On Human Race: Scripture and Soteriology

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Woe. As promised, in this episode, we are going to be talking about how scripture interfaces with biological race, how scripture describes how God created the races and the arguments that are sometimes used by Christians who are cherry picking aspects of scripture outside of their context to make secular arguments against some of the things that we've said in the past couple episodes. Uh this is episode three on race. We didn't want to do too much about it, but as we said last week in particular, this is such an important subject subject to the world, the reason that there's so much fighting around it is that there's something theological going on here.

1:23 And we are speaking about it because we believe that there's almost no one else who understands all of these moving parts the way we do and a lot of people have gotten some value out of it, so we're going to continue. But it's w it's gonna have a beginning and an end. The beginning was the episode where we talked about the biological reality of race. We laid out the genetics Uh and people receive that well. Like it's it's obvious. Science is not in opposition to scripture. Reality is not in opposition to the creator of that reality. That's that should surprise no one who's listening. But that was a case we had to make first. And then last week we specifically talked about the effects of race

2:04 as they relate to sin and the fact that there are propensities for sin that are greater in some races than others, which is a really tough pill to swallow. And I'm sure that there are some people who heard that and you know may never listen again if you're still listening. Thank you. And as we said in each of those episodes, we were deliberately not going too much into scripture for the very reason that if we had front loaded scripture in these multiple episodes, if we had just focused on what the Bible says and then gone on to science, I know I know with absolute certainty that as people listened, they would forget that we ever pointed to scripture and just say, well, what you're saying doesn't make any sense.

2:40 The Bible says this, that, and the other thing. So we deliberately did this kind of upside down by saving scripture for the third episode so that we can contextualize all the things that we just said for the cat past couple weeks in a manner that is consistent with scripture to say, look, the things that we just said do not fly in the face of what God has said. So this is episode three of five. Uh episode four next week is going to specifically be entirely about IQ, and that's based in part on race. Uh, it is based in part on human history and the different people groups, and it's not just a scientific thing. It's not just about a measuring contest to see who's smarter or who's stupider. There's no judgment involved in talking about IQ.

3:25 The reason that that question matters is that if someone lacks the mental capacity to understand certain types of things, that precludes large amounts of theology from their understanding. They're not going to be able to understand things. So the reason that that's part of this is that talking about IQ is talking about the gospel. How do you share the gospel with someone who can't understand hypotheticals? And then the last episode, episode five of this mini-series, is going to specifically discuss the invention of racism in the late eighteen hundreds and what has followed, because most people think the racism is a sin that God ordained as being against his will from before eternity, and that we are doing what God wants us to do when

4:11 we attack something that the world calls racism. So the capstone for all of this is going to be to put all of this is in context because the things that we've said so far and the things we're going to continue to say, uh, the Missouri Senate in particular, on their webpage where they describe racism and responses to it, they basically refute every single thing that we're saying. They refute all the things that are factual that you've already agreed with, uh, if if you agreed with the previous episodes. And so we're gonna in the the last episode in this series, we're going to completely dismantle the lies that the Senate has been telling really only since about the seventies. Prior to the seventies those lies weren't being told, uh, but in

4:48 the sixties something happened to the whole world and it seems more and more like there was a portal hell was opened and a whole lot of demons came pouring out out and kind of went in all different directions. We saw the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church even worse than it was before. We saw the destruction of Protestantism. Lutherans were not immune to it. And all that began in the US really in the sixties. So we're gonna finish this up by specifically addressing the charges against us and now against you if you believe anything we've said, that you are a racist and that you are going to hell if you don't repent for believing the truth about scripture and about creation. So to begin with in this episode on scripture and race, we're

5:31 going to recap and go back over some of the territory we covered in I think episode four, uh, where we talked about Christian nationalism. That was kind of the kickoff for us really discussing the subject of race head on. So there'll be a little bit of repetition in this from that episode if you happen to listen to it. If you haven't, go back and listen to it after this because there's a lot more to say about all these things in different directions. There will be some some recapitulation of some of those things, but they're well worth hearing again because if you have a scriptural basis for believing what we have said and it with a clean conscience, then you're going to be immunized against charges of, well, that's

6:10 racist. Well you can't think that. that's a sin. If that's true, it's a very bad thing. But if it's false, you need to be equipped from scripture to be able to respond it faithfully as a Christian. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. So let's begin back in Genesis once again, I think at the table of nations. So to start off with a basic point about genealogies. In scripture, there are a lot of genealogies. It is not just in Genesis, it's not just in the Old Testament. The New Testament starts with the genealogy of Christ. But genealogies play an important role in scripture. They have to do with God's promises, they have to do with, of course, who descends from whom that is the nature of a

6:54 genealogy, but part of the core thread of scripture is literally a bloodline from Adam, through Noah, through Shem, through David, down the line to Christ. And so we begin that really with the table of nations, which is of course Genesis ten. Let me just pull that up here. And And Genesis ten gives the nations that are descended from the sons of Noah. And of course Noah and his sons, and their wives, are the only ones currently living, because the flood has just wiped the slate clean And so this gives the descent of literally everyone alive. Now, these nations, of course, have further split as time has gone on. We have more than just the number of individuals listed here relative to the number of nations that now exists or tribes depending

7:52 on the resolution. But this is the basic outline of what happened. And you have the three rate groups of humanity, the three great races of men, descended respectively Japheth, Shem, and Ham in order of birth. Unsurprising Shem would be second. If you look at the one of the themes in the Old Testament, God very often subverts the expectation that the best of things will go to the firstborn, although Japheth is definitely blessed, we see that in the the blessing and the curses spoken by Noah later on, but often the line of Christ goes through the second born. So in this case it is the second born, it is Shem. But But you have Japheth becomes basically Europe, and a little bit of northern Africa because the sons of Japheth became sailors and sailed

8:46 the Mediterranean. You have Shem, who largely stayed in the Middle East for a period of time but then spread eastward into Asia and other places. The Amerindians are descended at least in part from Shem, and then you have Ham who moved southward through Egypt, past the Sahara, however big it happened to be at the time, and down and filled Africa. And so, speaking of that, it leads into the Exodus, but of course, before the Exodus you have the line of Christ moving to Egypt, and then eventually the Israelites being enslaved in Egypt. And scripture is very clear that Egypt Egypt, one, the name is actually in the table of nations, and two, Scripture explicitly calls Egypt the land of Ham. That would be from one example Psalm one hundred six, they forgot

9:43 God their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, and awesome deeds by the Red Sea. And so the Israelites were in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years. We get that from Exodus twelve, of course, which says literally four hundred and thirty years, that is Exodus twelve verse that's verse forty. The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years, at the end of four hundred and thirty years on that very day all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. And so the reason it's worth noting in this context, the Exodus and the sojourn in Egypt, is that the Israelites were in Egypt four hundred and thirty years, over four centuries, they are not called

10:37 Egyptian, they did not become Egyptian. They lived there for a time, that did not make them Egyptian. Simply moving somewhere does not make you a member of the race that inhabits that particular geographic location. It makes you a sojourner, which is what the Israelites were, which is how Scripture describes them. And so when they left Egypt, they were still Israelites. They were not Egyptians, even though they had been there four hundred and thirty years, which bear in mind, most of the audience for this podcast and the two of us, we live in the United States, founded in seventeen seventy-six. Of course, the colonies are earlier, the nation came before the country, but four hundred and thirty years is a long time.

11:24 long time. And I think it's important to note there that when the Israelites lived in Egypt, there was no confusion. The Egyptians didn't think they were Egyptian. The Israelites didn't think they were Egyptian. there was no interbreeding of the groups by and large. There may have been a little bit, but it was they were they were segregated, not only socially, but biologically. And I think that's important to to observe because when we discuss the Israelites in scripture, there's a strong tendency today that I think is largely driven by Zionism, by by beliefs that were originated in the United States primarily in the late nineteenth century, to believe that somehow Israel was something special

12:17 apart from all other nations, and apart from its purpose in God's plan of providing the Messiah's bloodline and also being a vessel to preserve the prophecies of the Messiah. So a lot of times what you'll hear today is when someone denies their race exists at all and you say, well what about the Israelites? The knee-jerk response is, Oh, well, they were special. God chose them for a purpose. Well, yes, God used the used Abraham's bloodline through Isaac and Jacob specifically to provide the bloodline to Jesus. But God also worked through other bloodlines and other places, less important works certainly than giving us the Messiah. There there's no one who would ever deny that God coming incarnate

13:09 among us is the chief of all events in human history. So I'm not trying to diminish that in the slightest. But the point is the fact that a people group, that a race, the race of the Hebrews was used for that purpose doesn't mean that they were the only race and that everyone else was just human. There were all these different races that were serving different purposes. You can see that even in Egypt. What did God do with Egypt? He created a great empire in that place that was on the Nile, where they were going to be able to grow a great amount of grain. He knew that he was going to be sending a famine. He knew that he was going to be sending the Israelites into Egypt to become slaves to them for a period of centuries.

13:55 And then he was going to send them out from that place. None of that story would have worked if God had not also used the race of the Egyptians to serve their purpose in history. And so I don't think that it's a stretch at all to say that each of the races have had their purpose in God's plan. Some certainly greater, some lesser, some completely unknown. We don't have to know what God's doing to believe that God is actually doing something. And I think chief among our concerns is In describing that race is a real thing, is that we want to give God the glory for what he does in the world. It's not just about, well, here's this one specific thing that I know he said he did. So he gets credit for that, and all the rest is random.

14:39 We talked about randomness last week and the tendency that we have to think, oh, it's who knows what happens, you know, you ha you have a baby and there's millions of sperm and it's it's all just random. No, God is in control of everything. Now that's not making an utterly deterministic claim about the universe. It's saying that things happen when God desires that they happen. Things don't happen when God does not desire them. And if there's something evil or something that's That seems to be bad that God permits, he will also use that evil for his good ends. And so it's not only the good that the Hebrew people were a vessel for, despite their own incredible wickedness throughout scripture.

15:22 It's astonishing how evil those people were in in ways that in in some ways are far worse than some of the things we see even today. When I think I mentioned before, when you look at when Moses went up to get the ten commandments from God and they saw the pillar of fire and smoke and God was up there with Moses, with with the man who led them out of captivity. It took less than forty days for them to abandon God while he was right in front of him. They got mad that Moses was gone for a few weeks and told Aaron, Make us a new God, make make us a golden calf who will be the one who led us out of Egypt. Like that's in it's completely insane. It's incomprehensible to us, even as a pagan, to think, well, if

16:06 you saw this miracle and your God came down as a pillar of fire on a mountain and the guy that God sent to do that is up there talking to him, wouldn't you have p more patience than forty days? And yet that that was all they could muster. By when Moses came down, they had descended in into an orgy and they were worshiping pagan gods and who knows what else they were doing. It was it was unspeakable evil. in in in the same amount of time that Lent will take, which is this is a period that will be beginning on the day that this episode is released. So they were chosen for the purpose of being a vessel of God's promise. But they were not the only race. They were one of many. And the table of nations lists all of them.

16:48 And there's one interesting thing that I want to note, I Corey, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in most places in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, when you're talking about the patriarchs, it will say that in Adam had other sons and daughters. So there will be some who were enumerated, and then there will be others that simply are mentioned. Now I believe that the table of nations is complete and na Noah is in the table of nations. The reason that I think that's interesting is that although Noah lived to be 950, it never says that he hasn't had more than those three sons. And I think the fact that God limited Noah's offspring to three men who became the fathers of the greatest nations of what became

17:32 today what we call Africans, principally Asians and principally Europeans, like those are distinct groups that still exist in the world today and we can trace it directly back to a specific chapter in Genesis. So when we talked in episode one of this about how this isn't evolution, this is God acting in history, I think there's some significance to the fact that God God did not bless Noah with additional children. Unless I'm wrong. Can you correct me, Corey? No, I think it's very obvious here that this is a complete list. This is an exhaustive list of the nations. And verse thirty-two, the last verse in Genesis ten emphasizes that point. These are the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their

18:14 genealogies, in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. So there's no mention of anyone else. These are all of the human beings ever to exist contained within these men enumerated in this listing in Genesis 10. So I think what that tells us is that God wanted there to be Africans. He wanted there to be Europeans and Asians. Now it's important to note when you look at the genetics that there was definitely more admixture of the sons of Japheth and the sons of Shem as they sort of went kind of north and then east and west. There was more mixture than there is with the sons of Ham. We have the really the only genes we have in common with Africans as as Asians and Europeans goes pretty much back to the

19:02 Tower of Abel, more or less just after the flood. There's very little commonality beyond that, which is rooted in Noah himself, Noah and his wife and his son and Ham and his wife. Those four people have all the genes that we would have in common with that group. And again, that's in no way a denial of their humanity or their worth or got Jesus sacrificed for them, which is something we'll get to in in a little bit. We're not making a qualitative judgment. We're simply saying, God did this. God made Africans. He didn't make infinite human beings of all just we're fungible. We're all completely interchangeable. And you can have an African and you move him over here and suddenly he becomes someone from Ohio.

19:44 God didn't do that. It's not how he created the world. And so when these discussions at occur today there's such a tendency among especially Christians who want to be nice, they want to be kind, and they want to point to the cross, go too far and delve into what's functionally Gnosticism to deny the the flesh that God has created in time and throughout time through a series of fathers going back and back, to whom we are commanded by God to have respect and to love and to obey. When we as Christians try to be more moral than God and say, well, none of that even happened. You're human, I'm human, there's no difference at all. That's a lie and it's a denial of what God did. And that is the reason to get these things right.

20:32 Because as we've as we say frequently, if you let any lie into your own epistemology, how you view all of these subjects, whatever lie you say, yeah, that's mine. I'm I don't want to this this this race stuff, it bothers me too much. I want to think about it. I want to hear about it. I'm just gonna lie and say the world exactly the same. That's Satan's hook in your mind to be able to do damage down the road. And it's pretty clear what that damage is as is we see in the world. And on one side you have Antifa saying that, and on the other side you have Christians saying exactly the same thing. That's them on the same side. How did that happen? How did Antifa and Christians both deny the race is real when

21:14 Scripture says that God created it and created all of us according to the image of our fathers going back and back and back. And so the emphasis on fatherhood and the emphasis on patrilineal lines, it's not something man invented. As Corey said, there's so many genealogies in scripture, not only not only for Jesus line, but just in general. God like there's there are books in the Bible that people skip because they're so boring because it's just genealogy. And then we're supposed to believe today that genealogy doesn't matter, that the way that God created us through our fathers doesn't matter. How do you obey the fourth commandment when you do that? How do you believe the Bible when you do that?

21:56 So discussion of race is not it's not an assault on on the Christian faith. It's It's just making sure that we're shoring up the foundations that God has given to the very faith that is presented to us in Scripture. And it really does come down to the fact that if you deny race, you are cutting yourself off at the knees when it comes to defending the faith. Because it is everywhere in Scripture and it plays out in the natural sciences as well. If you affirm what Scripture says, you can also affirm what science has found. You can show people who believe in the science, who will believe in the numbers if you can show them those. Look, scripture says that's exactly what you're going to find if you

22:37 look. Because these are entirely in agreement, because of course, if you look at the natural world in an honest way, and believe the conclusions you actually find, you don't filter them through some sort of ideology to skew the data. If you look at what is actually there, it fully aligns with Scripture. Because Scripture is actual history. Genesis is the actual history of the world, with a focus, yes, on humanity, of course, but it is the history of the world, and so what is contained in scripture is what you will find in nature, it is what you will find in creation. Because as some used to say, God has two books. One is scripture. One is One is creation. They both attest to his glory. And if you look in Job, when God speaks directly to Job,

23:26 he does not in fact appeal to Scripture. Now, of course, you can argue that's partly because Job is one of the oldest books, possibly the oldest book in scripture, but God appeals to creation when he is speaking of his glory. And we should pay attention to that. But this is probably a good place to refute a particular argument that comes up sometimes with regard to the existence of the nations of the races. And that would be the Tower of Babel. Now you have A small problem with the ordering here if you're trying to say the Tower of Babel has something to do with the creation of the races, because well, the Table of Nation come before the Tower of Babel, because the Tower of Babel is chapter

24:08 eleven in Genesis, insofar as we're pretending the chapters are really a thing. But anyway, it comes after it in the text. And to be very clear, the Tower of Babel is not where the the races were created. God did not come down and make races at Babel. And the races are not a punishment, they're not a consequence of sin. They are part of God's good creation. I will come back to that in a minute to explain why we know that for certain, but when it comes to the Tower of Babel, it is such an important story in scripture that if you ask even Christians, very few would be able to tell you, Oh yeah, of course it's one paragraph. But it is, it's literally one paragraph. It is a very short section in scripture, but of course it's

24:54 very important. I tempted to read it into a small study now, but that's not really the place for it. But the story of Babel is that instead of obeying God, men and we can debate who exactly is present in this, but at least some of the sons of the sons of Noah are present here, and they build a tower. They say they're going to make a name for themselves. They are defying God who told them to spread out and cover the face of the earth, which was his intention for the nations. And so God comes down, which that's a bit of biblical irony for you. Think about that one for a minute. God comes down to confuse their language so they can no longer work together and continue sinning in this open, high-handed fashion, and that

25:40 disperses them as they were supposed to do beforehand. One, the scripture says nothing here about dispersing them in a way that creates new nations or new Genetic information, and that's one of the problems. If you contend that new genetic information was created by God at the Tower of Babel, you are implicitly denying earlier on in Genesis when Adam names Eve and he names her Eve because she is the mother of all living, if God comes down and creates new genetic information and by doing that creates the nations at Babel, creates the races there, you're saying there's a break between those who are still descended from Eve and those who are descended effectively from God's work at Babel. So that conflicts with what Scripture says.

26:34 But to go back to the issue of how we know that the races are not a consequence of sin, they're not a consequence of the fall, they are not a punishment, they are preserved in Revelation. Because John speaks of seeing a huge crowd from every tribe and nation. Well he knows this because they still look like they belong to different tribes and nations, so that's preserved in paradise. This is part of God's good creation that's preserved in paradise. And of course you can't say therefore that it is a consequence of sin or a punishment, because sin is not preserved, and the consequences of sin are not preserved in paradise. So if the tribes and the nations are preserved, they are part of God's good plan.

27:21 They are in and of themselves good. And that's exactly what we see in Scripture from Genesis through Revelation. I think that what they're trying to say when they claim that God created races at Babel is it's from the the specific verse where it it says, And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is the only beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. I think the one people thing is what they're they're hooking on to and saying, Well, they were all exactly the same and then God did something and it changed things. Now that's probably part of that. That's true in a sense. Part of the problem though, they're conflating two separate things because it

28:09 doesn't say they're one people. It says the whole earth has one language, but says that as people migrated from the east. And so I think they're conflating that a little bit to try to say that the the one language is one people, when it doesn't tell us that they're one people. Okay. I was reading from the ESV. I didn't actually go back and look at maybe that's butchering it. In any event, the the the problem I want to the high the problem to highlight there is that it ignores the command that God gave to Adam and repeated to Noah. This was the at the at the end of Genesis 9, he again says to Noah, and you be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth, and multiply in it. It's a repetition of filling the earth and subduing it.

28:52 Filling the earth was part of God's eternal plan. They weren't to stay in one place, and that was precisely what the tower was to do. They wanted to remain one people. They wanted one race the human race. That was literally the cry of Babel. We are one people, we are one race, we will be mighty, we will do things that no one else can understand. And God said, No, I told you to disperse. Now is Cory is you just highlighted, all of the genetic information came from Adam and then from Eve by having been taken from him. And as we described in the first episode, it's entirely consistent that all the genes in Adam have been winnowed down in different directions. They basically have been sieved among the different nations and subnations

29:40 as you go throughout time to the point that Corey and I have very similar genetic backgrounds. I'm like 75% English giver tape and about 20% German. I think you're kind of the flip side of that, more or less, aren't you? Pretty close, yeah. I'm more Scottish than English, but close enough. Yeah. You know, they're like ultimately we're all the same people because you if you go back far enough when when the they were moving around, they're all coming from from the Germanic lands before. So we're closely related. if you know we had a co-host who was was Russian or some other Slavic nation, they would be more distantly related because of physical distance and the time of separation. So the people at Babel, they were one people in the sense

30:26 that they had Noah as their father, and they were, you know, second, third, fourth, fifth cousins, however far they had dispersed genetically, they were still very closely linked because they lived in the same place. God said no. You people are supposed to fill the earth that I've created. I made this magnificent planet for you, and you're not going anywhere. You're just sitting here being idolatrous. Again, I just killed everybody because you're idolatry and you're doing it again. No. I'm gonna come down and I can feud your language and gonna send you the corners of the earth so that you will obey. Because if you won't obey because you believe me and fear me, you will obey because I'm gonna make it impossible for you to

31:04 talk to your cousin. And that's exactly what happened. Suddenly the the man who's standing next to him, who was related closely, certainly by modern standards, was a stranger. You couldn't stand a word he said. And so they naturally self-segregated and drifted apart and spread as God commanded. And so all of the discussion from the episode on the biological nature of race talked about that dispersal, about how people went largely their separate directions. You had Shem in the Middle East and in some into Asia, you had Japheth, you know, to India and to uh to Europe, and you had Ham basically to Africa. And that's pretty much where humanity stayed more or less in their places until you get to the fifteen hundreds when the sons of

31:47 Jathfith began exploring the rest of the world by sea. There's you can do some stuff over land, but when you start moving by sea, it completely changes everything. And that's something we talk about in the Atley election episode where we also discuss race. We talk about how the sons of Japheth were the first to actually obey the Great Commission and take Christianity apart from their lands to other lands, and when they went to the Americas and they went into deepest darkest Africa, that's what they did. They took the gospel with them. Ethiopia in a tiny corner of an impossibly large continent of Africa had Christianity, but whatever attempts that they made to spread it to their neighbors completely failed.

32:28 It was just that one tiny corner and that was all that was ever there. They never evangelized the less rest of Africa. And for all intents and purposes, it seems like the Indians on the tiny coast, probably where Mark went, never told anybody. They didn't even tell their next door neighbors. So you have a tiny sliver, but no evangelism, no no spreading of the gospel. There was preservation of it, and as Cory and I were talking about this before we started, I point out that you know, maybe they shook the dust off their feet. Maybe they said our neighbors are are never going to accept this. So I'm not condemning Ethiopians and Sudanese and and the Indians who had the gospel for not spreading it, 'cause I don't know

33:06 what the situation was. But we know with an absolute certainty there was only Europeans who took Christianity to India and to Africa, even though there were Christians who were natives to those lands. So again, the races as they play out in time have a real impact on on the spread of the gospel, just as they did in the Old Testament, where it was principally the Hebrews, not exclusively, but principally the Hebrew people, you know, once you get past A Abraham, there were many believers before Abraham, but he was one em one among them And I think that's important to know. Abraham wasn't a Hebrew. He wasn't an Israelite. That was that was his grandson who became the father of that people. Abraham was just a believer.

33:49 He believed in the promise of Christ, which made him a Christian. And he learned it from his father, and we have no reason to believe that that was not a commonly held belief by others, some of whom may not have been related. I mean, they were in the area, so they're probably somewhat related, but it wouldn't necessarily have been exactly the same clan. And we see in European history that much of the the mythology points to echoes of the Christian faith having once been held in places where it died out, where it turned into myth and it turned into then paganism. But at one time people far distant from the Middle East had at least some kernel of the gospel promise promises that God gave well in advance of Christ's birth.

34:36 And so God uses different races and different times for different purposes, and that's to his glory. We don't get to rob him of his glory because again, we have a duty to our fathers. My fathers are English and German predominantly, and you know, more broadly all of northwestern Europe Europe. Those are my people. Other people Other people are not my people. That's not a hateful thing to say. If you are Chinese, you're not my people, and I'm not your people, and that's not a hateful thing to say. It's an acknowledgement that our roots, our commonality, goes back very far. Whereas the roots that I have with someone like Corey are in the much more recent past. You know, we both have ancestors who were here in colonial days

35:21 from earliest colonial days. We're probably related many times over, even on this continent, and certainly in in Europe, that's how it works. When y you are the of the same people as someone else, it means that you're you're family. And I think that's I think next we're gonna think th next thing we're going to talk about is the fourth commandment and how the obedience to the fourth commandment, particularly as it's explained by Luther, is a fundamental part of all of this. Your duty to obey and to honor your father and your mother doesn't end with those two human beings. There's no excuse, well, yeah, God says I have to obey my dad, but my grandpa, whatever. He's not, he's not enumerated, I can do whatever I want to

36:06 him. Even if for the sake of argument such thought were were possible, the only way that I, as a man, could honor my father, would be to respect his duty to honor his father, which would require obeying his grand his father, my grandfather. So even if you take the most literal, strict reading of the fourth commandment, which we believe is Lutheran's, is not permissible. But even if you did that, it doesn't change your fundamental duty to honor and to obey your ancestors again unless it contravenes the first commandment, where we are fear, love, and trust in God above above all things. If your choice is between God and your father, you choose God. Short of that, you obey your father in obedience to God, and

36:51 you obey all of your fathers before you. And that requires a respect and an honor of what is ultimately your race. That is not idolatry or of race. That is an acknowledgement that how God made you, whatever you are. Like when I'm saying these things, I'm not talking to white people. I don't know who's listening. I've said this before. If you're Chinese, if you're African, if you can be anything that God has created, you have a duty to honor your fathers, going back to Noah and going back to Adam and everyone in between. That is obedience to the fourth commandment. I'm not saying my fathers are better than your fathers, and therefore you should honor mine and said, no, that that would be disobedience

37:33 to God. This is not a white message. This is this is the Christian faith that we honor our fathers in time immemorial. And doing that is anathema in this day. To say that will cause you to be accused of racism and whatever supremacy your your race happens to be. Turns out it's always white, no one else can be a supremacist, which is a subject for another day. But the fact that that pattern keeps playing out should give Christians pause. It should make you very concerned that you're being told by the world, hey, maybe don't obey God. That sounds like it's going a little too far. That message, if you're hearing it in your ear, that is not coming from God. And so we turn to the commandments and we turn to Scripture

38:18 to see what God says so that we can continue to obey God. And if the world hates us for it, frankly, that just tells us that we're obeying God. God promised many times you'll be hated for his sake. So if the world loves you, that should make you much more nervous than if the world hates you. Just address two points quickly because I know they will come up in comments if I do not address them now, so it makes more sense to do it now instead of six times in comments. When I said that they were not one people at the Tower of Babel, I'm looking at the Greek here And the word used is Genos instead of Ethnos, Ethnos being the word that is typically used for race or people group that appears many times in Scripture,

38:59 which is what we're talking about here one hundred and sixty one times in the New Testament, just shy of seven hundred in the Septuagint. And in case anyone thinks I'm playing games with the Greek, it appears five hundred and fifty sometimes as Goy in the Hebrew. But the point that I'm making is Genos is used there, and that means they're all one generation One generation or one family as opposed to one ethnos that is a different thing. Of course at the time they would have all been very much more closely related because there had been less time for genetic drift and changes in allele frequency, etc., see our previous episode for more on that. But the point that is being made is that these people are

39:38 all closely related and know each other. Because if you think about it, these are probably grandparents and grandchildren, great grandparents, not too many generations of a span there. So even if you are as far away as possible on this, you are still going to be, say, a great grandchild of Ham versus a great grandchild of Shem. So these are still a fairly closely related people group. That was the distinction I was making there between those two terms. And then when it comes to Abram, there are some who have made the argument that Abram was probably a pagan before he was called. Scripture does not actually tell us. Scripture tells us that Terra was at least an idolater. He may also have served to some degree the one true God,

40:26 because that would have been carried down possibly from his ancestors, but yes, in Joshua twenty four it does say that he served other gods. It does not say that notably of Abram. Although one way to take that of course would be that it was God's initiative coming to Abram, giving him faith, calling him out of a pagan setting, because at the least he was in a pagan setting. So just clearing those up now instead of fielding comments later. Thank you for that. Uh do you want to talk about the fourth commandment before we move on to the New Testament? Aaron Powell I mean really I would just be echoing what you said for Lutherans. This is going to be very straightforward. You've read this in the small catechism.

41:02 I hope that you have also read this in the large catechism, particularly if you were a father or someone involved in teaching in your church, because it is incumbent on you then to have done that. But the fourth commandment is very clear actually if you read the fourth commandment in scriptural context and understand how God works with humanity in time and over time. Just look at the line of Christ. God works with Abraham. He works with his sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, great-great-grandsons, down through the line of Judah and David and all the others. So yes, you are supposed to honor your immediate mother and father, but you are also supposed to honor your grandparents and your great grandparents, and it extends back in time

41:54 because you are not some sort of er individual. You do not stand alone. You are not an isolated island. You are part of a great chain that extends from you back through your parents and your grandparents all the way back to Noah and all the way back to Adam. You are ultimately a son of God, if you're a Christian, that is restored to you, but you are a son of God because Adam is described in Scripture as a son of God. And then so everything you are, everything you have from God, he has given you through this family line, through your race. And to ignore how God works is to ignore the real meaning of the fourth commandment. And of course, there's also the issue of the fourth commandment applying

42:43 to those who are in authority in the kingdom of the left hand, but that's not really directly related to what we're discussing today. So the focus more is on the family, because that's one of the three estates, these three estates being the state, the church, and the family. We're really talking about the family today. And as the fourth commandment applies to the family, it applies to your entire family, not just your immediate family. So we mentioned, I think at the very beginning of the first episode, that one of those particular verses we would address was from Galatians three twenty-eight. You've probably all heard, you may have said yourself in arguing about race with another Christian, there is neither Jew nor Greek.

43:28 Now that's in isolation, game over, right? I mean if God says there's no more of that, then obviously even if Even if race existed previously, it doesn't exist after Jesus. That's more or less the argument that's made. Now, it's a completely incoherent argument because it's based on proof texting, it's based on completely eliminating the entire context of that verse and then making a point that as we've said in past episodes nobody ever made before this past century. No one ever said this stuff that we're refuting today. No one ever said that there were no races until the last hundred and fifty years, and less than that really. So I'm going to give you the full context for Galatians three twenty eight, beginning with verse twenty five and following.

44:19 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. Now there's a lot going on in this verse and that passage as we mentioned previously. I want to highlight particularly that if you when you read Galatians 3 in general, there's a gr sorry, all of Galatians, Paul is making an extensive argument about the rights of inheritance. As a Christian, as an adopted son of God, you receive the

45:11 inheritance rights along with Christ to eternal life. And through Christ you receive that inheritance. Now it says there, you are all sons of God. That's talking about women too. Women in baptism become sons of God for the specific reason that inheritance is limited to sons. So when the verse says there is no male and female, it is not a denial of biological sex. It is saying that it doesn't matter how God created you in your app in your baptism, by receiving the gift of faith, you become a son of God, you receive the inheritance of eternal life, that the rights and privileges of being a son of God, as it is Corey just said, are extended to those who are adopted, adopted by faith through baptism.

46:03 So when someone tries to use this verse that says there is neither Jew nor Greek and say that means that race doesn't exist, or that means that race was a sin and Jesus fixed it. You must completely deny the entire context of this passage. And frankly you must deny the entire book. Because the book is talking about in this particular passage Are talking about salvation. This is an explicitly soteriological passage. It is saying, How are we received in Christ by faith? We are received as sons of God. So no, there is no male and female because you are all received as sons of God. Now people are following that. That's not a denial of biological sex any more than it's a denial of biological race.

46:48 So for anyone who has ever said there is neither Jew nor Greek as a refutation of what we're saying about biological race, they're committing a heresy. They're denying the soteriological basis of this precious passage that is said That is saying, no matter who you are, it doesn't matter who you are. And that's what we say, that's what we believe is what we will take before the judgment throne of God. It does not matter who you are. If you're a human being, Jesus Christ died on the cross for you for your sins. When you receive the gift of faith, you receive that forgiveness which was already poured out on the cross. Your sins have already been paid for, and you receive that forgiveness when you received as a son of God in baptism through your

47:38 faith. This is all part and parcel. This is all talking about salvation. And so it is utterly grotesque. It is demonic for any Christian to take this passage and say, well, there's no race because look it says there it's saying Jew and Greek or Jew and Gentile. There's none of that. Well if you If you pay attention to the words we talked before, to pay very careful attention when the possessive is used. This says, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God. And then it says there is neither Jew nor Greek. Now if you actually understand the English language and you believe scripture and you pay attention, in Jesus Christ means something, because not every man is in Jesus Christ.

48:25 There are billions of men who are not in Jesus Christ. They are damned because they do not have faith and they reject God. So to say that race doesn't exist, it obliterates this passage. It turns this passage that's something about the precious gift that is received only within the faith, and turns it into a Gnostic passage that nullifies creation itself. This is not a small matter. When men will destroy such a profoundly comforting passage for the sake of scoring political points to to say that race is not real, how are you gonna then say that sex is real? It says there's no male and female. So trannies are on the menu, right? You can be pansexual, you can have no sex, you can be just a human being with absolutely no particular qualities whatsoever.

49:15 Because it says right there in Galatians 328. This is not how Christians read the Bible. It is not how Christians use the Bible. So I save this for this point because all the things that we've said in the past episode Episodes that are very upsetting because they fly in the face of what has been said about race for the last hundred years. If your refutation is there as J neither Jew nor Greek, you need to take a long hard pause and look at how you're receiving scripture and look at who's talking to you. Where did you get that idea? Because you didn't get it from God. There is no possible way for any Christian to read Galatians 3 and come away thinking that sex and race and biological reality cease

49:56 to exist. They cease to matter for the purpose of salvation. In fact, they never mattered for the purpose of salvation. God makes it explicit for our comfort. Do not rob scripture of its comfort to score political points. Really, if you're going to misinterpret Galatians 328, you have two choices. You can either make it completely incoherent by saying that Jew and Greek aren't real categories, and therefore scripture is just saying something that has no semantic context whatsoever, or you can make it into a Gnostic scripture and become something other than Christian. And I've definitely seen people do both of those. But on a tangentially related issue, lately I've been reading more, and I have two sets of scripture that don't have any of the

50:45 little modern bits and pieces here and there, which is to say, chapter and headings and verses and all that. And I think this may be one of the best examples of arguments against the use of chapter numbers and verses because they literally split this section of the letter to the Galatians in half for well not quite half, but close for no reason, no good reason anyway, because if you continue on into chapter four, the next section is s should be directly attached to this bit in Galatians three, because it gives the explanation, I mean that an heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father, in

51:35 the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. So we see exactly what is being said earlier in the passage when you continue on to the part that for some reason has been segmented off as the beginning of the next chapter. And of course, we could go over Galatians three hundred twenty eight

52:20 for a six hour episode just by itself, but the the core takeaway is that these are real categories, and that's why the verse has meaning. If these categories, Jew and Greek, which is to say race, slave and free, which is to say hierarchy essentially, male and female, which is to say biological sex, if these categories are not real, the verse doesn't have any meaning. It has meaning because they're real. And so the meaning is these very real things, these very real distinctions between and among people have no soteriological impact. Now, of course, there's an ancillary impact because obviously if you are descended from Christians in a Christian nation, you are more likely to be Christian because you're more likely to have had the means of

53:13 grace in your life. You're more likely to have been baptized, you're more likely to have heard the word, etc. But in an absolute sense, whether you are Jewish or Greek or Roman or German or French or Chinese does not matter to whether or not the gospel is for you, soteriologically your race is irrelevant. In a practical sense, again, it may be relevant because again, living in a Christian nation, you are more likely to be Christian, and that is one of the reason these things matter and why we are discussing them. The same as with race, so with hierarchy, regardless of where you fall on the social hierarchy, which is a very real thing, there are slave and free. Even today. Slavery is incidentally still legal in the United States.

54:06 Go ahead and read the amendment if you don't believe me. But the hierarchy is real, but it does not have soterological impact. You can be saved regardless of whether you are the wealthiest man in a nation or the poorest man in a nation. And the same holds for biological sex. Whether or not you are saved does not depend on whether you are male or female. And these are also polemical because these are directly refuting various heresies that were around at the time. Because you have the Judaizers who say you have to become a Jew before you can become a Christian. Well, neither Jew nor Greek is written in part against them. You have those who would contend that well it's only the free born who are of the quality necessary to have access to salvation

55:01 to be worthy of this gift from God and no, that's neither slave nor free, it's condemning that heresy. And then you had those who would say that women could not be saved because woman is the weaker vessel, that part is true, but that because she's the weaker vessel she cannot receive this gift of God and says no, there is no male and female. It is a condemnation of that heresy. So you have to know what you're reading in scripture and what is being said, and if you take the modernist approach, if you deny these categories, you rob the scripture of any coherent meaning, you destroy the polemical nature against heresies, and you are going to destroy, if not your own faith, then the faith of your children or

55:43 your grandchildren. Because they will recognize at some point, well, I was told there's no male and female, so how can I possibly say that homosexuality is wrong? Because Because that depends on a difference biologically between men and women. Well, so it can't be wrong because of what I was told. Well, being transgender can't be wrong, because if there's no male and female, then it doesn't matter which one you claim to be. These are incoherent. They mean nothing. They mean whatever I want them to mean. That is the reality you will see if you start by denying these. It doesn't matter what the reason is. It never matters what the reason is if you are supporting a lie. Is it worse to support a lie willfully for a malicious

56:27 reason? Of course. But Satan will use your support of the lie even if you believe it was undertaken in good faith, even if insofar as it is possible to defend a lie in good faith you were doing so. Satan just needs that little toe hold. And that's what you give him when you deny any of the categories in Galatians three twenty-eight. And this is why we're constantly emphasizing the importance of not embracing any lies. We're talking about six words there. There is neither Jew nor Greek. That's six words. If you abuse those, you can destroy the Christian faith by adopting one lie after another that must necessarily follow from the lie you already hold. As Cory just pointed out, the same as with there is neither

57:12 there's no male and female. You will destroy the Christian faith in short order. If you use that verse, if you cherry pick that, if you invert it to mean literally the opposite of what it's saying by saying that it's not really a true category, that it's something that God has erased, which would imply that it's the result of sin. And this is another thing that I referred to I think in the I think it was the episode on Frame, pointed out that BLM on their website, they actually went through Galatians 3.28 and inverted it piece by piece as their bullet points for what they were doing. You know, BLM is obviously going to be anti-slavery, so they've got neither slave nor free down. Everyone's free.

57:55 They're freer than ever. Freedom is just flowing down the gutters today when BLM is on the march. There's neither Drew nor Greek will it's all about anti racism. Being anti racist is sacramental. And if you have to burn and destroy cities as a performance of that sacrament, your blessings flow from it. And there's no male and female. We pointed out that they were advocating homosexuality, the destruction of the nuclear family, and treating human beings as sexually fungible in a way that if you look at the purpose of BLM as stated, doesn't make any sense. Why are they talking about the family? Why are they talking about kids? Why are they talking about sexuality? Well, Satan knows what he's doing.

58:40 Satan knows that Galatians 3 28 is the distillation of many elements of the Christian faith. There's an intersection here of everything that's happening today. And so we save this verse to deal with in this episode because Satan cares about it. So again, if you ever hear someone, there's neither Jew nor Greek, that means that there's no race. That w once you've processed this and you go back and you read Galatians and do some thinking on your own. I we were talking about this before the before we began recording. We don't want you to listen to what we're saying and instantly agree with all of it. Because if you'll instantly agree with us when we say something you've never heard before that's the opposite of what you've been told, then

59:22 when the next guy comes along and says something else that seems novel and exciting, you're just gonna believe that too. I would much prefer that you hear us say these things and you struggle with them. The more you struggle, the more you're gonna turn to God's word to say, is that right? Are these guys insane? Are they lying to me? What's the trick here? I want you to turn to God in these questions. Because if somebody can come along and horn swoggle you with a bunch of fancy words. we try not to use fancy words, but we try not to use rhetorical tricks, and we particularly point out when others do that. But the world is full of that. People will try to just weave a web around you and bury you to the point that you don't you don't know how to

1:00:04 navigate your way out of it. And so just say, oh, either I don't care, or I guess I'll agree with that. That seems fine. If it just clicks, if you hear it and for the first time, what we're saying absolutely makes sense, we're not saying doubt it. Like the if if if we are unlocking something that has been bothering you for years, that's just us giving you the key to to finally piece that together. But if you struggle with these things, continue to struggle. Don't let that be a bad sign. I don't want you to believe right away just because we said something. That's not good for your soul. You should hear something, and if it's you're hearing it for the first time and it's contrary to what you've been taught.

1:00:42 As we've said repeatedly, that should make you nervous. That should get your hackles up. You should be on the defensive when a man tells you something contrary to what you've been taught. However, if the argument is coming from Scripture, or at least is presented from Scripture, go back to Scripture. Go read Galatians 3. Go read Galatians. Forget the chapters and verses. I've said before: if you don't have a Bible that's just missing all that garbage, you can go to esv.org, click on the gear, you can turn it all off. You'll have no footnotes, no headers, no verse numbers, none of that crap. You'll just have Galatians and you'll know when you're done because it'll say Ephesians, because they show the book distinction, so you know

1:01:23 which book you're in. That is how you should read scripture at least some of the time. Go read Galatians as a whole and see if you can c possibly come away with that. thinking that Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was saying race isn't real. It's not gonna happen. if you have the Holy Spirit, that will not be your conclusion. And if there are men who are saying those things to you, they're in profound error and they're jeopardizing the souls of everyone who listens to them. We're saying these things because they're not being sell said elsewhere, and they're pivotal. It's absolutely pivotal. The Galatians 328 contains so much truth in so few verses, and every word of it is being destroyed in the world.

1:02:07 Not theologically. Now it's being destroyed in our churches by men twisting these words to mean the opposite, but it's being destroyed in the world at large on a secular basis, on the basis that, well, race can't be real because look at the division it's causing socially. Well Reread Genesis where God talks about the Tower of Babel and what he thought about the unity of man. When you hear unity of man as a watchword for the ultimate morality, does that come from God? What unifies us? Man is to be united in one thing and one thing only. That is the worship of the one true God. Worship of the one true God is only possible by faith. So when Galatians is talking about us being one by virtue of being adopted as sons of God, that is not an inversion of

1:03:01 Babel. That is the perfection of our salvation. It does not erase the physical. It does not erase your race. It does not erase your hierarchical status in society. And it doesn't erase your sex. All of those things are how God created you. And all of those things we have no br reason to believe they won't be preserved in heaven. Now, the slave nor free free thing is the one that's up in the air. We don't know what freedom will be like. We can't imagine freedom. All we can imagine is a perverse freedom. We can't imagine the true freedom where the only things that we can possibly do are godly. That's That's heaven. That's the new earth. It's when anything you can conceive of wanting is going to be

1:03:46 in accord with God's will. That is a profound comfort and it's it's unspeakably wonderful. We don't know how to comprehend that. The flip side of that, as we speak today, is slave. All slave means is property of another man. It means that a human is the property of another human. I don't know how that's going to play out in a new earth. Will there still be property? I think yes, absolutely. I don't think you can look at the Ten Commandments as you get to the six, seven, eight, nine, and ten in particular, and think that property rights are contrary to God's will. Did he really emphasize them so profoundly to his people and to the world? Written on our hearts, every man knows not to steal. He has to throw that away.

1:04:32 He has to know he has to cease to care that he's doing something evil before before he'll steal. So property is written on our hearts. Whether we will continue to be property, whether we will continue to have hierarchy, it's not revealed. It's not something you have to worry about. And so I wouldn't go so far as to make a theological claim on the basis of this because those other categories are real, but I will tell you this. If your view of a man owning another man as property is so hellbent against it, you're gonna have a real hard time reconciling that with the rest of scripture. Because there are many places where slavery, where the ownership of a man is property, is given and it is not condemned per se.

1:05:15 We're gonna do an entire episode just on slavery, but part of the reason we're going to do that is because these are all part of a whole. Why are we talking about race? Galatians 3 28. Why do we talk about the difference between men and women? Galatians three twenty eight. Why we talk about slavery? Same reason. All of these things that are under attack today, and isn't it interesting? Sex, slavery, and you know, hierarchy of any sort and the races. Why are those the hot button issues of this day? Think about that as as you as you go away from this episode. Why is it that Galatians three twenty-eight defines the news cycle. Seriously, why does Galatians 3 28 define the news cycle? Why does it define higher education?

1:06:01 How did that happen? Because they weren't reading but the Bible and saying oh we're going to do the opposite. They're getting their marching orders from hell. And God and Satan is really concerned about people correctly understanding this. Because again, this is soteriological. This is God using the created order and then sanctifying it through the blood of his son. We can't undo any of that. We can't undo, we can't ignore the salvation, and we can't ignore the creation. You can't just pick one either. And that's what we talk about Gnosticism. You can't say, oh, this physical stuff, whatever, that's not important. It's all about Jesus. It's all about the spirit. It's all about salvation. That's not true.

1:06:43 I we're going to talk in a minute about duty as it relates to the fourth commandment, but if you think that you have no duties other than to worship God, what does that do to the Christian life? Say, for example, you own a dog. Well, we'll leave aside, you know, your your wife or your children. Say you own a dog. If you own a dog, that's your property. The dog is a living creature created by God. You own it. It is your duty to care for it, to feed it, to shelter it, to preserve its health and its safety. What if you decide it's all about Jesus? I'm not going to feed my dog anymore. That's not a gospel issue. There are people who actually will try to approach these subjects by with that reasoning, by saying, Well, this isn't the gospel, this isn't

1:07:30 a gospel issue, this race stuff, this creation stuff, this isn't about Jesus or the cross. Well, neither is feeding your dog. Does that mean you have the moral right to starve your dog to death? No. If I come to you and say you're starving your got your dog to death, this is your property, you care for, you love it, you cannot starve it to death. If your If your response is that's not a gospel issue, why aren't you talking about Jesus? You have you've abandoned the faith, even while you think you're pointing to the cross. And so when we talk about not letting these subjects be being reduced to only one thing, that's why. If you just want to say, well, it's all about Jesus and you won't talk about created order, you're not even talking about Jesus

1:08:13 anymore because Jesus is the fountainhead of created order. Jesus is God. All of this flows from Him and all of it is sanctified through Him. We don't get to throw away the things that God sanctified with his blood and created and redeemed for his own good purposes. We don't get to ignore that to say that we're pointing to the cross because that's the only thing that matters. All of it matters. All of it matters because of the cross. All of it matters because of God. He is our creator first and then our redeemer. The redemption was only necessary because we were created and we fell. Had we not fallen, redemption would not have been necessary and God would still have been our creator. And that's when when Corey was referring to Job, especially Job thirty-eight

1:08:59 and following, God points to himself as creator. When he speaks to Job, he doesn't talk about, well, I'm gonna save you later. I'm gonna I'm gonna pay for your sins. So don't worry about that. Why are why are you challenging me? When Job challenges God, God points to creation to testify who to his glory. We as Christians are obligated to look to creation and not denounce it and not say it doesn't matter. It doesn't save, but it's from the same creator from whom our our redemption comes. And if you deny your creator, you have denied your redeemer. There's no way to get around that. And that's why we these seemingly peripheral issues are so important. Satan knows they matter, and that's why he's going after 'em today.

1:09:42 And so when you read this section, and really you should read the entire book, when you read it, read it in context, and then compare the parallel passages, so also read Colossians, specifically in this case Colossians three, if if you decide not to read the entire book, here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian Scythian, slave free, but Christ is all and in all and of course you can see the listing here is giving a different emphasis, but making a similar point. These are a listing of attributes that are real, that are important, that mean something, that correspond to reality, but in Christ they aren't as important because they don't have the soteriological meaning or

1:10:28 impact. They are still of absolute importance when it comes to how you conduct yourself in this life, because they are part of how you were made by your creator. But another thing that is worth pondering is if you look to the beginning of some of the current, let's call them political problems that we have in the world, if you trace them back, many of them you will have to trace not necessarily as the foundation, but back through the French Revolution. And what was the slogan of the French Revolution? Liberte Egalite Fraternite Liberty Equality Fraternity. It is a literal rejection of these three categories from Galatians. There is neither Jew nor Greek, well we reject that, with fraternite.

1:11:25 There is neither slave nor free, well we reject that with libert. There is no male and female, well we reject that with egalite. You should think long and hard and be very careful which side you are going to choose, if you are going to choose the side of violent revolutionaries who quite nearly succeeded in burning Europe to the ground. Thankfully, this one happened to be stamped out more or less, but they kept trying. If you want to join them, reject what Galatians 3:28 tells you. If instead you want to believe what God tells you and stay a Christian and have your children be Christians and your grandchildren be Christian, then believe what God has written here. Believe the reality of the categories he has chosen, he chose them

1:12:22 because they are real things that correspond to the way he made the world. And so the option should be very clear. You can choose the spirit of the age, which I just gave you in French and English, or you can choose to follow the actual spirit, to follow God, to follow Christ. And that is the starkness of it. That is the reality of the situation. That is the gravity of the choice. It's God or Satan. Those are the two sides. And you must choose wisely. I think that there are probably a lot of people who've listened to this and may still think, well, so what? What's the application? Well, we're gonna end with 1 Timothy 5. Uh it's one that we've referred to before, and in the interest of not cherry-picking, since we just connect.

1:13:12 I'm going to read the whole paragraph just to give you the context and then we're going to focus on the end of it. Honor widows who are truly widows, but if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God. She who is truly a widow, left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day. But she who is self indulgent is dead even while she lives. Command these things as well, so that they may be without reproach. But if any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for the members of his household, he has denied the faith and

1:13:55 is worse than an unbeliever. This is a passage that I point to frequently because it flies so vehemently at odds with the notions that oh well we're all brothers, we're all neighbors, we're all just this collapsed humanity, and we all have equal rights and obligations to each other. I provided the whole context to show that most of it was referring to widows. I didn't want to make it seem like this was only talk just talking in general. I think it's worth noting that the second sentence there, but if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness. So that again points back to what we're saying about the fourth commandment. Honor your father and mother, includes your grandmother.

1:14:38 Because if grandchildren have this obligation, it's under the fourth commandment. There's no difference. It's basically living relatives. Now in the case of widowhood, they're specifically focusing on lineal descent in when that is not available due to death or whatever other reason, then the members of the church are to care for those widows. But the general application of that last two sentence or that last sentence is is universal. If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Now that's what we're talking about frequently. When you do these things that deny God's command you are denying

1:15:23 the faith. You can't say in response to Galatians 328, if even if you hear us talking about neither Jew nor Greek being soteriological If you say, I don't care, it's all about Jesus. You're denying the faith. Because wait, what are you doing? You're denying the rest of that sense. You're denying that your relatives exist. You're denying that your relatives are related to you. You're saying I'm related to everyone. I'm I'm everyone's brother. If you're everyone's brother, you're no one's brother. That is incoherent. And isn't it often interesting how often we're using that word incoherent. the readings of these passages as interpreted through the lens of of this age in the service of non-Christian goals ultimately render the text

1:16:11 itself incoherent. If God says provide for your relatives and you say relatives, what's that? my brothers are ten thousand miles away. My brothers are all over the planet. I don't have relatives. They're all my relatives. There are people who actually they won't say it quite in those terms, but I saw someone recently use the text where Jesus said Well who are my brothers and who is my mother and who are my brothers? These are who are before you are my mother and brothers. They try to use that as a denial of the flesh. They try to set those passages in opposition to passages like this, where God says you're damned if you don't cover if you don't care for your relatives, if you don't care for your flesh.

1:16:52 And the case that we made in the first episode in particular of this mini-series is that your relatives, writ large, is your race. The further you go out, the more the the less immediately related they are, but that's just the same as an extended family. You wouldn't go to a family reunion where a hundred and fifty people show up and say, Well, you know, my first cousins, yeah, you guys you guys are fine. The second cousins, those guys, I don't even know who they are. They're nothing to me. They're more distantly related, but the fact that you all showed up in the same place means that you're all family. You have a common lineage, you have a common ancestry, you have something in common that God gave you.

1:17:32 It's not a social structure, it's not some convention that man came up with. These are all God's commands and God's orders. The genealogies, God cares about those. That's not man having a fetish for trying to borrow someone else's story. That's saying, yes, when God says where you came from matters, who your father is matters, I as a Christian must believe that. And that continues beyond even the fathers whose names I might remember. When you look at a passage that says if you don't provide for your relatives, you're damned. And that's literally what it says. He has denied the faith. That is apostasy. Corey and I will increasingly are using the word apostasy to describe the denial of these things, particularly in our own church, for this

1:18:20 very reason. We're not name-calling, we're not throwing firebombs. We're illustrating what this passage in first Timothy five makes abundantly clear. You say that you're pointing to Christ and that you have faith, and then you let your grandmother go to a home where she's mistreated You don't have faith. You've denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever. If an unbeliever is going to go to hell, what is worse than an unbeliever going to receive? Because that's what you're going to receive. If you don't care for your relatives. And if you despise those who are related to you, even if the distant relation is to the point that we would call it a race versus a family or an ethnicity or some intermediate step,

1:19:04 if you think that you have license to despise the manner in which God created you and to despise your extended relatives, do you think that you will be saved on the last day? Do you think that you have an excuse in the light of First Timothy five to say, yeah, I hate those relatives. I I'm ashamed of them. They're disgusting. I want nothing to do with them. I'm not going to help them. Yeah, they're my neighbor. Yeah, they're my brother, but I d I despise them. I would rather have a brother ten thousand miles away. I like him better than these people. What is God gonna say to that? This passage makes clear what he's gonna say. The only question that we as Christians have is are we going to believe it and are we going to obey God?

1:19:43 Not to save ourselves. Like that's the problem that Protestants have all the time. You say obey God, and they're like, well, that's work salvation. You're trying to save yourself. You think you can do something to earn your salvation. No. Our salvation was earned by Christ's blood on the cross. There's nothing I can do that could possibly save me in God's eyes. There are, however, things I can do to continue to nail Christ to the cross every day with new sins that I come up with, either through deliberate malice or through apathy, or through ignorance, I continue to nail Christ to the cross with the sins that I commit in my own life, and so do you. That is not a cause for despair, is a cause to continue

1:20:22 to turn to the cross as a source of our salvation. And then when we step back from the cross and go on with our lives, by leaving, by keeping the cross in view in our lives, it doesn't mean talking all about Jesus 24-7. It means obeying God 24-7. As we've said before, God gives you 168 hours in the week, and He calls you to church once a week. He calls you to study faithfully, but not continuously. He doesn't say every waking moment and even while you sleep, I want you only ever thinking about me and not doing anything else. That is what the ascetics and the monks do, and it's a despising of what God desires. God desires that our good works and our care for our neighbor and for our brother especially, those are the categories that are most

1:21:12 important to God. Your brother first, and then your neighbor, and then everyone else. That is the three part hierarchy into which God has divided humanity. And your brother includes those who are distantly related to you. Corey is my brother because we come from the same extended family. He's not my neighbor because we don't live in the same place. But my obligations are to him not only as a brother in Christ, but as a brother according to the flesh. It is a less immediate concern than I have or obligation than I have for my own immediate family, and that is fine. There is triage that God has baked into the system when you obey him. But to say, nope, yeah, those those people in Ohio that are,

1:21:56 you know, they're living in a hazmat, you know, super fun site now, they don't have any clean water, eh Yeah. You know, I I'd rather worry about what's going on in Turkey. I'd rather pray for the Turks than I would pray for the people in Ohio. I would rather send my money overseas to people who do not worship the same god because that sounds that's more worldly. That's a better way for me to be a Christian, to n to love my brother and my neighbor according to the flesh and according to proximity who's right next door. If someone next door is suffering, or if your brother who is more distant is suffering, he is your first duty according to God. And some of that is racial because that's how God made you.

1:22:38 That's not an evil thing. It's a good thing. to deny it is when the evil enters the picture and not before. And so when we're speaking of good works, it's a useful comment from Luther. God does not need my good works, but my neighbor does. And that's really the heart of the matter when it comes to good works. And so the monks and others who hide themselves away and believe that they are worshiping God, that they are doing God's will. They simply aren't. Because God does not need your good works. Your neighbor does. So you serve God by serving your neighbor. And yes, that includes your neighbor in Ohio, who now needs clean water and many other things, and your neighbor elsewhere in your own nation. You are not serving God when you are virtue signaling by

1:23:36 sending your money and your goods overseas to people you don't even know, to people with whom you have no connection. And that is especially true when you are doing it to the neglect and harm of your actual neighbours. And that's the point of the Good Samaritan Who is my neighbor? Your neighbor is the person God has put next to you. Your neighbor is that person whose house you can see from where you're sitting if you happen to be near a window. Because neighbor literally means the person near actually means the farmer nearby, but it means the person nearby. That is your neighbor. And to rely not just on Luther will give you from Mark seven. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition

1:24:26 of men, and he said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Korban, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do. And so if you believe that you are serving God by virtue signaling, by withdrawing from the world, by doing these things for which the world will praise you, and not in fact serving your neighbor,

1:25:15 not in fact serving your relatives, not in fact serving your family, those whom God has put into your life by proximity and blood, then you are not in fact serving God. You are violating these words of Christ from Mark seven. And that is the state in which we currently find much of the world. People think that they are doing something good because they sent some hundreds of numbers of cases of water to Africa because of course your dollar goes f your dollar goes further if you're dealing with Africa or somewhere that is poor, particularly somewhere that is very poor. But you aren't, you aren't serving God. You're signaling to the world, look at me, aren't I a good person? Because it would actually be hard work if you had to

1:26:03 go and help your neighbor next door. And you don't want to do that. Much easier to do something for which the world will praise you, and Scripture's very clear about that as well. Is it really charity, if you're on the street corner, shouting your prayer to God, shouting how good you are? It isn't. Scripture is very clear. And so if you want to do good works and you should, because good works follow naturally from true faith, from living faith, then you do those by serving those whom God has given to you, by serving your actual neighbors, by serving your family, by serving the members of your own household. That is what Scripture says. That is what Christians must do. So I'd like to leave everyone today with a renewed request for you

1:26:53 to evaluate your own morality in terms of scripture. You don't have to listen to what we say. Just look to scripture for where you get your moral virtues. If as you're going through your daily life, if as you're deciding where to spend your charitable dollars or your energy or your time protesting or talking or whatever you do, if in those moments the things that you're doing earn the adulation of the world, rather than its condemnation. In these dark days, any honest Christian has to be asking himself, if the world isn't hating me for what I'm saying and doing right in this minute, am I actually sermon God? Because many of these questions are portrayed by the world as moral questions. The BLM inversion of Galatians three twenty-eight is portrayed as a

1:27:51 moral question. The same was true in the French Revolution. They were casting down monarchy and replacing it with something better. They were pursuing a moral good in their religion. If your religion is informed with a morality that comes from a source that is consistent with this world, if you can do things where the girl world is gonna say, that's beautiful, I love that, you're one of us, does that fill you with pride to know that you're welcomed arm in arm, even with those who hate Christ? Or does it fill you with dread that you have a morality that has somehow emerged in the hearts of those who are damned? How did they get on the same page as you morally? And when Corey and I talk about these things, we face great

1:28:40 personal consequences for saying these things. And if you say these things in public, you will too. If we're lying, then maybe that's what God wants. Maybe he wants to destroy those who would say things that are contrary to his word. That is the case. God was does want to see those men destroyed, and on the last day they will all be cast into fire. If we're making an argument from scripture and the world hates us, what do you do with that? Do you side with the world reflexively because they said the right mean words to us? Or do you take another look at the arguments that are being made and you look at scripture and say, well, I believe this with a clean heart, I I believe that racism was a sin,

1:29:25 that there was one race, the human race. After this was explained to me, I'm not sure what to do. We'll say again, look to your left and look to your right. Who are your allies morally? Who are those who hold the same morality as you? Because on one side are the Satanists, the Jews, the atheists, the abortionists, they're all together in lockstep on all of these questions, they know what they think about Galatians 3.28, and they all believe exactly the same thing. If you believe the same thing as those groups, or really that single group, because they're speaking with a unified voice, if you If you speak with the same voice as them, do you worship the one true God? You need to think long and hard about that.

1:30:13 How did your morality come to be in accord with the world? I want to leave you with a passage from John 16 that came up recently that's from one of the many places where Jesus prophesies about the end of the world. He talks about the last days and what's going to come to his church. It's worth spending time thinking about those things for the very reason that he's gonna give in this passage. And I'll just after I've read it, we'll I think we'll just end the episode on Jesus' words. Think long and hard about what he says. You know, dwell on our arguments for a little while, dwell in sc scripture daily and forever. If our arguments are sound because they're from scripture, do something with them that isn't gonna destroy your life.

1:30:58 Make scripture the anchor in everything that you do. Because what we're saying is that the world is trying to destroy scripture and it's destroying it verse by verse without addressing it directly. And so Christians have been disarmed. And so when these arguments are made that there's neither Jew nor Greek, we think, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. That's there's no race, that Darwin invented that. that's postmodern. That's Marxism, you know, whatever whatever label you want to stick on it. When you've allied yourself with people who are universally damned, where is your salvation then? Have you turned your back on the true faith if you're doing things that belong to a morality that didn't come from God?

1:31:38 So I'll leave you with John sixteen. I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. Amen