Transcript: Episode 0058

WEBVTT

00:00.000 --> 00:04.420
...

00:30.000 --> 00:45.760
Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler, and I'm still woe. On today's Stone

00:45.760 --> 00:51.360
Choir, we're going to be continuing the series we're doing on the current state of religion.

00:52.000 --> 00:58.240
Last week, we talked about defining religion in terms of a source of right and wrong and morality

00:58.880 --> 01:03.040
and why it's important to use that view when you're looking at religions, because

01:03.920 --> 01:10.160
many of us simultaneously hold multiple religions in our heads. So we made the case last week

01:10.160 --> 01:13.520
that there's a whole lot of that going on that's causing problems in the church.

01:13.520 --> 01:17.280
And we said that this week we're going to specifically be discussing Judaizing and

01:17.280 --> 01:24.000
Gnosticism, which are two of the earliest false religions that attacked Christianity in its very

01:24.000 --> 01:28.960
earliest days. As Corey and I were doing the prep for this episode, we realized that there's more

01:28.960 --> 01:35.520
than enough just on Judaizing for an entire episode, so this will be in two parts. Next week

01:35.520 --> 01:40.080
we'll be about Gnosticism exclusively, and then the following week we'll be talking about apostasy.

01:41.280 --> 01:46.560
Before we get into this warning to parents who listen with kids, one of the subjects we're going

01:46.560 --> 01:50.640
to talk about is circumcision. We're going to go into some of the obvious details because it's

01:50.640 --> 01:57.200
necessary to discuss what's going on there, and you can decide if you want to listen to that before

01:57.200 --> 02:03.200
your kids do. This episode is, as always, a continuation of previous episodes, and I want

02:03.200 --> 02:08.000
to make this point again, particularly as we're getting into the second full year of Stone Choir.

02:08.800 --> 02:14.320
This season, and so far, is such a thing exists for us. There's going to be a lot more episodes

02:14.320 --> 02:21.680
that are syntheses of parts of previous episodes, so what I mean by that is that we're going to treat

02:22.240 --> 02:27.520
every previous episode that we've done essentially as axiomatic for the purposes of arguments that

02:27.520 --> 02:34.160
we make in future episodes. This episode on Judaizing, obviously, is going to assume for

02:34.160 --> 02:39.200
the sake of argument that you've already heard and at least understand, even if you don't agree,

02:39.280 --> 02:44.480
with what we said in the four parts we did on the Jews. It is the first episode of Stone Choir

02:44.480 --> 02:49.520
you're listening to. Stop. I'd say start from the beginning. If you refuse to start from the

02:49.520 --> 02:55.360
beginning before listening to this one, if it's interesting, at least go back to Hebrews, Israelites,

02:55.360 --> 03:01.600
and Jews and listen to that four-part series because this will not be the complete arguments

03:01.600 --> 03:07.200
from that episode. They're made there in totality. We consider that a done deal. I give that warning

03:07.200 --> 03:12.240
because we're going to say some things that just assume all the facts previously entered

03:12.240 --> 03:17.200
into evidence. We're incorporating those by reference, and if you're not coming along with

03:17.200 --> 03:20.960
the previous thoughts, if you don't know what's there, we're going to be taking a lot of shortcuts

03:20.960 --> 03:26.800
in the future because we don't waste your time just repeating the same things over and over again,

03:26.800 --> 03:31.680
so we're going to just assume that you at least know what we're talking about when you say some

03:31.680 --> 03:38.560
of those things. One of the key things that we've said frequently throughout Stone Choir,

03:38.560 --> 03:43.280
and it's going to be a key part of this, particularly in framing this episode on Judaism,

03:43.280 --> 03:48.880
is that it's crucial for our understanding of Scripture and for understanding our place

03:48.880 --> 03:58.000
as Christians in history to verbally acknowledge out loud that Adam was not a Jew. Noah was not a

03:58.000 --> 04:05.680
Jew. Abraham was not a Jew. We made the case in those episodes for why that is true. The reason

04:05.680 --> 04:13.280
that we're mentioning here is that one of the fundamental elements of the Judaizing tendency

04:13.280 --> 04:18.000
that occurred from the very earliest days of the church, and it's roaring back in the last two

04:18.000 --> 04:25.840
centuries in particular in America, is there's this notion that we have inherited from kind of

04:25.840 --> 04:31.520
ambient morality in the world around us that, well, I'm a Christian, but I'm the Christian

04:31.520 --> 04:37.920
in the Judeo-Christian, and the Judeo came first, and that was really the older, more authentic

04:37.920 --> 04:45.520
version. I've got Christianity, but I'm the lesser cousin here, and there's a senior member from way

04:45.520 --> 04:53.440
back, the Jew who has more real stuff. They fundamentally have more Jesus-y stuff than I have,

04:53.440 --> 04:58.480
even though Jesus came after their period. I can't really be a Christian unless I Jew up the

04:58.480 --> 05:04.480
stuff that I have today. That's really what happens with Judaizing in all its forms and

05:04.480 --> 05:09.760
everything we talk about today. It's fundamentally, sure, we're Christians, but can we make this more

05:09.760 --> 05:16.000
Jewish? Wouldn't that make it more authentic? The reason I mention Adam and Noah and Abraham is that

05:17.760 --> 05:22.080
the assumption that the Old Testament is Jewish and that the New Testament is Christian,

05:22.080 --> 05:26.640
it's blasphemous for one. Let's just get that right out of the way. That's utterly false.

05:27.680 --> 05:34.320
The entire history of Christianity before the birth of Christ pointed to the birth of Christ.

05:34.320 --> 05:43.040
That was its purpose. In Genesis 3.15, when Adam was given the proto-gospel, he was told

05:43.040 --> 05:49.200
that Jesus would come to fix his sin. He wasn't told explicitly, not in a prophetic manner,

05:49.200 --> 05:54.800
that could be as easily understood as the later prophecies. Most of those prophecies

05:54.800 --> 06:02.640
that are recorded for us began with Moses. However, we know there were many believers

06:02.640 --> 06:08.640
in God, including Noah, most notably historically, who didn't have the written versions of those

06:08.640 --> 06:14.960
things either because none of it had been written down yet. The tendency that Christians have today

06:14.960 --> 06:19.600
to think, well, I need more Jewish stuff in order to be a better Christian, what it really

06:19.600 --> 06:25.520
is doing is espousing a belief that comes from the Talmud. I'm going to give you a few paraphrases

06:25.520 --> 06:30.080
of things in the Talmud, just to give you an idea of what Jews have been taught,

06:30.640 --> 06:37.920
including in Jesus' day. In this four-part series now, we're doing about the ending with apostasy.

06:37.920 --> 06:43.040
The next episode is going to be about Galatians 3.28. One of the excellent points that Corey

06:43.040 --> 06:48.720
has made in the past elsewhere is that once you know about the Jewish prayers that come from the

06:48.720 --> 06:55.120
Talmud, you understand that Galatians 3.28 is Jesus rebuking the Talmud before it had been written

06:55.120 --> 07:01.440
down because the Talmud was a recording of oral tradition. It was writing down things that they

07:01.440 --> 07:05.840
had been passing from generation to generation. There are things in the Talmud that were written

07:05.840 --> 07:15.120
down generations after Jesus that were already practiced in his day. These things have existed

07:15.120 --> 07:21.120
for thousands of years among these people, not all of them, because Mary was also a Christian.

07:22.000 --> 07:28.800
She was obviously a Judaite. She was of that people. But when the angel came to her and said,

07:28.800 --> 07:33.520
you're going to bear the Son of God, she wasn't out of left field. She was amazed it was her,

07:33.520 --> 07:38.240
but she wasn't amazed at what's this Messiah stuff. I don't know what that's about. She

07:38.240 --> 07:42.880
knew exactly what it was about because she was a Christian. She was a Christian expecting the Messiah.

07:42.880 --> 07:48.800
What she didn't expect was that God would come to her personally to be the vessel for God to be

07:48.800 --> 07:55.600
born. The Talmud, as it existed in that day and then was written down, and is the basis for the

07:55.600 --> 08:04.720
modern Jewish religion, says things like, Jews may use subterfuge to circumvent a goi as a non-Jew.

08:05.680 --> 08:11.520
All children of the goyim are animals. The goyim are not humans, they're beasts. If you eat with

08:11.520 --> 08:16.160
a goi, it's the same as eating with a dog. Even the best of the goyim should all be killed.

08:18.560 --> 08:23.760
The common theme that these all have is that Jews are human, and the goyim, that's us,

08:23.760 --> 08:29.120
that's everyone who's a non-Jew, is less than human. Now think about that in the context of

08:29.120 --> 08:36.880
saying that Adam is a Jew. If Adam is a Jew, then isn't it consistent that we are less than Jews if

08:36.880 --> 08:44.480
we don't have the Jew stuff along with our religion? But Adam was not a Jew. Adam was all men. Every

08:44.480 --> 08:51.120
single homo sapien on the planet has Adam as his father. No matter what we've said about any other

08:51.120 --> 08:57.760
race, any people on the planet, they're all children of Adam, which is why we all die,

08:57.760 --> 09:02.320
because we inherit Adam's sin, because he is our father. We inherit the sin of that father,

09:02.320 --> 09:06.560
that first father, the first biological father. He's our first father, he's obviously

09:06.560 --> 09:13.120
God the Father in heaven. The first Judaism tendency that's permeating all of Christian

09:13.120 --> 09:19.440
testimony today is that, well, Adam was a Jew, Noah was a Jew, Abraham can be a Jew,

09:19.440 --> 09:24.720
because that's the case, then Muslims are Jews, because Muslims trace back to Abraham just like

09:24.720 --> 09:30.720
the Jewish tribes. It becomes incoherent when you actually look at what's trying to be claimed,

09:30.720 --> 09:35.760
but it's consistent with the Talmudic belief that the Goyim are not humans, they're beasts,

09:35.760 --> 09:42.080
they're less than us, us being the Jews. So everything that we're talking about here today in

09:42.080 --> 09:47.120
terms of Judaism tendencies is something that we see from the very earliest days of the early

09:47.120 --> 09:53.120
church, where their Christians and the attack that Satan took against Christ's church as it was

09:53.120 --> 09:58.240
being born was, sure, okay, you have this gospel stuff now, you know, Jesus rose from the dead,

09:58.240 --> 10:03.360
and he forgives your sins, and blah, blah, blah, but did you know you still have to have this stuff

10:03.360 --> 10:09.120
from the Jews? And that was the fight in the very earliest church. We have to keep the Jew stuff,

10:09.120 --> 10:13.920
the Christian stuff isn't complete by itself. It's very common today, and so all the examples

10:13.920 --> 10:19.920
that we give in this episode will reinforce that there's an inherent notion in many people's minds

10:19.920 --> 10:26.080
that Christianity is incomplete unless it's more Jewish than it is today, which if you understand

10:26.080 --> 10:32.240
that Judeo-Christian is an oxymoron, obviously it falls apart. Judeo-Christian is like saying

10:32.240 --> 10:38.720
Satan, oh Christian, they're opposing religions. It's not a continuum. It is not one and then the

10:38.720 --> 10:44.400
other. Noah and Adam and Abraham were Christians because they believed in the promise of the Messiah.

10:44.400 --> 10:50.400
You and I believe in the promise of the Messiah. The key difference between us and them is that

10:50.400 --> 10:58.320
they had an expectant hope in the promise. We have a hope in a promise already fulfilled. We hope in

10:58.320 --> 11:03.360
the resurrection, we hope in the return of Christ, but we already know for a fact that he came once.

11:03.920 --> 11:08.640
So that's the only difference between our belief in theirs, as they were hoping in a prophecy

11:08.640 --> 11:13.680
that had yet to be fulfilled. We have a hope that the prophecy which has been fulfilled in Christ's

11:13.680 --> 11:19.280
birth, death, and resurrection does what God says it was going to do. The reason that those miracles

11:19.280 --> 11:25.120
occurred was so that we would all have confidence. Yes, if I can do these things in space and time,

11:25.120 --> 11:29.360
you can trust my promises that the things that I'm doing are for the forgiveness of your sins.

11:29.920 --> 11:33.440
That's the Christian faith, and they held it, and we hold it in common.

11:34.080 --> 11:41.120
So when Judaizing occurs in the church, it's a subtle attack against that, and we see right from

11:41.120 --> 11:46.080
the very beginning, the one time in the New Testament where the word Judaizing is literally

11:46.080 --> 11:52.000
used is in Galatians 2. Paul writes, But when Cephas, that is Peter, came to Antioch, I posed him to

11:52.000 --> 11:56.960
his face because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with

11:56.960 --> 12:02.000
the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision

12:02.000 --> 12:07.680
party, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him so that even Barnabas was led astray

12:07.680 --> 12:12.960
by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel,

12:12.960 --> 12:17.600
I said to Cephas, Before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew,

12:18.400 --> 12:25.280
how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? This is the ESV, but the word that's used there,

12:25.280 --> 12:29.600
the underlying word that we transliterate, is he saying, How can you force the Jews,

12:29.600 --> 12:35.040
or how can you force the Gentiles to Judaize? Interestingly, that word does appear in the

12:35.040 --> 12:40.800
Old Testament in the Septuagint, which we'll get to towards the end in Esther chapter 8 verse 17.

12:40.800 --> 12:46.000
It's said that the people there were in fear of the Jews and they Judaized. Same thing, it was

12:46.000 --> 12:55.520
adopting the previous Jewish practices of the Mosaic law in order to what? In order to earn

12:55.520 --> 13:00.960
salvation, because when Jesus showed up and the Jews were holding the Mosaic law, they were

13:01.680 --> 13:06.800
following the rules, they'd forgotten what the rules were for. A lot of us preaching was like,

13:06.800 --> 13:12.320
these rules weren't to save you. These rules are God's will, they're my will for you, the

13:12.320 --> 13:16.880
will of the Father for you, but they don't save you. They didn't understand that. All they knew

13:16.880 --> 13:21.280
was the rote performance of the thing. They didn't understand that it wasn't for their salvation,

13:21.280 --> 13:26.240
it was simply what God said to do. If they believed in God, they would do those things.

13:26.240 --> 13:30.960
But it was the belief that always mattered. It was Abraham's faith that was credited to him,

13:30.960 --> 13:36.720
his righteousness, not his doing. It was his belief, belief in the promise. From the very

13:36.720 --> 13:41.680
beginning, the very first instance of Judaizing being explicitly highlighted has to do with

13:41.680 --> 13:49.120
circumcision party, has to do with Peter himself. One of the most beloved apostles of Christ was

13:49.120 --> 13:54.320
sinning against the church as a Judaizer. This is why we said in the past episode,

13:54.320 --> 14:00.000
this was the ground floor heresy in the church. We're going to get into this today,

14:00.000 --> 14:04.560
that whether or not that's a gospel issue depends on how you understand true teaching

14:04.560 --> 14:09.600
and false teaching. Paul was deeply concerned when he saw what Peter was doing, because it was a

14:09.600 --> 14:16.240
false confession. That was the issue. When Peter Judaized, when he refused to eat with non-Jews,

14:16.240 --> 14:21.360
his confession was false. He was confessing a false religion. Even though he was doing what

14:21.360 --> 14:26.400
the Jews had been told to do before, when God said it is finished on the cross, that was it.

14:26.400 --> 14:30.320
He was talking about those rules. Much of the angst spilled in the New Testament

14:30.320 --> 14:36.080
is specifically saying, no, you didn't understand it all. The separation of those people for a time

14:36.080 --> 14:41.040
with these rules was not for their salvation. It was to preserve the promise of the Messiah.

14:41.040 --> 14:44.480
When that had been fulfilled, when Christ had lived that perfect life,

14:44.480 --> 14:50.480
that none of them ever could, then it was finished. From then on, everything that every

14:50.480 --> 14:57.760
believer has is Christian practice. From Peter to today, whenever we see people Judaizing,

14:57.760 --> 15:00.720
they're fundamentally exposing a false confession.

15:02.400 --> 15:07.360
And so to start off this section of the episode about circumcision specifically,

15:07.360 --> 15:12.000
but obviously more generally about Judaizing, we will read through Acts 15,

15:12.720 --> 15:19.360
verses 1 through 29, which relates the text that Woe just mentioned in his intro.

15:21.120 --> 15:26.160
But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers. Unless you are circumcised

15:26.160 --> 15:31.520
according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. And after Paul and Barnabas had no

15:31.520 --> 15:36.240
small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed

15:36.240 --> 15:39.680
to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

15:40.400 --> 15:45.360
So being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria,

15:45.360 --> 15:50.240
describing in detail the conversion of the nations, and brought great joy to all the brothers.

15:50.880 --> 15:55.920
When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders,

15:55.920 --> 16:01.040
and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belong to the party of

16:01.040 --> 16:06.560
the Pharisees rose up and said, it is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the

16:06.560 --> 16:12.400
law of Moses. The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter.

16:12.960 --> 16:16.240
And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them,

16:16.880 --> 16:20.640
Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you,

16:20.640 --> 16:24.240
that by my mouth the nations should hear the word of the gospel and believe.

16:24.800 --> 16:29.840
And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as

16:29.840 --> 16:35.840
he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.

16:36.640 --> 16:42.320
Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples,

16:42.320 --> 16:47.840
that neither your fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved

16:47.840 --> 16:54.480
through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. And all the assembly fell silent,

16:54.480 --> 16:59.040
and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done

16:59.040 --> 17:05.200
through them among the nations. After they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers, listen to me.

17:05.920 --> 17:11.040
Simon has related how God first visited the nations, to take from them a people for his name.

17:11.680 --> 17:15.360
And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,

17:16.080 --> 17:20.480
After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen,

17:20.480 --> 17:26.560
I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord,

17:26.560 --> 17:32.240
and all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from

17:32.240 --> 17:38.240
of old. Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the nations who turn to God,

17:38.240 --> 17:43.680
but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality,

17:43.680 --> 17:48.960
and from what has been strangled and from blood, for from ancient generations Moses has had in

17:48.960 --> 17:53.520
every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.

17:55.120 --> 17:59.040
Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men

17:59.040 --> 18:05.040
from among them, and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsobus

18:05.040 --> 18:10.480
and Silas leading men among the brothers, with the following letter. The brothers, both the

18:10.480 --> 18:15.840
apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the nations in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia,

18:15.840 --> 18:21.520
greetings. Since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words,

18:21.520 --> 18:26.640
unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us,

18:26.720 --> 18:33.120
having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you, with our beloved Barnabas and Paul,

18:33.120 --> 18:38.000
men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore

18:38.000 --> 18:42.400
sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth.

18:42.960 --> 18:48.160
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us to lay on you no greater burden

18:48.160 --> 18:53.840
than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood,

18:53.840 --> 18:59.200
and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these,

18:59.200 --> 19:09.040
you will do well, farewell. Now you may note that when I read from the ESV or other translations

19:09.040 --> 19:16.800
that use the word Gentiles, I drop that word, I change that word to a more accurate translation

19:17.360 --> 19:24.880
to be clear. And the reason that I do that is because Gentiles itself has become a form of

19:24.880 --> 19:30.400
Judaizing in the modern church. We'll get into that more later in the episode, but I just wanted

19:30.400 --> 19:35.760
to point out that that is something that I do. At least I attempt always to do that when I am

19:35.760 --> 19:43.280
reading from these translations, because the underlying word is, in fact, nations or heathens.

19:43.280 --> 19:48.880
We have these words in English. There is no reason we need to use a Latin derived word such as

19:48.880 --> 19:54.640
Gentiles. I'm not saying the word is necessarily wrong, because if you understand what it means,

19:54.640 --> 20:01.360
the word is fine. But in the modern context, it tends to be misleading and can be used

20:01.360 --> 20:05.280
for Judaizing, and that is why I personally do not tend to use it.

20:06.560 --> 20:09.760
I think it's conspicuous when you look at this passage that,

20:10.080 --> 20:14.320
again, it was the Pharisees who came and said, look what these people are doing.

20:14.880 --> 20:20.480
The Pharisees didn't attack the gospel. They didn't say, no, Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

20:20.480 --> 20:26.160
They didn't attack anything that we think of as Christianity today. The Pharisees came to the

20:26.160 --> 20:30.400
church and said, what are these people doing? If they're going to convert, if they're going to be

20:30.400 --> 20:35.040
believers in the one true God, they need to be circumcised, because they didn't understand what

20:35.040 --> 20:41.120
circumcision was. They didn't understand the purpose. They didn't understand what Jesus had said and

20:41.120 --> 20:49.040
done, and so they were burdening consciences with something that was false. The reason we're beginning

20:49.040 --> 20:56.160
with this is that circumcision is really the Judaizing heresy that is the most prevalent

20:56.160 --> 21:01.600
in the New Testament. You see it in numerous epistles. It comes up all the time. That first

21:01.600 --> 21:06.160
quote was from Galatians. This is from Acts. I have quotes from Philippians, from Titus, and that's

21:06.160 --> 21:11.840
just a small portion of where these fights were occurring, where the so-called circumcision party

21:11.840 --> 21:17.200
would show up and burden consciences and say, you must obey the Mosaic law.

21:19.520 --> 21:25.920
The reason that the Holy Spirit worked through the apostles to put an end to that,

21:25.920 --> 21:30.800
that false teaching was that, again, they didn't understand what circumcision was in the first

21:30.880 --> 21:37.760
place. They didn't understand the sealing a baby boy into the covenant of God with the act of

21:37.760 --> 21:48.240
circumcision, or for adult converts, which happened as well. It wasn't an act onto itself. It was a

21:48.240 --> 21:54.640
public confession, and with Christ's death and resurrection, Christians had a new confession.

21:55.360 --> 22:00.800
The confession was in the risen Lord. The confession no longer needed to be in terms of

22:00.800 --> 22:08.800
circumcision, which was pointing forward. That's why it was happening everywhere, because, as I said,

22:09.520 --> 22:15.600
Satan didn't care about the gospel. His first attack on the church once it was established,

22:15.600 --> 22:20.400
he didn't go after what we call the gospel. What did the teachings of demons that Satan

22:20.400 --> 22:24.720
brought to bear do? They said, no, no, no, you have to do this stuff. You have to do what Moses

22:24.720 --> 22:30.800
said to do. What could be more of a believing thing than to say, obey God? That's how Satan attacked

22:30.800 --> 22:36.720
by saying, hey, obey God, do this stuff, because it took what God said to do entirely out of context

22:36.720 --> 22:43.360
with complete disregard for what God actually made clear about the practice. It tried to burden

22:43.360 --> 22:48.320
consciousness to say, well, you have a Christian confession, but you haven't done the thing yet.

22:51.200 --> 22:56.880
This is something that, in various shades, you will find in all the other Judaism practices that

22:56.880 --> 23:04.400
we see to this day. There's a constant myriad churn. There's always some new form of this sort

23:04.400 --> 23:10.400
of thing, but it invariably says, hey, sure, you got the Jesus stuff, all right, but did you know

23:10.400 --> 23:17.040
the Jews stuff from the olden days will make it even more authentic? I think this is an interesting

23:17.040 --> 23:21.840
thing for us to talk about on Stone Choir, because it sounds kind of like, well, we talk about a lot

23:21.840 --> 23:26.400
on the show. Like, hey, we have this stuff in the church, but what about the old practices?

23:27.200 --> 23:34.720
There are two crucial differences. One, we are not claiming that doing one thing versus another

23:34.800 --> 23:41.200
saves you. There's never the claim of any Christian that doing saves. The doing is the fruit of

23:41.200 --> 23:47.680
salvation. If we have saving faith, then we obey God. That's why there are some who believe before

23:47.680 --> 23:53.520
they're baptized. A believer's baptism is entirely a real thing. They're examples in Scripture.

23:53.520 --> 23:59.680
That does not mean that baptism does not also give the Holy Spirit to those who do not yet have faith.

23:59.760 --> 24:04.640
I did a whole episode on baptism about that. It can be both one thing and the other at the same

24:04.640 --> 24:10.960
time. When we talk about things that used to be church belief and practice, like, for example,

24:10.960 --> 24:15.760
head coverings, it's not to burden consciences. It's certainly not to say, if you don't cover your

24:15.760 --> 24:21.280
head, you haven't earned salvation. That's not a phrase that can even come from our lips, except

24:22.080 --> 24:27.760
ironically. It's an impossibility for a Christian to believe that entire vein of thought.

24:28.640 --> 24:34.240
It's also important to know that sometimes the argument is simply true. Sometimes we do lose

24:34.240 --> 24:38.320
things that we used to have, like head coverings. Like, God said to do it. He didn't say, if a

24:38.320 --> 24:43.600
girl covers her head, she will be saved. He just said, do it because it's proper order. It was never

24:43.600 --> 24:51.200
a matter of salvation, but it was a command from God. When we point back, it's not trying to make

24:51.200 --> 24:58.560
people do something that will prove that they're faithful or to earn their salvation. It's just

24:58.560 --> 25:03.440
to say, this is what believers actually do. It's what the Christian life actually looks like,

25:04.080 --> 25:11.360
which is a very clear distinction from circumcision, because there were many who were not circumcised,

25:11.360 --> 25:16.320
who became believers. Again, one of the earliest controversies in the church. It was a question

25:16.320 --> 25:20.880
to be settled. They sat down and discussed this for a while. It was an important question,

25:20.960 --> 25:27.200
2000 years ago. It's not an important question, because God settled it. So when the Pharisees

25:27.200 --> 25:32.560
asked it, regardless of what their intentions were or their ignorance, God answered. He said,

25:33.120 --> 25:37.920
that was for them, that is over. Someone can believe in God and not be circumcised.

25:37.920 --> 25:42.000
And so it went away entirely. It ceased to be a practice among Christians.

25:42.080 --> 25:52.720
We should point out that not only is circumcision not a Christian practice, but the modern practice

25:52.720 --> 25:59.040
that we call circumcision and the ancient practice in the context of the Near East, which would be

25:59.040 --> 26:05.760
the practice of which the Jews, the more accurately named Israelites or Hebrews partook,

26:06.640 --> 26:11.760
these practices are not the same. Now, there are a number of different circumcision practices

26:11.760 --> 26:16.560
across the world. There are some that are particularly barbaric amongst certain island

26:16.560 --> 26:22.480
peoples and some parts of South America. But we're talking about the Near East here. And in the Near

26:22.480 --> 26:29.440
East, the circumcision practice of that area and of those peoples. And this is the part where if you

26:30.160 --> 26:34.560
are concerned about your children listening to materials that are technically explicit,

26:35.360 --> 26:40.640
you may wish to skip or listen to it, screen it before allowing them to.

26:42.560 --> 26:49.280
That practice is fundamentally different from what we see today. The practice today is the total

26:49.280 --> 26:55.600
removal of the foreskin, which is actually a relatively significant chunk of tissue. The

26:55.600 --> 27:03.040
practice back then was simply either a cut in the foreskin or the removal of the tip of the

27:03.040 --> 27:09.200
foreskin. This is one of the reasons that we see in Scripture, when adult converts even

27:09.760 --> 27:16.160
are circumcised, they recover fairly quickly. If someone removes a significant portion of

27:16.160 --> 27:22.240
your penis, you are not going to recover from that quickly. If it is the ancient practice,

27:22.240 --> 27:28.080
you can recover a number of days and be back at work or even go fight in a battle. That's possible.

27:28.080 --> 27:35.760
That is why in the narrative related to Dina, we see that they attacked them immediately afterward,

27:35.760 --> 27:40.720
because it was a relatively short window in which they would have had this advantage

27:40.720 --> 27:45.760
due to the recovery period. These are very different practices. And the reason that this

27:45.760 --> 27:54.080
matters is because the modern practice has arguably been designed maliciously. It is designed to do

27:54.080 --> 28:00.640
something to the child. It is designed to do something to that boy who is circumcised. It's

28:00.640 --> 28:05.440
mutilation to be frank. It is gentle mutilation. We're used to hearing that particular phrase,

28:05.440 --> 28:11.440
that term with regard to female so-called circumcision, but it is the same when it comes to males for

28:11.440 --> 28:18.720
the modern version of circumcision. It is more comparable to what we see in some of the most

28:18.720 --> 28:24.480
demonically oppressed part of the world, and these parts of the world practice truly heinous

28:24.480 --> 28:31.280
things that are somehow even worse than circumcision, but it is comparable to them with regard to its

28:31.280 --> 28:36.880
goal, with regard to what it does to the circumcised. There are a number of effects to this, and we

28:36.880 --> 28:42.080
have very good studies on this. We know these things to be true. This has been researched

28:42.880 --> 28:48.320
quite significantly. You will typically not hear of these things in the U.S. context because

28:48.880 --> 28:54.800
the overwhelming majority of those in the United States are circumcised.

28:56.240 --> 29:01.680
That is not the case in the rest of the Western world. You basically do not get circumcised in

29:01.680 --> 29:09.120
Europe or Australia or New Zealand or the UK, any of these places. The rest of the European world

29:09.120 --> 29:16.000
does not practice circumcision. It is something that was imported into the U.S. culture because

29:16.000 --> 29:20.640
it's Judaizing. It's part and parcel of a number of other things, and we'll get into some of those

29:20.640 --> 29:26.720
later in the episode as well, but to speak of some of the consequences of circumcision.

29:28.320 --> 29:33.200
When performed on an infant, and we will distinguish between infant circumcision and

29:33.200 --> 29:38.160
adolescent or adult because there are different consequences for those, it is more significant

29:38.160 --> 29:43.520
with regard to infants and adolescents for a number of reasons. But infant circumcision,

29:43.600 --> 29:49.360
often you will hear the argument that, well, the child will not remember the pain,

29:50.400 --> 29:54.080
one that is a morally abhorrent argument, if you actually think about it,

29:55.040 --> 29:58.880
because that would justify doing almost anything to an infant because the infant won't remember,

29:59.760 --> 30:02.480
and the Talmud has some things to say about that, certainly.

30:03.760 --> 30:07.760
But the problem with this argument, beyond being morally abhorrent, is that it is false.

30:08.400 --> 30:15.680
Studies performed on infants, those who were circumcised in infancy, and those who were not show

30:16.560 --> 30:23.440
circumcision actually causes a fundamental change in the brain. It causes site-specific changes to

30:23.440 --> 30:30.960
the brain, usually with regard to pain or centers related to trauma in the brain, but it also causes

30:30.960 --> 30:36.560
a brain wave change that sometimes does not return to a baseline and certainly does not do so quickly.

30:37.520 --> 30:42.480
It causes a spike in all of the various body chemistry that relates to anxiety,

30:43.760 --> 30:48.640
because it is seen by the body, rightfully, as an attack on the body. Of course, an infant

30:48.640 --> 30:54.400
can't do anything in response to an attack, so the infant just has this stress response,

30:55.280 --> 31:00.320
this trauma response, but crying is all the infant can do, of course, which the infant does.

31:00.720 --> 31:08.880
It is also notable that this procedure is often done with minimal, if any, anesthetic.

31:10.480 --> 31:15.120
And yes, infants can feel pain. If you start your argument or you start trying to make an

31:15.120 --> 31:19.840
argument that an infant doesn't feel pain, congratulations, you're on the exact same

31:19.840 --> 31:24.640
road as the people who try to argue for abortion. You're making roughly the same sort of argument

31:24.640 --> 31:28.960
they make with regard to, well, if an infant can't feel pain, then whatever we do is obviously moral.

31:30.720 --> 31:37.440
That is abominable and Christians should never argue that. But beyond the alteration of brain

31:37.440 --> 31:43.280
waves and also certain parts of the brain even, not so much structurally necessarily, but

31:44.720 --> 31:49.280
in regards to later on psychological responses in the adolescent and adult,

31:50.480 --> 31:56.320
and this leads into my next point, we do see increases in pain sensitivity, anxiety,

31:56.320 --> 32:01.280
and a number of other problems, including attention problems in infants,

32:02.000 --> 32:07.280
in the adolescents who were circumcised as infants. There are longitudinal consequences

32:07.280 --> 32:14.480
to the modern practice of circumcision. Again, this is a fundamentally different procedure

32:14.480 --> 32:19.520
from what is described in the Old Testament. It is not the same thing that is being done to boys

32:19.600 --> 32:23.760
today that was done to them in that part of the world historically.

32:25.200 --> 32:31.920
Now to distinguish between infants and adolescents. It's difficult to say if it's

32:31.920 --> 32:37.840
worse to circumcise an infant or an adolescent. However, one of the salient differences that we

32:37.840 --> 32:42.480
see, and part of the reason it's difficult to distinguish obviously is that adolescents can

32:42.480 --> 32:48.000
actually remember what happened consciously, not unconsciously, because there's a difference there.

32:48.960 --> 32:54.800
You can remember things in your unconscious or subconscious mind that you may not be able

32:54.800 --> 33:01.840
to remember in your conscious mind. And notably, your body also remembers things

33:01.840 --> 33:07.280
that your mind does not necessarily store. One good example of that would be when we went

33:07.280 --> 33:13.680
over the issue of promiscuity, a woman's body remembers after a fashion her sexual partners,

33:13.680 --> 33:21.440
even if she may have forgotten them. But that aside, the issue of a child who is circumcised

33:21.440 --> 33:28.480
in adolescence is that the studies done on those who were circumcised in adolescence has shown that

33:28.480 --> 33:35.520
the majority of them fulfill all of the diagnostic criteria in order to diagnose them with post-traumatic

33:35.520 --> 33:44.240
stress disorder. Circumcision, the modern practice, inflicts very real harm on children.

33:45.120 --> 33:50.000
It is something that should not be practiced. It is a barbaric practice that is inexcusable,

33:50.000 --> 33:58.160
and it is Judaizing. It is attempting to participate in a Jewish right. And many of those

33:58.160 --> 34:03.440
doing it are supposedly Christian. This is inexcusable. This is not something that is permissible

34:03.440 --> 34:09.520
for Christians to do. Now we know that some of those who are listening will be fathers. We

34:09.520 --> 34:14.000
know for certain that some of you are fathers, and that most likely, because much of our audience

34:14.000 --> 34:20.400
is American, most likely you had your son circumcised. We are saying you should not have done that.

34:21.040 --> 34:28.480
However, do not beat yourself up over it. Do not worry about it, really.

34:29.520 --> 34:33.040
You do need to repent because it was sinful. It was not something you should have done.

34:33.680 --> 34:37.280
But repent, lay it at the foot of the cross, and be done with it.

34:39.040 --> 34:45.120
This is difficult for many people to do, particularly in the U.S. context. This is a

34:45.120 --> 34:53.440
major problem. We have this issue of looking at sins that have physical consequences,

34:53.440 --> 35:01.120
consequences in time, and many people want to defend those. So for instance, we spoke of promiscuity

35:01.120 --> 35:06.720
in previous episodes. There are those who will want to try and defend those actions in the past,

35:06.720 --> 35:15.360
because if you recognize them as sin, except they were sin, repent. That repentance does not

35:15.360 --> 35:21.120
cure the physical consequences. The same thing is true here. If you repent of the fact that you had

35:21.120 --> 35:28.320
your son circumcised, his foreskin is not growing back. That's not how this works. There are very

35:28.320 --> 35:34.880
real consequences to our sins in time that will not be restored, that will not be undone,

35:35.440 --> 35:41.280
until the second coming, until we are in paradise. We have to live with those things in this life.

35:42.400 --> 35:51.760
But we do not carry them around as conscious baggage. Now, there are, again, real consequences

35:51.760 --> 35:56.560
that stick with us, and those are baggage in the sense that our sin does burden us.

35:57.520 --> 36:01.920
But we are not supposed to carry our sin around as a burden, because Christ took

36:01.920 --> 36:07.760
that on the cross and we are forgiven. So again, you repent, but you don't beat

36:07.760 --> 36:11.520
yourself up over this. That's not the point of the episode. That's not what we're trying to do

36:11.520 --> 36:17.440
by talking about circumcision. The goal here, as is the goal with many of the things we discuss

36:17.440 --> 36:22.640
on our episodes, is to get people to stop participating in something that is sinful.

36:22.960 --> 36:27.600
Just because you did something that was sinful, or you were burdened by something that was sinful,

36:27.600 --> 36:32.560
or you were harmed by it, does not mean that you allow it to perpetuate through additional

36:32.560 --> 36:38.880
generations. You can have it stop with you, or in this case, you can have it stop with your sons.

36:39.440 --> 36:45.280
Don't carry forward the wickedness of past generations. That's the goal. We can actually

36:46.000 --> 36:54.400
create a better future, a more Christian future, by getting rid of these pagan or Jewish practices.

36:55.440 --> 37:02.960
The goal is to end the wickedness. The goal is not to beat up on those who either willingly,

37:02.960 --> 37:08.720
wittingly, unwittingly, however it was, participated in something that was wrong, that was sinful.

37:09.840 --> 37:14.880
The goal is to get the practice to stop, to get Christians to recognize that there is

37:14.960 --> 37:19.600
a Christian response to this, and there is an anti-Christian or Jewish response to this.

37:20.400 --> 37:25.280
And as we've pointed out in some of the readings from Scripture so far, and there are many others,

37:26.240 --> 37:32.480
the New Testament is very clear. Circumcision is a Jewish practice. It is Judaizing.

37:32.480 --> 37:37.680
It is not something that Christians should be doing. It's not because, as Woe already said,

37:37.680 --> 37:42.560
it's not because it's a gospel issue, although ironically, as soon as you say

37:42.560 --> 37:49.440
that this isn't a gospel issue, you've made it a gospel issue by making it into a works issue.

37:50.080 --> 37:55.120
And so you've suddenly imported works righteousness into the discussion by saying it's not a gospel

37:55.120 --> 38:02.960
issue. What we are saying is that it is a practice in which Christians should not participate

38:02.960 --> 38:11.440
because it is Judaizing. Does participation in it damn you to hell? No. If you are circumcised,

38:11.440 --> 38:18.240
are you going to hell? No. Not what we're saying. If you try to make it part of the Christian religion

38:18.240 --> 38:24.160
and say this is something that you must do to be saved, now you have made it works righteousness,

38:24.160 --> 38:29.040
now you have rejected Christ, now you are severed from Christ in the words of the New Testament,

38:30.000 --> 38:35.600
then you are in danger of hellfire. But the ultimate point, the foundational point that we

38:35.680 --> 38:42.560
are trying to make by discussing circumcision is that it is one, a harmful practice, and that it is

38:42.560 --> 38:50.560
two, impermissible Judaizing in which Christians should not be engaged. I want to add just one

38:50.560 --> 38:58.720
additional specific scientific point to why and how it causes harm. As Corey said, this is male

38:58.800 --> 39:06.160
genital mutilation. This is the amputation of not only a body part without anesthetic. As Corey

39:06.160 --> 39:13.600
said, the foreskin is a sizable portion of what is amputated today. It has nothing to do with the

39:13.600 --> 39:20.080
scriptural practice. It has nothing to do with what Moses was commanded. The foreskin itself,

39:20.880 --> 39:26.000
when it is removed, that is functionally like a clitorectomy, which is a barbaric,

39:26.080 --> 39:34.080
disgusting practice that we often find in the Muslim world. A foreskin has about 30,000 nerve

39:34.080 --> 39:40.960
endings. The foreskin has significantly more nerve endings than the rest of the penis. And so when

39:40.960 --> 39:48.800
it is removed without anesthesia, obviously the pain is indescribable. And thankfully for those of

39:48.800 --> 39:54.080
us who have been victims of it, we can't remember. But as Corey said, not only do our bodies bear

39:54.080 --> 40:01.040
the witness of that barbaric amputation, but there are permanent, in many cases,

40:02.240 --> 40:10.960
psychological and what do you call the brain? It's not mental. We are permanently changed by

40:10.960 --> 40:21.440
what is fundamentally a practice of torture. The actual process of circumcising an American boy

40:21.440 --> 40:27.920
today, they're often put on a cruciform slab where their arms and legs are bound, just like Christ.

40:28.480 --> 40:35.520
They're not given anesthesia. And a part of their penis is amputated that has as many endings as many

40:35.520 --> 40:42.000
other parts of the body combined. Of course, this is going to do tremendous harm. It's a fundamentally

40:42.000 --> 40:48.640
wicked and evil practice. As Corey said, once the damage is done, it was done to me. I don't

40:48.640 --> 40:52.960
remember. I don't know what life would be like without it. And we'll make explicit that this is

40:52.960 --> 40:58.880
not sour grapes about my foreskin. I don't care. The point is, we should not be permitting these

40:58.880 --> 41:04.080
things to happen in the world. If you participated in something evil, if you've been the victim of

41:04.080 --> 41:08.880
something evil, you don't look at it and then try to baptize and say, oh, I guess it was okay.

41:08.880 --> 41:13.280
It's actually fine. Let's just keep going with more of that. Because you don't want to confront

41:13.280 --> 41:18.320
whatever evil happened in the past. If something is evil, this is plain evil. Forget scripture

41:18.320 --> 41:25.360
entirely. What I just described and what Corey described is per se evil's far too shallow word

41:25.360 --> 41:33.120
for what it is. It's fundamentally a primitive version of what's done in MKUltra. The MKUltra

41:33.120 --> 41:39.280
torture program was designed to achieve many of the same effects that are achieved on every single

41:39.280 --> 41:46.000
American boy who's circumcised. As Corey said, the number of European males who are circumcised,

41:46.000 --> 41:51.120
over 90% of them live in the United States. It's almost exclusively an American practice

41:51.120 --> 41:58.400
among whites. About 90% of Jews are circumcised. About 80% of Muslims worldwide are circumcised.

41:58.400 --> 42:04.160
So the only people who have participated in this barbaric practice are Americans,

42:04.160 --> 42:09.120
Jews, and Muslims. That by itself should be an indication that there's something religious

42:09.120 --> 42:13.920
going on here. Because what is that? That triad? That's the Abrahamic religions. That's what we're

42:13.920 --> 42:20.400
told today. Oh, it all came from Abraham. Isaac had Ishmael, and then we get the Muslims down the

42:20.400 --> 42:28.480
road. Jacob gave birth to the Jews, and then the Jews gave birth to the Christians. Circumcision

42:28.480 --> 42:34.080
unites us all. No. What's interesting when you look at this specific history of it in the United

42:34.080 --> 42:40.400
States, it did not exist when this country was founded because it never existed among Christians.

42:40.400 --> 42:46.240
It was expressly banned. It was, frankly, it's something that should be a death penalty

42:47.200 --> 42:51.920
matter today, in my opinion. I think if you're going to harm infants like that,

42:51.920 --> 42:58.400
you need to talk to the hangman. The practice when it was introduced in this country,

42:59.520 --> 43:05.360
part of it, it became very widespread once Jews began coming into this country at the end of the

43:05.680 --> 43:12.960
19th century, beginning of the 20th century. But it was already being pushed a few decades prior by

43:15.280 --> 43:20.640
post-Christian Judaizing Americans. This country, when you look at things like the

43:20.640 --> 43:27.120
history of the Burntover District and other places, there has been a sort of Judaizing,

43:27.120 --> 43:34.240
apostatizing development of entirely New Pagan religions that was unique to the United States.

43:34.720 --> 43:38.640
Some of it got exported back to England, and it's made it to a few other places.

43:39.280 --> 43:44.320
Many of these things, the reason that almost exclusively happens in the U.S., is that it was

43:44.320 --> 43:51.440
exclusively a U.S. thing. Once we started it, and originally one of the theories was,

43:51.440 --> 43:55.680
it's going to improve hygiene, it's going to improve mental health, they said it was going

43:55.680 --> 44:01.360
to prevent masturbation. Then when Jews started showing up, well, it was a way to normalize

44:02.000 --> 44:06.640
their population intermingling with ours, because they were all going to be circumcised.

44:07.200 --> 44:12.720
If you have these people who are trying to insinuate themselves into American life,

44:12.720 --> 44:18.240
but they all have this one fundamental difference, well, that's going to mark them as being a part,

44:18.240 --> 44:25.200
which was part of the original point. All of the Levitical laws were specifically to separate

44:25.840 --> 44:32.800
the Hebrews from their Pagan neighbors. The promise of the Messiah would be preserved and

44:32.800 --> 44:37.120
fulfilled in time. They were kept apart from their Pagan neighbors, so they wouldn't apostatize.

44:38.480 --> 44:44.320
That was no longer necessary once Jesus came. Not that the circumcision is not specifically

44:44.320 --> 44:49.920
a Levitical law, but it fell into the same bucket for the purposes of it was ended,

44:49.920 --> 44:56.720
is clearly ended in Scripture. When it reemerged in the US almost exclusively in the 1800s,

44:56.720 --> 45:00.960
and then it took off in the 20th century when Judaizing just became the norm,

45:01.760 --> 45:06.240
that's, sorry, 19th century and the 20th century, it began in the mid to late 1800s,

45:06.240 --> 45:11.520
and it really took off in the 20th century to point that at its peak in the 20th century,

45:11.520 --> 45:17.120
it was something like 90% of males in some places were circumcised. Thankfully,

45:17.120 --> 45:23.840
it's began falling in recent years, but mostly it's been falling because of illegal aliens coming

45:23.840 --> 45:28.960
here who don't practice it. So as we have non-whites who have not been subjected to the Judaizing

45:28.960 --> 45:33.600
tendencies, they just don't do it because its religious practice is not part of their religion.

45:34.320 --> 45:38.560
So while mathematically it's a good thing, and it shouldn't be happening to anyone regardless

45:38.560 --> 45:44.720
of religion, that should be a law for everyone. It's also the case that it's declining in large

45:44.720 --> 45:50.000
part mostly simply because we're being overrun by aliens. It's also starting to taper off,

45:50.000 --> 45:54.720
thankfully, fewer and fewer zoomers in the latter generation have been subjected to it.

45:54.720 --> 46:00.160
And it's a good thing. It should be illegal. It should be impermissible. And a Christian

46:00.160 --> 46:06.960
government would prevent this because it's torture. It's antithetical to everything that any decent

46:06.960 --> 46:12.480
person would hold. And the obvious implication is that that would ban Jews, wouldn't it?

46:12.480 --> 46:17.120
Because if the Jews today still say they have to be circumcised to be Jews, which they do,

46:17.120 --> 46:24.720
they have their bris, that's part of them still practicing the religion that Jesus fulfilled

46:24.720 --> 46:30.320
and then set aside. And they never gave up because they never understood God. They never knew God in

46:30.320 --> 46:36.720
the first place. So it's absolutely the case that to ban circumcision would be to make Jews illegal.

46:36.720 --> 46:39.920
That's necessary. A Christian country should do that.

46:41.920 --> 46:47.520
It's a shocking thing for some people to hear, but if it's evil, why do you permit it? Do you

46:47.520 --> 46:52.000
permit it because it's their religious practice? This is the fight that then happened with peyote

46:52.000 --> 46:55.760
and these other things where, oh, Indians have always been doing it, so we have to let it go.

46:55.760 --> 47:01.360
Or now Satanists are saying, well, abortion is part of my religion. It's a sacrament.

47:01.360 --> 47:05.760
They're absolutely right. Abortion is a satanic sacrament. It's part of their religion. That's

47:05.760 --> 47:11.120
true. What is not true is that it should be tolerated. It should be persecuted to the full

47:11.120 --> 47:16.640
extent of the law in addition to being prosecuted. I mean, both of those. It should be stamped out

47:16.640 --> 47:23.360
because it's wicked. And so this is the most extreme example of Judaizing tendencies

47:23.360 --> 47:28.400
that's particular to the United States, but it's also, as we said, it has the most

47:28.400 --> 47:34.000
texts spilled in the New Testament condemning it. I'll finish with a passage from Titus 1,

47:34.000 --> 47:40.400
the very beginning of what's a pastoral epistle. This passage here is being shared to an overseer

47:40.400 --> 47:44.960
to say, look, this is what you're going to be facing. And here's what is written.

47:46.320 --> 47:51.040
For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the

47:51.040 --> 47:56.640
circumcision party. They must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching

47:56.640 --> 48:01.760
for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own said,

48:01.760 --> 48:07.200
Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore,

48:07.200 --> 48:12.880
rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths

48:12.880 --> 48:17.680
and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. To the pure, all things are pure,

48:17.680 --> 48:23.280
but to the defiled and the unbelieving, nothing is pure. But both their minds and their consciences

48:23.280 --> 48:28.720
are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable,

48:28.720 --> 48:34.480
disobedient, unfit for any good work. This is the sort of thing that Cory and I say about some of

48:34.480 --> 48:40.080
the evil men that we see online, and everybody loses their mind. Is it un-Christian to express

48:40.080 --> 48:46.640
these sorts of sentiments? No. And it wasn't that Paul gets a special get out of jail free card,

48:46.640 --> 48:52.400
and it wasn't that we have a capricious God, and so whenever the Holy Spirit transmits these things,

48:52.400 --> 48:57.280
well, I guess it's not sin when God does it. This is a necessary part of the Christian faith

48:57.280 --> 49:03.280
to rebuke and condemn evil actions and those who are spreading them, and those who are perpetuating

49:03.280 --> 49:07.840
them. Because this circumcision party, which sounds like the worst party in the world,

49:07.840 --> 49:13.360
was pervasive. You found it everywhere in the early church. These Judaizers showed up everywhere,

49:13.360 --> 49:20.480
and they never reviled the cross, not directly, but they reviled the cross by despising the sacrifice

49:20.480 --> 49:25.120
that Christ had made. Because when he said it was finished, it included circumcision. Like,

49:25.120 --> 49:29.280
no, no, no. We got to keep doing that. We got to hang on to these things. We have to have this

49:29.280 --> 49:35.760
Jewish stuff in the church. The defining battle of the very first century of the Christian church

49:35.760 --> 49:40.560
was against Judaizing, and what we see today is it's roaring back. And next week, we're going to

49:40.560 --> 49:46.160
talk about Gnosticism, which was the second false religion that came roaring into the church,

49:46.160 --> 49:50.240
attacking it from every direction, and that's exactly what we have today. We're going to tie

49:50.240 --> 49:56.960
together many past episodes that deal with elements of the Gnostic faith, the Gnostic religion,

49:57.520 --> 50:04.480
of those days that are now, again, pervasive. Because why would that happen? Satan knows that

50:04.480 --> 50:10.560
the old tricks work, the lies that men believed before. We keep gobbling them up, and it's only

50:10.560 --> 50:15.600
when men will speak, as Paul speaks here in Titus, as the Holy Spirit speaks, and says,

50:15.600 --> 50:20.320
they profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They're detestable, disobedient,

50:20.320 --> 50:26.080
unfit for any good work. This is a sort of revulsion and hatred of evil that Christians

50:26.080 --> 50:34.080
are commanded to have. It's necessary to hate evil. Now, in the Acts 15 passage, when the Pharisees

50:34.080 --> 50:39.040
came and said, you guys need to be circumcising, the immediate response in that day, because the

50:39.040 --> 50:44.880
subject had not yet been broached, was not hatred. But by the time we get to Titus being written,

50:44.880 --> 50:51.680
it's clear, this question had been settled by God once and for all time. And when people keep

50:51.680 --> 50:58.160
coming back and reinvigorating the old question, knowing that it's going to do harm, you're permitted,

50:58.160 --> 51:02.320
and in fact, you're commanded to have a hateful response to it. Now, that doesn't mean you

51:02.320 --> 51:07.920
necessarily actually speak hatefully. I'm not advocating that. But if our response to this

51:07.920 --> 51:13.360
sort of wickedness is not animated by vehemence, there's something wrong with us.

51:14.320 --> 51:20.160
There is one more passage that I want to briefly add to this section on circumcision,

51:20.160 --> 51:24.080
because this is something about which I want you, the audience, to think.

51:25.280 --> 51:28.080
And I'm going to read briefly from Romans 4.

51:44.320 --> 51:51.280
It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal

51:51.280 --> 51:57.760
of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to

51:57.760 --> 52:03.680
make him the father of all who believe, without being circumcised, so that righteousness would

52:03.680 --> 52:08.880
be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised, who were not merely

52:08.960 --> 52:15.440
circumcised, but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he

52:15.440 --> 52:24.720
was circumcised. I want you to think about what that passage assumes about two distinct groups,

52:25.600 --> 52:30.720
and whether or not they are circumcised, and then compare that to what we are doing

52:31.360 --> 52:37.280
in the modern U.S. I would actually recommend you read the entire book of Romans,

52:37.280 --> 52:41.280
but at the very least perhaps meditate on that part of the book.

52:42.560 --> 52:48.640
The next example of Judaizing that we're going to tackle is actually a very modern one, which is,

52:48.640 --> 52:54.560
I think, a great example, because no one today knows it's modern. I didn't know until someone

52:54.560 --> 53:01.440
asked me the question, and the question was, is the use of the word Yahweh something that is good

53:01.440 --> 53:06.240
or bad? Somebody asked me, and my first response was, obviously, that's garbage. That was my

53:06.240 --> 53:12.160
instinctual response. Yeah, it sounds like bunk. That sounds like Judaizing, as I just instinctively

53:12.160 --> 53:20.000
knew this sort of pattern replays over and over throughout history. So when someone is using this

53:20.000 --> 53:26.480
Jewish-sounding word to speak of God, when in many other contexts that's not how we talk about God,

53:26.480 --> 53:31.520
my instinct was that's crap. But I didn't know anything about the history, so I started digging

53:31.520 --> 53:37.200
into it a little bit, and what I found was astonishing. So some months ago, I think about last

53:37.200 --> 53:42.240
June, I did a thread on Twitter. We will link in the show notes that thread, so I'll have the

53:42.240 --> 53:46.640
screenshots that I dug up, and we'll flesh it out a little more fully than we're going to do here,

53:46.640 --> 53:51.120
but because a lot of you guys are not on TwitterX, I want to just give this example because it's

53:51.120 --> 53:59.520
another great way of illustrating that these tendencies, they're pervasive. We all want to

53:59.520 --> 54:04.560
Jew up our Christianity. We want to have the more authentic version of our faith,

54:04.560 --> 54:10.080
and that means making it seem less Christian and making it seem more like the old Hebrew stuff.

54:10.080 --> 54:15.920
We need those Hebrew roots. We need the Judeo back in our Christianity. That's the impetus in

54:15.920 --> 54:20.960
the American church, and we've talked to some length in other places that that's just by itself,

54:20.960 --> 54:28.160
it's evil. The specific example of Yahweh is particularly astonishingly bad. So the first

54:28.240 --> 54:34.640
thing I did, before we get into it, I want to make one thing very clear. Yahweh, I'm talking about

54:34.640 --> 54:44.400
the six letters, Y-A-H-W-E-H. It's pronounced in English, Yahweh. It's not synonymous with the

54:44.400 --> 54:51.200
tetragrammaton. That is Y-H-W-H. So the first thing that we have to understand when we're talking

54:51.200 --> 54:56.560
about this subject is a reminder of something we talked about in a couple of the earlier episodes

54:56.560 --> 55:03.120
about Jews, which is that Hebrew is a very primitive language. It is fundamentally deficient

55:03.120 --> 55:09.680
in numerous ways. One of the most glaring is that Hebrew literally has no vowels. There are no vowels

55:09.680 --> 55:16.800
in the Hebrew language. They're spoken because we don't know how to speak without vowels.

55:16.800 --> 55:23.440
Basically, the vowels are the meat of a word, and the consonants are like the bread on either

55:23.440 --> 55:30.480
side of the sandwich. But you have to have a vowel in order to have a word. Hebrew doesn't have any

55:30.480 --> 55:38.800
vowels. It has 22 letters or all consonants. This is fundamentally defective for a written language

55:38.800 --> 55:46.240
because there's so much ambiguity. Imagine that I had written down this sentence.

55:46.320 --> 55:58.080
You should turn off the, and then I write, L-D. You know when you're reading it that L-D

55:58.800 --> 56:05.760
is a word, but I've left out the vowels. I've left out the vowel sounds. Now what can L-D mean?

56:06.480 --> 56:12.640
I could mean lead. I could mean lid, lude, load, lod.

56:14.800 --> 56:18.560
All those have very different meanings. Those are all fundamentally different words,

56:18.560 --> 56:22.880
and maybe in context you might be able to guess which one I was talking about.

56:23.680 --> 56:30.240
But the problem with the Hebrew language being so deficient and lacking vowels entirely

56:30.240 --> 56:37.360
is that without the direct oral transmission faithfully, it's entirely possible for someone to

56:37.360 --> 56:43.120
alter what a word means. Because if you just have the consonants L and D, any of those words are

56:43.120 --> 56:47.840
possible, and sometimes context doesn't tell you which one it is. They could in some cases be two

56:47.840 --> 56:54.160
or three of them. And so it's only with faithful oral transmission of the knowledge of which words

56:54.160 --> 56:58.880
it is you're reading, which existed for a long time. I'm not trying to call into question whether

57:00.240 --> 57:05.680
the Hebrews were faithfully transmitting scripture, because the rabbis would teach their pupils,

57:06.400 --> 57:11.280
here's the words, here's how you read it, here's how to pronounce it, here's what the word actually is,

57:11.280 --> 57:15.360
because language is fundamentally spoken and then secondarily written.

57:17.440 --> 57:25.840
So the question of Yahweh versus Y-H-W-H, the tetragrammaton, is that because in Hebrew,

57:25.840 --> 57:32.480
the word, and that this is a word that was given to Moses from the burning bush, God said I am,

57:32.480 --> 57:40.960
that's how you revealed his name, he said his name is I am. Y-H-W-H means I am. We know this

57:40.960 --> 57:49.120
to be a fact. What we don't know, what no one knows, is what the vowel sounds were in Y-H-W-H.

57:50.000 --> 57:56.880
And so one of the earliest episodes we did on A Name No Man Knows where we talked a little

57:56.880 --> 58:01.760
bit about secret names. There are secret names of God where he specifically says there's a name

58:01.760 --> 58:09.920
that no man knows for Jesus Christ. That's fine, that's God's business. It's not supposed to be

58:09.920 --> 58:15.200
some sort of esoteric knowledge that we should chase after and desire greedily. I want to know

58:15.200 --> 58:20.000
the secret name, I want to know how to pronounce it. What that's fundamentally doing is turning

58:21.120 --> 58:29.200
what God said into a black magic incantation. And the reason that I can say this is that when we

58:29.200 --> 58:36.800
look elsewhere in Scripture, in the other places where God said I am, he said I am, not in English,

58:36.800 --> 58:45.040
but he said in Hebrew and he said also incidentally in Greek. In the New Testament, I am is also said

58:45.120 --> 58:52.160
in fact one of the times when the Jews tried to murder Christ was when he said before Abraham was

58:52.160 --> 59:01.120
I am. And he said it in Greek, he said ego and me. If the tetragrammaton, if the Y-H-W-H were some

59:01.120 --> 59:07.280
special sound that had a power all its own, Jesus would have used the special magic word,

59:07.280 --> 59:12.560
but he didn't. What did he say? He said in Greek, I am. And they knew what he was talking about

59:12.560 --> 59:19.600
because they tried to murder him on the spot. Why? Because even the sentence before Abraham was I am,

59:20.400 --> 59:24.080
which was a confession that he was God, he was saying I am God, which is why they tried to

59:24.080 --> 59:29.440
murder him because if he was lying, it would be utter blasphemy. That's something I would never

59:29.440 --> 59:33.600
say because it would be blasphemous. I'm not even joking about saying it because it's facially

59:33.600 --> 59:39.200
untrue. When he said it, it was true because he's God. The interesting thing about the sentence

59:39.200 --> 59:46.160
structure before Abraham was I am is it doesn't work. It doesn't work logically to human minds.

59:46.160 --> 59:51.680
It would make sense to say before Abraham was I was. It would still have been blasphemy,

59:51.680 --> 59:56.400
but it would not have hearkened to what the theophany of the burning bush said.

59:57.200 --> 01:00:04.320
It would not have pointed back to that. And so when Jesus said I am, he said exactly what

01:00:04.320 --> 01:00:08.960
God said. So that illustrates that it's not a secret noise. It's not a special

01:00:09.840 --> 01:00:16.720
hidden name. It's just how I am was spelled. And Christians left it alone because one of

01:00:16.720 --> 01:00:22.320
things we'll get into in this thread a little bit is that the Septuagint was the Bible of Jesus

01:00:22.320 --> 01:00:29.040
Day. The Old Testament was 100% Greek. Almost no one could read Hebrew and no one spoke Hebrew.

01:00:29.040 --> 01:00:35.120
It was a dead language. It was not being spoken. So in the New Testament, when Jesus' words are

01:00:35.120 --> 01:00:39.200
recorded in Greek, it's not a translation of what he was actually saying. They're the words

01:00:39.200 --> 01:00:44.160
that he said, which is why there are the few places where you have Aramaic sayings. It's like,

01:00:44.160 --> 01:00:48.400
you know, why does he say Eloi, Eloi, Lama, Thessabic Thani? Well, he said that because

01:00:48.400 --> 01:00:54.480
that's what he actually said because he also spoke Aramaic. And so when the words of Jesus

01:00:54.480 --> 01:00:59.200
uttered out loud were in Aramaic, that is what is recorded in Scripture. When it records his

01:00:59.200 --> 01:01:04.320
Greek words, it's not that he was speaking Greek or he wasn't speaking Hebrew and they translated

01:01:04.320 --> 01:01:09.040
into Greek. He was speaking in Greek. That was his natural language. He spoke both when he was

01:01:09.040 --> 01:01:14.080
preaching in the crowds. He spoke in Greek. Later on in the year, we're going to be doing an entire

01:01:14.080 --> 01:01:20.240
episode specifically in the Septuagint. So we're not going to belabor that point today. But it's

01:01:20.240 --> 01:01:26.160
very important that his Bible, Jesus Bible, which incidentally is a pretty big deal. If the Bible

01:01:26.160 --> 01:01:31.920
that God is using to preach from is written in Greek, it should be good enough for us to say,

01:01:31.920 --> 01:01:38.800
yes, we can trust this. It has the imprimatur of God to say, this is my word. I'm using it to teach.

01:01:38.800 --> 01:01:45.120
And what we find in the Septuagint is that it simply translates, I am. And other places where

01:01:45.120 --> 01:01:52.800
it translates as God. So this all highlights that there's no magic, secret word. There's no

01:01:52.800 --> 01:02:01.120
secret noise that we need to utter or invoke in order to have some more Christian experience.

01:02:01.120 --> 01:02:05.600
But that's the Judaizing tendency to say, I need some of the sounds more Jewish than what I'm doing.

01:02:05.600 --> 01:02:12.000
If I just say God, or if I say I am, I mean, I understand what that means. If I say Yeshua,

01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:17.440
or if I say Jehovah, or if I say Yahweh, now we're talking. That's that really authentic

01:02:17.440 --> 01:02:23.360
Jewish stuff. I need more of that. That's the problem. And so when I dug into the history of

01:02:23.360 --> 01:02:29.360
Yahweh, not YHWH, don't care about that. Don't care about vowel pointing. Where did Yahweh come from?

01:02:30.000 --> 01:02:36.400
Well, the first place I looked was on Google Engram's search for frequency. Because if Yahweh

01:02:36.400 --> 01:02:41.200
is the good name of God, if it's what everybody knows today, it's common probably in a lot of your

01:02:41.200 --> 01:02:49.280
churches for pastors and others to say Yahweh. Because it seems sincere. It seems authentic,

01:02:49.840 --> 01:02:56.880
authentic. It seems like something that's really, really legit. And so people do it in good

01:02:56.880 --> 01:03:01.520
conscience. I don't think that they're acting maliciously when they do it. But my question

01:03:01.520 --> 01:03:06.720
was, what's the genealogy of this thing? Is this godly or is it a turd? And what I found was that

01:03:07.280 --> 01:03:14.080
the word literally did not exist until the mid 1800s. And it was kind of hanging around in the

01:03:14.080 --> 01:03:20.080
background in terms of frequency on Google Engram's. And it was kind of on a slow upward

01:03:20.080 --> 01:03:28.400
trajectory until after about 2005 or so. Right around 2010, 15, 14 years ago, it goes vertical.

01:03:29.600 --> 01:03:35.440
Everybody suddenly is saying Yahweh out of the blue. Well, that's a really big red flag to me.

01:03:35.440 --> 01:03:40.560
Because that's not a natural pattern. That means if something changed in the zeitgeist,

01:03:40.560 --> 01:03:44.960
people were behaving in one way and then they started behaving another. Now, in some cases,

01:03:44.960 --> 01:03:49.120
that's just an interesting thing to notice. But when you're talking about God's name,

01:03:49.120 --> 01:03:55.200
and suddenly God's name explodes 14 years ago, yeah, that's going to concern me a great deal.

01:03:55.200 --> 01:04:01.920
So I dug into it and I started looking at the very earliest instances in the Google Engram's

01:04:01.920 --> 01:04:07.680
repository of where Yahweh was first used. And the thread is going over what I discovered.

01:04:07.680 --> 01:04:12.720
I'm not going to go into it too much here, but the gist of it is that, as I said,

01:04:12.720 --> 01:04:20.480
it was never done in church history until around the Middle Ages. And then one of the first things

01:04:20.480 --> 01:04:27.280
that happened was that the vow pointing. So, you know, we mentioned that the Hebrew has no

01:04:27.280 --> 01:04:32.240
vowels. Some of you probably are familiar with vow pointing. If you see what's called Hebrew

01:04:32.240 --> 01:04:37.520
today, it's not, but it's what it's called. You'll often see that there are dots and lines. So it's

01:04:37.520 --> 01:04:42.640
look like broken Morse code is scattered around. That's the vow pointing. That's adding the vow

01:04:42.640 --> 01:04:48.480
sounds to the written text so that someone who isn't receiving the orally transmitted teaching

01:04:48.480 --> 01:04:52.960
knows how to pronounce it, knows which words they are. Because, again, this primitive backward

01:04:52.960 --> 01:04:58.720
language has no, often has none of context, even know what word you're talking about. So,

01:04:59.520 --> 01:05:06.320
the vow pointing has only existed for about 11, maybe 1200 years at the outside. It's a brand

01:05:06.320 --> 01:05:11.840
new thing. It's a brand new because, you know, in America, most of you know, he's living in a 1200

01:05:11.840 --> 01:05:19.200
year old house, but 1200 years is new for Christianity. And so what happened was the

01:05:19.200 --> 01:05:25.040
Maserites, the Jewish scholars in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East,

01:05:26.320 --> 01:05:31.680
they wanted to solve this problem. They finally started adding vowels to the old language because

01:05:31.680 --> 01:05:35.280
there had been an effort, even though it was dead, they were beginning to try to repersonate it.

01:05:35.280 --> 01:05:40.240
They were bringing it back, trying to preserve it, trying to preserve that part of their tradition.

01:05:41.360 --> 01:05:47.200
Incidentally, they also wrote the Talmud and Aramaic. And so it has vow pointing as well.

01:05:47.440 --> 01:05:53.440
The very first instance that we have of vowels on so-called Hebrew is the Aleppo Codex, which is

01:05:53.440 --> 01:06:00.720
about 1100 years old. It could happen, they say maybe about as early as about 750 was the first

01:06:00.720 --> 01:06:05.840
time that the vowels were added. And something that happened in the 12th century because they

01:06:05.840 --> 01:06:10.400
still wouldn't add the vowels to Yahweh, they left it alone. And so around the 12th century,

01:06:11.120 --> 01:06:19.680
the Maserites transliterated the vowels from Adonai, which is another name for God,

01:06:19.680 --> 01:06:28.240
onto the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. The Y-H-W-H had the vowels from Adonai superimposed

01:06:28.240 --> 01:06:36.720
on it. And that's where the word Jehovah comes from. So they invented Jehovah about 800 years ago.

01:06:36.720 --> 01:06:40.880
And after a couple hundred years, it got picked up medieval Europe because

01:06:42.640 --> 01:06:46.960
contact with the Jews who were passing around their Hebrew texts and saying,

01:06:46.960 --> 01:06:51.840
this is scripture, this is more authentic than what you have, some of them fell for it.

01:06:52.880 --> 01:06:58.000
Uncritically, like, well, okay. It was kind of the beginning of Judaizing, resurging,

01:06:58.000 --> 01:07:04.400
and the Christian church was already happening before the Reformation. And it's a tragedy that

01:07:04.560 --> 01:07:10.560
happened because they were uncritical. No one ever considered the fact that the genealogy of even

01:07:10.560 --> 01:07:17.600
the vowel pointing, never mind the so-called Hebrew text of scripture that was a thousand years

01:07:17.600 --> 01:07:24.640
newer than the Septuagint, every single vowel pointer had been invented or had been transcribed,

01:07:24.640 --> 01:07:30.240
had been not transcribed because there was no transmission, had been given to the Christians

01:07:30.800 --> 01:07:36.640
by men who were in hell. Every single man who was involved in the creation of vowel pointing for

01:07:36.640 --> 01:07:44.480
the Hebrew language is in hell because 100% of them were Jews. They were evil, wicked, God-hating men.

01:07:45.200 --> 01:07:50.880
And even in the Middle Ages, they were called Christ killers. And yet when the church started

01:07:50.880 --> 01:07:56.400
looking at, hmm, I want to learn more about God's word, okay, great. Let's turn to the Jews. What?

01:07:57.200 --> 01:08:01.200
They went to the people that they called Christ killers and said, tell us more about our God.

01:08:01.200 --> 01:08:06.400
And so what did the rabbis do? They started passing off their Hebrew text and saying, here you go,

01:08:06.400 --> 01:08:13.680
here's the vowel pointers, and the Adonai tetragrammaton mashup of Jehovah was passed on. And

01:08:13.680 --> 01:08:20.400
so it began to plant the seed in people's minds that, I am, is not sufficient. The words that

01:08:20.400 --> 01:08:25.600
God used isn't enough. You need the sound. And I realize this is kind of a fiddly point for some

01:08:25.680 --> 01:08:30.000
people, but the word and the sound isn't the same thing. You can have synonyms where different

01:08:30.000 --> 01:08:35.760
words mean the same thing. Totally different words, different sounds. The sound of whatever

01:08:35.760 --> 01:08:42.720
the tetragrammaton is, it's the name that God gave. I don't mean to diminish its importance.

01:08:42.720 --> 01:08:49.280
What it is not is a magic spell. It's not something that because I don't know how God

01:08:49.280 --> 01:08:55.040
pronounced it, I'm missing out. I do not have less of the Christian faith because I don't know how to

01:08:55.040 --> 01:09:03.440
pronounce Y-H-W-H. And so what happened in the 1800s, there was a man named Wilhelm Gethenius,

01:09:03.440 --> 01:09:08.000
who was a linguist, he was a scholar, who was digging into some of these questions,

01:09:08.640 --> 01:09:15.680
and he came up with Yahweh, Y-A-H-W-E-H, the six letters, that sound. He said,

01:09:15.680 --> 01:09:20.160
I think this is the sound that it probably was. Fine. People have been arguing about for a while,

01:09:20.160 --> 01:09:24.960
just as a peripheral academic exercise. It's an interesting question. I wonder,

01:09:24.960 --> 01:09:29.680
personally. I like to know. I don't care. Again, I'm not missing out on anything, but

01:09:29.680 --> 01:09:36.400
it's a reasonable question. And it's one thing for a man to speculate. But what Gethenius did was,

01:09:38.960 --> 01:09:45.760
for one, he was already practicing critical scholarship. So he didn't believe that Moses

01:09:46.320 --> 01:09:55.520
was the scribe of the Torah. He didn't believe that Genesis was literal. And so he came up with

01:09:55.520 --> 01:10:03.120
Yahweh, in part, by thinking that the Hebrews were influenced by their neighbors. And so he got to

01:10:03.120 --> 01:10:11.600
the pronunciation Yahweh with Job and with Jupiter because those were also preeminent gods in those

01:10:11.600 --> 01:10:16.720
places where the Hebrews lived with their neighbors. And he thought, well, there seem to be some

01:10:16.720 --> 01:10:22.640
similarities between Y-H-W-H and Job and Jupiter. I bet they were all influenced the same way.

01:10:22.640 --> 01:10:29.920
And so he sort of mangled some of the phonetics of those words, stuck him into the Tetragrammaton,

01:10:29.920 --> 01:10:36.960
and ta-da, we have Yahweh. If he had been a proper Christian, he could have still made the

01:10:36.960 --> 01:10:42.880
connection between the Tetragrammaton and Job and Jupiter. Because as a Christian, it's entirely

01:10:42.880 --> 01:10:48.480
believable that those would be related, not because there's some God and we don't know his name,

01:10:48.480 --> 01:10:55.680
but because the worshipers of Jupiter and Job still remembered something of God,

01:10:55.680 --> 01:11:00.720
but they didn't know God. So they knew something about how to call upon him,

01:11:00.720 --> 01:11:05.360
but they didn't know who they were calling upon. So the mythologies, all the things that they believed

01:11:05.360 --> 01:11:09.920
about Job and Jupiter were evil, but they at least were pointing to the king of gods.

01:11:09.920 --> 01:11:15.200
They got that one detail, right? That's entirely permissible for a Christian to believe,

01:11:15.200 --> 01:11:19.360
but he didn't believe that. So he said, yeah, I think it's Yahweh. He wrote it in a book,

01:11:19.360 --> 01:11:23.760
he published it a few years later, he actually retracted. It was a footnote, effectively.

01:11:25.360 --> 01:11:29.760
About 30 years later, 20 years later, a man named Alexander MacArthur III

01:11:30.560 --> 01:11:38.320
discovered this book. And when he saw Yahweh, he didn't see a pious or unpious,

01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:42.400
depending on how you want to interpret it, speculation about how to pronounce this word.

01:11:42.400 --> 01:11:49.360
It doesn't really matter. When he saw Yahweh, he discovered a key to reinterpret all of Scripture.

01:11:49.360 --> 01:11:54.240
So he went nuts. He wrote a whole book, wrote 179 page books. I read the whole thing.

01:11:55.200 --> 01:11:58.720
Either screenshots in the thread where you can read some of the clips I found.

01:11:59.840 --> 01:12:04.880
Basically, what he believed when he discovered this word Yahweh,

01:12:06.400 --> 01:12:10.160
one, he was a unitarian. He was not a Christian. He had some insane

01:12:11.040 --> 01:12:16.640
heretical beliefs about the Trinity. He denied the Trinity. It was just a disaster.

01:12:17.840 --> 01:12:21.840
He believed that the Septuagint was a shoddy translation

01:12:21.840 --> 01:12:25.360
by men who didn't know Hebrew at all. He said they're really bad at Hebrew.

01:12:25.360 --> 01:12:29.360
So he had fallen completely under the spell that the Masoretic text

01:12:29.360 --> 01:12:34.160
that dates back, in his case, about 800 years, that was the real Bible.

01:12:34.160 --> 01:12:37.840
And the 2000-year-old version that we have in Greek, that was somehow botched.

01:12:39.120 --> 01:12:45.040
Because he believed that, he believed that the translators of the Septuagint were influenced

01:12:45.120 --> 01:12:52.000
by Greek pagan philosophy. And so one of the things that the Septuagint does,

01:12:52.000 --> 01:12:57.600
is it will just translate, God is God. And he rejected the word God. It's Theos in Greek.

01:12:58.240 --> 01:13:03.840
He rejected that. He said that that was Greek philosophy and pinging upon the true religion.

01:13:03.840 --> 01:13:07.440
So he found it impermissible that the Septuagint said God.

01:13:08.720 --> 01:13:13.120
That's kind of weird, because Christians have always invoked the name of God.

01:13:13.120 --> 01:13:17.840
He says that's a pagan practice. No one's permitted to do that. So when he found Yahweh,

01:13:18.880 --> 01:13:25.680
what he decided was that it didn't mean I am. He effectively said that Hebrew had a tense that

01:13:25.680 --> 01:13:31.680
it doesn't have. It doesn't have a future tense. He believed that Yahweh was he who is to come.

01:13:32.880 --> 01:13:38.880
Which is a really weird thing, because what he wanted to do by taking this Yahweh sound,

01:13:38.880 --> 01:13:42.320
like, and I realize it's kind of getting off into the weeds, but that's the point of this.

01:13:42.320 --> 01:13:47.840
When we say Yahweh today, this is what we're inheriting. One guy makes up a word, says,

01:13:47.840 --> 01:13:51.920
I think it might have sounded like this. Another guy discovers it. He invents a new

01:13:52.560 --> 01:13:57.600
way of interpreting that word. And he sticks it back in the rest of the Bible. And so,

01:13:57.600 --> 01:14:04.400
according to McCordier, if Yahweh or Yahweh means he who is to come, he wanted to treat that as a

01:14:04.400 --> 01:14:11.440
prophecy of the Messiah. And so the book that he wrote was entitled Yahweh Christ or the Memorial

01:14:11.440 --> 01:14:19.280
Name. And basically, he used Yahweh as a decoder ring for the entire Bible. And he reinterpreted

01:14:19.280 --> 01:14:23.120
all the passages, contrary to how they'd ever been interpreted by Christians in the history of the

01:14:23.120 --> 01:14:31.760
church in a way that was forward-looking. Now, this becomes really creepy when it gets adopted

01:14:31.760 --> 01:14:38.000
by others. When he published this book, it was roundly panned. I clipped some of the reviews of

01:14:38.000 --> 01:14:43.280
it. It was despised, rightfully, even by some places that weren't particularly very Christian.

01:14:43.280 --> 01:14:49.280
They still found this utterly outside the faith. So it didn't really go anywhere too much until

01:14:49.280 --> 01:14:55.680
a cult discovered it. After he wrote this, he published it. It didn't really take off because

01:14:55.680 --> 01:15:02.480
it was pop theology. It was garbage and it was blasphemy. Unfortunately, it was discovered by a

01:15:02.480 --> 01:15:10.160
man named John Thomas and the Christodelfians. They were a Unitarian cult. And when they found it,

01:15:10.160 --> 01:15:17.920
they became ecstatic because this was this key of Yahweh, of decoding the Old Testament, the New

01:15:17.920 --> 01:15:25.040
Testament, and then pointing to a future incarnation. They believed that this was consistent with their

01:15:25.040 --> 01:15:31.440
beliefs, which was really bad news because these guys were a full-blown cult. They called themselves

01:15:31.440 --> 01:15:40.640
Antipas, which means basically the adversary working against it. You can see in the thread how

01:15:40.640 --> 01:15:46.720
creepy some of the stuff is. They're disturbing people. They denied that the devil existed.

01:15:47.280 --> 01:15:53.760
They denied that there's immortality of the flesh. They weren't remotely Christian, but they loved

01:15:53.760 --> 01:15:58.000
Yahweh. And so they popularized it because Unitarianism, unfortunately, was taking off.

01:15:58.560 --> 01:16:06.080
They got enough attention that it entered not the mainstream, but it became widely known enough.

01:16:06.080 --> 01:16:11.520
They were just sitting there. I didn't figure out where later on Yahweh became adopted more

01:16:11.520 --> 01:16:18.080
broadly, but it became normal where people suddenly stopped thinking that I am has significance,

01:16:18.080 --> 01:16:24.560
which it does, that confession of Jesus saying before Abraham was I am. That's a profound confession

01:16:25.120 --> 01:16:34.000
of who he is as God, that God is eternal. When McCordier made Yahweh a future promise, he effectively

01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:40.800
turned it into a prophetic word, which is a problem because he wasn't talking about the

01:16:40.800 --> 01:16:46.000
Second Coming of Christ. He was talking about a new incarnation. And my personal belief,

01:16:46.000 --> 01:16:50.960
after digging through this, I think that when you read through it, it should creep you out.

01:16:51.600 --> 01:16:59.280
And I believe that Yahweh is an invocation of the Antichrist. I think that the way these men

01:16:59.280 --> 01:17:05.040
who expounded upon Yahweh and they used it as a decoder ring for the Old and New Testament,

01:17:05.680 --> 01:17:10.640
the ecstatic terms in which they describe Yahweh as he who is coming,

01:17:12.320 --> 01:17:17.200
it screams Antichrist to me. I think when you look at it side by side with some of the passages

01:17:17.200 --> 01:17:24.160
in Revelation, I think that's what they're talking about. And you can take a look for yourself,

01:17:24.160 --> 01:17:28.480
I don't know. It's my personal opinion, but it's really creepy. Even if you don't agree

01:17:28.480 --> 01:17:33.760
that it's an invocation of Antichrist, it's still really creepy who was attracted to it.

01:17:33.760 --> 01:17:39.760
None of them are Christian, like maybe Gisenius was. He was in rough shape. McCordier was absolutely

01:17:39.760 --> 01:17:45.840
not. The Christodelfians were absolutely not. And then yet later on, in the 20th century,

01:17:45.920 --> 01:17:50.480
somebody else digs it up and says, oh, Yahweh, that's the original name of God. That's the Jewish

01:17:50.480 --> 01:17:55.600
name of God. Now we have it. Now we have that sound that we're going to use. And now we have a more

01:17:55.600 --> 01:18:01.760
authentic version of Christianity than we have when we just said God or I am, depending on context.

01:18:02.720 --> 01:18:10.720
So by itself, it seems meaningless. But when you know the genealogy of who was attracted to it

01:18:10.720 --> 01:18:15.920
in the last two centuries, again, it didn't exist before two centuries ago. It did not exist.

01:18:15.920 --> 01:18:23.360
It was 190 years ago that Yahweh was invented. And yet today, in our churches and our synods,

01:18:23.360 --> 01:18:30.000
we see men using this, again, with ecstasy, because it's authentic. And what's really weird is that

01:18:30.000 --> 01:18:35.760
even in the LCMS there are guys who claim to be theologians who will talk about God in the New

01:18:35.760 --> 01:18:42.720
Testament and will refer to God as Yahweh in the Old Testament. That's coming incredibly

01:18:42.720 --> 01:18:49.040
dangerously close to confessing a heresy all by itself, to divide God into two parts like that.

01:18:49.040 --> 01:18:54.080
We have Yahweh in the Old Testament and then God in the New Testament. That's not a Christian

01:18:54.080 --> 01:19:00.400
confession. And yet that's a completely normal way for guys to be talking today. And since Corey

01:19:00.400 --> 01:19:05.680
and I began delving into some of these subjects, even just a little bit, we have directly seen pushback

01:19:05.680 --> 01:19:10.160
in the Missouri Synod at the highest levels to double and triple down on this stuff.

01:19:10.160 --> 01:19:15.360
They're pushing Hebrew even harder. They're overtly attacking the Septuagint, which, again,

01:19:15.360 --> 01:19:19.760
was the Bible of the early church. That's unequivocally true. There's no Hebrew Bible used.

01:19:19.760 --> 01:19:24.960
There didn't exist. The Hebrew Bible that they're using, that they're saying is authentic,

01:19:24.960 --> 01:19:31.520
is just over a thousand years old. And the continuity, such as it is, between what they're

01:19:31.520 --> 01:19:37.840
using from their Masoretic text and what goes back to Jesus' day was exclusively in the hands

01:19:37.840 --> 01:19:43.040
of the Christ killers who deny God. Incidentally, there are specific changes that were made in

01:19:43.040 --> 01:19:49.600
their Masoretic text to remove a few of the key prophecies about God in the Hebrew text.

01:19:49.600 --> 01:19:55.840
The Masoretic text has prophecies removed to not refer to Jesus Christ. That's what they did

01:19:55.920 --> 01:20:02.400
with a Bible, so-called, that these men want to hold over against the Septuagint.

01:20:02.960 --> 01:20:09.600
Now, Corey and I both think that there's some value in comparing them, but for someone to

01:20:09.600 --> 01:20:16.320
deliberately attack the Greek to support the much newer Hebrew, again, it's Judaizing.

01:20:16.320 --> 01:20:20.960
Why are you doing that? Because it's Hebrew and therefore it's older. That's simply not true.

01:20:20.960 --> 01:20:25.120
It's not older. You're always not older. You're always less than 200 years old.

01:20:25.120 --> 01:20:29.680
That's what we find with some of these things. Some of the newer forms of Judaizing are,

01:20:30.400 --> 01:20:34.960
they're just fabrications. They're taking things that seem Jewy, sticking them in Christianity

01:20:34.960 --> 01:20:39.200
when they have no basis in the Christian church. And that's why it's something that

01:20:39.200 --> 01:20:44.240
Stone Choir was concerned about, because what are you doing? Why are you importing stuff that

01:20:44.240 --> 01:20:49.360
has no basis in church history? And then what's going to be the fruit of it when you have

01:20:49.440 --> 01:20:53.600
Christodelfians, Unitarians, people who deny that there's a Satan saying,

01:20:53.600 --> 01:21:01.520
yeah, Yahweh is coming. Yahweh is to come. That creeps me out. That makes me viscerally

01:21:01.520 --> 01:21:09.520
uncomfortable. These guys want to preach about it. There's a conflict of religions going on here.

01:21:09.520 --> 01:21:12.720
That's why the first episode we talked about, where are you getting your morality from? Where

01:21:12.720 --> 01:21:17.280
are you getting your theology from? If you're getting it from people who call themselves the

01:21:17.280 --> 01:21:23.840
adversary, and you're Unitarians who deny God, you're rowing across the river to hell.

01:21:25.520 --> 01:21:32.400
For anyone in our audience who happens to be inclined toward languages, or perhaps we even

01:21:32.400 --> 01:21:40.800
have a philologist in our audience, you may have noticed something about the word Yahweh, or

01:21:41.680 --> 01:21:50.400
Yahweh, if you want to say it as the Germans would. The vowel sequence that is added to

01:21:51.280 --> 01:21:59.120
the consonants is simply what one would expect if you were adding vowels to a German word in the

01:21:59.120 --> 01:22:04.640
one case, or an English word in the other, which is a little curious that it just happens to have

01:22:05.280 --> 01:22:11.280
obtained the vowels that fit the languages, the target languages. It's a minor point, but it is

01:22:11.280 --> 01:22:16.640
a curious thing to have happen, because if you were going to say this more clearly, perhaps for

01:22:16.640 --> 01:22:24.560
those who are not linguistically inclined, if you were given those four consonants and told to

01:22:24.560 --> 01:22:31.600
pronounce them as an English speaker or a German speaker, what we now have is exactly what you

01:22:31.600 --> 01:22:39.360
would do. Just think about it. Think of the four consonants, pretend you don't know what vowels

01:22:39.360 --> 01:22:44.800
are added to them today, and then add vowels in your head. You're going to add a and e,

01:22:44.800 --> 01:22:50.480
because that's just the natural way English and German work when it comes to this sequence of

01:22:50.480 --> 01:22:58.240
consonants. But I want to point out something about the names of God that are given in Scripture,

01:22:58.240 --> 01:23:03.920
a fundamental fact. God gives us a number of different names in Scripture. Obviously,

01:23:03.920 --> 01:23:12.560
one of the biggest instances of this is in Exodus, Exodus 314, in which God speaks to Moses and says,

01:23:12.560 --> 01:23:19.440
in English, I am who I am. For those who are intending to clip that, no, I don't mean that God

01:23:19.440 --> 01:23:24.720
spoke to Moses in English. I mean to say that I am who I am is how we render it in English.

01:23:25.120 --> 01:23:35.680
God gives his name as I am, ego e mi, ego sum. These are all things

01:23:36.560 --> 01:23:44.320
that are eminently translatable. You can readily translate I am who I am into basically any language.

01:23:45.520 --> 01:23:52.400
But two of the other names God gives us that we have in Scripture are God and Lord.

01:23:52.720 --> 01:23:59.120
God, Lord and I am are all eminently translatable. I think you would find it very challenging to

01:23:59.120 --> 01:24:05.120
find any language into which you could not translate these. God gave us names for himself

01:24:05.120 --> 01:24:12.400
that we can use in our own language. He didn't give us a special name, a special combination of

01:24:12.400 --> 01:24:20.000
sounds that we have to use. He gave us a word that can be translated and he did cause it to be

01:24:20.960 --> 01:24:27.360
translated because he gave it here to Moses in whatever language it happened to be that he

01:24:27.360 --> 01:24:32.080
was speaking to Moses here because obviously we don't know. Moses knew more than one language.

01:24:32.080 --> 01:24:38.160
We don't know which one God used. It was recorded in Hebrew at one point. It has been translated

01:24:38.160 --> 01:24:43.360
into Aramaic. It has been translated into Greek. God caused it to be translated into Greek with

01:24:43.360 --> 01:24:51.440
the Septuagint. And so we know that this was a word God gave us to be translated because if,

01:24:51.440 --> 01:24:58.240
as Woe said, if it was not meant to be translated, if God had intended for this to be this specific

01:24:58.240 --> 01:25:04.720
set of sounds is my name and you will use this as my name, Christ would have given it to us

01:25:04.720 --> 01:25:09.360
as his name when he spoke of it in the New Testament and it would have been translated

01:25:09.440 --> 01:25:14.800
as that sequence of sounds. It would not have been translated as a concept.

01:25:15.840 --> 01:25:19.760
It would have been transliterated in order that you could pronounce it the same

01:25:19.760 --> 01:25:25.200
in your tongue as it was pronounced by those who used it in another. But that's not the case

01:25:25.200 --> 01:25:30.560
because you have God which you can translate into German easily. Got. You can translate into Latin.

01:25:30.560 --> 01:25:36.800
Deus. You can translate it into Greek. Theos. The same thing is true of Lord and I am.

01:25:39.920 --> 01:25:45.600
God did not intend us to use some magical sequence of sounds as his name.

01:25:48.560 --> 01:25:54.400
And we should be very hesitant. We should be very concerned when someone tries to say

01:25:54.400 --> 01:25:59.600
that we have to use this sequence of sounds because as Woe mentioned, that's magic. That's

01:25:59.600 --> 01:26:04.080
name magic. That is something that we see in the Talmud. That is something we see in paganism.

01:26:04.080 --> 01:26:10.480
That is something we see in mysticism in the occult. We see this all over in the anti-Christian

01:26:10.480 --> 01:26:17.280
world. It is not something that exists in Christianity. And so I want to bring up a version

01:26:17.280 --> 01:26:23.680
of this that we see with regard to the New Testament. Because in addition to those who say

01:26:23.680 --> 01:26:29.920
we have to use the word Yahweh for God, at least in the Old Testament or where it appears in the

01:26:29.920 --> 01:26:35.760
New Testament, we have those today who in another form of Judaizing will tell us that

01:26:35.760 --> 01:26:43.520
we have to call Christ Yeshua. Because yes, that is His name if you speak Hebrew or Aramaic.

01:26:43.520 --> 01:26:50.480
His name is Yeshua. That's not the name we use in English. That's not the name that's used

01:26:50.480 --> 01:26:56.160
in the New Testament because the New Testament is recorded in Greek. And that's Jesus. It is not

01:26:56.160 --> 01:27:04.960
Yeshua. In English, we say Jesus. Jesus. Depending on which language you use, you use a different

01:27:04.960 --> 01:27:13.520
name, but they are all Jesus. And so no, if you are an English speaker, you do not have to say

01:27:14.080 --> 01:27:21.040
Yeshua. That is Judaizing. We are not Hebrew speakers. We are not Aramaic speakers. We are

01:27:21.040 --> 01:27:31.120
English speakers. In English, His name is Jesus. In whatever your mother tongue happens to be,

01:27:31.840 --> 01:27:36.960
use the name Jesus. Whatever it happens to be translated as, it's Jesus if you speak Spanish.

01:27:38.400 --> 01:27:47.280
Use the name for Christ in your language. Because again, it is not a magic spell. It is not if you

01:27:47.280 --> 01:27:54.480
say these sounds in this order, something necessarily happens. It's not ex opera operato.

01:27:55.120 --> 01:27:58.880
Again, we'll come back to that because we will always return to this point.

01:28:00.880 --> 01:28:06.800
Things that are of the devil. Things that are evil. Things that are black magic or the occult

01:28:06.800 --> 01:28:14.640
often are ex opera operato. You do the thing. You get the result. You ask for demons to join you.

01:28:15.360 --> 01:28:21.520
You're probably going to get demons. That's how evil works. That is not how God works.

01:28:21.520 --> 01:28:30.080
The things of God depend on faith. And so it is not that you utter this particular series of sounds

01:28:31.280 --> 01:28:40.400
and then God does something because you said the magic word. No. You pray to God. Using the names

01:28:40.400 --> 01:28:49.120
God has given us in your language. Because again, we have shown amply that God intended for his name

01:28:49.120 --> 01:28:54.960
to be translated, gave it in a way that can be translated and even caused it to be translated

01:28:54.960 --> 01:29:02.560
in the case of the Septuagint. You use that name and you use it in faith. Because the things of

01:29:02.560 --> 01:29:09.360
God depend on faith. They do not occur simply because you did the sequence of things or made

01:29:09.360 --> 01:29:14.880
the sequence of sounds. That is black magic. Christians need to avoid it.

01:29:16.480 --> 01:29:21.440
Just to reiterate the point one more time, the Septuagint, the Bible that Jesus used,

01:29:22.080 --> 01:29:29.600
translates Y-H-W-H, the tetragrammaton, as either I am or God. It shows up a bunch of times and the

01:29:29.600 --> 01:29:37.520
Greek Bible never once plays any games with sounds. It either translates the word or just

01:29:37.520 --> 01:29:43.200
calls them God because they're synonymous. I am his God. That's a permissible thing to say.

01:29:43.920 --> 01:29:48.400
And when God inspired the translation of the Septuagint, that's what he did.

01:29:49.120 --> 01:29:55.360
And it's what Jesus preached from and it's what Paul cited. It was almost universal. Over 90% of

01:29:55.360 --> 01:30:02.960
the quotations in the New Testament of the Old Testament are either directly or consistent with

01:30:02.960 --> 01:30:09.040
the Septuagint. And a significant portion of the quotations are not consistent with the Masoretic

01:30:09.040 --> 01:30:14.880
text. We'll do a future episode where we specifically talk about those details because it's fascinating.

01:30:14.880 --> 01:30:23.040
And it's another example of the widespread abandoning of the Greek Septuagint as the

01:30:23.040 --> 01:30:28.960
Old Testament basis for Scripture. The early church held that universally. Everyone did.

01:30:29.520 --> 01:30:33.360
It was the only one. For centuries, before Jesus and after Jesus,

01:30:33.360 --> 01:30:39.280
it was preserved. And then as eventually not everyone spoke Greek, so they needed another

01:30:39.280 --> 01:30:46.960
vernacular. And in the West, they shifted into Latin. And unfortunately, Jerome had some very

01:30:46.960 --> 01:30:54.240
deep-seated problems. In fact, he had significant contact with Talmudic scholars who did some very

01:30:54.240 --> 01:31:00.720
real damage to some of his theology. He ended up using some of the Hebrew text for the Vulgate.

01:31:01.760 --> 01:31:07.120
And then on down the road, everyone sort of fell into the same view that is widely held today,

01:31:07.120 --> 01:31:13.840
that the Hebrew is more authentic because it's older. Simply not true. And also, it's not consistent

01:31:13.840 --> 01:31:19.520
when you look at the mechanisms of translation. It's not consistent with what was done in Scripture

01:31:19.520 --> 01:31:26.160
itself. So the fundamental point there is not just that word. And again, I've probably used it at

01:31:26.160 --> 01:31:30.400
some point, although I'm kind of viscerally. Even before I knew what was going on, I really didn't

01:31:30.400 --> 01:31:36.640
like the word. I probably said it unironically. I won't again. Now that I know, that's part of a

01:31:36.640 --> 01:31:42.720
lot of what this is about. We often act in good conscience, not knowing that we've done something

01:31:42.720 --> 01:31:48.080
that's an error. And the Christian response when you find out you're in error, as Corey was saying

01:31:48.080 --> 01:31:53.360
at the beginning, is not to double down. It's not once you find out that you've made a mistake

01:31:53.360 --> 01:31:59.680
that was an innocent mistake, but it was nevertheless a wicked thing that you did. You didn't know it.

01:31:59.680 --> 01:32:04.160
You didn't know where it came from. You trusted someone who taught you. You repeated what they

01:32:04.160 --> 01:32:10.400
said. It turned out it was bad. The Christian response is repentance, metanoia. Turn away

01:32:10.400 --> 01:32:18.320
from it, condemn it, point to it and say what I did was sin. I reject my sin. I reject this sin

01:32:18.320 --> 01:32:24.560
is not mine anymore. I'm not going to do it again. You shouldn't do it again. If you are living a

01:32:24.560 --> 01:32:30.160
life where that never happens, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're not a Christian

01:32:30.160 --> 01:32:37.040
because we all sin knowingly and unknowingly. And when you find out the Christian response is be like,

01:32:37.040 --> 01:32:42.880
that's awful. Lord, forgive me. That should be a part of the regular Christian daily life.

01:32:43.520 --> 01:32:48.240
Lord, forgive me what I didn't even know I was doing wrong. But you, Lord, know everything. So,

01:32:48.240 --> 01:32:54.240
of course, you knew about that too. When we double down on our error, that's when, as Corey said,

01:32:54.240 --> 01:32:59.600
we get into real trouble. Because then it's not just this translation issue versus a sound and

01:33:01.120 --> 01:33:05.600
the circumcision. As Corey said, circumcision doesn't damn. It shouldn't be happening.

01:33:06.080 --> 01:33:12.800
I think it's the criminality of the torture involved is certainly damnable. But that's

01:33:12.800 --> 01:33:19.360
not what's in the minds of those who are typically permitting it. Nevertheless, once you realize

01:33:19.360 --> 01:33:23.200
what's going on, you have to respond as a Christian. And that means to flee from evil.

01:33:24.160 --> 01:33:30.560
In order to head off some potential questions in the future, particularly for myself,

01:33:31.520 --> 01:33:39.120
I want to point out that the phrase I am who I am has been translated slightly differently

01:33:39.120 --> 01:33:46.160
in different languages. And again, this is a case where we have this between the Hebrew

01:33:46.160 --> 01:33:51.600
and the Greek, again, the Greek Septuagint being an inspired translation. We have this

01:33:51.600 --> 01:33:59.120
in other languages as well. And so those who know German may decide to ask me questions because

01:33:59.120 --> 01:34:05.600
Woe mentioned the future tense. And arguably Luther's translation is future tense in the

01:34:05.600 --> 01:34:10.640
German, although I will comment more on that in a second here. In English, it's I am who I am,

01:34:12.160 --> 01:34:15.520
which I don't have to translate for you because you are an English speaking audience.

01:34:16.800 --> 01:34:28.880
The Greek is egoemi haon. I am the one. The Latin is ego sum qui sum. I am who I am. So exactly

01:34:28.960 --> 01:34:33.200
the same, incidentally as the English. Luther translates it,

01:34:40.400 --> 01:34:46.640
You really shouldn't take that necessarily as a simple future. Bear in mind, this is 500 years

01:34:46.640 --> 01:34:50.800
ago for this translation, you're making the transition from Middle High German to modern

01:34:50.800 --> 01:34:56.400
German, which Luther incidentally spurred with his translation of scripture. And I translated it,

01:34:58.960 --> 01:35:05.040
because it is more emphatic. It is God making an emphatic statement of I am,

01:35:05.040 --> 01:35:11.600
which is how we would translate it in English. And you'll see this incidentally later in the

01:35:11.600 --> 01:35:17.600
exact same verse, because later in the same verse, God gives a shortened version of his name. And he

01:35:17.600 --> 01:35:22.960
does this in any of the various languages and translations we have, because he doesn't repeat

01:35:22.960 --> 01:35:30.640
I am who I am when telling Moses to say, well, who sent you? Who sent you? When they are asked,

01:35:30.640 --> 01:35:36.800
when Moses is asked, who sent you to us? Why should we believe you? Well, what does he say?

01:35:36.800 --> 01:35:43.040
He says, I am has sent me to you in the German. Ich werde sein hat mich zu euch gesannt.

01:35:43.920 --> 01:35:50.240
And incidentally in the Latin, it doesn't even use the exact same terms, because it says qui est

01:35:50.320 --> 01:35:52.880
misid me advos. So qui est.

01:35:55.600 --> 01:36:00.720
This difference across the translations is not something about which we have to worry. There

01:36:00.720 --> 01:36:07.200
are minor differences in emphasis in the way that you relay concepts in different languages.

01:36:08.720 --> 01:36:15.280
These translators were faithful to the original in translating in a way that worked in the target

01:36:15.280 --> 01:36:21.920
language. And so Ich werde sein is not the same thing as what was saying about the future tense,

01:36:21.920 --> 01:36:29.840
because it's not saying I am the one who will come. It says I shall be. It's an emphatic statement of

01:36:29.840 --> 01:36:36.320
I am the one. It's really if you want to extrapolate out of this, what you can take away from this

01:36:36.320 --> 01:36:42.320
name is God is saying that he is the root of all being. Because as we would say philosophically,

01:36:42.320 --> 01:36:50.160
he is being. He is being itself. That is again going back to the transcendentals. That is one

01:36:50.160 --> 01:36:56.160
of the five transcendentals. Being and unity are fourth and fifth, whatever order you want to place

01:36:56.160 --> 01:37:02.640
them. God is being. God is the fundamental ground of all things. That is what he is saying here.

01:37:02.640 --> 01:37:09.120
That is his name, because that is his essence. Because again, God is his essence. Because God

01:37:09.120 --> 01:37:13.200
is simple. You cannot have a division in God. And so that is how you should think about this,

01:37:13.200 --> 01:37:18.080
regardless of the language that you are using. So I just wanted to head off those potential

01:37:18.080 --> 01:37:28.640
future questions and answer them here and now. So next we'll deal with a relatively modern issue

01:37:28.640 --> 01:37:37.760
actually. This came into specifically the Lutheran Church in America in relatively recent years.

01:37:37.760 --> 01:37:42.800
And by relatively recent, admittedly, I mean a century ago, but we're talking about things

01:37:42.800 --> 01:37:49.600
that span millennia, not things that happened yesterday. So put yourself in the right mindset

01:37:49.600 --> 01:37:55.040
for recent. I was just talking about Luther's translation, which is from the 1500s. And we're

01:37:55.040 --> 01:38:03.360
talking about the Septuagint, which is considerably older. But we're going to talk about the right

01:38:04.000 --> 01:38:12.000
of baptism as it was practiced historically in the LCMS, in the Lutheran Church in America.

01:38:14.800 --> 01:38:23.280
And until the early 1900s, essentially right around the time of the First World War, which

01:38:23.280 --> 01:38:26.560
you should bear in mind some of the things we've talked about previously, historically,

01:38:27.120 --> 01:38:29.440
with some of the currents that were happening around that time.

01:38:31.440 --> 01:38:41.120
A curious thing was dropped from the right of baptism. The right today, as it now stands,

01:38:41.760 --> 01:38:48.400
is essentially just do you renounce the devil? Yes. And all his works? Yes. And all his ways?

01:38:48.400 --> 01:38:53.680
Yes. It depends on the specific setting you have in the rubrics as to what exactly

01:38:53.680 --> 01:38:57.520
the language is. But basically you're denouncing the devil, his works and his ways.

01:38:58.720 --> 01:39:03.760
In the older version, and we'll go right ahead and say this is more appropriate,

01:39:03.760 --> 01:39:10.960
there was an additional renunciation and that additional renunciation applied to specific groups.

01:39:11.840 --> 01:39:16.640
Now it could be used conditionally depending on the relevant group.

01:39:17.280 --> 01:39:24.480
If you came from heathen, pagan parents, you could be asked to specifically renounce

01:39:24.480 --> 01:39:31.520
the old heathen ways. And this is a carryover incidentally from very early on. This was part

01:39:31.520 --> 01:39:38.000
of the baptism rite in Germany, in the German lands, when they were first converting to Christianity.

01:39:38.720 --> 01:39:44.560
They were asked to renounce the ways, the false ways of their pagan ancestors, the worship in

01:39:45.200 --> 01:39:48.560
groves and the worship of false deities of the pagan gods.

01:39:50.560 --> 01:39:55.680
In the American context, you also have the Unitarians. There's the separatist group, which is

01:39:55.680 --> 01:40:01.200
really a specific sort of Lutheran historical matter that isn't relevant today. But obviously,

01:40:01.200 --> 01:40:05.040
Unitarians are still relevant. And so if you came from a Unitarian background,

01:40:05.040 --> 01:40:10.560
you would be asked to specifically denounce the blasphemy, the heresy of Unitarianism.

01:40:11.520 --> 01:40:17.520
But for the sake of this episode, the most salient one is that they were asked to renounce

01:40:18.240 --> 01:40:25.440
the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy. This was part of our baptismal rite,

01:40:26.720 --> 01:40:36.160
up until the 1900s, up until right around World War I. But you can see why this would have been

01:40:36.160 --> 01:40:42.560
dropped. But the fact that it was dropped is Judaizing. Because what you're doing is you're

01:40:42.560 --> 01:40:50.480
trying to minimize the fact that the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy is something from which

01:40:50.480 --> 01:40:58.800
a convert to Christianity needs to sever himself. He needs to say that my past, in Judaism, was a

01:40:58.800 --> 01:41:04.800
wicked and evil thing, because they deny Christ, they do not believe in Christ, they blaspheme

01:41:04.800 --> 01:41:14.080
Christ. I am renouncing the devil, and all his works, and all his ways, which include the Jewish

01:41:14.080 --> 01:41:21.760
faith. This is something that should be included today. We should have this in our baptismal rite.

01:41:22.400 --> 01:41:26.960
It isn't necessarily the case that every single candidate should have to say this, because, for

01:41:26.960 --> 01:41:33.760
instance, if you happen to have a pagan background, you probably don't need to renounce Judaism. You

01:41:33.760 --> 01:41:39.600
probably don't have a Jewish background as well, although you may. You should renounce what is

01:41:39.600 --> 01:41:46.160
relevant to you, because you are converting to Christianity. You are renouncing your old unbelief

01:41:46.160 --> 01:41:54.400
and blasphemous ways. But this isn't what modern Christians want to hear, and modern pastors are

01:41:54.400 --> 01:42:00.160
made uncomfortable by this. Because you have people who want to say, well, the Jews are just our

01:42:00.240 --> 01:42:06.880
older brothers, they're the old version of Christianity as it were. And as we have gone

01:42:06.880 --> 01:42:13.360
over repeatedly, that is not the case. Christianity does not derive from Judaism.

01:42:14.240 --> 01:42:23.200
Judaism is younger than Christianity. Judaism is a wicked offshoot that denies the divinity of

01:42:23.200 --> 01:42:33.600
Christ, that denies the sacrifice of Christ, that denies the resurrection. Judaism, quite frankly,

01:42:33.600 --> 01:42:39.440
is a pagan religion, but it is a pagan religion that is a perversion of the Christian faith.

01:42:40.080 --> 01:42:45.280
The faith of Abraham, the faith of Adam, the faith of Noah, all of these.

01:42:45.280 --> 01:42:52.160
Judaism is not related to them, because they were not Jews, they were Christians.

01:42:53.520 --> 01:42:58.400
And so we see even today, relatively recently, in the recent past in our own country,

01:43:00.560 --> 01:43:06.560
this sort of Judaism has crept into the church. We had the right belief previously,

01:43:06.560 --> 01:43:14.480
we had the right praxis as well. When you get rid of these safeguards, that's when the Judaism,

01:43:14.480 --> 01:43:18.240
the Judaizing, when all of these problems start to creep back into the church,

01:43:19.360 --> 01:43:25.040
because you've removed the guardrails. And all Satan looks for is that little opening.

01:43:25.040 --> 01:43:28.720
He's a rat, he just has to find that little opening and he'll squeeze himself right through.

01:43:30.160 --> 01:43:33.680
And that's what we gave him by dropping this from our baptismal right.

01:43:35.040 --> 01:43:40.720
We'll have the link in the show notes to this recent discovery, but again, this was the LCMS

01:43:40.800 --> 01:43:48.640
baptismal right in German in 1922, just over one century ago, any Jew who wanted to become

01:43:48.640 --> 01:43:56.240
a Christian. As a condition of baptism, baptism was denied to every Jew who would refuse to

01:43:56.240 --> 01:44:02.400
renounce Jews. It is important to read how this, you will, you can see the link in the show notes

01:44:02.400 --> 01:44:09.440
with the translation, how it's actually phrased. The public confession is not simply a

01:44:09.440 --> 01:44:15.440
confession of personal guilt for having been a Jew in the past. It says,

01:44:15.440 --> 01:44:20.800
due to renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways, especially the Jewish

01:44:20.800 --> 01:44:27.440
unbelief and blasphemy, for a Jew to become a Christian and to make this public confession

01:44:27.440 --> 01:44:34.880
is to denounce every other Jew, is to publicly damn all Jews, to say they are of the devil

01:44:35.440 --> 01:44:41.120
because they are unbelievers and they are blasphemers. To make that a necessary precondition

01:44:41.120 --> 01:44:48.800
for someone to become a Christian is the true Christian faith. It is a precondition. No Jew

01:44:48.800 --> 01:44:53.920
can actually be a Christian unless this is their confession. Whether or not a church makes them

01:44:53.920 --> 01:44:59.840
say it, the reason this was necessary because there are many who will pretend they will try to

01:44:59.920 --> 01:45:06.480
slide in, but I can name pastors in the LCMS today who would refuse to make this confession

01:45:06.480 --> 01:45:11.120
that was the public confession of the LCMS 100 years ago because they don't believe it.

01:45:11.840 --> 01:45:18.080
Do they not believe it because politics changed or because of the Holocaust? Well, yeah,

01:45:18.960 --> 01:45:25.600
it's not about Christianity anymore for any of them. Christianity is no longer in view when these

01:45:25.600 --> 01:45:36.320
subjects come up. I think the crux of the entire Judaizing heresy is that it sets aside Christianity

01:45:36.320 --> 01:45:41.040
by bits and pieces and by degrees and says, well, yeah, you have your gospel, seven-year Jesus stuff,

01:45:41.040 --> 01:45:48.080
but not this. We got to have this older thing, this more Jewish thing. We have this thing that's

01:45:48.080 --> 01:45:53.920
more Jewish than what we have because that's going to be more authentic. I reject and denounce

01:45:54.480 --> 01:46:02.000
the unbelief and blasphemy of all Jews. I despise the wickedness of these people who murdered Christ

01:46:02.000 --> 01:46:06.800
and dance in his blood to this day. That's my confession because a Christian confession,

01:46:07.840 --> 01:46:14.000
and so in the church I'm despised, it's a despicable thing to say. According to Christianity, no,

01:46:14.000 --> 01:46:19.920
it's a necessary precondition of Christianity. It's a necessary precondition to enter the kingdom

01:46:19.920 --> 01:46:25.760
of heaven. That's what denying baptism to someone who refuses to say that means. That's literally

01:46:25.760 --> 01:46:31.680
what it means. This is not a small point, this fact that this is buried in an agenda for a baptism

01:46:31.680 --> 01:46:39.440
right, and that's a one-off thing, whatever. This is a choke point that excludes. This is the narrow

01:46:39.440 --> 01:46:46.000
path versus the wide way to hell. That's precisely why it used to be done, why it was the Christian

01:46:46.000 --> 01:46:51.680
confession. It still is the Christian confession. It's just one that's by and large rejected.

01:46:51.680 --> 01:46:59.280
As Corey said, these sorts of things function as guardrails because if, for example, the LCMS

01:46:59.280 --> 01:47:05.040
to this day required every Jew who would enter into fellowship with us and say, I am a Christian

01:47:05.040 --> 01:47:10.640
just like you, if they had to denounce all Jews as children of the devil for their unbelief and

01:47:10.720 --> 01:47:17.920
their blasphemy, which is active, Jewish blasphemy is active. They don't simply blaspheme by existing,

01:47:17.920 --> 01:47:24.080
the way they live their lives and the things that they say blaspheme God Almighty. Christians must

01:47:24.080 --> 01:47:30.400
condemn that, and for a Jew to become a Christian must condemn it as a first party. But even then,

01:47:30.400 --> 01:47:37.600
the way this is phrased isn't, I repent of my being a Jew. They have to say, I condemn all Jews

01:47:37.600 --> 01:47:42.960
as a radical difference. It's not a small little personal, I'm here for Jesus thing.

01:47:42.960 --> 01:47:48.400
It's every Jew is going to hell unless they also repent as I am, and unless they also

01:47:48.400 --> 01:47:54.080
denounce all Jewry. That's a big deal, and it would have prevented many of the problems that

01:47:54.080 --> 01:47:59.040
we see in our church today because most of the people who are hanging around today would have

01:47:59.040 --> 01:48:05.040
long since left. They would hate this because it's not Christian. Well, was it Christian 100

01:48:05.040 --> 01:48:09.680
years ago because that's really the question? It's the Stonequire question. If it was Christian

01:48:09.680 --> 01:48:14.560
100 years ago, when did it stop being Christian? If we were Christian 100 years ago, when did we

01:48:14.560 --> 01:48:22.000
stop? Well, we stopped and we started rejecting basic Christian beliefs. Keep all this in mind

01:48:22.000 --> 01:48:25.280
in view of what we said in the first episode about, where are you getting your morality?

01:48:25.280 --> 01:48:30.720
This is another part of it. Where are you getting your beliefs? If you're getting them from people

01:48:30.720 --> 01:48:36.560
who murdered Christ, who hate God, who blaspheme him with everything that they do in their lives,

01:48:37.280 --> 01:48:43.680
if this is the source of some of your theology, how much room is left for God? And can you have

01:48:43.680 --> 01:48:49.840
competing religions at the same time? That's what we're dealing with here. The situation that we

01:48:49.840 --> 01:48:56.960
face today is that we are trying to hold multiple competing religions simultaneously. We're trying

01:48:56.960 --> 01:49:01.840
to take these things that came from evil men, whether it was thousands of years ago, or hundreds

01:49:01.840 --> 01:49:08.560
of years ago, or decades ago. We're taking things that come from evil and we're trying to baptize

01:49:08.560 --> 01:49:14.720
them. I was reminded earlier as I was thinking about this, how much a lot of these Judaizing

01:49:14.720 --> 01:49:23.520
problems are captured by what Tolkien did with the One Ring. Remember, Sauron poured his malice

01:49:23.600 --> 01:49:30.960
in his hatred and his evil into this talisman that was the Ring. Part of his soul, his essence

01:49:30.960 --> 01:49:36.160
as an evil being, was put into the Ring. And it was fine because it was a weapon for him,

01:49:36.160 --> 01:49:43.600
but then he lost the Ring. And so when he lost access to that part of his wicked power, he was

01:49:43.600 --> 01:49:50.320
diminished. But what happened with the Ring? The Ring was captured by Isildur. He found it,

01:49:50.320 --> 01:49:59.600
he wore it, he used it. He died because of it. There was the covetousness of men for that power

01:49:59.600 --> 01:50:04.240
because they misunderstood what the power of the One Ring was. That was basically what Lord of the

01:50:04.240 --> 01:50:10.480
Rings was about. The covetousness of that power, believing, oh, this power of the Great Enemy,

01:50:10.480 --> 01:50:15.280
if only I took it into my hands, I could use it for good. That's what they all wanted to believe,

01:50:15.280 --> 01:50:21.040
that they could take this evil thing and use it for good purposes. What they did not appreciate in

01:50:21.040 --> 01:50:29.840
the essence of the story of the Ring was that it was itself evil. It did not cease to be evil

01:50:29.840 --> 01:50:34.960
because it was no longer in the possession of Sauron. He had put his malice into it,

01:50:34.960 --> 01:50:42.640
and whoever wielded it possessed his malice, and the malice acted on its own. When we look at these

01:50:42.640 --> 01:50:49.120
evil things, now, it's saying Yahweh is evil as the One Ring. I mean, it's more evil because it's

01:50:49.120 --> 01:50:54.880
real and the Ring's made up, but it's not simply a question of degrees. It's a question of genealogy.

01:50:54.880 --> 01:51:01.760
Where did this thing come from? If you found the One Ring and you knew that it had all of the devil's

01:51:01.760 --> 01:51:06.080
malice poured into it, would you pick it up knowing how powerful it was and say,

01:51:06.080 --> 01:51:10.560
I'm going to use this for good? Or would you know this thing is pure evil and I can only

01:51:10.560 --> 01:51:17.120
possibly use it for evil because it has not only evil intent, but it has a life of its own.

01:51:17.760 --> 01:51:25.200
Evil ideas have a life of their own. We cannot co-opt hell. We can't take Satan's things and

01:51:25.200 --> 01:51:32.000
use them for our purposes. We can only use things from God for godly purposes. When we use evil

01:51:32.000 --> 01:51:37.760
things, things from hell, things that are teachings of demons, which we'll talk about a lot next week,

01:51:38.160 --> 01:51:46.080
we can only possibly use those things for evil. The genealogy of the practice of modern

01:51:46.640 --> 01:51:54.800
amputation circumcision is pure evil. There's no godly outcome for it and it is a false confession

01:51:54.800 --> 01:52:02.960
to do it. To say Yahweh is itself an evil thing. It didn't exist for nearly 2000 years and then a

01:52:03.280 --> 01:52:08.560
pagan unbelievers made it up and turned it into something that they used for evil purposes.

01:52:09.280 --> 01:52:16.080
What has happened in the last few decades really, Christians discovered the Yahweh ring and picked

01:52:16.080 --> 01:52:20.320
it up and said, I'm going to use this for good. Why gives this more authentic? It's more like

01:52:20.320 --> 01:52:25.920
that old-time religion. It's Judeo. I need more Judeo and less Christian. Well, that's exactly

01:52:25.920 --> 01:52:30.240
what they're getting. When you start talking about Yahweh and you stop talking about God,

01:52:30.240 --> 01:52:35.840
which is incidentally what all these people do, that's what you get. You lose God and you're going

01:52:35.840 --> 01:52:40.960
to get Yahweh. You're going to get a face full Yahweh, but it's not going to be what you thought it was

01:52:40.960 --> 01:52:46.880
because you can't use an evil thing for good purposes. All these things follow the same pattern.

01:52:46.880 --> 01:52:52.080
We can get into Seder meals today, but it's the same thing. It's a completely new made up way

01:52:52.080 --> 01:52:59.040
for Christians to adopt evil pagan practices because it seems more authentic. Why? Because

01:52:59.120 --> 01:53:06.400
Jews do it. The purpose of those things is always to deny Christ small degrees, but it's to say

01:53:06.400 --> 01:53:11.440
what we received in the church, what we received in Christian history is not as good as the other

01:53:11.440 --> 01:53:15.440
thing, as the secrets, as the mysteries that were lost. We're going to pick them up and we're going

01:53:15.440 --> 01:53:20.400
to adopt them all and we're going to make Christianity this brand new, more powerful thing

01:53:20.400 --> 01:53:27.360
by making it even older. When we on Stonequire talking about adopting old beliefs, it's consistent

01:53:27.360 --> 01:53:35.600
with Scripture. If God had said, yes, keep circumcising, we'd disagree, but the very first thing

01:53:35.600 --> 01:53:40.320
that happened in the early church was it got shut down. It was said, you never understood in the

01:53:40.320 --> 01:53:44.560
first place. You never knew what you were doing with this, and today you're using it for evil,

01:53:44.560 --> 01:53:51.200
and you can only possibly do evil with it. These tendencies that we have to just adopt

01:53:51.200 --> 01:53:56.560
random crap and think it's going to be hunky dory are a threat to souls because nobody takes it

01:53:56.560 --> 01:54:02.240
seriously. Nobody cares where they get their ideas. Oh, Yahweh, that sounds fine. I remember that

01:54:02.240 --> 01:54:08.480
Tetragrammaton thing in some translations where it won't translate it. It would just say Y-H-W-H,

01:54:08.480 --> 01:54:12.880
which is also dumb. The point of Scripture is you're supposed to be able to read it.

01:54:13.680 --> 01:54:18.800
The Septuagint did. It said God or it said I am because that's what it is. You don't need special

01:54:18.800 --> 01:54:25.360
incantations, and it's fine to acknowledge. In the ESV, when the Tetragrammaton is used,

01:54:25.360 --> 01:54:31.200
they will translate Lord in all caps. That's fine too. God and Lord are synonymous. Lord,

01:54:31.200 --> 01:54:35.760
as we said before, is a synonym for master. That's how you should think of God as your master,

01:54:35.760 --> 01:54:41.200
and you will answer to your master for what we do with these things. Me included, I'm preaching to

01:54:41.200 --> 01:54:46.880
you here. We're all guilty of something. When we take seriously where we're getting these ideas,

01:54:46.880 --> 01:54:52.880
we're going to be armored against the very sort of errors that Satan exploits. As Cory just said,

01:54:52.880 --> 01:54:59.360
Satan just needs a little crack. As we said at the beginning, the Judaizing attack that

01:54:59.360 --> 01:55:05.840
Satan leveled instantaneously in the church was about circumcision, which was from God. God said

01:55:05.840 --> 01:55:11.760
to circumcise, Jesus sends into heaven, and then Satan says to circumcise, circumcise, circumcise,

01:55:11.760 --> 01:55:16.400
the Pharisees show up and say circumcise, there's a circumcision party running around and telling

01:55:16.400 --> 01:55:21.840
everybody to circumcise. Isn't that what God said? They shut it down. God said, no, you didn't

01:55:21.840 --> 01:55:28.000
understand. You weren't obeying. You weren't believing. It was pro forma garbage that is ended

01:55:28.000 --> 01:55:33.200
because it served its purpose. It is no longer mine. When they hang on to things that are no

01:55:33.200 --> 01:55:38.640
longer from God, they're necessarily from the devil. That's why stuff matters. It's not just

01:55:38.640 --> 01:55:43.200
matters of opinion. I think I can do this or that or the other thing. If something has evil

01:55:43.200 --> 01:55:48.880
origins, we must excise it. We can't permit it to be among us, because even the things that seem

01:55:48.960 --> 01:55:53.840
small, like Yahweh, suddenly you have to start saying Yahweh when you're talking about the

01:55:53.840 --> 01:55:59.200
Old Testament God. Then the Old Testament God is the really mean one. The New Testament God is

01:55:59.200 --> 01:56:05.120
the loving one. You know what? That Yahweh God, he was pretty tough and he had a lot of rules.

01:56:05.120 --> 01:56:10.960
This new Jesus-y New Testament God, he's a lot more loving. That division suddenly pops into

01:56:10.960 --> 01:56:16.000
people's heads. It's very difficult for him to get away from, because most people don't have the

01:56:16.000 --> 01:56:19.920
mental sophistication to keep all the stuff in their heads at once. You just learn Yahweh. You

01:56:19.920 --> 01:56:26.080
think, yeah, that's the old thing. Okay, great. Then someone separately sets Yahweh against Jesus.

01:56:26.080 --> 01:56:29.280
You're like, well, yeah, like Jesus is better than Yahweh. Suddenly, there's no God in the Old

01:56:29.280 --> 01:56:33.760
Testament. That's what Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. That's what Bonhoeffer believed.

01:56:33.760 --> 01:56:39.280
They believed in the demiurge. They thought there was evil before. Then something new came

01:56:39.280 --> 01:56:44.320
in the New Testament, that he who was coming would arrive. It's bad news for Christians,

01:56:44.320 --> 01:56:50.240
but it's what these men will preach. These tiny errors that seem like just fiddly academic garbage,

01:56:50.880 --> 01:56:56.000
it's always a building block for Satan. We have building blocks too. They're ones that God gave

01:56:56.000 --> 01:57:01.200
us. When he says, do this, we should do it. When he says, stop, we should stop. When he says,

01:57:01.200 --> 01:57:06.560
to believe it, when he says, I am and I am God, that should be the end of it. If it's good enough

01:57:06.560 --> 01:57:10.960
for God, it's good enough for me. I hope it'll be good enough for you too, because that's what

01:57:11.040 --> 01:57:16.160
all this is about. I am glad you mentioned the Seder meal, because I had three points with which

01:57:16.160 --> 01:57:21.040
I wanted to end, and that was one of them. But on the topic of Seder, because of course I can't

01:57:21.040 --> 01:57:28.240
leave it untouched, I would just recommend that all of you go and read Hebrews 7,

01:57:30.720 --> 01:57:38.720
and then bear in mind two things, both while reading it and after reading it. One, Christ is

01:57:38.720 --> 01:57:44.560
the perfect Passover lamb. He completed the shadow of the things that were to come,

01:57:45.440 --> 01:57:51.120
and we have a Passover meal, a better one. We have the Lord's Supper. But do go and read

01:57:51.120 --> 01:57:55.200
Hebrews 7. I recognize I'm giving reading homework in this episode, but I think that's fine.

01:57:56.560 --> 01:58:03.920
And then second, of the three points. I mentioned that I would comment on the word

01:58:03.920 --> 01:58:13.440
Gentiles and why I do not use it. And just very quickly, we get Gentile from Latin. Gens is the

01:58:13.440 --> 01:58:22.400
Latin word, the G is pronounced that way, and Latin that means clan or tribe. And then Ile is the

01:58:22.400 --> 01:58:31.040
adjectival suffix. So it just means of or belonging to the same people, nation, clan, Gentilus,

01:58:31.120 --> 01:58:37.360
which we get Gentiles in English. And so if you understand the Latin, it makes perfect sense,

01:58:37.360 --> 01:58:42.480
because it is translating ethnos or ethne, if it's in the plural, nations or people,

01:58:43.680 --> 01:58:48.800
in the ethnic sense, in the racial sense. And so if you understand the Latin, underlying the word,

01:58:48.800 --> 01:58:56.960
it makes perfect sense. But very few modern readers know any Latin. And so it is a misleading term

01:58:56.960 --> 01:59:03.520
to the modern ear, because it sets up this false distinction between the Jew on the one hand

01:59:03.520 --> 01:59:11.600
and the Gentile on the other. And that is alien to Scripture. We will get into that more in another

01:59:11.600 --> 01:59:20.720
episode when we deal with Galatians, but there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. And that is the

01:59:20.720 --> 01:59:28.400
point. And that is my third point here. The term Jew has become extremely misleading for a number

01:59:28.400 --> 01:59:34.480
of reasons. It's used in a number of senses in Scripture. It's used in a number of senses in

01:59:34.480 --> 01:59:40.640
our everyday lives. But it is important, setting all of that aside, it is important to keep in mind

01:59:41.920 --> 01:59:50.000
what exactly is meant by Scripture. And the best way to keep that in view is to keep the Gospel in

01:59:50.000 --> 01:59:55.760
view. Yes, we speak of the law quite a lot on this podcast, because part of this is the

01:59:55.760 --> 01:59:59.840
and then what of Christian life? You believe and now what? Now what do you do? How do you

01:59:59.840 --> 02:00:06.320
live your Christian life? What should you do or not do? But all of it is in light of the Gospel.

02:00:07.440 --> 02:00:15.120
And what is the Gospel? You are saved by faith, which is a free gift, due to Christ's perfect life,

02:00:15.120 --> 02:00:21.520
His work, death, resurrection. That's the Gospel. You aren't saved by your blood,

02:00:21.520 --> 02:00:26.240
and that's true whether you're Jewish or German or French or Japanese or

02:00:26.240 --> 02:00:32.480
any of whatever other ethnicity I could list. No one will be saved by his own blood.

02:00:33.200 --> 02:00:37.440
Everyone who will be saved will be saved by Christ's blood.

02:00:38.160 --> 02:00:46.160
And so when you see the word Jew in Scripture, which probably shouldn't be translated Jew because

02:00:46.160 --> 02:00:51.760
the underlying word in the New Testament is Judahite, which is useful for a number of reasons

02:00:51.760 --> 02:00:56.080
partly because it reminds us that the 10 northern tribes are gone at this point in history, but

02:00:56.080 --> 02:01:03.760
that is a topic for another time. When you see the word Jew in Scripture, don't think that this is

02:01:03.760 --> 02:01:10.000
some special group that is set aside, they get special treatment, and God has some special

02:01:10.000 --> 02:01:13.440
relationship and they have another way to paradise because that's Christian Zionism,

02:01:13.440 --> 02:01:18.320
which is another Judaizing heresy, but we did an episode on that so you can go and listen to that.

02:01:19.360 --> 02:01:25.920
But think of the words of Romans 3 because you'll hear these words many times from

02:01:25.920 --> 02:01:33.040
Christians so-called Zionists. Then what advantage has the Jew or what is the value of circumcision?

02:01:33.600 --> 02:01:39.120
Much in every way. And of course they'll end there, they won't mention the rest of it because it

02:01:39.120 --> 02:01:43.680
gives the value. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

02:01:45.440 --> 02:01:51.120
That is a magnificent blessing from God to be entrusted with his word, and the ancient

02:01:51.120 --> 02:01:56.560
Israelites, the Hebrews were greatly blessed with that, granted for them because they were unfaithful,

02:01:56.560 --> 02:02:02.240
it wasn't much of a blessing. But if they had been faithful, it would have been a great blessing.

02:02:02.720 --> 02:02:06.640
They at least had the ability to read God's word because they physically had it.

02:02:07.760 --> 02:02:13.360
Which again, without faith, is of no blessing to you, is of no good to you, it is in fact worse

02:02:13.360 --> 02:02:17.040
to have the oracles of God and reject them than not to have them.

02:02:18.960 --> 02:02:23.440
But you'll notice that the Christian Zionists never goes on, and reads verse 9,

02:02:24.080 --> 02:02:31.680
What then, are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all

02:02:31.680 --> 02:02:37.360
both Jews and Greeks are under sin. Which is to say that all are under sin.

02:02:38.720 --> 02:02:46.640
This is one of the ways, in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in a number of these Shemitic languages in this

02:02:46.640 --> 02:02:53.440
region, they speak of the totality of a thing. They speak of the totality by listing two opposite

02:02:53.440 --> 02:02:57.680
ends of a spectrum. And so when it says that God created the heavens and the earth,

02:02:57.760 --> 02:03:02.400
that's saying that he created all things, he created the universe. And so here when it says

02:03:02.400 --> 02:03:09.920
both Jews and Greeks, what that means is all men, all men are under sin. For all have sinned and

02:03:09.920 --> 02:03:16.480
fallen short of the glory of God. In Adam all men fell. And so Christ as the second and better

02:03:16.480 --> 02:03:22.560
Adam, is the redemption of all mankind. Yes, of course there is the objective justification,

02:03:23.200 --> 02:03:28.400
but there is the subjective which is faith. If you have faith, then you are numbered amongst

02:03:28.400 --> 02:03:34.000
the elect, then you are saved. Again it all comes back to faith. It is not your bloodline,

02:03:34.000 --> 02:03:44.640
whether it be Jew or Greek. And that is the point. Any time you see anyone arguing that there is some

02:03:45.280 --> 02:03:50.880
special character of the Jews, or that they have some special route to God,

02:03:51.600 --> 02:03:56.640
or special relationship, whatever it happens to be, look at the actual words of Scripture.

02:03:57.280 --> 02:04:01.760
What then are we Jews any better off? No, not at all.

02:04:04.400 --> 02:04:09.200
Any time you see someone rejecting those words, you are dealing with someone who is

02:04:09.200 --> 02:04:14.800
Judaizing. And if you listen to that person, if you believe what he is saying, your soul is in

02:04:14.800 --> 02:04:21.200
danger. Because these are things that Satan attempts to bring into the church, to steal away

02:04:21.200 --> 02:04:26.720
the gospel, to bring back in works righteousness, to get you to attempt to work your way to God,

02:04:26.720 --> 02:04:33.360
or find some alternative route to God, instead of the only way God is given. What does Christ say?

02:04:33.360 --> 02:04:39.520
I am the way, the truth, and the life. He doesn't say that he's one way of many,

02:04:39.520 --> 02:04:44.320
which is what we hear from so many today when they speak about all paths lead to God. No,

02:04:44.320 --> 02:04:51.440
they don't. Most paths lead to hell. For broad is the way that leads to hell. For narrow is the way

02:04:51.440 --> 02:04:58.800
that leads to paradise. And so be on your guard. As a Christian, that is your duty,

02:04:58.800 --> 02:05:04.160
particularly as a Christian man, that is your duty, because you have a duty to instruct and to lead

02:05:04.160 --> 02:05:09.280
your wife if you have one, and your children if you have them. But also others entrusted to your

02:05:09.280 --> 02:05:16.000
care, because if you're an uncle, you have duties to your nephews and nieces. You have duties with

02:05:16.000 --> 02:05:20.640
regard to your parents and your siblings, and all those entrusted to your care in whatever capacity

02:05:20.640 --> 02:05:26.880
in your life. And so you need to be on your guard against these heresies that have been with us from

02:05:26.880 --> 02:05:32.800
the beginning, as we covered at the beginning of the episode. This was a problem starting with the

02:05:32.800 --> 02:05:40.880
apostles. This has always been one of Satan's tactics. Judaism is one of his favorite tactics,

02:05:40.880 --> 02:05:47.600
and it will undoubtedly be so until the end, because it's effective. Because in a sense,

02:05:48.240 --> 02:05:54.480
all of this is a form of Gnosticism. It is that desire that is inherent in

02:05:55.440 --> 02:06:00.400
some men at least, many men most likely, to have a secret knowledge, a secret way,

02:06:00.400 --> 02:06:05.840
to have something, some connection, some ability, or path, or whatever it happens to be,

02:06:06.880 --> 02:06:12.080
that elevates them above everyone else. And that is not what Scripture says.

02:06:13.120 --> 02:06:16.960
Scripture says all have sinned. Scripture says the only way is Christ.

02:06:18.960 --> 02:06:22.960
That is what Christians believe. That is what Christians have always held,

02:06:22.960 --> 02:06:29.360
and that is what we as Christians have to defend. And part of defending that is pushing back

02:06:29.360 --> 02:06:35.440
against the rampant Judaizing that we see in the church today, because it is destroying the church,

02:06:36.400 --> 02:06:45.280
and too few men are fighting back against it.