Transcript: Episode 0058

“The Judaizing Heresy”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:30 – 00:00:45:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler, and I'm still woe. On today's Stone

00:00:45 – 00:00:51:	Choir, we're going to be continuing the series we're doing on the current state of religion.

00:00:52 – 00:00:58:	Last week, we talked about defining religion in terms of a source of right and wrong and morality

00:00:58 – 00:01:03:	and why it's important to use that view when you're looking at religions, because

00:01:03 – 00:01:10:	many of us simultaneously hold multiple religions in our heads. So we made the case last week

00:01:10 – 00:01:13:	that there's a whole lot of that going on that's causing problems in the church.

00:01:13 – 00:01:17:	And we said that this week we're going to specifically be discussing Judaizing and

00:01:17 – 00:01:24:	Gnosticism, which are two of the earliest false religions that attacked Christianity in its very

00:01:24 – 00:01:28:	earliest days. As Corey and I were doing the prep for this episode, we realized that there's more

00:01:28 – 00:01:35:	than enough just on Judaizing for an entire episode, so this will be in two parts. Next week

00:01:35 – 00:01:40:	we'll be about Gnosticism exclusively, and then the following week we'll be talking about apostasy.

00:01:41 – 00:01:46:	Before we get into this warning to parents who listen with kids, one of the subjects we're going

00:01:46 – 00:01:50:	to talk about is circumcision. We're going to go into some of the obvious details because it's

00:01:50 – 00:01:57:	necessary to discuss what's going on there, and you can decide if you want to listen to that before

00:01:57 – 00:02:03:	your kids do. This episode is, as always, a continuation of previous episodes, and I want

00:02:03 – 00:02:08:	to make this point again, particularly as we're getting into the second full year of Stone Choir.

00:02:08 – 00:02:14:	This season, and so far, is such a thing exists for us. There's going to be a lot more episodes

00:02:14 – 00:02:21:	that are syntheses of parts of previous episodes, so what I mean by that is that we're going to treat

00:02:22 – 00:02:27:	every previous episode that we've done essentially as axiomatic for the purposes of arguments that

00:02:27 – 00:02:34:	we make in future episodes. This episode on Judaizing, obviously, is going to assume for

00:02:34 – 00:02:39:	the sake of argument that you've already heard and at least understand, even if you don't agree,

00:02:39 – 00:02:44:	with what we said in the four parts we did on the Jews. It is the first episode of Stone Choir

00:02:44 – 00:02:49:	you're listening to. Stop. I'd say start from the beginning. If you refuse to start from the

00:02:49 – 00:02:55:	beginning before listening to this one, if it's interesting, at least go back to Hebrews, Israelites,

00:02:55 – 00:03:01:	and Jews and listen to that four-part series because this will not be the complete arguments

00:03:01 – 00:03:07:	from that episode. They're made there in totality. We consider that a done deal. I give that warning

00:03:07 – 00:03:12:	because we're going to say some things that just assume all the facts previously entered

00:03:12 – 00:03:17:	into evidence. We're incorporating those by reference, and if you're not coming along with

00:03:17 – 00:03:20:	the previous thoughts, if you don't know what's there, we're going to be taking a lot of shortcuts

00:03:20 – 00:03:26:	in the future because we don't waste your time just repeating the same things over and over again,

00:03:26 – 00:03:31:	so we're going to just assume that you at least know what we're talking about when you say some

00:03:31 – 00:03:38:	of those things. One of the key things that we've said frequently throughout Stone Choir,

00:03:38 – 00:03:43:	and it's going to be a key part of this, particularly in framing this episode on Judaism,

00:03:43 – 00:03:48:	is that it's crucial for our understanding of Scripture and for understanding our place

00:03:48 – 00:03:58:	as Christians in history to verbally acknowledge out loud that Adam was not a Jew. Noah was not a

00:03:58 – 00:04:05:	Jew. Abraham was not a Jew. We made the case in those episodes for why that is true. The reason

00:04:05 – 00:04:13:	that we're mentioning here is that one of the fundamental elements of the Judaizing tendency

00:04:13 – 00:04:18:	that occurred from the very earliest days of the church, and it's roaring back in the last two

00:04:18 – 00:04:25:	centuries in particular in America, is there's this notion that we have inherited from kind of

00:04:25 – 00:04:31:	ambient morality in the world around us that, well, I'm a Christian, but I'm the Christian

00:04:31 – 00:04:37:	in the Judeo-Christian, and the Judeo came first, and that was really the older, more authentic

00:04:37 – 00:04:45:	version. I've got Christianity, but I'm the lesser cousin here, and there's a senior member from way

00:04:45 – 00:04:53:	back, the Jew who has more real stuff. They fundamentally have more Jesus-y stuff than I have,

00:04:53 – 00:04:58:	even though Jesus came after their period. I can't really be a Christian unless I Jew up the

00:04:58 – 00:05:04:	stuff that I have today. That's really what happens with Judaizing in all its forms and

00:05:04 – 00:05:09:	everything we talk about today. It's fundamentally, sure, we're Christians, but can we make this more

00:05:09 – 00:05:16:	Jewish? Wouldn't that make it more authentic? The reason I mention Adam and Noah and Abraham is that

00:05:17 – 00:05:22:	the assumption that the Old Testament is Jewish and that the New Testament is Christian,

00:05:22 – 00:05:26:	it's blasphemous for one. Let's just get that right out of the way. That's utterly false.

00:05:27 – 00:05:34:	The entire history of Christianity before the birth of Christ pointed to the birth of Christ.

00:05:34 – 00:05:43:	That was its purpose. In Genesis 3.15, when Adam was given the proto-gospel, he was told

00:05:43 – 00:05:49:	that Jesus would come to fix his sin. He wasn't told explicitly, not in a prophetic manner,

00:05:49 – 00:05:54:	that could be as easily understood as the later prophecies. Most of those prophecies

00:05:54 – 00:06:02:	that are recorded for us began with Moses. However, we know there were many believers

00:06:02 – 00:06:08:	in God, including Noah, most notably historically, who didn't have the written versions of those

00:06:08 – 00:06:14:	things either because none of it had been written down yet. The tendency that Christians have today

00:06:14 – 00:06:19:	to think, well, I need more Jewish stuff in order to be a better Christian, what it really

00:06:19 – 00:06:25:	is doing is espousing a belief that comes from the Talmud. I'm going to give you a few paraphrases

00:06:25 – 00:06:30:	of things in the Talmud, just to give you an idea of what Jews have been taught,

00:06:30 – 00:06:37:	including in Jesus' day. In this four-part series now, we're doing about the ending with apostasy.

00:06:37 – 00:06:43:	The next episode is going to be about Galatians 3.28. One of the excellent points that Corey

00:06:43 – 00:06:48:	has made in the past elsewhere is that once you know about the Jewish prayers that come from the

00:06:48 – 00:06:55:	Talmud, you understand that Galatians 3.28 is Jesus rebuking the Talmud before it had been written

00:06:55 – 00:07:01:	down because the Talmud was a recording of oral tradition. It was writing down things that they

00:07:01 – 00:07:05:	had been passing from generation to generation. There are things in the Talmud that were written

00:07:05 – 00:07:15:	down generations after Jesus that were already practiced in his day. These things have existed

00:07:15 – 00:07:21:	for thousands of years among these people, not all of them, because Mary was also a Christian.

00:07:22 – 00:07:28:	She was obviously a Judaite. She was of that people. But when the angel came to her and said,

00:07:28 – 00:07:33:	you're going to bear the Son of God, she wasn't out of left field. She was amazed it was her,

00:07:33 – 00:07:38:	but she wasn't amazed at what's this Messiah stuff. I don't know what that's about. She

00:07:38 – 00:07:42:	knew exactly what it was about because she was a Christian. She was a Christian expecting the Messiah.

00:07:42 – 00:07:48:	What she didn't expect was that God would come to her personally to be the vessel for God to be

00:07:48 – 00:07:55:	born. The Talmud, as it existed in that day and then was written down, and is the basis for the

00:07:55 – 00:08:04:	modern Jewish religion, says things like, Jews may use subterfuge to circumvent a goi as a non-Jew.

00:08:05 – 00:08:11:	All children of the goyim are animals. The goyim are not humans, they're beasts. If you eat with

00:08:11 – 00:08:16:	a goi, it's the same as eating with a dog. Even the best of the goyim should all be killed.

00:08:18 – 00:08:23:	The common theme that these all have is that Jews are human, and the goyim, that's us,

00:08:23 – 00:08:29:	that's everyone who's a non-Jew, is less than human. Now think about that in the context of

00:08:29 – 00:08:36:	saying that Adam is a Jew. If Adam is a Jew, then isn't it consistent that we are less than Jews if

00:08:36 – 00:08:44:	we don't have the Jew stuff along with our religion? But Adam was not a Jew. Adam was all men. Every

00:08:44 – 00:08:51:	single homo sapien on the planet has Adam as his father. No matter what we've said about any other

00:08:51 – 00:08:57:	race, any people on the planet, they're all children of Adam, which is why we all die,

00:08:57 – 00:09:02:	because we inherit Adam's sin, because he is our father. We inherit the sin of that father,

00:09:02 – 00:09:06:	that first father, the first biological father. He's our first father, he's obviously

00:09:06 – 00:09:13:	God the Father in heaven. The first Judaism tendency that's permeating all of Christian

00:09:13 – 00:09:19:	testimony today is that, well, Adam was a Jew, Noah was a Jew, Abraham can be a Jew,

00:09:19 – 00:09:24:	because that's the case, then Muslims are Jews, because Muslims trace back to Abraham just like

00:09:24 – 00:09:30:	the Jewish tribes. It becomes incoherent when you actually look at what's trying to be claimed,

00:09:30 – 00:09:35:	but it's consistent with the Talmudic belief that the Goyim are not humans, they're beasts,

00:09:35 – 00:09:42:	they're less than us, us being the Jews. So everything that we're talking about here today in

00:09:42 – 00:09:47:	terms of Judaism tendencies is something that we see from the very earliest days of the early

00:09:47 – 00:09:53:	church, where their Christians and the attack that Satan took against Christ's church as it was

00:09:53 – 00:09:58:	being born was, sure, okay, you have this gospel stuff now, you know, Jesus rose from the dead,

00:09:58 – 00:10:03:	and he forgives your sins, and blah, blah, blah, but did you know you still have to have this stuff

00:10:03 – 00:10:09:	from the Jews? And that was the fight in the very earliest church. We have to keep the Jew stuff,

00:10:09 – 00:10:13:	the Christian stuff isn't complete by itself. It's very common today, and so all the examples

00:10:13 – 00:10:19:	that we give in this episode will reinforce that there's an inherent notion in many people's minds

00:10:19 – 00:10:26:	that Christianity is incomplete unless it's more Jewish than it is today, which if you understand

00:10:26 – 00:10:32:	that Judeo-Christian is an oxymoron, obviously it falls apart. Judeo-Christian is like saying

00:10:32 – 00:10:38:	Satan, oh Christian, they're opposing religions. It's not a continuum. It is not one and then the

00:10:38 – 00:10:44:	other. Noah and Adam and Abraham were Christians because they believed in the promise of the Messiah.

00:10:44 – 00:10:50:	You and I believe in the promise of the Messiah. The key difference between us and them is that

00:10:50 – 00:10:58:	they had an expectant hope in the promise. We have a hope in a promise already fulfilled. We hope in

00:10:58 – 00:11:03:	the resurrection, we hope in the return of Christ, but we already know for a fact that he came once.

00:11:03 – 00:11:08:	So that's the only difference between our belief in theirs, as they were hoping in a prophecy

00:11:08 – 00:11:13:	that had yet to be fulfilled. We have a hope that the prophecy which has been fulfilled in Christ's

00:11:13 – 00:11:19:	birth, death, and resurrection does what God says it was going to do. The reason that those miracles

00:11:19 – 00:11:25:	occurred was so that we would all have confidence. Yes, if I can do these things in space and time,

00:11:25 – 00:11:29:	you can trust my promises that the things that I'm doing are for the forgiveness of your sins.

00:11:29 – 00:11:33:	That's the Christian faith, and they held it, and we hold it in common.

00:11:34 – 00:11:41:	So when Judaizing occurs in the church, it's a subtle attack against that, and we see right from

00:11:41 – 00:11:46:	the very beginning, the one time in the New Testament where the word Judaizing is literally

00:11:46 – 00:11:52:	used is in Galatians 2. Paul writes, But when Cephas, that is Peter, came to Antioch, I posed him to

00:11:52 – 00:11:56:	his face because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with

00:11:56 – 00:12:02:	the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision

00:12:02 – 00:12:07:	party, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him so that even Barnabas was led astray

00:12:07 – 00:12:12:	by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel,

00:12:12 – 00:12:17:	I said to Cephas, Before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew,

00:12:18 – 00:12:25:	how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? This is the ESV, but the word that's used there,

00:12:25 – 00:12:29:	the underlying word that we transliterate, is he saying, How can you force the Jews,

00:12:29 – 00:12:35:	or how can you force the Gentiles to Judaize? Interestingly, that word does appear in the

00:12:35 – 00:12:40:	Old Testament in the Septuagint, which we'll get to towards the end in Esther chapter 8 verse 17.

00:12:40 – 00:12:46:	It's said that the people there were in fear of the Jews and they Judaized. Same thing, it was

00:12:46 – 00:12:55:	adopting the previous Jewish practices of the Mosaic law in order to what? In order to earn

00:12:55 – 00:13:00:	salvation, because when Jesus showed up and the Jews were holding the Mosaic law, they were

00:13:01 – 00:13:06:	following the rules, they'd forgotten what the rules were for. A lot of us preaching was like,

00:13:06 – 00:13:12:	these rules weren't to save you. These rules are God's will, they're my will for you, the

00:13:12 – 00:13:16:	will of the Father for you, but they don't save you. They didn't understand that. All they knew

00:13:16 – 00:13:21:	was the rote performance of the thing. They didn't understand that it wasn't for their salvation,

00:13:21 – 00:13:26:	it was simply what God said to do. If they believed in God, they would do those things.

00:13:26 – 00:13:30:	But it was the belief that always mattered. It was Abraham's faith that was credited to him,

00:13:30 – 00:13:36:	his righteousness, not his doing. It was his belief, belief in the promise. From the very

00:13:36 – 00:13:41:	beginning, the very first instance of Judaizing being explicitly highlighted has to do with

00:13:41 – 00:13:49:	circumcision party, has to do with Peter himself. One of the most beloved apostles of Christ was

00:13:49 – 00:13:54:	sinning against the church as a Judaizer. This is why we said in the past episode,

00:13:54 – 00:14:00:	this was the ground floor heresy in the church. We're going to get into this today,

00:14:00 – 00:14:04:	that whether or not that's a gospel issue depends on how you understand true teaching

00:14:04 – 00:14:09:	and false teaching. Paul was deeply concerned when he saw what Peter was doing, because it was a

00:14:09 – 00:14:16:	false confession. That was the issue. When Peter Judaized, when he refused to eat with non-Jews,

00:14:16 – 00:14:21:	his confession was false. He was confessing a false religion. Even though he was doing what

00:14:21 – 00:14:26:	the Jews had been told to do before, when God said it is finished on the cross, that was it.

00:14:26 – 00:14:30:	He was talking about those rules. Much of the angst spilled in the New Testament

00:14:30 – 00:14:36:	is specifically saying, no, you didn't understand it all. The separation of those people for a time

00:14:36 – 00:14:41:	with these rules was not for their salvation. It was to preserve the promise of the Messiah.

00:14:41 – 00:14:44:	When that had been fulfilled, when Christ had lived that perfect life,

00:14:44 – 00:14:50:	that none of them ever could, then it was finished. From then on, everything that every

00:14:50 – 00:14:57:	believer has is Christian practice. From Peter to today, whenever we see people Judaizing,

00:14:57 – 00:15:00:	they're fundamentally exposing a false confession.

00:15:02 – 00:15:07:	And so to start off this section of the episode about circumcision specifically,

00:15:07 – 00:15:12:	but obviously more generally about Judaizing, we will read through Acts 15,

00:15:12 – 00:15:19:	verses 1 through 29, which relates the text that Woe just mentioned in his intro.

00:15:21 – 00:15:26:	But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers. Unless you are circumcised

00:15:26 – 00:15:31:	according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. And after Paul and Barnabas had no

00:15:31 – 00:15:36:	small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed

00:15:36 – 00:15:39:	to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

00:15:40 – 00:15:45:	So being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria,

00:15:45 – 00:15:50:	describing in detail the conversion of the nations, and brought great joy to all the brothers.

00:15:50 – 00:15:55:	When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders,

00:15:55 – 00:16:01:	and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belong to the party of

00:16:01 – 00:16:06:	the Pharisees rose up and said, it is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the

00:16:06 – 00:16:12:	law of Moses. The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter.

00:16:12 – 00:16:16:	And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them,

00:16:16 – 00:16:20:	Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you,

00:16:20 – 00:16:24:	that by my mouth the nations should hear the word of the gospel and believe.

00:16:24 – 00:16:29:	And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as

00:16:29 – 00:16:35:	he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.

00:16:36 – 00:16:42:	Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples,

00:16:42 – 00:16:47:	that neither your fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved

00:16:47 – 00:16:54:	through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. And all the assembly fell silent,

00:16:54 – 00:16:59:	and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done

00:16:59 – 00:17:05:	through them among the nations. After they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers, listen to me.

00:17:05 – 00:17:11:	Simon has related how God first visited the nations, to take from them a people for his name.

00:17:11 – 00:17:15:	And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,

00:17:16 – 00:17:20:	After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen,

00:17:20 – 00:17:26:	I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord,

00:17:26 – 00:17:32:	and all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from

00:17:32 – 00:17:38:	of old. Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the nations who turn to God,

00:17:38 – 00:17:43:	but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality,

00:17:43 – 00:17:48:	and from what has been strangled and from blood, for from ancient generations Moses has had in

00:17:48 – 00:17:53:	every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.

00:17:55 – 00:17:59:	Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men

00:17:59 – 00:18:05:	from among them, and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsobus

00:18:05 – 00:18:10:	and Silas leading men among the brothers, with the following letter. The brothers, both the

00:18:10 – 00:18:15:	apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the nations in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia,

00:18:15 – 00:18:21:	greetings. Since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words,

00:18:21 – 00:18:26:	unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us,

00:18:26 – 00:18:33:	having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you, with our beloved Barnabas and Paul,

00:18:33 – 00:18:38:	men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore

00:18:38 – 00:18:42:	sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth.

00:18:42 – 00:18:48:	For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us to lay on you no greater burden

00:18:48 – 00:18:53:	than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood,

00:18:53 – 00:18:59:	and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these,

00:18:59 – 00:19:09:	you will do well, farewell. Now you may note that when I read from the ESV or other translations

00:19:09 – 00:19:16:	that use the word Gentiles, I drop that word, I change that word to a more accurate translation

00:19:17 – 00:19:24:	to be clear. And the reason that I do that is because Gentiles itself has become a form of

00:19:24 – 00:19:30:	Judaizing in the modern church. We'll get into that more later in the episode, but I just wanted

00:19:30 – 00:19:35:	to point out that that is something that I do. At least I attempt always to do that when I am

00:19:35 – 00:19:43:	reading from these translations, because the underlying word is, in fact, nations or heathens.

00:19:43 – 00:19:48:	We have these words in English. There is no reason we need to use a Latin derived word such as

00:19:48 – 00:19:54:	Gentiles. I'm not saying the word is necessarily wrong, because if you understand what it means,

00:19:54 – 00:20:01:	the word is fine. But in the modern context, it tends to be misleading and can be used

00:20:01 – 00:20:05:	for Judaizing, and that is why I personally do not tend to use it.

00:20:06 – 00:20:09:	I think it's conspicuous when you look at this passage that,

00:20:10 – 00:20:14:	again, it was the Pharisees who came and said, look what these people are doing.

00:20:14 – 00:20:20:	The Pharisees didn't attack the gospel. They didn't say, no, Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

00:20:20 – 00:20:26:	They didn't attack anything that we think of as Christianity today. The Pharisees came to the

00:20:26 – 00:20:30:	church and said, what are these people doing? If they're going to convert, if they're going to be

00:20:30 – 00:20:35:	believers in the one true God, they need to be circumcised, because they didn't understand what

00:20:35 – 00:20:41:	circumcision was. They didn't understand the purpose. They didn't understand what Jesus had said and

00:20:41 – 00:20:49:	done, and so they were burdening consciences with something that was false. The reason we're beginning

00:20:49 – 00:20:56:	with this is that circumcision is really the Judaizing heresy that is the most prevalent

00:20:56 – 00:21:01:	in the New Testament. You see it in numerous epistles. It comes up all the time. That first

00:21:01 – 00:21:06:	quote was from Galatians. This is from Acts. I have quotes from Philippians, from Titus, and that's

00:21:06 – 00:21:11:	just a small portion of where these fights were occurring, where the so-called circumcision party

00:21:11 – 00:21:17:	would show up and burden consciences and say, you must obey the Mosaic law.

00:21:19 – 00:21:25:	The reason that the Holy Spirit worked through the apostles to put an end to that,

00:21:25 – 00:21:30:	that false teaching was that, again, they didn't understand what circumcision was in the first

00:21:30 – 00:21:37:	place. They didn't understand the sealing a baby boy into the covenant of God with the act of

00:21:37 – 00:21:48:	circumcision, or for adult converts, which happened as well. It wasn't an act onto itself. It was a

00:21:48 – 00:21:54:	public confession, and with Christ's death and resurrection, Christians had a new confession.

00:21:55 – 00:22:00:	The confession was in the risen Lord. The confession no longer needed to be in terms of

00:22:00 – 00:22:08:	circumcision, which was pointing forward. That's why it was happening everywhere, because, as I said,

00:22:09 – 00:22:15:	Satan didn't care about the gospel. His first attack on the church once it was established,

00:22:15 – 00:22:20:	he didn't go after what we call the gospel. What did the teachings of demons that Satan

00:22:20 – 00:22:24:	brought to bear do? They said, no, no, no, you have to do this stuff. You have to do what Moses

00:22:24 – 00:22:30:	said to do. What could be more of a believing thing than to say, obey God? That's how Satan attacked

00:22:30 – 00:22:36:	by saying, hey, obey God, do this stuff, because it took what God said to do entirely out of context

00:22:36 – 00:22:43:	with complete disregard for what God actually made clear about the practice. It tried to burden

00:22:43 – 00:22:48:	consciousness to say, well, you have a Christian confession, but you haven't done the thing yet.

00:22:51 – 00:22:56:	This is something that, in various shades, you will find in all the other Judaism practices that

00:22:56 – 00:23:04:	we see to this day. There's a constant myriad churn. There's always some new form of this sort

00:23:04 – 00:23:10:	of thing, but it invariably says, hey, sure, you got the Jesus stuff, all right, but did you know

00:23:10 – 00:23:17:	the Jews stuff from the olden days will make it even more authentic? I think this is an interesting

00:23:17 – 00:23:21:	thing for us to talk about on Stone Choir, because it sounds kind of like, well, we talk about a lot

00:23:21 – 00:23:26:	on the show. Like, hey, we have this stuff in the church, but what about the old practices?

00:23:27 – 00:23:34:	There are two crucial differences. One, we are not claiming that doing one thing versus another

00:23:34 – 00:23:41:	saves you. There's never the claim of any Christian that doing saves. The doing is the fruit of

00:23:41 – 00:23:47:	salvation. If we have saving faith, then we obey God. That's why there are some who believe before

00:23:47 – 00:23:53:	they're baptized. A believer's baptism is entirely a real thing. They're examples in Scripture.

00:23:53 – 00:23:59:	That does not mean that baptism does not also give the Holy Spirit to those who do not yet have faith.

00:23:59 – 00:24:04:	I did a whole episode on baptism about that. It can be both one thing and the other at the same

00:24:04 – 00:24:10:	time. When we talk about things that used to be church belief and practice, like, for example,

00:24:10 – 00:24:15:	head coverings, it's not to burden consciences. It's certainly not to say, if you don't cover your

00:24:15 – 00:24:21:	head, you haven't earned salvation. That's not a phrase that can even come from our lips, except

00:24:22 – 00:24:27:	ironically. It's an impossibility for a Christian to believe that entire vein of thought.

00:24:28 – 00:24:34:	It's also important to know that sometimes the argument is simply true. Sometimes we do lose

00:24:34 – 00:24:38:	things that we used to have, like head coverings. Like, God said to do it. He didn't say, if a

00:24:38 – 00:24:43:	girl covers her head, she will be saved. He just said, do it because it's proper order. It was never

00:24:43 – 00:24:51:	a matter of salvation, but it was a command from God. When we point back, it's not trying to make

00:24:51 – 00:24:58:	people do something that will prove that they're faithful or to earn their salvation. It's just

00:24:58 – 00:25:03:	to say, this is what believers actually do. It's what the Christian life actually looks like,

00:25:04 – 00:25:11:	which is a very clear distinction from circumcision, because there were many who were not circumcised,

00:25:11 – 00:25:16:	who became believers. Again, one of the earliest controversies in the church. It was a question

00:25:16 – 00:25:20:	to be settled. They sat down and discussed this for a while. It was an important question,

00:25:20 – 00:25:27:	2000 years ago. It's not an important question, because God settled it. So when the Pharisees

00:25:27 – 00:25:32:	asked it, regardless of what their intentions were or their ignorance, God answered. He said,

00:25:33 – 00:25:37:	that was for them, that is over. Someone can believe in God and not be circumcised.

00:25:37 – 00:25:42:	And so it went away entirely. It ceased to be a practice among Christians.

00:25:42 – 00:25:52:	We should point out that not only is circumcision not a Christian practice, but the modern practice

00:25:52 – 00:25:59:	that we call circumcision and the ancient practice in the context of the Near East, which would be

00:25:59 – 00:26:05:	the practice of which the Jews, the more accurately named Israelites or Hebrews partook,

00:26:06 – 00:26:11:	these practices are not the same. Now, there are a number of different circumcision practices

00:26:11 – 00:26:16:	across the world. There are some that are particularly barbaric amongst certain island

00:26:16 – 00:26:22:	peoples and some parts of South America. But we're talking about the Near East here. And in the Near

00:26:22 – 00:26:29:	East, the circumcision practice of that area and of those peoples. And this is the part where if you

00:26:30 – 00:26:34:	are concerned about your children listening to materials that are technically explicit,

00:26:35 – 00:26:40:	you may wish to skip or listen to it, screen it before allowing them to.

00:26:42 – 00:26:49:	That practice is fundamentally different from what we see today. The practice today is the total

00:26:49 – 00:26:55:	removal of the foreskin, which is actually a relatively significant chunk of tissue. The

00:26:55 – 00:27:03:	practice back then was simply either a cut in the foreskin or the removal of the tip of the

00:27:03 – 00:27:09:	foreskin. This is one of the reasons that we see in Scripture, when adult converts even

00:27:09 – 00:27:16:	are circumcised, they recover fairly quickly. If someone removes a significant portion of

00:27:16 – 00:27:22:	your penis, you are not going to recover from that quickly. If it is the ancient practice,

00:27:22 – 00:27:28:	you can recover a number of days and be back at work or even go fight in a battle. That's possible.

00:27:28 – 00:27:35:	That is why in the narrative related to Dina, we see that they attacked them immediately afterward,

00:27:35 – 00:27:40:	because it was a relatively short window in which they would have had this advantage

00:27:40 – 00:27:45:	due to the recovery period. These are very different practices. And the reason that this

00:27:45 – 00:27:54:	matters is because the modern practice has arguably been designed maliciously. It is designed to do

00:27:54 – 00:28:00:	something to the child. It is designed to do something to that boy who is circumcised. It's

00:28:00 – 00:28:05:	mutilation to be frank. It is gentle mutilation. We're used to hearing that particular phrase,

00:28:05 – 00:28:11:	that term with regard to female so-called circumcision, but it is the same when it comes to males for

00:28:11 – 00:28:18:	the modern version of circumcision. It is more comparable to what we see in some of the most

00:28:18 – 00:28:24:	demonically oppressed part of the world, and these parts of the world practice truly heinous

00:28:24 – 00:28:31:	things that are somehow even worse than circumcision, but it is comparable to them with regard to its

00:28:31 – 00:28:36:	goal, with regard to what it does to the circumcised. There are a number of effects to this, and we

00:28:36 – 00:28:42:	have very good studies on this. We know these things to be true. This has been researched

00:28:42 – 00:28:48:	quite significantly. You will typically not hear of these things in the U.S. context because

00:28:48 – 00:28:54:	the overwhelming majority of those in the United States are circumcised.

00:28:56 – 00:29:01:	That is not the case in the rest of the Western world. You basically do not get circumcised in

00:29:01 – 00:29:09:	Europe or Australia or New Zealand or the UK, any of these places. The rest of the European world

00:29:09 – 00:29:16:	does not practice circumcision. It is something that was imported into the U.S. culture because

00:29:16 – 00:29:20:	it's Judaizing. It's part and parcel of a number of other things, and we'll get into some of those

00:29:20 – 00:29:26:	later in the episode as well, but to speak of some of the consequences of circumcision.

00:29:28 – 00:29:33:	When performed on an infant, and we will distinguish between infant circumcision and

00:29:33 – 00:29:38:	adolescent or adult because there are different consequences for those, it is more significant

00:29:38 – 00:29:43:	with regard to infants and adolescents for a number of reasons. But infant circumcision,

00:29:43 – 00:29:49:	often you will hear the argument that, well, the child will not remember the pain,

00:29:50 – 00:29:54:	one that is a morally abhorrent argument, if you actually think about it,

00:29:55 – 00:29:58:	because that would justify doing almost anything to an infant because the infant won't remember,

00:29:59 – 00:30:02:	and the Talmud has some things to say about that, certainly.

00:30:03 – 00:30:07:	But the problem with this argument, beyond being morally abhorrent, is that it is false.

00:30:08 – 00:30:15:	Studies performed on infants, those who were circumcised in infancy, and those who were not show

00:30:16 – 00:30:23:	circumcision actually causes a fundamental change in the brain. It causes site-specific changes to

00:30:23 – 00:30:30:	the brain, usually with regard to pain or centers related to trauma in the brain, but it also causes

00:30:30 – 00:30:36:	a brain wave change that sometimes does not return to a baseline and certainly does not do so quickly.

00:30:37 – 00:30:42:	It causes a spike in all of the various body chemistry that relates to anxiety,

00:30:43 – 00:30:48:	because it is seen by the body, rightfully, as an attack on the body. Of course, an infant

00:30:48 – 00:30:54:	can't do anything in response to an attack, so the infant just has this stress response,

00:30:55 – 00:31:00:	this trauma response, but crying is all the infant can do, of course, which the infant does.

00:31:00 – 00:31:08:	It is also notable that this procedure is often done with minimal, if any, anesthetic.

00:31:10 – 00:31:15:	And yes, infants can feel pain. If you start your argument or you start trying to make an

00:31:15 – 00:31:19:	argument that an infant doesn't feel pain, congratulations, you're on the exact same

00:31:19 – 00:31:24:	road as the people who try to argue for abortion. You're making roughly the same sort of argument

00:31:24 – 00:31:28:	they make with regard to, well, if an infant can't feel pain, then whatever we do is obviously moral.

00:31:30 – 00:31:37:	That is abominable and Christians should never argue that. But beyond the alteration of brain

00:31:37 – 00:31:43:	waves and also certain parts of the brain even, not so much structurally necessarily, but

00:31:44 – 00:31:49:	in regards to later on psychological responses in the adolescent and adult,

00:31:50 – 00:31:56:	and this leads into my next point, we do see increases in pain sensitivity, anxiety,

00:31:56 – 00:32:01:	and a number of other problems, including attention problems in infants,

00:32:02 – 00:32:07:	in the adolescents who were circumcised as infants. There are longitudinal consequences

00:32:07 – 00:32:14:	to the modern practice of circumcision. Again, this is a fundamentally different procedure

00:32:14 – 00:32:19:	from what is described in the Old Testament. It is not the same thing that is being done to boys

00:32:19 – 00:32:23:	today that was done to them in that part of the world historically.

00:32:25 – 00:32:31:	Now to distinguish between infants and adolescents. It's difficult to say if it's

00:32:31 – 00:32:37:	worse to circumcise an infant or an adolescent. However, one of the salient differences that we

00:32:37 – 00:32:42:	see, and part of the reason it's difficult to distinguish obviously is that adolescents can

00:32:42 – 00:32:48:	actually remember what happened consciously, not unconsciously, because there's a difference there.

00:32:48 – 00:32:54:	You can remember things in your unconscious or subconscious mind that you may not be able

00:32:54 – 00:33:01:	to remember in your conscious mind. And notably, your body also remembers things

00:33:01 – 00:33:07:	that your mind does not necessarily store. One good example of that would be when we went

00:33:07 – 00:33:13:	over the issue of promiscuity, a woman's body remembers after a fashion her sexual partners,

00:33:13 – 00:33:21:	even if she may have forgotten them. But that aside, the issue of a child who is circumcised

00:33:21 – 00:33:28:	in adolescence is that the studies done on those who were circumcised in adolescence has shown that

00:33:28 – 00:33:35:	the majority of them fulfill all of the diagnostic criteria in order to diagnose them with post-traumatic

00:33:35 – 00:33:44:	stress disorder. Circumcision, the modern practice, inflicts very real harm on children.

00:33:45 – 00:33:50:	It is something that should not be practiced. It is a barbaric practice that is inexcusable,

00:33:50 – 00:33:58:	and it is Judaizing. It is attempting to participate in a Jewish right. And many of those

00:33:58 – 00:34:03:	doing it are supposedly Christian. This is inexcusable. This is not something that is permissible

00:34:03 – 00:34:09:	for Christians to do. Now we know that some of those who are listening will be fathers. We

00:34:09 – 00:34:14:	know for certain that some of you are fathers, and that most likely, because much of our audience

00:34:14 – 00:34:20:	is American, most likely you had your son circumcised. We are saying you should not have done that.

00:34:21 – 00:34:28:	However, do not beat yourself up over it. Do not worry about it, really.

00:34:29 – 00:34:33:	You do need to repent because it was sinful. It was not something you should have done.

00:34:33 – 00:34:37:	But repent, lay it at the foot of the cross, and be done with it.

00:34:39 – 00:34:45:	This is difficult for many people to do, particularly in the U.S. context. This is a

00:34:45 – 00:34:53:	major problem. We have this issue of looking at sins that have physical consequences,

00:34:53 – 00:35:01:	consequences in time, and many people want to defend those. So for instance, we spoke of promiscuity

00:35:01 – 00:35:06:	in previous episodes. There are those who will want to try and defend those actions in the past,

00:35:06 – 00:35:15:	because if you recognize them as sin, except they were sin, repent. That repentance does not

00:35:15 – 00:35:21:	cure the physical consequences. The same thing is true here. If you repent of the fact that you had

00:35:21 – 00:35:28:	your son circumcised, his foreskin is not growing back. That's not how this works. There are very

00:35:28 – 00:35:34:	real consequences to our sins in time that will not be restored, that will not be undone,

00:35:35 – 00:35:41:	until the second coming, until we are in paradise. We have to live with those things in this life.

00:35:42 – 00:35:51:	But we do not carry them around as conscious baggage. Now, there are, again, real consequences

00:35:51 – 00:35:56:	that stick with us, and those are baggage in the sense that our sin does burden us.

00:35:57 – 00:36:01:	But we are not supposed to carry our sin around as a burden, because Christ took

00:36:01 – 00:36:07:	that on the cross and we are forgiven. So again, you repent, but you don't beat

00:36:07 – 00:36:11:	yourself up over this. That's not the point of the episode. That's not what we're trying to do

00:36:11 – 00:36:17:	by talking about circumcision. The goal here, as is the goal with many of the things we discuss

00:36:17 – 00:36:22:	on our episodes, is to get people to stop participating in something that is sinful.

00:36:22 – 00:36:27:	Just because you did something that was sinful, or you were burdened by something that was sinful,

00:36:27 – 00:36:32:	or you were harmed by it, does not mean that you allow it to perpetuate through additional

00:36:32 – 00:36:38:	generations. You can have it stop with you, or in this case, you can have it stop with your sons.

00:36:39 – 00:36:45:	Don't carry forward the wickedness of past generations. That's the goal. We can actually

00:36:46 – 00:36:54:	create a better future, a more Christian future, by getting rid of these pagan or Jewish practices.

00:36:55 – 00:37:02:	The goal is to end the wickedness. The goal is not to beat up on those who either willingly,

00:37:02 – 00:37:08:	wittingly, unwittingly, however it was, participated in something that was wrong, that was sinful.

00:37:09 – 00:37:14:	The goal is to get the practice to stop, to get Christians to recognize that there is

00:37:14 – 00:37:19:	a Christian response to this, and there is an anti-Christian or Jewish response to this.

00:37:20 – 00:37:25:	And as we've pointed out in some of the readings from Scripture so far, and there are many others,

00:37:26 – 00:37:32:	the New Testament is very clear. Circumcision is a Jewish practice. It is Judaizing.

00:37:32 – 00:37:37:	It is not something that Christians should be doing. It's not because, as Woe already said,

00:37:37 – 00:37:42:	it's not because it's a gospel issue, although ironically, as soon as you say

00:37:42 – 00:37:49:	that this isn't a gospel issue, you've made it a gospel issue by making it into a works issue.

00:37:50 – 00:37:55:	And so you've suddenly imported works righteousness into the discussion by saying it's not a gospel

00:37:55 – 00:38:02:	issue. What we are saying is that it is a practice in which Christians should not participate

00:38:02 – 00:38:11:	because it is Judaizing. Does participation in it damn you to hell? No. If you are circumcised,

00:38:11 – 00:38:18:	are you going to hell? No. Not what we're saying. If you try to make it part of the Christian religion

00:38:18 – 00:38:24:	and say this is something that you must do to be saved, now you have made it works righteousness,

00:38:24 – 00:38:29:	now you have rejected Christ, now you are severed from Christ in the words of the New Testament,

00:38:30 – 00:38:35:	then you are in danger of hellfire. But the ultimate point, the foundational point that we

00:38:35 – 00:38:42:	are trying to make by discussing circumcision is that it is one, a harmful practice, and that it is

00:38:42 – 00:38:50:	two, impermissible Judaizing in which Christians should not be engaged. I want to add just one

00:38:50 – 00:38:58:	additional specific scientific point to why and how it causes harm. As Corey said, this is male

00:38:58 – 00:39:06:	genital mutilation. This is the amputation of not only a body part without anesthetic. As Corey

00:39:06 – 00:39:13:	said, the foreskin is a sizable portion of what is amputated today. It has nothing to do with the

00:39:13 – 00:39:20:	scriptural practice. It has nothing to do with what Moses was commanded. The foreskin itself,

00:39:20 – 00:39:26:	when it is removed, that is functionally like a clitorectomy, which is a barbaric,

00:39:26 – 00:39:34:	disgusting practice that we often find in the Muslim world. A foreskin has about 30,000 nerve

00:39:34 – 00:39:40:	endings. The foreskin has significantly more nerve endings than the rest of the penis. And so when

00:39:40 – 00:39:48:	it is removed without anesthesia, obviously the pain is indescribable. And thankfully for those of

00:39:48 – 00:39:54:	us who have been victims of it, we can't remember. But as Corey said, not only do our bodies bear

00:39:54 – 00:40:01:	the witness of that barbaric amputation, but there are permanent, in many cases,

00:40:02 – 00:40:10:	psychological and what do you call the brain? It's not mental. We are permanently changed by

00:40:10 – 00:40:21:	what is fundamentally a practice of torture. The actual process of circumcising an American boy

00:40:21 – 00:40:27:	today, they're often put on a cruciform slab where their arms and legs are bound, just like Christ.

00:40:28 – 00:40:35:	They're not given anesthesia. And a part of their penis is amputated that has as many endings as many

00:40:35 – 00:40:42:	other parts of the body combined. Of course, this is going to do tremendous harm. It's a fundamentally

00:40:42 – 00:40:48:	wicked and evil practice. As Corey said, once the damage is done, it was done to me. I don't

00:40:48 – 00:40:52:	remember. I don't know what life would be like without it. And we'll make explicit that this is

00:40:52 – 00:40:58:	not sour grapes about my foreskin. I don't care. The point is, we should not be permitting these

00:40:58 – 00:41:04:	things to happen in the world. If you participated in something evil, if you've been the victim of

00:41:04 – 00:41:08:	something evil, you don't look at it and then try to baptize and say, oh, I guess it was okay.

00:41:08 – 00:41:13:	It's actually fine. Let's just keep going with more of that. Because you don't want to confront

00:41:13 – 00:41:18:	whatever evil happened in the past. If something is evil, this is plain evil. Forget scripture

00:41:18 – 00:41:25:	entirely. What I just described and what Corey described is per se evil's far too shallow word

00:41:25 – 00:41:33:	for what it is. It's fundamentally a primitive version of what's done in MKUltra. The MKUltra

00:41:33 – 00:41:39:	torture program was designed to achieve many of the same effects that are achieved on every single

00:41:39 – 00:41:46:	American boy who's circumcised. As Corey said, the number of European males who are circumcised,

00:41:46 – 00:41:51:	over 90% of them live in the United States. It's almost exclusively an American practice

00:41:51 – 00:41:58:	among whites. About 90% of Jews are circumcised. About 80% of Muslims worldwide are circumcised.

00:41:58 – 00:42:04:	So the only people who have participated in this barbaric practice are Americans,

00:42:04 – 00:42:09:	Jews, and Muslims. That by itself should be an indication that there's something religious

00:42:09 – 00:42:13:	going on here. Because what is that? That triad? That's the Abrahamic religions. That's what we're

00:42:13 – 00:42:20:	told today. Oh, it all came from Abraham. Isaac had Ishmael, and then we get the Muslims down the

00:42:20 – 00:42:28:	road. Jacob gave birth to the Jews, and then the Jews gave birth to the Christians. Circumcision

00:42:28 – 00:42:34:	unites us all. No. What's interesting when you look at this specific history of it in the United

00:42:34 – 00:42:40:	States, it did not exist when this country was founded because it never existed among Christians.

00:42:40 – 00:42:46:	It was expressly banned. It was, frankly, it's something that should be a death penalty

00:42:47 – 00:42:51:	matter today, in my opinion. I think if you're going to harm infants like that,

00:42:51 – 00:42:58:	you need to talk to the hangman. The practice when it was introduced in this country,

00:42:59 – 00:43:05:	part of it, it became very widespread once Jews began coming into this country at the end of the

00:43:05 – 00:43:12:	19th century, beginning of the 20th century. But it was already being pushed a few decades prior by

00:43:15 – 00:43:20:	post-Christian Judaizing Americans. This country, when you look at things like the

00:43:20 – 00:43:27:	history of the Burntover District and other places, there has been a sort of Judaizing,

00:43:27 – 00:43:34:	apostatizing development of entirely New Pagan religions that was unique to the United States.

00:43:34 – 00:43:38:	Some of it got exported back to England, and it's made it to a few other places.

00:43:39 – 00:43:44:	Many of these things, the reason that almost exclusively happens in the U.S., is that it was

00:43:44 – 00:43:51:	exclusively a U.S. thing. Once we started it, and originally one of the theories was,

00:43:51 – 00:43:55:	it's going to improve hygiene, it's going to improve mental health, they said it was going

00:43:55 – 00:44:01:	to prevent masturbation. Then when Jews started showing up, well, it was a way to normalize

00:44:02 – 00:44:06:	their population intermingling with ours, because they were all going to be circumcised.

00:44:07 – 00:44:12:	If you have these people who are trying to insinuate themselves into American life,

00:44:12 – 00:44:18:	but they all have this one fundamental difference, well, that's going to mark them as being a part,

00:44:18 – 00:44:25:	which was part of the original point. All of the Levitical laws were specifically to separate

00:44:25 – 00:44:32:	the Hebrews from their Pagan neighbors. The promise of the Messiah would be preserved and

00:44:32 – 00:44:37:	fulfilled in time. They were kept apart from their Pagan neighbors, so they wouldn't apostatize.

00:44:38 – 00:44:44:	That was no longer necessary once Jesus came. Not that the circumcision is not specifically

00:44:44 – 00:44:49:	a Levitical law, but it fell into the same bucket for the purposes of it was ended,

00:44:49 – 00:44:56:	is clearly ended in Scripture. When it reemerged in the US almost exclusively in the 1800s,

00:44:56 – 00:45:00:	and then it took off in the 20th century when Judaizing just became the norm,

00:45:01 – 00:45:06:	that's, sorry, 19th century and the 20th century, it began in the mid to late 1800s,

00:45:06 – 00:45:11:	and it really took off in the 20th century to point that at its peak in the 20th century,

00:45:11 – 00:45:17:	it was something like 90% of males in some places were circumcised. Thankfully,

00:45:17 – 00:45:23:	it's began falling in recent years, but mostly it's been falling because of illegal aliens coming

00:45:23 – 00:45:28:	here who don't practice it. So as we have non-whites who have not been subjected to the Judaizing

00:45:28 – 00:45:33:	tendencies, they just don't do it because its religious practice is not part of their religion.

00:45:34 – 00:45:38:	So while mathematically it's a good thing, and it shouldn't be happening to anyone regardless

00:45:38 – 00:45:44:	of religion, that should be a law for everyone. It's also the case that it's declining in large

00:45:44 – 00:45:50:	part mostly simply because we're being overrun by aliens. It's also starting to taper off,

00:45:50 – 00:45:54:	thankfully, fewer and fewer zoomers in the latter generation have been subjected to it.

00:45:54 – 00:46:00:	And it's a good thing. It should be illegal. It should be impermissible. And a Christian

00:46:00 – 00:46:06:	government would prevent this because it's torture. It's antithetical to everything that any decent

00:46:06 – 00:46:12:	person would hold. And the obvious implication is that that would ban Jews, wouldn't it?

00:46:12 – 00:46:17:	Because if the Jews today still say they have to be circumcised to be Jews, which they do,

00:46:17 – 00:46:24:	they have their bris, that's part of them still practicing the religion that Jesus fulfilled

00:46:24 – 00:46:30:	and then set aside. And they never gave up because they never understood God. They never knew God in

00:46:30 – 00:46:36:	the first place. So it's absolutely the case that to ban circumcision would be to make Jews illegal.

00:46:36 – 00:46:39:	That's necessary. A Christian country should do that.

00:46:41 – 00:46:47:	It's a shocking thing for some people to hear, but if it's evil, why do you permit it? Do you

00:46:47 – 00:46:52:	permit it because it's their religious practice? This is the fight that then happened with peyote

00:46:52 – 00:46:55:	and these other things where, oh, Indians have always been doing it, so we have to let it go.

00:46:55 – 00:47:01:	Or now Satanists are saying, well, abortion is part of my religion. It's a sacrament.

00:47:01 – 00:47:05:	They're absolutely right. Abortion is a satanic sacrament. It's part of their religion. That's

00:47:05 – 00:47:11:	true. What is not true is that it should be tolerated. It should be persecuted to the full

00:47:11 – 00:47:16:	extent of the law in addition to being prosecuted. I mean, both of those. It should be stamped out

00:47:16 – 00:47:23:	because it's wicked. And so this is the most extreme example of Judaizing tendencies

00:47:23 – 00:47:28:	that's particular to the United States, but it's also, as we said, it has the most

00:47:28 – 00:47:34:	texts spilled in the New Testament condemning it. I'll finish with a passage from Titus 1,

00:47:34 – 00:47:40:	the very beginning of what's a pastoral epistle. This passage here is being shared to an overseer

00:47:40 – 00:47:44:	to say, look, this is what you're going to be facing. And here's what is written.

00:47:46 – 00:47:51:	For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the

00:47:51 – 00:47:56:	circumcision party. They must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching

00:47:56 – 00:48:01:	for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own said,

00:48:01 – 00:48:07:	Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore,

00:48:07 – 00:48:12:	rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths

00:48:12 – 00:48:17:	and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. To the pure, all things are pure,

00:48:17 – 00:48:23:	but to the defiled and the unbelieving, nothing is pure. But both their minds and their consciences

00:48:23 – 00:48:28:	are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable,

00:48:28 – 00:48:34:	disobedient, unfit for any good work. This is the sort of thing that Cory and I say about some of

00:48:34 – 00:48:40:	the evil men that we see online, and everybody loses their mind. Is it un-Christian to express

00:48:40 – 00:48:46:	these sorts of sentiments? No. And it wasn't that Paul gets a special get out of jail free card,

00:48:46 – 00:48:52:	and it wasn't that we have a capricious God, and so whenever the Holy Spirit transmits these things,

00:48:52 – 00:48:57:	well, I guess it's not sin when God does it. This is a necessary part of the Christian faith

00:48:57 – 00:49:03:	to rebuke and condemn evil actions and those who are spreading them, and those who are perpetuating

00:49:03 – 00:49:07:	them. Because this circumcision party, which sounds like the worst party in the world,

00:49:07 – 00:49:13:	was pervasive. You found it everywhere in the early church. These Judaizers showed up everywhere,

00:49:13 – 00:49:20:	and they never reviled the cross, not directly, but they reviled the cross by despising the sacrifice

00:49:20 – 00:49:25:	that Christ had made. Because when he said it was finished, it included circumcision. Like,

00:49:25 – 00:49:29:	no, no, no. We got to keep doing that. We got to hang on to these things. We have to have this

00:49:29 – 00:49:35:	Jewish stuff in the church. The defining battle of the very first century of the Christian church

00:49:35 – 00:49:40:	was against Judaizing, and what we see today is it's roaring back. And next week, we're going to

00:49:40 – 00:49:46:	talk about Gnosticism, which was the second false religion that came roaring into the church,

00:49:46 – 00:49:50:	attacking it from every direction, and that's exactly what we have today. We're going to tie

00:49:50 – 00:49:56:	together many past episodes that deal with elements of the Gnostic faith, the Gnostic religion,

00:49:57 – 00:50:04:	of those days that are now, again, pervasive. Because why would that happen? Satan knows that

00:50:04 – 00:50:10:	the old tricks work, the lies that men believed before. We keep gobbling them up, and it's only

00:50:10 – 00:50:15:	when men will speak, as Paul speaks here in Titus, as the Holy Spirit speaks, and says,

00:50:15 – 00:50:20:	they profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They're detestable, disobedient,

00:50:20 – 00:50:26:	unfit for any good work. This is a sort of revulsion and hatred of evil that Christians

00:50:26 – 00:50:34:	are commanded to have. It's necessary to hate evil. Now, in the Acts 15 passage, when the Pharisees

00:50:34 – 00:50:39:	came and said, you guys need to be circumcising, the immediate response in that day, because the

00:50:39 – 00:50:44:	subject had not yet been broached, was not hatred. But by the time we get to Titus being written,

00:50:44 – 00:50:51:	it's clear, this question had been settled by God once and for all time. And when people keep

00:50:51 – 00:50:58:	coming back and reinvigorating the old question, knowing that it's going to do harm, you're permitted,

00:50:58 – 00:51:02:	and in fact, you're commanded to have a hateful response to it. Now, that doesn't mean you

00:51:02 – 00:51:07:	necessarily actually speak hatefully. I'm not advocating that. But if our response to this

00:51:07 – 00:51:13:	sort of wickedness is not animated by vehemence, there's something wrong with us.

00:51:14 – 00:51:20:	There is one more passage that I want to briefly add to this section on circumcision,

00:51:20 – 00:51:24:	because this is something about which I want you, the audience, to think.

00:51:25 – 00:51:28:	And I'm going to read briefly from Romans 4.

00:51:44 – 00:51:51:	It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal

00:51:51 – 00:51:57:	of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to

00:51:57 – 00:52:03:	make him the father of all who believe, without being circumcised, so that righteousness would

00:52:03 – 00:52:08:	be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised, who were not merely

00:52:08 – 00:52:15:	circumcised, but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he

00:52:15 – 00:52:24:	was circumcised. I want you to think about what that passage assumes about two distinct groups,

00:52:25 – 00:52:30:	and whether or not they are circumcised, and then compare that to what we are doing

00:52:31 – 00:52:37:	in the modern U.S. I would actually recommend you read the entire book of Romans,

00:52:37 – 00:52:41:	but at the very least perhaps meditate on that part of the book.

00:52:42 – 00:52:48:	The next example of Judaizing that we're going to tackle is actually a very modern one, which is,

00:52:48 – 00:52:54:	I think, a great example, because no one today knows it's modern. I didn't know until someone

00:52:54 – 00:53:01:	asked me the question, and the question was, is the use of the word Yahweh something that is good

00:53:01 – 00:53:06:	or bad? Somebody asked me, and my first response was, obviously, that's garbage. That was my

00:53:06 – 00:53:12:	instinctual response. Yeah, it sounds like bunk. That sounds like Judaizing, as I just instinctively

00:53:12 – 00:53:20:	knew this sort of pattern replays over and over throughout history. So when someone is using this

00:53:20 – 00:53:26:	Jewish-sounding word to speak of God, when in many other contexts that's not how we talk about God,

00:53:26 – 00:53:31:	my instinct was that's crap. But I didn't know anything about the history, so I started digging

00:53:31 – 00:53:37:	into it a little bit, and what I found was astonishing. So some months ago, I think about last

00:53:37 – 00:53:42:	June, I did a thread on Twitter. We will link in the show notes that thread, so I'll have the

00:53:42 – 00:53:46:	screenshots that I dug up, and we'll flesh it out a little more fully than we're going to do here,

00:53:46 – 00:53:51:	but because a lot of you guys are not on TwitterX, I want to just give this example because it's

00:53:51 – 00:53:59:	another great way of illustrating that these tendencies, they're pervasive. We all want to

00:53:59 – 00:54:04:	Jew up our Christianity. We want to have the more authentic version of our faith,

00:54:04 – 00:54:10:	and that means making it seem less Christian and making it seem more like the old Hebrew stuff.

00:54:10 – 00:54:15:	We need those Hebrew roots. We need the Judeo back in our Christianity. That's the impetus in

00:54:15 – 00:54:20:	the American church, and we've talked to some length in other places that that's just by itself,

00:54:20 – 00:54:28:	it's evil. The specific example of Yahweh is particularly astonishingly bad. So the first

00:54:28 – 00:54:34:	thing I did, before we get into it, I want to make one thing very clear. Yahweh, I'm talking about

00:54:34 – 00:54:44:	the six letters, Y-A-H-W-E-H. It's pronounced in English, Yahweh. It's not synonymous with the

00:54:44 – 00:54:51:	tetragrammaton. That is Y-H-W-H. So the first thing that we have to understand when we're talking

00:54:51 – 00:54:56:	about this subject is a reminder of something we talked about in a couple of the earlier episodes

00:54:56 – 00:55:03:	about Jews, which is that Hebrew is a very primitive language. It is fundamentally deficient

00:55:03 – 00:55:09:	in numerous ways. One of the most glaring is that Hebrew literally has no vowels. There are no vowels

00:55:09 – 00:55:16:	in the Hebrew language. They're spoken because we don't know how to speak without vowels.

00:55:16 – 00:55:23:	Basically, the vowels are the meat of a word, and the consonants are like the bread on either

00:55:23 – 00:55:30:	side of the sandwich. But you have to have a vowel in order to have a word. Hebrew doesn't have any

00:55:30 – 00:55:38:	vowels. It has 22 letters or all consonants. This is fundamentally defective for a written language

00:55:38 – 00:55:46:	because there's so much ambiguity. Imagine that I had written down this sentence.

00:55:46 – 00:55:58:	You should turn off the, and then I write, L-D. You know when you're reading it that L-D

00:55:58 – 00:56:05:	is a word, but I've left out the vowels. I've left out the vowel sounds. Now what can L-D mean?

00:56:06 – 00:56:12:	I could mean lead. I could mean lid, lude, load, lod.

00:56:14 – 00:56:18:	All those have very different meanings. Those are all fundamentally different words,

00:56:18 – 00:56:22:	and maybe in context you might be able to guess which one I was talking about.

00:56:23 – 00:56:30:	But the problem with the Hebrew language being so deficient and lacking vowels entirely

00:56:30 – 00:56:37:	is that without the direct oral transmission faithfully, it's entirely possible for someone to

00:56:37 – 00:56:43:	alter what a word means. Because if you just have the consonants L and D, any of those words are

00:56:43 – 00:56:47:	possible, and sometimes context doesn't tell you which one it is. They could in some cases be two

00:56:47 – 00:56:54:	or three of them. And so it's only with faithful oral transmission of the knowledge of which words

00:56:54 – 00:56:58:	it is you're reading, which existed for a long time. I'm not trying to call into question whether

00:57:00 – 00:57:05:	the Hebrews were faithfully transmitting scripture, because the rabbis would teach their pupils,

00:57:06 – 00:57:11:	here's the words, here's how you read it, here's how to pronounce it, here's what the word actually is,

00:57:11 – 00:57:15:	because language is fundamentally spoken and then secondarily written.

00:57:17 – 00:57:25:	So the question of Yahweh versus Y-H-W-H, the tetragrammaton, is that because in Hebrew,

00:57:25 – 00:57:32:	the word, and that this is a word that was given to Moses from the burning bush, God said I am,

00:57:32 – 00:57:40:	that's how you revealed his name, he said his name is I am. Y-H-W-H means I am. We know this

00:57:40 – 00:57:49:	to be a fact. What we don't know, what no one knows, is what the vowel sounds were in Y-H-W-H.

00:57:50 – 00:57:56:	And so one of the earliest episodes we did on A Name No Man Knows where we talked a little

00:57:56 – 00:58:01:	bit about secret names. There are secret names of God where he specifically says there's a name

00:58:01 – 00:58:09:	that no man knows for Jesus Christ. That's fine, that's God's business. It's not supposed to be

00:58:09 – 00:58:15:	some sort of esoteric knowledge that we should chase after and desire greedily. I want to know

00:58:15 – 00:58:20:	the secret name, I want to know how to pronounce it. What that's fundamentally doing is turning

00:58:21 – 00:58:29:	what God said into a black magic incantation. And the reason that I can say this is that when we

00:58:29 – 00:58:36:	look elsewhere in Scripture, in the other places where God said I am, he said I am, not in English,

00:58:36 – 00:58:45:	but he said in Hebrew and he said also incidentally in Greek. In the New Testament, I am is also said

00:58:45 – 00:58:52:	in fact one of the times when the Jews tried to murder Christ was when he said before Abraham was

00:58:52 – 00:59:01:	I am. And he said it in Greek, he said ego and me. If the tetragrammaton, if the Y-H-W-H were some

00:59:01 – 00:59:07:	special sound that had a power all its own, Jesus would have used the special magic word,

00:59:07 – 00:59:12:	but he didn't. What did he say? He said in Greek, I am. And they knew what he was talking about

00:59:12 – 00:59:19:	because they tried to murder him on the spot. Why? Because even the sentence before Abraham was I am,

00:59:20 – 00:59:24:	which was a confession that he was God, he was saying I am God, which is why they tried to

00:59:24 – 00:59:29:	murder him because if he was lying, it would be utter blasphemy. That's something I would never

00:59:29 – 00:59:33:	say because it would be blasphemous. I'm not even joking about saying it because it's facially

00:59:33 – 00:59:39:	untrue. When he said it, it was true because he's God. The interesting thing about the sentence

00:59:39 – 00:59:46:	structure before Abraham was I am is it doesn't work. It doesn't work logically to human minds.

00:59:46 – 00:59:51:	It would make sense to say before Abraham was I was. It would still have been blasphemy,

00:59:51 – 00:59:56:	but it would not have hearkened to what the theophany of the burning bush said.

59:57 – 01:00:04
It would not have pointed back to that. And so when Jesus said I am, he said exactly what

01:00:04 – 01:00:08:	God said. So that illustrates that it's not a secret noise. It's not a special

01:00:09 – 01:00:16:	hidden name. It's just how I am was spelled. And Christians left it alone because one of

01:00:16 – 01:00:22:	things we'll get into in this thread a little bit is that the Septuagint was the Bible of Jesus

01:00:22 – 01:00:29:	Day. The Old Testament was 100% Greek. Almost no one could read Hebrew and no one spoke Hebrew.

01:00:29 – 01:00:35:	It was a dead language. It was not being spoken. So in the New Testament, when Jesus' words are

01:00:35 – 01:00:39:	recorded in Greek, it's not a translation of what he was actually saying. They're the words

01:00:39 – 01:00:44:	that he said, which is why there are the few places where you have Aramaic sayings. It's like,

01:00:44 – 01:00:48:	you know, why does he say Eloi, Eloi, Lama, Thessabic Thani? Well, he said that because

01:00:48 – 01:00:54:	that's what he actually said because he also spoke Aramaic. And so when the words of Jesus

01:00:54 – 01:00:59:	uttered out loud were in Aramaic, that is what is recorded in Scripture. When it records his

01:00:59 – 01:01:04:	Greek words, it's not that he was speaking Greek or he wasn't speaking Hebrew and they translated

01:01:04 – 01:01:09:	into Greek. He was speaking in Greek. That was his natural language. He spoke both when he was

01:01:09 – 01:01:14:	preaching in the crowds. He spoke in Greek. Later on in the year, we're going to be doing an entire

01:01:14 – 01:01:20:	episode specifically in the Septuagint. So we're not going to belabor that point today. But it's

01:01:20 – 01:01:26:	very important that his Bible, Jesus Bible, which incidentally is a pretty big deal. If the Bible

01:01:26 – 01:01:31:	that God is using to preach from is written in Greek, it should be good enough for us to say,

01:01:31 – 01:01:38:	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 – 01:01:45:	And what we find in the Septuagint is that it simply translates, I am. And other places where

01:01:45 – 01:01:52:	it translates as God. So this all highlights that there's no magic, secret word. There's no

01:01:52 – 01:02:01:	secret noise that we need to utter or invoke in order to have some more Christian experience.

01:02:01 – 01:02:05:	But that's the Judaizing tendency to say, I need some of the sounds more Jewish than what I'm doing.

01:02:05 – 01:02:12:	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 – 01:02:17:	or if I say Jehovah, or if I say Yahweh, now we're talking. That's that really authentic

01:02:17 – 01:02:23:	Jewish stuff. I need more of that. That's the problem. And so when I dug into the history of

01:02:23 – 01:02:29:	Yahweh, not YHWH, don't care about that. Don't care about vowel pointing. Where did Yahweh come from?

01:02:30 – 01:02:36:	Well, the first place I looked was on Google Engram's search for frequency. Because if Yahweh

01:02:36 – 01:02:41:	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 – 01:02:49:	churches for pastors and others to say Yahweh. Because it seems sincere. It seems authentic,

01:02:49 – 01:02:56:	authentic. It seems like something that's really, really legit. And so people do it in good

01:02:56 – 01:03:01:	conscience. I don't think that they're acting maliciously when they do it. But my question

01:03:01 – 01:03:06:	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 – 01:03:14:	the word literally did not exist until the mid 1800s. And it was kind of hanging around in the

01:03:14 – 01:03:20:	background in terms of frequency on Google Engram's. And it was kind of on a slow upward

01:03:20 – 01:03:28:	trajectory until after about 2005 or so. Right around 2010, 15, 14 years ago, it goes vertical.

01:03:29 – 01:03:35:	Everybody suddenly is saying Yahweh out of the blue. Well, that's a really big red flag to me.

01:03:35 – 01:03:40:	Because that's not a natural pattern. That means if something changed in the zeitgeist,

01:03:40 – 01:03:44:	people were behaving in one way and then they started behaving another. Now, in some cases,

01:03:44 – 01:03:49:	that's just an interesting thing to notice. But when you're talking about God's name,

01:03:49 – 01:03:55:	and suddenly God's name explodes 14 years ago, yeah, that's going to concern me a great deal.

01:03:55 – 01:04:01:	So I dug into it and I started looking at the very earliest instances in the Google Engram's

01:04:01 – 01:04:07:	repository of where Yahweh was first used. And the thread is going over what I discovered.

01:04:07 – 01:04:12:	I'm not going to go into it too much here, but the gist of it is that, as I said,

01:04:12 – 01:04:20:	it was never done in church history until around the Middle Ages. And then one of the first things

01:04:20 – 01:04:27:	that happened was that the vow pointing. So, you know, we mentioned that the Hebrew has no

01:04:27 – 01:04:32:	vowels. Some of you probably are familiar with vow pointing. If you see what's called Hebrew

01:04:32 – 01:04:37:	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 – 01:04:42:	look like broken Morse code is scattered around. That's the vow pointing. That's adding the vow

01:04:42 – 01:04:48:	sounds to the written text so that someone who isn't receiving the orally transmitted teaching

01:04:48 – 01:04:52:	knows how to pronounce it, knows which words they are. Because, again, this primitive backward

01:04:52 – 01:04:58:	language has no, often has none of context, even know what word you're talking about. So,

01:04:59 – 01:05:06:	the vow pointing has only existed for about 11, maybe 1200 years at the outside. It's a brand

01:05:06 – 01:05:11:	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 – 01:05:19:	year old house, but 1200 years is new for Christianity. And so what happened was the

01:05:19 – 01:05:25:	Maserites, the Jewish scholars in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East,

01:05:26 – 01:05:31:	they wanted to solve this problem. They finally started adding vowels to the old language because

01:05:31 – 01:05:35:	there had been an effort, even though it was dead, they were beginning to try to repersonate it.

01:05:35 – 01:05:40:	They were bringing it back, trying to preserve it, trying to preserve that part of their tradition.

01:05:41 – 01:05:47:	Incidentally, they also wrote the Talmud and Aramaic. And so it has vow pointing as well.

01:05:47 – 01:05:53:	The very first instance that we have of vowels on so-called Hebrew is the Aleppo Codex, which is

01:05:53 – 01:06:00:	about 1100 years old. It could happen, they say maybe about as early as about 750 was the first

01:06:00 – 01:06:05:	time that the vowels were added. And something that happened in the 12th century because they

01:06:05 – 01:06:10:	still wouldn't add the vowels to Yahweh, they left it alone. And so around the 12th century,

01:06:11 – 01:06:19:	the Maserites transliterated the vowels from Adonai, which is another name for God,

01:06:19 – 01:06:28:	onto the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. The Y-H-W-H had the vowels from Adonai superimposed

01:06:28 – 01:06:36:	on it. And that's where the word Jehovah comes from. So they invented Jehovah about 800 years ago.

01:06:36 – 01:06:40:	And after a couple hundred years, it got picked up medieval Europe because

01:06:42 – 01:06:46:	contact with the Jews who were passing around their Hebrew texts and saying,

01:06:46 – 01:06:51:	this is scripture, this is more authentic than what you have, some of them fell for it.

01:06:52 – 01:06:58:	Uncritically, like, well, okay. It was kind of the beginning of Judaizing, resurging,

01:06:58 – 01:07:04:	and the Christian church was already happening before the Reformation. And it's a tragedy that

01:07:04 – 01:07:10:	happened because they were uncritical. No one ever considered the fact that the genealogy of even

01:07:10 – 01:07:17:	the vowel pointing, never mind the so-called Hebrew text of scripture that was a thousand years

01:07:17 – 01:07:24:	newer than the Septuagint, every single vowel pointer had been invented or had been transcribed,

01:07:24 – 01:07:30:	had been not transcribed because there was no transmission, had been given to the Christians

01:07:30 – 01:07:36:	by men who were in hell. Every single man who was involved in the creation of vowel pointing for

01:07:36 – 01:07:44:	the Hebrew language is in hell because 100% of them were Jews. They were evil, wicked, God-hating men.

01:07:45 – 01:07:50:	And even in the Middle Ages, they were called Christ killers. And yet when the church started

01:07:50 – 01:07:56:	looking at, hmm, I want to learn more about God's word, okay, great. Let's turn to the Jews. What?

01:07:57 – 01:08:01:	They went to the people that they called Christ killers and said, tell us more about our God.

01:08:01 – 01:08:06:	And so what did the rabbis do? They started passing off their Hebrew text and saying, here you go,

01:08:06 – 01:08:13:	here's the vowel pointers, and the Adonai tetragrammaton mashup of Jehovah was passed on. And

01:08:13 – 01:08:20:	so it began to plant the seed in people's minds that, I am, is not sufficient. The words that

01:08:20 – 01:08:25:	God used isn't enough. You need the sound. And I realize this is kind of a fiddly point for some

01:08:25 – 01:08:30:	people, but the word and the sound isn't the same thing. You can have synonyms where different

01:08:30 – 01:08:35:	words mean the same thing. Totally different words, different sounds. The sound of whatever

01:08:35 – 01:08:42:	the tetragrammaton is, it's the name that God gave. I don't mean to diminish its importance.

01:08:42 – 01:08:49:	What it is not is a magic spell. It's not something that because I don't know how God

01:08:49 – 01:08:55:	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 – 01:09:03:	pronounce Y-H-W-H. And so what happened in the 1800s, there was a man named Wilhelm Gethenius,

01:09:03 – 01:09:08:	who was a linguist, he was a scholar, who was digging into some of these questions,

01:09:08 – 01:09:15:	and he came up with Yahweh, Y-A-H-W-E-H, the six letters, that sound. He said,

01:09:15 – 01:09:20:	I think this is the sound that it probably was. Fine. People have been arguing about for a while,

01:09:20 – 01:09:24:	just as a peripheral academic exercise. It's an interesting question. I wonder,

01:09:24 – 01:09:29:	personally. I like to know. I don't care. Again, I'm not missing out on anything, but

01:09:29 – 01:09:36:	it's a reasonable question. And it's one thing for a man to speculate. But what Gethenius did was,

01:09:38 – 01:09:45:	for one, he was already practicing critical scholarship. So he didn't believe that Moses

01:09:46 – 01:09:55:	was the scribe of the Torah. He didn't believe that Genesis was literal. And so he came up with

01:09:55 – 01:10:03:	Yahweh, in part, by thinking that the Hebrews were influenced by their neighbors. And so he got to

01:10:03 – 01:10:11:	the pronunciation Yahweh with Job and with Jupiter because those were also preeminent gods in those

01:10:11 – 01:10:16:	places where the Hebrews lived with their neighbors. And he thought, well, there seem to be some

01:10:16 – 01:10:22:	similarities between Y-H-W-H and Job and Jupiter. I bet they were all influenced the same way.

01:10:22 – 01:10:29:	And so he sort of mangled some of the phonetics of those words, stuck him into the Tetragrammaton,

01:10:29 – 01:10:36:	and ta-da, we have Yahweh. If he had been a proper Christian, he could have still made the

01:10:36 – 01:10:42:	connection between the Tetragrammaton and Job and Jupiter. Because as a Christian, it's entirely

01:10:42 – 01:10:48:	believable that those would be related, not because there's some God and we don't know his name,

01:10:48 – 01:10:55:	but because the worshipers of Jupiter and Job still remembered something of God,

01:10:55 – 01:11:00:	but they didn't know God. So they knew something about how to call upon him,

01:11:00 – 01:11:05:	but they didn't know who they were calling upon. So the mythologies, all the things that they believed

01:11:05 – 01:11:09:	about Job and Jupiter were evil, but they at least were pointing to the king of gods.

01:11:09 – 01:11:15:	They got that one detail, right? That's entirely permissible for a Christian to believe,

01:11:15 – 01:11:19:	but he didn't believe that. So he said, yeah, I think it's Yahweh. He wrote it in a book,

01:11:19 – 01:11:23:	he published it a few years later, he actually retracted. It was a footnote, effectively.

01:11:25 – 01:11:29:	About 30 years later, 20 years later, a man named Alexander MacArthur III

01:11:30 – 01:11:38:	discovered this book. And when he saw Yahweh, he didn't see a pious or unpious,

01:11:38 – 01:11:42:	depending on how you want to interpret it, speculation about how to pronounce this word.

01:11:42 – 01:11:49:	It doesn't really matter. When he saw Yahweh, he discovered a key to reinterpret all of Scripture.

01:11:49 – 01:11:54:	So he went nuts. He wrote a whole book, wrote 179 page books. I read the whole thing.

01:11:55 – 01:11:58:	Either screenshots in the thread where you can read some of the clips I found.

01:11:59 – 01:12:04:	Basically, what he believed when he discovered this word Yahweh,

01:12:06 – 01:12:10:	one, he was a unitarian. He was not a Christian. He had some insane

01:12:11 – 01:12:16:	heretical beliefs about the Trinity. He denied the Trinity. It was just a disaster.

01:12:17 – 01:12:21:	He believed that the Septuagint was a shoddy translation

01:12:21 – 01:12:25:	by men who didn't know Hebrew at all. He said they're really bad at Hebrew.

01:12:25 – 01:12:29:	So he had fallen completely under the spell that the Masoretic text

01:12:29 – 01:12:34:	that dates back, in his case, about 800 years, that was the real Bible.

01:12:34 – 01:12:37:	And the 2000-year-old version that we have in Greek, that was somehow botched.

01:12:39 – 01:12:45:	Because he believed that, he believed that the translators of the Septuagint were influenced

01:12:45 – 01:12:52:	by Greek pagan philosophy. And so one of the things that the Septuagint does,

01:12:52 – 01:12:57:	is it will just translate, God is God. And he rejected the word God. It's Theos in Greek.

01:12:58 – 01:13:03:	He rejected that. He said that that was Greek philosophy and pinging upon the true religion.

01:13:03 – 01:13:07:	So he found it impermissible that the Septuagint said God.

01:13:08 – 01:13:13:	That's kind of weird, because Christians have always invoked the name of God.

01:13:13 – 01:13:17:	He says that's a pagan practice. No one's permitted to do that. So when he found Yahweh,

01:13:18 – 01:13:25:	what he decided was that it didn't mean I am. He effectively said that Hebrew had a tense that

01:13:25 – 01:13:31:	it doesn't have. It doesn't have a future tense. He believed that Yahweh was he who is to come.

01:13:32 – 01:13:38:	Which is a really weird thing, because what he wanted to do by taking this Yahweh sound,

01:13:38 – 01:13:42:	like, and I realize it's kind of getting off into the weeds, but that's the point of this.

01:13:42 – 01:13:47:	When we say Yahweh today, this is what we're inheriting. One guy makes up a word, says,

01:13:47 – 01:13:51:	I think it might have sounded like this. Another guy discovers it. He invents a new

01:13:52 – 01:13:57:	way of interpreting that word. And he sticks it back in the rest of the Bible. And so,

01:13:57 – 01:14:04:	according to McCordier, if Yahweh or Yahweh means he who is to come, he wanted to treat that as a

01:14:04 – 01:14:11:	prophecy of the Messiah. And so the book that he wrote was entitled Yahweh Christ or the Memorial

01:14:11 – 01:14:19:	Name. And basically, he used Yahweh as a decoder ring for the entire Bible. And he reinterpreted

01:14:19 – 01:14:23:	all the passages, contrary to how they'd ever been interpreted by Christians in the history of the

01:14:23 – 01:14:31:	church in a way that was forward-looking. Now, this becomes really creepy when it gets adopted

01:14:31 – 01:14:38:	by others. When he published this book, it was roundly panned. I clipped some of the reviews of

01:14:38 – 01:14:43:	it. It was despised, rightfully, even by some places that weren't particularly very Christian.

01:14:43 – 01:14:49:	They still found this utterly outside the faith. So it didn't really go anywhere too much until

01:14:49 – 01:14:55:	a cult discovered it. After he wrote this, he published it. It didn't really take off because

01:14:55 – 01:15:02:	it was pop theology. It was garbage and it was blasphemy. Unfortunately, it was discovered by a

01:15:02 – 01:15:10:	man named John Thomas and the Christodelfians. They were a Unitarian cult. And when they found it,

01:15:10 – 01:15:17:	they became ecstatic because this was this key of Yahweh, of decoding the Old Testament, the New

01:15:17 – 01:15:25:	Testament, and then pointing to a future incarnation. They believed that this was consistent with their

01:15:25 – 01:15:31:	beliefs, which was really bad news because these guys were a full-blown cult. They called themselves

01:15:31 – 01:15:40:	Antipas, which means basically the adversary working against it. You can see in the thread how

01:15:40 – 01:15:46:	creepy some of the stuff is. They're disturbing people. They denied that the devil existed.

01:15:47 – 01:15:53:	They denied that there's immortality of the flesh. They weren't remotely Christian, but they loved

01:15:53 – 01:15:58:	Yahweh. And so they popularized it because Unitarianism, unfortunately, was taking off.

01:15:58 – 01:16:06:	They got enough attention that it entered not the mainstream, but it became widely known enough.

01:16:06 – 01:16:11:	They were just sitting there. I didn't figure out where later on Yahweh became adopted more

01:16:11 – 01:16:18:	broadly, but it became normal where people suddenly stopped thinking that I am has significance,

01:16:18 – 01:16:24:	which it does, that confession of Jesus saying before Abraham was I am. That's a profound confession

01:16:25 – 01:16:34:	of who he is as God, that God is eternal. When McCordier made Yahweh a future promise, he effectively

01:16:34 – 01:16:40:	turned it into a prophetic word, which is a problem because he wasn't talking about the

01:16:40 – 01:16:46:	Second Coming of Christ. He was talking about a new incarnation. And my personal belief,

01:16:46 – 01:16:50:	after digging through this, I think that when you read through it, it should creep you out.

01:16:51 – 01:16:59:	And I believe that Yahweh is an invocation of the Antichrist. I think that the way these men

01:16:59 – 01:17:05:	who expounded upon Yahweh and they used it as a decoder ring for the Old and New Testament,

01:17:05 – 01:17:10:	the ecstatic terms in which they describe Yahweh as he who is coming,

01:17:12 – 01:17:17:	it screams Antichrist to me. I think when you look at it side by side with some of the passages

01:17:17 – 01:17:24:	in Revelation, I think that's what they're talking about. And you can take a look for yourself,

01:17:24 – 01:17:28:	I don't know. It's my personal opinion, but it's really creepy. Even if you don't agree

01:17:28 – 01:17:33:	that it's an invocation of Antichrist, it's still really creepy who was attracted to it.

01:17:33 – 01:17:39:	None of them are Christian, like maybe Gisenius was. He was in rough shape. McCordier was absolutely

01:17:39 – 01:17:45:	not. The Christodelfians were absolutely not. And then yet later on, in the 20th century,

01:17:45 – 01:17:50:	somebody else digs it up and says, oh, Yahweh, that's the original name of God. That's the Jewish

01:17:50 – 01:17:55:	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 – 01:18:01:	authentic version of Christianity than we have when we just said God or I am, depending on context.

01:18:02 – 01:18:10:	So by itself, it seems meaningless. But when you know the genealogy of who was attracted to it

01:18:10 – 01:18:15:	in the last two centuries, again, it didn't exist before two centuries ago. It did not exist.

01:18:15 – 01:18:23:	It was 190 years ago that Yahweh was invented. And yet today, in our churches and our synods,

01:18:23 – 01:18:30:	we see men using this, again, with ecstasy, because it's authentic. And what's really weird is that

01:18:30 – 01:18:35:	even in the LCMS there are guys who claim to be theologians who will talk about God in the New

01:18:35 – 01:18:42:	Testament and will refer to God as Yahweh in the Old Testament. That's coming incredibly

01:18:42 – 01:18:49:	dangerously close to confessing a heresy all by itself, to divide God into two parts like that.

01:18:49 – 01:18:54:	We have Yahweh in the Old Testament and then God in the New Testament. That's not a Christian

01:18:54 – 01:19:00:	confession. And yet that's a completely normal way for guys to be talking today. And since Corey

01:19:00 – 01:19:05:	and I began delving into some of these subjects, even just a little bit, we have directly seen pushback

01:19:05 – 01:19:10:	in the Missouri Synod at the highest levels to double and triple down on this stuff.

01:19:10 – 01:19:15:	They're pushing Hebrew even harder. They're overtly attacking the Septuagint, which, again,

01:19:15 – 01:19:19:	was the Bible of the early church. That's unequivocally true. There's no Hebrew Bible used.

01:19:19 – 01:19:24:	There didn't exist. The Hebrew Bible that they're using, that they're saying is authentic,

01:19:24 – 01:19:31:	is just over a thousand years old. And the continuity, such as it is, between what they're

01:19:31 – 01:19:37:	using from their Masoretic text and what goes back to Jesus' day was exclusively in the hands

01:19:37 – 01:19:43:	of the Christ killers who deny God. Incidentally, there are specific changes that were made in

01:19:43 – 01:19:49:	their Masoretic text to remove a few of the key prophecies about God in the Hebrew text.

01:19:49 – 01:19:55:	The Masoretic text has prophecies removed to not refer to Jesus Christ. That's what they did

01:19:55 – 01:20:02:	with a Bible, so-called, that these men want to hold over against the Septuagint.

01:20:02 – 01:20:09:	Now, Corey and I both think that there's some value in comparing them, but for someone to

01:20:09 – 01:20:16:	deliberately attack the Greek to support the much newer Hebrew, again, it's Judaizing.

01:20:16 – 01:20:20:	Why are you doing that? Because it's Hebrew and therefore it's older. That's simply not true.

01:20:20 – 01:20:25:	It's not older. You're always not older. You're always less than 200 years old.

01:20:25 – 01:20:29:	That's what we find with some of these things. Some of the newer forms of Judaizing are,

01:20:30 – 01:20:34:	they're just fabrications. They're taking things that seem Jewy, sticking them in Christianity

01:20:34 – 01:20:39:	when they have no basis in the Christian church. And that's why it's something that

01:20:39 – 01:20:44:	Stone Choir was concerned about, because what are you doing? Why are you importing stuff that

01:20:44 – 01:20:49:	has no basis in church history? And then what's going to be the fruit of it when you have

01:20:49 – 01:20:53:	Christodelfians, Unitarians, people who deny that there's a Satan saying,

01:20:53 – 01:21:01:	yeah, Yahweh is coming. Yahweh is to come. That creeps me out. That makes me viscerally

01:21:01 – 01:21:09:	uncomfortable. These guys want to preach about it. There's a conflict of religions going on here.

01:21:09 – 01:21:12:	That's why the first episode we talked about, where are you getting your morality from? Where

01:21:12 – 01:21:17:	are you getting your theology from? If you're getting it from people who call themselves the

01:21:17 – 01:21:23:	adversary, and you're Unitarians who deny God, you're rowing across the river to hell.

01:21:25 – 01:21:32:	For anyone in our audience who happens to be inclined toward languages, or perhaps we even

01:21:32 – 01:21:40:	have a philologist in our audience, you may have noticed something about the word Yahweh, or

01:21:41 – 01:21:50:	Yahweh, if you want to say it as the Germans would. The vowel sequence that is added to

01:21:51 – 01:21:59:	the consonants is simply what one would expect if you were adding vowels to a German word in the

01:21:59 – 01:22:04:	one case, or an English word in the other, which is a little curious that it just happens to have

01:22:05 – 01:22:11:	obtained the vowels that fit the languages, the target languages. It's a minor point, but it is

01:22:11 – 01:22:16:	a curious thing to have happen, because if you were going to say this more clearly, perhaps for

01:22:16 – 01:22:24:	those who are not linguistically inclined, if you were given those four consonants and told to

01:22:24 – 01:22:31:	pronounce them as an English speaker or a German speaker, what we now have is exactly what you

01:22:31 – 01:22:39:	would do. Just think about it. Think of the four consonants, pretend you don't know what vowels

01:22:39 – 01:22:44:	are added to them today, and then add vowels in your head. You're going to add a and e,

01:22:44 – 01:22:50:	because that's just the natural way English and German work when it comes to this sequence of

01:22:50 – 01:22:58:	consonants. But I want to point out something about the names of God that are given in Scripture,

01:22:58 – 01:23:03:	a fundamental fact. God gives us a number of different names in Scripture. Obviously,

01:23:03 – 01:23:12:	one of the biggest instances of this is in Exodus, Exodus 314, in which God speaks to Moses and says,

01:23:12 – 01:23:19:	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 – 01:23:24:	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 – 01:23:35:	God gives his name as I am, ego e mi, ego sum. These are all things

01:23:36 – 01:23:44:	that are eminently translatable. You can readily translate I am who I am into basically any language.

01:23:45 – 01:23:52:	But two of the other names God gives us that we have in Scripture are God and Lord.

01:23:52 – 01:23:59:	God, Lord and I am are all eminently translatable. I think you would find it very challenging to

01:23:59 – 01:24:05:	find any language into which you could not translate these. God gave us names for himself

01:24:05 – 01:24:12:	that we can use in our own language. He didn't give us a special name, a special combination of

01:24:12 – 01:24:20:	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 – 01:24:27:	translated because he gave it here to Moses in whatever language it happened to be that he

01:24:27 – 01:24:32:	was speaking to Moses here because obviously we don't know. Moses knew more than one language.

01:24:32 – 01:24:38:	We don't know which one God used. It was recorded in Hebrew at one point. It has been translated

01:24:38 – 01:24:43:	into Aramaic. It has been translated into Greek. God caused it to be translated into Greek with

01:24:43 – 01:24:51:	the Septuagint. And so we know that this was a word God gave us to be translated because if,

01:24:51 – 01:24:58:	as Woe said, if it was not meant to be translated, if God had intended for this to be this specific

01:24:58 – 01:25:04:	set of sounds is my name and you will use this as my name, Christ would have given it to us

01:25:04 – 01:25:09:	as his name when he spoke of it in the New Testament and it would have been translated

01:25:09 – 01:25:14:	as that sequence of sounds. It would not have been translated as a concept.

01:25:15 – 01:25:19:	It would have been transliterated in order that you could pronounce it the same

01:25:19 – 01:25:25:	in your tongue as it was pronounced by those who used it in another. But that's not the case

01:25:25 – 01:25:30:	because you have God which you can translate into German easily. Got. You can translate into Latin.

01:25:30 – 01:25:36:	Deus. You can translate it into Greek. Theos. The same thing is true of Lord and I am.

01:25:39 – 01:25:45:	God did not intend us to use some magical sequence of sounds as his name.

01:25:48 – 01:25:54:	And we should be very hesitant. We should be very concerned when someone tries to say

01:25:54 – 01:25:59:	that we have to use this sequence of sounds because as Woe mentioned, that's magic. That's

01:25:59 – 01:26:04:	name magic. That is something that we see in the Talmud. That is something we see in paganism.

01:26:04 – 01:26:10:	That is something we see in mysticism in the occult. We see this all over in the anti-Christian

01:26:10 – 01:26:17:	world. It is not something that exists in Christianity. And so I want to bring up a version

01:26:17 – 01:26:23:	of this that we see with regard to the New Testament. Because in addition to those who say

01:26:23 – 01:26:29:	we have to use the word Yahweh for God, at least in the Old Testament or where it appears in the

01:26:29 – 01:26:35:	New Testament, we have those today who in another form of Judaizing will tell us that

01:26:35 – 01:26:43:	we have to call Christ Yeshua. Because yes, that is His name if you speak Hebrew or Aramaic.

01:26:43 – 01:26:50:	His name is Yeshua. That's not the name we use in English. That's not the name that's used

01:26:50 – 01:26:56:	in the New Testament because the New Testament is recorded in Greek. And that's Jesus. It is not

01:26:56 – 01:27:04:	Yeshua. In English, we say Jesus. Jesus. Depending on which language you use, you use a different

01:27:04 – 01:27:13:	name, but they are all Jesus. And so no, if you are an English speaker, you do not have to say

01:27:14 – 01:27:21:	Yeshua. That is Judaizing. We are not Hebrew speakers. We are not Aramaic speakers. We are

01:27:21 – 01:27:31:	English speakers. In English, His name is Jesus. In whatever your mother tongue happens to be,

01:27:31 – 01:27:36:	use the name Jesus. Whatever it happens to be translated as, it's Jesus if you speak Spanish.

01:27:38 – 01:27:47:	Use the name for Christ in your language. Because again, it is not a magic spell. It is not if you

01:27:47 – 01:27:54:	say these sounds in this order, something necessarily happens. It's not ex opera operato.

01:27:55 – 01:27:58:	Again, we'll come back to that because we will always return to this point.

01:28:00 – 01:28:06:	Things that are of the devil. Things that are evil. Things that are black magic or the occult

01:28:06 – 01:28:14:	often are ex opera operato. You do the thing. You get the result. You ask for demons to join you.

01:28:15 – 01:28:21:	You're probably going to get demons. That's how evil works. That is not how God works.

01:28:21 – 01:28:30:	The things of God depend on faith. And so it is not that you utter this particular series of sounds

01:28:31 – 01:28:40:	and then God does something because you said the magic word. No. You pray to God. Using the names

01:28:40 – 01:28:49:	God has given us in your language. Because again, we have shown amply that God intended for his name

01:28:49 – 01:28:54:	to be translated, gave it in a way that can be translated and even caused it to be translated

01:28:54 – 01:29:02:	in the case of the Septuagint. You use that name and you use it in faith. Because the things of

01:29:02 – 01:29:09:	God depend on faith. They do not occur simply because you did the sequence of things or made

01:29:09 – 01:29:14:	the sequence of sounds. That is black magic. Christians need to avoid it.

01:29:16 – 01:29:21:	Just to reiterate the point one more time, the Septuagint, the Bible that Jesus used,

01:29:22 – 01:29:29:	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 – 01:29:37:	Greek Bible never once plays any games with sounds. It either translates the word or just

01:29:37 – 01:29:43:	calls them God because they're synonymous. I am his God. That's a permissible thing to say.

01:29:43 – 01:29:48:	And when God inspired the translation of the Septuagint, that's what he did.

01:29:49 – 01:29:55:	And it's what Jesus preached from and it's what Paul cited. It was almost universal. Over 90% of

01:29:55 – 01:30:02:	the quotations in the New Testament of the Old Testament are either directly or consistent with

01:30:02 – 01:30:09:	the Septuagint. And a significant portion of the quotations are not consistent with the Masoretic

01:30:09 – 01:30:14:	text. We'll do a future episode where we specifically talk about those details because it's fascinating.

01:30:14 – 01:30:23:	And it's another example of the widespread abandoning of the Greek Septuagint as the

01:30:23 – 01:30:28:	Old Testament basis for Scripture. The early church held that universally. Everyone did.

01:30:29 – 01:30:33:	It was the only one. For centuries, before Jesus and after Jesus,

01:30:33 – 01:30:39:	it was preserved. And then as eventually not everyone spoke Greek, so they needed another

01:30:39 – 01:30:46:	vernacular. And in the West, they shifted into Latin. And unfortunately, Jerome had some very

01:30:46 – 01:30:54:	deep-seated problems. In fact, he had significant contact with Talmudic scholars who did some very

01:30:54 – 01:31:00:	real damage to some of his theology. He ended up using some of the Hebrew text for the Vulgate.

01:31:01 – 01:31:07:	And then on down the road, everyone sort of fell into the same view that is widely held today,

01:31:07 – 01:31:13:	that the Hebrew is more authentic because it's older. Simply not true. And also, it's not consistent

01:31:13 – 01:31:19:	when you look at the mechanisms of translation. It's not consistent with what was done in Scripture

01:31:19 – 01:31:26:	itself. So the fundamental point there is not just that word. And again, I've probably used it at

01:31:26 – 01:31:30:	some point, although I'm kind of viscerally. Even before I knew what was going on, I really didn't

01:31:30 – 01:31:36:	like the word. I probably said it unironically. I won't again. Now that I know, that's part of a

01:31:36 – 01:31:42:	lot of what this is about. We often act in good conscience, not knowing that we've done something

01:31:42 – 01:31:48:	that's an error. And the Christian response when you find out you're in error, as Corey was saying

01:31:48 – 01:31:53:	at the beginning, is not to double down. It's not once you find out that you've made a mistake

01:31:53 – 01:31:59:	that was an innocent mistake, but it was nevertheless a wicked thing that you did. You didn't know it.

01:31:59 – 01:32:04:	You didn't know where it came from. You trusted someone who taught you. You repeated what they

01:32:04 – 01:32:10:	said. It turned out it was bad. The Christian response is repentance, metanoia. Turn away

01:32:10 – 01:32:18:	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 – 01:32:24:	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 – 01:32:30:	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 – 01:32:37:	because we all sin knowingly and unknowingly. And when you find out the Christian response is be like,

01:32:37 – 01:32:42:	that's awful. Lord, forgive me. That should be a part of the regular Christian daily life.

01:32:43 – 01:32:48:	Lord, forgive me what I didn't even know I was doing wrong. But you, Lord, know everything. So,

01:32:48 – 01:32:54:	of course, you knew about that too. When we double down on our error, that's when, as Corey said,

01:32:54 – 01:32:59:	we get into real trouble. Because then it's not just this translation issue versus a sound and

01:33:01 – 01:33:05:	the circumcision. As Corey said, circumcision doesn't damn. It shouldn't be happening.

01:33:06 – 01:33:12:	I think it's the criminality of the torture involved is certainly damnable. But that's

01:33:12 – 01:33:19:	not what's in the minds of those who are typically permitting it. Nevertheless, once you realize

01:33:19 – 01:33:23:	what's going on, you have to respond as a Christian. And that means to flee from evil.

01:33:24 – 01:33:30:	In order to head off some potential questions in the future, particularly for myself,

01:33:31 – 01:33:39:	I want to point out that the phrase I am who I am has been translated slightly differently

01:33:39 – 01:33:46:	in different languages. And again, this is a case where we have this between the Hebrew

01:33:46 – 01:33:51:	and the Greek, again, the Greek Septuagint being an inspired translation. We have this

01:33:51 – 01:33:59:	in other languages as well. And so those who know German may decide to ask me questions because

01:33:59 – 01:34:05:	Woe mentioned the future tense. And arguably Luther's translation is future tense in the

01:34:05 – 01:34:10:	German, although I will comment more on that in a second here. In English, it's I am who I am,

01:34:12 – 01:34:15:	which I don't have to translate for you because you are an English speaking audience.

01:34:16 – 01:34:28:	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 – 01:34:33:	the same, incidentally as the English. Luther translates it,

01:34:40 – 01:34:46:	You really shouldn't take that necessarily as a simple future. Bear in mind, this is 500 years

01:34:46 – 01:34:50:	ago for this translation, you're making the transition from Middle High German to modern

01:34:50 – 01:34:56:	German, which Luther incidentally spurred with his translation of scripture. And I translated it,

01:34:58 – 01:35:05:	because it is more emphatic. It is God making an emphatic statement of I am,

01:35:05 – 01:35:11:	which is how we would translate it in English. And you'll see this incidentally later in the

01:35:11 – 01:35:17:	exact same verse, because later in the same verse, God gives a shortened version of his name. And he

01:35:17 – 01:35:22:	does this in any of the various languages and translations we have, because he doesn't repeat

01:35:22 – 01:35:30:	I am who I am when telling Moses to say, well, who sent you? Who sent you? When they are asked,

01:35:30 – 01:35:36:	when Moses is asked, who sent you to us? Why should we believe you? Well, what does he say?

01:35:36 – 01:35:43:	He says, I am has sent me to you in the German. Ich werde sein hat mich zu euch gesannt.

01:35:43 – 01:35:50:	And incidentally in the Latin, it doesn't even use the exact same terms, because it says qui est

01:35:50 – 01:35:52:	misid me advos. So qui est.

01:35:55 – 01:36:00:	This difference across the translations is not something about which we have to worry. There

01:36:00 – 01:36:07:	are minor differences in emphasis in the way that you relay concepts in different languages.

01:36:08 – 01:36:15:	These translators were faithful to the original in translating in a way that worked in the target

01:36:15 – 01:36:21:	language. And so Ich werde sein is not the same thing as what was saying about the future tense,

01:36:21 – 01:36:29:	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 – 01:36:36:	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 – 01:36:42:	name is God is saying that he is the root of all being. Because as we would say philosophically,

01:36:42 – 01:36:50:	he is being. He is being itself. That is again going back to the transcendentals. That is one

01:36:50 – 01:36:56:	of the five transcendentals. Being and unity are fourth and fifth, whatever order you want to place

01:36:56 – 01:37:02:	them. God is being. God is the fundamental ground of all things. That is what he is saying here.

01:37:02 – 01:37:09:	That is his name, because that is his essence. Because again, God is his essence. Because God

01:37:09 – 01:37:13:	is simple. You cannot have a division in God. And so that is how you should think about this,

01:37:13 – 01:37:18:	regardless of the language that you are using. So I just wanted to head off those potential

01:37:18 – 01:37:28:	future questions and answer them here and now. So next we'll deal with a relatively modern issue

01:37:28 – 01:37:37:	actually. This came into specifically the Lutheran Church in America in relatively recent years.

01:37:37 – 01:37:42:	And by relatively recent, admittedly, I mean a century ago, but we're talking about things

01:37:42 – 01:37:49:	that span millennia, not things that happened yesterday. So put yourself in the right mindset

01:37:49 – 01:37:55:	for recent. I was just talking about Luther's translation, which is from the 1500s. And we're

01:37:55 – 01:38:03:	talking about the Septuagint, which is considerably older. But we're going to talk about the right

01:38:04 – 01:38:12:	of baptism as it was practiced historically in the LCMS, in the Lutheran Church in America.

01:38:14 – 01:38:23:	And until the early 1900s, essentially right around the time of the First World War, which

01:38:23 – 01:38:26:	you should bear in mind some of the things we've talked about previously, historically,

01:38:27 – 01:38:29:	with some of the currents that were happening around that time.

01:38:31 – 01:38:41:	A curious thing was dropped from the right of baptism. The right today, as it now stands,

01:38:41 – 01:38:48:	is essentially just do you renounce the devil? Yes. And all his works? Yes. And all his ways?

01:38:48 – 01:38:53:	Yes. It depends on the specific setting you have in the rubrics as to what exactly

01:38:53 – 01:38:57:	the language is. But basically you're denouncing the devil, his works and his ways.

01:38:58 – 01:39:03:	In the older version, and we'll go right ahead and say this is more appropriate,

01:39:03 – 01:39:10:	there was an additional renunciation and that additional renunciation applied to specific groups.

01:39:11 – 01:39:16:	Now it could be used conditionally depending on the relevant group.

01:39:17 – 01:39:24:	If you came from heathen, pagan parents, you could be asked to specifically renounce

01:39:24 – 01:39:31:	the old heathen ways. And this is a carryover incidentally from very early on. This was part

01:39:31 – 01:39:38:	of the baptism rite in Germany, in the German lands, when they were first converting to Christianity.

01:39:38 – 01:39:44:	They were asked to renounce the ways, the false ways of their pagan ancestors, the worship in

01:39:45 – 01:39:48:	groves and the worship of false deities of the pagan gods.

01:39:50 – 01:39:55:	In the American context, you also have the Unitarians. There's the separatist group, which is

01:39:55 – 01:40:01:	really a specific sort of Lutheran historical matter that isn't relevant today. But obviously,

01:40:01 – 01:40:05:	Unitarians are still relevant. And so if you came from a Unitarian background,

01:40:05 – 01:40:10:	you would be asked to specifically denounce the blasphemy, the heresy of Unitarianism.

01:40:11 – 01:40:17:	But for the sake of this episode, the most salient one is that they were asked to renounce

01:40:18 – 01:40:25:	the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy. This was part of our baptismal rite,

01:40:26 – 01:40:36:	up until the 1900s, up until right around World War I. But you can see why this would have been

01:40:36 – 01:40:42:	dropped. But the fact that it was dropped is Judaizing. Because what you're doing is you're

01:40:42 – 01:40:50:	trying to minimize the fact that the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy is something from which

01:40:50 – 01:40:58:	a convert to Christianity needs to sever himself. He needs to say that my past, in Judaism, was a

01:40:58 – 01:41:04:	wicked and evil thing, because they deny Christ, they do not believe in Christ, they blaspheme

01:41:04 – 01:41:14:	Christ. I am renouncing the devil, and all his works, and all his ways, which include the Jewish

01:41:14 – 01:41:21:	faith. This is something that should be included today. We should have this in our baptismal rite.

01:41:22 – 01:41:26:	It isn't necessarily the case that every single candidate should have to say this, because, for

01:41:26 – 01:41:33:	instance, if you happen to have a pagan background, you probably don't need to renounce Judaism. You

01:41:33 – 01:41:39:	probably don't have a Jewish background as well, although you may. You should renounce what is

01:41:39 – 01:41:46:	relevant to you, because you are converting to Christianity. You are renouncing your old unbelief

01:41:46 – 01:41:54:	and blasphemous ways. But this isn't what modern Christians want to hear, and modern pastors are

01:41:54 – 01:42:00:	made uncomfortable by this. Because you have people who want to say, well, the Jews are just our

01:42:00 – 01:42:06:	older brothers, they're the old version of Christianity as it were. And as we have gone

01:42:06 – 01:42:13:	over repeatedly, that is not the case. Christianity does not derive from Judaism.

01:42:14 – 01:42:23:	Judaism is younger than Christianity. Judaism is a wicked offshoot that denies the divinity of

01:42:23 – 01:42:33:	Christ, that denies the sacrifice of Christ, that denies the resurrection. Judaism, quite frankly,

01:42:33 – 01:42:39:	is a pagan religion, but it is a pagan religion that is a perversion of the Christian faith.

01:42:40 – 01:42:45:	The faith of Abraham, the faith of Adam, the faith of Noah, all of these.

01:42:45 – 01:42:52:	Judaism is not related to them, because they were not Jews, they were Christians.

01:42:53 – 01:42:58:	And so we see even today, relatively recently, in the recent past in our own country,

01:43:00 – 01:43:06:	this sort of Judaism has crept into the church. We had the right belief previously,

01:43:06 – 01:43:14:	we had the right praxis as well. When you get rid of these safeguards, that's when the Judaism,

01:43:14 – 01:43:18:	the Judaizing, when all of these problems start to creep back into the church,

01:43:19 – 01:43:25:	because you've removed the guardrails. And all Satan looks for is that little opening.

01:43:25 – 01:43:28:	He's a rat, he just has to find that little opening and he'll squeeze himself right through.

01:43:30 – 01:43:33:	And that's what we gave him by dropping this from our baptismal right.

01:43:35 – 01:43:40:	We'll have the link in the show notes to this recent discovery, but again, this was the LCMS

01:43:40 – 01:43:48:	baptismal right in German in 1922, just over one century ago, any Jew who wanted to become

01:43:48 – 01:43:56:	a Christian. As a condition of baptism, baptism was denied to every Jew who would refuse to

01:43:56 – 01:44:02:	renounce Jews. It is important to read how this, you will, you can see the link in the show notes

01:44:02 – 01:44:09:	with the translation, how it's actually phrased. The public confession is not simply a

01:44:09 – 01:44:15:	confession of personal guilt for having been a Jew in the past. It says,

01:44:15 – 01:44:20:	due to renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways, especially the Jewish

01:44:20 – 01:44:27:	unbelief and blasphemy, for a Jew to become a Christian and to make this public confession

01:44:27 – 01:44:34:	is to denounce every other Jew, is to publicly damn all Jews, to say they are of the devil

01:44:35 – 01:44:41:	because they are unbelievers and they are blasphemers. To make that a necessary precondition

01:44:41 – 01:44:48:	for someone to become a Christian is the true Christian faith. It is a precondition. No Jew

01:44:48 – 01:44:53:	can actually be a Christian unless this is their confession. Whether or not a church makes them

01:44:53 – 01:44:59:	say it, the reason this was necessary because there are many who will pretend they will try to

01:44:59 – 01:45:06:	slide in, but I can name pastors in the LCMS today who would refuse to make this confession

01:45:06 – 01:45:11:	that was the public confession of the LCMS 100 years ago because they don't believe it.

01:45:11 – 01:45:18:	Do they not believe it because politics changed or because of the Holocaust? Well, yeah,

01:45:18 – 01:45:25:	it's not about Christianity anymore for any of them. Christianity is no longer in view when these

01:45:25 – 01:45:36:	subjects come up. I think the crux of the entire Judaizing heresy is that it sets aside Christianity

01:45:36 – 01:45:41:	by bits and pieces and by degrees and says, well, yeah, you have your gospel, seven-year Jesus stuff,

01:45:41 – 01:45:48:	but not this. We got to have this older thing, this more Jewish thing. We have this thing that's

01:45:48 – 01:45:53:	more Jewish than what we have because that's going to be more authentic. I reject and denounce

01:45:54 – 01:46:02:	the unbelief and blasphemy of all Jews. I despise the wickedness of these people who murdered Christ

01:46:02 – 01:46:06:	and dance in his blood to this day. That's my confession because a Christian confession,

01:46:07 – 01:46:14:	and so in the church I'm despised, it's a despicable thing to say. According to Christianity, no,

01:46:14 – 01:46:19:	it's a necessary precondition of Christianity. It's a necessary precondition to enter the kingdom

01:46:19 – 01:46:25:	of heaven. That's what denying baptism to someone who refuses to say that means. That's literally

01:46:25 – 01:46:31:	what it means. This is not a small point, this fact that this is buried in an agenda for a baptism

01:46:31 – 01:46:39:	right, and that's a one-off thing, whatever. This is a choke point that excludes. This is the narrow

01:46:39 – 01:46:46:	path versus the wide way to hell. That's precisely why it used to be done, why it was the Christian

01:46:46 – 01:46:51:	confession. It still is the Christian confession. It's just one that's by and large rejected.

01:46:51 – 01:46:59:	As Corey said, these sorts of things function as guardrails because if, for example, the LCMS

01:46:59 – 01:47:05:	to this day required every Jew who would enter into fellowship with us and say, I am a Christian

01:47:05 – 01:47:10:	just like you, if they had to denounce all Jews as children of the devil for their unbelief and

01:47:10 – 01:47:17:	their blasphemy, which is active, Jewish blasphemy is active. They don't simply blaspheme by existing,

01:47:17 – 01:47:24:	the way they live their lives and the things that they say blaspheme God Almighty. Christians must

01:47:24 – 01:47:30:	condemn that, and for a Jew to become a Christian must condemn it as a first party. But even then,

01:47:30 – 01:47:37:	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 – 01:47:42:	as a radical difference. It's not a small little personal, I'm here for Jesus thing.

01:47:42 – 01:47:48:	It's every Jew is going to hell unless they also repent as I am, and unless they also

01:47:48 – 01:47:54:	denounce all Jewry. That's a big deal, and it would have prevented many of the problems that

01:47:54 – 01:47:59:	we see in our church today because most of the people who are hanging around today would have

01:47:59 – 01:48:05:	long since left. They would hate this because it's not Christian. Well, was it Christian 100

01:48:05 – 01:48:09:	years ago because that's really the question? It's the Stonequire question. If it was Christian

01:48:09 – 01:48:14:	100 years ago, when did it stop being Christian? If we were Christian 100 years ago, when did we

01:48:14 – 01:48:22:	stop? Well, we stopped and we started rejecting basic Christian beliefs. Keep all this in mind

01:48:22 – 01:48:25:	in view of what we said in the first episode about, where are you getting your morality?

01:48:25 – 01:48:30:	This is another part of it. Where are you getting your beliefs? If you're getting them from people

01:48:30 – 01:48:36:	who murdered Christ, who hate God, who blaspheme him with everything that they do in their lives,

01:48:37 – 01:48:43:	if this is the source of some of your theology, how much room is left for God? And can you have

01:48:43 – 01:48:49:	competing religions at the same time? That's what we're dealing with here. The situation that we

01:48:49 – 01:48:56:	face today is that we are trying to hold multiple competing religions simultaneously. We're trying

01:48:56 – 01:49:01:	to take these things that came from evil men, whether it was thousands of years ago, or hundreds

01:49:01 – 01:49:08:	of years ago, or decades ago. We're taking things that come from evil and we're trying to baptize

01:49:08 – 01:49:14:	them. I was reminded earlier as I was thinking about this, how much a lot of these Judaizing

01:49:14 – 01:49:23:	problems are captured by what Tolkien did with the One Ring. Remember, Sauron poured his malice

01:49:23 – 01:49:30:	in his hatred and his evil into this talisman that was the Ring. Part of his soul, his essence

01:49:30 – 01:49:36:	as an evil being, was put into the Ring. And it was fine because it was a weapon for him,

01:49:36 – 01:49:43:	but then he lost the Ring. And so when he lost access to that part of his wicked power, he was

01:49:43 – 01:49:50:	diminished. But what happened with the Ring? The Ring was captured by Isildur. He found it,

01:49:50 – 01:49:59:	he wore it, he used it. He died because of it. There was the covetousness of men for that power

01:49:59 – 01:50:04:	because they misunderstood what the power of the One Ring was. That was basically what Lord of the

01:50:04 – 01:50:10:	Rings was about. The covetousness of that power, believing, oh, this power of the Great Enemy,

01:50:10 – 01:50:15:	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 – 01:50:21:	that they could take this evil thing and use it for good purposes. What they did not appreciate in

01:50:21 – 01:50:29:	the essence of the story of the Ring was that it was itself evil. It did not cease to be evil

01:50:29 – 01:50:34:	because it was no longer in the possession of Sauron. He had put his malice into it,

01:50:34 – 01:50:42:	and whoever wielded it possessed his malice, and the malice acted on its own. When we look at these

01:50:42 – 01:50:49:	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 – 01:50:54:	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 – 01:51:01:	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 – 01:51:06:	malice poured into it, would you pick it up knowing how powerful it was and say,

01:51:06 – 01:51:10:	I'm going to use this for good? Or would you know this thing is pure evil and I can only

01:51:10 – 01:51:17:	possibly use it for evil because it has not only evil intent, but it has a life of its own.

01:51:17 – 01:51:25:	Evil ideas have a life of their own. We cannot co-opt hell. We can't take Satan's things and

01:51:25 – 01:51:32:	use them for our purposes. We can only use things from God for godly purposes. When we use evil

01:51:32 – 01:51:37:	things, things from hell, things that are teachings of demons, which we'll talk about a lot next week,

01:51:38 – 01:51:46:	we can only possibly use those things for evil. The genealogy of the practice of modern

01:51:46 – 01:51:54:	amputation circumcision is pure evil. There's no godly outcome for it and it is a false confession

01:51:54 – 01:52:02:	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 – 01:52:08:	pagan unbelievers made it up and turned it into something that they used for evil purposes.

01:52:09 – 01:52:16:	What has happened in the last few decades really, Christians discovered the Yahweh ring and picked

01:52:16 – 01:52:20:	it up and said, I'm going to use this for good. Why gives this more authentic? It's more like

01:52:20 – 01:52:25:	that old-time religion. It's Judeo. I need more Judeo and less Christian. Well, that's exactly

01:52:25 – 01:52:30:	what they're getting. When you start talking about Yahweh and you stop talking about God,

01:52:30 – 01:52:35:	which is incidentally what all these people do, that's what you get. You lose God and you're going

01:52:35 – 01:52:40:	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 – 01:52:46:	because you can't use an evil thing for good purposes. All these things follow the same pattern.

01:52:46 – 01:52:52:	We can get into Seder meals today, but it's the same thing. It's a completely new made up way

01:52:52 – 01:52:59:	for Christians to adopt evil pagan practices because it seems more authentic. Why? Because

01:52:59 – 01:53:06:	Jews do it. The purpose of those things is always to deny Christ small degrees, but it's to say

01:53:06 – 01:53:11:	what we received in the church, what we received in Christian history is not as good as the other

01:53:11 – 01:53:15:	thing, as the secrets, as the mysteries that were lost. We're going to pick them up and we're going

01:53:15 – 01:53:20:	to adopt them all and we're going to make Christianity this brand new, more powerful thing

01:53:20 – 01:53:27:	by making it even older. When we on Stonequire talking about adopting old beliefs, it's consistent

01:53:27 – 01:53:35:	with Scripture. If God had said, yes, keep circumcising, we'd disagree, but the very first thing

01:53:35 – 01:53:40:	that happened in the early church was it got shut down. It was said, you never understood in the

01:53:40 – 01:53:44:	first place. You never knew what you were doing with this, and today you're using it for evil,

01:53:44 – 01:53:51:	and you can only possibly do evil with it. These tendencies that we have to just adopt

01:53:51 – 01:53:56:	random crap and think it's going to be hunky dory are a threat to souls because nobody takes it

01:53:56 – 01:54:02:	seriously. Nobody cares where they get their ideas. Oh, Yahweh, that sounds fine. I remember that

01:54:02 – 01:54:08:	Tetragrammaton thing in some translations where it won't translate it. It would just say Y-H-W-H,

01:54:08 – 01:54:12:	which is also dumb. The point of Scripture is you're supposed to be able to read it.

01:54:13 – 01:54:18:	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 – 01:54:25:	incantations, and it's fine to acknowledge. In the ESV, when the Tetragrammaton is used,

01:54:25 – 01:54:31:	they will translate Lord in all caps. That's fine too. God and Lord are synonymous. Lord,

01:54:31 – 01:54:35:	as we said before, is a synonym for master. That's how you should think of God as your master,

01:54:35 – 01:54:41:	and you will answer to your master for what we do with these things. Me included, I'm preaching to

01:54:41 – 01:54:46:	you here. We're all guilty of something. When we take seriously where we're getting these ideas,

01:54:46 – 01:54:52:	we're going to be armored against the very sort of errors that Satan exploits. As Cory just said,

01:54:52 – 01:54:59:	Satan just needs a little crack. As we said at the beginning, the Judaizing attack that

01:54:59 – 01:55:05:	Satan leveled instantaneously in the church was about circumcision, which was from God. God said

01:55:05 – 01:55:11:	to circumcise, Jesus sends into heaven, and then Satan says to circumcise, circumcise, circumcise,

01:55:11 – 01:55:16:	the Pharisees show up and say circumcise, there's a circumcision party running around and telling

01:55:16 – 01:55:21:	everybody to circumcise. Isn't that what God said? They shut it down. God said, no, you didn't

01:55:21 – 01:55:28:	understand. You weren't obeying. You weren't believing. It was pro forma garbage that is ended

01:55:28 – 01:55:33:	because it served its purpose. It is no longer mine. When they hang on to things that are no

01:55:33 – 01:55:38:	longer from God, they're necessarily from the devil. That's why stuff matters. It's not just

01:55:38 – 01:55:43:	matters of opinion. I think I can do this or that or the other thing. If something has evil

01:55:43 – 01:55:48:	origins, we must excise it. We can't permit it to be among us, because even the things that seem

01:55:48 – 01:55:53:	small, like Yahweh, suddenly you have to start saying Yahweh when you're talking about the

01:55:53 – 01:55:59:	Old Testament God. Then the Old Testament God is the really mean one. The New Testament God is

01:55:59 – 01:56:05:	the loving one. You know what? That Yahweh God, he was pretty tough and he had a lot of rules.

01:56:05 – 01:56:10:	This new Jesus-y New Testament God, he's a lot more loving. That division suddenly pops into

01:56:10 – 01:56:16:	people's heads. It's very difficult for him to get away from, because most people don't have the

01:56:16 – 01:56:19:	mental sophistication to keep all the stuff in their heads at once. You just learn Yahweh. You

01:56:19 – 01:56:26:	think, yeah, that's the old thing. Okay, great. Then someone separately sets Yahweh against Jesus.

01:56:26 – 01:56:29:	You're like, well, yeah, like Jesus is better than Yahweh. Suddenly, there's no God in the Old

01:56:29 – 01:56:33:	Testament. That's what Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. That's what Bonhoeffer believed.

01:56:33 – 01:56:39:	They believed in the demiurge. They thought there was evil before. Then something new came

01:56:39 – 01:56:44:	in the New Testament, that he who was coming would arrive. It's bad news for Christians,

01:56:44 – 01:56:50:	but it's what these men will preach. These tiny errors that seem like just fiddly academic garbage,

01:56:50 – 01:56:56:	it's always a building block for Satan. We have building blocks too. They're ones that God gave

01:56:56 – 01:57:01:	us. When he says, do this, we should do it. When he says, stop, we should stop. When he says,

01:57:01 – 01:57:06:	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 – 01:57:10:	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 – 01:57:16:	all this is about. I am glad you mentioned the Seder meal, because I had three points with which

01:57:16 – 01:57:21:	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 – 01:57:28:	leave it untouched, I would just recommend that all of you go and read Hebrews 7,

01:57:30 – 01:57:38:	and then bear in mind two things, both while reading it and after reading it. One, Christ is

01:57:38 – 01:57:44:	the perfect Passover lamb. He completed the shadow of the things that were to come,

01:57:45 – 01:57:51:	and we have a Passover meal, a better one. We have the Lord's Supper. But do go and read

01:57:51 – 01:57:55:	Hebrews 7. I recognize I'm giving reading homework in this episode, but I think that's fine.

01:57:56 – 01:58:03:	And then second, of the three points. I mentioned that I would comment on the word

01:58:03 – 01:58:13:	Gentiles and why I do not use it. And just very quickly, we get Gentile from Latin. Gens is the

01:58:13 – 01:58:22:	Latin word, the G is pronounced that way, and Latin that means clan or tribe. And then Ile is the

01:58:22 – 01:58:31:	adjectival suffix. So it just means of or belonging to the same people, nation, clan, Gentilus,

01:58:31 – 01:58:37:	which we get Gentiles in English. And so if you understand the Latin, it makes perfect sense,

01:58:37 – 01:58:42:	because it is translating ethnos or ethne, if it's in the plural, nations or people,

01:58:43 – 01:58:48:	in the ethnic sense, in the racial sense. And so if you understand the Latin, underlying the word,

01:58:48 – 01:58:56:	it makes perfect sense. But very few modern readers know any Latin. And so it is a misleading term

01:58:56 – 01:59:03:	to the modern ear, because it sets up this false distinction between the Jew on the one hand

01:59:03 – 01:59:11:	and the Gentile on the other. And that is alien to Scripture. We will get into that more in another

01:59:11 – 01:59:20:	episode when we deal with Galatians, but there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. And that is the

01:59:20 – 01:59:28:	point. And that is my third point here. The term Jew has become extremely misleading for a number

01:59:28 – 01:59:34:	of reasons. It's used in a number of senses in Scripture. It's used in a number of senses in

01:59:34 – 01:59:40:	our everyday lives. But it is important, setting all of that aside, it is important to keep in mind

01:59:41 – 01:59:50:	what exactly is meant by Scripture. And the best way to keep that in view is to keep the Gospel in

01:59:50 – 01:59:55:	view. Yes, we speak of the law quite a lot on this podcast, because part of this is the

01:59:55 – 01:59:59:	and then what of Christian life? You believe and now what? Now what do you do? How do you

01:59:59 – 02:00:06:	live your Christian life? What should you do or not do? But all of it is in light of the Gospel.

02:00:07 – 02:00:15:	And what is the Gospel? You are saved by faith, which is a free gift, due to Christ's perfect life,

02:00:15 – 02:00:21:	His work, death, resurrection. That's the Gospel. You aren't saved by your blood,

02:00:21 – 02:00:26:	and that's true whether you're Jewish or German or French or Japanese or

02:00:26 – 02:00:32:	any of whatever other ethnicity I could list. No one will be saved by his own blood.

02:00:33 – 02:00:37:	Everyone who will be saved will be saved by Christ's blood.

02:00:38 – 02:00:46:	And so when you see the word Jew in Scripture, which probably shouldn't be translated Jew because

02:00:46 – 02:00:51:	the underlying word in the New Testament is Judahite, which is useful for a number of reasons

02:00:51 – 02:00:56:	partly because it reminds us that the 10 northern tribes are gone at this point in history, but

02:00:56 – 02:01:03:	that is a topic for another time. When you see the word Jew in Scripture, don't think that this is

02:01:03 – 02:01:10:	some special group that is set aside, they get special treatment, and God has some special

02:01:10 – 02:01:13:	relationship and they have another way to paradise because that's Christian Zionism,

02:01:13 – 02:01:18:	which is another Judaizing heresy, but we did an episode on that so you can go and listen to that.

02:01:19 – 02:01:25:	But think of the words of Romans 3 because you'll hear these words many times from

02:01:25 – 02:01:33:	Christians so-called Zionists. Then what advantage has the Jew or what is the value of circumcision?

02:01:33 – 02:01:39:	Much in every way. And of course they'll end there, they won't mention the rest of it because it

02:01:39 – 02:01:43:	gives the value. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

02:01:45 – 02:01:51:	That is a magnificent blessing from God to be entrusted with his word, and the ancient

02:01:51 – 02:01:56:	Israelites, the Hebrews were greatly blessed with that, granted for them because they were unfaithful,

02:01:56 – 02:02:02:	it wasn't much of a blessing. But if they had been faithful, it would have been a great blessing.

02:02:02 – 02:02:06:	They at least had the ability to read God's word because they physically had it.

02:02:07 – 02:02:13:	Which again, without faith, is of no blessing to you, is of no good to you, it is in fact worse

02:02:13 – 02:02:17:	to have the oracles of God and reject them than not to have them.

02:02:18 – 02:02:23:	But you'll notice that the Christian Zionists never goes on, and reads verse 9,

02:02:24 – 02:02:31:	What then, are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all

02:02:31 – 02:02:37:	both Jews and Greeks are under sin. Which is to say that all are under sin.

02:02:38 – 02:02:46:	This is one of the ways, in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in a number of these Shemitic languages in this

02:02:46 – 02:02:53:	region, they speak of the totality of a thing. They speak of the totality by listing two opposite

02:02:53 – 02:02:57:	ends of a spectrum. And so when it says that God created the heavens and the earth,

02:02:57 – 02:03:02:	that's saying that he created all things, he created the universe. And so here when it says

02:03:02 – 02:03:09:	both Jews and Greeks, what that means is all men, all men are under sin. For all have sinned and

02:03:09 – 02:03:16:	fallen short of the glory of God. In Adam all men fell. And so Christ as the second and better

02:03:16 – 02:03:22:	Adam, is the redemption of all mankind. Yes, of course there is the objective justification,

02:03:23 – 02:03:28:	but there is the subjective which is faith. If you have faith, then you are numbered amongst

02:03:28 – 02:03:34:	the elect, then you are saved. Again it all comes back to faith. It is not your bloodline,

02:03:34 – 02:03:44:	whether it be Jew or Greek. And that is the point. Any time you see anyone arguing that there is some

02:03:45 – 02:03:50:	special character of the Jews, or that they have some special route to God,

02:03:51 – 02:03:56:	or special relationship, whatever it happens to be, look at the actual words of Scripture.

02:03:57 – 02:04:01:	What then are we Jews any better off? No, not at all.

02:04:04 – 02:04:09:	Any time you see someone rejecting those words, you are dealing with someone who is

02:04:09 – 02:04:14:	Judaizing. And if you listen to that person, if you believe what he is saying, your soul is in

02:04:14 – 02:04:21:	danger. Because these are things that Satan attempts to bring into the church, to steal away

02:04:21 – 02:04:26:	the gospel, to bring back in works righteousness, to get you to attempt to work your way to God,

02:04:26 – 02:04:33:	or find some alternative route to God, instead of the only way God is given. What does Christ say?

02:04:33 – 02:04:39:	I am the way, the truth, and the life. He doesn't say that he's one way of many,

02:04:39 – 02:04:44:	which is what we hear from so many today when they speak about all paths lead to God. No,

02:04:44 – 02:04:51:	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 – 02:04:58:	that leads to paradise. And so be on your guard. As a Christian, that is your duty,

02:04:58 – 02:05:04:	particularly as a Christian man, that is your duty, because you have a duty to instruct and to lead

02:05:04 – 02:05:09:	your wife if you have one, and your children if you have them. But also others entrusted to your

02:05:09 – 02:05:16:	care, because if you're an uncle, you have duties to your nephews and nieces. You have duties with

02:05:16 – 02:05:20:	regard to your parents and your siblings, and all those entrusted to your care in whatever capacity

02:05:20 – 02:05:26:	in your life. And so you need to be on your guard against these heresies that have been with us from

02:05:26 – 02:05:32:	the beginning, as we covered at the beginning of the episode. This was a problem starting with the

02:05:32 – 02:05:40:	apostles. This has always been one of Satan's tactics. Judaism is one of his favorite tactics,

02:05:40 – 02:05:47:	and it will undoubtedly be so until the end, because it's effective. Because in a sense,

02:05:48 – 02:05:54:	all of this is a form of Gnosticism. It is that desire that is inherent in

02:05:55 – 02:06:00:	some men at least, many men most likely, to have a secret knowledge, a secret way,

02:06:00 – 02:06:05:	to have something, some connection, some ability, or path, or whatever it happens to be,

02:06:06 – 02:06:12:	that elevates them above everyone else. And that is not what Scripture says.

02:06:13 – 02:06:16:	Scripture says all have sinned. Scripture says the only way is Christ.

02:06:18 – 02:06:22:	That is what Christians believe. That is what Christians have always held,

02:06:22 – 02:06:29:	and that is what we as Christians have to defend. And part of defending that is pushing back

02:06:29 – 02:06:35:	against the rampant Judaizing that we see in the church today, because it is destroying the church,

02:06:36 – 02:06:45:	and too few men are fighting back against it.