Transcript: Episode 0034

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

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Choir we're going to begin the first of what will be at least a three-part series on the

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Jews. As I said last week towards the end of the episode, in the next few weeks we're

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going to be getting into some stuff that will probably cross some red lines for some people,

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probably make some of you uncomfortable. The reason that we're tackling it is that that's a

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problem. The fact that someone simply saying the Jews may have made you squirm, maybe you turned

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down the volume a little bit, that's a big deal because that came from somewhere. And as Christians,

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we can't talk about our own religion without talking about the Jews. There's no way to talk

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about the history of the faith without talking about these people. The ethnicity, the religious

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beliefs, the history are all relevant to us today, both in time and in the current year. And so the

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fact that there's this sort of inherent recoiling that I think has been put in many of our hearts to

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even hear the word, you sort of flinch and think something bad is going to happen. I don't want

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to be here anymore. That's not an adult response, that that's not something that should be the case.

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And so today and over the next couple of weeks, we're going to be going through the history of

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the Jews in terms of scripture, in terms of post-scriptural history and then modern history,

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things that some of the things have happened in living memory. This first episode is going to be

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entirely focused around scripture. So we're going to begin in the garden and we're going to take it

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all the way through the end. And then, obviously, the Bible basically ends with some prophecies and

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the destruction of the temple. We're going to be talking about a few post-temple destruction

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events that are relevant to some of the points we're going to make today. But for the most part,

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this will be ending right around the second century. The episode is going to be in three

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distinct parts. They'll sort of flow into each other because we're going to do this in chronological

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order. The first part, the first third, will be basically the timeline of, you know, from Adam

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through Noah to Abraham through Moses to Jesus. When did the Jews appear? What did they do?

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How did they act? What was promised to them? What was commanded to them? How did they respond to all

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those things? That basically takes us to roughly the end of the Old Testament, which is also called

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the inter-testamental period. There are some things that happened in that timeframe from the

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conquering of the Northern Kingdom through the birth of Christ that I think some Christians who

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know a little bit know some bits and pieces. But I think we're going to put some of those details

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together in a way that will actually make sense for why we talk about things like, for example,

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the Septuagint. Why is there a Greek Old Testament? That's relevant. So the second part is going to

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be the fact that many of you would probably recognize the Hebrew language. If you saw it written,

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you see a picture, you know, yes, Hebrew. What you don't know is that that's not Hebrew. That is,

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it's an Aramaic script, and it's a language that is disconnected from the original language

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of the Israelites. And so we're going to talk about what happened in that time period and why

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it's relevant today that we have these confusions about what happened in the past.

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Because some of the claims that we're trying to disabuse in this episode are that

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when someone today says, I am a Jew and I speak Hebrew and I live in Israel,

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those are all words from the Bible. And those are therefore borrowing whatever affections we

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have as Christians for our connection to those words in the Bible. And the reason for going

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over some of the history is that there is a not only a profound discontinuity between

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what we have and what we see and what we hear today and what was happening thousands of years ago,

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but the discontinuity is the result of God's judgment against those people. And that's

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what makes it a profoundly important religious matter. This is a matter of the faith when God

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pronounces judgment upon people and they're scattered and destroyed. Every nation is to

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take that as a warning whenever there's any sort of calamity that befalls someone that should be

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taken as a warning that this is God's judgment, they did something bad, whatever it was, I should

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pay attention, I should not do the bad thing that they did. So it's important to learn from everything

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in scripture when God visits his wrath, let's make sure that doesn't happen to us too. And that

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might involve not listening to the people to whom God's wrath was poured out by the bucket load.

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So the second part will be the Interpretational Period in the fiction of the Hebrew language.

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And third part is going to specifically deal with the time of Christ in the New Testament

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as he was preaching, as he was going around in Judea and Samaria. What did he encounter and

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how did the Jews treat him? One of the overarching themes of all three of these sections is that

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we're going to be saying many things that your pastors probably are afraid to say. And in some

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cases your pastors don't know. I've had pastors who literally didn't know that Jesus wasn't speaking

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Hebrew every day. Nobody spoke Hebrew every day. It was a dead language. It was like Latin is dead

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today. It still existed in tiny corners, but it wasn't a going concern at all. That's relevant.

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And in fact, the pastors don't know is a big deal. And in particular, pastors are terrified of

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telling people the Jews killed God. Scripture makes that so clear that no one could possibly

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reach any other conclusion other than by listening to voices that do not come from Scripture.

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So last third of this is going to go through many verses that make it abundantly clear that

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the Pharisees were the leaders. The Jews were the people. The angry crowd that was continuously

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chasing Jesus around hundreds of miles are running in sandals, continuously trying to kill him.

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It wasn't the Pharisees. It was the Jews. Not all of them. There were some Jews who were faithful.

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His followers were Jews. The disciples were Jews. So again, the nax all things comes into play.

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Not all acts are like that. There were Jews in that day who believed the promise. Mary believed

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the promise of the Christ. And so when the angel came to her and said that she would be the vessel

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for that promise, she wasn't confused. She knew exactly what the angel was talking about. She

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couldn't believe it was going to be her, but she received it in faith because she was a faithful

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Christian. She was a Christian who was a Jew. And we've talked about that in the past that the

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belief in the promise from the garden is what makes one a Christian. And so we're going to end

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as we're talking about, particularly from acts and from Romans where Scripture discusses who are

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the true children of Abraham. Because that's one of the fundamental questions. Unfortunately today

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it's a political question somehow. That'll be a few trips. Are we talking about how children of

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Abraham, how could that possibly be a political live issue in the 21st century? That's why saying

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the Jews makes people nervous. Because something that should be a scriptural historical term and

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concept has political ramifications today. So today's episode is Scripture. Future episodes will

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deal with history and some politics. But we have to lay the foundation first for the subject in

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what God reveals in Scripture. So I think we'll begin at the very beginning just with

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who is a Jew in the Old Testament? I think one of the lazy things that we do is to just kind of

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assume that everybody in the Old Testament is a Jew. That's the Jewish book. And then the New

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Testament book is a Christian book. And there were some Jews who became Christians, but that was

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that transition period. And then post-New Testament, everybody's Christian. Or you're a Jew, but you

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went off in the other direction. But the key element is that the misconception that everyone

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in the Old Testament is a Jew opens the door to all sorts of errors downstream. We're not going

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to get to those errors today. We're just going to make the case that Jews came into the timeline

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by God's design at a certain time for a certain purpose. And prior to that, there were no Jews.

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Adam was not a Jew. I think one of the tricky things about that is that Adam is a Hebrew word.

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And so we're just sort of intellectually lazy. And we think, well, if the name was Hebrew,

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that must make him a Jew, right? They're Adam's today who are Jews. Many are not because it's

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the oldest name we have. When you start making these small errors, they don't seem to have any

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consequence at the moment, but they will accumulate over time. And that's the recurring theme on

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Stone Choir. These small errors are doors that are being opened to make big errors later.

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So as we go through this, we're going to pick seemingly small things, but they're all going

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to point in the same direction to say, this man was a Jew. This man was not a Jew. Here's what the

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Jews were doing and why all those things matter. When you mention that the name is in Hebrew,

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it brings to mind a favorite argument that I've seen primarily from leftists, Marxists,

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and others like that. But you'll see it on posters and things that rally sometimes for them,

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because they like to appeal to Scripture, even though they don't believe in it. That should

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bring a certain meme to mind for certain people. But they'll argue there are no white people in

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Scripture, which of course just betrays a staggering ignorance of Scripture, because Japheth is the

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father of all of Europe. Obviously, then he was white. There were Romans in Scripture,

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there are Greeks in Scripture. It's a complete nonsense argument. It just betrays

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stunning ignorance of Scripture. And that's what we're dealing with when it comes to pastors and

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many others who will say, well, no, all these people, they were Jews. Adam was not a Jew.

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Noah was not a Jew. Abraham was not a Jew. You don't have any Jews in Scripture

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until you get to Judah, because that is how you derive the term Jew is from the tribe of Judah.

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That's where that comes from and from Judean. So the modern term in English anyway,

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enters basically through Latin, the term for the people living in Palestine,

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as the Romans renamed it, who were living in Palestine at the time that Rome controlled the area.

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And it wasn't even a term that they used for themselves. They didn't call themselves Jews.

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It was just shorthand because the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed. You had these people in the

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South in Judah, so they got called Jews by their conquerors. It wasn't half, it was a slur, but

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it was just, it was a term applied to a group of people that was alien to the people naming them.

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They didn't care, like, oh, yeah, those are the Jews down there in Judea.

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Exactly. And there are some who will argue that the etymology for Hebrew, which is the

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term they would have used before that, and still, of course, do use for themselves and for their

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language, which will get into the language more. That's derived either from Eber, which can have,

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of course, that initial H sound in the Greek, Hebrew, or it is derived from an older term from,

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I can't remember which language it was now. I think it was related to a handful of languages

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in the area, so it's not necessarily just one, but it means across the river, or one who lives

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across the river. And so it was just a term of place, essentially, also a person's name,

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obviously, Eber being the son of Shullah, son of Arpakshad, son of Shem, Shem being the ultimate

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father after Noah, of course, after Adam, after Noah, of the line from which Christ came.

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And so the people who would become known as Jews, at least a part of them would become

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known as Jews, because as was said, the northern kingdom was destroyed. The Assyrian captivity

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of the northern kingdom took those 10 tribes, and yes, there's some fuzz there, some gray area when

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it comes to the numbering of the tribes, how many tribes exactly were in the south, how many were

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in the north, because you have 10 in the north, but then you have Judah, Benjamin, and Levi in the

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south. That aside, the Assyrian captivity is what took the northern kingdom and destroyed it.

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The people of the northern kingdom were destroyed, because how the Assyrians destroyed a conquered

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people was they would take some of those out of the conquered territory, move them elsewhere in their

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empire, and then take people from elsewhere in the empire and move them into the conquered territory.

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So in other words, what they did was they used interbreeding, interracial relationships as a

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means of destruction of a nation. And that's exactly what they did to the northern kingdom.

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So the northern kingdom was completely and utterly destroyed, which of course,

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is the beginning of an argument against so-called Christian Zionism,

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and many other, well, heretical theologies that have sprung up more recently. You can't have a

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restoration of the 12 tribes, because 10 of them no longer exist.

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They were destroyed by the Assyrians, as opposed to the southern kingdom, the kingdom of Judah,

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which was taken into partial captivity by the Babylonians, but the Babylonians did not

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destroy their conquered peoples in the same way the Assyrians did. So the southern kingdom was

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not destroyed. That would become the Judeans. That would be the people who were living in the area

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when the Romans came and conquered them. Those are the people who would come to be called Jews.

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And so early on in Scripture, all of these men are not Jews. Jews don't exist in the earliest

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parts of Scripture. There are no Jews in Genesis, unless you're talking just about names, in which

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case, yes, you have obviously the genealogies. But if your pastor is telling you that Abraham was a

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Jew, your pastor is just wrong. He needs to go back and read Scripture.

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The first occurrence in both the Septuagint and the Masoretic text for the Old Testament

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of the word Hebrew is in Genesis 39, when Potiphar's wife describes Joseph as the Hebrew slave.

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So that was several generations removed from Abraham. That's not Jew, but it's the first

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instance of Hebrew. There is one instance it's worth noting in Genesis 13, where when Abram

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has not yet received the name Abraham from God, the text, the Masoretic text, that is the Hebrew

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text, that is much newer, incidentally, than the Septuagint, even though it's technically written

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to Hebrew, and we'll get to that later. In Genesis 13, the Masoretic text does refer to,

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maybe it's Genesis 14, I think it's 1413, refers to Abram as the Hebrew. Interestingly,

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in the Septuagint, the word Hebrew does not appear. That word was added in the Hebrew text,

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which is notable, I think, because while we're not going to get into the disputation between

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the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, it is important to acknowledge that there are a few

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places where the Masoretic text is demonstrably corrupted. The most prominent example is

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the prophecy in Isaiah of the Virgin giving birth. That has changed in what we call the

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Hebrew Bible today to a young girl. Septuagint doesn't have that error, and if you remember

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from our genealogy episode, that's a particularly interesting one because we actually have evidence

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from post-Babel expansion of humanity in all different directions. People who were never

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part of any of this story had the story of a virgin birth of a God. That is something that is

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a widespread story, a myth, a legend that exists in far-flung places like Vietnam,

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well separated from any contact with anyone who would have known what was going on in the

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days of Abraham, or Isaiah for that matter, because Isaiah was fairly late. It's crucially

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important to note that we know from outside of Scripture that some notion of a virgin-born God

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was a prophecy that was given prior to Isaiah, and it was shared among believers,

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and then corrupted among unbelievers. We can know with absolute certainty as Christians that

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when the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text, that we are told to believe is older,

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says young girl instead of virgin, it's not correct. I think it's worth acknowledging that the word

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Hebrew does occur one time in Abrams day, but I just found this a couple hours ago. I haven't

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had a chance to really dig into it too much. Based on what I know of a couple of the other heirs,

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it's my assumption as I go digging into that, that that was probably added in the 2nd, 3rd,

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4th, 5th, 6th century AD. It was added well after by Jews who had been expelled from Jerusalem,

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who hated the Christians, and were beginning to concoct this story that Hebrews are eternal.

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Noah was Hebrew. Noah was a Jew. No, Abraham wasn't a Jew. It was his grandson who was named Israel

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by God. That's the other term that comes up that's very important. Basically, you have

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Jew, you have Hebrew, and you have Israel, or Israelite, all more or less used interchangeably at

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different places and different times. Sometimes they mean the same thing. Sometimes they don't.

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Sometimes they mean different things. When God wrestles with Jacob and then names him Israel,

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that's the very first time that that word was used. It was given to him by God as a new name,

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and that name was carried by his descendants. That's very important. It's from God. No Christian

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would ever besmirch that in the slightest, but as we'll get to it in the last part,

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what does that mean? What does it mean to be a child of Abraham, to be a child of the covenant?

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When we get into some of the later texts in the New Testament, pointing back to the Old Testament,

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it makes it very clear, it means those who have faith, that it is not a genetic lineage,

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it is a lineage of faith. As we discussed in the election episode, which is very much

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a part of this episode, please go back and listen to that. If you haven't listened to it in the

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last couple of months, it is key to understanding this episode, because one of the other terms

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that gets thrown around a lot is chosen. You hear of the Jews called God's chosen people.

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It's a word that God uses. God says, I chose these people. Many times that's how it's referred to,

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the Israelites are referred to. Chosen and elect are synonyms. This is something that we've

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completely lost sight of today. When God says, I chose you, that's literally saying, I elected you.

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In the election episode, we explain in detail that election is not a new doctrine that Calvin

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came up with. Most people think that election or predestination, that's that Calvinist stuff.

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In Lutherans, we call what Calvinists hold double predestination, where God elected some to be saved

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and God elected others to be damned. We believe that Scripture doesn't say that. Scripture says

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that God elected some to be saved, and that God desires that all men be saved, and that God

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sacrificed on the cross was for all men. Those men who are damned are damned of their own volition.

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They choose to remain evil. They reject God. Those who are elect do not reject God.

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We spent a couple hours dealing with, how does that make sense? Because it sounds irrational.

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Frankly, it is irrational. You can't make a reasonable case for predestination that doesn't

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sound crazy. We do it there as best we can. It makes sense if you believe Scripture. What you

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can't believe is your own reason. The important thing to carry away is that whenever you hear

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someone saying, particularly in the Old Testament, these people were the chosen people of God,

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they were elect. That applied not only to the lineal descendants of Abraham, because remember

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Jonah, who was a Jewish prophet, was sent by God to go to Nineveh, which was one of the greatest of

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the Gentile cities. It was one of the largest cities on the planet at the time. Jonah wouldn't go

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because he knew they would believe and they would repent and they would become children of God.

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God said, the people of Nineveh are elect. Go to them and proclaim my word. Jonah was like,

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no, if I go, they'll believe me and they'll repent. I don't want that because they're not Jews.

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The whole story of Jonah is about him refusing to go to people who weren't Jews because

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he didn't want to give them the gospel. God elected them. Jonah disobeyed. God won because

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that's how election works. God doesn't lose. He doesn't lose any of us. These terms like

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Jew, chosen, Israelite, Hebrew, it's important to understand which term you're using and why

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and where it's coming from etymologically because sometimes they do serve different purposes.

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And for those who are maybe not particularly familiar with these source texts, the Masoretic

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text is from roughly the earliest, would be the 6th century, and that's AD, not BC, notably.

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It wasn't completed until the 9th or the 10th century. That is, say, as opposed to the Septuagint,

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which is from, I think the earliest copies we have are the 3rd century BC.

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So there's a significant difference in age between these two manuscript sources.

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Notably, of course, the Masoretic text also has the so-called Star of David all over it.

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We see that in many of the copies of things that we have related to that line of sources.

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We'll get into that perhaps, perhaps not in this episode, but soon enough.

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That'll be for the next episode.

23:32.880 --> 23:38.480
That's what I figured. That symbol does date back before that. I think the earliest

23:39.760 --> 23:46.480
instance of that in a religious context is the 3rd or the 4th century, again AD, not BC, but at any

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rate. So it is arguably the more reliable text is the Greek text, and that is the text the church

23:56.080 --> 24:01.280
has used for a very long time until modern translation started using the Masoretic.

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I think it's important. We're not going to get into textual criticism or anything today, but

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when people are hearing these things, one of the most common responses internally in someone's

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mind will probably be to have their confidence undermined and, well, is my Bible really the

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word of God? I think that the more manuscripts we get access to, the more clear it is how much

24:30.640 --> 24:37.200
God has preserved his word through the millennia. There's very few differences between the Masoretic

24:37.200 --> 24:42.960
text and the Septuagint in Greek. There's very little difference between all the various manuscripts

24:42.960 --> 24:49.280
in Greek. They're overwhelmingly almost identical. The changes are typically small and

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incidental. Oftentimes, it's clear that they're just copyist errors. Occasionally, you will have

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things that were in the margin that then got migrated where someone had made a note to himself,

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and someone said, well, that sounds good, and ended up inserting it into the text.

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So the reason it's important, I don't want anyone who's hearing us talk about these two

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different textual sources to think, oh no, my Bible is wrong. You're reading your Bible in

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English. It's far removed from these languages. It's translated by men, for the most part. We're

25:20.720 --> 25:27.680
doing the best they could. Every translation today has some problems. That's okay. It's not going to

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destroy your faith. God has preserved his word for thousands of years. He will continue to do so.

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Yes, we should seek to have the most reliable books of the Bible that we can get our hands on.

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We should seek to have faithful translations. When errors are discovered,

25:42.160 --> 25:47.200
we should figure out why and how, and we should get rid of them. But none of these conversations

25:47.200 --> 25:52.720
should ever be an excuse for you to think, oh man, I just, I can't trust any of this now. I don't

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know what's going on. I don't have confidence. God has preserved his word. He preserved it in

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the Maseritic text, even in spite of the interference of the post-Christian Jews who

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were rabidly against the Christians. They still preserved almost all the text completely intact.

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So when there are variations, that should not be a source to think, oh no, something terrible has

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gone wrong. In a few cases, like yeah, it's clear why this change was made. It's almost never the

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case otherwise. So please don't conclude from listening to this episode. I need to get rid of

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my Bible and get a different one. I have to learn about this or I'm not going to have confidence.

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That's not the case. Whatever Bible you have, God is going to use for your edification.

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If you want to learn more about this stuff, there's plenty to learn and study and dig into it.

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And to be enriched, I think that's the important part, is that learning about these variations

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is enriching. It doesn't undermine faith because the more you look at the different copies,

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the more you realize how much they're on the same page, which is miraculous. The only way that this

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stuff could have been preserved across thousands of examples, across millennia, is if God was

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intervening in time and space with the copies, with the manuscripts, with the papyri. Only God

27:10.240 --> 27:14.400
could have done this. So even when we find things like, that doesn't seem quite right. Doesn't mean

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God didn't do this stuff. It just means that when humans are involved, we have to pay attention.

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That's why this podcast exists because humans are involved. We have to pay attention to stuff. So

27:24.240 --> 27:30.080
please do not lose confidence in whatever Bible you have, because that is God's word given to you

27:30.080 --> 27:36.640
for your edification. I personally primarily make use of the ESV. That's, I have, most of my

27:36.640 --> 27:42.880
Bibles are ESV. I have, I don't even know how many Bibles at this point, but that is in the

27:42.880 --> 27:48.240
Old Testament primarily relying on the Masoretic. I have no problem trusting the text of the ESV.

27:48.880 --> 27:52.160
Yes, there are some little problems here and there. They play some games with a couple words,

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but I'm not worried about it. It is still God's word. It is still reliable.

27:58.320 --> 28:07.200
And to give listeners an idea of the sort of differences between the Greek source documents

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we use for translating the Scriptures, one of the more famous examples is the announcement of the

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angels to the shepherds. In some of the manuscripts, there's an iota missing, literally the smallest

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letter in Greek. It's just a scribal error. It was dropped. It changes the meaning in terms of nuance,

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but it does not change the meaning in terms of content. It basically shifts from the angels

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announcing peace on earth and goodwill toward men to peace on earth and goodwill toward men on whom

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God's favor rests. It's a minor thing and obviously again, smallest letter in Greek, scribal error.

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That's the sort of thing you're seeing when you see disagreements between the manuscripts. These are

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not big disagreements. They're usually relatively minor things. So again, yes, your Bible in English

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or whatever language you're reading it in is reliable. You can rely on that. Yes, it's helpful to

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have some resort to the underlying languages, but you don't even actually have to know them in this

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day and age because you can go and find websites online where you can click on a word in a verse

29:21.040 --> 29:25.200
and it will tell you exactly what it means in the underlying language so you can verify for yourself.

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If something you read, you have questions, talk to your pastor, talk to someone who understands it,

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or find one of these sites and do the study on your own. There is a wealth of information and

29:38.960 --> 29:44.400
tools at our disposal today that would have made scholars in the past incredibly envious.

29:45.520 --> 29:52.000
So on the subject of language, as we mentioned, as I'm sure you all know, the Northern Kingdom

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of Israel was conquered in 722 BC by the Assyrians. As Corey mentioned, when the Assyrians conquered

29:58.800 --> 30:05.840
them, they used the importation of foreigners to basically impose race mixing to wipe out

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those tribes, and the result was the Samaritans, which is why in scripture we are all familiar with

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the notions that the Samaritans were treated as filthy, as less than, as half-breeds,

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because they had been Israelites, they had been Hebrews at one point, but then when the Assyrians

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forcibly mixed them with other races, they ceased to have the Israelite bloodline and the Jews of

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the first century found that disgusting. They had always been disgusted by them. The Samaritans

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and the Jews had disliked each other for many centuries to that point. The Samaritans were

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created by having been conquered. What's important about the conquering is that

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the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans

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intern each conquering them, by the way, all judgment from God. When you get conquered five

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times in almost as many centuries by disparate people who are crushing you, that's a bad sign.

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God has turned his back on you. Scripture makes that clear. There was a sea of

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prophets coming to them, calling them to repent for their wickedness, that had led

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to the destruction of the two kingdoms in the first place. One of the things that occurred under

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the Syrian and then Persian rule is that the original Hebrew language in which

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Moses had written the Torah, when God transcribed the Torah for Moses and he wrote it down,

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he used what is today called Proto-Hebrew. The Proto-Hebrew alphabet is similar to hieroglyphs.

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They think it's probably derived. It's downstream. It's not pictograms, but it's similar in that vein

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of simple geometric shapes and some symbols, but it's a fairly primitive language. Today,

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it's called Proto-Hebrew because what replaced it just gets called Hebrew. That's one of the first

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big things that's really important to learn in this episode is that, as I said earlier,

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what you see today when you think, oh yeah, that's Hebrew, it isn't. It is an alphabet that was

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imposed. It's the Aramaic alphabet. They're related, but it's related through the Persian

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conquest. It has no relation whatsoever to the language of Moses. I think that's important

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just as a fact. You don't need to derive any particular theological inclusion from it,

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but simply as a fact, when Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets,

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it was not in what we call Hebrew today. In fact, I think if it's not the Shoah,

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it will definitely include the image. Charlton Heston's Ten Commandments movie,

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the poster with him holding the Ten Commandments, actually has Proto-Hebrew on it. It has the

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Proto-Hebrew alphabet. They got that detail right. If they were to remake that today,

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they would never do that. They would use the fake Hebrew script that's actually Aramaic today.

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They came from Persia. Why? Because we think that there's a direct continuity between

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Abraham and Moses and Jesus and us. Languages go through those evolutions. I was just looking

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earlier today at Middle English and Old English just to see, for example, could I comprehend

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something that was 1,000, 1,200 years old Middle English? I can read most of it. Some of the

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vocabulary is strange. There are a few symbols, a few letters that have been transposed into

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other letters today, but it's intelligible for the most part. That's still English,

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and that's something that's from 7, 800 years ago. You go back to Old English that's over 1,000 years

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old. I can't read it. I can pick out a few words if I know how to phonetically describe them.

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I can maybe guess at what some of them are, but although it's called Old English,

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as an English speaker, it's not accessible to me. This happens all the time in language. It's not

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inherently that something is up, something is sneaky for the Hebrew of today, what is called

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modern Hebrew, to not match what existed in the first century or what existed 500 years before

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Christ. It is important because I think almost everyone thinks that's not the case. We think

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that we have this ancient stuff and that the scripted, square, almost calligraphic letters

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that you know is the Hebrew language, you think that that's what Moses was reading and writing,

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and probably what Adam was reading. Obviously, Adam was a Jew, too. Well, no. The first Jew was

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Jacob, maybe. If you want to say all the Israelites are Jews, I don't care. We'll talk about some of

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the history of the terminology in the next episode, but the important part is that there's a fundamental

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discontinuity. When they were conquered and they had their alphabet replaced, they had their language

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replaced, the Hebrew language was lost. It was completely lost in the Northern Kingdom.

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Interestingly, the Samaritan alphabet is basically the proto-Hebraic alphabet. It preserves many of

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those same symbols. It looks very similar. It's completely disconnected from what is modern Hebrew

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or Aramaic. If you look at Old Hebrew or Proto-Hebrew or whichever term you want to use for it,

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it looks very similar to Phoenician. If you have seen Phoenician lettering before somewhere,

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museum or whatnot, you know exactly what Old Hebrew looked like. They are both derived from

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Proto-Sanaitic, which was even older than that. That looks very similar. It's missing some letters,

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but as was mentioned, modern Hebrew is not what scripture, it's not the language in which

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scripture was written. It's not the text, the alphabet in which scripture was written, because

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this is actually an alphabet that was written in Old Hebrew, which actually, another thing to which

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you could compare it if you know Runic, it looks much more similar to Runic than say modern Hebrew

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slash Aramaic or modern English Latin lettering. But Hebrew itself, the language,

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was basically dead by the time of Christ. It was still used to some degree in what would be

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considered today perhaps academic circles. So you would have had some handful of priests in

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Jerusalem who could still read this language. They didn't use the language, they didn't speak the

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language. Maybe they read the language aloud at certain services on a high holy days. They would

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have had someone there to translate it into Aramaic for the common people, because the common people

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did not know any Hebrew. So at least they had more decency than the medieval Roman church,

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which didn't even bother to translate from Latin. But you can think of it in that same sort of light.

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In the medieval era, you had church services being conducted in Latin. The common people

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did not know Latin anymore. Some of the educated class knew Latin, so it's not directly comparable,

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because you did have Europeans who still knew Latin, who still learned Latin, the sons of

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noble houses and such. But the common people did not know what was going on in the church service,

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because it was conducted in Latin, and they did not translate it into the vernacular.

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You had a similar thing happening around the the switchover, as it were, from BC to AD,

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where Hebrew was no longer understood by the common people. They spoke Aramaic because they

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had been conquered a number of times by Aramaic speaking peoples, and so they had used Aramaic

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in order to deal with their new neighbors, as it were, to handle trade. All of these various

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things were conducted in Aramaic, and so they lost their language over time. That's what happens

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if you stop using your language, you lose your language. And when they were conquered by Alexander

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around 330 BC, they began to speak Greek. They're probably speaking of some before that. But

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if you look at the original languages of the Apocrypha, the books that were written in the

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inter-testamental period after Malachi and before Matthew, none of them are written Hebrew,

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none of them are written Aramaic. They're written in Greek. The Septuagint was translated around

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250 BC. Now, this was in part because I believe it was Tommy II had requested that the laws of the

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Hebrews be translated so that they were accessible, but it was also because the people needed it.

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There were certainly some Aramaic texts of scripture that were available to them,

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but increasingly, there were people who were Jews ethnically who in some cases may not have

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spoken Aramaic either. The translation of scripture in the Septuagint into Greek was also for

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accessibility. And so by the first century, when Jesus was born and the disciples were alive and

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were writing and speaking, they were, as Cory said, virtually none of them would have been

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conversant in Hebrew at all because it would have been no point for someone to be speaking Hebrew

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would be identical to someone today speaking maybe Latin or Old English. It's a dead language

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that isn't used at all. So it's a party trick. Maybe you can have an interesting conversation

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where you teach someone something, but you can't converse. It's not a language of commerce.

39:55.280 --> 40:00.720
The languages that were used were Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, and that's reflected at Christ's

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crucifixion. In John 19, Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. He read Jesus

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of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. Maybe the Jews read this inscription for the place where Jesus

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was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic and Latin and in Greek. It was not

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written incidentally in Hebrew because there would have been no point. It wasn't that they ran out of

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room. It was if they put Hebrew above Christ's head, no one would have been able to read it.

40:29.440 --> 40:34.960
That's a big deal. It's a small detail. I don't think it's some huge profound insight,

40:35.520 --> 40:40.480
but oh, by the way, did you know that no one who is speaking Hebrew in Jesus' day? Most people

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probably don't know that. Please go look this stuff up. I can tell you, you can spend hours

40:45.040 --> 40:52.000
just on Wikipedia going through the various articles about the language of Jesus on Aramaic,

40:52.000 --> 40:58.640
on proto-Hebrew. Go do some reading and go do some wiki-holing where you dig down and dig through.

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You will find some places where some of the articles disagree, usually around some of these

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sensitive areas that we're talking about directly. Where they disagree, I would give the benefit

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of the doubt to the version that's less friendly to the modern narrative. To the idea, everyone from

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Adam to Jesus just spoke Hebrew and wrote in Hebrew because that was the universal language?

41:22.800 --> 41:28.880
No. These Semitic languages were basically a dead end. They're pretty primitive languages. They're

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not remotely sophisticated. It's something like Greek or Latin. Almost nothing is really downstream

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from them. They ran their course and then the civilizations went away and the languages went

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away. There was nothing that they contributed to later. That's not the case with the languages

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we're speaking today. English has had tributaries from many other languages.

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Their language is the winners. Hebrew is not a language of the winners. It's a language of

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the conquered and of the losers. It's worth putting special emphasis on the term that was

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actually on the cross, what Pilate actually put on the cross, and that was Jesus Nazareno

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Yudaiorum. That last word, Yudaiorum, is Judeans. That's the word from which we get

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Jews, as previously mentioned, in English. We ultimately derive it from the Latin.

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It's a demon name, basically. It is a term related to the people of a particular place.

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That's how the Romans named. That's how the Romans named everyone they encountered,

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was according to the land where they found them. That's where we get this term.

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The word Jew isn't even in Scripture in the original languages. That's the term that we use

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in English because in Scripture, it's Judean. As we mentioned the history, these are some of the

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tribes descended from Israel. On the subject of terms, I think it's important to note that

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this is one of the key places, particularly in Scripture and in conversation, where

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Hebrew ceases to mean the same thing. The key example for this is John 19-17.

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In the ESV, it says, and he went out, bearing his own cross to the place called the place of the

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skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. Now, if you're a King James reader, you know that is,

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he bearing his cross went forth into the place called the place of the skull, which is called

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in Hebrew Golgotha. Now, one of those is wrong because Hebrew and Aramaic are two different

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languages. I think it's notable that in many of the cases in Scripture in the New Testament,

43:46.320 --> 43:52.960
when Jesus is quoted, when he says things like Abba Father or Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabaqfani,

43:52.960 --> 43:59.440
he's speaking Aramaic. Growing up, no one ever taught me why. I thought, wow, why did he slip

43:59.440 --> 44:04.800
into some other language? Jesus, he's a Jew. Why is this Hebrew guy talking Aramaic all of a

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sudden? Did he speak Aramaic when he got excited? No, he was always speaking Aramaic to those around

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him. These things were recorded, and God through the Holy Spirit recorded these in the actual words

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that Jesus spoke because there were the words he was speaking all the time, but they weren't

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translated even today. So we hear Abba, and we hear Eloi instead of the translated word from the

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Aramaic. The reason that the King James gets this wrong, and yes, sorry guys, if you're a King James

44:36.960 --> 44:42.720
only, unless it gets a lot of things wrong, they're not hugely impactful. They did the best they could.

44:42.720 --> 44:46.800
If they had had more manuscripts, they would have translated a different Bible than the one they

44:46.800 --> 44:52.320
translated. It's useful. I think it's out of disuse. That's a conversation for another day.

44:53.600 --> 45:01.440
The important thing is, if you look in Greek in John 1917, the word that King James translates

45:01.440 --> 45:10.080
in Hebrew is hebreist. The problem here is that Hebrew means one of two things. Either Hebrew

45:10.080 --> 45:15.440
language means the Hebrew language, as you would say, the English language. When I say English

45:15.440 --> 45:21.840
language, you know that I don't mean an Englishman. See, that's the distinction. It could be the

45:21.840 --> 45:29.120
language of the Hebrew people, isn't the language of the English people, or it could be the specific

45:29.120 --> 45:37.920
language. Now, the distinction is that in Judah, in Judea, they were the Hebrew people, and so

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whatever language they were speaking in Judea was the Hebrew language because they were the Hebrew

45:43.680 --> 45:50.240
people. I hope I'm making this clear, but the Hebrew language of the Judean people was Aramaic.

45:51.200 --> 45:55.440
When it says the Hebrew language, it doesn't mean they were speaking Hebrew. It means the Hebrews

45:55.440 --> 46:02.560
were speaking their language, which was Aramaic. This is something that Josephus, who was the famous

46:02.560 --> 46:08.640
historian from the 1st century AD, he said himself, he was a Jew. He was well connected. He was well

46:08.640 --> 46:15.280
favored. He is viewed by Jews today as a traitor. For 1900 years, they wouldn't translate anything he

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had said because they were so angry at him for siding with the Romans. Josephus differentiated

46:23.360 --> 46:28.880
Hebrew from his language in that of the 1st century Israel. He refers to Hebrew words as belonging to

46:28.880 --> 46:35.440
the Hebrew tongue, but refers to Aramaic words as belonging to our tongue, or our language, or the

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language of our country. In Josephus, the Hebrew, the Jew of the 1st century, refers to his language

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in the possessive. He always refers to Aramaic. He never refers to Hebrew as in the Hebrew that

46:50.560 --> 46:56.000
was spoken by Moses, or the Hebrew that was spoken in 800 BC because nobody spoke it anymore.

46:56.000 --> 47:00.560
He was very well educated. He may have known it, perhaps, because he was so well educated,

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but again, it would have been an academic exercise and not a social one.

47:06.320 --> 47:12.800
This is also borne out as we find texts, for example, from the Kumran Caves and other places.

47:12.800 --> 47:21.360
When we find texts, if it's using what we see today as what we call the Hebrew alphabet,

47:21.360 --> 47:27.120
it's always written in Aramaic. There's nothing written in Hebrew in what we call the Hebrew

47:27.120 --> 47:31.840
language or the Hebrew alphabet today. I realize some of this is probably getting confusing because

47:31.840 --> 47:36.320
that's the point of discussing it. The same word is used in different contexts, I mean different

47:36.320 --> 47:43.040
things. While that's not necessarily duplicitous, it's very easy to get lazy or to get sloppy and

47:43.040 --> 47:48.400
then to make errors. The downstream have serious problems because when you look in a place like

47:48.400 --> 47:53.920
the Kumran Cave and you don't find much, if any, Hebrew, there's a little bit in there,

47:53.920 --> 47:58.080
but I think it's some of the newer stuff. It's important because this was an archive.

47:59.760 --> 48:03.920
I think today when we think, oh, well, you found something in one language and something in another

48:03.920 --> 48:08.800
language, you probably have hundreds of books in your homes. Most people listening easily have

48:08.800 --> 48:13.600
many dozens, probably hundreds of books in your home. The threshold for writing something down

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today for putting something on paper is basically zero. I have probably 800 books in my house.

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A lot of them are crap. They were things that didn't need to be put down on paper.

48:23.920 --> 48:29.760
That wasn't the case 2000 years ago. It was so incredibly expensive to record anything

48:29.760 --> 48:34.720
that for something to be written down, whether on parchment or on papyrus,

48:34.720 --> 48:39.040
meant that it was profoundly important. The preponderance of the evidence when you're looking

48:39.040 --> 48:44.320
at whatever is written tells you about the languages that they spoke. If no one was speaking

48:44.320 --> 48:48.640
what we call Hebrew, then you're not going to find much, if any of it. That's what we find.

48:48.640 --> 48:53.200
We find Aramaic in some of the other languages. We do not find what is called Hebrew today.

48:53.840 --> 48:59.200
And it seems like this is somewhat confusing, perhaps, but we really have the same thing in

48:59.200 --> 49:07.120
English. Typically, a German will speak German. Exact same noun used in two very different ways.

49:08.960 --> 49:17.520
The English speak English. However, Americans speak English. And perhaps one of the best examples

49:18.640 --> 49:24.800
Belgians who live in Belgium don't speak Belgian. They speak Dutch, French, and German.

49:26.800 --> 49:33.040
So just because a term has multiple different meanings doesn't mean that the meanings are

49:33.040 --> 49:37.680
identical. It doesn't mean the term is always used in the same way. And Scripture also doesn't

49:37.680 --> 49:44.240
always record the language of the original interactions. So it is worth noting Christ's

49:44.240 --> 49:51.680
new Greek. He probably used Greek a lot in his ministry, because do remember he was ministering

49:52.560 --> 50:00.800
at times in the vicinity of Greek-speaking cities. He would probably have used Greek

50:00.800 --> 50:05.280
to speak to those people because many of them probably were not particularly good at Aramaic.

50:06.400 --> 50:11.280
They were, in some cases, Greeks who had moved from Greece to these Greek colonies,

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or had moved to Roman colonies. Perhaps they were from somewhere else in the Roman Empire,

50:17.920 --> 50:22.400
but the language of everyday life in the Roman Empire at that time was Greek.

50:23.440 --> 50:30.880
Yes, that seems confusing as well, but the Romans used Greek because some of the peoples they had

50:30.880 --> 50:36.960
conquered, in particular the Greeks, spoke Greek. It was an easy language to use for everyday

50:36.960 --> 50:41.280
interactions, for commerce, and all the things you need to run everyday life in an empire.

50:42.000 --> 50:46.880
Latin was still the language of the empire at the higher level, so in the Senate, the laws,

50:46.880 --> 50:53.680
and things like that. But they spoke Greek, and so Christ, again, would also have used Greek.

50:56.000 --> 50:59.600
And this is something that's made very clear in the New Testament itself,

50:59.600 --> 51:04.880
as we all know New Testament quotes the Old Testament over and over and over again.

51:04.880 --> 51:09.680
You can find numerous web pages that show all the connections of direct quotes of the New

51:09.680 --> 51:15.120
Testament quoting the Old Testament. The reason that's important is that many, I think perhaps

51:15.120 --> 51:18.480
the majority, you can correct me if I'm wrong, if you know off the top of your head, but I think the

51:18.480 --> 51:23.760
majority of the quotes of the Old Testament and the New Testament quote the Septuagint,

51:23.760 --> 51:27.680
they quote the Greek. Now, it's not that it's two different Bibles, it's just that there are

51:27.680 --> 51:31.680
different ways of phrasing things and perhaps different word order that would be preserved

51:31.680 --> 51:39.440
differently in Aramaic or Hebrew versus Greek. And so we know that the writers of the New Testament,

51:39.440 --> 51:45.680
that the men who are recorded as speaking spoke Greek because they quote scripture in Greek.

51:45.680 --> 51:51.680
They frequently quote the Septuagint, not exclusively, which is important. As we said earlier,

51:51.680 --> 51:57.040
I don't reject one over the other because scripture doesn't, so I'm not going to do something that

51:57.040 --> 52:03.600
God didn't do. But it's important to know that Greek is frequently used as the reference of the

52:03.600 --> 52:08.880
Old Testament in the New. That is substantial, that's important. And it's something that you don't

52:08.880 --> 52:13.760
hear very much unless you actually get into these fiddly arguments about which one is better.

52:13.760 --> 52:18.800
We're not trying to make the argument for which one is better. Personally, I wish that Hebrew no

52:18.800 --> 52:23.440
longer existed. I think it's doing more harm than good. It's not an argument I'm going to make here.

52:23.440 --> 52:29.760
It's simply important to note that Greek is what Jesus spoke. It's what Paul spoke. They all spoke

52:29.760 --> 52:33.680
it. They spoke other languages too. They're not like the average American. They could hold more

52:33.680 --> 52:39.040
than one language in their head. And they did so on a daily basis. And so when scripture quotes

52:39.040 --> 52:44.640
scripture from the New to the Old, it frequently quotes scripture, God, in Greek.

52:47.600 --> 52:52.480
For the percentage of quotes that come from the Septuagint versus other translations,

52:52.480 --> 52:57.680
it would depend on whether you're counting direct or also indirect. And indirect starts to get

52:57.680 --> 53:03.360
difficult because there are a lot of those. I believe the standard number as it were for

53:03.360 --> 53:12.320
direct quotations from the Old Testament is 283. And 170 of those are essentially from the

53:12.320 --> 53:19.680
Septuagint. So 60%. So yes, the majority of the quotations that are direct quotations

53:19.680 --> 53:23.040
from the Old Testament in the New Testament are from the Greek.

53:25.120 --> 53:32.080
But just to emphasize what I said about scripture not always recording the original language in

53:32.080 --> 53:38.800
which something took place, in what language did Moses interact with Pharaoh? Scripture doesn't

53:38.800 --> 53:45.680
tell us. It was probably Egyptian because he was educated in Pharaoh's household. He spoke Egyptian.

53:45.680 --> 53:51.760
It would have made sense for him to deal in the language of the Egyptian court when he was dealing

53:51.760 --> 53:58.480
with the Egyptian court. Scripture doesn't tell us that. But from context, we can of course infer

53:58.480 --> 54:04.880
that as a reasonable conclusion. Another thing that we can infer as a reasonable conclusion

54:06.640 --> 54:10.880
from the New Testament, from what it actually tells us when it does tell us the language of

54:10.880 --> 54:17.440
the original, when Christ is speaking Aramaic in the cases where he is in Scripture, we are told

54:17.440 --> 54:24.080
specifically that this was an Aramaic. Well, that implies he was not always using Aramaic. He may

54:24.080 --> 54:30.400
have been using Greek more than Aramaic, in fact, because it is specifically noted when he used Aramaic.

54:31.920 --> 54:35.840
Now, you don't have to necessarily draw that conclusion. I'm not saying this is a tenet of

54:35.840 --> 54:40.640
the faith and you absolutely have to believe Christ spent most of his time speaking Coina

54:40.640 --> 54:47.280
Greek. I'm not saying that. But it is a reasonable inference to draw from what Scripture does tell

54:47.280 --> 54:54.800
us. We know that he would have used Greek. He lived in an area that spoke Greek. He lived around

54:54.800 --> 55:00.640
people who spoke Greek. He dealt with people who spoke Greek. He undoubtedly used Greek.

55:00.640 --> 55:04.480
In the last point to hammer home is that the reason that was happening is that nobody spoke Hebrew.

55:05.200 --> 55:11.360
Nobody spoke Hebrew. It may have been done ceremonially in the temple, that's likely. It

55:11.360 --> 55:15.840
may be that a few of the educated men, including probably Christ himself because he was educated

55:15.840 --> 55:24.880
in the temple, would have been able to read the original Hebrew language, actual Hebrew alphabet

55:24.880 --> 55:31.680
scrolls. But they had to be translated because apart from the few experts, nobody else knew it.

55:32.400 --> 55:40.240
And yes, this is a small point. This isn't earth shattering. But it's really interesting that most

55:40.240 --> 55:46.640
people don't know this. Because again, you see what's called the Hebrew language smacked on

55:46.640 --> 55:50.880
everything today. And it's like, oh, that's the Bible language. That's the language of Jesus.

55:50.880 --> 55:54.960
That's what we automatically think. I thought that until a couple of years ago when I learned

55:54.960 --> 55:59.760
about this, what's going on? Why didn't someone just tell me the truth? What's the difference

55:59.760 --> 56:05.680
between the true version and the made up version? Well, there are things downstream from the made

56:05.680 --> 56:11.280
up version that turned out not to be very good for Christians. I'll be in future episodes. But

56:11.280 --> 56:16.720
we're just making the case today that just know for a fact that Jesus was not running around

56:16.720 --> 56:22.240
talking Hebrew because no one would have understood it. The Hebrews didn't speak Hebrew.

56:22.240 --> 56:28.800
They were still Hebrew. They were still descended from Abraham, which is one of the last things that

56:28.800 --> 56:34.800
we're going to get into here today. We're going to conclude this just by reading a number of passages

56:34.800 --> 56:41.200
from the New Testament that specifically refute the claim that's very often made. It usually flares

56:41.200 --> 56:47.840
up around Easter during Holy Week. Usually by Good Friday, there have been think pieces and people

56:47.840 --> 56:54.880
fretting, saying it's so anti-Semitic for people to say that the Jews killed Christ. The Romans

56:54.880 --> 57:01.840
killed Christ. Our sins killed Christ. Anything killed Christ except for the Jews. It is true.

57:02.480 --> 57:07.760
Your sins killed Christ. My sins killed Christ. Jesus died on the cross for our sins.

57:08.880 --> 57:15.120
Saying how that happened does not diminish the soteriological aspect of it. There's no point

57:15.120 --> 57:21.440
in making any argument about the facts that try to defend soteriology against men who don't dispute

57:21.440 --> 57:26.160
the soteriology. We know how we are saved, and we know why we need to be saved. We need to be

57:26.160 --> 57:32.080
saved from our own sin. God did that on the cross. God's sacrifice on the cross was for us,

57:32.080 --> 57:39.520
and it was our sins that caused it. Our sins are the ultimate cause. The penultimate cause

57:40.640 --> 57:46.880
was the Jews. The Jews who had been trying to kill Christ for three and a half years

57:46.880 --> 57:53.200
finally succeeded, and then the proximate cause was the Romans. Of course, it was Pilate. Jesus

57:53.200 --> 57:59.600
suffered under Pontius Pilate. That's his epitaph for eternity in the creeds. Talk about the legacy.

58:00.320 --> 58:05.120
The guy shows up briefly in history, and he's known as the man who scourges the Son of God,

58:06.000 --> 58:13.840
and yet his actions are less egregious than what the Jews did. I can say that because that's

58:13.840 --> 58:19.280
literally what Jesus says. He says that those who turn me over to you have the greater sin.

58:21.440 --> 58:27.200
When God says that, we don't get to disagree. When there are the hysterics around who killed

58:27.200 --> 58:32.000
Jesus, it is not lying. It's not lying to say that the Romans killed Christ. They crucified him. Why?

58:32.000 --> 58:36.560
Because they were the only ones with the legal authority to do so. The Jews had been trying to

58:36.560 --> 58:40.960
murder Christ for years. They had been trying to stone him anything they could do to kill him.

58:40.960 --> 58:46.800
They finally got their ducks in a row politically and coerced Herod and Pontius Pilate into doing

58:46.800 --> 58:50.640
it for them, not because they wouldn't have done it themselves, but because they didn't have the

58:50.640 --> 58:57.760
legal authority to do it. Obviously, Jesus was incarnate for her sins. It's not dismissing or

58:57.760 --> 59:02.960
minimizing or taking anything away from the fact that we are the reason that Christ had to die on

59:02.960 --> 59:08.880
the cross for us. It still matters who did it. The reason we're doing these episodes is that

59:09.760 --> 59:18.160
Christians have been put in this box where we're not allowed to speak as God speaks. Why? Because

59:18.160 --> 59:23.520
the Jews. To say the Jews, again, as I said at the very beginning, makes people frightened,

59:23.520 --> 59:27.920
makes them nervous and scared. They don't know what's going to happen next, but they know it's

59:27.920 --> 59:33.520
not going to be good. That is not the Christian response to anything. We should be fearless and

59:33.600 --> 59:39.680
we should be confident in our God and in the truth, especially the truth as it's found in Scripture.

59:40.560 --> 59:45.120
These next passages we're going to look at are specifically all the cases. They were just cherry

59:45.120 --> 59:50.960
picking some of the myriad passages in the New Testament where it explicitly says that it was

59:50.960 --> 59:55.840
the Jews who were trying to kill Christ because when they ultimately succeeded in killing Christ,

59:56.480 --> 01:00:01.840
mission accomplished. You cannot possibly look at all these passages and then get to the crucifixion

01:00:01.920 --> 01:00:06.800
and think, wow, I can't believe the Romans did that just out of nowhere. It would be laughable.

01:00:06.800 --> 01:00:11.440
No Christian reading the Bible would ever reach that conclusion, and yet so many Christians and

01:00:11.440 --> 01:00:17.200
pastors reached that conclusion today. I've heard things that we're going to read here refuted from

01:00:17.200 --> 01:00:24.000
pulpits where pastors are afraid to attribute to the Jews, to the crowd, to the masses,

01:00:24.640 --> 01:00:31.040
to the group that which Scripture attributes to them. One of the first ones is the very

01:00:31.040 --> 01:00:37.440
beginning of Matthew at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Interestingly, this is actually started,

01:00:37.440 --> 01:00:42.480
this is prior to his ministry. The very first time the Jew tried to kill him was Herod the Great.

01:00:43.440 --> 01:00:48.800
As soon as he was born and the news came, Herod the Great, who was a ruler, but he was also a Jew,

01:00:49.360 --> 01:00:53.360
said, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, rise, take this child and his

01:00:53.360 --> 01:00:57.760
mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you. For Herod the Great is about to search

01:00:57.760 --> 01:01:04.800
for the child to destroy him. So literally Jesus' entire life on earth was bookended by Jews trying

01:01:04.800 --> 01:01:10.640
to kill him. I think that's important because one of the conversations that frequently comes up

01:01:10.640 --> 01:01:15.920
is to try to shift the emphasis to the political. In Herod's case, he was undoubtedly political.

01:01:15.920 --> 01:01:20.640
All he knew was that someone was saying maybe some prophecy had been fulfilled and maybe some

01:01:20.640 --> 01:01:26.080
Messiah or something is happening. He knew the prophecies. He just didn't want any competition.

01:01:26.080 --> 01:01:31.600
He didn't want uprisings. He'd had enough of that. And so easy thing was to go kill a few babies.

01:01:32.880 --> 01:01:37.680
Later on, when the Jews are chasing Jesus around trying to stone him repeatedly,

01:01:38.400 --> 01:01:44.080
it's not for political reasons. It's for blasphemy. It's for when he says he's the Son of God.

01:01:44.080 --> 01:01:49.680
That's when they try to kill him. And so when we finally get to the crucifixion on Good Friday,

01:01:49.680 --> 01:01:55.360
and everyone wants to line up and say it was the Pharisees who were entirely responsible

01:01:55.360 --> 01:01:59.440
and it was because they were jealous of the power, it doesn't bear out when you actually

01:01:59.440 --> 01:02:03.840
look at the verses that lead up to that for three and a half years that say the complete opposite.

01:02:04.480 --> 01:02:09.280
Now, of course, that is not to deny that the Pharisees did in fact seek to destroy him.

01:02:09.280 --> 01:02:15.040
The point is that when pastors and others try to minimize the participation of the people,

01:02:15.920 --> 01:02:21.120
they are perverting scripture. And so this next one does say that the Pharisees were seeking to

01:02:21.120 --> 01:02:27.520
destroy him, Matthew 12 14, but the Pharisees went out and conspired against him how to destroy him.

01:02:29.040 --> 01:02:33.600
We should note the context of this because this is what often happens in the pages of scripture.

01:02:34.320 --> 01:02:39.680
Christ performs a miracle and then the Jews seek to kill him because of the miracle,

01:02:40.640 --> 01:02:47.920
or some extraneous matter related to the miracle. In this case, it is when Christ healed the man

01:02:47.920 --> 01:02:53.360
with the withered hand, well, he healed him on the Sabbath. And so the Pharisees decided that that was

01:02:53.920 --> 01:03:00.880
prohibited by scripture related to the keeping of the Sabbath, the third commandment,

01:03:01.760 --> 01:03:05.440
and so they conspired to kill him. Of course, they had other reasons as well,

01:03:06.160 --> 01:03:13.680
but Christ very clearly explained it is permissible to do good on the Sabbath. The point of the Sabbath

01:03:13.680 --> 01:03:19.120
is not to sit on your couch and stare at the ceiling. That's not what it means to keep the Sabbath,

01:03:19.120 --> 01:03:25.120
but that is a discussion for another time. The same thing played out when Jesus healed the blind man

01:03:25.760 --> 01:03:31.040
and told him to go and wash his eyes. And when the people saw that he was healed,

01:03:31.040 --> 01:03:35.840
they became very upset. And there was a long scene there where they interrogate his parents,

01:03:35.840 --> 01:03:43.040
they interrogate all the witnesses, and they're angry that Jesus had healed a blind man on the Sabbath.

01:03:43.280 --> 01:03:49.840
It infuriated them. And that's a particularly interesting one because in, I think it's Isaiah

01:03:49.840 --> 01:03:58.880
37 and Isaiah 42, healing the blind is one of the prophecies of God, one of the prophecies pointing

01:03:58.880 --> 01:04:08.320
to the Messiah. And when the scene erupts where Jesus healed the blind man and people are exclaiming,

01:04:08.320 --> 01:04:12.320
one of them says, this has never happened in the history of the world. So it wasn't that there had

01:04:12.320 --> 01:04:16.960
been other prophets in the past who had healed the blind. There had been other healings, but

01:04:17.600 --> 01:04:23.360
Jesus was the first to ever heal the blind. And that's profoundly important because it's a fulfillment

01:04:23.360 --> 01:04:31.920
of a messianic prophecy. And yet, what was the concern of the Jews? Not that the messianic

01:04:31.920 --> 01:04:38.000
prophecy had been fulfilled before their eyes. Not that a miracle had occurred, but that some guy

01:04:38.000 --> 01:04:44.480
broke the rules, broke their rules as they interpreted them, which is crucial because

01:04:44.480 --> 01:04:48.160
their interpretations of the Sabbath, as Jesus makes clear in those passages,

01:04:48.800 --> 01:04:54.960
is not scriptural, is not a godly interpretation. Jesus says, if your ox falls in a ditch on the

01:04:54.960 --> 01:04:58.240
Sabbath, or you're not going to get it out, someone falls in a well, you're not going to get

01:04:58.240 --> 01:05:04.320
him out. Of course you are. Their definition of work was nonsense. And so Jesus demonstrates

01:05:05.120 --> 01:05:12.400
through acting justly and in a godly fashion, the hypocrisy and the evil of the Jews who became

01:05:12.400 --> 01:05:17.280
incensed at this miracle, at this blessing for a man who had been blind from birth.

01:05:17.280 --> 01:05:22.160
That was one of the questions they, who sinned, this man or his parents? And when the man was healed,

01:05:23.040 --> 01:05:28.560
suddenly they don't care about the trick question, now they care about the gotcha question.

01:05:28.560 --> 01:05:32.880
Because all that they ever wanted to do was to trip him up to destroy him.

01:05:34.400 --> 01:05:37.600
I don't think that any other people on the planet would have acted this way.

01:05:38.160 --> 01:05:43.040
If Jesus had come to the Japanese, or to the Germans, or to the Ugandans,

01:05:43.040 --> 01:05:47.280
and started performing miracles and healing them, I don't think anyone else had murdered him.

01:05:47.920 --> 01:05:51.440
I think part of the reason that Jesus was born a Jew among Jews

01:05:51.440 --> 01:05:55.600
was that no one else would behave in this way. That's speculative. Maybe I'm being unfair,

01:05:55.600 --> 01:06:00.960
but I sincerely believe it. I don't think anyone else who shows up and can heal the blind and the

01:06:00.960 --> 01:06:07.760
deaf and the lame is going to be murdered by people. For what? For fulfilling prophecy.

01:06:07.760 --> 01:06:11.920
Like they were told that these things would happen, and when they did, they became enraged.

01:06:11.920 --> 01:06:16.240
And in fact, they frequently said, you have a demon. One of the common refrains,

01:06:16.240 --> 01:06:21.360
I think it was in John, of the crowds of Jews to scream at Jesus as you have a demon. How could

01:06:21.440 --> 01:06:28.240
you say this? I think it's very profound in exemplifying the spiritual nature of the people

01:06:28.240 --> 01:06:32.960
to whom he was going. Now, obviously, it wasn't all of them. There were followers, there were

01:06:32.960 --> 01:06:38.720
disciples who were Jews, just like the others. The difference was that they believed. They believed

01:06:38.720 --> 01:06:42.720
in the promise of the Messiah, and when they saw the promises fulfilled, they rejoiced.

01:06:43.520 --> 01:06:48.800
That's the difference. It's not that all Jews are bad, or that all Jews are saved,

01:06:48.800 --> 01:06:53.840
is that when the promise of Scripture is fulfilled in Christ, those with faith,

01:06:53.840 --> 01:06:57.360
those who are elect, will receive it with gladness, and the rest will shout,

01:06:57.360 --> 01:07:01.360
he has a demon and try to kill him. And we see that sort of energy to this day.

01:07:01.920 --> 01:07:05.360
And yes, that is the same sort of accusation we see today.

01:07:06.240 --> 01:07:13.600
Freud did not get the idea of projection from nowhere. This is something that the Jews and

01:07:13.600 --> 01:07:21.440
Satan have been doing for a very long time. It is to accuse the enemy of exactly what you

01:07:21.440 --> 01:07:27.120
yourself are doing. This is Alinsky again as well, because all of this has the same father.

01:07:28.480 --> 01:07:35.120
And so that is why the Jews are flinging the accusation of you have a demon at Christ. Well,

01:07:35.120 --> 01:07:41.680
no, because the demon is on the other side, Satan's on the other side. Look at how many times

01:07:42.320 --> 01:07:49.680
Christ had to cast out demons during his ministry. There was a very real and active and

01:07:49.680 --> 01:07:56.240
widespread problem with possession and demon oppression in this part of the world at this time.

01:07:57.200 --> 01:08:01.520
And that's why they fling the accusation at Christ. Of course, it's also an insult they

01:08:01.520 --> 01:08:06.160
like to fling at the Samaritans, which is why at one point they accuse him of being a Samaritan

01:08:06.160 --> 01:08:10.000
and having a demon. Now, there are other overtones there as well. They're trying to

01:08:10.080 --> 01:08:14.640
gin up an excuse to murder him, because a Samaritan was not allowed to be where he was

01:08:14.640 --> 01:08:19.840
located in the temple at the time. But that accusation of having a demon,

01:08:21.200 --> 01:08:24.560
we see that all down through history. We see it here in the pages of scripture,

01:08:24.560 --> 01:08:30.720
and we see it today on social media and elsewhere. But the next reading we have

01:08:31.440 --> 01:08:38.560
is one of the most famous or infamous, of course. And that's the crowd in Pilate's courtyard.

01:08:38.560 --> 01:08:40.000
I'll just read the whole section.

01:09:09.440 --> 01:09:16.560
Now, the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.

01:09:17.280 --> 01:09:21.680
The governor again said to them, Which of the two do you want me to release for you?

01:09:21.680 --> 01:09:27.200
And they said, Barabbas, Pilate said to them, Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called

01:09:27.200 --> 01:09:33.520
Christ? They all said, Let him be crucified. And he said, Why, what evil has he done?

01:09:34.080 --> 01:09:37.040
But they shouted all the more. Let him be crucified.

01:09:40.160 --> 01:09:44.960
It is not just the Pharisees. It is not just the leaders of the Jews

01:09:44.960 --> 01:09:49.040
who scream for Christ to be crucified. And we'll read another section

01:09:49.040 --> 01:09:55.840
that adds more to this as well. It is the Jews themselves. It is the crowd that screams for

01:09:55.920 --> 01:09:58.720
Barabbas for the murderer over Christ.

01:10:02.080 --> 01:10:07.120
That cannot be avoided. And we are not permitted to minimize that. That is what Scripture says.

01:10:07.120 --> 01:10:12.800
That is what we are required to believe. You don't subtract from Scripture. You don't add

01:10:12.800 --> 01:10:17.600
to Scripture. Revelation is very clear about the warning for those who would do either of those

01:10:17.600 --> 01:10:26.080
things. And it is worth especially noting Pilate tries repeatedly to free Christ.

01:10:27.280 --> 01:10:33.760
Pilate asked multiple times why they want to kill Christ. He picks Barabbas as the option.

01:10:34.400 --> 01:10:39.120
Because do note that Pilate is the one who selects Barabbas. Pilate doesn't just select a prisoner

01:10:39.120 --> 01:10:44.800
at random. He doesn't say, Would you like me to free any prisoner? He says, Would you like this

01:10:44.800 --> 01:10:49.040
murderous rebel who is probably going to go out and murder someone the same day he's released?

01:10:50.320 --> 01:10:56.640
Or do you want Christ? He stacks the deck as much as he possibly can to try to free Christ.

01:10:58.160 --> 01:11:01.920
The crowd will have none of it. The crowd wants his blood.

01:11:03.280 --> 01:11:08.240
And I think that's the chief reason that we focus so much on pastors and teachers because

01:11:08.880 --> 01:11:12.560
the crowd was doing what they had been taught. But the crowd did it.

01:11:13.280 --> 01:11:19.520
The Pharisees and the high priests absolutely ginned up hatred against Christ. Just as we see

01:11:19.520 --> 01:11:26.880
today, we see church leaders on our own J ginning up hatred against men, seeking their murder.

01:11:27.680 --> 01:11:31.600
And people go along with it. People will happily go along with it. Because you know what? When your

01:11:31.600 --> 01:11:36.800
church leader stands up and said, This man is a Nazi. He needs to be thrown out and destroyed.

01:11:36.800 --> 01:11:42.720
He needs to be killed. Who's going to argue? Nobody likes that. And so it's very easy for the

01:11:42.720 --> 01:11:48.800
crowd to go along. God doesn't care what your station is. Whether you are the leader or you are

01:11:48.800 --> 01:11:55.360
someone at the very bottom in the crowd, just a nameless face. If your voice speaks in opposition

01:11:55.360 --> 01:11:59.440
to that, which is godly, you are guilty of the same murder as everyone else.

01:11:59.440 --> 01:12:04.400
In John 5, it's written,

01:12:04.720 --> 01:12:08.080
The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him.

01:12:08.080 --> 01:12:13.360
And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.

01:12:13.360 --> 01:12:17.680
But Jesus answered them, My father is working until now and I am working.

01:12:17.680 --> 01:12:21.680
This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only

01:12:21.680 --> 01:12:27.040
breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.

01:12:27.520 --> 01:12:30.400
And at the beginning of John 7, it says,

01:12:30.400 --> 01:12:35.200
After this, Jesus went about to Galilee. He would not go into Judea because the Jews were

01:12:35.200 --> 01:12:38.720
seeking to kill him. And then later in John 7, he says,

01:12:39.040 --> 01:12:43.920
Has not Moses given you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?

01:12:44.560 --> 01:12:48.960
The crowd answered, You have a demon. Who is seeking to kill you? The Pharisees heard the

01:12:48.960 --> 01:12:53.440
crowd muttering these things about him. And the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to

01:12:53.440 --> 01:13:00.560
arrest him. I think that's an interesting passage, because it was the crowd that wanted Jesus dead.

01:13:00.560 --> 01:13:04.400
And it was the Pharisees and the chief priests who responded to the demand.

01:13:05.040 --> 01:13:09.440
See, we're always told that, Oh, it was a chief priest that were the gang leaders.

01:13:10.000 --> 01:13:14.880
It was a team effort, because the chief priests and the Pharisees, they had their own agenda.

01:13:15.440 --> 01:13:22.080
And it was a wicked one, but they often followed the lead of the crowd. The crowd of what? The

01:13:22.080 --> 01:13:29.040
crowd of Jews. Not every Jew, because obviously when Jesus went around in Galilee, he was with

01:13:29.040 --> 01:13:34.160
Jews. He was with his disciples. They were Jews. It wasn't all of them, but it was a small minority

01:13:34.400 --> 01:13:40.480
who were faithful. The rest were either confused or they were murderous. And the confused he'd

01:13:40.480 --> 01:13:45.200
preached to and the murderous he typically fled. He would go to a place and speak for a little while,

01:13:45.200 --> 01:13:49.760
and then he would disappear because they were trying to murder him continuously for three years.

01:13:50.320 --> 01:13:54.880
I mean, it's like a Benny Hill skit where you have like three times speed, and somebody just

01:13:54.880 --> 01:13:59.440
running back and forth across the screen, and you have the crowd chasing and waving pitchforks

01:13:59.440 --> 01:14:03.920
and torches. That was basically Jesus' ministry. You would go and do something miraculous and

01:14:03.920 --> 01:14:08.000
preach something wonderful, and then everyone tried to murder him. And he had to flee with

01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:13.600
a few followers he had that you could trust not to try to murder him. That was his entire life

01:14:14.160 --> 01:14:21.040
as Jesus, the minister to his people. And for three and a half years, he did that. And finally,

01:14:21.040 --> 01:14:28.560
God permitted them to fulfill their murderous goal, because it was also God's goal, their evil,

01:14:28.560 --> 01:14:35.360
what they meant for evil. God intended for good. God used the evil of the Jews. He used the cowardice

01:14:35.360 --> 01:14:40.480
of Pilate, who knew that he was doing something wrong, but he didn't want to take the political

01:14:40.480 --> 01:14:46.480
risk. So he stacked the deck and then let the chips fall where they may. God used all of those

01:14:46.480 --> 01:14:52.800
failings to pour out the punishment for our sins on Jesus on the cross. All this was done for our

01:14:52.800 --> 01:14:56.800
benefit. And that doesn't change the fact that all of it was evil when it was happening.

01:14:57.760 --> 01:15:06.960
To add to the narrative of the Jews in Pilate's courtyard, Pilate at least twice in this narrative

01:15:06.960 --> 01:15:13.120
says that he will punish Christ and then release him. He is attempting to appease the Jews by

01:15:13.120 --> 01:15:19.040
punishing Christ, but attempting not to have this innocent man's blood on his hands. And yes,

01:15:19.040 --> 01:15:25.360
he does wash his hands of the matter by releasing Christ, and so from Luke 23.

01:15:26.080 --> 01:15:30.240
When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean, and when he learned that he belonged

01:15:30.240 --> 01:15:34.960
to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him over to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time.

01:15:35.520 --> 01:15:40.800
When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he had heard

01:15:40.800 --> 01:15:46.080
about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him. So he questioned him at some length,

01:15:46.080 --> 01:15:51.680
but he made no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stood by vehemently accusing him,

01:15:51.680 --> 01:15:55.680
and Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him. Then,

01:15:55.680 --> 01:16:00.800
arraying him in splendid clothing, he sent him back to Pilate. And Herod and Pilate became friends

01:16:00.800 --> 01:16:04.800
with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other.

01:16:05.760 --> 01:16:09.200
Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers of the people,

01:16:09.200 --> 01:16:14.000
and said to them, You brought me this man as one who was misleading the people,

01:16:14.000 --> 01:16:18.960
and after examining him before you, behold, I do not find this man guilty of any of your

01:16:18.960 --> 01:16:25.440
charges against him. Neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Look, nothing deserving death

01:16:25.440 --> 01:16:32.320
has been done by him. I will therefore punish and release him. So again, you see in this narrative,

01:16:32.320 --> 01:16:38.800
Pilate is attempting to do anything he can. To not kill Christ, to not have to deal with this issue,

01:16:38.800 --> 01:16:41.840
he sends him over to Herod, hoping that Herod will be able to deal with it.

01:16:42.400 --> 01:16:48.640
And so Christ stands before a Jewish ruler, accused by the Jews standing by. And so they treat

01:16:48.640 --> 01:16:54.320
him shamefully and send him back, after mocking him, send him back to Pilate. Pilate again tries to

01:16:55.600 --> 01:16:59.600
not have to crucify Christ. He says, I will punish the man and then release him.

01:17:01.040 --> 01:17:05.440
And then to continue reading, but they all cried out together, away with this man,

01:17:05.440 --> 01:17:09.760
and released to us Barabbas, a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection

01:17:09.760 --> 01:17:15.120
started in the city and for murder. Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release

01:17:15.120 --> 01:17:21.520
Jesus. But they kept shouting, crucify, crucify him. A third time he said to them,

01:17:21.520 --> 01:17:27.520
why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death. I will therefore punish

01:17:27.520 --> 01:17:33.040
and release him. But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified,

01:17:33.040 --> 01:17:38.880
and their voices prevailed. So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the

01:17:38.880 --> 01:17:43.600
man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, for whom they asked, but he delivered

01:17:43.600 --> 01:17:52.800
Jesus over to their will. Scripture is very clear again. It says that Pilate desires to release

01:17:52.800 --> 01:18:01.360
Jesus. But the crowd, the Jews, want him crucified. And more than that, because of course we have,

01:18:01.360 --> 01:18:08.560
from Matthew in Matthew 27, and all the people answered, his blood be on us and on our children.

01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:15.440
That is in response to Pilate saying, I am innocent of this man's blood, see to it yourselves.

01:18:17.040 --> 01:18:24.880
The Jews call down a generational curse for Christ's blood on themselves, on themselves and on their

01:18:24.880 --> 01:18:32.720
children. That is what Scripture says. So Christians are not, again, Christians are not permitted

01:18:33.280 --> 01:18:40.480
to minimize what Scripture says about the guilt and the evil of the Jews. That does not mean they

01:18:40.480 --> 01:18:46.080
can't be Christian, because of course they can repent. Even crucifying Christ isn't the unforgivable

01:18:46.240 --> 01:18:55.520
sin. However, being impenitent is unforgivable. And the Jews, by and large, are impenitent.

01:18:56.560 --> 01:19:00.960
Ask them today. You will see, even just go on social media and search for it.

01:19:02.160 --> 01:19:05.680
There are many of them who will say, if Christ came back, we'd crucify Him again.

01:19:08.320 --> 01:19:11.360
To this day, they are proud of what they did in Pilate's courtyard.

01:19:11.840 --> 01:19:15.920
Now, again, that does not apply to those who have repented, who have converted, who have

01:19:15.920 --> 01:19:21.200
ceased to be Jews and become Christians, because that in this case is what it takes. You have

01:19:21.200 --> 01:19:29.680
to cease to be a Jew, to be a Christian. But many of them are proud of what their ancestors did.

01:19:29.680 --> 01:19:35.200
That's the generational curse, his blood on those in that courtyard and on their children.

01:19:35.440 --> 01:19:42.480
That is the word of God. That is what Scripture says. That is what Christians are required to

01:19:42.480 --> 01:19:50.720
believe. And it's, of course, the most ironic blasphemy imaginable, because we too pray for

01:19:50.720 --> 01:19:55.360
Christ's blood to be upon us, upon our children. But from the complete opposite direction,

01:19:55.920 --> 01:20:02.960
we wish to receive the forgiveness of sins found in that blood. They had nothing but contempt for

01:20:03.040 --> 01:20:08.560
it, and they have nothing but contempt for it to this day. So the blood of Christ is upon everyone,

01:20:09.360 --> 01:20:13.440
but it doesn't mean the same thing. When the blood of Christ is upon the elect,

01:20:13.440 --> 01:20:18.880
it is for their salvation. When the blood of Christ is upon those who despise Him,

01:20:18.880 --> 01:20:25.200
it is for their eternal damnation, which is tragic. And I think that we'll get into it in

01:20:25.200 --> 01:20:30.400
a future episode, but I think it's worth noting that today you have the Zionists and you have the

01:20:30.400 --> 01:20:36.720
John Haggis and even the Pope himself in the 60s effectively saying, we don't need to evangelize the

01:20:36.720 --> 01:20:43.520
Jews or just find the way they are. Not only is that blasphemy, not only is it absolutely false

01:20:43.520 --> 01:20:50.400
doctrine, but it's the worst possible thing for the Jews. If you hate Jews, then yeah,

01:20:50.400 --> 01:20:55.440
leave them alone. Don't tell them about God. If you hate Jews and want to seem burning in

01:20:55.520 --> 01:21:01.840
eternity, then just let them be because that's the track that they're on. The only loving thing that

01:21:01.840 --> 01:21:07.920
can be possibly done for this group of people is to bring the gospel to them, something incidentally

01:21:07.920 --> 01:21:15.840
is illegal in Israel. You'll be deported if you try to do that. And that spirit is exemplified

01:21:15.840 --> 01:21:20.400
after Christ's crucifixion. I think it's important. Like we said, part of the reason we're talking about

01:21:20.400 --> 01:21:24.560
this particular thing is that there are many pastors who are afraid to say this stuff from the

01:21:24.560 --> 01:21:31.120
pulpit or in Bible study. They want to hem and haw and try to deflect blame from the crowd of Jews

01:21:31.120 --> 01:21:36.960
to the small group of people. Listen to the preaching of Peter in Acts 3. While he clung

01:21:36.960 --> 01:21:40.720
to Peter and John and all the people, utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico

01:21:40.720 --> 01:21:46.720
called Solomon's. And when Peter saw he addressed the people, men of Israel, why do you wonder at

01:21:46.720 --> 01:21:51.840
this? Or why do you stare at us? As though by our own power or piety, we have made him walk,

01:21:51.840 --> 01:21:56.640
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers glorified

01:21:56.640 --> 01:22:02.320
his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had

01:22:02.320 --> 01:22:08.000
decided to release him. But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murder to be

01:22:08.000 --> 01:22:14.000
granted to you. And you killed the author of life whom God raised from the dead. To this we are

01:22:14.000 --> 01:22:19.760
witnesses. And his name by faith in his name has made this man strong whom you see and know.

01:22:19.760 --> 01:22:24.320
And the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you

01:22:24.320 --> 01:22:30.000
all. And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance as did also your rulers. But what

01:22:30.000 --> 01:22:35.440
God foretold by the bough of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled,

01:22:35.440 --> 01:22:40.960
repent therefore and turn back. This is everything that Cori and I just said.

01:22:42.240 --> 01:22:47.360
Peter, as soon as he gets us some preaches, he doesn't say it was the Pharisees that did it. He

01:22:47.360 --> 01:22:52.560
doesn't say your rulers are bad that you're all right. He says, men of Israel, you murdered God.

01:22:54.640 --> 01:23:02.160
And he also offers forgiveness. He says, I know that you acted in ignorance as did also your rulers.

01:23:02.160 --> 01:23:06.800
As Cori just said, it wasn't the unforgivable sin. Even murdering God on the cross was not

01:23:06.800 --> 01:23:13.040
unforgivable. And yet they continue to by and large to persist in their evil. That is what

01:23:13.040 --> 01:23:18.800
the law and the gospel are for. You must deliver to a lot of those who are impenitent in their sins.

01:23:20.000 --> 01:23:25.840
Peter was looking at this crowd of Jews and saying, you murdered Christ. You must repent of this.

01:23:26.720 --> 01:23:33.120
He wasn't begging them, but that was it. You murdered Christ. What possibly could be more

01:23:33.120 --> 01:23:38.880
horrific to a believer than to hear that. And that's precisely why he told them. When we have

01:23:38.880 --> 01:23:43.440
pastors today and we have leaders and we have teachers who are afraid to say that, what happens

01:23:43.440 --> 01:23:48.320
to the Christian faith when we become so ashamed of it that we have to hide it in a corner and we

01:23:48.320 --> 01:23:54.400
can't proclaim it in its fullness as scripture itself proclaims it. We don't get a vote on this

01:23:54.400 --> 01:23:59.520
stuff. We don't get to say it was the Pharisees. It wasn't the crowds. We don't get to just blame

01:23:59.520 --> 01:24:03.440
the crowds either because there are numerous passages to say that the Pharisees, the rulers,

01:24:03.440 --> 01:24:10.560
the high priests conspired off on their own. Everyone was guilty and everyone had the opportunity

01:24:10.560 --> 01:24:17.440
to be forgiven. God says it. We have to say it. We have to say it about the Jews and we have to

01:24:17.440 --> 01:24:22.160
say it about the Jews today. And the fact that today when you say the Jews, people get really

01:24:22.160 --> 01:24:27.280
nervous and suddenly pastors have to get up in the pulpit. I've actually heard pastors change the

01:24:27.280 --> 01:24:33.840
text to avoid saying the Jews. They will say the Pharisees or some other thing to deflect blame

01:24:33.840 --> 01:24:38.880
to that one little outgroup, to blame the leaders, to blame the president of the Senate.

01:24:38.880 --> 01:24:44.160
It's not that guy. It's everyone who's listening. It's everyone who's following evil that is equally

01:24:44.160 --> 01:24:49.680
evil. You don't get an out because you're not senior. The only out is forgiveness through

01:24:49.680 --> 01:24:56.720
repentance. In case anyone thinks that we are going beyond the bounds of the evidence as it were,

01:24:57.440 --> 01:25:03.520
in our comments about what the Jews believe today, I will read for you in English translation.

01:25:04.480 --> 01:25:08.800
A prayer from the Talmud, this one is from the Jerusalem version instead of the Babylonian,

01:25:08.800 --> 01:25:14.240
but they are nearly identical. The Jews traditionally pray three times per day.

01:25:15.280 --> 01:25:19.200
This is the Burqat Haminim. And here is the prayer in English.

01:25:20.000 --> 01:25:24.720
For the apostates let there be no hope and uproot the kingdom of arrogance,

01:25:24.720 --> 01:25:30.880
speedily and in our days. May the Nazarenes and the sectarians perish as in a moment.

01:25:30.880 --> 01:25:35.280
Let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be written together with the righteous.

01:25:35.280 --> 01:25:37.760
You are praised, O Lord, who subdues the arrogant.

01:25:39.760 --> 01:25:43.440
You are a Nazarene, if you're a Christian. That's what that means.

01:25:44.880 --> 01:25:51.920
Traditionally, and still today, Jews pray three times per day, cursing you specifically because

01:25:52.000 --> 01:25:56.480
you are a Christian. That is something they've been doing for centuries.

01:25:57.360 --> 01:26:03.040
That is something, again, they still do today. This was something they hid for a very long time.

01:26:03.920 --> 01:26:09.280
But then, I believe it was originally a German academic who got a hold of a copy

01:26:09.280 --> 01:26:13.760
of some of these documents and started translating them. And as the Talmud has been translated,

01:26:13.760 --> 01:26:18.720
we've found more and worse things. And I'm sure at some point we will go over the Talmud in greater

01:26:18.720 --> 01:26:29.600
depth. But this is the mindset of modern Jews. They hate Christians. And incidentally, when

01:26:29.600 --> 01:26:35.280
they're talking about apostates, they are cursing Jews who have converted to Christianity.

01:26:35.840 --> 01:26:44.080
They hold a particular hatred for Jews who convert. But they hate Christians. And they pray and curse

01:26:44.080 --> 01:26:49.680
you multiple times per day. Now, of course, they are not praying to the Lord God because those

01:26:49.680 --> 01:26:54.800
who do not have the Son do not have the Father. And they reject the Son, so they are not praying

01:26:54.800 --> 01:26:59.600
to God the Father. That is an important point. There are many pastors and others who will say,

01:26:59.600 --> 01:27:05.360
well, no, the Jews worship God. They just don't worship Him correctly. No. Scripture says that

01:27:05.360 --> 01:27:10.960
those who do not have the Son do not have the Father. The Jews do not worship the Lord God.

01:27:10.960 --> 01:27:16.160
They do not worship the Father. They do not worship the Trinity. They are not in any way,

01:27:16.160 --> 01:27:25.520
shape or form, related to Christians or Christianity. They are vile pagans. And they pray to curse you

01:27:25.520 --> 01:27:29.760
three times per day, at least. There are other prayers they say that are daily prayers that

01:27:29.760 --> 01:27:37.200
also call down curses. That is the reality of the situation. Yes, exactly. Their prayers are to

01:27:37.200 --> 01:27:43.760
Satan. They are praying to Satan to curse you. There are so many pastors and leaders and others

01:27:43.760 --> 01:27:49.440
who are afraid to say these things. But this is the reality. This is exactly what their own

01:27:49.440 --> 01:27:57.920
holy books say, so-called holy books. And this is just grazing the surface. Incidentally,

01:27:57.920 --> 01:28:05.440
Christ responds to the Talmud in Scripture. One of the most abused passages in Scripture is in part

01:28:05.440 --> 01:28:11.840
a response to a wicked Jewish prayer from proto-versions of the Talmud. Because one of the

01:28:11.840 --> 01:28:16.880
prayers that is said by Jewish men traditionally, at least once per day, sometimes multiple times

01:28:16.880 --> 01:28:26.000
per day, is a prayer that basically says, thank you to God that I was not made a Gentile. Thank you

01:28:26.000 --> 01:28:32.640
to God that I was not made a woman. And so you should be thinking of Galatians 3 28.

01:28:33.520 --> 01:28:38.640
There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is not male and female.

01:28:39.520 --> 01:28:44.000
Well, they also add to their prayer that thank you God for not making me a slave. Well,

01:28:44.960 --> 01:28:51.440
there are the three categories that Christ uses right there in a Jewish prayer. He is

01:28:51.440 --> 01:28:57.840
responding in part to the evil of the Talmud as it is taking form, because it was not finished until

01:28:58.800 --> 01:29:03.040
around the five hundreds, perhaps a little earlier, but right around that time.

01:29:04.720 --> 01:29:09.040
But some of the materials were obviously coalescing at the time of Christ's ministry.

01:29:11.520 --> 01:29:17.120
So Christians should have some familiarity with these things, because it is responded to in our

01:29:17.120 --> 01:29:24.320
own holy documents, in Scripture. This is not just some esoteric issue that's off on the sidelines.

01:29:24.320 --> 01:29:31.840
This is of the utmost importance, because this deals with a very real, very live controversy in

01:29:31.840 --> 01:29:39.120
our time. And the reason for pointing these things out in time is that none of these are flukes.

01:29:39.680 --> 01:29:45.760
It wasn't a fluke that they just happened to be really mean in the year that Jesus was

01:29:45.760 --> 01:29:50.960
ministering. And it doesn't so happen that they just happen to be really mean when they wrote

01:29:50.960 --> 01:29:56.240
those prayers, or that they're really mean today. For Cesslonians 2 says,

01:29:56.240 --> 01:30:01.280
For you, brothers, became imitators of the Church of God and Christ Jesus that are in Judea,

01:30:01.280 --> 01:30:06.560
for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews,

01:30:06.560 --> 01:30:12.400
who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out and displeased God and opposed

01:30:12.400 --> 01:30:17.680
all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved,

01:30:17.680 --> 01:30:22.400
so as always to fill up the measure of their sins, but wrath has come upon them at last.

01:30:23.120 --> 01:30:28.560
This was Paul writing to a Greek city, but he's talking not only about the murder of Christ,

01:30:28.560 --> 01:30:34.240
but how the Jews have been murdering prophets for centuries. This was not new behavior for them.

01:30:34.240 --> 01:30:40.800
God kept sending prophets and they kept getting killed or ignored. Being selected as a prophet

01:30:40.800 --> 01:30:48.160
is never good news. It never ends well. I think the one who got off the best was Elijah.

01:30:48.160 --> 01:30:54.800
He didn't die. He was just taken up on a whirlwind or on a chariot. He didn't have to

01:30:54.800 --> 01:31:02.240
suffer as many others did in death, but his life was no bowl of roses. I think it's important

01:31:02.240 --> 01:31:06.400
to harken back to something that we have mentioned on previous episodes. We didn't mention we were

01:31:06.400 --> 01:31:12.640
talking about the Old Testament today. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt,

01:31:13.600 --> 01:31:19.200
they were in the desert. He went up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God.

01:31:19.760 --> 01:31:26.080
He was gone for 40 days. That was when he received the books. He was up there for 40 days.

01:31:27.520 --> 01:31:33.440
There was a pillar of fire at night and pillars smoked during the day. It was a huge scene.

01:31:33.440 --> 01:31:39.360
It was very visible. The Israelites were down at the base of the mountain. In the 40 days that

01:31:39.360 --> 01:31:46.000
Moses was up there, they descended into idolatry. They had Aaron melt down their gold and make a

01:31:46.000 --> 01:31:51.840
golden calf for them, which, as Corius said previously, was almost certainly one of the

01:31:51.840 --> 01:31:58.240
gods of Egypt that they chose to worship. They said, Aaron, make a god for us. Make the god that

01:31:58.240 --> 01:32:03.360
led us out of Egypt. God's right there in the mountain. God's in a pillar of fire talking to

01:32:03.360 --> 01:32:08.800
Moses, talking to the prophet who led them out of captivity. What do they do? They turn their back

01:32:08.800 --> 01:32:14.400
on him and say, no, we want to make shift, God. We're going to worship this instead. They did.

01:32:14.400 --> 01:32:21.520
Moses comes down and they're having a big party worshiping pagan gods. They just left Egypt.

01:32:21.520 --> 01:32:27.200
They'd just seen all of these miracles. They're before a miracle with the physical special presence

01:32:27.200 --> 01:32:33.200
of God through the fire and the smoke, and they apostatize. This was the spirit of these people.

01:32:33.840 --> 01:32:40.560
So I think one of the key things to understand about the Jewish period of time in scripture is that

01:32:42.000 --> 01:32:49.440
I think a good analog for it is a message in a bottle. The gospel was given to Adam

01:32:49.440 --> 01:32:56.720
in the garden, Genesis 3.15. There was a promise made that God was going to fix this.

01:32:57.600 --> 01:33:04.720
That was expanded upon in future generations. When the day came that God came to Abraham

01:33:04.720 --> 01:33:09.840
and made the special promise to him and then wrestled with Jacob and named him Israel,

01:33:10.400 --> 01:33:21.120
and then when Moses was given the books of God, something changed. What changed was that what

01:33:21.120 --> 01:33:29.360
had been a broadly defined promise became much more narrowly defined in terms of additional

01:33:29.360 --> 01:33:35.120
promises were being made. A covenant was specifically made with Abraham and was renewed with his

01:33:35.120 --> 01:33:42.640
descendants. In some ways, that covenant and the laws, the Levitical laws in particular,

01:33:42.640 --> 01:33:47.440
were like the bottle. You throw a message in the bottle and you throw it in the ocean. It's going

01:33:47.440 --> 01:33:56.320
to bob away and then get somewhere. The function that the Levitical laws or the ceremonial laws

01:33:56.320 --> 01:34:03.760
had for the Israelites is that it made them weird. They had to do weird stuff with their clothing and

01:34:03.760 --> 01:34:09.280
with their food and with their appearance. They weren't going to be permitted to mix with their

01:34:09.280 --> 01:34:15.520
neighbors because God knew that every time his people mixed with their pagan neighbors, they

01:34:15.520 --> 01:34:20.800
became pagan. It didn't work the other way. It should have worked the other way, but they were

01:34:20.800 --> 01:34:27.280
not faithful. Any exposure to foreign gods caused them to whore after foreign gods. That's how God

01:34:27.280 --> 01:34:34.080
describes it as whoring. That's what it is. It's spiritual lust after that which is forbidden,

01:34:34.080 --> 01:34:40.640
which is a cheap imitation, but people's passions get inflamed and they chase that which is fake

01:34:40.640 --> 01:34:46.080
and they turn their back on that which is real. God knew this. He wrapped them in this bottle of

01:34:46.080 --> 01:34:51.200
these Levitical laws that said, you have to do this with your beard and you can't eat these foods

01:34:51.200 --> 01:34:57.280
and you can't sow your grains like this. The isolation that that caused from them

01:34:57.280 --> 01:35:03.760
relative to their neighbors helped to preserve the message, which was the gospel. It was the word

01:35:03.760 --> 01:35:08.880
of God and it was the promises of the Messiah. They were to be preserved through the people

01:35:08.880 --> 01:35:17.440
as well as through the bloodline. The word that was basically their DNA, the ACTG in their genes,

01:35:17.440 --> 01:35:25.360
they would be passed down to Jesus in the flesh. That was from Abraham's seed and there was also

01:35:25.360 --> 01:35:31.520
the word, the spoken word, the promises of God were also passed and that was the function that

01:35:31.520 --> 01:35:37.760
the Jews served for 2000 years. For 2000 years there were no Jews and then for 2000 years from

01:35:37.760 --> 01:35:46.320
Abraham to Jesus the Jews were in varying states of evolution preserving these messages from God

01:35:46.320 --> 01:35:52.560
so that in the day when the Messiah came and fulfilled the prophecies everyone would know

01:35:52.560 --> 01:35:57.200
they would have a list and they would have been studying and looking for it and being excited

01:35:57.200 --> 01:36:04.000
to see it come so that when a man appears and heals the blind and the lame you rejoice and you say

01:36:04.000 --> 01:36:11.040
alas the Messiah has come. That was the purpose. They did everything in their power to fail that

01:36:11.040 --> 01:36:17.360
purpose and yet God preserved them for his ends because they were chosen not to be special

01:36:18.160 --> 01:36:24.480
in some sense of its own but to be the vessel that would preserve these promises until they were

01:36:24.480 --> 01:36:31.520
fulfilled. One of the things that's emphasized repeatedly, particularly in Paul's epistles,

01:36:31.520 --> 01:36:39.120
is because the promises had been given to the Jews they knew about them. Paul's very clear

01:36:39.200 --> 01:36:45.120
that when there's no knowledge sin does not attach in the same way as when there's knowledge

01:36:45.120 --> 01:36:50.240
and so the urgency of reaching the Jews with the gospel especially in his day

01:36:50.240 --> 01:36:55.760
was but they had become apostate. When the prophecies were not yet fulfilled they could hope

01:36:55.760 --> 01:37:01.120
in their future fulfillment but now that they had been fulfilled it was urgent that the Jews

01:37:01.120 --> 01:37:06.320
would be told the prophecies are fulfilled the Messiah has come and he's died and he is

01:37:06.320 --> 01:37:11.680
living again. It was urgent for them to hear that because they were now under condemnation

01:37:11.680 --> 01:37:18.160
for refusing to believe. That's a fundamentally different thing than the the Greek or the Roman

01:37:18.160 --> 01:37:23.360
or the Ugandan or the Indian who's never heard any of this stuff. He's not in the same spiritual

01:37:23.360 --> 01:37:28.880
state as these people who for hundreds and thousands of years had been told these stories

01:37:28.880 --> 01:37:34.080
who'd been given these promises because the promises were made to them and through them for all.

01:37:35.040 --> 01:37:39.040
When Jesus came and fulfilled them and then they rejected them and said his blood be on us

01:37:39.040 --> 01:37:44.640
and our children that was the worst possible thing for them and part of Paul's urgency to

01:37:44.640 --> 01:37:51.120
reach the Jews was to try to save them from their own wickedness just as Peter did in this sermon.

01:37:51.120 --> 01:37:59.680
We said you unknowingly did this repent because when they die that's it. We get to read the book

01:37:59.680 --> 01:38:05.440
today that says here's what happened bad 2000 years ago it wasn't written yet they were living it

01:38:05.440 --> 01:38:10.640
and so they had the choice in their lifetime do I believe in the promise that God has fulfilled

01:38:10.640 --> 01:38:16.640
or do I continue in my hatred of those promises. It might not have been hatred before Christ came

01:38:16.640 --> 01:38:22.320
but once he came that was the proof of who was elect and who was faithless.

01:38:22.720 --> 01:38:30.160
And so on the topic of the Jews and whether or not they can convert to be Christian

01:38:31.840 --> 01:38:37.200
we should of course read Romans 9 the words of Paul here the words of the Holy Spirit

01:38:38.080 --> 01:38:45.120
spoken written through Paul. I am speaking the truth in Christ I am not lying my conscience

01:38:45.120 --> 01:38:50.560
bears me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart

01:38:51.120 --> 01:38:56.480
for I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers

01:38:57.040 --> 01:39:02.720
my kinsmen according to the flesh they are Israelites and to them belong the adoption

01:39:02.720 --> 01:39:08.480
the glory the covenants the giving of the law the worship and the promises to them belong the

01:39:08.480 --> 01:39:14.640
patriarchs and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ who is God overall

01:39:14.640 --> 01:39:15.840
forever amen

01:39:45.360 --> 01:39:51.760
son and not only so but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man our forefather

01:39:51.760 --> 01:39:57.360
Isaac though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad in order that God's

01:39:57.360 --> 01:40:04.080
purpose of election might continue not because of works but because of him who calls she was told

01:40:04.080 --> 01:40:09.520
the older will serve the younger as it is written Jacob I loved but Esau I hated

01:40:09.520 --> 01:40:16.720
it what shall we say then is there injustice on God's part by no means for he says to Moses

01:40:16.720 --> 01:40:21.440
I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion

01:40:22.080 --> 01:40:26.240
so then it depends not on human will or exertion but on God who has mercy

01:40:26.960 --> 01:40:31.360
for the scripture says to Pharaoh for this very purpose I have raised you up

01:40:31.360 --> 01:40:36.160
that I might show my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth

01:40:36.960 --> 01:40:41.520
so then he has mercy on whomever he wills and he heartens whomever he wills

01:40:42.400 --> 01:40:47.040
I think that ties back perfectly into the the election episode that we mentioned earlier again

01:40:47.040 --> 01:40:51.680
that's it's really an important one to understand this and many of the other things we say a lot of

01:40:52.560 --> 01:40:58.960
a lot of what is misunderstood in 21st century Christian theology is the result of a bad

01:40:58.960 --> 01:41:03.520
understanding of election we don't take it seriously we don't we don't think it means anything

01:41:04.240 --> 01:41:07.360
and neither did the Jews I mean that was part of the problem

01:41:08.000 --> 01:41:13.440
they thought that being lineal sons of Abraham was all it took that and obeying the law you

01:41:13.440 --> 01:41:17.840
you keep the law and you're a child of Abraham and you're in and everyone else is out no matter

01:41:17.840 --> 01:41:25.440
what that's not what God said it was never what God promised and so as we look at these things

01:41:25.440 --> 01:41:30.960
it's just important to remember how God speaks he talks about them being important for these

01:41:30.960 --> 01:41:36.640
purposes but it wasn't they were not a purpose unto themselves the Jews didn't exist for the sake

01:41:36.640 --> 01:41:44.640
of the Jews they do today and frankly in most times in history they did the few glory days that

01:41:44.640 --> 01:41:51.040
Israel had were the few days when they were being faithful there wasn't much he had a period under

01:41:51.040 --> 01:41:57.680
David a period under Solomon in precious few other times where there were really glory periods

01:41:57.760 --> 01:42:01.520
the rest was punishment from God for faithlessness

01:42:03.760 --> 01:42:10.320
I want to end here with a passage from John 8 that it comes up every year when Easter rolls around

01:42:10.320 --> 01:42:18.800
because it's something that the Jews to this day explicitly condemn whenever you hear a Jew talking

01:42:18.800 --> 01:42:23.840
about Christianity they will bring up John John 8 particularly John 844 but I'm going to read the

01:42:23.840 --> 01:42:29.200
whole passage to putting in context we're going to talk next week about some of the early church

01:42:29.200 --> 01:42:37.280
fathers and some of the quotes and sermons that are called anti-Semitic where the notion arose

01:42:37.920 --> 01:42:44.800
that you know that that's basically a term of blasphemy to say you were blaspheming against

01:42:44.800 --> 01:42:48.560
something you know when something is called anti-Semitic you're saying you're blaspheming

01:42:48.560 --> 01:42:54.560
the Jews well that is a religion due to have that sort of blasphemy law is indeed a religion

01:42:54.560 --> 01:42:59.600
but it's not the Christian religion a Christian can only blaspheme God we can't blaspheme anything

01:42:59.600 --> 01:43:06.880
else now there are ways that we can blaspheme God that don't necessarily involve that which is overt

01:43:06.880 --> 01:43:13.840
so I'm not trying to draw a fuzzy line here where there's a clear one but we don't get to speak in

01:43:13.840 --> 01:43:19.760
ways that God doesn't speak so I'm going to read this passage from John 8 to close because it's one

01:43:19.760 --> 01:43:26.240
that's despised and it's one that frankly makes Christians uncomfortable this day and that really

01:43:26.240 --> 01:43:30.560
concerns us I mean that's why stone choir exists if there's a passage in scripture that you can

01:43:30.560 --> 01:43:36.640
read to Christians and Christians start squirming you have a problem forget anybody else in the

01:43:36.640 --> 01:43:43.120
world forget any other opinions you might have if you are uncomfortable about something in scripture

01:43:43.120 --> 01:43:51.120
you have a spiritual problem so John 8 Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him

01:43:51.120 --> 01:43:55.680
if you abide in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set

01:43:55.680 --> 01:44:01.040
you free they answered him we are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone

01:44:01.040 --> 01:44:07.040
how is it you say you will become free Jesus answers them truly truly I say to you

01:44:07.040 --> 01:44:12.160
everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin the slave does not remain in the house forever the

01:44:12.160 --> 01:44:18.880
son remains forever so if the son sets you free you will be free indeed I know that you're offspring

01:44:18.880 --> 01:44:24.400
of Abraham yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you I speak of what I

01:44:24.400 --> 01:44:30.480
have seen with my father and you do what you have heard from your father they answered him

01:44:30.480 --> 01:44:35.360
Abraham is our father Jesus said to them if you were Abraham's children you would be doing the

01:44:35.360 --> 01:44:40.880
works Abraham did but now you seek to kill me a man who has told you the truth that I heard from

01:44:40.880 --> 01:44:47.280
God this is not what Abraham did you were doing the works your father did they said to him we are

01:44:47.280 --> 01:44:53.440
not born of sexual immorality we have one father even God Jesus said to them if God were your

01:44:53.440 --> 01:44:58.880
father you would love me for I came from God and I am here I came not of my own accord but he sent

01:44:58.880 --> 01:45:04.640
me why do you not understand what I say it is because you cannot bear to hear my word you are

01:45:04.640 --> 01:45:10.160
of your father the devil and your will is to do your father's desires he was a murderer from the

01:45:10.160 --> 01:45:15.680
beginning and he does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him when he lies he

01:45:15.680 --> 01:45:22.320
speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies but because I tell you the

01:45:22.320 --> 01:45:27.600
truth you do not believe me which one of you convicts me of sin if I tell the truth why do you not

01:45:27.600 --> 01:45:33.680
believe me whoever is of God hears the words of God the reason why you do not hear them as a you

01:45:33.680 --> 01:45:43.120
are not of God this is a profound passage because Jesus is speaking directly to a crowd of Jews

01:45:43.120 --> 01:45:49.920
and he's telling them you are Satan's children you are deaf to my voice because you were born

01:45:49.920 --> 01:45:55.440
of the father of lies even as they stand there and they make claims of lineage and claims of

01:45:55.440 --> 01:46:01.440
being sons of Abraham and claims of righteousness he says you have none of those things you do not

01:46:01.440 --> 01:46:06.400
do Abraham's works because you do not have Abraham's faith which was the root of election

01:46:07.440 --> 01:46:13.920
Abraham had faith and it was counted to him as righteousness the circumcision came after the

01:46:13.920 --> 01:46:18.800
circumcision was not what made him righteous he was circumcised because he was righteous he was

01:46:18.800 --> 01:46:25.280
righteous and therefore he obeyed God the order of operations matters and Jesus understood that

01:46:25.280 --> 01:46:30.800
Jesus is God as he said when he came to him and he did his father's things and they hated it it's

01:46:30.800 --> 01:46:38.400
because they are of their father when there's a man today whether it's 2000 years ago or today

01:46:38.400 --> 01:46:46.320
when a man hates the things of God that man is of Satan it's not all Jews today there are a few

01:46:46.320 --> 01:46:51.520
Jews who actually become Christian and cease to be Jews and there are many who are not Jews

01:46:51.520 --> 01:46:56.640
who are enemies of God today and today in our own churches we have these same Jews

01:46:56.640 --> 01:47:02.480
they don't go by the name Jew but they hate God just as much they will thump their genealogy

01:47:02.480 --> 01:47:07.840
it won't be the genealogy of Abraham it will be the genealogy of some confession a confession

01:47:07.840 --> 01:47:13.440
which points God faithfully but they will ignore that part they will just use whatever they can

01:47:14.080 --> 01:47:19.040
as an anchor to make themselves a participant in something where they are not participants

01:47:19.040 --> 01:47:23.920
you can only participate in God's things if you were God's child and you're only his child by

01:47:23.920 --> 01:47:29.840
adoption through faith those who do not have faith are not adopted sons of God they remain

01:47:29.840 --> 01:47:37.520
children of Satan and so as you see people in the world reacting to God's things many times in

01:47:37.520 --> 01:47:42.480
this preaching whether it's from Jesus or Peter or Paul or any other man when they preach some of

01:47:42.480 --> 01:47:48.000
the people were confused they it wasn't ignorant confusion it wasn't a confusion born of a lack

01:47:48.000 --> 01:47:51.760
of faith they were hearing something for the first time and they didn't know what to make of it

01:47:52.560 --> 01:47:59.360
that's okay that there's hope for that man some believed immediately some all already believed

01:48:00.080 --> 01:48:07.120
those are saved the rest and frankly the majority in Jesus day and in our day hear the things of

01:48:07.120 --> 01:48:13.760
God and they react by saying you have a demon you're evil there's no middle ground when you're

01:48:13.760 --> 01:48:19.360
dealing with people who are possessed by the devil they know when they're dealing with a son of God

01:48:19.440 --> 01:48:25.840
and their reactions are violent they're filled with hatred we should expect that when we are

01:48:25.840 --> 01:48:31.600
faithful to God there will be times when it elicits those same responses that is not that

01:48:31.600 --> 01:48:36.400
there's been some miscommunication it's not that we should have been more winsome we should have

01:48:36.400 --> 01:48:42.800
been nicer it's not that if we'd only use different words they would understand it's that we are of

01:48:42.800 --> 01:48:47.760
our father in heaven and they are of their father the devil you will face this in your

01:48:47.760 --> 01:48:52.880
lives if you're faithful christians if you just if you hide and try to ride it out

01:48:52.880 --> 01:48:56.960
it's not going to work but you'll you'll learn that the hard way you are going to have to take

01:48:56.960 --> 01:49:02.480
a stand for christ and there there will be days when that hurts there will be days where you suffer

01:49:02.480 --> 01:49:09.600
for it and you were hated to your face because that is the state that the world is in the father

01:49:09.600 --> 01:49:16.800
of lies the father of jews is running the show today there's not much left of the faithful remnant

01:49:16.800 --> 01:49:22.480
it exists and it will always exist but only because god promised it and god will preserve it

01:49:22.480 --> 01:49:29.360
god will preserve his people everyone else is going to try to kill us that's good news it means

01:49:29.360 --> 01:49:34.400
that we're on the right side it means that we're on god's side and god is on our side that's the

01:49:34.400 --> 01:49:40.160
thing we have to worry about so don't be afraid of topics that seem scary be afraid of the fact

01:49:40.160 --> 01:49:45.120
that a topic that seems scary is scary in the first place because it shouldn't be the truth

01:49:45.120 --> 01:49:51.360
should not scare christians when someone's afraid of the truth that person has a bigger problem and

01:49:52.080 --> 01:49:56.400
we've said before these are not problems that a podcast can solve you need to spend time in the

01:49:56.400 --> 01:50:02.400
word you need to spend time studying scripture and contemplating and meditating on these things

01:50:02.400 --> 01:50:08.000
and be aware in your life not just on sunday not just in bible class be aware every day of where

01:50:08.000 --> 01:50:13.360
you're seeing these things playing out and you will find that there's a spiritual tenor two things

01:50:13.440 --> 01:50:19.600
that don't necessarily have a spiritual context your workplace is going to have a spiritual tenor

01:50:19.600 --> 01:50:25.520
to things where maybe 20 years ago it didn't or if it did it wasn't at all obvious today it's going

01:50:25.520 --> 01:50:31.280
to be obvious this is where the battleground is and this is where we will prove ourselves to either

01:50:31.280 --> 01:50:36.160
be faithful children of god or to be sons of satan as christians we have only one choice

01:50:37.040 --> 01:50:42.320
and as we see others respond we see them choosing as well all these sermons that were delivered in

01:50:42.880 --> 01:50:50.000
the new testament served a winnowing function many wandered away from jesus preaching upset or

01:50:50.000 --> 01:50:55.680
confused or angry a few stuck around because they believed the same math is going to work out today

01:50:56.240 --> 01:50:59.840
be one of the few who sticks around and believes in god because on the last day

01:50:59.840 --> 01:51:05.120
he is going to welcome each of us and so i want to close out this episode by going over

01:51:05.680 --> 01:51:15.920
a seemingly minor technical matter but something that is really at the foundation of all of this

01:51:15.920 --> 01:51:23.280
for this series of episodes and many of the others as well and that is the word concept fallacy

01:51:24.000 --> 01:51:30.080
this is really in a sense related to the idea of essence and accident those who understand

01:51:30.080 --> 01:51:35.760
those terms can tie that together i won't go over that bit but the word concept fallacy has

01:51:35.760 --> 01:51:42.320
two essential forms the first one is that you believe you've studied a word and therefore you

01:51:42.320 --> 01:51:47.280
understand the concept that's a fallacy you can study a word without understanding the concept to

01:51:47.280 --> 01:51:54.000
which it refers but the second one and perhaps the more important one here is the conflation

01:51:54.560 --> 01:52:01.440
of the two things the conflation of the word that symbolizes the concept and the concept itself

01:52:02.640 --> 01:52:08.480
that is what we have happening in many of these issues for instance with the term jew

01:52:09.360 --> 01:52:16.080
there are those who will use the term and then conflate it with the concept and there are

01:52:16.080 --> 01:52:21.920
several different concepts it covers you can be jewish by blood you can be jewish by religion

01:52:22.160 --> 01:52:29.680
those are not the same thing if you conflate those and then say the term always refers to

01:52:30.320 --> 01:52:35.920
one or the other or both you are running a foul of this fallacy you are committing this error

01:52:38.000 --> 01:52:42.400
and so it is important to understand the sense in which the terms are being used

01:52:43.280 --> 01:52:48.640
but perhaps more relevant to us as christians and more on our own backyard

01:52:48.880 --> 01:52:55.600
for instance if you are holding a bible and the book of concord that doesn't make you a lutheran

01:52:56.880 --> 01:53:03.440
if you just say that well i have these and i believe them that still doesn't make you a lutheran

01:53:04.640 --> 01:53:13.600
if you believe them that makes you a lutheran now some will have brought to mind the idea of well

01:53:13.600 --> 01:53:21.680
that's no true scotsman fallacy but it's not and that's where that accident and essence issue comes

01:53:21.680 --> 01:53:29.280
in there are things that you are essentially and there are things that you are not essentially they

01:53:29.280 --> 01:53:36.960
can change if you are male you are essentially male that cannot change you aren't male because you

01:53:36.960 --> 01:53:42.080
believe you're male you aren't male because you call yourself male you aren't male because you put

01:53:42.080 --> 01:53:46.320
pronouns at the end of your email signature that's not how that works that is something you are

01:53:46.320 --> 01:53:52.720
essentially the same is true of your race if you are german you are german because your parents

01:53:52.720 --> 01:53:57.280
were german if you are english you are english because your parents were english the same for any

01:53:57.280 --> 01:54:06.880
race that is something you are essentially you are not essentially a christian because you may

01:54:06.880 --> 01:54:14.000
not have been a christian as a child you could apostatize that can change and therefore it is

01:54:14.000 --> 01:54:21.440
not in this sense of the term essential and so when you are dealing with the no true scotsman

01:54:21.440 --> 01:54:28.720
issue that only applies to things that are essential and that's why it's no true scotsman

01:54:28.720 --> 01:54:34.240
because that is race that is blood you cannot change that and so if you say no true scotsman

01:54:34.240 --> 01:54:39.200
would wear pink and you find a scotsman by blood who's wearing pink well you can't just say well

01:54:39.200 --> 01:54:47.040
no true scotsman because you found a true scotsman who's wearing pink now there are other issues here

01:54:47.040 --> 01:54:54.480
there's some nuance i could go into but we'll leave that aside for now the issue here is that which

01:54:54.480 --> 01:54:58.240
when you are dealing with christianity when you are dealing with religion when you're dealing with a

01:54:58.240 --> 01:55:05.120
confession or a political party anything like that these things have tenets they have doctrines

01:55:05.120 --> 01:55:11.280
they have things they profess things they assert that are true if you believe those things you belong

01:55:11.280 --> 01:55:18.000
to that group because that is what defines the group being a scotsman is defined by blood

01:55:18.720 --> 01:55:27.120
not by what color you wear or which pattern you wear whatever it happens to be that is not the case

01:55:27.120 --> 01:55:34.080
with christianity to be a christian you must believe the things that scripture teaches

01:55:34.080 --> 01:55:41.040
that is what it means to be a christian a christian has faith in christ in the saving blood of christ

01:55:41.040 --> 01:55:47.040
in his atonement in his sacrifice that is what it means to be a christian being a christian does

01:55:47.040 --> 01:55:51.360
not mean holding up the bible and waving it at people that doesn't make you a christian being

01:55:51.360 --> 01:55:55.840
a lutheran doesn't mean holding up the book of concord and waving it at people being reformed

01:55:55.840 --> 01:56:00.480
doesn't mean holding up the westminster confession and waving it at people whichever group it is

01:56:00.480 --> 01:56:06.960
you have to actually believe the contents of that book and so if someone tells you well of course

01:56:06.960 --> 01:56:13.920
i'm x of course i'm this kind of christian look i have the caller in the book and that's not what

01:56:13.920 --> 01:56:19.040
it means what does he actually believe what does he actually teach what does he do in his life

01:56:20.400 --> 01:56:24.800
it is the same thing with the jews there are jews who can convert to christianity

01:56:24.800 --> 01:56:30.960
and no longer be a jew and be christian there are christians who can be apostate in everything they

01:56:30.960 --> 01:56:39.680
do and still claim to be christian simply labeling yourself with the term does not make you the thing

01:56:39.680 --> 01:56:44.960
one would think that christians living in an era when we have men claiming to be women and women

01:56:44.960 --> 01:56:49.520
claiming to be men and people claiming to be dogs and whatever else is happening out there

01:56:49.520 --> 01:56:54.320
one would think it would be obvious that simply claiming to be a thing does not make you the thing

01:56:55.200 --> 01:57:04.080
and yet pastors and many others constantly get away with doing so do not let them get away with it

01:57:05.600 --> 01:57:11.360
simply claiming that you are x does not make you x simply claiming that you are christian

01:57:11.360 --> 01:57:17.920
does not make you christian being a christian means believing the word of god trusting in christ

01:57:17.920 --> 01:57:25.680
as your lord and savior and yes it does also mean rejecting the various teachings of the devil

01:57:26.640 --> 01:57:33.040
that is why as lutherans for instance in our confirmation oath we reject the devil in all

01:57:33.040 --> 01:57:37.840
his works in all his ways because that is part of what it means to be a christian

01:57:39.280 --> 01:57:45.520
and so when the jews told christ we're descended from abraham we've never been slaves of course

01:57:45.520 --> 01:57:52.240
we're zaved of course we're elect that's not what it means that's why in romans it says

01:57:52.240 --> 01:57:58.640
not all who are descended from israel belong to israel those are two different things the first

01:57:59.440 --> 01:58:07.600
is the essential that's race descended from israel the second is belong to israel that's christians

01:58:07.600 --> 01:58:15.840
that's the church you can be descended from israel by blood and not belong to israel the church by

01:58:15.840 --> 01:58:24.160
faith you can belong to israel the church by faith and not be descended from israel the man by blood

01:58:26.640 --> 01:58:33.200
being a christian is a matter of faith that is the core of what we believe that is why

01:58:33.200 --> 01:58:42.800
we call it a faith believe the words of god as they are written in his book don't water them down

01:58:42.800 --> 01:58:48.320
for the world don't ignore them because they're uncomfortable don't start editing the scripture

01:58:48.320 --> 01:58:53.440
because it makes you uncomfortable or it makes your life more difficult as christians we are called

01:58:53.440 --> 01:59:00.000
to proclaim the truth in season and out of season and that is in fact regardless of the consequences

01:59:00.640 --> 01:59:05.840
yes we may apply wisdom to these things but we do not get to deny the truth

01:59:07.360 --> 01:59:10.960
because denying god's truth is denying christ before men

01:59:12.720 --> 01:59:19.440
and we know what christ says about that we as christians are going to spend eternity with adam

01:59:19.440 --> 01:59:26.400
and with noah and with abraham and with moses and with elijah and with jesus we're going to spend

01:59:26.400 --> 01:59:32.400
eternity with them because they were christian they are christian we are christian the essence of

01:59:32.400 --> 01:59:38.960
the christian faith is belief in the gospel belief in the promise of the messiah those who lived

01:59:38.960 --> 01:59:44.640
before the messiah believed in the promise as it was yet to be fulfilled those who lived in christ

01:59:44.640 --> 01:59:50.240
day believed in the promise of the messiah as they witnessed its fulfillment and we who lived

01:59:50.240 --> 01:59:56.800
2000 years after the fulfillment of the messiah's promise believe it in retrospect we believe that

01:59:56.800 --> 02:00:02.640
which has been fulfilled and transmitted to us through time and in eternity we will all be united

02:00:02.640 --> 02:00:08.320
as christians because every single person in heaven every single person who will be in the new

02:00:08.320 --> 02:00:16.000
earth is a christian in essence the essence of the christian faith is belief in the messiah

02:00:16.000 --> 02:00:22.080
who has delivered the eternal life to us every man in faith in heaven believe that and receive

02:00:22.080 --> 02:00:28.160
that is how the christian faith works amen

02:00:52.080 --> 02:00:53.540
you