Confessional Idolatry

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be revisiting a few concepts that we've discussed in the last year or so. One year ago, January twenty fourth of last year, we did an episode on apostasy. And this is going to be a continuation of that, basically a part two of okay, now that churches are becoming apostate, here's what it's gonna look like. And we're gonna refer back to a number of examples. That's a really good series to revisit from the beginning of last year. Yeah, if you haven't heard it in a while or if you're jumping around, the first five episodes that we did in 2024 really stand the test of time very well.

1:18 It's much worse now than it was when we did them. That's the way this stuff is going to keep going. So what we're going to talk about today is when churches are apostatizing, how are the men inside those churches going to behave? Because we said in that episode, we're not talking about individual apostasy, which is really kind of the good case of such a thing can exist for the notion of apostasy. When an individual steps away from God, rejects God, it's obvious. He says, I don't believe in God anymore. I'm just gonna go away. This is all crap. It's a very noticeable heel turn. And he goes in the other direction. He basically repents of his repentance. It's obvious. You can tell by someone's confession, by his words, by his life,

1:59 this man no longer believes in God. When churches apostatize, they don't do any of those things, not overtly, at least not at first. When a church apostatizes, it pretends that it continues in the faith of whatever fathers it claims. And for the purposes of our discussion today, we will just assume for the sake of argument that whatever your favorite confession is is true. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. I'm not conceding anything as Lutherans, anybody else is right, but it doesn't even matter who's right about those facts. Because the problem that we have in our respective churches is that given those confessions, assuming that they're infallible, assuming they're true, they're a correct exposition of what God says, the problem is how do apostatizing

2:45 churches employ those confessions in service of Satan. So we're going to talk about today some historical examples. We're going to revisit examples from the apostasy episode. And we're going to deal with the fact that Satan wants us to be making true confessions. He doesn't want everybody making true confessions. He loves it when someone apostatizes and is an individual and says, I hate God, I don't believe in God anymore. This is all dumb. I'm gone. I'm just gonna go live a wicked life 'cause nothing exists. Satan loves that. But he's just as happy for us to be sitting here inside the churches making true confessions because he can use that to his benefit exactly the same. One year ago this week, we released the episode called The Required

3:31 Confession, where we talked about one of Dakotas had just proposed, I think it subsequently passed a law related to anti-Semitism. And it makes it illegal the confession of what scripture says about the crucifixion. And the point that we made in that episode is that there are five things at least that you can say about who killed Christ. My sins killed Christ. And so did yours. Pontius Pilate killed Christ. The Roman Centurions killed Christ, the Pharisees killed Christ, and the Jews collectively as a group, those who were present, killed Christ. All five of those things are true, and only the last two will get you into any trouble. And the last one is illegal in a number of states now, and it will probably be illegal soon nationally, because that's the way

4:19 things are going. And so in the required confession episode, we made the case that it doesn't matter which of those other confessions are true when you are challenged and told you cannot confess what's in scripture, when you go along with it and say, well, sure, I'm not going to say that the Jews did anything, because my sins killed Christ. Obviously that's true. So let's just leave it at that. That contradicts Scripture, which means that you're apostatizing, even while you're saying the very thing that Scripture says about your sins crucifying Christ. The thing that is true becomes a lie because it is used specifically in service of telling a different lie. This is a trick that Satan has played from the Garden of

5:02 Eden and the apostasy episode we began with. I'm just gonna briefly revisit here. When you read Satan's encounter with Eve, what happens? The first thing that Satan said to Eve was, did God actually say? Which tricked her, as we pointed out, into making a true confession. She went on to elaborate on what God had said, what Adam had taught her. And for the purpose of this argument, it doesn't matter if the fact that the additional words that she used above and beyond what God is recorded to have said to Adam doesn't matter if that's an elaboration that was false, if she was making stuff up, if Adam made stuff up. We can assume for the sake of argument that that was true because it doesn't change anything.

5:44 What happened was that Satan said, Did God actually say? And then she confessed what God said, and that's when Satan had her. Satan goaded her, goaded Eve, our mother, into confessing truly what God had said. Because when he did that, Satan shifted her focus. He wanted her to focus on the fruit that was forbidden for her to eat so that he could make her envious. He wanted her to desire that which God had forbidden. And when she responded with a true confession, then he told a half-truth, you will not surely die, which was false in the long run, but it was true immediately. She didn't die on the spot. And she got the benefit. She got the upside. She knew good and evil, just as the fruit was intended for.

6:30 But it wasn't intended for her or Adam at that time. So right from the outset, with two perfect human beings, the only perfect human beings who have ever lived with the exception of Jesus Christ, who's the exception to every rule for men, they were tricked into telling Satan something that was true and that's how he had him. Satan's been replaying that same attack over and over again ever since. And the reason for this episode today is that we don't believe that we can possibly be tricked when we're saying things that are true. And that's the whole point of this. It is entirely possible for us to sin and to in fact apostatize as individuals and collectively as churches by telling the truth when

7:13 it's the wrong truth at the wrong time. Because Satan continues to change up his attacks and we have to pay attention to those changes. And so the purpose of putting this in front of you and putting in your mind is that we're all vulnerable to this. Every one of us is going to tend to cling to whatever our confessions are. Whatever it is that we've inherited or adopted as a matter of our personal faith, again, we're not going to get into who's right or wrong, even if you're completely right. We're Lutherans. The book of Concord would suffice for our confession for these purposes. It's true. The arguments that it makes are true. It is also used today by Lutherans as an idol. It is idolatrous the way Lutherans treat the Book of Concord, because

7:56 what do they do? They will use it to argue against scripture or to argue against reason and to argue against creation whenever anything comes up that isn't addressed. This is the whole problem. You can take a confession that's true that's solving a particular problem at a particular time. And when you try to morph it and make it do something it was never intended to do, you know, the authors of the book of Concord had a particular problem in mind they were trying to solve. They knew what problems those were, and they addressed them as best they could at the time. It's a good confession. It's a solid confession of the Christian faith for those purposes. It is not a complete confession of the entire Christian faith.

8:37 You need scripture for that and you need a reason for that. And without all of those things, you're gonna go flying off into space. Part of the reason that this approach that Satan is taking, where he tricks people or goads people into making these true confessions that are narrow is that we have to have them. It's not that it's bad to have a confession, if it's the Book of Concord or the Westminster Confession or the Pope, God help you guys who are Roman Catholic, if that is the root of your faith, if that is where you have determined this is my North Star, as long as I have this in view, I know where I am. I can keep my bearings. We all need something like that. Now, scripture is also that, and scripture should be the ultimate source

9:23 of that. But there's nothing wrong with having creeds. There's nothing wrong with having a confession, assuming it's true, assuming it doesn't disagree with scripture, but you can make it an idol. And we're saying something here today that a lot of people say in a lot of different contexts. Oh, you you're making the family an idol now, which is a modern degenerate thing to say. It's like, well, you're obeying God. You're creating families. That's not idolatry per se. And these guys freak out at the notion that obedience to God could possibly make people think, okay, I'm obeying God, so no, I don't need God. It's a completely irrational Protestant fear, but it's one that's very pervasive. We need to be able to have something to help us keep

10:06 our bearings in these creeds and these confessions serve that vital function. Just as Eve's confession that she gave to Satan was a vital confession. He specifically attacked something that God had said. He lied about it with his question. And she correctly confessed. She said back what Adam had told her, God said. She did it right, and she fell for it. What should have happened, I think, you know, this is extra scriptural, so you can take it or leave it. I think that the correct form of that entire situation where Eve was having a conversation with the serpent, with Adam standing right next to her, just passively listening, maybe he should not have permitted the serpent to speak to her. Certainly after the serpent denied what God said, I think he probably

10:51 should have killed the serpent on the spot. I think personally that probably wouldn't have been sin. That could have gone a different way because they had free will. They had perfect free will to behave differently than they behaved. And although the eating and the envy, the covetousness of that fruit was sin, I think the failure to stop the evil that Satan had introduced into the garden with his lies, one could argue, and I I would make the argument that that was a sin even further back than the eating. In any event, Satan was able to get away with it because they went along with it. They played his game. And this is the problem that we don't understand that we all face all the time. We are always forced to contend with Satan because he is our

11:35 adversary. He is always the ultimate adversary in anything that we deal with that's difficult in life. We die, we get sick, we suffer, we're miserable, we're sad, we're lonely. Whatever bad things that happen are downstream from the fall that are downstream from Satan's attacks. And then he tags right along every day, trying to amplify the stuff to harm us, to separate us from God's love. So we're constantly enduring those attacks. And we understand when the attacks are bad. We understand when the attacks are deliberately saying the opposite of what God said. Sometimes Satan will come to some people, maybe some of you, and say, just apostise, stop believing God altogether. Forget that stuff.

12:17 That's nonsense. Go do this other thing. Forget about Jesus. You don't need any of that crap. Sometimes that's the pitch that works for some people. The problem is that's not the only pitch that Satan has. The pitch that he used for Eve and the pitch that he's used many times since and he uses to this day, especially in this day, is to goad Christians in especially Christian denominations as a whole into making partially true confessions that serve his purposes. Because just like in that situation with the Dakotas Law where it's illegal to say that the Jews killed Christ, most Christians are happy to go along with that. They don't believe that anyway. Scripture says it, and they don't believe it.

12:59 What do they believe? They believe something is true. They believe that their sins killed Christ, which is absolutely true. But there are other things that can also be said that are scriptural that if you deny them, what have you done? If you deny that the Pharisees killed Christ and that the Jews killed Christ, are you Christian? You cannot be, because what are you doing? You're calling God a liar. Scripture could not possibly be more clear about the fact that the Jews killed Christ. It's reiterated over and over again after it happens by numerous authors, and they're all inspired. You can't be a Christian if you don't believe that the New Testament's not inspired. And if you do, then you're confessing that God said this.

13:37 And so when you say, Well, I don't believe that part, you're calling God a liar. And that's where all this stuff comes down to. You can have a narrowly true confession, which Satan loves. I made the point in the episode on the true confession. Satan loves it when Christians run around saying, My sins killed Christ. Yeah, it's all my fault. Not in denial of that fact. That's absolutely true. And it is the most important thing. I'm not getting the slightest bit of slander against that true confession. It is not the only one, but it's the one that Satan wants us to focus on because if you If you stop saying that the Jews killed Christ, it opens up the door for a whole nother avenue of attack. And this is how Satan works.

14:20 This is how Satan's warfare against the church works. There are direct attacks and there are indirect attacks. And if we believe that we're better than Eve, who was perfect when she fell for this crap, if we believe that we can do better than that, we are setting ourselves up for apostasy and for damnation. That's the purpose of this episode. Churches, individuals, collectively, we're all subject to trying to keep our eyes on whatever we know to be true. Because we have to. You can't possibly fit all of scripture in your head all the time, but God warns us that we have to be watchful. And the problem that we're trying to solve here today with this episode is that confessions at some point become an excuse for not

15:05 being watchful for saying, well, this stuff is going on. I don't really I don't really understand it. It sounds like, you know, some people who aren't really all that great with their theology are making some some weird arguments I've never heard anyone make before. It's not in my confession, so I'm just not going to participate. They're all bums, they're all bad. I'm over here with my confession. I'm above it all. I'm not going to fall for it. That is what Satan wants. Because maybe the guy who has a true confession that's actually competent theology, unlike some of the people who are entering the fray when these new attacks come, sometimes they're pretty bad at it. The guys who are off on the side with their noses up

15:43 in the air would be better contenders for the faith. If only they would enter the fray and say, okay, there's a new attack. Maybe we need a new argument for it. The idolatry of confession comes in when we say, well, I don't care what's happening now because my confession doesn't say anything, so it must not be important. Satan cheers when we do that. And he's cheering a lot lately because this is the default position that we find churches in today, to say, well, this new stuff is just Satan being weird and the world being weird. It's got nothing to do with me. I'm going to cling to my confession and I know I'm going to be fine. That makes us Pharisees. The Pharisees weren't unique. They were abominable, but they embodied the natural human sinful nature to

16:28 cling to whatever is self-justifying. And true confessions ultimately become self-justifying. Even faith alone, when your confession is that faith is the only thing that can save me, it doesn't take too much back and forth before ironically someone concludes that the fact that they confess that faith saves them alone is what saves them. If I hope you're following that. It's one level of indirection. It's no longer my faith that saves me, but it's my confession that my faith is the only thing that saves me. As long as I'm confessing that right, then I'm in good shape. Because it's no longer rooted in the gift of faith that God has given to me. It's now rooted in, well, I'm clinging to this. And although we need things to cling to, they have to be

17:15 everywhere word from the mouth of God. That's how Satan fragments the church into a million pieces by driving these wedges where he successfully sets one part of the word against another. He gets us fighting each other, he gets us ignoring the word entirely. And then he has us. Because it's perfectly fine in hell for you to have a true confession as long as it's not a complete confession. And this nature is played out over and over again. And we're warning you about this today because we're already seeing it a bunch this year. We've seen it continuously. It's probably going to continue to be amplified because it's one of the last fig leaves that are left in in the church's impotent attempts to prevent Satan's attack.

18:00 Satan is coming in new angles, new avenues, and churches are saying, Well, I've got the old confession, I'm fine. The Roman Catholics say, Well, I've got the Pope, I'm fine. Sure, the Pope might not be great some decades, but overall tradition, you know, going back, yeah, they claim Peter was, even now it's news to him. Not trying to pick on you guys, but like when you root anything outside of what's directly scriptural, that's all it takes, even if it's true. The Lutheran confessions are true, but they're not complete. I've mentioned before I had an argument a few years ago on Discord with a guy where I made an argument from scripture and he refused to believe it because I couldn't point to where it

18:39 was in the book of Concord. And that was his argument. A scriptural argument from me could not possibly be true because I could not cite the Lutheran confessions. Any of the men who authored the Lutheran confessions would tear their hair out if they had any to hear that someone who thought he was a good Lutheran made that his confession. Yeah, that's why this is so dangerous. Because you're doing it in good conscience. It's an appeal to good conscience that is in fact an attack on heaven. That's why Satan loves it. That's why it's apostasy. The one thing that we think we've gotten right are historical confessions Satan is going to use as a weapon against us. When we swear in witnesses in our courts, we have them typically swear

19:23 something along the lines of do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? And all three parts of that, the fourth as well, if you include swearing before God, are important, because it is insufficient simply to tell the truth. You need to tell the whole truth and obviously not embellish it as it were with lies. In previous episodes, we've gone over the different kinds of lies and how in some ways, yes, you can in fact lie with the truth, which is why we have the inclusion of the whole truth in that oath. Because if you tell only part of a narrative, it is very possible to use just that portion, that true portion though, in order to manipulate, which is one of the ways, of course, that you

20:14 can lie. You can lie by omission, commission, or manipulation. And so obviously commission is the most obvious when that's that affirmative lie, so you aren't embellishing your story with things that are in fact not the truth. Omission is what is addressed by the whole truth. You don't get to leave out parts of the truth and pretend that you have still given a full and true accounting of events. Because you haven't. You've neglected to include things. Now that doesn't mean that just because you left out some ancillary fact, if you are a witness in a murder trial and you leave out the color of a garment that someone standing by was wearing. Some bystanders wearing a red shirt and you neglect to say

21:00 that his shirt was red. That doesn't matter. These are facts that are relevant, truths that are relevant to the matter. And this is one of those centrally important points in this discussion. As Wo said, obviously you cannot hold the totality of scripture in your head at any given time. That isn't a requirement. That's not something that you have to do as a Christian. However, when a truth is relevant, when a truth is attacked, then indeed you must defend it, and then indeed you must confess the full truth and not simply a part of it. And for those who object to confessions or think that the argument that we're making here maybe it doesn't make any sense to you. Just think about church history.

21:49 We have three ecumenical creeds. We don't have three ecumenical creeds because the men who made the Nicene and the Athenasian thought we should have longer creeds considerably longer in the case of the Athanasian. We have them because they confessed truths that were being attacked at that time. We have them because the previous creeds were not wrong, but we're not complete in the sense of being a full confession of the Christian faith. That's not to say that if you confess the Apostles' Creed and understand everything that is in the Apostles' Creed, that you can't be saved. In fact, if you believe what's in the Apostles' Creed, that is a sufficient saving faith, but you have to believe what's actually

22:36 there. The reason we have the Nicene is to explain some of the additional matters. For instance, I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. That's not in the apostles Creed. It is in the Nicene. And then of course the case of the Athanasian is to deal with Trinitarian issues that had arisen in the church. So these confessions that we have are to address issues that were live at the time. It doesn't mean the issues have gone away, because obviously Unitarians still exist, so for instance, we still need the Athanasian Creed. Satan's not going to stop attacking things just because we have a confession that addresses it. He will continue to attack those things. However, by and large he is going to move on to new

23:22 tactics because he is going to choose things that are undefended. A good analogy for many of these issues in this area would be a military analogy. If you have a protected position and it's protected on three sides, well a smart enemy is going to try to attack that fourth one that isn't protected if he can do so. That is what Satan does. Satan is constantly testing for weak points in the wall. He's not going to attack the place where you are most strongly defended. Now, if you happen to attend a church that does not have a confession, he may have more opportunity to attack you because you haven't built up that wall in really anywhere, except for possibly, hopefully you at least confess the three ecumenical creeds.

24:13 So Satan is going to attack the weak point, and he's going to constantly be looking for that weak point. Not for nothing does he take the form of a snake and is he described as a snake? As we've mentioned before, and as those who've dealt with snakes know, if a snake can get his head into a place, the whole snake is getting into that place. And so that's what Satan does. He finds whatever little opening he can, and he slithers through. But there's an additional layer here when it comes to the military analogy, that is perhaps the more important one for our discussion today. If you look at military history, and the American Revolutionary War is actually a great example, many times you will have forces on one

25:03 or more sides of a particular conflict employing tactics from previous wars. That's not always bad. Sometimes it works because sometimes technology and tactics haven't changed much between one war and the next. But sometimes they have. And so for instance, in the American Revolutionary War, the British were employing tactics from continental warfare of centuries past. fine at the time, perhaps not great, but workable at the time under certain conditions, did not work in the American theater. It's part of the reason that they lost. Because Americans, on the other hand, employed tactics that had been learned during conflicts with the Amerindians, that had been taught by von Steuben and Lafayette.

25:51 They had updated their tactics, they were employing tactics that were more effective than those used by the British. Satan does the same thing. He updates his tactics. He is not going to employ old tactics in a new conflict unless he thinks that you've forgotten how to address those old tactics, because he'll certainly do that. But the confessions that we have do not address all of the problems we are facing today. And that is true regardless of which confession you happen to have in mind. If it's the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Augsburg Confession, the Full Book of Concord, Satan is not primarily attacking those issues today. He's attacking creation. Because if you look at the confessions, particularly the ones from the

26:51 Reformation era, they are largely addressing issues such as justification. There are many other issues that are addressed in the Book of Concord and in other confessions, of course. There's predestination, election, all of these things. But Satan isn't attacking those. As we pointed out previously, what he's attacking to attack now, with a great deal of success in some cases, is creation itself. Because if Satan can get you to deny creation, well, that's an implicit denial of the creator. So he doesn't need you to reject justification if he can simply get you to reject God in toto, if he can get you to reject who God is, then he doesn't need you to give a confession that is by its words false.

27:44 Because what you mean when you confess it is false. Because it's one thing to say the words. It's another thing to say the words and mean the right thing by them. Because it's entirely possible to say something that the other person hears as being entirely true and yet it's not what you meant. This is something that Muslims use all the time when deceiving non-Muslims. They lie about Islam, and they lie in a number of different ways. Sometimes it's simply that lie of commission. They just outright lie about it. But other times, they deliberately mislead by saying something that they know you will hear one way, but they mean it another. Mormons do the exact same thing, incidentally. I don't believe Mormons have a particular term for it, the

28:35 Muslims have four different terms for their different kinds of deception. Not the topic for today, but Just because the words themselves on their face are true does not mean that the thing being said is true. Because for a thing to be true, with regard to the person making the confession, the words must be true, the meaning must be true, the understanding must be true. Now that doesn't mean that it's bad to confess the creeds, even if you don't completely understand them, because they're guardrails. They serve as a bulwark against Satan and against heresy, against false doctrine, and so it is good to confess them, but obviously, it is better by far to actually understand what you are saying.

29:21 Because again, as wo said in his introduction, Satan can get you to focus with a sort of monomania on a true confession and get you to miss everything else, other truths that are also important. Because there's not truth just in Scripture. There's not truth just in the confessions. There's truth in creation as well. And that's why Satan is attacking creation. If he can get you to deny these other truths eventually, he will get you to deny the faith. Because the consequence of denying the other truth will inevitably be denying the faith. What he'll do effectively is turn you into a Gnostic. Because if you deny the reality of creation, that's effectively what you're becoming. If you are the kind of person, and we've all encountered

30:11 this sort of person recently, who simply says that's not a gospel issue? That's not about salvation, that doesn't matter. How is that about Jesus? Almost without exception, when someone uses that objection, he's a Gnostic. He may not know it, but he is a Gnostic because he is denying the reality of creation and trying to spiritualize everything. So that's a case in which Satan is bringing back an ancient heresy. Really, it never went away, but it is an ancient heresy, and he's using it in a new form, to get men to confess things that often are in their own sense, in a minimal way, true, but in the way they are employed by Satan, they are getting those men to give a false confession, getting them to

30:58 deny the faith. Because you can say that's not about Jesus, and maybe that's true. But that's not an objection. If someone, for instance, raises the reality of race, because that's part of creation, we see that in creation. It is a Abundantly obvious to any man with eyes. If he can get you to deny that, if Satan can get you to say, well, that's not real, it's not a gospel issue, it's not about Jesus, well, he's turned you into a Gnostic. Because now you said the flesh doesn't matter, the flesh isn't real, it's only the spirit. Well that's denying God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, in the words of both the Apostles in the Nicene Creed. Satan is getting you to deny reality, getting you to deny a truth that isn't explicitly mentioned in

31:55 Scripture. It's everywhere in Scripture, of course. You have the Table of Nations, you have Acts seventeen, you have all these places where it is mentioned, and it is assumed throughout the pages of Scripture. But you're not going to find a specific verse that simply says, God created the races of men, races real, and that lists a bunch of the things that we know from looking at creation. Just because it's not there in an explicit verse does not mean it is not true. And if Satan can get you to deny any truth, he is eventually going to get you to deny all truth. least if you don't repent of rejecting that initial truth. Which is part of the problem when it comes to these confessions from the Reformation era.

32:49 They state things that are true. Again, we're not going to say that they're all correct, but certainly as Lutherans, we're going to say in the case of the Book of Concord, it's correct. In so far as it addresses matters, it is accurate, it is a true statement of the faith because it agrees with scripture. But it does not address the problems we have today. And so when men try to bring up the Book of Concord and try to use it as a cudgel in order to attack men who are addressing other problems, well now the Book of Concord has become an idol. And incidentally, you can in fact do the same thing with Scripture. In the case of Scripture, it takes a slightly different form, but it's a form that is familiar to all of us because it's

33:39 something that Satan loves to do, and I just went over how he does it. If Satan can get you to set two truths against each other and reject one, that's his opening. And so if you think that you find a truth in creation, and then someone tells you well that conflicts with scripture, be very careful, because the truth contained in scripture is from God, and the truth contained in nature is from God. Those things will not conflict. It's one of the reasons that evolution is so dangerous because evolution makes claims about truth with regard to reality, with regard to creation, and then attempts to set those at odds with scripture. And so the problem that you are faced with when you look at that is well either scripture is false

34:32 or evolution is false. That's the actual problem there. That's the actual decision you have to make. But how they try to spin it, because how Satan tries to spin it is that evolution is just obviously true because it's just making these assertions about things that we observe in creation, that we observe in of course they wouldn't call it creation, but these things that we observe in the natural world, so obviously this is true, so now you have to reinterpret what you believe about scripture, because obviously that can't be true at the same time as this. The issue, of course, is that the claims asserted by evolution, are ultimately false. The minor claims are true to some degree, but the major claims

35:17 are false. We've gone over this in previous episodes. But what Satan wants you to do is deny some truth, any truth, wherever it is. He doesn't really care which one it is, because he just wants that opening. And if he can get you to lie with the truth, That's so much better. Because it is much more difficult to get a man to realize that he has been confessing the truth but in a false way than it is to get a man to realize he's simply been confessing a lie. Because if you've been confessing a lie and someone can prove to you it's a lie, only an insane man is not going to reject that and reform what he believes. But if you've been confessing the truth and someone is trying to tell you, yes, but

36:05 you're missing this part of the truth, or you're confessing it in a way that is effectively false, that is a much harder argument. It is much more difficult to get someone to repent in that case. And that's why Satan loves it. If he can get you to entrench on whatever it is, one of the confessions, some particular aspect of Christian doctrine, and in doing so, get you to reject other truth He's got you. Because now it is going to be almost impossible for anyone else to convince you that what you're doing is wrong because what you're doing is true, right? You're telling the truth. You're speaking the truth. The things you've said are true. Perhaps. But it's not the whole truth. And that's the issue, because it has to be the truth, and

36:58 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Not just some little portion of the truth and certainly not some little portion of the truth used in a way that is misleading or even outright false. The summer of my junior year of high school, I went to a week-long summer camp for basically law school. And it was brought to mind by Corey's beginning and ending in that segment where he talked about the whole truth. One of the exercises that we did was a moot court where we were all given a fact pattern and each of us was given assignments for our roles. I was assigned to be the defendant. Yeah, I don't remember exactly the details, but I think the gist of it was that I had been a father at my kids

37:46 baseball game and I hit somebody. There was some sort of altercation in the parking lot. There was some verbal disagreement that turned into a physical altercation. And so I was being put on trial for assault or for battery. And I remember it because it was a fun exercise. But as the defendant, I wasn't given any information. Everyone else wasn't given, I don't think. I could be wrong about that. But when I took a look at the fact pattern that I had been given, my own conclusion as me was that well, this guy's clearly guilty. But when I was on the stand, I wasn't going to tell the whole truth. I thought I was guilty. Because I was a defendant. And so I tried to be as clever as I could, because

38:30 it was the competition against the other kids and to show off and whatever. And so I was exonerated on the stand and moot court. And it And as soon as I was found not guilty, I laughed and said I was so guilty, which triggered subsequent discussion about double jeopardy 'cause some of the kids were really offended. And I was reminded of that because obviously, we all have an incentive not to tell the whole truth when we're going to get in trouble. And that's one of the big problems with these long-running theological disputes or cases where there's men no theological dispute, but suddenly something comes into dispute that no one's ever really thought about, there's a good chance that you're gonna get it wrong at some point.

39:17 Not because you're a bad person or because you're evil or because you're stupid. You might just get it wrong. You were missing something. Maybe you didn't have all the facts. Maybe you couldn't put it all together. Maybe you personally are not the right person to be figuring out complicated theological problems. That's almost universally true. So don't feel bad if it applies to you. In these circumstances, as fallible human beings, when we are faced with fact patterns in real life where we can get stuff wrong, and theology is on the line, which means that morality is on the line. Calling God a liar is on the line. Suddenly the willingness to tell the whole truth is paramount because the natural incentive to say I'm gonna be really clever when I'm engaging

40:02 here, I'm not gonna say anything that's gonna give up any ground in a debate or in you know some sort of trial, that makes a kind of sense. Doesn't necessarily make moral sense, but it makes logistical sense. Because if you just give away the whole game by conceding your opponent's point, then why have the dispute in the first place? Just admit you were wrong. We don't have that tendency. I'm not saying necessarily we should, but the problem is that the armor that we have as individuals, as human beings, is to push in the other direction, to never give an inch, even when we should. So, say in some of these theological disputes, like evolution, we did six thousand years in counting as an episode where one of

40:44 the things we talked about was evolution. And we made the case there that it's completely incompatible with Christianity. And yet at the same time, there are a lot of Christians who in good conscience believe that it's okay because they've they've not heard the arguments that we made there. They've not given it much thought. You know, it kinda makes sense, and you know, I guess Genesis maybe could be allegorical, so I believe in God, I believe in scripture. I just think that it took longer than six, seven thousand years for all this stuff to come into being. We made the case in that episode that the only way evolution, macroevolution, can exist is with death. And so either scripture is lying about when death entered the world,

41:27 or evolution is impossible. You can't have it both ways. And that's not an argument that most people have heard. So there are a number of people when they heard that are like, okay, I believe that evolution is false now. Some people had their minds changed just based on that fact, because it's a black and white situation where the observable universe, portions of it, for example, the age of the earth and the age of the universe itself, which doesn't suggest evolution, but those ages are much older than the age given in Scripture. It does not necessarily follow that Scripture is wrong, but it does imply that different things are happening. So the argument we made is that Adam had an age when

42:09 he was created. He was zero days of living, but he wasn't a baby. He was a fully grown, sexually mature man. And And as I mentioned before, after doing that episode, in the episode, I speculated, you know, maybe he was 40 years old. I realized after the fact he had to have been 70 years old. I believe that now that Adam was created as a 70-year-old. Because A, it would have made him an elder, and B it would have meant that he died when he was a thousand years of age. So a speculative maybe I'm wrong, but he had an age, and that was the point. Adam was created with an age. The earth was created with an age. The universe was created with an age. And it is entirely up to God that those don't have to

42:51 be the same age. In order for everything mechanically to work out with the universe, they have to be different ages. And so that is what we observe. And so there are cases where reason when apprehending creation is going to seemingly contradict scripture. And that doesn't mean that we just have to give up on either. There may be sometimes a clever solution that lets both accord. Some things are just flat out miraculous. The examples we've given the past are things like baptism and communion, the hypostatic union, God, Jesus Christ being fully man and fully God, which is incidentally why there are three ecumenical creeds, battling that out for centuries, because it's such a big deal and it's such a

43:31 hard problem to wrap our heads around because it's miraculous. If you try to be completely rational when you're talking about the nature of Christ, you're gonna be a heretic. You will absolutely 100% be a heretic if you try to take reason and shoehorn Christ's nature into that because it is irrational. You're dealing with a God and B supernatural happenings. So there are very limited cases where our reason fails. Our reason fails all the time. There are limited cases where what we observe is plainly contradictory to scripture, but it's exceedingly rare. Most of the time, places where scripture is silent are places where creation testifies. And so they're in accord because scripture says that God made everything.

44:18 So anything that you find, God made. There's no adversarial nature there. That's why it's called God's two books. Both of these things testify his glory. And you know what? Scripture says the same thing. Scripture says that God points to creation as testifying to his glory. So it's not a wacko position to say that you can believe all those things at once, even when they don't talk to each other. You're never going to discover what's in scripture in nature. There are things in nature that you will find described in scripture. We need both to understand the glory and the might of God and to understand his love for us. And scripture is more important because it fills in all the blanks we can never apprehend with our reason.

45:02 It's only by that faith being passed down as fact as the written word of God, which at one point in history was the oral word of God. One of the other examples that we used in the apostasy episode that I mentioned from last year was King Josiah, whom whom scripture describes as having been a boy king, having been a faithful king, and yet when it describes and we went into great detail in that episode we read the whole section where it described all the things that were going on in King Josiah's temple at the time that he was king. And it was profound wickedness. There were ashera poles, there were altars to false gods, to demons. All of this wickedness was being worshipped in and around God's temple

45:50 with Josiah's permission, and he thought he was serving God. And that was the purpose of that illustration. Josiah believed with a clean conscience that all the evil that he was participating in before they found the book of the law in the temple, they found it in some rubble or in some dust, it was completely forgotten. When they rediscovered scripture, he he repented. He had it read to him and he immediately knew that he had been engaged in the most grievous, idolatrous wickedness. He repented on the spot. He didn't try to synthesize the two. He didn't ask his priest to pour through that to find some example or some reason, some out, for him to say, Well, I'm not actually guilty of this, because you know, it was like this

46:35 when I got here, so it's not my fault. That's the human impulse to try to find some excuse. He was horrified properly because he was a faithful Christian. And that's why God credited him as righteousness, his belief, even in the face of the wickedness he'd participated in for nearly a decade of of his kingship when they rediscovered scripture and put it into practice again, and again as we said there, not only did they forget where the book of the law was, but they forgot it existed. That's how far gone they were. They had forgotten the existence of the written word. And so when this was rediscovered, it was telling them things they'd completely forgotten, things they didn't have any access to.

47:18 Because again, you can't find it in nature. You can only find that which God reveals in his word through his word. You're not going to find it on gold tablets. You're not going to find it in the stars. You're only going to find it in Scripture. He repented. He had no excuses. He didn't blame anyone. He said, Lord have mercy, let's fix this as soon as possible. And he spent the rest of his kingship addressing those problems and he fixed it very quickly. And so his kingdom again fell into wickedness as soon as he died 'cause his son was evil, but at least for his sake, there's a period of time where his people were blessed by faithful teaching. And that gets into the other thing that Corey said.

48:03 Satan doesn't necessarily even need our individual churches to apostatize conversation. Completely in one generation. So it's fine if you go from having strong belief to having a syncretist mixture of beliefs, but you still go to heaven somehow. God sorts it out. You're forgiven for your errors, of which we all have. And you go to heaven despite having held some false beliefs. Satan still wins because he's playing a multi-generational game because what you have done is created an inheritance for the next generation that's worse off than the one that you found. So when it's passed down, what everyone is taught is this messed up version that's riddled with lies and has some truth in it. What do you think's gonna happen in that circumstance?

48:52 Is it gonna somehow emerge even better in another generation? Or is it gonna continue to deteriorate? Satan knows how to play this game, and he plays it for the long run. He's perfectly content to let some generations to go to heaven. He'd like to get everybody, but if he has an intermediary generation that's in decay, such that, you know, maybe they preserved the temple before Josiah, somebody preserved the temple in some knowledge of God, and then just misplaced scripture. Maybe they were still Christian. They were still believers, but they forgot where the Bible was. And then a generation passed and a generation passed and soon nobody remembers anything. That's how Satan plays this game, which is why we have to

49:36 always be vigilant at every point. We can never let air creep in. And wherever we find error, wherever we find it, we have to respond as Josiah did. We have to be horrified. And we have to personally repent the moment we realize we've been in error. It is possible, it has happened to you. It has happened to me. It will happen again. We're not perfect creatures. We are imperfect. We're fallible. We're foolish. We're selfish, we're gonna stick to whatever makes us feel good. And the things that are true generally don't meet that criteria. The things that are true that are of God genuinely, they're usually unpopular. They're usually going to get you into trouble. So when people start screaming and shouting and saying, you can't do

50:23 that. That's evil. That's wicked. That's not what we've done since the 1960s, you're going to have to face an uphill battle and you're going to have to choose do I fit in or do I obey God? When a generation fails to meet that test head on, that generation is going to apostatize. And then the inheritance passed on to future generations of the church, the entire church is going to be false doctrine, false belief, and spiritual weakness, where there's no notion of fighting or contending for that which is true in a from God. At this point, when someone actually wants to contend with things that are godly, contend for them in the face of adversaries in public, the guy's usually going to get shouted down.

51:09 Why are you fighting? Why are you you're angry about stuff? you're causing dissent. Everything was so peaceful and happy, and then you said somebody was wrong about God and everyone's riled up. Look at all the disruption you're causing. Well, it's possible that there's actual harm being done by someone doing that, if everyone was right in the first place, or it's possible that someone's pulling the fire alarm. And the dire situation that we face today is that all of us individually are in put in a situation where we have to discern as best we can, has someone messed up in a previous generation? Have they made a false confession or has Satan tricked us into taking a true confession and twisting it and using it for

51:52 purposes for which it was never intended. Another example I point to frequently is the bronze serpent that Moses held aloft at the command of God, he had him fashion a bronze serpent, to hold up on a pole in front of Israel, because they were being bitten by snakes, poisonous snakes, that incidentally God sent. And God told Moses to have Israel look at this serpent, this bronze serpent on a pole, and those who gazed upon it would be saved from the venomous stings and not die. And it worked. Those who obeyed God were saved from poisoning and dying. And then later on, a few books later, we find out that they kept that bronze serpent and they gave it a name. They named it Nehushton, and they were worshipping it as a god.

52:40 So this is what confessions often end up doing. You have something that was good at the time, it was true, it served a purpose, it was entirely in accord with God's will. And yet somebody decides we're gonna hang on to it and we're gonna s reuse it for some other purpose for which it was not intended, it was not ordained by God. And next thing you know, you have idolatry. In that case, it was straight up idol worship. They gave the name of a demon. They were worshiping it instead of God. That's how easy it is for us to do these things. You know, in the case of things like creeds and a good sound Christian confession, you don't throw it away after a generation 'cause it served its purpose, but you must always acknowledge that it only

53:25 served the purpose of answering the questions that those men faced at that time. There can be no doubt that if the exact same men who wrote all the books in the Book of Conquered, the Lutheran Confessions, or your Confessions of Your Church, whatever it is, if all of those men were alive today in our churches and our circumstances, those men, if those confessions did not exist, they would write very different confessions. Does that mean that the old ones are wrong? No. It means they were solving a different purpose. A faithful contender for God's word is going to deal with what's in front of him. And sometimes that's going to mean talking about things that people haven't talked about before.

54:07 And when that happens, you're going to have men who are going to try to cling to the old confession just like that bronze serpent. They're gonna wave it around and say, well, what what about this? We've had this for centuries, and it it clearly applies here because of the old use. Like, well, the old use doesn't apply here because we have a different problem now. The reason the pattern keeps repleting is that it's human nature to fall for it and it's Satan's playbook. He loves this crap because it's easy, it keeps working, we keep gobbling it up, and it's deadly. It's deadly to souls. Maybe not in one generation, maybe it takes three or four. Do you think Satan cares? No. He can keep attacking people in many different ways as he

54:48 wants. He doesn't need to corrupt every church instantly all the time. He'll take his time if it means that he can ultimately destroy a church, especially one that once had a sound confession. What greater victory for hell than to take something that was once true and faithful and to gradually corrupt it and get it to turn its own confessions that once pointed to God and then have it point to hell. That's as satanic as it gets. That is what we're dealing with as an enemy. And the problem is that we don't believe it. We believe that as long as we just keep mouthing the correct words, we're going to be saved from everything. As long as we cry, Lord, Lord, we're gonna be honky dory. God warns us about that.

55:36 For anyone who happens to be thinking that this could never happen, this is obviously something about which we don't really need to worry because Satan couldn't possibly Well, I would direct you to look at the various church bodies in the United States. Because we've seen exactly this play out over time. Each and every tradition has bodies ranging from relatively conservative, traditional, to wildly liberal and outright and openly apostate. In the case of the Presbyterians you have the OPC, the PCA and PCUSA. In the case of even the Methodists, you have the Wesleyan and then you have all the way down to the UMC. For the Anglicans or the Episcopalians you have Acna and Tech, and you even have the same thing with regard to the Baptists from,

56:34 say, the IFB churches, SBC is middle of the road, and then there's ABC USA, which is the very liberal Baptist body. In the case of Lutherans, we have the LCMS, NALC, LCMC, and Elka. Now those of us who are Lutheran would not call Elka Lutheran. We would in fact say they should not be allowed to use the name Lutheran. Because they're not even Christian. But they didn't start out that way. They started out as a faithful Lutheran body. They started out as a merger of a number of bodies and the organization chart, as it were, starts to get complicated, but they didn't start out apostate. That happened incrementally over a number of generations. Because they would yield on an issue here, or they would stop

57:26 confessing this truth in the right way there. And eventually, you wind up flying the so-called rainbow flag and the BLM flag, and suddenly your churches are empty and you're having to sell them to balance your budget. We've seen this play out time and time again. And it hasn't played out just in the US, it's played out everywhere there have been Christians when they didn't guard the deposit of faith entrusted to them by their forefathers, or when their forefathers themselves were corrupt, as often happens. This is very much a playbook that Satan has been running for a very long time, and he will continue to run it, because it will continue to work. What we're saying is this is something against which Christians have to

58:21 guard, because not only do we have to guard against it for ourselves, but we have to guard against it for those who will come after us as well. Because as Woe was saying, and as we've addressed in previous episodes, it may be that your errors don't damn you, but your children will be worse off, and their children will be even worse off. And unless you have something like a reformation, like a restoration of right doctrine and teaching, eventually you are going to wind up with bodies calling themselves churches that are nothing of the sort. Because the things they teach aren't true, and the things they teach do not save. Can you be a member of an Elka Church and possibly be saved? Sure. Felicitous inconsistency does exist.

59:15 But you don't want to rely on that. As I've said before, if you are out hiking, generally speaking, unless you're one of those people who has some issue with adrenaline, you don't try to get as close to the cliff as possible. When it comes to issues of religion, when it comes to doctrinal issues, you should absolutely avoid the cliff. You don't want to get as close as possible to the line of apostasy. Well, I'm not over the line, so I'm fine. The issue is you don't know exactly where that line is. You don't know how many false beliefs you can hold and still be saved. We're not saying that you should doubt your salvation, we're not addressing this topic in order to cause you to fear. We're just calling you to think about these issues, to be mindful

1:00:09 of what you believe, why you believe it, what you confess, why you confess it. Because again, it's not sufficient. Just to confess the thing mindlessly. A parrot can do that. It is important to understand the words you're saying, what they mean, and why you're saying them. Because even if, let's say you understand all of that perfectly, if all that you pass on to the next generation is the words, devoid of understanding, devoid of the why, then they are in a precarious situation. It may be sufficient for them. But what about the generation that comes after them? All of these issues are generational. Because that is simply how it works for mortal men. We're only around for eighty-ish years, depending on genetics and other factors.

1:01:11 Misadventure. And generally speaking, there's twenty-five to thirty years between generations, so you have that overlapping time in order to transmit the faith to the next generation, but you have to make sure that what you're transmitting is the truth, is the whole truth, and is nothing but the truth. Not just certain sub-segments of the truth, not the truth with some bits distorted. Because Satan is going to be around for that next generation. He's still going to be here, working at destroying the faith, working at leading men astray, long after you're gone. He's been at it for thousands of years. We don't have thousands of years. We have a limited time in which to get these things right and then to pass them on to future generations.

1:02:05 And if we don't take those issues seriously, it's very possible to go from something like what the LCMS was in the 1800s and the early 1900s to what Elke is today. And it can happen a lot faster than most men believe. It doesn't take a hundred generations to become apostate. As Woe mentioned with Nehushtan, that took less than a generation maybe one generation, essentially. And they went from I won't say good and proper worship of the true God, because obviously they had their problems at that point in Israel's history, but they went from recognizing and understanding at least at least part of the truth, to open idolatry. And the example of what has happened in the US with Lutheranism is a great warning.

1:03:02 It's not just Lutheranism. I'm not picking on Lutherans. It just happens to be that I'm Lutheran, and I'm most familiar with their history. Obviously, the same thing has happened as I mentioned with the Presbyterians and the Baptists and others as well. But But it is very possible to go from conservative Christian bodies that confess right doctrine and two generations later have essentially empty pews with female so called pastors preaching Marxism from the pulpit. We've seen that happen. There are men alive today They who watched it happen within their own lifespan. Because there were men when they were children who were attending Elka churches, or what would become Elka in many cases, faithful churches

1:03:56 and they've watched that change in their own lifespan. They should have left those churches long ago, but some of them have not. This is not something that is theoretical or something that is just some possibility out there that this is something that is you should think about it, because maybe it'll happen. No, this is something that Satan actively exploits and actively pursues every single day. Because it works. It's effective. Satan is not going to use ineffective tactics over the long run. Because he's not dumb. If he were dumb, he wouldn't be a threat. If he were dumb, we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with these issues. Because then he'd basically be a court gesture and we could just ignore him or laugh at him.

1:04:46 We should certainly still laugh at him, but we should also take him seriously as the enemy that he is. Because he does prowl about as a roaring lion seeking to consume whom he can. And one of the ways that he does that is leading men astray by getting them to turn into an idol that which is in fact true, but true only in so far as the things it addresses and when it is used true used truthfully because there's a certain Latin phrase that comes to mind when dealing with this issue, and of course that is abusus usum non tolit, which is a general Latin maxim, a legal maxim, but also a logical one, and essentially it just means that the abuse of a thing does not destroy the use of a thing, which is to say,

1:05:38 a good A good thing can in fact be abused. We all know that. I'm holding a pen right now. I always wind up using my pen as an example because it's usually in my hand when recording. But I can write with my pen, which is a good use. I could also stab someone in the neck with my pen, which is usually a bad use, unless it's self defense, which is a different matter. Don't really want to destroy the pen, but there is a good use for the thing, and just because there's a bad use does not mean the good use is destroyed. But perhaps we need a sort of corollary. Usus bonus abusum non precludit a good use does not preclude abuse. Just because a thing has a good use does not mean you cannot abuse it. And so the standard maxim is that the abuse doesn't destroy the

1:06:29 use, but we should keep in mind the corollary as well. The good use does not mean that the thing cannot be abused. And so just because there is this good use for our confessions, just because they are true They are true in the matters they address, in the way in which they address them, when you understand what they're saying, does not mean that Satan cannot use them to mislead, because he can certainly get you to give a false confession with words that on their face appear to be true. Now I know this is going to sound horrible to some of you some of you, because quite frankly it is a horrible thing. The idea that you could give a false confession that you could lie effectively with the truth is a terrifying possibility.

1:07:21 But it remains a fact. It is something that can occur, and we all recognize this, from the examples given with regard to the courts, for instance, that's one people can grasp quite readily. Another example would be the use of words that are not univocal but in a univocal fashion, essentially equivocation. If you speak a certain a certain sentence will abstract it a bit. If I say X is true, well it depends what X is, rather heavily, doesn't it? And so if I mean one thing by X, and in that case it's true, it doesn't mean that it holds for all senses of that. A more concrete example. If you told another person I saw Tom at the party. Well if you know more than one Tom, there's an ambiguity there's

1:08:18 the problem there. That can be exploited to mislead. Because maybe you know the other person will think one person One friend, Tom, but you actually saw the other one. Maybe there's a reason you're attempting to mislead. That's what Satan attempts to do. He wants you to say something that is false. He doesn't care if there's a particular sense in which it could be true, because the goal is to get you to give the false confession, or to get you to distort the confession and pass it on as a false confession. Because sure Satan would love to drag you personally to hell. But if he can't get you, he will definitely settle for your grandchildren. And so these are things against which we have to guard,

1:09:06 because if we lose this deposit entrusted to us, if we lose the faith, the truth, the good confessions, the things that have been entrusted to us as part of our patrimony, we Then we are passing on a burden to the next generation, and it may be that they will lose the faith. Because that certainly happened all over the world. As we have mentioned so many times, all three of Noah's sons walked off the ark, knowing the Christian faith. Now there's some doubt as to what particularly Ham believed, but he knew of the Christian faith. Did they all pass it on? The answer is no. In fact, at some point that chain was broken in all cases, because all of humanity apostatized. To varying degrees and at varying times.

1:10:01 That may have happened in this very way, getting men to state something that's true, but not in that sense. For instance, Nehushtan God did command Moses to create that. That was something from God. It had a legitimate use. It was then used in a way that was an abuse. It was used in a way to mislead. It was turned into an idol. Because if you looked at it, if you used it in the way that God commanded, it would save you from death from being bitten by the serpents. But if you start to worship it instead, if you turn it into an idol, you're using it in this false way. It doesn't change the nature of the thing, because the thing was still from God and had that legitimate use. But what you have done with it, what Satan has got you

1:11:01 to do with it, Is idolatry, is apostasy. It is entirely possible to apostatize while speaking words that on their face that on the surface appear to be true. The phrase it's true, but is something that should really weigh on us much more. I think that when we see these arguments playing out in public or in private, there's not the inherent impulse to guard against the butt part. All the guys want to argue about, especially if they're not particularly good at hammering these issues out, then in the case where someone's not particularly adept, all they're going to be able to lean on is whether or not it's true. And if it's true, that's gotta be good enough. As I said earlier, it's necessary for us to have these North

1:11:59 Stars, to have these frames of reference so that we don't lose our way. And sometimes they are just summaries and distillations, like the creeds. And we've mentioned a previous episode when we were talking about the creeds. One of the reasons that typically the either the apostles or Nicene Creed is put right before or right after a sermon is so even the man who doesn't know a lot about theology, if he hears a sermon and the very next or the very previous thing that he hears is a creed that contradicts something in the sermon, he's probably gonna notice. He might not be the one to figure it out or argue correctly how to fix it, but he might have enough awareness, situational awareness, to say, hey, the creed says this about Jesus nature and

1:12:47 the pastor said something that I don't understand. That doesn't mean that the pastor is a a liar or blasphemer or anything. Hopefully it's just a good teaching moment, where there's some subtlety that you know a good teacher can tease out and explain to someone. But those are also there as curbs to say whatever you say in the pulpit it had better accord with these creeds, because these are many centuries old. These North Stars of a Basic Confession of the Christian faith. And they're not complete. I reread all three of them earlier just to prepare for this. And I noticed one thing I was looking for, whether and to what extent they refer to scripture. And scripture is pretty much an afterthought.

1:13:31 One of them mentions that it talks about Jesus as being raised from the dead. And so the creed confesses that scripture exists and says some good stuff, but you know, that's you just have the gospels and you'd be set there. That doesn't imply or certainly state that all of scripture is breathed out by God. And it wasn't that the men who crafted the creeds denied scripture in the slightest. That's my whole point. They didn't mention it because it wasn't what they were fighting over. When we get in this position where we wanna make arguments where we'll say it's true But I'm gonna go in this other direction. That's when we're in real danger. I want to leave you with something that John the Baptist said

1:14:12 at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry for Matthew 3. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father. For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. That warning should be a warning to each of us, because this tendency that the churches have and that we have been taught is to become Pharisees. I want you to remember the words we have Abraham as our father. Because every time someone picks up his confession and waves it in the air is proof of what a sound theologian he is.

1:14:59 That's exactly what he's doing. He is saying, I have Abraham as my father. How can I possibly be wrong when I'm waving this confession in the air. It's a carnival Barker's trick, even if it's true, because it's not a sound argument. That's the distinction here. Even assuming for the sake of argument that what he is holding up in the air is a true true and faithful confession of the word, it doesn't mean that whatever else he's saying is also true just because he believes that thing. Each argument needs to stand on its own and it needs to be consistent with other arguments, and all those arguments need to be rooted in scripture. Any departure from that is an opening for Satan to attack, and he always will, without fail.

1:15:42 He's the one orchestrating these departures from Scripture. He's the one orchestrating these departures. And sometimes he begins the way he began with Eve, by tricking her into confessing truly, and that was his opening. Every time you hear someone saying, I have Abraham as my father, Other, you're dealing with a Pharisee. Doesn't mean that he's apostate, but that is a Phariseeal argument to presume that because of the genealogy of one set of ideas that everything else is legitimate. That's not reason, it's not borne out by scripture. it's an absurdity, and it's one that wouldn't work on us if we were being vigilant. That's really what this episode is about. It's a call to vigilance in whatever circumstances you find yourself.

1:16:30 They're gonna be different than my circumstances. That's fine. And we're gonna have differences of opinion about what our confessions should be. We should all be on the same page, because only one of us can be right. But even if your confessions are true, if you are met with the impulse to wave them in the air and say, I can't be wrong about this other thing because I hold to this, you're being a Pharisee. You're being a tiny little Pharisee and you're doing something stupid and you're giving Satan a foothold. Even if you're right. Even if you're right about the thing you're arguing about, never mind the confession being true. Even if you're also right about the thing you're opposing, if you're

1:17:07 using that pharisaical argument, I have Abraham as my father, that's the opening that Satan might use 20 years down the road. We can never let ourselves get away with doing that. Because that's it. That's the whole shooting match as soon as we start making those arguments. And it was prophetic when John the Baptist mentioned that because throughout the rest of the New Testament, that's what they act like. They continuously say, you can't be right because we have Abraham as our father. We were never slaves, which is a lie. Incidentally, it's absurd. The lengths that they went to to point to Abraham being their father is justification for everything else. It's an absurdity, it's a falsehood, it is a bad argument, and

1:17:48 it's the first step to hell. Or not necessarily the first step. It's one of the steps to hell. For some it may be the first step. For others, it's probably not. But it's never a good argument. We have We have to catch ourselves when we say it's true, but and then realize that we are we're on shaky ground. If you're asserting something true that's irrelevant, you're making a bad argument in any context. And if you're doing it with theology, you're getting into very dangerous territory. Because another thing we've said many times, when you make a scriptural argument, a doctrinal Christian argument, if someone believes you, if they agree with you, you're binding their conscience. In this particularly a problem with pastors and clerics, because they automatically

1:18:32 get that sort of respect accorded to them by virtue of their office. When someone attains the teaching office in public, everyone is naturally going to tend to defer to him. When in doubt, you're probably not going to argue with a pastor. And that's a good tendency. I don't want people going around arguing with their pastors all the time. That's disruptive. You're probably wrong if the guy's half competent. Even if you're both wrong about stuff, he's probably gonna argue it better than you. So frankly, picking these fights is not a good idea until you've done a ton of legwork, which you may or may not be competent to do. But it's not a question of being disruptive. It's a question of just understanding, are we getting into trouble here?

1:19:13 Maybe all you can do is go talk to someone else who has his head on straight better than you do to help you check what's going on, to maybe straighten you out. In a lot of cases that's going to be the case. You just misunderstood something. The pastor said something true you didn't understand, you got upset, you were wrong. That can happen. Repent. Figure it out and repent. Part of the episode that we did a while back called You Are Forgiven, when we discussed repentance. The essence of repentance is turning away from your sin, from your error, realizing that you were wrong. Repentance is not sorrow. It's not a feeling. It's a behavior. It's a change of direction. And that's part of the Christian life.

1:19:57 To realize, oh crap, I screwed up. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. I did it in good conscience. I've realized it was evil. I'm doing a 180 right now. I'm going in the opposite direction. That's repentance. And every Christian is capable of that. A man who's not capable of that is not Christian, regardless of what his confession is. You can confess with your lips all day long. If you can never possibly be wrong under any circumstances, if you can never have sinned, you can be guaranteed that you're not a Christian. And those are often the guys who are the most insistent that they're free from sin, basically hold themselves up as examples to others. look how great you can be if you're just like me.

1:20:37 What a nightmarish thing to say to someone. God help you, please be better than me. When we're dealing with God's things, we have to take exceptional care. And that's especially true of teachers and of pastors. And part of that is realizing, just as Josiah realized, that he'd made a mistake. He was in sin. Satan's been doing this for seven thousand years, and he knows that one of the most effective strategies is to get men to confess true things so that he can destroy them. We're not immune to that. We're vulnerable to it. The man who's just straight up apostate who says I hate God I'm out of here. I'm I'm gonna be an atheist now, I'm gonna live a degenerate life. He's no threat when it comes to this.

1:21:23 No one's gonna be misled by his life and think, well, this is what godly living looks like. He's not going to bind anyone's conscience with his wicked ways. He's going to be a bad example, maybe an appealing example to some. But it's the man who says, no, this is what God wants us all to do. And I'm gonna hurt you if you don't agree. The man who wants to make arguments that aren't in scripture that aren't consistent with scripture, that's the man who's a real danger. Well, the earliest episodes that we did was on neglected matters in scripture. And one that's I've thought about more and more lately is the directive from Jesus Christ to curse those who reject the gospel. He said to shake the dust off your feet against a town,

1:22:07 against an entire group of people. And the apostles did it. In fact, Paul did it to the extent that he said to the Jews, Your blood be upon your own heads, I'm gonna go preach to the Europeans. And that's what he said. He cursed them in the name of God for rejecting God. And he was obeying Jesus Christ when he did it. Now Now find a pastor who's going to say we must curse those who reject the gospel. As we said in that episode, and I'll reiterate here. I don't know exactly what that looks like. I I'm not advocating for the church of going around and cursing people. that's not the point. But if you're dealing with someone who, when he sees those passages that say, curse those who reject the gospel, if you say that's

1:22:53 not my God, you're a Pharisee, you are saying I have Abraham as my father, because I've got all this stuff. Oh, but I don't believe that. That's a bunch of crap. Whatever God said here in Scripture is clearly wrong, because I have all this other stuff that he said that I believe. And this is my God. This is the problem that we have today. Inside the church people are picking and choosing which parts of scripture they like and don't like, and reinventing a new god from the pieces. It is untenable, it is a danger to souls, and it's everywhere around us. So beware of those who say, I have Abraham as my father. Beware of those who waive their confession as the proof of their legitimacy. If their words and their actions are legitimate, they'll be borne

1:23:38 out by Scripture. And if their words and actions are not borne out by Scripture, then they're not legitimate, and they have something of which to repent. And the same is true of each of us. Same is certainly true of me. It's just that simple. We can't say that we're perfect. We can't say that we're locked in and because we have the genealogy of past performance that we're not going to make any mistakes in the future. Nothing ever works that way. And the fact that that's become a normal thing in the church today is a tremendous danger. So just watch out for it. Watch out for guys who are saying, I have Abraham as my father. You don't worry about it. I I got this I got this settled. This confession says that whatever else I'm saying is right, because this

1:24:20 confession is true. It's a sales mechanism. It's a logical fallacy. It's all manner of deception. If any of this sounds like Satan, congratulations. You're starting to get a whiff of the sulfur that's emanating here. It is possible for individuals to apostatize, it is possible for churches to apostatize. It is possible for your church to apostatize. And when your church is doing it, that's probably when they're gonna scream the loudest about their confessions while they're doing all the other things that are not consistent with scripture. Anything that's limited in its nature of its confession is going to have holes that Satan can drive right around. In the past, we've described the confessions of Lutheranism as a maginot

1:25:02 line. They were in impenetrable bulwark against certain attacks. So what has Satan done the last five centuries? He drove around. He went over. He didn't need to attack the impenetrable fortress of arguments about justification and sanctification. Fine, whatever. You can say all that stuff all you want. Satan has new attacks. We have to be prepared for new attacks as Christians. We have to be vigilant for false teachers who are incompetent or who were actively malicious, because not only will they get these things wrong, but they will tell us in the name of God that we have to obey them while they lie. We don't want this to be an unsettling or upsetting episode, but in some ways it is. Because to say that you have to be vigilant, even in the

1:25:50 face of true confessions, is deeply upsetting and disruptive. It's a terrible situation, which is how you know it's from hell. No man could cause this on his own to just if something were true and men tried to attack it, it would withstand that attack on its own. But Satan is the ultimate rules lawyer. He invented this crap. He invented sitting on the stand like I did in moot court and lying with the truth. I told just enough that I wouldn't get in trouble. That was play acting, I wasn't being duplicitous, but I also wanted to be really clever. I wanted to impress the other kids by beating the system. That impulse is in all of us. And when we bring it to bear in these situations that are eternal life and death, we cross the line.

1:26:36 We can't do that. We have to recognize if we have erred, we have to have the confession of Josiah. We have to rend our robes and beg for forgiveness. And we have to repent on the spot. Because Because anything else is doubling down and saying, I have Abraham as my father, I'm gonna be fine. On the last day, everyone who has that confession is gonna be in the line with the goats