of quotes that I went through in Justin

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Martyr and Irenaeus. And lest anyone think that I cherry-picked them, I essentially pulled out

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a handful of places in which they speak of those and then chose at random the ones that I would use.

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I have many others. They're all the same. There are no places in either of those

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authors, in either of those Church Fathers, where you could possibly construe their use of economy

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to be coterminous with the modern dispensationalist use of the word dispensation,

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or sometimes they will attempt to say administration or economy in order to further conflate in order

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to muddy the waters. And that's a general takeaway. If someone is attempting to create

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additional gray area or to muddy the waters or to make Scripture unclear, that man is

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attempting to mislead or deceive you. That is a man you should not follow because Scripture

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is, as a general rule, abundantly clear. And where Scripture is less clear because we lack

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perspective or understanding, we have some deficit that makes it difficult for us to

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understand a particular passage. We have the entire weight of Church history and the clear

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teaching of Scripture. You use the parts of Scripture that are clear to interpret those

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that supposedly are not, because God is consistent and the whole will agree. You do not use passages

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that are uncertain in order to write your priors, your presuppositions, your theology,

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back into the other passages that are clear. That's where you get the use of something that

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is supposedly unclear to muddy the waters for something that is abundantly clear.

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That is what false teachers do. And as Christians, we have to be aware of that and be careful of these

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wolves. In the specific use and abuse, entirely abuse of language, not its proper use, that's

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occurring here is a trap that I think part of the reason that in particular some Baptist,

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but the other denominations, Pentecostalists, Charismatics and some others, I think part

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of the reason that they fell for it, and I think part of the appeal of it naively, is that one of

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the other things that Rairi said, which is part of the dispensationalist shtick, is that

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one must be literal with the certain words that they pick out. And the problem with it is that

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sometimes that's true. We made the argument in the 6,000 years and counting episode that

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when God says six days in Genesis for the creation, it was six days. There's not special

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kinds of days that only occurred in creation, and then we get a different kind of day now.

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It was six 24-hour periods. So that sort of appeal to clarity is very easy to make someone adopt in

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all cases. And the particular issue with the dispensationalist abuse of that is twofold. One,

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when they're talking about things like the millennium, that is language that appears almost

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exclusively in Revelation. And the problem with treating Revelation literally is that

47:55.400 --> 48:02.520
it itself says it is a vision. It is John's apocalypse. He was having a dream, a vision

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from God. Things were revealed to him that were clearly figurative. They're clearly figurative.

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There are many dreams in Scripture that are revealed to men of God. And it's very clear within

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the dream and then the interpretation of the dream that they're symbolic. When Joseph interpreted

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the dream about the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows, it wasn't about cattle. It wasn't about

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how plump the livestock were. It was the seven fat years and the seven skinny years. And fat and

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skinny were an allusion to plenty and famine. So that sort of symbolic language is inherent to

48:44.600 --> 48:50.120
how God uses visions. It's how God does it. That's not man-made. That's what God has done

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throughout Scripture with visions. And so the issue is that when you take a literalist approach,

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that in some cases is appropriate, it's not always absolutely necessary because

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different parts of Scripture are different types of literature. God uses allusion. He uses

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storytelling. He uses songs. And he also uses just the delivery of facts. When you go through

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something like First and Second Kings, it's a bunch of facts. There's not a lot of allusion there

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because it's a telling of events. The events that are told in Revelation are symbolic

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and a dream and a vision. And so when you read Millennium, which means a thousand years,

49:35.160 --> 49:44.120
it's possible that that's 1,000 year periods of 365 days each. But it's not necessary. And in fact,

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when you look at the other places where a thousand is used, it's very clear that that is a symbolic

49:50.840 --> 49:56.040
number. It's numerological, which is something else that God uses. There are some guys who go

49:56.040 --> 50:00.360
completely off the rails with numerology and try to make everything about it. There are some

50:00.360 --> 50:04.920
guys who go completely off the rails with typology, trying to make everything typological.

50:04.920 --> 50:11.400
These are tools that God uses that God enjoys and he's given us, but they're tools. It's not a

50:11.400 --> 50:16.440
universal hermeneutic for every single thing in the Bible, just like literalism. There are places

50:16.440 --> 50:22.920
where you cannot possibly accept the literal reading of a word when it cannot possibly mean that,

50:22.920 --> 50:28.680
according to the rest of Scripture, which as Cory was saying, the unclear passages are interpreted

50:28.680 --> 50:34.280
by the clear passages. And so just as a basic approach to all of Scripture, when you take

50:34.280 --> 50:41.640
something from a vision that is inherently packed with symbolic language and Revelation,

50:41.640 --> 50:46.280
when you look at it, it's the same series of events being told three times over in three

50:46.280 --> 50:54.680
different ways. It's all symbolic through and through. That millennium, that thousand-year period,

50:54.680 --> 51:02.280
has been ripped from its context in a vision, where it does mean something. It has a meaning.

51:02.280 --> 51:07.560
We're not saying it's meaningless, but when they say it must necessarily be a thousand years and

51:07.560 --> 51:13.880
then therefore we can plug it into the timeline as that sort of period, there's already an abuse

51:14.760 --> 51:21.000
of Scripture. And the other word that gets abused here, and the one I want to focus on, is Israel.

51:21.880 --> 51:26.440
Now, this episode, in a lot of ways, is a continuation of one of the very first episodes

51:26.440 --> 51:31.560
that we did of Stone Choir on election in view of headship. At the time, we were shy about doing

51:31.560 --> 51:35.720
two-hour episodes, so that was a two-hour episode that we basically called a two-parter that we

51:35.720 --> 51:44.760
concatenated. The first hour was entirely about the doctrine of election. Now, election and chosen

51:45.640 --> 51:49.640
mean the same thing. That's one of the things that we make the case in that. Just linguistically,

51:49.640 --> 51:56.040
they don't even have a lot of daylight between them. They're completely interchangeable. If I say

51:56.040 --> 52:02.280
that I elect a man president, I'm saying I choose him to be president. It's the same thing. If you

52:02.280 --> 52:07.800
elect something from a menu, you choose something from a menu. Now, we might use one term over the

52:07.800 --> 52:12.600
other preferentially when, depending on context, but it's not because the word means different things.

52:13.320 --> 52:20.040
So, when Scripture speaks of election, it speaks of it identically to how Scripture speaks of God

52:20.040 --> 52:25.880
choosing, and whom did God choose? In the Old Testament, there was a time where he chose

52:25.880 --> 52:31.720
the people of Israel, where he made specific promises to Abraham and said that his descendants

52:32.280 --> 52:35.800
would be as numerous as the stars and that theirs would be the inheritance.

52:37.560 --> 52:46.840
This is another aspect of taking literalism abusively, because Scripture is clear, clear as day,

52:47.880 --> 52:52.600
that both historically in the Old Testament and when it is taught in the New Testament,

52:52.600 --> 52:56.840
you have passages like this from Romans 9, where God says,

52:56.840 --> 53:03.160
for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham,

53:03.160 --> 53:08.120
because they are his offspring, but, quote, through Isaac, shall your offspring be named.

53:08.680 --> 53:12.440
This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God,

53:12.440 --> 53:17.880
but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Now, in that one passage,

53:18.840 --> 53:24.520
Paul shifts between descended from Israel belonging to Israel and children of the flesh

53:24.520 --> 53:31.320
and children of God. They mean the same thing. See, in many cases, especially in the New Testament,

53:31.320 --> 53:39.640
most of, but notably not all statements that refer to Israel are talking about the

53:39.640 --> 53:45.160
lineal genetic descendants of Abraham. A few of them do, and it's clear in context when that is

53:45.160 --> 53:50.840
the case, but over and over in the New Testament, one of the key points of the New Testament,

53:50.840 --> 53:56.040
one of the chief arguments that Paul had to struggle to hammer into the heads

53:56.040 --> 54:01.160
of the stubborn Jews of that day, was that they didn't simply get to be saved because

54:01.160 --> 54:07.880
they were children of Abraham. That's not how it works. God said he could raise up children

54:07.880 --> 54:13.640
of Abraham from the stones if he wished. God can make children of Abraham any way he pleases.

54:13.640 --> 54:20.920
It doesn't need to be linearly. It says elsewhere that the faith that Abraham was counted to him

54:20.920 --> 54:26.680
is righteousness. It wasn't his own blood. Or even that God had made him a promise. The promise

54:26.680 --> 54:32.280
was fulfilled in the giving of the gift of faith, but it was the faith that God gave as a gift that

54:32.280 --> 54:37.560
received the salvation that God had intended for Abraham and for his offspring and show the children

54:37.560 --> 54:43.320
of the flesh of Abraham account for nothing. They're not children of God. They don't belong to Israel,

54:43.640 --> 54:50.600
unless they have the faith of Israel. When that is said, it can only possibly be speaking of

54:50.600 --> 54:58.600
actual saving faith. I think really the most crucial mistake that is in Rairi's description,

54:58.600 --> 55:03.720
which is completely apt, is the definition of all dispensationalism. It is the defining

55:03.720 --> 55:09.400
characteristic. I think even over and above all the talk of the dispensations, the time periods

55:09.400 --> 55:23.000
themselves, the statement that we must treat the church as one thing and Israel as something else.

55:23.880 --> 55:29.640
This is something that emerged back in Darby's day 200 years ago. It's accelerated and it's continued.

55:32.040 --> 55:37.080
We did a four-part episode on Jews. We've talked numerous times about the various aspects

55:37.080 --> 55:44.440
of the history of those people. One of the things that has occurred in the last century that makes

55:44.440 --> 55:54.520
this geopolitically relevant, as we're going to get to in a bit, is that there was an inversion

55:54.520 --> 56:02.920
of the historic nature of Christ's fulfillment of prophecy. When Jesus was scourged and he was

56:02.920 --> 56:08.840
killed for our sins and then he rose again on the third day, all of the creeds and all of our hope

56:08.840 --> 56:15.240
and our faith points to the cross and to the risen Christ as our hope for our own salvation delivered

56:15.240 --> 56:22.680
by God through the faith that we have in that gift and in that promise. Jesus, who fulfilled all

56:22.680 --> 56:30.600
prophecy and scripture and made manifest God's will as God himself, his death and his resurrection

56:30.600 --> 56:33.960
three days later and then his ascension into heaven, sitting at the right hand of God,

56:34.840 --> 56:42.760
are the basis of the Christian faith. This is relevant because as we went over in the Big

56:42.760 --> 56:49.960
Lie episode, there was another scourging and death that occurred in the 20th century where the 6

56:49.960 --> 56:56.840
million were sacrificed. Then three years later, the state of Israel was resurrected from the dead

56:57.560 --> 57:04.600
and the state of Israel is used interchangeably with Israel today. What Darby helped give birth to

57:04.600 --> 57:11.240
in 1830, 120 years later, after all this work done by Schofield and all the other Zionists,

57:12.040 --> 57:18.200
this multi-century project that involved people from all walks of life with all different agendas

57:18.200 --> 57:23.960
of their own, Schofield was just a shyster. The guy was a crook. There was an honest bone

57:23.960 --> 57:27.640
in the man's body. When you hear some of the other stuff that's said about him, there's no doubt

57:27.640 --> 57:31.800
that he was in this to get rich and to be influential and he slapped his man on him because

57:31.800 --> 57:37.880
he was basically the front man. These frauds need a front man. That's not the case with all of them.

57:37.880 --> 57:42.120
There are other men who had other agendas, but they were all working inexorably towards the same

57:42.120 --> 57:49.400
goal and the fulfillment of the Zionist project occurred in 1948, three years after the end of

57:49.400 --> 57:57.720
World War II, the state of Israel was born. It was very much treated as a rebirth of the

57:57.720 --> 58:06.600
historic Jewry of the Old Testament. It was completely false, genetically false, spiritually

58:06.600 --> 58:11.400
false, religiously. Everything about it is a lie, but it was an inversion that was done

58:12.040 --> 58:19.240
in the vacuum created by this ignorance about confusing Israel in the Bible with these people

58:19.240 --> 58:23.320
who just slapped the name Israel on themselves. I think it's one of the most important things.

58:23.320 --> 58:28.760
Another early episode we do is on framing. The frame of calling themselves Israel is

58:29.320 --> 58:34.600
catnip for any dispensationalist. For anyone who's been taught their entire life,

58:34.600 --> 58:39.800
we must support and defend Israel because of the apple of God's eye. If you believe that that refers

58:39.800 --> 58:45.720
to any Jew who's alive today, and any Jew who's alive today has right of return to the state of

58:45.720 --> 58:50.600
Israel, so they're all Israel, wherever they are on the planet. They're all the state of Israel.

58:51.560 --> 58:57.720
If religiously you adhere to the claim that Israel means these people with this passport,

58:57.720 --> 59:04.280
then necessarily you are bound morally to follow a certain political course. And voila,

59:04.360 --> 59:10.840
there it is. You have no choice as a Christian, but to do whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says,

59:10.840 --> 59:16.040
whoever's in charge at the time, that's wild. And so the last part of this we're going to talk about

59:16.040 --> 59:22.600
the geopolitics, but just keep in mind that that switcheroo that's being done that Rairi described

59:22.600 --> 59:27.320
is the key element of dispensationalism. If you say that Israel is one thing and the church is

59:27.320 --> 59:32.520
another thing, which we completely agree with, that's totally factual. The problem is that they

59:32.520 --> 59:38.840
say that Israel has a plan from God that is separate from Scripture, that's separate from the cross.

59:39.800 --> 59:44.440
As Corey said at the end of that, Rairi is trying to like, well, yeah, the cross is still there,

59:44.440 --> 59:49.720
but it doesn't mean what you think it means. And incidentally, this isn't just limited entirely

59:49.720 --> 59:58.280
to them. Vatican II adhered to this. They issued a statement, no striatate, referring to the gifts

59:58.280 --> 01:00:05.800
and promises of God being inevitable. I think about 1965 that more or less reiterated dispensationalism

01:00:05.800 --> 01:00:12.680
said that the Jews alone have a special promise from God and basically said it's anti-Semitic to

01:00:12.680 --> 01:00:17.000
proselytize to them, to take the gospel to them. God will take care of them because he made promises

01:00:17.000 --> 01:00:22.280
thousands of years ago. You don't need to worry about it. They have a separate deal. That's what

01:00:22.360 --> 01:00:28.200
the Vatican put out. That's false doctrine. And it's crazy false doctrine that came from well

01:00:28.200 --> 01:00:35.480
outside of Roman Catholicism. That's not like that was a development of their theology,

01:00:35.480 --> 01:00:43.000
but it was absolutely an importation of something that, again, played out geopolitically. Is this

01:00:43.000 --> 01:00:47.480
a religion podcast or is it a politics podcast? Are we talking about race? Are we talking about

01:00:47.480 --> 01:00:52.120
religion or genes? It's all those things simultaneously. And that's the reason that a lot of the

01:00:52.120 --> 01:00:57.400
topics that we cover kind of muddled because when all these things play out, when you look at the

01:00:57.400 --> 01:01:02.040
history and you look at the theology and then you look at the impact, if you ignore one of those,

01:01:02.040 --> 01:01:06.840
you're going to be missing the whole picture. You're really going to be missing the whole picture.

01:01:06.840 --> 01:01:11.880
And dispensationalism, by defining itself, is saying that Israel, and whoever calls themselves

01:01:11.880 --> 01:01:16.280
Israel is Israel automatically. If it's a Jew, it's Israel. It's separate from the church and we

01:01:16.280 --> 01:01:22.040
can judge them and we can't proselytize to them and we must do whatever they say. Because one

01:01:22.040 --> 01:01:28.120
of the key elements of dispensationalist doctrine is that they are superiors, that the Jews are

01:01:28.120 --> 01:01:36.520
first and we are second. Now, there are passages in Scripture that speak to that in a fashion.

01:01:36.520 --> 01:01:43.800
In particular, I commend reading Romans 10 and 11 back to back, particularly because it's a

01:01:43.800 --> 01:01:47.880
warning, I think, to many on the right today. If you're listening and you think you're kind of

01:01:47.880 --> 01:01:54.760
dissent right or something in that vein, you have certainly seen and heard men saying the glory of

01:01:54.760 --> 01:01:59.080
Europe is because of our genes. And it didn't only have to do with God, where the white man

01:01:59.080 --> 01:02:03.560
were strong and proud and blah, blah, blah. And that's why European history was great.

01:02:04.520 --> 01:02:11.320
When they remove Christianity from European history, they're doing exactly what Romans 11

01:02:11.320 --> 01:02:15.800
warns of us. I think that historically there have been many, even in the post-Reformation

01:02:15.800 --> 01:02:20.920
church, including in Luther's day, who read Romans 11 talking about grafting of branches and cutting

01:02:20.920 --> 01:02:31.880
off of branches as hope for the future restoration of ethnic Jews to come to faith. I wish that,

01:02:31.960 --> 01:02:36.840
I wish that nothing more than anything in the universe. The only cure for a Jew being a Jew

01:02:36.840 --> 01:02:42.840
and being evil continuously is to become Christian. The Jew who becomes Christian ceases to be a Jew.

01:02:42.840 --> 01:02:47.160
He's just going to obey God and stop doing all the things that I have a problem with

01:02:47.160 --> 01:02:51.560
and Korea has a problem with. We'd have nothing left to complain about with these people if they

01:02:51.560 --> 01:02:58.840
would be Christian. So above all men, we hardly wish that Romans 11 were making a promise that

01:02:58.840 --> 01:03:04.440
they would one day become Christian. But I think the reason it's important for us today is that

01:03:05.080 --> 01:03:09.560
we should look at that as a warning to the West. I think if you look at the warnings

01:03:09.560 --> 01:03:15.080
Romans 11, what you'll find is that God is saying, I made the promise first to the Jews,

01:03:15.080 --> 01:03:18.920
and when they abandoned me, I cut them off and threw them into the fire. Do you think you're

01:03:18.920 --> 01:03:24.920
going to fare any better? That's the gist of it, is a warning from God to the sons of Japheth,

01:03:25.480 --> 01:03:31.640
to Europe, to say you were Christian for a thousand years and then you abandoned me,

01:03:31.640 --> 01:03:35.240
do you think I'm not going to do the same thing to you that I did to the Jews?

01:03:35.240 --> 01:03:39.400
And we see the state of the Jews today and we see the state of the West. I think that it is,

01:03:40.200 --> 01:03:42.920
I'm not going to call it a prophecy, but it is certainly applicable.

01:03:43.800 --> 01:03:48.840
What God said is being done to us because we are abandoning God just as they did.

01:03:49.400 --> 01:03:57.960
So I don't read Romans 11 and flex on the Jews today. It's a chastisement to anyone in the West

01:03:57.960 --> 01:04:01.240
because we have done the very thing that God warned us not to do.

01:04:01.880 --> 01:04:06.920
Our fathers inherited the faith and then at some point it began to be thrown away.

01:04:06.920 --> 01:04:12.040
And now so many in the West today don't think it even matters. And God's warning to us

01:04:12.040 --> 01:04:17.640
is the same as it was to them in Paul's day. I'm going to cut you off and throw you in the fire.

01:04:17.640 --> 01:04:22.040
This is what I do to those who betray me and who defy and do not have faith.

01:04:22.760 --> 01:04:28.120
And we should expect to have every bit the same bad outcome that the Jews have had

01:04:28.120 --> 01:04:33.560
when we continue down this path. So, theologically, this is a live issue for us.

01:04:33.560 --> 01:04:37.400
I don't think it's about the restoration of the Jews to the church,

01:04:37.400 --> 01:04:41.160
which again would be wonderful. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think that Paul is

01:04:41.160 --> 01:04:47.000
promising that, that he specifically says that when he's talking about Israel and the promises

01:04:47.000 --> 01:04:52.280
that God made, he also says that in those days, there were only 7,000 who didn't bend the knee

01:04:52.280 --> 01:04:57.400
to Baal. God killed the rest. The rest are in hell. There's only 7,000 who were saved.

01:04:57.400 --> 01:05:01.880
And he says the same in his day, that all the promises were extended to all Jews.

01:05:02.760 --> 01:05:06.760
Only a remnant would have faith. And that's always been the case.

01:05:06.760 --> 01:05:12.840
Now there is a substantial remnant in Paul's day who did become Christian and basically

01:05:12.840 --> 01:05:15.880
vanished as Jews. They just became wherever they lived in their place.

01:05:15.880 --> 01:05:20.760
They cease to have their ethnic identity because they lived in Palestine or Turkey or

01:05:20.760 --> 01:05:24.440
Iraq or wherever. They just became locals and they were Christians in those places.

01:05:25.160 --> 01:05:29.400
I don't think it's coincidental that when you look closely at the headlines today,

01:05:29.400 --> 01:05:33.640
if you can read through the top line stuff, you'll find that those very populations

01:05:33.640 --> 01:05:38.200
are being exterminated today. The Christians who trace their roots, the Arab Christians,

01:05:38.200 --> 01:05:44.280
the Eastern, Middle Eastern Christians, in those places who have roots going back thousands of

01:05:44.280 --> 01:05:50.360
years, they're being genocide today. They're being exterminated. They were faithful and they are

01:05:50.360 --> 01:05:58.920
paying the price for living among wicked men. So these promises do pan out over time, not in

01:05:58.920 --> 01:06:03.720
terms of dispensations. And again, not in terms of genetics, but in terms of faithfulness.

01:06:05.000 --> 01:06:12.440
When it comes to hermeneutics, we see a problem with dispensationalists that is sort of the inverse

01:06:12.760 --> 01:06:19.560
problem that we see with liberals in the academic sense of the term or the theological sense of the

01:06:19.560 --> 01:06:27.560
term. Liberals fall off the left side of the horse by allegorizing literal books of the Bible.

01:06:29.000 --> 01:06:35.480
The most obvious example, of course, is creation, the days of creation. They allegorize those by

01:06:35.480 --> 01:06:41.880
saying that, oh, well, it's an epic or it's an era or there's a gap between the days. Whatever it

01:06:41.880 --> 01:06:46.840
happens to be that they're currently arguing. And so they fall off the left side of the horse by

01:06:46.840 --> 01:06:53.160
taking the first five books, say, which are very clearly history books written by Moses,

01:06:53.960 --> 01:07:00.520
almost exclusively literal, and turning them into a metaphor or an allegory. On the other hand,

01:07:01.640 --> 01:07:07.800
you have dispensationalists and those adjacent to them who take books like Daniel,

01:07:08.600 --> 01:07:15.880
parts of Ezekiel, some of the other parts of the prophets, revelation, books that are prophetic,

01:07:16.600 --> 01:07:23.800
that are metaphorical, that are symbolic, and attempt to interpret them in a literalistic

01:07:23.800 --> 01:07:31.640
fashion. And so they fall off the right side of the horse. It doesn't matter off of which side of

01:07:31.640 --> 01:07:36.920
the horse you fall. You don't want to fall off the horse. You want to stay on the horse. Yes,

01:07:36.920 --> 01:07:40.680
if there's a cliff on one side, you probably prefer to fall off the other. Sometimes some

01:07:40.680 --> 01:07:46.360
heresies are worse than others. We've seen what liberalism has done to major denominations,

01:07:47.160 --> 01:07:50.200
but we can see what dispensationalism is currently doing to the world.

01:07:51.880 --> 01:07:57.560
So don't fall off either side of the horse. You have to interpret the books of Scripture

01:07:57.560 --> 01:08:04.840
according to the type of book it is. Because that is something that must always be in your

01:08:04.840 --> 01:08:12.280
mind when you are reading Scripture. Scripture is a single book in so far as it is a single work

01:08:12.280 --> 01:08:18.920
from the mind of God. It flowed out of the pens of many scribes, of many inspired men,

01:08:19.720 --> 01:08:29.960
but it is the work ultimately of a single mind. However, it is a collection of books from that

01:08:29.960 --> 01:08:38.600
mind. God did not write one kind of book. God did not write one single book beginning to end.

01:08:38.600 --> 01:08:43.320
He wrote a collection of books that are intertwined, interrelated. We've gone over this previously

01:08:43.320 --> 01:08:47.080
in other episodes, but he wrote a collection of books that are related to each other,

01:08:48.280 --> 01:08:54.040
but there are distinct genres within that collection. And so you do not read Genesis

01:08:54.600 --> 01:09:00.600
in the same way that you read Psalms. You do not read the Psalms in the same way that you read,

01:09:01.240 --> 01:09:07.560
say, Revelation. Matthew is going to be more like Genesis, because Matthew is more of a

01:09:07.560 --> 01:09:12.280
literal account, but it contains parables that are going to be interpreted differently

01:09:12.280 --> 01:09:18.840
from the genealogy at the beginning of the book. Different genres call for different assessment.

01:09:19.560 --> 01:09:25.000
That doesn't mean that we ignore what the text says. In fact, the only way in which

01:09:25.000 --> 01:09:31.320
you can interpret the text literally is to interpret it in the way that God literally

01:09:31.320 --> 01:09:38.440
meant it to be interpreted. If you take the text, if you take something that is in fact spiritual,

01:09:38.440 --> 01:09:43.480
or allegorical, or metaphorical, symbolic, what have you, if you take that text,

01:09:44.280 --> 01:09:48.920
an attempt to make it a purely literal reading, you will get it wrong.

01:09:50.760 --> 01:09:58.040
Christ is not literally a lamb with seven horns. That's in Scripture. You cannot take that

01:09:58.040 --> 01:10:03.960
in the literalistic sense. The same is true, speaking of the number of one thousand, which is

01:10:03.960 --> 01:10:08.280
where we get the millennium supposedly from Revelation, in the Psalms it says that God

01:10:08.280 --> 01:10:16.760
owns the cattle on a thousand hills. God owns the universe. God does not own literally the cattle

01:10:16.760 --> 01:10:24.280
on literally a thousand hills. You have to interpret that as what it is. It is a symbolic

01:10:24.280 --> 01:10:30.920
use of a number. One thousand, of course, just representing complete perfection, God's perfection.

01:10:30.920 --> 01:10:37.480
That is what the number actually means. It's ten to the power of three. And so that one thousand

01:10:37.480 --> 01:10:43.560
years, the supposed millennium, is the church age. It is the perfect amount of time from Pentecost

01:10:44.360 --> 01:10:50.680
to the last day in which God will ingather his church. It is the church age. That is what the

01:10:50.680 --> 01:10:57.640
millennium actually is. Just as the cattle on a thousand hills is meant to represent a number

01:10:57.640 --> 01:11:04.760
of perfection in that all things belong to God. It is a statement of his complete and total ownership

01:11:04.760 --> 01:11:09.960
over all that exists. That is how you interpret these things. You have to know what they are to

01:11:09.960 --> 01:11:17.000
know how to interpret them. Or else, again, you fall off one or the other side of the horse.

01:11:19.560 --> 01:11:25.320
Now, we'll recommend it that you read Romans 10 and 11. I would second that. Read the entire book.

01:11:25.320 --> 01:11:30.040
Set aside the time. It's not that long of a book. Yes, it's a very long letter for the

01:11:30.040 --> 01:11:36.760
era and it was very expensive for the time. But it doesn't take that long to read. I will include

01:11:36.760 --> 01:11:43.480
in the show notes Luther's preface to the book of Romans. I believe that is available online.

01:11:43.480 --> 01:11:47.640
I know it's in the Lutheran study Bible, at least in part. So if you have that, you can just read it.

01:11:48.200 --> 01:11:55.960
But it's worth reading. He gives a good summary of how to read Romans, what the book of Romans is,

01:11:55.960 --> 01:12:02.760
why Paul organized it the way that he did, how a Christian reads it, and in part it echoes what

01:12:02.760 --> 01:12:09.800
Woe said about the book, because it is in part a warning. Part of the reason that I said chapters

01:12:09.800 --> 01:12:16.600
10 and 11 and 9 is I'm going to read most of 9 right now, because there are so many different

01:12:16.600 --> 01:12:21.560
places in the New Testament where if someone just comes along and they have the Holy Spirit,

01:12:21.560 --> 01:12:27.240
they're a Christian, and they're reading this stuff, they could never possibly conclude that on one

01:12:27.240 --> 01:12:33.880
hand you have Israel that belongs to God, and on the other hand you have the church that also belongs

01:12:33.880 --> 01:12:43.720
to God. Either Israel is the church or Israel is damned, because the church is the whole universe

01:12:43.720 --> 01:12:49.720
of the elect period. That's what the elect means, is what the chosen means. Those who were chosen

01:12:49.720 --> 01:12:55.240
in the Old Testament were elected unto salvation. They were given the gift of faith and they received

01:12:55.240 --> 01:13:01.080
the gift of salvation. Jews, Ninevites, wherever they were, when the Word of God came to them and

01:13:01.080 --> 01:13:05.720
they repented, they were saved. So I'm going to read from Romans 9 now.

01:13:19.720 --> 01:13:26.360
Forehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles,

01:13:26.360 --> 01:13:32.120
as indeed he says in Hosea, Those who were not my people, I will call my people,

01:13:32.120 --> 01:13:37.720
and her who is not beloved, I will call beloved. And in the very place where it was said to them,

01:13:37.720 --> 01:13:44.040
you are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God. And Isaiah cries out

01:13:44.040 --> 01:13:49.080
concerning Israel, though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea,

01:13:49.080 --> 01:13:54.680
only a remnant of them will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully

01:13:54.680 --> 01:14:01.320
and without delay. And Isaiah predicted, if the Lord of hosts had not left us off spring,

01:14:01.320 --> 01:14:07.080
we would have been like Sodom and become like Gomorrah. What shall we say then? The Gentiles who

01:14:07.080 --> 01:14:11.800
did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is a righteousness that is by faith,

01:14:11.800 --> 01:14:15.880
but that Israel who pursued a law, that would lead to righteousness did not

01:14:15.880 --> 01:14:22.600
succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were

01:14:22.600 --> 01:14:28.200
based on works, they have stumbled over the stumbling stone as it is written. Behold, I am

01:14:28.200 --> 01:14:34.600
laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes in him will not be

01:14:34.600 --> 01:14:43.240
put to shame. So what is the difference between the church and the Israel of the Old Testament

01:14:43.320 --> 01:14:48.680
that is excluded from the promise? It is whether or not they stumbled on the stone of stumbling.

01:14:48.680 --> 01:14:53.880
When Jesus came and fulfilled all of the promises and prophecies, there were many Jews who believed

01:14:53.880 --> 01:15:02.200
and converted. They left the phariseic world and they became Christians. But it was a continuation

01:15:02.200 --> 01:15:07.720
of the faith that they had held under a new covenant, and that was the shift that occurred. It

01:15:07.720 --> 01:15:14.360
wasn't a new religion. It was that Jesus came to fulfill all the law and all the testimonies of

01:15:14.360 --> 01:15:20.840
the Old Testament. They were then freed from that, and we are freed from that. The burdens

01:15:20.840 --> 01:15:26.040
they were placed on them, the ceremonial burdens going to the temple, were replaced. They were

01:15:26.040 --> 01:15:34.040
removed entirely, and God finalized what he said on the cross when Christ said it is finished.

01:15:34.680 --> 01:15:40.200
And remember at the moment that Christ said that what happened? He died, there was a great earthquake,

01:15:40.840 --> 01:15:47.800
and I think equally important symbolically with the rest, the temple curtain was torn in two.

01:15:48.360 --> 01:15:52.920
This wasn't like a curtain in your house. This was a huge, incredibly tall, incredibly thick,

01:15:52.920 --> 01:15:59.240
heavy curtain. It was torn in two like it was nothing. And this is important because that curtain

01:15:59.240 --> 01:16:05.320
separated the Holy of Holies in which God's special presence on earth in the temple, the reason

01:16:05.320 --> 01:16:11.000
for the temple, the reason for the sacrifices, was contained within the Holy of Holies where the

01:16:11.000 --> 01:16:18.280
Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God's special presence existed. God left that place

01:16:18.280 --> 01:16:24.440
when Christ died because when he said it was finished, it was over. The temple sacrificial

01:16:24.440 --> 01:16:29.880
system that Jesus had participated in when he was alive, he had fulfilled all of those requirements.

01:16:30.600 --> 01:16:37.400
When he died, that ended, and God left the temple. And then 40 years later, he completed it by using

01:16:37.400 --> 01:16:43.560
Titus to destroy and sack the temple and to kill and scatter and destroy the Jews who were no longer

01:16:43.560 --> 01:16:49.480
Christian. They were still trying to hang on to something that God had said, this is over, this

01:16:49.480 --> 01:16:55.640
period has ended. I've given you a new covenant in Christ in his blood, the perfect blood for which

01:16:55.640 --> 01:17:00.680
the blood of all the previous sacrifices were only typological. And there are numerous places

01:17:00.680 --> 01:17:06.600
in the New Testament that specifically says that the blood of beasts can never save anyone. They

01:17:06.600 --> 01:17:13.800
can't forgive your sins. Those were there pointing to Christ's atoning sacrifice. It's typological.

01:17:13.800 --> 01:17:18.440
The smaller points to the greater. And there's nothing greater than Christ's atoning blood on

01:17:18.440 --> 01:17:25.800
the cross. So when the Jews stumbled on the stumbling block, it was Jesus coming to them

01:17:25.800 --> 01:17:32.200
as had been promised as their Messiah, who for us is the Christ because it's just Greek versus Hebrew.

01:17:33.800 --> 01:17:40.280
It was over. Now, they rejected it. And so to this day, they continue to reject it overly.

01:17:41.320 --> 01:17:47.880
You lose legal standing if you are an Israeli citizen and you convert to Christianity. If you

01:17:47.880 --> 01:17:52.600
attempt to proselytize in the state of Israel, you will go to prison or you'll be deported because

01:17:52.600 --> 01:17:58.520
it's illegal to do so. They have Muslims there and they'll permit Christians to come and to spend

01:17:58.520 --> 01:18:04.040
lots of money as part of their grift, getting people to come as tourists. But you're not allowed

01:18:04.040 --> 01:18:09.080
to stay. You're not allowed to be a Christian there. That is forbidden. Why? Because they continue

01:18:09.080 --> 01:18:14.920
to reject Christ to this day. And so this dispensationalist stuff that tries to say that

01:18:14.920 --> 01:18:19.320
there's an Israel on one hand. And yet, by the way, it's clearly the state of Israel today.

01:18:19.960 --> 01:18:24.360
And on the other hand, just forget about the Jesus stuff. That's for us. That's for the church.

01:18:24.360 --> 01:18:31.160
But it's not really even as important as what's going on with these Jews. That's a satanic inversion.

01:18:31.160 --> 01:18:36.760
That is a complete inversion of the Christian faith. And yet, there are so many who call

01:18:36.760 --> 01:18:41.160
themselves Christians today that are full bore with this stuff. And they're doing it with a clean

01:18:41.160 --> 01:18:47.240
conscience, which is tragic. This is theologically bankrupt and it's completely at odds with all

01:18:47.240 --> 01:18:53.560
of Scripture. We're not going to belabor this by reading 50 verses or 50 passages, but we very easily

01:18:53.560 --> 01:18:59.560
could. There's one last passage I want to read because it's often cited as one of the clear proof

01:18:59.560 --> 01:19:06.600
texts for this notion that there's Israel and then separately there's Christianity. It's at the

01:19:06.600 --> 01:19:12.440
very end of Galatians. It's after Paul says, you can tell I'm writing this with my own hand.

01:19:12.440 --> 01:19:13.640
Paul concludes the letter,

01:19:14.680 --> 01:19:19.400
It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised

01:19:19.400 --> 01:19:23.480
and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.

01:19:23.480 --> 01:19:27.320
For even among those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law,

01:19:27.320 --> 01:19:31.160
but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh.

01:19:31.880 --> 01:19:36.280
But far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,

01:19:36.280 --> 01:19:42.280
by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world, for neither circumcision counts for

01:19:42.280 --> 01:19:49.400
anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and

01:19:49.400 --> 01:19:54.920
mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. And then there's a couple of lines he finishes

01:19:54.920 --> 01:20:00.680
of the epistle. This is the very end of Galatians. There's several key things that we've said numerous

01:20:00.680 --> 01:20:05.400
times. I want to just hammer home the point here. One, this is at the end of the epistle,

01:20:05.400 --> 01:20:10.120
no one who reads all of Galatians. And again, you should just go sit down and read the whole thing.

01:20:10.120 --> 01:20:15.800
It's not that long. You can do it in 15, 20 minutes at the outside. You could not possibly

01:20:15.800 --> 01:20:21.000
read Galatians and come to the conclusion of the dispensationalists that when Paul says,

01:20:21.000 --> 01:20:25.960
peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God, that somehow they're talking about two

01:20:25.960 --> 01:20:32.200
different things, that the Israel of God is in one category. And then what's in the other category?

01:20:32.200 --> 01:20:39.640
Well, if you go back and read, he says, far be it for me to boast in anything except the cross of

01:20:39.640 --> 01:20:48.680
our Lord Christ Jesus. Well, is that the Israel of God? Not by the dispensationalist standard,

01:20:48.680 --> 01:20:53.960
but that's exactly the one and only Israel of God that Paul is referring to. It's very clear in

01:20:53.960 --> 01:21:00.520
the rest of the epistle because Galatians is also very heavily about the grafting of branches and

01:21:00.520 --> 01:21:06.600
about inheritance. He's talking about how we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ because

01:21:06.600 --> 01:21:11.560
we have been adopted. There's a lot of adoption language talking about Christ being our brother,

01:21:11.560 --> 01:21:18.200
and therefore we have legal rights as brothers according to adoption. No one can possibly get

01:21:18.200 --> 01:21:25.080
through this epistle and think that somehow there's some other separate version of God's people,

01:21:25.080 --> 01:21:32.760
apart from the one that boasts in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's absurd. And frankly,

01:21:32.760 --> 01:21:39.640
they hinge the whole thing on and, peace and mercy be upon them and upon Israel of God. Well,

01:21:39.640 --> 01:21:43.800
I might say that Corey is my friend and my brother. Does that mean that there are two

01:21:43.800 --> 01:21:48.760
quarries? No, it means that there's one man who's two different things. And rhetorically,

01:21:48.760 --> 01:21:53.880
when you look at the very end of this letter, Paul's just, he's ending with a flourish. And for

01:21:53.880 --> 01:21:59.320
all those who walk by this real peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God, he's

01:21:59.320 --> 01:22:04.440
raising his hands and saying, everybody who's a believer, he's not invoking a separate group of

01:22:04.440 --> 01:22:10.680
people. So no natural reading of this passage or certainly in the context of the book,

01:22:10.680 --> 01:22:15.320
whatever caused someone to say, well, actually, this means that Israel is a separate thing. And

01:22:15.320 --> 01:22:21.480
that's what I see on a map today. It's retarded. There's another word for it. It's dumb. It's

01:22:21.480 --> 01:22:27.320
inexcusably dumb. And this sort of laziness is the predicate for believing all the other

01:22:27.320 --> 01:22:33.880
dispensationalist beliefs. So when we call it a heresy, we're not playing games here.

01:22:34.440 --> 01:22:39.880
They reject the plain words of scripture throughout. We could spend an hour and a

01:22:40.280 --> 01:22:45.080
half just reading the passages that lay bare how stupid it is and impossible and

01:22:45.080 --> 01:22:49.560
faithless to say that there's Israel on one hand and there's a church on the other.

01:22:49.560 --> 01:22:55.960
Elect is elect as elect. Elect is chosen. Chosen are the people of God who are in the church,

01:22:55.960 --> 01:23:02.360
who are the bride of Christ. Those are Christians, all of them. That's why we always make the rhetorical

01:23:02.360 --> 01:23:06.040
point of saying that Adam is a Christian and Noah is a Christian and Mary is a Christian.

01:23:07.000 --> 01:23:14.280
Some of them were also Hebrews by birth, but it was their faith in God that saved them. And

01:23:14.280 --> 01:23:19.560
that is why, definitionally, they're Christian. When you start having these other dispensations

01:23:19.560 --> 01:23:24.280
and these other separate things, what are you fundamentally doing? You're removing God from

01:23:24.280 --> 01:23:30.200
the picture. You're saying, well, some people don't need God. God is just delivering it to

01:23:30.200 --> 01:23:34.280
him in some other way, and they don't even know it. And even if they hate and despise God to this

01:23:34.440 --> 01:23:39.240
day, they're still going to have something because God keeps his promises. Well, the passages where

01:23:39.240 --> 01:23:44.120
God talks about keeping his promises, he makes it very clear that I'll keep promises to those who

01:23:44.120 --> 01:23:50.200
are faithful to me, but I'll find more people. If you don't want to be my people, okay. In Hebrews

01:23:50.200 --> 01:23:54.520
8, he talks about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and it's made very clear. When one set

01:23:54.520 --> 01:24:00.520
of people abandoned me, okay, it wasn't that the covenant failed because God didn't do a good job

01:24:00.520 --> 01:24:05.400
with it. It was that they rejected it. And so he needed a new people of the covenant, and that's us.

01:24:06.120 --> 01:24:12.440
That's all it means. And so all the errors are downstream from abusing and misreading simple,

01:24:12.440 --> 01:24:18.440
clear passages that are reinforced. It's not like there's one place here and there's one other place

01:24:18.440 --> 01:24:22.920
somewhere else, and maybe you could see them being the same. It's consistent throughout. If you just

01:24:22.920 --> 01:24:28.040
read the New Testament, you will never reach these conclusions. That's why I say that a lot of these

01:24:28.040 --> 01:24:34.600
people are just dumb. And I'm sorry, I don't want to be abusive, but this is not an intelligent

01:24:34.600 --> 01:24:41.320
position. But intelligence aside, it's one that's at odds with Scripture. And whether you're reading

01:24:41.320 --> 01:24:46.920
intelligently or you're reading simply, you can read Scripture simply, please do. Most people should

01:24:46.920 --> 01:24:51.400
just stick to the simple reading of Scripture. Even if you make an error, it's going to be far

01:24:51.400 --> 01:24:55.800
less bad than the elaborate ones made by the clever people who want to come in and just

01:24:56.440 --> 01:25:01.400
layer on so many ridiculous things that they end up creating more distance between themselves and

01:25:01.400 --> 01:25:09.640
God. That's not why he gave us these words. Never underestimate the pettiness and the ability to

01:25:09.640 --> 01:25:19.320
hold a grudge of the Jews. And the reason that I say this is to emphasize what Woe said about the

01:25:19.320 --> 01:25:29.080
fact that so-called modern Israel is founded in large part and sustained by an explicit rejection

01:25:29.080 --> 01:25:38.280
of Christ and a hatred of Christ. An example of this in their mathematics textbooks, how they

01:25:38.280 --> 01:25:44.360
teach math to their children, how they write their math, they do not use the plus symbol.

01:25:45.320 --> 01:25:51.960
They use what is properly called the falsum or the uptack, depending on how you're using it really.

01:25:52.600 --> 01:25:59.400
It's an upside down T. They get rid of the lower part of the plus symbol because it looks like a

01:25:59.400 --> 01:26:04.280
cross. It doesn't even look that much like a cross, quite frankly, because the cross, the lower part

01:26:04.280 --> 01:26:10.920
is supposed to be longer, but it's enough like a cross that they get rid of it. This is not the

01:26:10.920 --> 01:26:19.640
only case of this. In some cases, when Jews have immigrated, they have been asked to sign

01:26:20.760 --> 01:26:25.400
a particular piece of paper because that is what you do when someone immigrates to your country.

01:26:25.400 --> 01:26:30.280
And in some cases, they would refuse to use an X because sometimes if you're a literate,

01:26:30.280 --> 01:26:36.920
you just make an X. Well, that also looks too much like a cross. This is the level of pettiness

01:26:36.920 --> 01:26:43.960
and hatred that these people have for Christ. And dispensationalism says that we're supposed to

01:26:43.960 --> 01:26:50.360
support them. That's not what Scripture says. Scripture says that we are to support our brothers,

01:26:50.360 --> 01:26:55.560
both those according to blood and those according to faith, particularly those who are brothers

01:26:55.560 --> 01:27:03.800
according to both. Supporting a foreign nation that is hostile to Christianity is observing neither

01:27:03.800 --> 01:27:09.080
of those injunctions in Scripture. It is not the Christian thing to do, and yet it is what

01:27:09.080 --> 01:27:15.320
every dispensationalist says that we are supposed to do. They all, to a man, particularly amongst

01:27:15.320 --> 01:27:24.280
the teachers, command Christians, basically, to virtually worship Israel. Because anything that

01:27:24.280 --> 01:27:32.520
is against the so-called nation of Israel is seen as blasphemy, is seen as a rejection of the Christian

01:27:32.520 --> 01:27:39.560
faith. And really, that's a good working definition of what a heresy is. A heresy is a false teaching

01:27:39.560 --> 01:27:46.120
that rises to the level of a litmus test. If a false teaching is used as a test of whether

01:27:46.120 --> 01:27:52.920
or not someone is Christian, then that false teaching has become a heresy. Now, in the broader sense,

01:27:52.920 --> 01:28:00.360
of course, all false teaching is heresy because it is all blasphemy. But there are different levels

01:28:00.360 --> 01:28:05.080
of blasphemy, the same as there are different levels of sin. Certainly, the blasphemy against

01:28:05.080 --> 01:28:11.240
the Holy Spirit is more egregious than saying something that is a minor falsehood as it were

01:28:11.240 --> 01:28:15.720
about God. Not to say that any falsehood is minor, but I have to speak in human terms to be

01:28:15.720 --> 01:28:24.760
understandable. But this is another case of falling off one or the other side of the horse.

01:28:25.480 --> 01:28:32.200
On the one hand, the Israelites thought they were special. They thought Abraham is our father.

01:28:32.200 --> 01:28:39.560
Certainly, we are saved by our blood. Christ very clearly rebuked them, as did John the Baptist.

01:28:40.840 --> 01:28:47.080
God can raise up for Abraham new sons from these stones. They were not saved by their blood.

01:28:47.880 --> 01:28:53.320
They should not have boasted in their blood. It was not wrong for them to be proud of their

01:28:54.280 --> 01:29:01.720
heritage. Every man should be proud of his heritage, insofar as there is good in that heritage.

01:29:02.760 --> 01:29:06.120
And, of course, you must, according to the Fourth Commandment, honor

01:29:06.120 --> 01:29:10.440
your father and your mother. And that includes grandparents, great-grandparents, your ancestors

01:29:10.440 --> 01:29:17.560
all the way back, indeed, through Noah to Adam. But it does not give you a special place before

01:29:17.640 --> 01:29:24.280
God. You are not saved by your blood. We continue to state this bluntly, because it is a problem

01:29:24.280 --> 01:29:28.840
for some on the right, but more than it is a problem on the right, because, quite frankly,

01:29:28.840 --> 01:29:35.480
it's not that big of a problem. It's a big problem in terms of its import, but not in terms of the

01:29:35.480 --> 01:29:42.760
widespread nature of it. Only a handful of people think it. But it is more of a problem because

01:29:42.760 --> 01:29:48.520
it is a constant accusation from our adversaries and enemies. They say that we think we're saved

01:29:48.520 --> 01:29:52.440
by our blood, and that's the second part of this. That's falling off the other side of the horse.

01:29:52.440 --> 01:29:56.760
I won't say which one's right and which one's left. You decide that for yourself, in this case.

01:29:57.880 --> 01:30:04.600
But the other one would be those who think that simply because we're white, we are somehow immune

01:30:04.600 --> 01:30:10.760
to these things, that we're inoculated against apostasy or whatever it happens to be, that everything

01:30:10.760 --> 01:30:16.440
will be good, simply because we're white. And if you just had white people, everything would be

01:30:16.440 --> 01:30:23.240
great. And that's not the case. Look at the actual history of various white nations when they were

01:30:23.240 --> 01:30:30.120
not Christian. Yes, they were certainly better off than most of those in Africa, than basically

01:30:30.120 --> 01:30:34.600
any of those in Africa, quite frankly. But that doesn't mean that things were good.

01:30:35.400 --> 01:30:39.640
Look at how the Romans treated their slaves. Slavery itself isn't a sin.

01:30:40.520 --> 01:30:43.160
Abusing your slaves in the way the Romans did certainly was.

01:30:44.520 --> 01:30:49.000
Look at how in some of the far northern reaches, disabled children were treated.

01:30:49.800 --> 01:30:54.760
They were left out to die. They were exposed, as it was called, was death by exposure.

01:30:55.880 --> 01:30:57.880
That's certainly not Christian. That's not permissible.

01:30:58.200 --> 01:31:05.560
Euthanasia of that variety, at the very least, is not permissible, because that is, of course,

01:31:05.560 --> 01:31:15.400
infanticide. That is the reality of any human group without God, without Christ.

01:31:17.000 --> 01:31:22.360
It doesn't matter if you're black, if you're white, if you're Asian, whatever you happen to be,

01:31:23.000 --> 01:31:30.120
your nation is going to go down the drain if you are not Christian. You will get worse with time,

01:31:30.120 --> 01:31:35.480
you will stray further and further from God, the longer you are away from Christ.

01:31:36.920 --> 01:31:40.600
Yes, some will fall, farther will fall, further and faster.

01:31:42.280 --> 01:31:47.560
But that doesn't mean that you are in a good position if you are the ones who fell only a

01:31:47.560 --> 01:31:53.400
little ways, because any falling away from God, in which you do not return to him,

01:31:53.400 --> 01:32:00.760
eventuates in hell. And so for those who think that we can save the West by just returning

01:32:00.760 --> 01:32:07.720
it to being ethnically pure, or whatever term they want to use, are deeply mistaken.

01:32:09.000 --> 01:32:13.160
Because if you are just producing more Europeans and they aren't Christian,

01:32:13.880 --> 01:32:16.840
all you're doing is filling hell with your brothers and sisters.

01:32:18.440 --> 01:32:23.240
And quite frankly, that is a worse future than simply going extinct. I would rather

01:32:23.240 --> 01:32:26.360
there were no more Europeans than we return to paganism.

01:32:28.280 --> 01:32:33.480
Because filling hell with your own people is the worst possible thing you can do.

01:32:35.480 --> 01:32:41.000
Contrast that with what Paul says of his people. He would have had his name stricken from the book

01:32:41.000 --> 01:32:46.040
of life, if it would have saved his own people. That's what it means to love your own people.

01:32:47.080 --> 01:32:49.160
Damning them all to hell is certainly not loving them.

01:32:52.840 --> 01:33:02.120
But when it comes to dispensationalism and this particular belief that there are two ways

01:33:02.120 --> 01:33:05.800
to God if we're being uncharitable, and quite frankly, it's not even that uncharitable,

01:33:05.800 --> 01:33:10.840
because many of them have come out and said that, not in so many words, but they'll essentially

01:33:10.840 --> 01:33:17.480
say the Jews have another way. On the one hand, this accuses Christ, accuses God of being a

01:33:17.480 --> 01:33:24.120
polygenist. Polygeny is not morally impermissible for men.

01:33:26.840 --> 01:33:33.160
God is not a polygenist. God has one bride. Scripture is very clear about this. God's

01:33:33.160 --> 01:33:41.320
bride, Christ's bride, is the Church. She is the only bride of Christ. There is no other.

01:33:42.120 --> 01:33:48.520
And that is why when we used to have statuary and proper design and aesthetics for our churches,

01:33:49.240 --> 01:33:56.840
you had Ecclesia and synagogue somewhere outside the Church. You had Ecclesia, the Church triumphant,

01:33:57.480 --> 01:34:04.040
head held high, holding Scripture, and you had synagogue blinded with, usually,

01:34:04.040 --> 01:34:09.320
the Old Testament falling out of her hand, possibly with a snake somewhere incorporated as well.

01:34:10.600 --> 01:34:16.360
Because that is the proper Christian view of these things. You have the bride of Christ,

01:34:16.360 --> 01:34:21.640
you have the wise virgins, and then you have the synagogue that rejected Christ,

01:34:21.640 --> 01:34:30.360
you have the wicked, foolish virgins. There is no second way to God. It is Christ alone. Scripture

01:34:30.360 --> 01:34:37.720
is abundantly clear on this. And so any theology that even hints that there is a second way is

01:34:37.720 --> 01:34:44.920
obviously false, is obviously anti-Christian, not merely un-Christian, but anti-Christian.

01:34:44.920 --> 01:34:51.560
And that is why we call dispensationalism a heresy. And it is a particularly vile heresy,

01:34:52.200 --> 01:34:56.600
not only for the damage it has done to the Church, not only for how many

01:34:57.560 --> 01:35:03.400
souls it has shipwrecked and destroyed, but for also what it continues to do in the world,

01:35:03.400 --> 01:35:12.440
because as Woe stated earlier, it has geopolitical consequences. It is not only a damning heresy,

01:35:12.520 --> 01:35:17.960
if you believe the extreme version, I'll call it of what it teaches, but it is also a destructive

01:35:17.960 --> 01:35:23.640
heresy. It destroys the Church, it destroys nations, it is tearing apart the world.

01:35:24.840 --> 01:35:28.920
And we are not being extreme, we are not being hyperbolic in what we are saying. If anything,

01:35:28.920 --> 01:35:35.880
we are understating the case. Because without dispensationalism, you would not have the power

01:35:35.960 --> 01:35:43.080
behind Zionism that we see today. Without Zionism, you would not have the complete and utter disaster

01:35:43.080 --> 01:35:50.600
that has been the last 200 years or so in the West. We are in the position in which we find ourselves

01:35:50.600 --> 01:35:57.720
today, in no small part, due to dispensationalism. There are many other factors, of course, and

01:35:57.720 --> 01:36:02.680
we've gone over those in various other episodes and we'll go over more of them in the future,

01:36:02.680 --> 01:36:09.720
but dispensationalism has played an outsized role and it continues to do so, particularly

01:36:09.720 --> 01:36:16.840
in the United States, so particularly in our context. And so there are a couple of teachings

01:36:18.200 --> 01:36:23.560
of the dispensationalists that I would like to cover. I would like to refute what they teach

01:36:23.560 --> 01:36:31.400
on these specifically. As we said, we are not going to go into all of the points. We are not

01:36:31.480 --> 01:36:37.800
going to examine the minutiae. We're not going to take a magnifying glass to what the dispensationalists

01:36:37.800 --> 01:36:43.960
teach. Not least of all, because they all disagree with each other and there's no coherent statement

01:36:43.960 --> 01:36:48.520
of dispensationalism to which they would all subscribe. It's the same problem we will have

01:36:48.520 --> 01:36:55.320
when we go over the EO in a future episode. Because the classic dispensationalists don't

01:36:55.320 --> 01:36:59.640
agree with the revised or modified, whichever term you prefer, and they don't agree with the

01:36:59.640 --> 01:37:07.880
progressives. Essentially what you have there, just for those who want a sort of idea of how

01:37:07.880 --> 01:37:17.320
they differ, you have an increasing incorporation of covenantal or covenant theology into dispensationalism.

01:37:17.320 --> 01:37:23.560
You have not so much of it. In classical dispensationalism, you have more in revised and

01:37:23.560 --> 01:37:29.080
even more in progressive, which is what you see in many of the churches that hold to this today.

01:37:30.280 --> 01:37:32.520
That's essentially how you can think of the difference in those.

01:37:33.880 --> 01:37:42.520
They're all heresies. And part of how you can tell that is theology does not develop in the

01:37:42.520 --> 01:37:52.520
sense of development as change. And so you see change in dispensationalism. What it teaches

01:37:52.520 --> 01:37:57.960
changes over time. What it teaches from the beginning is a significant change, is a break

01:37:57.960 --> 01:38:03.160
with what the church teaches, what scripture teaches. Theology can be fleshed out,

01:38:04.520 --> 01:38:12.680
but those additional details, the fleshing out, does not change the core content.

01:38:14.040 --> 01:38:19.240
The core teachings do not change, and they do not change notably from the creeds,

01:38:19.240 --> 01:38:27.560
because the creeds, as we stated before, are based firmly in scripture. And I will put a page in

01:38:27.560 --> 01:38:33.160
the show notes for this episode that links to a table showing those verses. I should have done that

01:38:33.160 --> 01:38:39.800
in a previous episode, but I'll do it in this episode. Dispensationalism is false. One of the

01:38:39.800 --> 01:38:47.560
ways you can tell is that it changes over time, because false theology changes. True theology

01:38:47.560 --> 01:38:53.320
is going to sound the same today as it will a thousand years from today, if Christ doesn't return

01:38:53.320 --> 01:38:58.360
in the intervening time, and will sound the same then as it did a thousand years ago.

01:38:59.640 --> 01:39:07.320
Because God doesn't change, God's word doesn't change, so theology cannot change. The core content

01:39:07.880 --> 01:39:15.160
will not be different, and that is why if you read the theologians of your church, if you read

01:39:15.160 --> 01:39:21.000
the men writing for your church body today, and they do not sound like the men from a thousand

01:39:21.000 --> 01:39:28.280
years ago, there is a very real problem somewhere. Because again, when men disagree, at least one

01:39:28.280 --> 01:39:35.640
man is wrong. The same is true here, so if you find that you have a thousand years, fifteen hundred

01:39:35.640 --> 01:39:40.840
years, two thousand years of men all saying the same thing about scripture, and you go and compare

01:39:40.840 --> 01:39:45.880
that to scripture, and scripture says the same thing that they are saying, and then you look at

01:39:45.960 --> 01:39:52.200
what your church body is saying, and it is different from that tradition in the proper sense of the

01:39:52.200 --> 01:40:01.000
term. You are part of a false church, and you need to reconsider what you are doing with your

01:40:01.000 --> 01:40:07.400
Christian life, because you are endangering your soul. As Lutherans, Cory and I are both

01:40:08.760 --> 01:40:12.600
aw-millennialists, for the sake of clarity for the rest of us, I'm going to slightly mispronounce

01:40:12.600 --> 01:40:17.000
and say amillennialist, just so it doesn't get misinterpreted as a hum or something.

01:40:17.960 --> 01:40:23.640
I'm going to read a passage on amillennialism from Wikipedia, just to give you a good overview of

01:40:23.640 --> 01:40:28.600
kind of the history. I know some people laugh at me for referring to Wikipedia. I will say again,

01:40:28.600 --> 01:40:33.880
it's very good generally for theological subjects. Somehow they don't mess with it. It's generally just

01:40:33.880 --> 01:40:41.640
a neutral factual accounting of the moving parts. Amillennialism gained ground after Christianity

01:40:41.640 --> 01:40:46.920
became a legal religion. It was systematized by Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century,

01:40:46.920 --> 01:40:52.760
and this systematization carried amillennialism over as the dominant eschatology of the medieval

01:40:52.760 --> 01:40:58.120
and reformation periods. Augustine was originally a premillennialist, but he retracted that view

01:40:58.120 --> 01:41:04.360
claiming the doctrine was carnal. Amillennialism was the dominant view of the Protestant reformers.

01:41:04.360 --> 01:41:09.800
The Lutheran church formally rejected chileism in the Augsburg Confession and condemned the

01:41:09.800 --> 01:41:16.040
Anabaptists. Historically, most Anabaptist groups were amillennial. And others, quote,

01:41:16.040 --> 01:41:22.440
who now scatter Jewish opinions that before the resurrection of the dead, the godly shall occupy

01:41:22.440 --> 01:41:27.800
the kingdom of the world, the wicked being everywhere suppressed. Likewise, the Swiss

01:41:27.800 --> 01:41:32.760
reformer, Heirich Bullinger, wrote up the second Helvetic Confession, which asserts,

01:41:32.760 --> 01:41:38.920
we also reject the Jewish dream of a millennium or golden age on earth before the last judgment.

01:41:39.480 --> 01:41:44.680
John Calvin wrote in the Institutes, the chileism is a, quote, fiction that is, quote,

01:41:44.680 --> 01:41:51.080
too childish, either to need or to be worth a refutation. He interpreted the thousand-year

01:41:51.080 --> 01:41:56.280
period of Revelation 20 symbolically, applying it to the various disturbances that awaited

01:41:56.280 --> 01:42:01.800
the church while still toiling on earth. Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches have long held

01:42:01.800 --> 01:42:06.920
a millennial positions, as well as the Roman Catholic Church. So going to Corey's point of

01:42:06.920 --> 01:42:15.720
man to go, you won't find a lot in church history disputing these specific subjects,

01:42:16.440 --> 01:42:24.680
because almost all of church history until the 17th century was a millennial. And I want to bring

01:42:24.760 --> 01:42:32.120
this up here to draw a distinction between when we go after dispensationalism and the

01:42:32.120 --> 01:42:38.920
pre-tribulation rapture stuff. I want to distinguish it from, I know we have a lot of post-millennialist

01:42:40.120 --> 01:42:47.800
listeners. I don't have a problem with the approach that they generally take. I think that the post-mill

01:42:47.800 --> 01:42:54.520
guys are not pursuing something that I have any problem with. It's the same thing that we say

01:42:54.600 --> 01:43:01.880
on Stone Choir all the time, hey, let's believe God, let's go to the church, let's read our Bibles.

01:43:01.880 --> 01:43:07.720
It's basically the eternal gospel of Revelation 14. Fear God and give him glory because the hour of

01:43:07.720 --> 01:43:12.120
his judgment has come and worship him who made heaven and earth the sea and the springs of water.

01:43:12.920 --> 01:43:19.160
So I think that the way the guys who call themselves post-millennial today

01:43:19.400 --> 01:43:25.960
are pursuing things I don't have a problem with. When we say that we are a millennial and we believe

01:43:25.960 --> 01:43:32.360
that that's correct, and we say that dispensationalism is a heresy, I want to draw a very clear line between

01:43:33.000 --> 01:43:39.800
that heresy and what we think is an error on the part of the post-millennialists. And so I wanted

01:43:39.800 --> 01:43:46.120
to point to this quotation on just facts from Wikipedia to make clear to you guys, your doctrine

01:43:46.120 --> 01:43:52.760
is less than 400 years old. It wasn't until the 17th century that the beginnings of post-millennialism

01:43:52.760 --> 01:43:59.800
began to emerge. And so you have like a 150-year head start on the dispensationalists, but it is

01:43:59.800 --> 01:44:05.720
still a novel eschatology in the history of the church. Again, even the Reformers, like Calvin

01:44:05.720 --> 01:44:11.160
and Luther agreed on something that didn't happen a great deal, but it occurred here. There was

01:44:11.160 --> 01:44:18.200
really no one debating anything about eschatology. Now, there were certainly discussions, are these

01:44:18.200 --> 01:44:24.600
the end times? That's Christian. There's a theme throughout all the New Testament that is pointing

01:44:24.600 --> 01:44:30.440
towards the end times. Much of Jesus' preaching was talking about the end days. It's referred to

01:44:30.440 --> 01:44:35.480
in numerous epistles. Obviously, the very last book in the Bible, as we order it today, is

01:44:35.480 --> 01:44:42.200
entirely, almost entirely, about end times. So it's entirely Christian to talk about these things.

01:44:43.880 --> 01:44:48.280
I think that amillennialism is the only defensible scriptural position,

01:44:49.880 --> 01:44:56.280
but I don't think that most of the errors, at least on the post-millennial side, are significant,

01:44:56.280 --> 01:45:00.120
with one key exception. The reason I wanted to bring it up here, in addition to saying,

01:45:00.200 --> 01:45:02.520
I don't think you're going to hell because you disagree with us on this.

01:45:04.200 --> 01:45:10.200
If you are post-millennial, if you believe that the thousand years is now, whether it's a literal

01:45:10.200 --> 01:45:13.880
thousand years or nine, a lot of guys don't believe it's literal. Thank you for that, at least.

01:45:14.840 --> 01:45:22.200
If you believe that Christ's church is ascendant and that we are capturing the kingdom on earth for

01:45:22.200 --> 01:45:29.560
God today, and you believe that's the ark that we're on, if you turn out to be wrong and I turn

01:45:29.640 --> 01:45:34.920
out to be right, and the world is going to blow up in the next 10 years, not as a planet exploding

01:45:34.920 --> 01:45:41.720
in space, but like everything that we know going away, suffering, apostasy, churches being destroyed,

01:45:41.720 --> 01:45:46.920
Christians being persecuted, if these things, which have happened in many places historically,

01:45:46.920 --> 01:45:54.280
if they happen to us and that blows up your post-millennial views, are you going to despair?

01:45:55.240 --> 01:45:58.600
Because as amillennialists, we're going to be just fine with that.

01:45:58.600 --> 01:46:04.040
No, it's terrible. It's going to be suffering and misery and chastisement,

01:46:04.040 --> 01:46:09.640
and a lot of people are going to die if I'm right. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see.

01:46:11.240 --> 01:46:16.600
As we've said in past episodes, a lot of these debates around doctrine are not simply about

01:46:16.600 --> 01:46:21.560
winning the argument. That's the key thing here. I'm not trying to win an argument with you and

01:46:21.560 --> 01:46:28.520
say, don't be post-mill, be amill. I'm trying to warn you that, by the way, the thing that both

01:46:28.520 --> 01:46:35.960
the Lutheran confessions and the other reformers called Jewish lies that you hold, the post-millennialist

01:46:35.960 --> 01:46:42.040
view, the idea that the millennium is a period of prosperity, that was a Jewish myth. It was

01:46:42.040 --> 01:46:47.160
something that was being spread in the 15th and 16th century, and that's important because

01:46:47.880 --> 01:46:53.160
there were a lot of Jews in parts of Europe then, ethnically. They were not

01:46:55.000 --> 01:47:02.520
people who held to the faith of the first century Jews. Talmudic Judaism completely,

01:47:02.520 --> 01:47:10.520
completely replaced whatever remnant of Judaism may have existed in Jesus' day.

01:47:10.520 --> 01:47:17.160
It's dead and gone for nearly 2,000 years. The Jews of the days of the reformers who were

01:47:17.160 --> 01:47:21.160
talking about what you call the millennium, what everyone calls the millennium,

01:47:22.120 --> 01:47:29.000
believing that it's a period of prosperity, that was a Jewish lie. It was a Talmudic lie.

01:47:29.800 --> 01:47:33.720
The reason that's crucial is, if you remember in the couple episodes, we've talked about

01:47:33.720 --> 01:47:41.000
tikan olam. What is the belief of tikan olam is the perfection of this world. The Jews believe

01:47:41.000 --> 01:47:47.800
today that it is their duty to be the agents of God on this earth perfecting things. That's why

01:47:47.800 --> 01:47:54.040
they're willing to do genetic engineering and organ harvesting and the most horrific abuses of

01:47:54.040 --> 01:48:00.600
man and creation. They will do it if they can rationalize it as perfecting the world.

01:48:01.400 --> 01:48:07.880
That's part of post-millennialism. Now, to be explicit, I'm not accusing you guys of being

01:48:07.880 --> 01:48:13.080
secret tikan olam agents. I don't believe that. I'm not saying that. I am, however, saying that

01:48:13.080 --> 01:48:18.520
when you look at the genealogy of that specific idea, it came from the Talmud. It came from

01:48:18.520 --> 01:48:24.120
these people. Today, you're not in serious error. It's a small mistake, but frankly,

01:48:24.920 --> 01:48:29.640
a lot of you agree with us about this stuff. That's fine. It's not that it's in egregious

01:48:29.640 --> 01:48:36.360
doctrinal error. In a specific case, I just want to warn you that if things get worse in such a

01:48:36.360 --> 01:48:42.840
fashion that many church denominations are in the process of collapsing today, the people at the top,

01:48:42.840 --> 01:48:48.440
the men at the top, are by and large evil, and they're actively seeking evil ends against those

01:48:48.440 --> 01:48:54.200
in the pews, if that continues, you're going to be run out of your churches. You can form more

01:48:54.200 --> 01:48:59.720
churches. That's going to be happening, as that's always happened. But if those bodies get smaller

01:48:59.720 --> 01:49:05.400
and smaller, as it seems like they probably will, if we're no longer as ascendant as Christendom

01:49:05.400 --> 01:49:11.480
was for a thousand years, I don't want you to lose hope. I don't want you to think, well, I got that

01:49:11.480 --> 01:49:17.480
wrong. Maybe the Bible's not right. That's the specific reason I want to point to amylinialism

01:49:17.480 --> 01:49:24.120
being the historic view of the church is that as Lutherans, we didn't change anything. When

01:49:24.200 --> 01:49:28.680
there's the ebb and flow of these things, we're not worried about it because we don't see

01:49:30.120 --> 01:49:36.440
the ebb and flow being a fulfillment of prophecy. Now, we've said in the past that revelation

01:49:36.440 --> 01:49:43.240
and Daniel and some of the things that Jesus says, it's prophecy about the future.

01:49:43.880 --> 01:49:51.400
As a matter of disclosure, I reject preterism. I believe specifically that revelation was written

01:49:51.480 --> 01:49:57.720
probably about A96 AD. I think it was written well after the fall of the temple. This has long

01:49:57.720 --> 01:50:03.160
been a matter of dispute within the church. I think that I have a defensible position. I also

01:50:03.160 --> 01:50:08.360
freely admit I could be wrong. I think it is possible that revelation was written in 68 AD.

01:50:09.080 --> 01:50:16.440
I think it is possible that those prophecies were partially fulfilled and we'll get into what that

01:50:16.440 --> 01:50:20.760
means because fulfillment, I don't think it could be partial. Being partially fulfilled is

01:50:20.840 --> 01:50:26.440
like being partially pregnant. Fulfillment means it's completed. I was talking to Cory before

01:50:26.440 --> 01:50:34.520
we started recording. I don't know if there's another word for it. If I'm wrong and the revelation

01:50:34.520 --> 01:50:41.240
prophecies were exclusively about the future, then I don't think it really changes anything

01:50:41.240 --> 01:50:45.560
because the prophecies are still typological. It's very clear that some of the prophecies,

01:50:45.560 --> 01:50:52.520
certainly there are prophecies from Jesus, either 30 or 60 years prior, that were at least partially

01:50:52.520 --> 01:50:58.520
fulfilled by the destruction of the temple. He was very clearly at that time warning the Jews of

01:50:58.520 --> 01:51:06.920
that day. Here's the trick with typology, including typology with prophecy. The fact that it occurred

01:51:06.920 --> 01:51:12.360
once does not preclude the possibility that it can never occur again because if the fulfillment of

01:51:12.440 --> 01:51:18.520
the prophecy is typological, then the antitype when it comes in the future, the full fulfillment of

01:51:18.520 --> 01:51:24.600
the thing, will be greater than the smaller one that was pointing to it. I think that it's very,

01:51:25.400 --> 01:51:31.720
to me at least, it's a very plain reading of all the prophecies and all the history that line up

01:51:32.520 --> 01:51:36.760
with the destruction of the temple and the scattering of the Jews from Roman territory.

01:51:37.720 --> 01:51:45.880
I believe that that is completely typological of the end days. I think that when the world ends,

01:51:45.880 --> 01:51:51.480
it's going to be a much bigger version of that. The reason I mention this is I think it's important

01:51:51.480 --> 01:51:56.760
when we're looking at these prophecies, which if they're future looking exclusively, if they have

01:51:56.760 --> 01:52:01.480
not yet been fulfilled, then we're not going to know until either we see it with our own eyes

01:52:01.480 --> 01:52:07.160
or a prophet who is not yet born explains it to us. Absent a prophet explaining a future prophecy,

01:52:07.160 --> 01:52:11.800
we cannot fully understand it. It's only when we see it and we have faith that we can remember

01:52:11.800 --> 01:52:19.240
the prophecy and say, yep, there it is. God promised it, now I see it. It's always good for

01:52:19.240 --> 01:52:24.440
Christians as was done in the days of the Reformation and done even from the very first days of the

01:52:24.440 --> 01:52:30.440
church. They looked around and they said, are these end times? That's something that God frankly

01:52:30.440 --> 01:52:35.320
wants from us. One of the prophecies of Jesus of end times would be there will be wars and rumors

01:52:35.320 --> 01:52:41.000
of war. Maybe some offtest has already done it, but I would imagine that that has been true

01:52:41.000 --> 01:52:47.320
certainly every decade in the history of humanity, at least since Jesus days, that there were either

01:52:47.320 --> 01:52:53.720
wars or rumors of wars going on. Does that mean that it's not a prophecy of end times because

01:52:53.720 --> 01:52:59.080
it's always true? No. That means we should always be looking around and taking these things seriously,

01:52:59.080 --> 01:53:04.840
not to the extent that is corresponding at the beginning about reading the newspaper and trying

01:53:04.840 --> 01:53:13.240
to correlate scorpions and flying creatures in Revelation to particular military programs.

01:53:14.440 --> 01:53:19.400
Please don't do that. That's not the point. When it's clearly fulfilled, you're not going to need

01:53:20.440 --> 01:53:26.520
to decoder. We may never see those things with our own eyes, but we should expect that we may,

01:53:27.240 --> 01:53:32.040
because that's why God gave it to us, to warn us, to warn every Christian,

01:53:32.040 --> 01:53:36.040
and to warn unbelievers too. Prophecies can be delivered to unbelievers and sometimes they come

01:53:36.040 --> 01:53:42.120
to believe. When Jonah went to Nineveh, if you read Jonah, it's a short book, just go read it,

01:53:42.120 --> 01:53:47.000
there's no gospel. God sends Jonah to Nineveh and he says, God's going to kill you all.

01:53:47.800 --> 01:53:51.720
That was it, that he went around, he walked around the very large city and said,

01:53:51.720 --> 01:53:56.920
God's killing you all in 40 days. They all repented and they prayed to God for mercy

01:53:56.920 --> 01:54:01.400
and God heard their pleas and saw that they had relented and God relented.

01:54:03.320 --> 01:54:07.800
Those were unbelievers who were given a prophecy and it became the source of their repentance.

01:54:08.760 --> 01:54:15.800
I think that as we talk about Jews in the world and the evils that come from them,

01:54:15.800 --> 01:54:20.360
if we actually hated those people, the very last thing that we would want would be for them to

01:54:20.440 --> 01:54:27.880
become Christian or for them to hear God's word or crucially for them to be told that what they're

01:54:27.880 --> 01:54:33.400
doing is evil because just as when Jonah went to Nineveh and said, God's going to kill you all

01:54:33.400 --> 01:54:39.720
because you're wicked, they repented. They only were capable of repenting because God gave them

01:54:40.280 --> 01:54:47.800
the gift to be able to do that. For us today to say that anyone is doing something evil

01:54:47.800 --> 01:54:55.960
is not itself evil. To call evil evil is scriptural. It's obedience to God. Other good ways and bad

01:54:55.960 --> 01:55:01.320
ways to approach it, but fundamentally to call out an evil man and say, this is wickedness

01:55:01.880 --> 01:55:07.160
is the greatest act of love you can have for him because what's going to happen if he repents?

01:55:07.160 --> 01:55:12.280
He's going to turn to God and he's going to be forgiven. His evil will cease. He will receive

01:55:12.280 --> 01:55:19.240
eternal life as a gift for God's sacrifice for the evil that he is relented from. When you do not

01:55:19.240 --> 01:55:25.400
call a man who is in fact evil evil, you're letting him continue in his wicked ways. So

01:55:27.800 --> 01:55:32.280
when we see these things in the world, if we're too afraid to speak to them,

01:55:32.280 --> 01:55:36.280
we're making things worse for our neighbor and for the very man who's acting evilly.

01:55:36.920 --> 01:55:40.440
So there are times where I don't want to talk to some of these people. I don't want to talk about

01:55:40.440 --> 01:55:46.360
some of these things. I'm not saying I always do a great job. I certainly fail many times,

01:55:46.360 --> 01:55:51.320
but there are times when I absolutely will speak against something knowing it's going to be unpleasant

01:55:51.320 --> 01:55:56.680
for me to do it because I feel as a matter of conscience, I have to. I have to warn someone

01:55:56.680 --> 01:56:03.640
that they're on a precipice and that they're about to fall off. The End Times prophecies

01:56:03.640 --> 01:56:09.320
help to reinforce the urgency of such things to remind us that we don't have forever to repent.

01:56:09.960 --> 01:56:14.920
We don't have forever to bring our families to God. It's probably the reason for the baptism

01:56:14.920 --> 01:56:20.520
episode. Don't wait until your kid is 12 to give them the gift of the Holy Spirit as God's gift.

01:56:20.520 --> 01:56:26.760
It's not yours to stand in their way. So all of these things, when we have a sense of urgency,

01:56:27.560 --> 01:56:33.320
it doesn't need to be in terms of, I'm going to go fix the world. It's simply in terms of,

01:56:33.320 --> 01:56:36.920
let's obey God and do whatever he says, and then he'll take care of the rest.

01:56:37.480 --> 01:56:42.360
And if the world were to repent today, as it should, and I certainly will not,

01:56:43.080 --> 01:56:48.520
I think that God would relent. I think that when we were blessed as Christendom,

01:56:48.520 --> 01:56:53.400
they were the times when we were largely in obedience to God. We certainly confessed him

01:56:53.400 --> 01:56:58.280
collectively, even though there were many unbelievers among us historically in Christendom.

01:56:58.840 --> 01:57:04.600
Today, Christians are the absolute minority in single digits in most places, including in the

01:57:04.600 --> 01:57:11.080
West. When you look at actual Christian belief, it's easily single digits, and that's in free fall.

01:57:11.720 --> 01:57:19.480
So I don't think we can fix anything by being better, and I don't think that we should worry

01:57:19.480 --> 01:57:24.360
about it. I think one of the key distinctions, as we talk about what do we do when we're living in

01:57:24.360 --> 01:57:28.920
the world and trying to obey God, there are two separate questions. What should I do,

01:57:28.920 --> 01:57:33.400
and what is the result going to be? We should always obey God simply because he's God.

01:57:33.400 --> 01:57:40.040
If you confess that God is God, you do whatever he says, and that's it. And so the permission slip

01:57:40.040 --> 01:57:46.280
that that gives us is that the outcome is not for us to achieve. If I do the right thing, knowing

01:57:46.280 --> 01:57:50.920
that if everyone were also doing the same right thing, there would be a good outcome that God

01:57:50.920 --> 01:57:56.600
would bless it. I don't have to worry about success. If I do the right thing and it fails,

01:57:57.560 --> 01:58:06.280
that's not on me. And if it succeeds, that's from God. So I think that's one of the weaknesses of

01:58:06.280 --> 01:58:12.680
post-millennialism, is that if all the impetus is on the teak and alarm, let us make the world better

01:58:12.680 --> 01:58:20.440
now. To the exclusion of God's providence, you're setting yourself up for being put in a situation

01:58:20.520 --> 01:58:26.520
where if things don't pan out, you might be left worse off in your faith than if you had

01:58:26.520 --> 01:58:30.920
simply done the right thing and not worried about the outcome. It's very difficult. We talked about

01:58:30.920 --> 01:58:37.080
in the Travails of Young Men episode, outcome independence is really hard. To do the thing

01:58:37.080 --> 01:58:42.680
that you know that you should do, knowing that it may well fail, it takes some fortitude. And it's

01:58:42.680 --> 01:58:48.520
something that as men and as Christians, we need to develop because it's preciously short in the

01:58:48.520 --> 01:58:55.960
world. And its absence is a tremendous danger. So yes, we should look to the end and we should

01:58:55.960 --> 01:59:00.520
look to God's promises and trust that He'll take care of us as He promised. And so whether things

01:59:00.520 --> 01:59:07.560
get better or they get worse, we at least know that God is going to continue to be God. And

01:59:08.360 --> 01:59:13.160
that's completely missing from what the dispensationalist view is. They basically push the

01:59:13.160 --> 01:59:16.920
whole church out of the way and say, you know, it's all about Israel. Let's do whatever they need,

01:59:16.920 --> 01:59:22.040
whatever they want. Well, they want to do evil. They're going to continue to do evil. That's making

01:59:22.040 --> 01:59:30.440
the world worse. As Christians, we must fight that. We must resist that. And we must know that we may

01:59:30.440 --> 01:59:37.160
fail. We may do everything right and it may fail. All of our obedience may be brought to nothing.

01:59:37.720 --> 01:59:42.680
If it's God's will, then that's what's going to happen. And we can't despair if and when that day

01:59:42.680 --> 01:59:48.280
comes. And frankly, that's one of my chief concerns. I don't want anyone to despair because

01:59:48.280 --> 01:59:51.640
whatever beliefs they have, carrying them into the hardest times of their lives,

01:59:52.760 --> 01:59:58.040
I don't want errors in their beliefs to make it easier for them to lose faith. Because God has

01:59:58.040 --> 02:00:04.120
given us these gifts for our comfort as well as for our salvation. And anything that gets in a way

02:00:04.120 --> 02:00:09.960
of comfort, when it's true comfort, according to God's will, is a sign that maybe there's something

02:00:09.960 --> 02:00:15.320
wrong. And sometimes comfort is just, you're going to die, pray that you'll die peacefully,

02:00:15.320 --> 02:00:19.560
that maybe that's the only comfort you can have. It's not prosperity gospel. It's just

02:00:20.840 --> 02:00:27.240
do what God says and trust the rest in his hands. And if the world ends in 10 years,

02:00:28.040 --> 02:00:32.760
be ready for it. And if the world lasts another 1000 years, be ready for that too.

02:00:32.760 --> 02:00:38.360
We should do the things that we're told by God to do, regardless of the outcome. Not planning for

02:00:38.360 --> 02:00:43.160
the end or even necessarily hoping for the end, but in obedience to whatever God demands today.

02:00:43.160 --> 02:00:50.760
Because we don't live in the future. We live in the now knowing that when we are faithful to God,

02:00:50.760 --> 02:00:56.600
he will deliver his promises in the future, whether it's the blessing of a peaceful life

02:00:56.600 --> 02:01:01.480
and a good church and a strong nation, or whether it's the blessing of Kingdom come,

02:01:02.440 --> 02:01:06.360
he's going to deliver. For my part, I've never really

02:01:07.880 --> 02:01:13.240
thought that worrying about how close the end times are is particularly worthwhile.

02:01:14.520 --> 02:01:20.280
And the reason for that is not because thinking about scripture or attempting to understand

02:01:20.280 --> 02:01:25.400
scripture is unimportant or irrelevant to one's life. Although spending

02:01:26.040 --> 02:01:31.960
an inordinate amount of your time in scripture and revelation is probably not a good sign and

02:01:31.960 --> 02:01:37.080
will not be good for your faith, you should be spending your time elsewhere. In large part,

02:01:37.080 --> 02:01:43.800
read more of Genesis and Romans and the Psalms and Proverbs. Read these things. I'm not saying

02:01:43.800 --> 02:01:49.160
avoid revelation. But if you're immature in the faith, yes, do avoid revelation. There are other

02:01:49.160 --> 02:01:55.720
things you need to read first. But the reason that I've never found it a particularly worthwhile

02:01:55.720 --> 02:02:02.440
or sensible thing to do to worry about the proximity of the end times to our current day

02:02:03.400 --> 02:02:09.480
is that the end times are always right around the corner for any given man. Because each and

02:02:09.480 --> 02:02:16.520
every one of us is a handful of missed heartbeats or a missed step as you're going down the stairs

02:02:17.400 --> 02:02:21.560
or a car accident, whatever it happens to be, we are all seconds away from death.

02:02:22.760 --> 02:02:27.560
Basically at every moment of the day. Now, we don't think about that as we go through our day

02:02:27.560 --> 02:02:32.920
and I'm not saying to dwell on that. That will drive you insane. Don't do it. But a meteor could

02:02:32.920 --> 02:02:37.640
strike me right now as we're recording. Lightning could strike me. Sideways lightning is a thing.

02:02:37.640 --> 02:02:40.840
There are all these problems. I don't worry about them. I'm not concerned about them.

02:02:40.840 --> 02:02:45.640
The hour of my death is known to God and I don't concern myself with it.

02:02:46.360 --> 02:02:50.680
The same thing is true of the end times. No man knows the hour. No man knows the day.

02:02:51.320 --> 02:02:58.120
Save God alone. And so I don't have to worry about it. It will come when it comes. For me,

02:02:58.120 --> 02:03:03.080
it could come tomorrow because I am mortal. I will one day die. God knows when that will happen.

02:03:04.040 --> 02:03:10.600
And so as a Christian, it is incumbent on me to live my life as if two things were true,

02:03:10.600 --> 02:03:17.400
because both are in fact true. First, as if I would die in the next moment or the next hour

02:03:17.400 --> 02:03:24.600
or tomorrow. And so I should live my life being prepared and in preparation for that. That doesn't

02:03:24.600 --> 02:03:30.440
mean becoming a monk or living in a cave or any of these silly things that people do because you

02:03:30.440 --> 02:03:37.320
serve God in the vocation He has given you, in the life He has given you, by serving those around

02:03:37.400 --> 02:03:44.840
you whom He has put into your life. You serve God by serving others. Because as Luther said,

02:03:44.840 --> 02:03:51.080
God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does. And the second way,

02:03:51.960 --> 02:03:56.600
in addition to not worrying about these things and serving our neighbor,

02:03:58.280 --> 02:04:04.200
we have to recognize that we will live forever because human beings are not conditionally immortal.

02:04:04.200 --> 02:04:14.520
From the second God decided to make you, you were immortal. You were going to live forever.

02:04:14.520 --> 02:04:20.920
The only question is where you will spend that eternity. You will spend that eternity either

02:04:20.920 --> 02:04:28.360
in paradise or in hell. And so both are simultaneously true. You are mortal and you will die soon.

02:04:29.320 --> 02:04:34.280
It could be 80 years from now. It could be 10 years from now. It could be 10 minutes from now.

02:04:34.280 --> 02:04:38.920
It doesn't matter. But you are also immortal and you will live forever. And so

02:04:39.640 --> 02:04:45.400
bearing both of those in mind with that sort of tension is how Christians are supposed to live

02:04:45.400 --> 02:04:51.400
their lives. You don't live it with worry because God will provide that is what He has said He will

02:04:51.400 --> 02:04:56.360
do and all things work together for the good of those who are called according to His purposes.

02:04:57.080 --> 02:04:59.560
I'll slip in my confirmation verse whenever I can.

02:05:01.720 --> 02:05:08.120
But we live without that worry, but at the same time we prepare ourselves for the inevitable.

02:05:10.600 --> 02:05:13.320
And in the case of the Christian, the inevitable is good news.

02:05:14.920 --> 02:05:21.160
Because for the Christian death is merely a doorway to the next life, to a perfect life,

02:05:21.160 --> 02:05:27.080
free of all of the cares and the sin and all the problems of this life. That doesn't mean

02:05:27.080 --> 02:05:32.120
that we want to go through that doorway immediately. Paul contemplates this in his writings.

02:05:33.000 --> 02:05:39.960
We have duties here. We have things we are called to do. We have work while at his day. And so we do

02:05:39.960 --> 02:05:48.520
those things. Of course, I am a millennial. So that's that does factor into this. And what Woe

02:05:48.600 --> 02:05:55.240
read that quote was essentially all of Article 17 insofar as it relates to eschatology

02:05:56.280 --> 02:06:03.400
from the Augsburg Confession. It was so little of an issue at the time. It was so not a live issue

02:06:03.400 --> 02:06:09.000
that it was addressed in a single paragraph and not even a long one at that. And bear in mind

02:06:09.000 --> 02:06:13.960
that these things were written in German. Some of the paragraphs are very long. This one very short.

02:06:14.760 --> 02:06:20.680
Because the historical position of the church is a millennialism.

02:06:22.280 --> 02:06:27.720
That's not to say that you aren't Christian if you interpret these things differently. It is simply

02:06:27.720 --> 02:06:33.080
to say that you are in fact standing outside the historical interpretation of the church.

02:06:33.640 --> 02:06:37.720
And as Woe mentioned, there are some concerns that come along with that.

02:06:38.520 --> 02:06:43.000
That is in part between you and God and between you and your teachers.

02:06:44.600 --> 02:06:48.840
Read the scriptures. See what it is that God says about these things.

02:06:50.520 --> 02:06:58.040
Come to a firm conclusion in your own conscience. That is the most vitally important matter. We would

02:06:58.040 --> 02:07:02.040
of course hope that you come to the same conclusion that we have reached, but you may not.

02:07:02.920 --> 02:07:09.240
Now, I said that there were two additional things that I wanted to mention about dispensationalist

02:07:09.240 --> 02:07:16.040
teaching. And really, there are three, but two that I will go into in a little bit of depth.

02:07:16.040 --> 02:07:23.080
Just to leave you with something from this episode so that you can try to refute at least,

02:07:23.080 --> 02:07:28.760
because quite frankly, many of these discussions will be unproductive. I don't want to bury the

02:07:29.720 --> 02:07:35.640
lead or hide that from you. If you try to discuss these issues with someone who has been steeped

02:07:35.640 --> 02:07:41.400
in dispensationalism, particularly for decades, you will probably not get anywhere.

02:07:43.800 --> 02:07:49.160
You have to keep that in mind, because otherwise you are going to despair of dealing with these

02:07:49.160 --> 02:07:55.000
people. Do not despair of it. In some cases, you will not be able to address the issue

02:07:55.080 --> 02:07:59.880
if it happens to be your father, your mother, your parents, your grandparents.

02:08:01.480 --> 02:08:05.480
The best you can do, honor them according to the Fourth Commandment,

02:08:06.360 --> 02:08:11.480
and probably try to avoid these issues to some degree. If they come up,

02:08:13.560 --> 02:08:18.600
then yes, you are arguably duty bound to speak the truth, because it is defending God and His word.

02:08:19.320 --> 02:08:23.960
But you do that with wisdom and with care and with the Fourth Commandment in mind.

02:08:25.000 --> 02:08:30.200
But anyway, the two main issues that I wanted to address were the so-called rapture,

02:08:31.880 --> 02:08:36.840
the promises to Abraham, and then I mentioned a third thing, but this one I can mention very

02:08:36.840 --> 02:08:45.880
quickly, but it is a useful arrow to have in your quiver. Woe read Romans 9. In Romans 9,

02:08:46.600 --> 02:08:53.160
there is a particularly important verse for those who are attempting to refute the heresy

02:08:53.160 --> 02:08:58.360
of dispensationalism. Some dispensationalists will try to use this as a proof of what they believe.

02:08:59.560 --> 02:09:04.600
They shouldn't, because that's insane. But many times you'll meet a dispensationalist

02:09:04.600 --> 02:09:12.440
who will attempt to argue that Israel can mean only ethnic Israel, descended from

02:09:12.440 --> 02:09:19.400
the man God renamed to Israel, Jacob. But we know that isn't the case,

02:09:19.480 --> 02:09:27.880
because in Romans 9.6, and I'll read through verse 7, because 6 ends halfway through the

02:09:27.880 --> 02:09:34.840
verse really. But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended

02:09:34.840 --> 02:09:42.280
from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham, because they are His offspring,

02:09:42.520 --> 02:09:46.120
but through Isaac shall your offspring be named.

02:09:47.880 --> 02:09:55.560
Two points here. The second point is that Abraham's true offspring are named through Isaac. They are

02:09:55.560 --> 02:10:01.880
children of the promise, which is what the next verse says, of course. But the first point,

02:10:02.920 --> 02:10:08.920
the word Israel is used twice in two distinct senses. They cannot be equivalent or the

02:10:08.920 --> 02:10:15.000
verse is incoherent, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.

02:10:16.680 --> 02:10:21.720
Well there you have both Israel's. There are more, of course, there are about seven senses

02:10:21.720 --> 02:10:29.000
of Israel used in Scripture, but these are the two most salient. You have ethnic Old Testament Israel,

02:10:29.560 --> 02:10:35.240
that would be those descended from Israel, Israel here being Jacob. They are the lineal

02:10:35.880 --> 02:10:43.240
blood descendants of that man, and it says not all of them belong to Israel. That is the Israel of

02:10:43.240 --> 02:10:50.680
God, that is the Ecclesia, that is the church, that is the elect, that is what is meant by the true

02:10:50.680 --> 02:10:59.720
Israel. And so here we have two senses of Israel in one verse. You cannot possibly claim that all

02:10:59.720 --> 02:11:06.520
mentions of Israel refer only to ethnic Israel, because right here we have an absolute categorical

02:11:06.520 --> 02:11:15.000
refutation of that contention. And then we'll close out with these two issues, the rapture and

02:11:15.000 --> 02:11:22.440
the promises to Abraham. We're already running a little long, so I may put the promises to Abraham

02:11:22.440 --> 02:11:26.120
as a separate audio file and link to that. We'll see how this goes.

02:11:26.760 --> 02:11:33.480
For the rapture there are a few verses, a few sections of Scripture, it's never one verse really,

02:11:33.480 --> 02:11:39.160
it's usually multiple verses and you don't want to cherry pick too much. You want the context

02:11:39.160 --> 02:11:45.080
along with the verse, but we'll start with verse Thessalonians 4 starting from verse 13.

02:11:46.360 --> 02:11:51.720
But we do not want you to be uninformed brothers about those who are asleep, that you may not

02:11:51.720 --> 02:11:57.320
grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again,

02:11:57.880 --> 02:12:04.280
even so through Jesus God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to

02:12:04.280 --> 02:12:10.440
you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord,

02:12:10.440 --> 02:12:15.240
will not precede those who have fallen asleep, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven

02:12:15.240 --> 02:12:20.280
with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of

02:12:20.280 --> 02:12:26.840
God, and the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught

02:12:26.840 --> 02:12:32.360
up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always

02:12:32.360 --> 02:12:36.440
be with the Lord, therefore encourage one another with these words.

02:12:38.920 --> 02:12:44.680
I mentioned this one first, because this is the verse where in the Latin of the Vulgate

02:12:44.680 --> 02:12:50.920
we get the term rapture, because the word therefore caught up in the Vulgate is raptus,

02:12:51.560 --> 02:12:58.440
which simply means caught up, that's why it's translated as caught up. It has a broader definition,

02:12:58.440 --> 02:13:02.040
it can mean a number of different things, it can even encompass kidnapping for instance,

02:13:02.040 --> 02:13:10.920
but here it means caught up together. The focus here in this section, as should be obvious when

02:13:10.920 --> 02:13:15.480
read in context, which is why I started at verse 13, instead of where dispensationless

02:13:15.480 --> 02:13:22.360
will typically start, the focus is on addressing the ancient and quite frankly silly worry about

02:13:22.360 --> 02:13:27.960
those who died before Christ returned. There were some in the ancient church who were worried

02:13:27.960 --> 02:13:31.960
that Christ hadn't come back yet, and some of those who believed had died.

02:13:32.200 --> 02:13:40.600
It's a fairly ridiculous position for members of a religion where the core of the religion

02:13:42.600 --> 02:13:49.560
is God incarnate dying and coming back to life, that some die before God returns does not mean

02:13:50.280 --> 02:13:56.440
they won't be resurrected or they won't be part of the new kingdom. That's the main thrust of this.

02:13:57.080 --> 02:14:02.600
This has nothing to do with a supposed rapture or some being left behind during the tribulation.

02:14:03.640 --> 02:14:07.720
This is simply a teaching of Christian doctrine, this is what we see in the creeds,

02:14:08.440 --> 02:14:15.160
the resurrection of the dead. All will come to life in Christ, some of us who are alive if we

02:14:15.160 --> 02:14:20.920
happen to be, I'm not saying that we speaking here will necessarily be so, but those who are alive

02:14:20.920 --> 02:14:27.240
will be changed in the blink of an eye and the dead will come to life. And the reason that it says

02:14:28.360 --> 02:14:36.440
first is that it is simply saying that this will happen before we are all caught up together.

02:14:37.400 --> 02:14:43.480
It's not saying the dead rise first or there's this group that first in time have something

02:14:43.480 --> 02:14:49.720
happen to them. This is a logical ordering that is one of the senses of the term first or in the

02:14:49.720 --> 02:14:55.880
Greek protoss. So neither of the teachings that are usually drawn out of this by dispensationalists

02:14:55.880 --> 02:15:01.560
is present here. You don't have a rapture, you don't have anyone left behind for the tribulation.

02:15:02.680 --> 02:15:08.520
This is just addressing an ancient worry that's not really a live issue in the church anymore.

02:15:08.520 --> 02:15:13.320
After two thousand years we've kind of figured out that some Christians will die before Christ

02:15:13.320 --> 02:15:22.280
returns. This is just no longer a concern for us. Then there are three additional sections of

02:15:22.280 --> 02:15:27.800
Scripture that I want to address on this point. Two of them essentially mirror each other and the

02:15:27.800 --> 02:15:32.920
last is a section of Revelation because of course we have to address something from Revelation

02:15:33.640 --> 02:15:38.040
in an episode on dispensationalism. The first is Luke 17.

02:15:38.040 --> 02:15:44.040
Being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, he answered them,

02:15:44.600 --> 02:15:49.240
the Kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say,

02:15:49.240 --> 02:15:54.840
look, here it is, or there, for behold, the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you.

02:15:56.040 --> 02:15:58.600
I'll pause here for a second before reading the rest of this.

02:16:00.760 --> 02:16:07.000
If there is a literal millennium, it would most certainly be visible. It would be something

02:16:07.000 --> 02:16:12.280
that can be observed. Here Christ is saying, the Kingdom of God is not coming in ways that

02:16:12.280 --> 02:16:16.120
can be observed. The second coming will be observed and I will get to that.

02:16:17.000 --> 02:16:23.720
But the Kingdom of God is the church. The Kingdom of God comes as the church age. It comes as the

02:16:23.720 --> 02:16:30.840
gospel is spread to more and more people. It comes as God gathers in his saints from every

02:16:30.840 --> 02:16:37.000
nation and tongue. It is not a literal rule upon the earth. Now he will stand upon the earth

02:16:37.720 --> 02:16:43.320
as we see in Job and we have quoted that many times, but that is the second coming and then

02:16:43.320 --> 02:16:47.160
also of course in Paradise. But to continue the reading.

02:16:48.360 --> 02:16:53.240
And he said to the disciples, the days are coming when you will desire to see one of the

02:16:53.240 --> 02:16:59.800
days of the Son of Man and you will not see it and they will say to you, look, there, or look,

02:16:59.800 --> 02:17:05.880
here. Do not go out or follow them, for as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from

02:17:05.880 --> 02:17:12.360
one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things

02:17:12.360 --> 02:17:18.280
and be rejected by this generation, just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the

02:17:18.280 --> 02:17:23.400
days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage,

02:17:23.400 --> 02:17:27.880
until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

02:17:28.680 --> 02:17:34.840
Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot, they were eating and drinking, buying and selling,

02:17:34.840 --> 02:17:40.440
planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom fire and sulfur reigned from

02:17:40.440 --> 02:17:45.560
heaven and destroyed them all. So will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

02:17:46.200 --> 02:17:51.240
On that day let the one who is on the housetop with his goods in the house not come down to

02:17:51.240 --> 02:17:55.800
take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back.

02:17:56.360 --> 02:18:02.120
Remember Lot's wife, whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life

02:18:02.120 --> 02:18:09.000
will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed, one will be taken and the other

02:18:09.000 --> 02:18:15.400
left. There will be two women grinding together, one will be taken and the other left. And they said

02:18:15.400 --> 02:18:21.000
to him, where, Lord, he said to them, where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.

02:18:22.680 --> 02:18:28.200
As I've mentioned many times before, you have to take sections of Scripture as a whole,

02:18:28.200 --> 02:18:35.720
not chop them up into little chunks. This all flows together. And perhaps that last bit is a

02:18:35.720 --> 02:18:41.880
little difficult to exegete for some, anyway, where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.

02:18:42.200 --> 02:18:49.640
This is a quip by Christ pointing out this is an obvious thing. If vultures are gathered,

02:18:50.360 --> 02:18:58.440
there's a corpse. This is used typologically, as it were, of the coming of the Son of Man,

02:18:59.640 --> 02:19:05.000
of the return of Christ, the second coming, the return to judgment. It'll be obvious,

02:19:05.880 --> 02:19:10.680
like the fire from heaven that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, like the flood that wiped out the

02:19:10.680 --> 02:19:17.880
ancient world. These things were not secret. These things were not difficult to discern.

02:19:17.880 --> 02:19:22.520
They were not hidden from the world. They were open and obvious, notorious even.

02:19:24.120 --> 02:19:30.520
That is how the second coming will be. Everyone will see it, from the east to the west.

02:19:31.480 --> 02:19:39.560
And so there is no rapture. There's no secret coming where Christ secretly steals into the world

02:19:39.560 --> 02:19:44.920
and takes out his saints, and then comes again at some later point to judge the world.

02:19:45.800 --> 02:19:51.080
That is what he very clearly denies here, for as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from

02:19:51.080 --> 02:19:58.600
one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. The rapture cannot be true, because

02:19:58.600 --> 02:20:08.600
Scripture says it is not. And so when you have those who teach that there will be a secret second

02:20:08.600 --> 02:20:15.960
coming, or a coming in between, the incarnation and the second coming, you know that's false.

02:20:16.920 --> 02:20:24.280
Scripture says it is false, right here. And so we must, according to Scripture, reject the idea of a

02:20:24.280 --> 02:20:31.400
rapture. And notably, I would like to pull out one more thing before moving on to Matthew 24.

02:20:31.640 --> 02:20:40.840
Some will attempt to use this, broken up into little pieces, to teach a rapture, because they

02:20:40.840 --> 02:20:45.400
will say, well look right here it says, there will be two women grinding together, one will be taken,

02:20:45.400 --> 02:20:50.280
and the other left. Does it say which one will be taken?

02:20:53.400 --> 02:20:57.960
The answer is no. It does not say if the believer will be taken or the unbeliever.

02:20:57.960 --> 02:21:04.920
So bear that in mind as we go through two more sections here. Matthew 24.

02:21:28.200 --> 02:21:37.880
Then two men will be in the field, one will be taken, and one left. Two women will be grinding at the

02:21:37.880 --> 02:21:44.280
mill, one will be taken, and one left. Therefore stay awake, for you do not know on what day your

02:21:44.280 --> 02:21:49.400
Lord is coming. But you know this, that if the Master of the house had known in what part of

02:21:49.400 --> 02:21:53.960
the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be

02:21:53.960 --> 02:22:00.520
broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not

02:22:00.520 --> 02:22:08.200
expect. Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom his Master has set over his household,

02:22:08.200 --> 02:22:13.080
to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his Master will

02:22:13.080 --> 02:22:18.920
find so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions.

02:22:19.480 --> 02:22:24.920
But if that wicked servant says to himself, my Master is delayed, and begins to beat his fellow

02:22:24.920 --> 02:22:31.160
servants and eat and drinks with drunkards, the Master of that house, the Master of that servant

02:22:31.160 --> 02:22:36.520
will come on a day when he does not expect him, and at an hour he does not know, and will cut

02:22:36.520 --> 02:22:41.880
him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of

02:22:41.880 --> 02:22:51.160
teeth. You will notice that again it is not mentioned which is taken and which is left.

02:22:51.720 --> 02:22:56.120
Scripture does not tell you if the believer is taken or if the believer is left,

02:22:56.120 --> 02:23:02.920
if the unbeliever is taken or if the unbeliever is left. Those who attempt to use these verses

02:23:02.920 --> 02:23:09.560
to justify a supposed rapture assume, without scriptural warrant, that these verses teach

02:23:09.560 --> 02:23:12.680
that the believers will be caught up, that believers will be taken.

02:23:13.800 --> 02:23:21.160
Now, believers are at some point in this caught up, because that's what we get

02:23:21.160 --> 02:23:29.400
from the earlier passage that I read. But that does not mean that here the believer is taken

02:23:29.400 --> 02:23:35.880
or the believer is left, and we know this from two of Christ's parables. I'll use these two

02:23:35.880 --> 02:23:39.640
parables before I read the final section from Revelation.

02:23:40.600 --> 02:23:47.080
The first parable is the parable of the net from Matthew 13. Again the kingdom of heaven is like

02:23:47.080 --> 02:23:52.440
a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it

02:23:52.440 --> 02:23:57.720
ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad. So it will

02:23:57.720 --> 02:24:03.080
be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous,

02:24:03.160 --> 02:24:08.120
and throw them into the fiery furnace, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

02:24:10.440 --> 02:24:14.040
So which is gathered first here, the believer or the unbeliever?

02:24:15.640 --> 02:24:22.280
Similarly, the parable of the wheat in the tares, again Matthew 13. He put another parable before

02:24:22.280 --> 02:24:27.400
them, saying, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.

02:24:27.960 --> 02:24:32.600
But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.

02:24:33.320 --> 02:24:38.520
So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also, and the servants of

02:24:38.520 --> 02:24:44.120
the master of the house came and said to him, Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?

02:24:44.120 --> 02:24:50.440
How then does it have weeds? He said to them, An enemy has done this. So the servants said to him,

02:24:51.000 --> 02:24:56.600
Then do you want us to go and gather them? But he said, No, lest in gathering the weeds,

02:24:56.600 --> 02:25:01.480
you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest,

02:25:01.480 --> 02:25:07.080
and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles

02:25:07.080 --> 02:25:15.320
to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn. And so I ask again, Which is gathered first,

02:25:15.320 --> 02:25:24.120
the believer or the unbeliever? The exegesis, the isegesis of the previous verses

02:25:24.120 --> 02:25:30.200
by those who believe in a rapture is not consonant with what Christ teaches in his parables.

02:25:31.000 --> 02:25:36.920
In his parables, he uses the wicked being taken away as his example.

02:25:37.720 --> 02:25:41.000
The wicked are taken out of the world first and thrown into the fire.

02:25:41.960 --> 02:25:47.880
Now I'm not saying that is necessarily how this will take place. Christ is using parables to explain

02:25:48.760 --> 02:25:55.960
using these what is going to happen in the end times. It is not necessarily an exact

02:25:56.040 --> 02:26:03.000
chronological statement of what will happen in the end times. However, it does tell us that we

02:26:03.000 --> 02:26:08.440
cannot interpret these other sections as those who believe in dispensationalism do,

02:26:09.160 --> 02:26:14.120
because they do not agree with Scripture. You cannot make Scripture contradict itself.

02:26:14.680 --> 02:26:21.000
If you make Scripture contradict itself, you have erred. It is not that Scripture is wrong,

02:26:21.000 --> 02:26:25.640
it is not that Scripture contradicts, it is that your interpretation of Scripture is

02:26:25.640 --> 02:26:31.960
necessarily wrong. And so in light of these parables, you cannot interpret the previous

02:26:31.960 --> 02:26:37.400
two passages from Luke and Matthew that are often used to attempt to justify a rapture,

02:26:38.040 --> 02:26:44.200
because they are not consonant if you use dispensationalist or rapture understanding.

02:26:44.600 --> 02:26:53.240
And so the final section here of Scripture, I think I will do the promises to Abraham separately

02:26:53.240 --> 02:26:57.720
just to keep this episode from running too long. I will link to that in the show notes. It's from

02:26:57.720 --> 02:27:04.520
my notes on Genesis when I was teaching a class on that book. But the last section of Scripture,

02:27:04.520 --> 02:27:11.720
from Revelation 3. And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia, right, the words of the Holy One,

02:27:11.800 --> 02:27:18.200
the true One, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.

02:27:19.320 --> 02:27:24.840
I know your works, behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.

02:27:25.480 --> 02:27:31.000
I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

02:27:31.640 --> 02:27:36.600
Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan, who say that they are Jews and are not,

02:27:36.600 --> 02:27:42.040
but lie. Behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that

02:27:42.040 --> 02:27:48.040
I have loved you. Because you have kept my word about patient endurance. I will keep you from

02:27:48.040 --> 02:27:52.680
the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth.

02:27:53.400 --> 02:27:59.560
I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. The one who

02:27:59.560 --> 02:28:05.720
conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I

02:28:05.720 --> 02:28:11.400
will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem,

02:28:11.400 --> 02:28:17.800
which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name. He who has an ear, let him hear

02:28:17.800 --> 02:28:24.840
what the Spirit says to the churches. Now this passage does not precisely tell us what Christ

02:28:24.840 --> 02:28:30.520
means when he says that he will keep them from the hour of trial. Dispensationalists will attempt

02:28:30.520 --> 02:28:37.160
to interpret this as proving a rapture. This is again not permissible, because this is importing

02:28:37.160 --> 02:28:44.360
one's priors into the text instead of taking the text as it appears. As stated earlier,

02:28:45.480 --> 02:28:52.120
the exegetical rule that Christians do, that Christians must follow, is that we use clear

02:28:52.120 --> 02:28:58.440
texts to interpret difficult texts, or ones that are from a human perspective less clear.

02:28:58.440 --> 02:29:03.640
We do not do this the other way around. We do not make clear texts gray by attempting

02:29:04.360 --> 02:29:09.880
to use hard texts to make them say what we would prefer they say instead of what they actually

02:29:09.880 --> 02:29:15.960
say. And so we know from the previous passages, from all that we've reviewed in this episode,

02:29:17.000 --> 02:29:24.440
dispensationalism cannot be true. And there is, of course, no rapture. I demonstrated that

02:29:24.440 --> 02:29:30.840
conclusively with the previous verses, showing that rapture theology necessarily makes of God a

02:29:30.840 --> 02:29:37.640
hypocrite, makes his word conflict and contradict. And so we cannot attribute error to God, the error

02:29:37.640 --> 02:29:44.760
must lie with those who misinterpret his word. And so this section from Revelation, which is

02:29:44.760 --> 02:29:50.520
sometimes used in an attempt, often used quite frankly, in an attempt to prove a supposed rapture,

02:29:51.160 --> 02:29:58.920
proves no such thing. That God will save these referenced individuals, and do remember there

02:29:58.920 --> 02:30:03.000
are multiple letters to multiple churches, it's not just this one letter to the church.

02:30:04.520 --> 02:30:09.880
That God will save these individuals from this particular trial does not say there will be

02:30:09.880 --> 02:30:16.200
a pre-tribulation rapture. It is simply not what the text says. And as Christians,

02:30:16.200 --> 02:30:22.280
we are bound by what the text says, not what we would like to think the text says,

02:30:22.280 --> 02:30:30.200
not what we believe, as our own interpretation arrived at outside of Scripture and then brought to

02:30:30.200 --> 02:30:38.280
Scripture and imported into it. You take God at his word. You don't take God at the word of

02:30:38.280 --> 02:30:44.840
fallible men who say, well, no, this must be true because X, Y, and Z show me in God's word.

02:30:46.280 --> 02:30:50.280
No, you don't have to show me everything in God's word that it's true. I know that water is wet.

02:30:51.000 --> 02:30:57.960
You don't have to prove that from Scripture. Because not all truth is contained in Scripture,

02:30:58.840 --> 02:31:05.160
but all things in Scripture are true. And so anything in Scripture, because all truth is one,

02:31:05.720 --> 02:31:12.600
must agree with everything else in Scripture. If you can show that a particular understanding,

02:31:12.600 --> 02:31:18.440
that a particular theology, that a particular doctrine or dogma necessarily makes Scripture

02:31:18.440 --> 02:31:25.320
conflict with itself, you have conclusively proven that that particular theology or doctrine,

02:31:25.320 --> 02:31:29.960
dogma, whatever it happens to be, you have proven conclusively that it is wrong.

02:31:31.720 --> 02:31:35.720
You haven't necessarily proved that any other particular interpretation is correct,

02:31:36.440 --> 02:31:42.920
but you have proved that that one is wrong. And so I would contend and I firmly believe

02:31:42.920 --> 02:31:49.000
that in this episode, we have shown, according to the history, according to,

02:31:50.120 --> 02:31:54.840
in large part, the Scripture, because the Scripture is obviously the most important thing here,

02:31:54.840 --> 02:32:01.320
but according to the history and the theology, and yes, the worldly consequences to some degree,

02:32:01.320 --> 02:32:07.720
we have shown that dispensationalism is necessarily false. It is a heresy.

02:32:08.520 --> 02:32:12.520
It is something that is impermissible for Christians to believe.

02:32:15.240 --> 02:32:22.920
And so the bottom line is very simple. Christians must reject dispensationalism. It is a modern

02:32:22.920 --> 02:32:29.640
innovation that does not have a basis in Scripture, that has a basis in the wicked secular world,

02:32:29.640 --> 02:32:34.760
and it has been used as a cudgel against Christians and against the Church, and yes,

02:32:34.760 --> 02:32:44.040
also against the West. If we are to preserve the Church, and yes, our own nations, our own peoples,

02:32:44.040 --> 02:32:52.360
the West, if we are to preserve Christendom, we must reject dispensationalism and those who

02:32:52.360 --> 02:32:59.400
teach it, because it is a wicked lie, and every wicked lie has an animating intelligence behind

02:32:59.400 --> 02:33:04.600
it. And so dispensationalism is not of God. It is not of Scripture. It is not truth.

02:33:05.320 --> 02:33:15.320
It is of Satan. It is a lie. It is pernicious. It is a heresy.

02:33:29.400 --> 02:33:45.320
It is a heresy.