Transcript: Episode 0059

“The Gnostic Heresy”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:23 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:48:	And I'm still woe. Today's Stone Choir is part three of our four-part series on the

00:00:48 – 00:00:54:	subject of the state of the church today in terms of foreign beliefs being imported into the church

00:00:54 – 00:01:01:	and being passed off as Christian. The first episode that we did specifically dealt with defining

00:01:01 – 00:01:07:	Christianity or defining religion in general in terms specifically of the source of right and

00:01:07 – 00:01:12:	wrong of morality. Because there are a lot of different sources of morality that we use today

00:01:12 – 00:01:19:	that we believe are giving us moral answers to things, but they're not from the Bible. But then

00:01:19 – 00:01:23:	we think they're Christian after the fact because we think they're moral. And so we talked for a

00:01:23 – 00:01:27:	couple hours about the fact that that's really dangerous because if you're getting your morality

00:01:27 – 00:01:32:	from the world and the world is evil, you're getting your morality from Satan and we should care.

00:01:32 – 00:01:38:	Last week's episode we specifically dealt with Judaism. This was the very first heresy that

00:01:38 – 00:01:44:	attacked the early church. And we talked specifically about two big areas and gave a couple other

00:01:44 – 00:01:51:	examples of ways in which the early church faced an attack from Satan that did not directly attack

00:01:51 – 00:01:58:	the gospel, not overly. It did subtly and it did ultimately, but the attack was to say,

00:01:58 – 00:02:04:	okay, you're Christian, that's fine, but you still need to do the Jewish stuff. And the case we made

00:02:04 – 00:02:08:	in the Judaizing episode, and although I didn't say this explicitly during the episode, I really

00:02:08 – 00:02:13:	thought I was re-listening to it, I think that we made the case, the point repeatedly throughout,

00:02:13 – 00:02:19:	that we didn't want to just give a list of, here are the top five ways that the church today is

00:02:19 – 00:02:25:	Judaizing. Because if you leave something off of the list, then someone will say, okay, well,

00:02:25 – 00:02:29:	it was on the list, so it must not be Judaizing. What we did was we established the principle

00:02:29 – 00:02:34:	by which you can determine whether or not anything is, in fact, a Judaizing heresy.

00:02:34 – 00:02:39:	And so we highlighted a couple examples to show, here's something that was stamped out in the church,

00:02:39 – 00:02:44:	it ceased to be Christian practice, and then it came roaring back in the last couple centuries.

00:02:44 – 00:02:48:	And now, more and more, we're told, here's another new thing that you need to do.

00:02:48 – 00:02:54:	Sure, you're Christian, that's fine, but if you want a more authentic version of your Christianity,

00:02:54 – 00:02:58:	you got to go back and you got to have more of this Jewish stuff that, sure, yeah,

00:02:58 – 00:03:01:	Christians never did, but we should be doing it so we can be more authentic.

00:03:02 – 00:03:07:	The reason we gave that premise is that you don't need a list of the things if you understand the

00:03:07 – 00:03:13:	principle. So by trying to teach the principle, I can almost guarantee that at some point in

00:03:13 – 00:03:18:	current year, some new form of Judaizing is going to come along, where someone will discover some

00:03:18 – 00:03:26:	new word or some new tradition or some new idea that is blessed by ancient Judaism, not the version

00:03:26 – 00:03:32:	of God, but the version of the people who killed Christ. And we'll be told, if you want your Christianity

00:03:32 – 00:03:38:	to be more authentic, you need to do this thing, too. And for those folks who listened and who

00:03:38 – 00:03:43:	got the point, you'll be able to say to something that couldn't possibly be on anyone's list,

00:03:43 – 00:03:48:	hey, that's Judaizing. I recognize what's going on because Satan will use the old

00:03:49 – 00:03:55:	tricks, but he'll use new forms of it. He'll use the old sales pitch, but he's not going to try

00:03:55 – 00:04:01:	to sell exactly the same thing. And so the danger that we have today is if we just want a checklist

00:04:01 – 00:04:05:	to say, well, if it's this, this, and this, then I understand what's going on. Otherwise,

00:04:05 – 00:04:11:	it's fine because there's nothing bad going on. This is a very vulnerable place where all Christians

00:04:11 – 00:04:17:	really have been left today because there's no one left who can think about new threats. Today,

00:04:17 – 00:04:23:	we're specifically talking about Gnosticism as it's been roaring back in the last century,

00:04:23 – 00:04:30:	not only in the church, but in our world at large. And when explicitly state at the outset,

00:04:30 – 00:04:36:	if you are autistic or if you're very knowledgeable about the history of Gnosticism as it's been

00:04:37 – 00:04:41:	recently researched and uncovered from the past, you're going to be really annoyed at our approach

00:04:41 – 00:04:48:	today because we don't care about the specific veins of Gnosticism in the first and second century.

00:04:48 – 00:04:52:	What we're going to do today is we're going to distill a few key elements that were present

00:04:52 – 00:04:58:	in all of the Gnostic cults. And we're going to present a case that those key elements are

00:04:58 – 00:05:04:	represented in new lies that are told today. And so when we're doing an episode of Gnosticism,

00:05:04 – 00:05:10:	I want to at least make the plea that we are not being some of the sort of idiotic people

00:05:10 – 00:05:15:	you see online that they learn a word and want to just say, well, I know that Gnosticism is bad,

00:05:15 – 00:05:20:	so anything I don't like is Gnosticism. There are people who do that. And so I'm going to acknowledge

00:05:21 – 00:05:25:	we're not being sloppy with the definition because we don't care about the specific

00:05:25 – 00:05:31:	implementation details. We're being specific about the underlying premises shared among all

00:05:31 – 00:05:38:	the Gnostic cults because this was the second key heresy that was frontally attacking the church,

00:05:38 – 00:05:44:	is denounced obliquely in Scripture. It's denounced very frequently in the early church

00:05:44 – 00:05:50:	fathers because it was one of the very first attacks that Satan waged sort of from outside

00:05:50 – 00:05:55:	the church and sort of within. So we'll get up very briefly into the history of what used to be

00:05:55 – 00:06:01:	believed, but we fundamentally don't care because once you understand a few of the key points that

00:06:01 – 00:06:08:	we're going to make about what beliefs were underlying their specific doctrinal claims,

00:06:08 – 00:06:12:	the specific doctrinal claims, some of which are coming back today and some of which are not,

00:06:13 – 00:06:17:	if someone is going to be completely autistic and will say, well, it doesn't meet any of these

00:06:17 – 00:06:22:	specific criteria that I found on this page, therefore it's not Gnosticism, don't care not the

00:06:22 – 00:06:28:	point. The point is that when you understand that there's a form of a thing that can creep back in

00:06:28 – 00:06:34:	in a new form, the underlying principles are the same, but then the substance is the same,

00:06:34 – 00:06:38:	but the form can change subtly, that's what we have today. And so we're going to make the case

00:06:38 – 00:06:44:	that once you understand that there are a few key principles in the early Gnostic religion,

00:06:44 – 00:06:50:	you will find them playing out over and over today. And this is one of the cases even more

00:06:50 – 00:06:55:	so than Judaizing, although there's a lot of parallels. I think the Gnosticism in some ways

00:06:55 – 00:07:00:	is even more dangerous of a heresy to the church because we're adopting it wholesale and we'll

00:07:00 – 00:07:06:	make the case for some of that. So we have kind of four basic areas that we're going to cover from

00:07:06 – 00:07:13:	the type of Gnosticism that used to exist that we're starting to see again. The first two examples,

00:07:13 – 00:07:18:	I'm going to get out of the way because they're important and they're interesting and they'll

00:07:18 – 00:07:22:	pop up a few times throughout this episode, but they're not really the main point, which is why

00:07:22 – 00:07:26:	we're front loading them. The main point is going to be the last two elements that are going to be

00:07:26 – 00:07:34:	the bulk of this episode. The first element of Gnosticism that is sort of definitional to all

00:07:34 – 00:07:39:	the views that used to be held, regardless of kind of which permutation nearly 2000 years ago,

00:07:40 – 00:07:47:	is that Gnosis is the mystical or esoteric knowledge coming from directly partaking of the

00:07:47 – 00:07:54:	divine. What I found interesting when I found this description was that this almost perfectly

00:07:54 – 00:07:59:	describes what Bonhoeffer was doing. I recently re-listed the Bonhoeffer episode because it's

00:07:59 – 00:08:04:	kind of part two of the MLK episode and since MLK Day was recent, I was going back through the

00:08:04 – 00:08:12:	back catalog and Bonhoeffer almost says this verbatim. When Bonhoeffer talks about what he was

00:08:12 – 00:08:19:	trying to do to and in Christianity, he was specifically pursuing a post-Christian religion,

00:08:20 – 00:08:25:	one where the doctrines and the dogmas fall away, but the spirit and the essence of the thing can

00:08:25 – 00:08:32:	live on. Even people stop being Christian per se, they can still have God because they've partaken

00:08:32 – 00:08:37:	of the divine essence that they're getting from wherever. The thing that Bonhoeffer and MLK

00:08:37 – 00:08:42:	had in common was that they believed religion was man-made. They didn't believe that Christianity

00:08:42 – 00:08:49:	came from God and was revealed to man. They believed that men created religion in specific ways and

00:08:49 – 00:08:55:	specific times. The way that that played out in the early Gnostic cults is that it was very much

00:08:56 – 00:09:03:	of the same vein. The elements of the Gnostic heresies was that we're just going to discover

00:09:03 – 00:09:09:	new secrets. We want esoteric knowledge, we want this mysticism, and that is how we're going to

00:09:09 – 00:09:15:	know that we're getting closer to the truth. The truth is in their mind God. We call it God

00:09:15 – 00:09:20:	Truth as well because that's what God calls himself. The question is when you contrast

00:09:20 – 00:09:25:	what they're doing with Scripture, it falls apart. They're clearly not looking for the true God.

00:09:25 – 00:09:32:	What they're looking for is deep, dark mysteries of things that are hidden, that are occult,

00:09:32 – 00:09:38:	because there's always an appeal. In every man and every age, there's a certain appeal to hidden

00:09:38 – 00:09:43:	knowledge. We've done episodes in the past where we've briefly touched on those things and specifically

00:09:43 – 00:09:48:	said, we're not going to go into them because we don't want to inflame those passions and the men

00:09:48 – 00:09:54:	who are vulnerable to them. Either Corey or I are interested in delving into that crap because we

00:09:54 – 00:10:00:	know just enough to know how wicked it is. There's no enticement. There are some men when they hear

00:10:00 – 00:10:07:	about secrets, hidden knowledge, it piques their interest. Okay, I want to learn more. That sounds

00:10:07 – 00:10:13:	juicy. I think it's part of the midwit trap that there are guys who are used to maybe knowing a

00:10:13 – 00:10:18:	little bit more than others. If you can learn some esoteric bit of knowledge, something you've

00:10:18 – 00:10:24:	leveled up, if you know a secret bit that nobody else knows, it makes you smarter. You are clearly

00:10:24 – 00:10:30:	the smartest man in the room when it comes to that one thing. Someone who's sort of striving

00:10:30 – 00:10:36:	to climb the ladder was perceived as intelligence. We'll see hidden knowledge as a way of getting

00:10:36 – 00:10:43:	there. The Gnostic esoteric impulse, there really is fundamental demand and we find it everywhere.

00:10:43 – 00:10:49:	You find it in Freemasonry. You find it in all the cults. You find in Mormonism, Scientology.

00:10:49 – 00:10:55:	There's a progressive revelation of new bits and pieces of knowledge so you level up and you go

00:10:55 – 00:11:00:	deeper into the thing, which is in stark contrast from Christianity. Christianity does not have

00:11:00 – 00:11:07:	levels. There's complexity to Christian doctrine. It is a newcomer. You're going to receive spiritual

00:11:07 – 00:11:13:	milk because that's all you can digest. As you get more into your faith, you can handle solid

00:11:13 – 00:11:18:	food. That's not progressive revelation. It's not levels of secrecy. It's simply that when you're

00:11:18 – 00:11:24:	early on, you have very simple questions, very basic questions. As you start making more mistakes,

00:11:24 – 00:11:29:	subtle mistakes by asking the obvious human questions, like, how does this work? What about

00:11:29 – 00:11:35:	this? What about this edge case? That is when the heretics of old invented all sorts of false

00:11:35 – 00:11:43:	doctrines to fill in the blanks when God had not revealed something. Although Christianity can be

00:11:43 – 00:11:49:	as complicated as you want it to be, the simplest version of Christianity is just as true. In some

00:11:49 – 00:11:55:	ways, it's more true. We said in the IQ episode, if you are literally retarded and you have good

00:11:55 – 00:12:01:	parents and faithful teachers, you will be a blessed Christian and you will have everything

00:12:01 – 00:12:06:	of Christianity you need. You don't need a bunch of facts and figures and details and arguments to

00:12:06 – 00:12:11:	be a better Christian. You need faith in receiving what is given correctly and just believing it.

00:12:12 – 00:12:17:	So if you have an IQ of 60 and you can't function and your parents tell you about Jesus

00:12:17 – 00:12:22:	and that you did something bad and that Jesus forgives you because you are sorry for it,

00:12:23 – 00:12:28:	tada, you're Christian. That's it. It's lots gospel. It's sanctification. It's justification.

00:12:28 – 00:12:33:	It's everything. And even though someone of that limited ability doesn't understand any of those

00:12:33 – 00:12:38:	words, he understands he did something bad and he understands he's forgiven and he's reconciled.

00:12:38 – 00:12:42:	And he knows that Jesus is the reason for it. That's the entirety of the Christian faith.

00:12:42 – 00:12:49:	So right the outside, I just want to make the case that there's no comparison between the fact

00:12:49 – 00:12:55:	that teaching more and more things about God is certainly a lifelong pursuit. You can spend your

00:12:55 – 00:13:00:	entire life reading the Bible and only begin to scratch the surface. That's not the same as a

00:13:00 – 00:13:06:	sort of Gnostic esoteric hidden knowledge that is so appealing and it's one of the ways it gets

00:13:06 – 00:13:11:	people distracted from what God actually wants for us. So it's impulse is always present and it's

00:13:11 – 00:13:18:	really a dangerous one. To give a concrete example here of where this crops up in the modern church

00:13:19 – 00:13:26:	with the greatest frequency, I would highlight Pentecostalism and I use that as an umbrella term

00:13:27 – 00:13:33:	because we see in Scripture very clearly that God works through means, not least of all being

00:13:33 – 00:13:40:	Scripture itself. God has given us his word and he has given us the sacraments. God works

00:13:40 – 00:13:49:	through means to create faith and largely even those Christians who are listening now and disagree

00:13:49 – 00:13:55:	with us on the sacraments, I would recommend you go listen to those episodes again. But even if you

00:13:55 – 00:14:01:	disagree with us on the sacraments, you will at a bare minimum as a Christian agree that the word

00:14:01 – 00:14:09:	of God is a means God uses to create faith and he uses that when it is read or when it is heard.

00:14:09 – 00:14:16:	Scripture is very clear that is how this works. Pentecostalism as an umbrella term would be all

00:14:16 – 00:14:25:	of those strains that are Christianity adjacent that claim direct revelation, inspiration,

00:14:25 – 00:14:31:	some direct connection to God where absent the means of grace which God has instituted,

00:14:31 – 00:14:39:	man can come to a saving faith of God, a saving faith in God. That is fundamentally

00:14:39 – 00:14:43:	Gnostic and well we'll get to that with the second point here in a minute but

00:14:45 – 00:14:52:	that is what you should think of when you hear or see Pentecostalism. It is a fundamentally

00:14:52 – 00:14:59:	Gnostic perversion of the Christian faith because again God works through means you do not go out

00:14:59 – 00:15:06:	and sit under a tree and just contemplate God or wait for God to come to you. He's given us

00:15:06 – 00:15:12:	his word. If you want to learn about God, if you want to learn about the things of God,

00:15:13 – 00:15:20:	use what he has provided. He has revealed himself to us in his word and so anyone who tells you

00:15:20 – 00:15:26:	that you don't need the word of God you just need to have a relationship with God or you just need

00:15:26 – 00:15:32:	to contemplate God or anything like that. You're dealing with a religion but that religion is not

00:15:32 – 00:15:38:	Christianity. That is a strain that is a thread that is a form of Gnosticism.

00:15:40 – 00:15:46:	One other thing that stands out when you look at that definition is in terms of partaking directly

00:15:46 – 00:15:54:	of the divine. That's pretty much Eastern Orthodoxy as well. All of the meditating on God and the

00:15:54 – 00:16:00:	naval gazing and pursuit outside of Scripture trying to find God where God does not say he

00:16:00 – 00:16:07:	reveals himself, it's the same sort of thing. It's the same sort of pursuit that's fundamentally

00:16:07 – 00:16:11:	a Gnostic pursuit. If you're EO, we're going to beat up on everybody. We're going to spend most

00:16:11 – 00:16:15:	of the time, I'm going to spend most of this time going after Lutherans. Please don't tune

00:16:15 – 00:16:20:	out if you're like, oh man, they called me Gnostic. What a jerk. Lutherans have some serious problems

00:16:21 – 00:16:27:	now. We're going to deal with Roman Catholics too. Everybody has this problem because we're all

00:16:27 – 00:16:33:	vulnerable to it. If we ever finger point at some other denomination, rest assured we are

00:16:33 – 00:16:39:	least as unhappy as things that are going on in our denominations. This is going to be a

00:16:39 – 00:16:44:	pan-denominational bloodbath in this episode because we all have these problems and sometimes

00:16:44 – 00:16:48:	they're subtle, sometimes they're profound. The Pentecostal thing is just wide open. They're just

00:16:48 – 00:16:54:	sitting there waiting for Jesus to tune in and drop new revelation on them. If anyone comes to

00:16:54 – 00:16:58:	you with a new revelation that is not from God that isn't from Scripture, you're going to put

00:16:58 – 00:17:03:	them out the window. Whether it's somebody in your church or it's some new teacher or it's a

00:17:03 – 00:17:08:	podcaster, that is deadly. Scripture condemns that. You need to deal with those people as a

00:17:08 – 00:17:16:	threat to your soul because it's not what happens. One of the other aspects of Gnosticism that

00:17:17 – 00:17:24:	it's not a huge issue in the church today, but it's always a danger. This is one of the

00:17:24 – 00:17:31:	other key elements from the origins of Gnosticism, is that this sort of secret knowledge or gnosis,

00:17:31 – 00:17:38:	incidentally, they have the same Proto-Indo-European root. GnO and Know pronounced the same. That's

00:17:38 – 00:17:45:	originally the word for no. Six thousand years ago, you could have said no to someone and you

00:17:45 – 00:17:51:	would have been saying the same thing. That's just very interesting, but it is that ancient

00:17:51 – 00:17:57:	word to say you know something, same root as gnosis, as Gnosticism. It's important to highlight that

00:17:58 – 00:18:05:	the pursuit of knowledge is not itself bad. In fact, some of the early contexts of the use of

00:18:05 – 00:18:10:	Gnostic was in some ways talking about learned men. He was talking about some of the men that we

00:18:11 – 00:18:16:	find that were opponents of the early church, but they weren't dumb. It was the Pharisees and some

00:18:16 – 00:18:21:	of the teachers. Even those who were outside of the Judaic cult, which was trying to destroy

00:18:21 – 00:18:27:	Christianity, there were other learned men that Paul went to in the Areopagus and elsewhere where

00:18:28 – 00:18:33:	they're philosophers. They were always pursuing knowledge as just part of their daily life.

00:18:33 – 00:18:37:	It's not inherently bad to pursue knowledge. The problem is where are you getting it from

00:18:37 – 00:18:44:	and what are you doing with it? As Christians, our concern is if this knowledge of religion

00:18:44 – 00:18:50:	and specifically of God is not coming from where God told us we would find it, we're in danger.

00:18:52 – 00:19:00:	One of the other aspects of Gnosticism is that there was a belief then that knowing these

00:19:00 – 00:19:06:	specific things were the means of salvation. It wasn't knowing that Jesus died for your sins

00:19:06 – 00:19:11:	and believing that and having faith in that that saved. It was specifically the knowledge.

00:19:12 – 00:19:17:	It was the one small portion of, okay, now I have the fact. The problem with this sort of approach

00:19:17 – 00:19:25:	is that it turns the faith into magic. It turns it into a sort of witchcraft where if you have

00:19:25 – 00:19:31:	the secret word, then you've captured the power behind it. We talked about last week in Judaism.

00:19:31 – 00:19:36:	We talked about Yahweh. That's an example of that. Not necessarily of imparting salvation,

00:19:36 – 00:19:41:	but of the secret knowledge that we think is being progressively revealed. Suddenly we've

00:19:41 – 00:19:47:	discovered Jehovah in the 1500s or whatever, and then Yahweh less than two centuries ago.

00:19:48 – 00:19:52:	That's the new secret name of God that you have to use if you want to refer to God.

00:19:53 – 00:19:59:	It becomes a case for some people that they won't refer to God as God. They won't say I am.

00:19:59 – 00:20:05:	They'll say Jehovah. They won't call Jesus Jesus. They'll have to call him Yeshua. Why?

00:20:05 – 00:20:09:	Because it's somehow more authentic, even though it's absurd, even though it's not scriptural,

00:20:10 – 00:20:16:	but it's fundamentally Gnostic in a very small way. I want to make explicit in this first section

00:20:16 – 00:20:22:	that when we say that these things are Gnostic in nature, that's not saying that anyone who says

00:20:22 – 00:20:27:	Yahweh or Yeshua is a Gnostic. That would be stupid. That would be what people do. I don't

00:20:27 – 00:20:32:	like that. That's just Gnostic. No, we're not saying that. We're saying that the impulse underneath

00:20:33 – 00:20:37:	the desire to do that, to say, well, I need a better name for God than God. God's not good enough.

00:20:37 – 00:20:44:	I need the secret name. Congratulations. That's a Gnostic impulse. Full stop in any century.

00:20:47 – 00:20:52:	I think it's interesting to know that one of the things that you see a lot, particularly on

00:20:52 – 00:20:58:	social media with a lot of guys, particularly younger guys who are what's called cage stage,

00:20:58 – 00:21:03:	where you just discover your faith or you just reinvigorated, especially if they're a little

00:21:03 – 00:21:08:	bit intelligent. You want to dig into the stuff. You want to read more. You want to learn more.

00:21:08 – 00:21:12:	You want to learn as much as you can because you're excited about God. You're excited about

00:21:12 – 00:21:19:	Christianity and about your faith. The very subtle error that I would caution is potentially Gnostic

00:21:19 – 00:21:24:	in that space is that when the desire to accumulate knowledge and facts

00:21:26 – 00:21:30:	ends up being the intermediate point that you focus on, instead of focusing on,

00:21:31 – 00:21:35:	like at some point, you accumulate so much knowledge and you get such a big library

00:21:35 – 00:21:39:	and you have so many arguments and talking points for all these different fiddly,

00:21:40 – 00:21:44:	sixth century councils almost no one's ever heard of, but you have really strongly held

00:21:44 – 00:21:51:	opinions on them. When that becomes your predominant focus, it's entirely possible to begin to lose

00:21:51 – 00:21:55:	sight of God because although those arguments in those days were pointing to God, they were about

00:21:55 – 00:22:03:	God, your focus can potentially be on having the knowledge itself and you think, okay, I've

00:22:03 – 00:22:08:	accumulated this stuff. I have these facts. I have all these details. Now I'm a better Christian

00:22:08 – 00:22:12:	and you're just not. You could be totally ignorant of all that stuff and potentially be a better

00:22:12 – 00:22:16:	Christian than you are with it. Not because the knowledge itself is bad, but because the emphasis

00:22:16 – 00:22:22:	that was placed on pouring out all that energy, like to what end? If you can eloquently argue with

00:22:22 – 00:22:30:	somebody on Twitter about a sixth century church council, so what? What has that done for anyone?

00:22:30 – 00:22:34:	Now maybe there's some interesting point. We're talking about a historical point here, but

00:22:34 – 00:22:41:	I want to highlight that when Corey and I tackle historical subjects, it's superficially and that's

00:22:41 – 00:22:47:	deliberate. It's not that we're not capable of digging deeply into these things, is it? I am very

00:22:47 – 00:22:53:	pragmatic about what I want to talk about. When we approach a subject, it needs to be immediate.

00:22:53 – 00:22:59:	It needs to actually be hurting people today. Sixth century councils aren't hurting anybody.

00:23:01 – 00:23:07:	First century Gnosticism isn't hurting anybody. If you go down the checklist of the specific

00:23:07 – 00:23:11:	cults that existed, you're not going to find them by and large. What you will find is the

00:23:11 – 00:23:18:	underlying spirit of those cults reemerging in all these little places by varying degrees,

00:23:18 – 00:23:22:	and so that's what concerns me. It's not that there was some weird thing in the first century

00:23:22 – 00:23:27:	that's reemerged, and so let's spend all this time talking about history. It's that when we

00:23:27 – 00:23:32:	know that the evil thing in the first and second century bore evil fruit, it had nothing but evil

00:23:32 – 00:23:38:	surrounding it. In all of the church history, it was always condemned it, and if I can say,

00:23:38 – 00:23:43:	yeah, this new thing has the same roots as that, I don't need to worry anymore about how good or

00:23:43 – 00:23:49:	bad it is. I know it's evil because I know that there's a Gnostic root underneath it. Now, I'm

00:23:49 – 00:23:55:	not saying that cage-stage guys are Gnostic at all. I'm not being stupid about it. I'm just saying

00:23:55 – 00:24:00:	that there's a desire that we all have to want to know more, to want to level up, and Christianity

00:24:00 – 00:24:05:	doesn't have levels. Christianity has depth and substance, but it's not the same thing. It's like

00:24:05 – 00:24:12:	there are ranks, there aren't secret tiers, there's no paywall, there's no Patreon level for Jesus.

00:24:12 – 00:24:17:	You're in or you're out, and that's all. The more you know, the better off you are, but all the

00:24:17 – 00:24:22:	things that God gives us are free, and they're in Scripture. It's interesting when you look at the

00:24:22 – 00:24:29:	transition from Hebrew to Greek in the Old Testament, that was the end of the oral tradition.

00:24:29 – 00:24:34:	Because the oral tradition was only needed when you had Val pointing. When everything had been

00:24:34 – 00:24:41:	written down in the Tanakh, and then it was translated by those faithful scribes into Greek,

00:24:41 – 00:24:45:	it was fully fleshed out. There was no longer a need for an oral tradition

00:24:46 – 00:24:51:	to explain anything from scratch. Now, it was certainly still valuable because,

00:24:51 – 00:24:56:	insofar as they were teaching faithfully, it was consistent with the text. But at that point,

00:24:56 – 00:25:03:	you could hand a Greek Old Testament, a Greek Tanakh, the Septuagint, to anyone. If he understood

00:25:03 – 00:25:08:	Greek well, he could come to faith by it all by himself. He didn't need any secret knowledge

00:25:08 – 00:25:12:	to be able to access it. I think it was a very interesting moment in history where, in a way,

00:25:13 – 00:25:20:	God really put oral tradition to death. What we've seen since then is wherever oral tradition is

00:25:20 – 00:25:26:	preserved, it causes problems because it's invariably departing from the text. Just knowing

00:25:26 – 00:25:31:	a bunch of stuff isn't going to save you, but it can potentially create a problem for your faith

00:25:31 – 00:25:35:	if you think, well, I got to know more. I'm not a good enough Christian. You don't. You don't have

00:25:35 – 00:25:40:	to listen to a podcast to be a good Christian. You don't have to know what we know or care about

00:25:40 – 00:25:45:	what we care about to be a good Christian. Being a good Christian is very simply believing in God

00:25:45 – 00:25:49:	and obeying him. If your conscience says, you know what, I think I'm missing out on something,

00:25:49 – 00:25:54:	I should spend more time in your Bible, do that, and you'll have more of what God wants for you.

00:25:54 – 00:25:57:	But there's no progressive revelation. It's all right there for us for the taking.

00:26:02 – 00:26:08:	For those who spend a lot of time on some of these ancient conflicts and various minutia,

00:26:09 – 00:26:12:	and by that I don't necessarily mean that they are unimportant because they may very well be

00:26:12 – 00:26:18:	important. But there's a difference, again, as Woe has just said, between importance and relevance.

00:26:19 – 00:26:24:	But I think a good standard, a good question for you to ask yourself if you think you may possibly

00:26:24 – 00:26:31:	be in that camp. Would you be just as happy arguing with someone on the Internet about your

00:26:31 – 00:26:37:	favorite fantasy army or military or faction? And if that's the case, then maybe you just

00:26:37 – 00:26:43:	like arguing and you've found a niche in which you can argue about something that really doesn't

00:26:43 – 00:26:52:	actually have any import or any impact in the current context. And if you are trying to invest

00:26:52 – 00:26:57:	that time in a Christian way, I'm not saying that investing your time in a hobby isn't Christian,

00:26:57 – 00:27:02:	because of course Christians can have hobbies. But if you're trying to invest that time in a way

00:27:02 – 00:27:07:	that you believe is explicitly a Christian use of that time, which is to say a pursuit of the

00:27:07 – 00:27:15:	Christian faith itself, then maybe just read scripture instead of the old councils, because by

00:27:15 – 00:27:21:	and large those battles aren't live. These are not things over which we're having actual fights

00:27:21 – 00:27:28:	today. These are not things that are endangering souls today. So just read scripture rather than

00:27:28 – 00:27:34:	reading whatever council it happens to be. Go and read several books of scripture. You can probably

00:27:34 – 00:27:40:	do it in about the same time. It's going to be of greater utility to you to read through scripture

00:27:41 – 00:27:45:	again. However many times you've read the book, it's always profitable to read it again.

00:27:48 – 00:27:53:	There is another issue that I want to bring up here, because it's an important way to frame

00:27:55 – 00:28:03:	the issue of knowledge and the division here between the sort of Gnostic conception of knowledge

00:28:03 – 00:28:09:	and what it does, and the Christian conception. This has come up in a number of other episodes,

00:28:09 – 00:28:13:	but I will go over it again here, because repetition is how we remember things.

00:28:15 – 00:28:23:	There's the tripartite division within Christianity with regard to knowledge and how we react to that

00:28:23 – 00:28:31:	knowledge. And that would be Noticia, Ascensus, and Fiducia. So to take notice of the thing,

00:28:31 – 00:28:35:	to ascent to the thing, and to trust in the thing. These are terms that have

00:28:35 – 00:28:39:	basically direct equivalents in English, so you can readily understand even the Latin.

00:28:42 – 00:28:49:	What distinguishes Christianity is the third. It is Fiducia. It is trust. It does not save you

00:28:50 – 00:28:58:	that you recognize the Bible exists. It does not even save you if you recognize the things in the

00:28:58 – 00:29:06:	Bible are true. What saves you, what saving faith is, is the trust in those things, that those things

00:29:06 – 00:29:14:	were undertaken by God for you. Now, they were undertaken, of course, for the entirety of creation,

00:29:14 – 00:29:22:	because Christ redeemed creation in his death and resurrection. However, it is that personal faith

00:29:22 – 00:29:28:	that applies that salvation to you. This is the subjective justification. This is what saves you,

00:29:28 – 00:29:37:	and that is Fiducia. The distinction here is that these Gnostic cults inevitably rely heavily on

00:29:37 – 00:29:43:	Ascensus. Now, they do play around with Noticia as well, because a big part of the cult,

00:29:43 – 00:29:51:	the initiation into the cult, is just to recognize the existence of this secret knowledge,

00:29:51 – 00:29:57:	to be given access to it, and then to accept it at Ascensus level. That's what makes you

00:29:57 – 00:30:02:	a part of the Gnostic cult. That is what they really are at their core, at their foundation.

00:30:04 – 00:30:11:	And you see this in basically the division between any religion that is not Christian

00:30:11 – 00:30:18:	and Christianity, because Christianity relies on faith, relies on that trust,

00:30:19 – 00:30:26:	relies on that third level, the belief. That is what saves you, whereas in every other religion,

00:30:27 – 00:30:33:	it generally works. But they also have this aspect of secret knowledge, particularly the mystery

00:30:33 – 00:30:39:	cults in ancient Greece and Rome and other places, but we're not getting into the specifics of the

00:30:39 – 00:30:46:	history in this episode, as Woe already said. But it's helpful to have this framework in mind,

00:30:47 – 00:30:53:	not only during this episode, but when you are listening to things out in your everyday life,

00:30:53 – 00:31:01:	when you are assessing things in our culture. Is this Gnosticism that is being sold to me

00:31:01 – 00:31:07:	as Christianity? Because that is often the case. You'll have a Gnostic cult that'll wear a Christian

00:31:07 – 00:31:13:	mask. The Mormons are one of the best examples of this, even though very few people in this

00:31:13 – 00:31:18:	audience are going to fall for the Mormon claim to being Christian. There are plenty of people

00:31:18 – 00:31:24:	in the United States and elsewhere who believe the Mormons are Christian, maybe a little weird,

00:31:24 – 00:31:27:	often their little corner doing their own thing, although there are now millions of them,

00:31:28 – 00:31:33:	but still Christian, because that's what they pretend to be. They will wear that mask until

00:31:33 – 00:31:37:	you're a Temple Mormon, then they drop the mask and tell you that Satan is Jesus Christ's brother

00:31:37 – 00:31:40:	and all of these other things and you get a rule of planet when you die.

00:31:43 – 00:31:48:	But you need to be careful as a Christian to make sure that you aren't falling for a demon that just

00:31:48 – 00:31:55:	happens to be wearing a mask, because Satan appears as an angel of light. He's not going to come to

00:31:55 – 00:32:00:	you as Satan, because if he comes to you as Satan, the odds you're going to fall for that are pretty

00:32:00 – 00:32:08:	low. But if he comes to you and says, I'm Christian just like you, brother, and I've discovered something

00:32:08 – 00:32:12:	and you need to hear about it, your hackles should go up, the hair on the back of your neck should

00:32:12 – 00:32:19:	stand up, you are in danger with regard to your eternal soul. And so bear this framework in mind,

00:32:20 – 00:32:26:	because Christianity is fundamentally different, it is different in kind from these false religions,

00:32:27 – 00:32:31:	because what distinguishes Christianity is faith, it's not secret knowledge.

00:32:32 – 00:32:35:	Now I'm not saying that knowledge isn't important, because again, all three of these levels also

00:32:35 – 00:32:43:	apply in Christianity. It is important to take notice of the fact that Christ did become incarnate,

00:32:43 – 00:32:51:	that he did die, that he was resurrected. It is also important to ascent to those facts as facts.

00:32:52 – 00:32:57:	But a Christian believes in them, trusts in them, has faith in them, that is what distinguishes

00:32:57 – 00:33:02:	Christianity, and that is one of the ways that you can tell false religion from true religion

00:33:03 – 00:33:10:	and Gnosticism from Christianity in this case. The fact that Mormons today masquerade as Christian

00:33:10 – 00:33:16:	is just historically absurd, until like the last 30 or 40 years, it was never the case.

00:33:17 – 00:33:22:	They saw us as separate, they saw Christianity as a separate competing religion,

00:33:22 – 00:33:29:	just as it's just as absurd as the claim today that Jews are white. 40 years ago it wasn't the

00:33:29 – 00:33:35:	case, it was never the case historically. The identity of the thing was one way, and then

00:33:35 – 00:33:41:	suddenly when it becomes advantageous for the group to identify differently, they just morph.

00:33:42 – 00:33:47:	And this is one of the fundamental problems that we're facing continuously.

00:33:47 – 00:33:53:	If something has no actual roots, if it can just transform on the fly like a hallucination,

00:33:53 – 00:33:58:	you can never get your hands around it. It's always a hallmark of deception.

00:33:58 – 00:34:02:	Something that's true today will still be true in 100 years. Even if things change,

00:34:03 – 00:34:08:	maybe it's no longer true because the thing is wiped out, but it was true today.

00:34:08 – 00:34:14:	You can't undo the truth retroactively, which incidentally is really the next point.

00:34:15 – 00:34:21:	One of the other key fundamental elements of Gnosticism, the early religions,

00:34:21 – 00:34:26:	that is where we spent a lot of time today, is the demiurge. We've talked about this before.

00:34:26 – 00:34:34:	One of the key doctrinal claims in the Gnostic cults was that there were two opposing gods,

00:34:34 – 00:34:41:	and the cults vary depending on whether or not the demiurge of before Jesus was

00:34:42 – 00:34:50:	equal to the newer god, or if they were subservient, did one create the other. They argued over that,

00:34:50 – 00:34:53:	which is why the Finley Autistic arguments over, well, that's not Gnosticism because blah.

00:34:53 – 00:34:59:	Don't care. The demiurge is the important part because the demiurge is the Old Testament god.

00:34:59 – 00:35:03:	That's a phrase that you've heard. Oh, that's the Old Testament god. Well, if the Old Testament god

00:35:03 – 00:35:10:	is not the same as the New Testament god, then they're both Satan because God is eternal. He

00:35:10 – 00:35:15:	doesn't wink in and out of existence. There's no one god here, and then he changes and he's something

00:35:15 – 00:35:23:	else later. That is not our god. We've talked about, particularly, in the perfect hatred episode,

00:35:23 – 00:35:27:	talking about how it's become common in Lutheranism in particular, but certainly everywhere,

00:35:28 – 00:35:34:	that men will say, sure, the Old Testament, which is a terrible name, by setting old and

00:35:34 – 00:35:39:	new in opposition, suddenly becomes, you can just discard it. Well, it doesn't really count

00:35:39 – 00:35:43:	because Jesus came, so now we have this new stuff. Well, Jesus came pointing to the Old

00:35:43 – 00:35:49:	stuff. The scripture that Jesus preached from, that the apostles preached from, that Paul reasoned

00:35:49 – 00:35:55:	from, was the Old Testament. It was the Tanakh. It was all the stuff that we call old. For them,

00:35:55 – 00:36:01:	it wasn't old. It was the faith. It's still the faith. What we have the benefit of today

00:36:01 – 00:36:06:	is everything that they said and wrote down is also recorded for us, but it's all an

00:36:06 – 00:36:11:	explication of what was said before, so there's not two religions. There's not a Judeo portion

00:36:11 – 00:36:17:	and then a Christian portion. It's all Christian because it's all pointed towards God. It's a

00:36:17 – 00:36:21:	fundamental element. If you never learn anything else from Stonequire that you can hang your head

00:36:21 – 00:36:27:	on, please let that be it. Christianity is eternal. Adam was a Christian. You're a Christian.

00:36:28 – 00:36:36:	It's all pointed to God. What we see with this Gnostic heresy actually manifesting today

00:36:37 – 00:36:41:	is that guys will actually say, well, the Old Testament, God did this and then things changed.

00:36:42 – 00:36:49:	And it's very notable that in the Gibbs essay that I referenced in that perfect hatred episode,

00:36:49 – 00:36:54:	in what we see today in many of the new Lutheran commentaries, they go out of their way to reference

00:36:55 – 00:37:01:	the God, the God in the Old Testament as Yahweh. They don't call him God anymore. They don't say

00:37:01 – 00:37:07:	I am where it's relevant. They say Yahweh. We talked a length last week about how that is,

00:37:07 – 00:37:14:	A, Judaizing, and B, it's a Satanic invocation. To say Yahweh is invoking the Antichrist. There's

00:37:14 – 00:37:20:	no other explanation for what happened in the last two centuries to produce those sounds.

00:37:21 – 00:37:27:	One of the reasons that they won't call God God is because demons can't call on his name.

00:37:27 – 00:37:33:	If they call him Yahweh or Yahweh God, they're changing the variable. They're talking about

00:37:33 – 00:37:38:	something different and they will explicitly say that anytime someone talks about Yahweh

00:37:38 – 00:37:43:	in the Old Testament and doesn't also talk about Yahweh in the New Testament as the immediate God

00:37:43 – 00:37:50:	in that age and in our age, they're talking about the Demiurge. They're talking about a bifurcation

00:37:50 – 00:37:56:	of multiple deities, competing deities. One of the key elements of the Demiurge was he was evil.

00:37:57 – 00:38:04:	The evil of the Old Testament, the God who killed people, the God who was was judgey,

00:38:04 – 00:38:11:	the God who didn't just have these rules, that is seen as evil. That's a perception that some

00:38:11 – 00:38:16:	people have today of their God or who they claim to be their God. Can God be your God if you call

00:38:16 – 00:38:22:	him evil? I don't think so. I don't think you can call God evil and have a promise of salvation

00:38:22 – 00:38:28:	and in our own denomination. This happened last year. In direct condemnation of this podcast,

00:38:28 – 00:38:35:	the LCMS put out a press release where in the name of every pastor in the Synod, they explicitly

00:38:35 – 00:38:41:	denounced numerous teachings of the Bible. They specifically highlighted one that's incredible.

00:38:41 – 00:38:46:	They said that genocide is always evil. When you look at the Old Testament, we made the case in the

00:38:46 – 00:38:52:	episode against the Antichrist. You went into detail on how to say something like that is inherently

00:38:52 – 00:38:59:	to say that God is evil. When the president of the LCMS and all the pastors and all the district

00:38:59 – 00:39:05:	presidents who participated willingly in publishing that in the name of all Christians, and indeed

00:39:05 – 00:39:10:	this was said in the name of Christ we condemn it. That was how Harrison ended that paragraph.

00:39:10 – 00:39:15:	Specifically said that to commit genocide is evil. He was talking about the demiurge because the Old

00:39:15 – 00:39:22:	Testament God was evil. Then there's a new God. When Jesus showed up, we have a new set of deities

00:39:22 – 00:39:30:	and everything's hunky-dory now. That is straight up Gnosticism. No holds barred, no equivocation,

00:39:30 – 00:39:36:	no need to play any games with definitions. This is a Gnostic heresy, full stop. It's on full

00:39:36 – 00:39:42:	display today, not only in Lutheranism, but in all Protestantism and really in pretty much everywhere

00:39:42 – 00:39:47:	because it's a necessary part of the global religion. Because when you look at the Old Testament,

00:39:47 – 00:39:53:	you find slavery, you find racism, you find women being treated as women and not as equals.

00:39:53 – 00:40:01:	You find the slaughter of wicked people on moss. Everybody gets killed. There were places where

00:40:01 – 00:40:06:	God said not only kill every living human, he said kill all the animals and all the livestock.

00:40:06 – 00:40:11:	He said kill everything. That's our God. If that's not your God, then you don't have the

00:40:11 – 00:40:16:	God of the Bible. There's not an Old Testament one and then a New Testament one. There's one

00:40:16 – 00:40:24:	God. That is the Christian confession. This is one of those places where Christianity today

00:40:24 – 00:40:31:	has come to a crossroads where guys who will suddenly adopt the Judaizing practice of saying,

00:40:31 – 00:40:37:	well, I was Yahweh God in the Old Testament and then Jesus came. They play games and say it's

00:40:37 – 00:40:42:	the same God, but when the confession is called into question, they'll say racism is bad. There's

00:40:42 – 00:40:47:	lots of racism in the Old Testament. There's lots of slaves in the Old Testament. The Old

00:40:47 – 00:40:52:	Testament never says it's bad. We did a whole episode on slavery as a Bible study. There's

00:40:52 – 00:40:57:	nothing. Even the New Testament doesn't say it as well. We try to make sure that we call out when

00:40:57 – 00:41:03:	people play these games to try to set the so-called old against the so-called new. Scripture is

00:41:03 – 00:41:10:	Scripture. It's all breathed out by God. It's all useful for reproof and rebuke and correction of

00:41:10 – 00:41:15:	every word of it, every jot and tittle. That's what it says. We have to believe that or we have

00:41:15 – 00:41:20:	to say God's a liar and why are we wasting our time? There are much easier things to do with

00:41:20 – 00:41:28:	your life if there is no God than this. It's not fun. The rewards are few and fleeting. The

00:41:28 – 00:41:33:	punishments are frequent and sometimes more than some people can bear. This is not what you would

00:41:33 – 00:41:39:	invent as a religion. It's what God has given us because it's true. When people come along and say,

00:41:39 – 00:41:46:	I have the secret revelation, let me improve it. Let me find a new sin as the racism episode

00:41:46 – 00:41:52:	and the feminist episode. These things that were not sins for thousands of years became sins by

00:41:52 – 00:41:59:	virtue of Gnostic revelation. The game that they have played is that they didn't say what the

00:41:59 – 00:42:03:	Mormons say. They didn't say this is a new revelation of Jesus Christ because that would be

00:42:03 – 00:42:08:	a bridge too far. Even idiotic Christians, even Christians who are almost asleep would detect,

00:42:09 – 00:42:12:	new revelation from Jesus Christ, that doesn't sound like Christianity.

00:42:12 – 00:42:17:	What they do, they said, oh, it was always a sin. It's always been a sin to do these things. This

00:42:17 – 00:42:22:	has always been wrong. When someone like us comes along and says, well, doesn't that mean that

00:42:22 – 00:42:26:	everybody in the Bible is in hell? Don't worry, but they didn't understand. They didn't get it.

00:42:26 – 00:42:34:	We get it now. That's progressive revelation. That is a type of Gnosticism. We're not making

00:42:34 – 00:42:38:	the fiddly case that we just want to shout Gnostic and call everything Gnostic. When you

00:42:38 – 00:42:46:	look at the moving parts and you see that these specific details are the machinery of the Gnostic

00:42:46 – 00:42:53:	cult, you'll find it emerging in new forms. If I say the Yahweh is not only Judaizing,

00:42:53 – 00:42:58:	but it's also fundamentally Gnostic, if you want to be autistic about the definition of

00:42:58 – 00:43:04:	Judaizing in the Bible, well, there were things that we said last week that are not condemned in

00:43:04 – 00:43:10:	Scripture, not in terms of this was Judaizing heresy. Yahweh in particular, the word hadn't

00:43:10 – 00:43:16:	been invented yet. If we say that that's Judaizing and you use what was Judaizing in the first

00:43:16 – 00:43:22:	century, obviously we're wrong because there was no Yahweh, so it can't be the same. That's why the

00:43:22 – 00:43:27:	conveyance of these principles is why we're doing these episodes. If we can explain to you,

00:43:27 – 00:43:33:	when you see these moving parts acting as a machine and they're producing certain results,

00:43:33 – 00:43:37:	you can identify the underlying cause. The underlying cause, when you have guys run around

00:43:37 – 00:43:43:	saying Yahweh and saying that God's sinned in the Old Testament and your ancestors who are

00:43:43 – 00:43:49:	Christians sinned and they didn't repent, and so according to Christian doctrine, they must

00:43:49 – 00:43:55:	necessarily be in hell. They usually won't go that far, but there's no way to reconcile that

00:43:55 – 00:44:01:	with what the Christian faith teaches. If you have unrepentant sin, you're damned for it. Only

00:44:01 – 00:44:05:	the sins that we take to the cross are those that are forgiven, which is why there's a Christian duty

00:44:05 – 00:44:11:	to throw everything on the cross. Say, Lord have mercy on me, poor, miserable sinner. That's every

00:44:11 – 00:44:17:	one of us. The more you learn about Christianity, the more miserable a sinner you will realize you

00:44:17 – 00:44:22:	are because the more bad things you get rid of, the more you'll realize how many little subtle

00:44:22 – 00:44:27:	things are lurking, but it doesn't beat you down. It's supposed to give you an appreciation for the

00:44:27 – 00:44:34:	gospel that God loved you so much that he paid for the price for all this crap, these evil things

00:44:34 – 00:44:38:	that you tried to do, and the stupid things you didn't even know about. He paid for all of them

00:44:38 – 00:44:41:	because he loved you even when you were his enemy. That's the gospel.

00:44:42 – 00:44:46:	This is one of the things about Gnosticism that should be

00:44:47 – 00:44:54:	somewhat easy for most Christians to detect, at least when it is blatant, because this sort

00:44:54 – 00:45:02:	of dualism is rampant in the world. It is a standard feature of most of the false religions of the

00:45:02 – 00:45:08:	world to various degrees. Sometimes good is stronger than evil, sometimes evil is stronger

00:45:08 – 00:45:14:	than good, it depends on which mythology, but you have this sort of balancing between good and

00:45:14 – 00:45:22:	evil that you see across the world in these false religions. And that is not the case in Christianity.

00:45:23 – 00:45:29:	Satan is not God's equal. Satan is not God's opponent in the sense of being equally matched

00:45:29 – 00:45:36:	as you would be in a tennis match or something. Satan exists because God permits him to continue

00:45:36 – 00:45:42:	to exist for a time before damning him to hell for eternity. He'll still exist,

00:45:42 – 00:45:45:	which is not good news for him. It's not good news for anyone in hell.

00:45:47 – 00:45:53:	But there's no dualism in Christianity. There's good and evil, but good wins and it's not even

00:45:53 – 00:46:03:	close. Evil is permitted for a time. Evil does not have control. Evil did not create. Evil cannot

00:46:03 – 00:46:12:	create. It can only pervert. And so the sort of dualism that we see in these Gnostic groups,

00:46:12 – 00:46:19:	which often takes the form of the demiurge being responsible for the creation of the physical

00:46:19 – 00:46:25:	world. Now, of course, we're not talking about Plato and his conception, we're talking about

00:46:26 – 00:46:30:	the later form of Gnosticism for those who are familiar with, say, Timaeus.

00:46:31 – 00:46:35:	But this later form of Gnosticism that is the kind that is a problem for the church that is creeping

00:46:35 – 00:46:46:	back into things, places the creation of the material world within the demiurge. The demiurge is what

00:46:46 – 00:46:53:	created your physical body. It may be that God created your soul and created the parts of you

00:46:53 – 00:46:58:	that are actually good and we'll get more into that issue of the distinction between the Spirit

00:46:59 – 00:47:03:	and the flesh and how Gnosticism conceives of that distinction.

00:47:06 – 00:47:15:	But that simply is not Christian because God created you and you are Spirit and flesh. Again,

00:47:15 – 00:47:20:	we're not going to get into whether you are Spirit and flesh or Spirit Mind and flesh in

00:47:20 – 00:47:25:	this episode. That's not the point here. And having that debate, although it may be interesting,

00:47:25 – 00:47:32:	is not actually that relevant to this topic. The distinction is between the Spirit and the

00:47:32 – 00:47:39:	flesh and both are good. We'll get into this more at the end of the episode. But they're both good

00:47:39 – 00:47:46:	because God created both. As Christians, we do not get to deny that God is the author both of our

00:47:46 – 00:47:54:	body and of our soul. If you deny that he created one or the other, then you are attributing the

00:47:54 – 00:48:00:	powers of God to something that is not God. Because if God didn't create your body, something

00:48:00 – 00:48:07:	created your body because your body certainly exists. And so this is an error that sometimes comes up

00:48:07 – 00:48:12:	and has come up in the Christian Church in the past. This is one that is actually relevant because

00:48:12 – 00:48:16:	people today still get this one wrong. And they may not even understand they are getting it wrong.

00:48:17 – 00:48:21:	In our fallen state, as we currently find ourselves,

00:48:23 – 00:48:33:	we are corrupted by original sin. Our nature is not original sin. Our flesh is not original sin.

00:48:34 – 00:48:40:	These things are in their essence good because they are still creations of God,

00:48:40 – 00:48:46:	even in your fallen state. God created your body, God created your soul, God gave you life.

00:48:47 – 00:48:54:	These things, in so far as they are the creations of God, are good. They are tainted. They are

00:48:54 – 00:49:00:	corrupted by original sin in this life until you are restored fully in the next life.

00:49:02 – 00:49:09:	That corruption is the work of Satan. But it is not an original creation. It's not a creation at all.

00:49:09 – 00:49:14:	It is a corruption of God's good creation. And it is vitally important for Christians

00:49:15 – 00:49:21:	to distinguish these things because if you say, for instance, that your nature in your

00:49:21 – 00:49:28:	fallen state is original sin, then what you are saying ultimately is that Satan created human

00:49:28 – 00:49:34:	nature because the corruption that is sin can be attributed to Satan bringing it into the

00:49:34 – 00:49:38:	world through our first parents. And so as a Christian, you must be careful here.

00:49:39 – 00:49:46:	God created human nature. Satan has corrupted it. There is a distinction there.

00:49:46 – 00:49:52:	Satan has not created any part of you. You can attribute, again, the corruption to him. He

00:49:52 – 00:49:58:	can be blamed for that. And he should be blamed for that. That's not to say we don't also bear

00:49:58 – 00:50:03:	blame, of course, because we bear blame for our sins. We have inherited original sins from our

00:50:03 – 00:50:11:	parents, et cetera. But our nature, again, not at risk of ad nauseam, because this is important

00:50:11 – 00:50:18:	and Christians need to understand it and take it to heart. Your nature, even in your fallen state,

00:50:18 – 00:50:25:	is a creature of God created by God. And so any system that attempts to prop up this sort of

00:50:25 – 00:50:32:	dualism where this part of creation is attributable to the demiurge and this part of creation is

00:50:32 – 00:50:37:	attributable to God and this part is good because it's from God and that part is evil because it's

00:50:37 – 00:50:44:	from Satan, that is from Satan. That idea, that thinking is from Satan. Because that is Satan

00:50:44 – 00:50:49:	attempting to elevate himself to the level of a God. He'd like to elevate himself to the level

00:50:49 – 00:50:58:	of God. He can't do that. But if you believe that he has created something, that he has created

00:50:58 – 00:51:03:	your nature, whatever it happens to be, you are attributing to him the powers of deity and you

00:51:03 – 00:51:10:	are making him your God. Now you may also have other gods, but you now have a false God. And so

00:51:10 – 00:51:19:	this dualism is alive and well in the world today. We see this not just in other religions, but we

00:51:19 – 00:51:27:	see it being imported into Christianity. And we see it primarily in this distinction, this false

00:51:27 – 00:51:31:	distinction that is drawn between the Old Testament and the New Testament as Woe was highlighting.

00:51:33 – 00:51:38:	Because if you can say, well that was then and this is now, you're saying that God changed.

00:51:40 – 00:51:46:	And if you're saying that God changed, well God doesn't change. So that's a different God you have

00:51:46 – 00:51:50:	in the Old Testament if you say that he is different from the one in the New Testament.

00:51:51 – 00:52:00:	Because Jesus Christ is the God who walked in the garden. Jesus Christ is the God who met

00:52:00 – 00:52:06:	and ate with Abraham and then went on with the angels to oversee the destruction of Sodom and

00:52:06 – 00:52:12:	Gomorrah. Jesus Christ is the one who took on flesh and walked around ancient Israel with the

00:52:12 – 00:52:20:	apostles. Jesus Christ is the one who was nailed to the cross. These are things that he did bodily.

00:52:21 – 00:52:27:	And he is God then, he is God now, he will always be God. You cannot say that the Old Testament

00:52:27 – 00:52:32:	God is a different God. It is the Triune God in the Old Testament and it is the Triune God in the

00:52:32 – 00:52:39:	New Testament. And so if you find something that God did in the Old Testament and you disagree

00:52:39 – 00:52:44:	with that, you think it's wrong, oh God couldn't do that. You have a different God. You don't get

00:52:44 – 00:52:52:	to pick and choose what God may do or may not do. What God has done is right and true and good.

00:52:52 – 00:52:59:	If you think it is not, you are an error. God is not an error. This is something that

00:52:59 – 00:53:05:	the modern world seems to think it can just declare this is good and right. And so anything else

00:53:05 – 00:53:10:	that doesn't agree with what I have said is good and right must be evil and wrong. And they will

00:53:10 – 00:53:17:	go to any length in order to justify that. You'll have men like Bonhoeffer who will go through

00:53:17 – 00:53:21:	the Old Testament and disagree with this piece and that piece and oh well that was a different

00:53:21 – 00:53:25:	God or that was a different time or you have to interpret this or you have to deal with it

00:53:25 – 00:53:30:	differently. You'll have someone in the East who will say the conquest of Canaan was actually

00:53:30 – 00:53:36:	metaphorical and they didn't actually kill anyone. These are people who are trying to make excuses

00:53:36 – 00:53:44:	for God or for their own religion often both. And that is not Christian because a Christian

00:53:44 – 00:53:54:	reads what God has done and says amen. What God has done is right and good. If you disagree,

00:53:54 – 00:53:59:	you are an error. And so when God commands the Israelites to take slaves, if you think that

00:53:59 – 00:54:06:	slavery is a sin, you are an error. When God commands the Israelites to genocide the cities

00:54:06 – 00:54:13:	and the peoples in the promised land, if you think that genocide is a sin, you are an error.

00:54:14 – 00:54:20:	Anything that God has ever commanded a man to do was not sin because God does not command sin.

00:54:21 – 00:54:26:	Anything that God has ever done was not sin because God does not sin. There isn't even a

00:54:27 – 00:54:32:	way to say that in our language. We don't have a word for it because merely to imply that the

00:54:32 – 00:54:39:	possibility of God sinning is a thing is incoherent. So it's not actually fully correct to say

00:54:39 – 00:54:45:	God does not sin or God did not sin because it is above and beyond that even to put God in sin

00:54:45 – 00:54:51:	other than saying God hates sin in the same sentence is basically incoherent. But our language

00:54:51 – 00:54:58:	doesn't really encompass the necessary concept there. But this distinction that we draw, not

00:54:58 – 00:55:05:	we in this episode and not we personally, but the general we, this distinction that is drawn

00:55:06 – 00:55:12:	by many, particularly many pastors and teachers today who will say that was then and this is now,

00:55:13 – 00:55:19:	that is Gnostic dualism being brought back into the church in order to deal with the fact that these

00:55:19 – 00:55:27:	men are one uncomfortable with what God did in the Old Testament because it's God, it's the same

00:55:27 – 00:55:34:	God, and to hide the fact that they don't actually worship that God. They have a totally different

00:55:34 – 00:55:41:	God they have created in their image. And if you look carefully, this is a problem that we have

00:55:41 – 00:55:46:	with many Christians that perhaps reveals they don't really read the Bible. If you look at the

00:55:46 – 00:55:50:	things that they say about their supposed New Testament God, right, this is a different God,

00:55:50 – 00:55:56:	he just loves everyone and he never hates and he doesn't use mean words, it never says anything

00:55:56 – 00:56:05:	that's coarse or never is blunt or anything like that. Anyone who would agree with that is clearly

00:56:05 – 00:56:10:	not read scripture as what was mentioned in other episodes, just go read the words in red letters.

00:56:11 – 00:56:16:	If you think that Christ never said anything that was harsh or blunt or brusque,

00:56:17 – 00:56:21:	I don't know which scripture you're reading, but it's clearly not the one written by God

00:56:22 – 00:56:25:	using men as his scribes, inspired men.

00:56:28 – 00:56:30:	Even if you just read the words of Christ,

00:56:33 – 00:56:37:	the God being propped up by these prophets of the modern world,

00:56:38 – 00:56:44:	that's not the God of scripture. And there is a consistency through all of scripture.

00:56:45 – 00:56:50:	God is not inconsistent between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

00:56:50 – 00:56:55:	God didn't have a manic episode in the Old Testament and he settled down in the New Testament,

00:56:55 – 00:57:02:	now things are good again. God is consistent because God does not change and if your God

00:57:02 – 00:57:09:	changes, if your God has changed, then you have a God, but it is not the Lord God.

00:57:10 – 00:57:14:	The last of the main points that we want to make today, which is going to take up the rest of the

00:57:14 – 00:57:22:	episode, is another of the key tenets of all of the early Gnostic heresies. And that is that the

00:57:22 – 00:57:28:	human body is a prison for the true self rather than a part of it. In other words, your spirit,

00:57:28 – 00:57:36:	your soul, your mind is trapped in a meat suit. You are not your body, fundamentally,

00:57:36 – 00:57:43:	because as Corey was saying, the body was created by the demiurge. The demiurge was evil.

00:57:43 – 00:57:50:	All of material creation was evil. And one of the first false prophets of this teaching was

00:57:50 – 00:57:57:	Marcian. We've talked about him before. I've publicly accused Jeff Gibbs, the retired professor

00:57:57 – 00:58:04:	from LCMS's St. Louis Seminary, who wrote the wicked essay on hatred, a Marcianite,

00:58:05 – 00:58:11:	particularly because he set the so-called Old Testament God against the New Testament God.

00:58:11 – 00:58:17:	And it's everywhere. Let me read this passage about Marcian to you and we're going to talk about

00:58:17 – 00:58:22:	a couple different things that emerge because it's fascinating how relevant these bits are today.

00:58:23 – 00:58:27:	Again, that's why we're talking about this. It's not that Marcianism has been resurrected wholesale,

00:58:27 – 00:58:33:	but when you look at the bits and pieces and you see them being recycled in Christian churches,

00:58:33 – 00:58:38:	that's notable today. And it doesn't matter if you say, well, it's Marcianite or not.

00:58:38 – 00:58:43:	I don't care. It's evil. This is one of the earliest, most prevalent heresies that was directly

00:58:43 – 00:58:49:	condemned by the entire church. It caused a firestorm. It was a huge problem for the church.

00:58:50 – 00:58:55:	Here's what this says. According to Marcian, the God of the Old Testament, whom he called the

00:58:55 – 00:59:01:	Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal deity of the Jews, whose law

00:59:01 – 00:59:07:	represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering

00:59:07 – 00:59:13:	and death. In contrast, the God that Jesus professed is an altogether different being,

00:59:13 – 00:59:18:	a universal God of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy.

00:59:20 – 00:59:24:	Marcian also produced a book called Antitheses, which is no longer extant,

00:59:24 – 00:59:29:	contrasting the Demiurge of the Old Testament with the Heavenly Father of the New Testament.

00:59:29 – 00:59:35:	Marcian held Jesus to be the Son of the Heavenly Father, but understood the Incarnation in a

00:59:35 – 00:59:42:	dorsetic manner. That is, the Jesus body was only an imitation of material body and consequently

00:59:42 – 00:59:46:	denied Jesus' physical and bodily birth, death, and resurrection.

00:59:47 – 00:59:53:	There are a couple things here. One, Marcian confessed the Demiurge. He said there are two

59:53 – 01:00:00
different gods, just as we find in our pulpits today. How did he describe the Demiurge? The

01:00:00 – 01:00:07:	tribal deity of the Jews whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice. You may remember

01:00:07 – 01:00:14:	something almost exactly like that described in the very Eastern Less Orthodox episode,

01:00:14 – 01:00:21:	where we talked about the Orthodox so-called hatred of penal substitutionary atonement.

01:00:21 – 01:00:27:	That's precisely what it is. Legalistic reciprocal justice is just Marcian's way of saying

01:00:27 – 01:00:33:	penal substitutionary atonement, saying that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins,

01:00:33 – 01:00:36:	because the Orthodox will say that there's no penalty for our sins that Jesus paid.

01:00:36 – 01:00:43:	They say Jesus died on the cross to make the story better. The idea that a God would punish

01:00:43 – 01:00:52:	Jesus for our sins is hateful. They go right to the limit of calling God the father of the Demiurge,

01:00:52 – 01:00:55:	but they get around it by saying, well, that didn't really happen because it's not Christianity.

01:00:56 – 01:01:03:	PSA is hated in Marcianism. It's hated in Eastern Orthodoxy. Again, if you're listening, I'm not

01:01:03 – 01:01:09:	picking on you guys. We're picking on Lutherans too. We're all under the same bus here. This is a

01:01:09 – 01:01:14:	disaster for the Church, because whenever these false beliefs got picked up, the fact that things

01:01:14 – 01:01:20:	in Marcian, the damned heretic, who's universally condemned by the Church, are being recycled in

01:01:20 – 01:01:26:	our pulpits or whatever the EO have, that's a bad thing. It shouldn't happen to any of us.

01:01:27 – 01:01:31:	And the second part of that towards the end specifically talked again about what Corrie

01:01:31 – 01:01:38:	was saying. If the Demiurge produced the material world and Jesus was God, then Jesus couldn't

01:01:38 – 01:01:44:	have a physical body, could he? Because he could not participate in evil by taking on human flesh.

01:01:44 – 01:01:50:	So, see, this is where the rubber meets the road with this denial of the flesh. Jesus,

01:01:50 – 01:01:56:	because he's perfect, can't have a body. But then you've denied his birth, his death, his resurrection.

01:01:56 – 01:02:02:	Christians, according to the Creed, according to Scripture, believe if you deny those things,

01:02:02 – 01:02:09:	you deny God. You are not Christian and you are going to hell. Jesus had to be born bodily as a man

01:02:09 – 01:02:15:	because it was prophesied, because it's what God said he was going to do, and it's what God said he

01:02:15 – 01:02:20:	did, and he showed us that he did it. And Jesus died the same way and he was resurrected the same way.

01:02:22 – 01:02:28:	The only way for Christianity to be true is for this Gnostic heresy to be false. And so,

01:02:28 – 01:02:32:	the reason that this matters today is not necessarily, they're not recycling this part

01:02:32 – 01:02:38:	of Martianism. They're not saying that Jesus wasn't necessarily resurrected bodily. What they will say

01:02:38 – 01:02:44:	is the other stuff about the body, that your body is not your true self. And this is a case where,

01:02:44 – 01:02:51:	as we spend the rest of this episode talking about this, we find that the church today of the new

01:02:51 – 01:02:57:	global religion is in perfect accord with the global religion appreciators in every other

01:02:57 – 01:03:03:	walk of life. Men who have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever will agree

01:03:03 – 01:03:07:	with all the things we're going to say for the rest of this, because the notion that your body

01:03:07 – 01:03:16:	is not your self, well, that is necessary to deny the race is real. If the only way for race to be

01:03:16 – 01:03:23:	real is if God did something bad, because the other side of the equation that these guys will say is

01:03:23 – 01:03:29:	that race is a product of sin, there would never have been any human races if not for sin. We went

01:03:29 – 01:03:35:	over in the DNA episode and in the satiriology episode on race about how that's a lie. But it's

01:03:35 – 01:03:39:	something that I still hear regularly online. People think, well, yeah, we have race, but that's

01:03:39 – 01:03:44:	only because Adam fell. If not for the Tower of Babel, there'd be no race, which is just complete

01:03:44 – 01:03:49:	nonsense. But fundamentally and much more importantly, it's a denial of the flesh,

01:03:49 – 01:03:55:	because it goes to the point that Cory made about the demiurge producing the physical.

01:03:56 – 01:04:03:	If you believe that the fact that you are white or black or Asian or whatever is a product of sin,

01:04:04 – 01:04:09:	you are saying that your body per se is a product of sin. And where that becomes a problem is in

01:04:09 – 01:04:15:	the resurrection, because forget this life, you assume for the sake of argument that that is true,

01:04:15 – 01:04:21:	that you only have a race today because there's sin, and therefore your race is sinful.

01:04:21 – 01:04:26:	Even if you ignore Revelation 7, we're making it very clear that all the races of men stand

01:04:26 – 01:04:32:	before the throne of God in perfection where nothing evil can exist, only that which is

01:04:32 – 01:04:38:	perfect can be there. So that proves that wrong all by itself. Even if you ignore that, you are

01:04:38 – 01:04:45:	still left with the question of if my body is sinful per se because I am white and I was never

01:04:45 – 01:04:50:	meant to be white, whatever I am, it's not a white man, it's not a man at all incidentally,

01:04:50 – 01:04:55:	it's just a spirit being trapped in this meat. What's going to be resurrected on the last day?

01:04:56 – 01:05:03:	The Christian faith, Scripture says that you, I, my actual physical body, the one sitting here

01:05:03 – 01:05:07:	and speaking to you right now, waving my arms in the air as I'm talking, you can't see because

01:05:07 – 01:05:15:	thank God this isn't a video podcast. This body will be raised on the last day. That's what Job

01:05:15 – 01:05:20:	said, he said, I know that my Redeemer lives and I will see him with my own eyes. He believed that

01:05:20 – 01:05:25:	he was going to be resurrected, his body, his eyes. My body and my eyes will be resurrected and so

01:05:25 – 01:05:31:	will yours and so will the unbelievers. As Corey said, that's really bad news for them because

01:05:31 – 01:05:36:	the bodily resurrection applies to everyone. Incidentally, this is something that divides

01:05:36 – 01:05:41:	some of the other cults from Christianity. There are those who subscribe to annihilationism,

01:05:41 – 01:05:48:	they say that only those who are saved, only the elect will actually be resurrected from the dead

01:05:48 – 01:05:53:	and everyone else just vanishes. Why? Because you can separate the body from the soul

01:05:53 – 01:05:58:	permanently and there's no more you. Now, death itself is clearly a separation of the body from

01:05:58 – 01:06:03:	the soul, that's absolutely a fact and that's why it's traumatic and it's evil and we see it

01:06:03 – 01:06:10:	as a corruption. We see it as the worst thing that can be imagined. You can suffer any indignity as

01:06:10 – 01:06:17:	long as you're still alive but to die, it's finished. When annihilationists say, no, only the savior

01:06:17 – 01:06:22:	raised from the dead or when someone says, well, sure, you're going to be raised from the dead but

01:06:22 – 01:06:28:	it's not going to be this body with these sinful things like being white, then what is raised from

01:06:28 – 01:06:34:	the grave? Because it's no longer your body, it's no longer you and this is why this is such an

01:06:34 – 01:06:41:	incredibly deadly and very active heresy today that we've, Cory and I have triggered this heresy

01:06:41 – 01:06:47:	on the spot, on contact with LCMS pastors by discussing racism. When we talk about the races,

01:06:47 – 01:06:53:	we specifically point it to them personally, Brian Wolfmueller, pastor in Austin, Texas.

01:06:53 – 01:06:58:	He's very well liked on YouTube. I used to like him. I just think he was a good,

01:06:58 – 01:07:04:	faithful pastor until he started attacking the resurrection of the dead in order to defend

01:07:04 – 01:07:11:	against racists because Galatians 3.28 says there's neither Jew nor Greek and so Cory made the point

01:07:11 – 01:07:16:	to him on Twitter, well, what's going to be resurrected for the dead Jew and the dead Greek

01:07:16 – 01:07:21:	and the dead me and the dead Cory and the dead Brian? What's going to come out of the grave?

01:07:21 – 01:07:28:	And scripture says, Job says, it's my eyes, this flesh, my body is what's going to be raised.

01:07:29 – 01:07:35:	Brian had to deny the resurrection of the dead in order to defeat racism because he's on the other

01:07:35 – 01:07:39:	side of the Gnostic heresy. He ceased to be Christian when it comes to these subjects

01:07:40 – 01:07:46:	because Gnosticism that hates the body that says it's the product of the demiurge must necessarily

01:07:46 – 01:07:52:	have something different resurrected from the dead. Now, there's absolutely open questions

01:07:52 – 01:07:57:	in Christianity about what is resurrected. It's my body, but I don't know which version.

01:07:57 – 01:08:02:	What age will I be? Will I have gray hair? When I was born, I had a heart defect. I didn't know

01:08:02 – 01:08:08:	it till I was about 40 years old when the valve started failing. I would have been dead six years

01:08:08 – 01:08:12:	ago if they hadn't replaced the valve. The valve that I have in my heart now is a cow valve.

01:08:12 – 01:08:18:	When I'm resurrected from the dead, am I going to be 0.2% cow? Probably not.

01:08:19 – 01:08:23:	I don't think there'd be any purpose in that, but all these things go wrong with all of us.

01:08:23 – 01:08:29:	If someone has an arm amputated, if you lose your eyesight, if you're born without body parts,

01:08:29 – 01:08:33:	what comes out of the grave? We don't know. We know that it will be perfect,

01:08:33 – 01:08:41:	and we know what the perfect form of humanity is because we can clearly discern that from creation.

01:08:41 – 01:08:45:	We can discern what Adam's body would have been like by looking at all the variations of human

01:08:45 – 01:08:51:	bodies with their different flaws, and we can see the good in individuals and say, well,

01:08:51 – 01:08:57:	if you mash all the good together and you extract all the evil, Adam's going to be a lot like that.

01:08:57 – 01:09:02:	God doesn't give us specifics, and we don't need to worry about it. I don't worry about it, but

01:09:03 – 01:09:08:	I want to distinguish between that and what we have with heretics like Wolfmueller,

01:09:08 – 01:09:12:	who will openly deny the resurrection of the dead, saying, well, it's some sort of spirit

01:09:12 – 01:09:18:	body that comes out of the grave. That's narcissism. That's saying that your body that you have today

01:09:18 – 01:09:22:	is fundamentally evil, and God has to give you something different for it to be perfect.

01:09:23 – 01:09:28:	This is dangerous stuff. This is the death of Christianity, because when you lose the

01:09:28 – 01:09:33:	resurrection of the dead, whether you deny that the damned are also resurrected bodily,

01:09:33 – 01:09:38:	they are, they're going to be cast bodily into fire. What does a spirit carry if it's cast

01:09:38 – 01:09:44:	into fire? The damned are cast bodily into fire. We're all going to get up on the last day. We're

01:09:44 – 01:09:48:	all going to be put back together, and the sheep go in one direction, the goats go in the other,

01:09:48 – 01:09:53:	and it's either paradise or it's eternal suffering, bodily suffering. That's horrible.

01:09:53 – 01:09:57:	I don't want that for anyone. Even the men who hate me, I don't want them to suffer that,

01:09:57 – 01:10:02:	particularly for my case, because it would be stupid. Why hating some podcaster would put

01:10:02 – 01:10:08:	someone in hell is beyond me. Please, just, I wish they were to repent and I forgive them for

01:10:08 – 01:10:14:	my sake, but ultimately, when they hate me, it's not me. They don't care about me. They hate God.

01:10:15 – 01:10:22:	These men hate God because God is the God of the old and the New Testament. God is the God that did

01:10:22 – 01:10:28:	a racism and did a genocide and did a misogyny. Scripture is unapologetic about that, and they

01:10:28 – 01:10:33:	hate it. They hate everything about it, and so they will go to the very heart of the Christian faith

01:10:33 – 01:10:39:	by denying the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, according to the creeds and

01:10:39 – 01:10:45:	according to Scripture, because it's necessary to own the racists. Think about how serious that is.

01:10:46 – 01:10:51:	The fundamental parts of the Christian faith just go out the window in order to deal with these new

01:10:51 – 01:10:57:	made up sins. So, we're talking about Gnosticism today. These aspects of it are not a dead issue.

01:10:57 – 01:11:02:	They're alive and they're destructive and they're sending men to hell. This is serious stuff and

01:11:02 – 01:11:07:	it's happening right now. That's why it's worth us discussing, because we got to get in front of this.

01:11:08 – 01:11:15:	And one of the problems that the church has today that Satan is exploiting is that these are new

01:11:15 – 01:11:21:	variations on the old theme. Satan didn't use these attacks in prior centuries,

01:11:21 – 01:11:25:	so what does that mean? It means that there are no prior church fathers to which we can

01:11:25 – 01:11:29:	reference and say, well, here's where he said this and we can trust his judgment,

01:11:29 – 01:11:33:	and here's a good sound argument. Okay, this is a subtle issue. That's bad. This is good.

01:11:33 – 01:11:39:	We have an argument. We have to actually recognize first, here's the pattern. It's replaying. It's

01:11:39 – 01:11:46:	not completely novel. It's a form of Gnosticism. It's a form of Judaizing, but it's the same heresy,

01:11:46 – 01:11:51:	but it's wearing a new skin suit. And so things that weren't even done in the first and second

01:11:51 – 01:11:56:	centuries are being done in the church today. They're being done in Christian pulpits today.

01:11:56 – 01:12:02:	The sheep and the pews don't know any better. And I said earlier, if you're retarded and you have a

01:12:02 – 01:12:08:	good teacher, you're fine. That'd be fine. There'd be no problem with that. The problem is that we

01:12:08 – 01:12:14:	don't have good teachers. We have men who will, for the sake of owning the racist on Twitter,

01:12:14 – 01:12:19:	they will deny the resurrection of the body. And at that point, all of Christianity is canceled.

01:12:19 – 01:12:24:	That man cannot come back from that without specifically repenting of that blasphemy. Wolf

01:12:24 – 01:12:30:	Miller is a blasphemer. Harrison's a blasphemer. These men who participate in these lies thinking,

01:12:30 – 01:12:36:	oh, it's a small thing. It's better to say this than to let someone be racist in our church.

01:12:37 – 01:12:44:	So we did that episode earlier. This stuff, these seemingly minor peripheral issues,

01:12:44 – 01:12:48:	they will always ultimately cut to the heart of the Christian faith because Satan knows what

01:12:48 – 01:12:54:	he's doing. Satan's not dumb. And the fact that he's recycling this stuff century after century,

01:12:54 – 01:12:59:	it's not just that he's lazy as he doesn't need to be creative. We're stupid. We're fundamentally

01:13:00 – 01:13:08:	evil in our fallen nature. The things that we are attracted to are always going to be bad.

01:13:08 – 01:13:15:	God has to replace that with a sanctified nature by perfecting what was originally supposed to be

01:13:15 – 01:13:23:	us. It was us that God desired when he foreknew us before eternity. But then sin came along and

01:13:23 – 01:13:27:	it corrupted us. And so we're naturally turned towards all these tricks that Satan can play

01:13:27 – 01:13:34:	over and over again, and we gobble it up. So again, we're not being fiddly with historical points,

01:13:34 – 01:13:39:	and we're not playing fast and loose with a definition to try and play a game here,

01:13:39 – 01:13:46:	but to say that if you believe that the first century heresy was demonic, as it demonstrably is,

01:13:47 – 01:13:52:	you must necessarily conclude that these new teachings from these men who call themselves

01:13:52 – 01:13:58:	Christian pastors are also demonic. And the fruit is right there. When a discussion came up about,

01:13:58 – 01:14:01:	well, what about the resurrection of the dead? If there's neither Jew nor Greek,

01:14:01 – 01:14:05:	the first response from these guys is, well, God's not going to resurrect us.

01:14:05 – 01:14:08:	He's going to resurrect something else. We don't even know what it'll be, but it won't be us.

01:14:08 – 01:14:13:	Well, if you're not your race, what about your sex? That's the next part of this,

01:14:13 – 01:14:18:	transsexualism. We open the door to every modern thing, and that's where the stuff

01:14:18 – 01:14:21:	outside the church comes in, because then it's not just about church doctrine,

01:14:21 – 01:14:25:	it's about what we see playing out all around the world today.

01:14:26 – 01:14:33:	Make sure that we are abundantly clear with regard to Woe's rhetoric about the resurrection.

01:14:33 – 01:14:41:	We do have some information about the resurrection and the state of things in the resurrection,

01:14:41 – 01:14:48:	in Scripture, because of course Christ during his ministry on earth was a foretaste of that kingdom,

01:14:48 – 01:14:53:	and he restored sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf, and the ability to walk to the lame.

01:14:54 – 01:14:59:	And yes, those are the terms that we should use. It's a tangential issue here, but an important one

01:14:59 – 01:15:06:	nonetheless. He restored these things because he was restoring the way these men were supposed to be.

01:15:06 – 01:15:11:	He was removing the defects. He was removing these things that are not supposed to be part of

01:15:11 – 01:15:17:	creation, because they are the result of sin. They are the result of corruption. They are not

01:15:17 – 01:15:24:	part of God's good design. And so yes, if you are blind, you will see in eternity. If you are deaf,

01:15:25 – 01:15:28:	I don't know how you're listening to the podcast, but you will hear. I guess we do have transcripts.

01:15:30 – 01:15:37:	These things will be cured in the resurrection, so Woe is not going to be some certain percentage cow.

01:15:37 – 01:15:39:	He will have a heart that no longer has that defect.

01:15:43 – 01:15:47:	But to turn to the issue, the fundamental, the core issue here,

01:15:50 – 01:15:57:	there are two reasons that Woe and I talk about things such as racism, such as the

01:15:57 – 01:16:00:	races. And by racism, I mean the fact that it essentially does not exist.

01:16:02 – 01:16:07:	Yes, of course, if you hate someone purely because he's a different race, that is actual

01:16:07 – 01:16:13:	racism and that is impermissible for a Christian. Preferencing your own is not racism, but we're

01:16:13 – 01:16:17:	not really discussing racism in this episode. We've gone over that previously. You can go and

01:16:17 – 01:16:24:	re-listen to that. But the point that I want to make here is the twofold reason that we constantly

01:16:24 – 01:16:30:	return to these issues. One is because they are relevant to society and we do talk about

01:16:30 – 01:16:36:	things that are relevant to society. We talk about them in a Christian light, but we talk

01:16:36 – 01:16:41:	about them because they are relevant. They are important. They have very real consequences

01:16:41 – 01:16:47:	for the society in which we live and the society, the societies in which all of you live because

01:16:47 – 01:16:52:	we have listeners from around the world. We have listeners from quite a few countries at this point.

01:16:52 – 01:17:00:	The second reason, and it deals specifically with the issue of race, that we talk about

01:17:00 – 01:17:05:	the issue of race or any of these other controversial issues, is that they matter

01:17:05 – 01:17:11:	to the Christian. And the reason for this is very simple logic and,

01:17:11 – 01:17:17:	yes, basic, very, very basic logic course that it's important to understand.

01:17:18 – 01:17:21:	This is called modus ponens if you want the Latin name. The Latin doesn't matter.

01:17:22 – 01:17:28:	It's just if P, then Q. Hold that in your mind. The reason that this matters,

01:17:29 – 01:17:36:	if A, then B, if P, then Q. And so if you have one thing, another thing necessarily follows.

01:17:38 – 01:17:44:	So if you say that you have P, then you will necessarily have Q.

01:17:46 – 01:17:50:	But to summarize this, without getting deep into the weeds, the reason that this matters

01:17:51 – 01:17:58:	is that issues like race and sex and all these core aspects, these fundamental parts

01:17:58 – 01:18:07:	of our physical bodies, if you deny them, you are denying the physical created reality,

01:18:07 – 01:18:13:	which means you are denying the creator. So these issues that will bring up that may seem like

01:18:13 – 01:18:21:	they're tangential or not particularly important or why on earth are Christians focusing on these

01:18:21 – 01:18:29:	things. Well, the reason that we're focusing on these things is that if you deny the reality of

01:18:29 – 01:18:36:	race, you're denying the reality of the flesh, you're denying the reality of creation, you are

01:18:36 – 01:18:43:	effectively asserting a form of Gnosticism. And as Woe said, and as we've highlighted elsewhere,

01:18:44 – 01:18:51:	how does the resurrection work in this sort of scheme that is being built up by these men who

01:18:51 – 01:18:59:	claim to be Christian and yet deny fundamental aspects of the creation? If you say that race

01:18:59 – 01:19:08:	isn't real, then as what are you resurrected? I am ethnically German and a little Scottish.

01:19:09 – 01:19:14:	That is what I will be in eternity, because if I were anything else, I would not be me. It is

01:19:14 – 01:19:20:	incoherent to say, well, if I were Chinese, if I were Chinese, it wouldn't be me. It would be a

01:19:20 – 01:19:28:	Chinese man. And I am not Chinese. The same thing works in reverse. If a man who is Chinese

01:19:28 – 01:19:34:	were German, well, he wouldn't be the same man. These things are fundamental. The same is true

01:19:34 – 01:19:39:	of sex, and hopefully Christians are still in a position, and I know that those who are listening

01:19:39 – 01:19:42:	are, but hopefully still in a position to recognize that there's a fundamental difference

01:19:42 – 01:19:48:	between the sexes. And so it is utterly incoherent to say, well, if I had been born a woman,

01:19:49 – 01:19:57:	I would not be me. I am male. All of these things are part of my nature as God created me.

01:19:57 – 01:20:04:	They cannot be otherwise, because if they were otherwise, I would not be me. And so God

01:20:05 – 01:20:12:	must resurrect these things in order to resurrect me, because if these things are not resurrected,

01:20:12 – 01:20:18:	then God has resurrected something else. God has created something else, and that would be to make

01:20:18 – 01:20:24:	God a liar. And ultimately, that is the accusation that these men are leveling against God,

01:20:25 – 01:20:29:	because ultimately they're not disagreeing with me, they're not disagreeing with Woe,

01:20:29 – 01:20:34:	they're not disagreeing with any of you who have interacted with them on Twitter or elsewhere.

01:20:35 – 01:20:42:	They are disagreeing with God, because they are denying what He created. If a man stands up

01:20:42 – 01:20:46:	and speaks the word of God, and someone shouts at him that he's a liar,

01:20:47 – 01:20:50:	he's not shouting at the man who stood up and spoke, he's shouting at it God.

01:20:51 – 01:20:57:	And that is why, for instance, in Scripture, when we see those who rise up against a prophet,

01:20:57 – 01:21:01:	and say the prophet is a liar, or say the prophet shouldn't have that position,

01:21:01 – 01:21:07:	or someone else should be able to unseat him from his position, God will take offense,

01:21:07 – 01:21:14:	because it is God who was insulted. Yes, the prophet is also insulted, but the ultimate insult,

01:21:14 – 01:21:20:	the ultimate accusation, is directed at God. And so that is true anytime you speak the things of

01:21:20 – 01:21:26:	God. And so these men who attack these things aren't ultimately attacking us. They're attacking

01:21:26 – 01:21:33:	God, and they will have to answer for that one day. But as Christians, we have to affirm these

01:21:33 – 01:21:41:	things, because if you hold a belief that necessarily entails a denial of Christianity,

01:21:42 – 01:21:50:	you are necessarily denying Christianity. You cannot hold beliefs that are contrary

01:21:50 – 01:21:55:	to Christianity to state it more simply. If you have mutually exclusive beliefs,

01:21:55 – 01:21:59:	so there's a set of things that Christianity says are true, and there's a set of things you believe,

01:21:59 – 01:22:07:	if these do not agree, you have an idol, at least one. You need to purge that idol from your life.

01:22:08 – 01:22:14:	And so it may be that it's one of these idols that is very common, that are very common in our culture.

01:22:15 – 01:22:22:	It may be race, it may be sex, it may be ability, it may be disability, maybe any of these various

01:22:22 – 01:22:27:	things that have been turned into idols either in and of themselves or by proxy in our culture.

01:22:28 – 01:22:33:	If you have them as part of your religion, whether you call it a religion or not,

01:22:34 – 01:22:40:	then you have a religion that is a different religion from Christianity. It is incompatible

01:22:40 – 01:22:44:	with Christianity, and that is why we keep talking about these issues, why we raise them,

01:22:45 – 01:22:49:	why we word things the way we do, in particular I will word things in order to elicit these

01:22:49 – 01:22:56:	responses from people, because I am highlighting where they have an idol, where they are worshiping

01:22:56 – 01:23:02:	a false god, where they are using language that is incompatible with Christianity. It is that pinch

01:23:02 – 01:23:09:	of incense to Caesar. There were Christians who were willing to go to the lions because they

01:23:09 – 01:23:15:	wouldn't give a pinch of incense to Caesar. I don't know how we could possibly think that the

01:23:15 – 01:23:21:	things that we see supposed Christian leaders and teachers doing every single day could possibly be

01:23:21 – 01:23:27:	conceived of as less than a pinch of incense. These are men who are devoting their time,

01:23:27 – 01:23:34:	their name, their honor, their lives in some cases to defending these tenets of a false religion.

01:23:34 – 01:23:40:	They are defending a form of Gnosticism. This is a new secret knowledge. This isn't something

01:23:40 – 01:23:44:	they got from Scripture. This is something they got from the world and then attempted to shoehorn

01:23:44 – 01:23:50:	into Scripture because they want to deceive you as well. So when someone tells you that,

01:23:50 – 01:23:54:	for instance, because it is one of the best examples, we will keep using it, when someone

01:23:54 – 01:24:02:	tells you that racism is a sin, tell them to give you a verse. There is no verse that says

01:24:03 – 01:24:10:	that racism is a sin because it simply is not in Scripture. There are things that God says in

01:24:10 – 01:24:15:	Scripture that today, if you took them out of context or you changed a couple of words but

01:24:15 – 01:24:21:	kept the meaning the same, all of these priests of the new modern religion would tell you that's

01:24:21 – 01:24:26:	racist and you can't say that. If you said that all Cretans are liars, well, they're going to

01:24:26 – 01:24:29:	understand that one because that's a quote from Scripture. They might catch that one.

01:24:29 – 01:24:34:	But if you change it and pick another stereotype from somewhere else,

01:24:35 – 01:24:39:	make fun of any other group, which is fine, you're allowed to engage in that sort of humor,

01:24:39 – 01:24:43:	but pick one and use that. They'll tell you all that's racist, you can't do that. It's the same

01:24:43 – 01:24:51:	sort of statement that God makes in Scripture. If you think that God sinned, then the religion you

01:24:51 – 01:24:57:	have is not Christianity. It is another religion. It is a competing religion. It is, in fact,

01:24:57 – 01:25:04:	this modern Gnostic religion that says we are more enlightened. We have progressed. We have these

01:25:04 – 01:25:13:	new beliefs that are distinct from those backwards, less progressive, less advanced people we find in

01:25:13 – 01:25:19:	the pages of Scripture. And so what we believe is right. And so we'll rewrite Scripture to fit

01:25:19 – 01:25:23:	the things we believe, which is what they're actually doing. When you change the meaning of a word,

01:25:24 – 01:25:31:	you are not actually interpreting the underlying text. You are changing the meaning

01:25:31 – 01:25:36:	of the text. You are rewriting the text in effect. And that is what we see happening

01:25:37 – 01:25:43:	with these false teachers, with these false pastors, these wolves, these false shepherds.

01:25:44 – 01:25:50:	In particular, with the case of racism, they'll try to say that, well, partiality and racism

01:25:50 – 01:25:55:	are the same thing. And so when it says that you can't be partial, well, there's a ban on racism.

01:25:55 – 01:25:59:	They'll try to use that one because that's the comeback for the ones who are a little better

01:25:59 – 01:26:04:	trained. They'll immediately use that one against you when you tell them to point to racism.

01:26:04 – 01:26:09:	That's not what partiality means. Partiality is the use of false scales. It's the use of a false

01:26:09 – 01:26:14:	measure. And Scripture is clear about that. God hates false measures. He hates a false scale.

01:26:15 – 01:26:16:	That's in multiple places in Scripture.

01:26:16 – 01:26:25:	But as Christians, we need to be very careful about these things. And you do need to think of them.

01:26:26 – 01:26:31:	It's not necessarily in a philosophical sense, but it is in a logical sense.

01:26:32 – 01:26:38:	You need to think, if I believe A, or if I agree with this person who says I must believe A,

01:26:39 – 01:26:46:	what are the consequences of this belief? Because it may not be so simple that it's

01:26:46 – 01:26:52:	A and then B is rank heresy. Satan is often more subtle than that because most people

01:26:52 – 01:26:59:	can figure out if there's that immediate connection there. But it may be that if I believe A,

01:27:00 – 01:27:06:	I must necessarily believe B, which necessarily entails C. And it happens to be that C is the

01:27:06 – 01:27:12:	heresy. Well, you can't believe A because necessarily entails means that it must follow.

01:27:12 – 01:27:20:	And that's the goal. The goal of Satan is to extrapolate this out just enough that it gets

01:27:20 – 01:27:27:	past your defenses. Well, that sounds jesus-y. That sounds kind of Christian. And it's said by

01:27:27 – 01:27:33:	someone who has M. Div behind his name and pastors of large church and all of these things that are

01:27:33 – 01:27:38:	supposed to be signals to tell me that this is a Christian. The signal that tells you whether

01:27:38 – 01:27:44:	or not it's Christian is whether or not it is in God's word. So if that person is just telling you

01:27:44 – 01:27:51:	well, to be a good person, to be nice, you can't do X, Y, and Z, and you must do A, B, and C.

01:27:52 – 01:27:58:	No, tell me where it is in God's word. Because God has given me his word. He has given me his

01:27:58 – 01:28:08:	revelation. He has told me what I am to believe and not to believe. Now, yes, we will, of course,

01:28:08 – 01:28:14:	continue to hold there is both special revelation, which is to say scripture, and there is natural

01:28:14 – 01:28:19:	revelation, which is to say the natural world. There are things that you can discern from the

01:28:19 – 01:28:27:	natural world. However, nothing you discern from the natural world will ever contradict what God

01:28:27 – 01:28:32:	has revealed of himself in scripture. And so if you find that these men are telling you things,

01:28:33 – 01:28:38:	that disagree with God's word, that you cannot reconcile with Christianity, that necessarily

01:28:38 – 01:28:45:	entails some false belief, they are trying to drag you into a false religion. They are trying to

01:28:45 – 01:28:50:	get you to give that pinch of incense. They are trying to get you to bow down before an idol.

01:28:50 – 01:28:54:	And ultimately, they are trying to drag you with them to hell.

01:28:55 – 01:29:01:	As we've mentioned, two of the most obvious examples of created reality being accessible,

01:29:01 – 01:29:10:	even to the unbeliever, is sex and race. Any man can look at a man and a woman and tell the

01:29:10 – 01:29:17:	difference. Any child can, animals can, dogs will have preferences for one sex versus the other.

01:29:17 – 01:29:22:	Incidentally, dogs also have preferences for race among humans. They know which humans are more

01:29:22 – 01:29:30:	likely to mistreat them. The sexes are plainly discernible. It's a created reality at every

01:29:30 – 01:29:35:	level, at the level of DNA, at the level of the body, particularly even before puberty,

01:29:35 – 01:29:41:	but especially after puberty, when the secondary characteristics become predominant.

01:29:41 – 01:29:45:	And then even in death, when a fully grown male and female die,

01:29:46 – 01:29:51:	a thousand years later, you can dig up those skeletons and tell which one was a man and which

01:29:51 – 01:29:57:	one was a woman, not only by the size, not only by the bone density, not only by the shape of

01:29:57 – 01:30:03:	certain types of bones, particularly by the pelvis, because a woman's pelvis needs to be able to

01:30:03 – 01:30:09:	transit a human skull when she gives birth to a baby. It's got to go from one side to the other.

01:30:10 – 01:30:16:	Man's pelvis doesn't need that. There's no possibility of getting a baby's head through a

01:30:16 – 01:30:23:	man's pelvis. It's literally physically different. You can have an entire lifetime without a shred

01:30:23 – 01:30:29:	of knowledge of God or of scripture, and still come to the correct scriptural conclusion about

01:30:29 – 01:30:34:	the fact that the two sexes are different, that the two sexes are unequal, and that they were made

01:30:34 – 01:30:40:	for different purposes. I've said before, I'm a physically completely average man, and yet I am

01:30:40 – 01:30:49:	stronger, meaner, and more capable of violence than almost any girl, and a man who's one standard

01:30:49 – 01:30:55:	deviation bigger than me is going to be basically superior to every girl who exists, unless there's

01:30:55 – 01:31:00:	a complete freak, because that's just how it works. I'm totally average, totally normal,

01:31:00 – 01:31:05:	totally nothing, and yet I'm bigger, stronger than meaner than almost every girl, because I'm a man,

01:31:05 – 01:31:12:	and that's it. It's just free and it's automatic. This is not a distinction of

01:31:13 – 01:31:19:	better or worse in terms of the way we usually use those words. It's just different. If I'm bigger,

01:31:19 – 01:31:25:	stronger, and meaner than a girl, and I'm not using that to be big, strong, and mean against her,

01:31:25 – 01:31:30:	then if for whatever reason she's with me, and there's a benefit to those qualities,

01:31:30 – 01:31:37:	I can protect her better than she can protect herself. Now, of course, in a world with sin,

01:31:38 – 01:31:42:	where there is always the possibility that the bigger, stronger, and meaner could hurt

01:31:42 – 01:31:48:	the smaller and weaker, girls instinctively understand that they shouldn't ever be alone

01:31:48 – 01:31:54:	with certain guys. Arguably, girls should never be alone with anyone who isn't a relative or a

01:31:54 – 01:32:00:	husband. Now, that sounds incredibly extreme, but it's worked for many cultures. One of the reasons

01:32:00 – 01:32:05:	that it has worked is that the guy who's bigger, stronger, and meaner, if he sees a pretty girl

01:32:05 – 01:32:09:	who's weaker, and he's like, well, I want her, and I don't care what she thinks, and I don't care

01:32:09 – 01:32:18:	about the law, he can do something harmful, and she has no choice. We're going to talk here for

01:32:18 – 01:32:22:	a minute about some things that some people may want to fast forward for five minutes or so,

01:32:23 – 01:32:29:	because it's necessary in refuting the gnostic heresy of your body not being yourself,

01:32:30 – 01:32:36:	unfortunately, to talk about some things that are harmful. So we're going to talk for a minute

01:32:36 – 01:32:42:	about things that some kids might not want to hear. If you've been the victim of a physical crime,

01:32:42 – 01:32:47:	especially one of that type of nature, you might want to skip ahead, because this might be unpleasant.

01:32:48 – 01:32:52:	You know, it's funny, when we hear things like trigger warnings, the thing, well, that's just

01:32:52 – 01:32:57:	stupid, that's just weak. Frankly, if someone has had something terrible happen to them,

01:32:57 – 01:33:02:	and you can do them a favor by not reminding them, that's a good thing. It's obviously taken to

01:33:02 – 01:33:08:	absurd extremes by leftists, but the principle is not a bad one. You know what, there's some content

01:33:08 – 01:33:14:	in this thing that it's not for everyone. It doesn't mean it's sinful or that it's bad per se,

01:33:14 – 01:33:19:	but if someone wants to opt out of that, let them. So just saying now, skip ahead for five minutes

01:33:19 – 01:33:27:	if you don't want to hear that sort of thing. For everyone else, one of the key proofs that

01:33:27 – 01:33:35:	the Gnostics are lying about the fact that the body is not self, is that when there's physical

01:33:35 – 01:33:42:	violence done to yourself, to your body, it's personal. It's completely personal. And it's

01:33:42 – 01:33:49:	why some people become permanently traumatized by that sort of injury. If someone is violently

01:33:49 – 01:33:57:	attacked, if a girl is raped or otherwise assaulted in such a manner, it's personal in a way that

01:33:57 – 01:34:03:	nothing else is. It's violative in a way that nothing else is, because it involves your body.

01:34:04 – 01:34:11:	It's not hypothetical. It's not external. It's not conceptual. It's physical. And the physical

01:34:11 – 01:34:14:	damage and harm that is done to an individual

01:34:16 – 01:34:20:	bypasses all the intellectual and all the other protections that we may have.

01:34:20 – 01:34:25:	There's not necessarily an amount of mental toughness that can insulate you from being

01:34:25 – 01:34:31:	physically injured by deliberate cause. If someone wants to hurt you if they're malicious

01:34:31 – 01:34:38:	and they do something harmful, it affects, in some cases, a lifelong permanent change

01:34:38 – 01:34:43:	in that person. That's one of the examples we gave last week with circumcision.

01:34:43 – 01:34:49:	Circumcision of an infant where their strapped cruciform in 36,000 nerve endings

01:34:49 – 01:34:55:	are sliced off without anesthesia. They go from being comfortable in the womb for nine months,

01:34:55 – 01:35:01:	completely protected, to the most unimaginable, excruciating pain possible. And it causes permanent

01:35:01 – 01:35:06:	changes. The baby doesn't remember, but the brainwaves remember, the body remembers, the

01:35:06 – 01:35:18:	self remembers, because the platonic separation of mind and soul and body is their distinctions

01:35:18 – 01:35:27:	that are valuable to a point, but they're not distinctions of their details of self,

01:35:27 – 01:35:35:	where every man is effectively a type of trinity. God has the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

01:35:35 – 01:35:39:	Man has body, mind, and soul. I'm not suggesting that they correlate directly,

01:35:40 – 01:35:46:	but there's a sense of typology there, even if it's not actually typological.

01:35:47 – 01:35:54:	What we are, as our bodies, as ourselves, is it's indistinguishable. You cannot separate

01:35:54 – 01:36:01:	the man or the woman from her body and take it somewhere else. And these sorts of

01:36:01 – 01:36:07:	violative attacks on the person prove that, because in some cases they'll fracture people.

01:36:08 – 01:36:13:	One of the horrible examples that we've alluded to before, and I'll say just briefly here,

01:36:14 – 01:36:20:	torture as it relates to MKUltra, a program that was developed in the 1960s by the United States

01:36:20 – 01:36:26:	government, specifically exploited this fact, exploit the fact that you could cause psychological

01:36:26 – 01:36:34:	and physical torture of a person to split the mind from the body, to cause disassociation.

01:36:34 – 01:36:40:	And they tried all these experiments, and they created a methodology of doing this specific

01:36:40 – 01:36:46:	thing, and they mastered it. And we think about that as sort of being ancient history,

01:36:46 – 01:36:50:	and that's just it doesn't happen anymore. And that's really extreme, and the Manchurian candidates

01:36:51 – 01:36:54:	who cares about disassociation, that's not a big deal.

01:36:55 – 01:36:59:	One of the ways that this has played out since then is in the form of things like

01:36:59 – 01:37:06:	nuclear drills. And today we have active shooter drills. We're little children who probably don't

01:37:06 – 01:37:12:	understand mortality yet, are told, there's an existential threat outside the door that's

01:37:12 – 01:37:17:	about to kill you. I don't know what kill means, but I'm terrified. My teacher is telling me this

01:37:17 – 01:37:23:	is serious. They make these things so elaborate that they're actually terrifying for little kids now.

01:37:24 – 01:37:31:	That is the end stage of MKUltra. Because what does it do? It takes a child in an innocent state

01:37:31 – 01:37:36:	where they don't know about death and they don't know about terror. And it imposes that sort of

01:37:36 – 01:37:41:	terror in a way that rips them away from what they thought was a safe, comfortable place.

01:37:42 – 01:37:47:	In this sort of mass conditioning that's done now, it's not the full version of MKUltra. It's

01:37:47 – 01:37:53:	a distinct deluded version for a slightly different purpose. But the conditioning effects are similar.

01:37:54 – 01:38:01:	When kids are continuously told, you may suffer grievous bodily harm or death at any moment.

01:38:01 – 01:38:05:	That's horrifying. We talked, I think, last week or the week before about the fact that

01:38:05 – 01:38:10:	there's certain types of evil knowledge that children should be spared from. People shouldn't

01:38:10 – 01:38:16:	know these things. And yet, unfortunately, we all learn them at some point. And so the sole purpose

01:38:16 – 01:38:21:	of talking about it is to illustrate that when you do something to the mind, when you do something

01:38:21 – 01:38:27:	to the body, you can actually permanently damage a person, internally, so that they can never

01:38:27 – 01:38:32:	completely be put back together. That's not to suggest that it's hopeless or that there's no

01:38:32 – 01:38:37:	forgiveness or whatever is applicable in the situation. It's to say that just like cutting

01:38:37 – 01:38:42:	off your arm or gouging out your eyes, these internal damages, this sort of psychic damage

01:38:42 – 01:38:48:	to the mind and to the soul can be just as permanent and just as scarring. And so when

01:38:48 – 01:38:54:	someone has suffered that, we need to be empathetic. Don't laugh when they need a little more cushioning

01:38:54 – 01:39:00:	to stay away from these things. That's something that's Christian. If you can spare them suffering

01:39:00 – 01:39:05:	something that hurts, do it. And thank God that you're in a position that you can't,

01:39:05 – 01:39:10:	because not everybody will care. Because the division of the body, mind, and soul

01:39:10 – 01:39:16:	is an artificial one, ultimately. You are all of those things at once. You are either a man

01:39:16 – 01:39:22:	or a woman, and that informs everything, informs your body, informs your psyche, informs your

01:39:22 – 01:39:27:	personality, it informs your intelligence even. Because although men and women on average are

01:39:27 – 01:39:33:	about the same intelligence, men go much further to the extreme. They're not nearly as many female

01:39:33 – 01:39:39:	geniuses or female retards as there are men. Men go much further to either side. So if you

01:39:39 – 01:39:44:	imagine the bell curve, the female bell curve for any particular race is much narrower. The male bell

01:39:44 – 01:39:51:	curve is wider because we have greater variety. That's intrinsic. So that's in part about the mind,

01:39:51 – 01:39:55:	but it's also about sex because it's at the body, and it's ultimately about the self.

01:39:56 – 01:40:02:	You know, and something like retardation is a, it's a regression from the norm, and it's something

01:40:02 – 01:40:09:	that is a defect. It just is being blind as a defect, being lame as a defect, being paralyzed.

01:40:10 – 01:40:17:	When Jesus performed miracles, as Corey said earlier, he removed those things. Men who were

01:40:17 – 01:40:23:	either suffered injury or sickness or were blind or lame from birth, God healed their bodies,

01:40:23 – 01:40:30:	and he did it for three reasons. One, he fulfilled prophecy. Two, it proved that he was master of

01:40:30 – 01:40:36:	creation, that he was the Creator. And so when he said, I can forgive your sins, and he will fix

01:40:36 – 01:40:41:	the lame and he will in fact cause people to be raised from the dead by speaking, you can believe

01:40:41 – 01:40:46:	that it's that he can actually deliver on that promise. And three, as Corey said, it's undoing

01:40:46 – 01:40:52:	the effects of the fall. If someone is certainly dead, or if they're lame or deaf or mute or blind

01:40:52 – 01:40:59:	or paralyzed, if they have leprosy or some other sickness, this is the fall. This is damage to the

01:40:59 – 01:41:05:	self. It is not intrinsic to the self. No one's intrinsically a leper. No one is naturally blind,

01:41:05 – 01:41:10:	even if they're born blind, even if you've never been able to see for a day in your life,

01:41:10 – 01:41:15:	that is not how God intended to create you. And this is a key point, because this is something

01:41:15 – 01:41:20:	that's happening very often in our churches. It didn't used to be the case until the last 20 or 30

01:41:20 – 01:41:26:	years, but now we have churches where people are afraid to say, this is a disability, this is a

01:41:26 – 01:41:31:	defect. If you're listening and you're blind, as Corey said, you weren't supposed to be blind at

01:41:31 – 01:41:38:	birth. I'm not making fun of you. I'm not saying you're worse than, but the fact that you can't see

01:41:38 – 01:41:43:	is something that God will fix. When you're raised on the last day, you will be able to see,

01:41:43 – 01:41:47:	and God proved that by healing the blind, as he was prophesied to do.

01:41:48 – 01:41:54:	God fixes the products of sin, because there won't be any in creation. What didn't he remove?

01:41:54 – 01:41:59:	He didn't turn men into women. He didn't turn people from one race into another or race their

01:41:59 – 01:42:04:	race entirely. They were still the same body that they had before, and it wasn't a fluke.

01:42:04 – 01:42:09:	It wasn't a forgot something. It wasn't that he hadn't proven that point yet. It was that those

01:42:09 – 01:42:15:	things are intrinsic. Those are how God made you. When God wrote my name in the book of life from

01:42:15 – 01:42:19:	before eternity, it was the name of a man. Same with Corey, same with you. If you're a woman,

01:42:19 – 01:42:23:	it's the same thing. You are what you are, because God made you that way.

01:42:25 – 01:42:30:	Today, we see, first, we had the equality of the sexes saying, well, sure, they're the same and

01:42:30 – 01:42:36:	they're interchangeable, which leads necessarily into transgenderism, because that is one of the

01:42:36 – 01:42:44:	most pure expressions of Gnosticism to say, this body, this flesh, it's not really me.

01:42:44 – 01:42:49:	I feel like I'm a woman. I'm feeling girly today. I think I'm going to do all the things I need to do

01:42:49 – 01:42:55:	butcher this body and turn into a woman. It doesn't work. All I've done is wreck a man's body and

01:42:55 – 01:43:01:	turned into something that's neither. I'm still a man inside and therefore tormented. That's what

01:43:01 – 01:43:05:	we find. The suicide rates for those people are horrific because they're being tormented.

01:43:06 – 01:43:11:	They're being demonically oppressed. Then when people don't say, stop, this is evil,

01:43:11 – 01:43:17:	don't do any of this. When there's no one to intervene and condemn the deception and the

01:43:17 – 01:43:21:	damage is done to the body, it's permanent. There are many accounts from people who have

01:43:21 – 01:43:27:	repented from having gone through one of those evil procedures. They come out the other side

01:43:27 – 01:43:33:	and they realized that they were always the sex that they were born. Oh, I was born that way,

01:43:33 – 01:43:39:	as though that's some accident. No, that is the substance of who you are. This is crucial because

01:43:39 – 01:43:45:	it doesn't only apply to us. To go back to what Marcian said about denying the birth, death,

01:43:45 – 01:43:52:	and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus was born a man. He was not born human. He was born a man

01:43:52 – 01:44:01:	because Adam was created a man. Woman was taken out of man. Jesus on the cross was fully anatomically

01:44:01 – 01:44:06:	correct just like any other man. He wasn't some hermaphrodite. He wasn't splitting the difference.

01:44:06 – 01:44:13:	He wasn't a spirit being. He was a man and he died bodily as a man. He was resurrected the same way.

01:44:15 – 01:44:20:	When we go down this path where we say that your body is not yourself,

01:44:20 – 01:44:23:	you will ultimately get to the point where you have to deny the resurrection,

01:44:23 – 01:44:27:	which is where Marcian started out. This is something else we're seeing today.

01:44:27 – 01:44:33:	Wells recently changed their hymnals, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which is

01:44:33 – 01:44:37:	generally considered more conservative than the LCMS. It's not really, but they have a

01:44:37 – 01:44:42:	different set of problems. We're all fighting these battles together. They recently changed

01:44:42 – 01:44:50:	the Apostles Creed to say that Jesus was born human, not born a man because of egalitarianism,

01:44:50 – 01:44:55:	because of anti-misogyny, because Jesus died for everyone. We want to be inclusive.

01:44:55 – 01:45:02:	You have to include everyone by denying that Jesus is a man. It's a small thing,

01:45:02 – 01:45:08:	but that's what Satan loves. He'll take generations to do this damage. He doesn't care if you're not

01:45:08 – 01:45:15:	tricked by switching from Jesus as a man to Jesus as human. He'll wait for the next round.

01:45:15 – 01:45:21:	He'll come back and say, well, human, what does that even mean? This sort of incrementalism

01:45:21 – 01:45:28:	is made possible in part by our appetite for Gnosticism. When you deny the body, as everyone is

01:45:28 – 01:45:34:	today, identifying with pronouns and all that crap, all these things that we all know about and

01:45:35 – 01:45:41:	tend to laugh about when it is not fought facially and condemned not only as false,

01:45:41 – 01:45:46:	but as evil, particularly because, as Corey is saying, it is a denial of how God made you.

01:45:47 – 01:45:54:	If you refer to a man as a woman, you are denying how God made them. You are denying God. You cannot

01:45:54 – 01:46:00:	deny their Creator or your Creator without denying that that Creator saved you. It's part

01:46:00 – 01:46:07:	and parcel. We're not trying to make race an issue of salvation. We're making confession of God

01:46:07 – 01:46:12:	an issue of salvation because we don't need to do that. God did that. You can't confess false

01:46:12 – 01:46:18:	gods and have the one true God's forgiveness. If you call God a liar and say, well, you didn't

01:46:18 – 01:46:24:	make this. I'm actually a girl or I'm Hindu. I'm Chinese. I'm all these different things. I don't

01:46:24 – 01:46:29:	care what you say. You're not the boss of me, Dad. That's the spirit behind all of it. It's

01:46:29 – 01:46:35:	facially absurd. It's stupid and yet we're told to tolerate it because self-identification

01:46:36 – 01:46:42:	is the purest form of Gnosticism. It's saying, this body, this evil garbage, this meat sack,

01:46:42 – 01:46:47:	none of this is me. Don't pay any attention to this. I'm just a spirit. I'm a spirit trapped and

01:46:47 – 01:46:53:	listen to my ideas and blah, blah, blah. It destroys what God has made because you're not just

01:46:54 – 01:47:00:	an idea. You're not just a soul. You're everything it wants. Whenever any one of them

01:47:00 – 01:47:07:	is damaged, it damages all of you. This becomes an issue of salvation because it's a denial of

01:47:07 – 01:47:13:	how God created you. Not only transgenderism, but also transhumanism, which isn't a problem

01:47:13 – 01:47:18:	in the church yet, but it's certainly a problem in the pagan world where there are guys who think

01:47:18 – 01:47:24:	that they will be able to live forever. Some are trying to enhance their human bodies. Others are

01:47:24 – 01:47:30:	looking at ways of extracting their consciousness of jumping into a robot or jumping into another

01:47:30 – 01:47:36:	human body or uploading into the cloud so they can just live on AWS and pay the fees and then

01:47:36 – 01:47:41:	they'll always be present even if they don't have a body. We laugh at those things and we think

01:47:41 – 01:47:48:	they're absurd, but by measures and degrees, they're going to get someplace. They're going to do

01:47:48 – 01:47:54:	portions of it. They won't do it perfectly because as soon as you remove a body from the mind,

01:47:55 – 01:48:02:	you have broken the person just as death breaks us. When the mind dies with the body

01:48:02 – 01:48:07:	and the soul departs, there's a rending that is terrible. It's something that we can visually see

01:48:08 – 01:48:14:	as bad. If you've ever been to the funeral with open casket of a loved one or a relative,

01:48:14 – 01:48:23:	you look at that and you're like, that's them, but it's not. It's a very viscerally unsettling,

01:48:23 – 01:48:29:	uncanny valley thing because it still looks like them. They do stuff with makeup and things,

01:48:29 – 01:48:34:	so it seems realistic, but you know that if you touch them, they're cold and no mammal is cold.

01:48:35 – 01:48:42:	You know that it's naturally awful. It's completely terrible. That's why it's so traumatic

01:48:42 – 01:48:47:	because it's not natural. It's a separation. These lies that are being told today about

01:48:47 – 01:48:53:	traniism and about your race not being who you are and about transhumanism being able to separate

01:48:53 – 01:48:58:	these things cleanly, ultimately, they're all destructive. That's what Satan wants. He wants

01:48:58 – 01:49:04:	to destroy. He wants to remake and destroy creation because he hates God and he hates us.

01:49:04 – 01:49:09:	He hates us more than you can possibly imagine because we were created in God's image and we

01:49:09 – 01:49:16:	were given a gift and he doesn't have those gifts and he despises us and he's devoting

01:49:17 – 01:49:23:	every moment that he has. I was going to say waking moment, but he never sleeps. He's always

01:49:23 – 01:49:28:	prowling like a roaring lion. He hates us because we're different than him because as an angel,

01:49:29 – 01:49:35:	he is spirit. To whatever degree he can manifest, it's not truly who he is. The supernatural

01:49:35 – 01:49:40:	is a totally separate category. It's fundamentally what we get into here when we deal with these

01:49:40 – 01:49:47:	gnostic things where men say we can separate body and mind and soul. We're going to create new things.

01:49:47 – 01:49:52:	We're going to have subsets of things and it's still going to be you. You're playing with a

01:49:52 – 01:49:59:	fabric of creation and it's not that it's impossible to do any of it. It's that it's

01:49:59 – 01:50:04:	impossible to do what they're claiming to do. They can destroy and they can create horrors,

01:50:04 – 01:50:10:	but they're not going to deliver on their promises because all the promises are satanic promises

01:50:10 – 01:50:15:	intended to deceive and to destroy. They're not intended for immortality, which incidentally

01:50:15 – 01:50:22:	is another defiance of God. The entire reason that the flaming sword in the hand of the angel

01:50:22 – 01:50:27:	was placed outside the garden was to keep Adam and Eve out of the garden because if they could still

01:50:27 – 01:50:34:	eat from the tree of life, they wouldn't die. What happens if you don't die? You can be resurrected.

01:50:34 – 01:50:42:	Our death is necessary for us to be reunited with God in perfection. All of this stuff,

01:50:42 – 01:50:46:	all this denial of the body, the least of the denial of the resurrection of the dead,

01:50:46 – 01:50:53:	it's not coincidental. It's an arrow pointed directly at the heart of the Christian faith.

01:50:53 – 01:50:57:	All these bits and pieces that we pulled together today, they all work towards that same end.

01:50:57 – 01:51:02:	When you start looking at this pattern, you find that there is hatred of this doctrine

01:51:02 – 01:51:08:	in this form that God has presented, in this way that he's given us things. It's just all

01:51:08 – 01:51:13:	hatred for what God does. It's substituting something that the world embraces. The global

01:51:13 – 01:51:18:	religion loves all this stuff. It says, maybe you're burdened with it and will pray for you,

01:51:18 – 01:51:25:	but you don't have to change. It's very common now among death ministry for those people to be told

01:51:26 – 01:51:30:	they're not going to be healed from being deaf, that you're going to be deaf in the resurrection.

01:51:30 – 01:51:35:	You're fine just the way you are. You're not fine. There's something wrong with you. Your body

01:51:35 – 01:51:39:	is defective, just as my body was defective when I had to flap it. It was just, it was flapping

01:51:39 – 01:51:44:	around. It never worked. My cardio was always terrible. I had no idea why. It turned out I had

01:51:44 – 01:51:50:	a valve that eventually failed, so they had to fix it. And now things work again. I was born

01:51:50 – 01:51:56:	defective in lots of ways. As one particular one, I can hear, I can see, but my heart didn't work

01:51:56 – 01:52:02:	quite right. Some people can't see. They can't hear. They're missing arms or legs. They, you know,

01:52:02 – 01:52:08:	all these things are less than what God wanted us to be. All these things are what God will restore

01:52:08 – 01:52:12:	in the resurrection of the dead. As soon as you start pretending that your body is not you, you're

01:52:12 – 01:52:17:	saying, I don't care what you do. You know, it's whatever. Let my soul go play a harp in heaven,

01:52:17 – 01:52:23:	like that absurdity. No, this body will be resurrected on the last day. I know that my

01:52:23 – 01:52:29:	Redeemer lives, and I will live to see him with my own eyes. That's a promise from God,

01:52:29 – 01:52:34:	and it's one that we have to remember, because Satan's trying to take it from us. And if he can

01:52:34 – 01:52:39:	take that away, then all these other lies are up for grabs. And the more you adopt and the more

01:52:39 – 01:52:44:	you're not terrified of, the more you think, well, maybe I can baptize that. It doesn't seem like

01:52:44 – 01:52:48:	it's a threat on Christianity. You know, annihilation is like, I don't want people to go to hell. So,

01:52:48 – 01:52:53:	you know, maybe they just vanished. No, they're resurrected bodily just like you. And then they're

01:52:53 – 01:52:58:	thrown into fire. If that seems bad to you, maybe tell them about Jesus. If damnation is

01:52:58 – 01:53:05:	inconsequential, then who cares? Like, it's this sort of separation of act and consequence

01:53:05 – 01:53:10:	is something else Satan wants. It's all about separation from God's Word, from his will,

01:53:10 – 01:53:17:	and from his promises to us. Everything that God has told us about and has given us is for a benefit.

01:53:17 – 01:53:22:	Everything that Satan has given us and told us about is terrible. It's the worst possible thing.

01:53:22 – 01:53:28:	And more and more, churches are adopting what Satan is giving us and despising what God has

01:53:28 – 01:53:33:	in the same breath. The church is not going to make it. The church will not make it if we

01:53:33 – 01:53:38:	continue down that path. So, these narrow episodes about this seemingly weird stuff,

01:53:38 – 01:53:42:	we have to nip it in the bud, because it will corrode the church from the inside,

01:53:43 – 01:53:47:	just as it's corroding the world around us. And we are the ones who have to stop it,

01:53:47 – 01:53:52:	because we have no guarantee that if we screw this up and let all this stuff slide,

01:53:52 – 01:53:57:	that there's going to be anything left for the next generation even know what Christianity

01:53:57 – 01:54:03:	was about in the first place. You are like most of the other things in your environment surrounding

01:54:03 – 01:54:10:	you, what is called a Gestalt. And that is simply a German word that means a thing that is greater

01:54:10 – 01:54:15:	than the sum of its parts. And it is also an English word, because we just straight imported

01:54:15 – 01:54:20:	that one into English. So, capitalize the G or don't capitalize it as you prefer.

01:54:22 – 01:54:28:	But this is true of so many of the things that surround us. The pen that I'm holding is a Gestalt,

01:54:29 – 01:54:35:	because certainly it is made of, I believe this one is Macrolon, it has some metal,

01:54:36 – 01:54:40:	a few other components. If those were all separated out and set on my desk,

01:54:40 – 01:54:45:	no one would call that a pen, it would just be a handful of miscellaneous materials.

01:54:46 – 01:54:51:	Useful certainly, they have utility still, but it wouldn't be a pen, it wouldn't be the same thing.

01:54:53 – 01:55:00:	And we see this, as Woe mentioned, when someone or a pet, something dies.

01:55:03 – 01:55:09:	That is the separation of the spirit and the mind as well from the body.

01:55:10 – 01:55:18:	The Gestalt is gone, which means the person is not there because you are the Gestalt.

01:55:19 – 01:55:24:	You are not just your finger, you are not just your spirit, you are not just your mind,

01:55:24 – 01:55:32:	you are all of those things. You can't take one part and rip it away and have the whole remain.

01:55:32 – 01:55:40:	And that is why death is a traumatic thing, not just for the one who dies but also for those

01:55:40 – 01:55:47:	who witness it, who are around after it, because it is unnatural, it is not meant to be a part

01:55:47 – 01:55:55:	of nature. Death was brought into the world by sin. Death will be removed from the world defeated

01:55:56 – 01:56:02:	by Christ. It already has been, but that ultimately resolves itself in the Second Coming

01:56:02 – 01:56:10:	and the New Heavens and the New Earth. And so when we think about this

01:56:10 – 01:56:19:	Gnostic tendency to deny the reality of the flesh, the reason that it is such a danger to

01:56:19 – 01:56:25:	Christians and to Christianity, to the Church, is that again it is ultimately a denial of the

01:56:25 – 01:56:34:	creation and therefore a denial of the Creator. There are a number of reasons for this. One is

01:56:34 – 01:56:40:	that Satan just wants to destroy. He hates God, he hates the things of God, he hates the people of

01:56:40 – 01:56:46:	God, he hates all that is good and true and beautiful. And so he just wants to destroy.

01:56:47 – 01:56:49:	But there's a nuance to it here.

01:56:52 – 01:57:01:	God took on human flesh. That sets man apart in a way that the angels and the demons are not.

01:57:02 – 01:57:09:	The demons hate that. The angels want to look into the mystery of the incarnation and what these

01:57:09 – 01:57:16:	things mean. The demons hate it, but at the same time they envy us. And we see that envy

01:57:17 – 01:57:25:	in a number of places, in the reliable recountings of exorcisms. We see this. We see it in

01:57:25 – 01:57:33:	Christ's interaction with the demoniac and the herd of pigs. On the one hand they hate the flesh,

01:57:33 – 01:57:37:	but on the other hand they envy the flesh, but they want to destroy it.

01:57:39 – 01:57:46:	And so if you participate in this denial of the flesh and this denial of the reality

01:57:46 – 01:57:50:	of what it means to be a person, because again, you are not just your spirit,

01:57:50 – 01:57:56:	you are spirit, mind and body. I'll go ahead and just state that you are tripartite. We're not

01:57:56 – 01:58:02:	getting into the finer details of that. We're just going to assert it. But you are that Gestalt.

01:58:02 – 01:58:08:	So if you deny some component part of that, you are ultimately really denying the whole.

01:58:08 – 01:58:15:	You are denying what you are. And this works out as a denial of the resurrection.

01:58:16 – 01:58:20:	Because here in time you'll have those who will say that, well, you're not really German. You're

01:58:20 – 01:58:24:	just German because you had a piece of paper that says it, or you're American because you have a

01:58:24 – 01:58:31:	piece of paper that says it. It's not because you were born American. You're a man because

01:58:31 – 01:58:36:	that's just what you feel like today. You're not a man or a woman because you happen to have

01:58:36 – 01:58:43:	the chromosomes that tell you you are that. Because that's what it is. It is according to the

01:58:43 – 01:58:48:	biological nature of your body that you are male or female. Now, of course, there are those

01:58:49 – 01:58:54:	who will scream about, well, what happens for those who have a genetic defect of any of a

01:58:54 – 01:59:02:	various number of kinds? It's a defect. If a man is missing a leg, that does not mean

01:59:02 – 01:59:08:	that it is in the nature of man to be missing a leg. It means that that man is missing a leg.

01:59:09 – 01:59:15:	And so if someone has a genetic defect that causes a problem with the reproductive system,

01:59:15 – 01:59:21:	that does not mean that it is in the nature of man or woman to have that defect. It means

01:59:21 – 01:59:28:	it is a deviation from the norm. It is a defect that will be fixed by God in the resurrection,

01:59:28 – 01:59:35:	which is great news if you're a Christian, terrible news and sad news if you are not.

01:59:36 – 01:59:44:	And so you cannot deny any of these fundamental aspects of the flesh of the body.

01:59:45 – 01:59:51:	These are, if we want to use the distinction, essential. They are not accidental.

01:59:53 – 01:59:58:	The color of the coat you're wearing, if you're wearing a coat right now or socks or whatever

01:59:58 – 02:00:02:	it happens to be, is accidental. It's not intrinsic to your nature.

02:00:04 – 02:00:11:	Whether you are German or Scottish or French or Japanese or Ugandan or any of the other

02:00:11 – 02:00:18:	races of men that I could list, that is essential to your nature. You are that now in time because

02:00:18 – 02:00:24:	you were born that because God created you as that. You will be that in eternity because he

02:00:24 – 02:00:34:	will raise you on the last day. Because again, if he were to raise some other thing from what you are,

02:00:35 – 02:00:41:	so if you are, say, a French woman and he raises a Chinese man, that isn't you,

02:00:41 – 02:00:47:	that would not be you. It's not to say that, oh well, now you're saying God can't do. No,

02:00:47 – 02:00:53:	I'm saying it is incoherent to assert that. It's the same as the stupid arguments where you see

02:00:53 – 02:00:57:	an atheist say, well, can God make a rock so heavy that God couldn't lift it?

02:00:59 – 02:01:03:	In brief, the reason that's incoherent and stupid, and we should be clear it is stupid,

02:01:04 – 02:01:12:	is because God, what you are premising in the beginning of your question, is defined as omnipotent.

02:01:12 – 02:01:18:	So as soon as you get to the word cannot, your sentence is incoherent, and anything after it

02:01:18 – 02:01:23:	is just a string of sounds. You could say purple moose banana, and it would make as much sense as

02:01:23 – 02:01:28:	the rest of that supposed question, just because you can intone so that it sounds like a question

02:01:28 – 02:01:34:	in English at the end of your rambling sound doesn't mean it's a question, it's incoherent.

02:01:35 – 02:01:39:	The same thing is true if someone tries to say that God is going to raise you

02:01:40 – 02:01:46:	as these things that you are not change your essence. That cannot happen because it is incoherent

02:01:46 – 02:01:53:	to say it. And so when we see the promise of the redemption and the resurrection, when we see

02:01:53 – 02:01:59:	these things in Scripture that are the core of the faith, if we give up what it means to be

02:01:59 – 02:02:05:	resurrected, what it means for you to be resurrected, not something to be resurrected, because if God

02:02:05 – 02:02:11:	just said he's going to burn the current universe to ash and then make a new one, that's not good

02:02:11 – 02:02:15:	news for anyone living in this one. It's good news if you're resurrected in the new one,

02:02:16 – 02:02:20:	which is what God promises incidentally because he is going to burn this one to ash.

02:02:22 – 02:02:28:	But believers will be resurrected into the new life, into the eternal life,

02:02:28 – 02:02:34:	in the new heavens and the new earth. And notably, we spend our eternity in the new earth.

02:02:35 – 02:02:39:	We're not saying what the exact contours of that are because Scripture doesn't give us all the

02:02:39 – 02:02:44:	details, we don't need them. We know it's perfect because that is what God promises, it is paradise.

02:02:45 – 02:02:52:	But what God says is new earth, because you are going to be flesh and blood. You will still be

02:02:52 – 02:03:01:	spirit, mind and body, but that body part is important. We cannot import this gnostic understanding,

02:03:01 – 02:03:06:	this gnostic contention, that well, all of the things of the flesh don't matter because it's

02:03:06 – 02:03:14:	ultimately the spirit that matters. Quite frankly, you are male or female according to your spirit,

02:03:14 – 02:03:23:	because you are male or female in your essence. And so if you are a German man, you are going to

02:03:23 – 02:03:29:	be resurrected as a German man. If you are a Scottish woman, you are going to be resurrected

02:03:29 – 02:03:35:	as a Scottish woman, because that is who you are. God is going to resurrect you.

02:03:37 – 02:03:42:	And that is why these verses that we will get into in another episode in more detail,

02:03:42 – 02:03:47:	these verses that say there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,

02:03:47 – 02:03:54:	there is not male and female. They're not a denial of those categories. They are an affirmation

02:03:54 – 02:04:00:	of those categories as real things, because what matters is what follows, all are one in Christ.

02:04:01 – 02:04:09:	It is saying that these categories do not preclude you from saving faith, do not preclude you from

02:04:09 – 02:04:15:	being included in the resurrection and the new life and the new heaven and the new earth.

02:04:16 – 02:04:21:	That is what is being said there. And so when you see pastors and teachers and others who stand up

02:04:21 – 02:04:26:	and use these verses to deny the reality of the creation as God has made it,

02:04:28 – 02:04:32:	those are false shepherds, those are wolves, those are liars and those are demons.

02:04:33 – 02:04:37:	Because what Scripture as we have highlighted previously calls teachings of demons,

02:04:37 – 02:04:44:	those things are trivial compared to the things being put forward today as supposed

02:04:44 – 02:04:51:	tenets of the Christian religion. And so the fundamental question that you need to ask yourself

02:04:51 – 02:04:57:	when it comes to these matters is the question that I raised earlier and really we've been

02:04:57 – 02:05:05:	illustrating it in this episode. Does this thing that I am being told I must believe

02:05:06 – 02:05:12:	or I must not believe conflict with what the Christian faith actually is?

02:05:14 – 02:05:21:	And do the consequences of, say, the thing I am being told to believe conflict with the

02:05:21 – 02:05:27:	Christian faith? Because if you are being told that you must believe A and as it turns out,

02:05:27 – 02:05:35:	what is entailed by believing A is something that is incompatible with the Christian religion,

02:05:35 – 02:05:42:	then what you are being told with A is that you must bow down to a false God. You must render

02:05:42 – 02:05:47:	unto Caesar something that does not belong to Caesar. You must bow before this idol. You must give

02:05:47 – 02:05:53:	the pinch of incense, whatever it happens to be. And we see this rampant in our culture.

02:05:54 – 02:06:00:	We see this with things that are extremely obvious. We see those who say, well, it's not nice and it's

02:06:00 – 02:06:06:	not kind if you oppose abortion, because that's health care for women. No, it's murder. And it is

02:06:06 – 02:06:10:	incompatible with the Christian religion. And if you support it and promote it, you will go to hell.

02:06:12 – 02:06:17:	Because that is high-handed, impenitent violation of the Fifth Commandment that is

02:06:17 – 02:06:22:	incompatible with what it means to be a Christian. But there are also more subtle

02:06:22 – 02:06:29:	things. And that is why we keep returning to the issue of race and sex and related matters,

02:06:29 – 02:06:34:	because those are more subtle. If you just look at it at a surface level, it may seem like,

02:06:35 – 02:06:41:	well, if I just say that we're all equal and these things don't matter, how can that possibly

02:06:41 – 02:06:48:	conflict with the Gospel? Because that's the tact they will often take. How does that conflict

02:06:48 – 02:06:56:	with the Gospel? Well, it does conflict with the Gospel. But fundamentally, foremost and first,

02:06:56 – 02:07:02:	it conflicts with what we confess in the first article of the Creed. Because we believe in God,

02:07:02 – 02:07:09:	the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. And if we deny the reality of the creation, we

02:07:09 – 02:07:16:	are denying the reality of the Creator. You cannot have the Son if you deny the Father.

02:07:16 – 02:07:21:	The same as you cannot have the Father if you deny the Son. But it does also conflict with

02:07:21 – 02:07:29:	the Gospel. Because the good news is that you're forgiven. And to be forgiven means that you are

02:07:29 – 02:07:37:	adopted as a Son of God and you will see eternal life and eternity. And if you deny the creation,

02:07:37 – 02:07:44:	you are denying that resurrection. And so again, as Christians, what we are urging you to do

02:07:45 – 02:07:53:	is to take all of these things and assess them in light of Scripture, in light of what it means

02:07:53 – 02:08:00:	to actually be a Christian. Because you are going to be constantly bombarded from all sides in this

02:08:00 – 02:08:06:	life, particularly as things currently stand in our culture, with demands that you give your pinch

02:08:06 – 02:08:12:	of incense, that you bow down before whatever idol it happens to be, that you affirm whatever

02:08:13 – 02:08:16:	the lie happens to be, and it changes seemingly every day.

02:08:18 – 02:08:25:	But as soon as you give that inch, Satan is going to take not a mile, but whatever you'll give him,

02:08:26 – 02:08:32:	right up to it, including your soul. Because as we've said before, Satan is a rat, he's a snake.

02:08:32 – 02:08:36:	If he can get his head in, the rest of Satan is coming in as well.

02:08:37 – 02:08:43:	And so we do these episodes that may seem like something that is perhaps a minor issue,

02:08:43 – 02:08:50:	or if you're thinking about classical Gnosticism, not a live issue, but we do them because they are

02:08:50 – 02:08:56:	live issues. Some of them may be a problem that we see that is going to be a live issue in the

02:08:56 – 02:09:02:	church, or currently a minor issue that is going to become a major issue for the church. This is

02:09:03 – 02:09:09:	not one of those. This is today a major issue for the church. Because when you start looking

02:09:10 – 02:09:17:	at what is being pushed in the world, you see a Gnostic religion, because you see this dualism,

02:09:17 – 02:09:22:	because really the third and the fourth points of the episode were the meat of it, as it were.

02:09:22 – 02:09:27:	Yes, there's the secret knowledge aspect, and there's the impartation of salvation,

02:09:27 – 02:09:29:	the belief that just the knowledge alone will save you.

02:09:30 – 02:09:36:	But the meat of the episode really is the dualism, that good versus evil in which they're

02:09:36 – 02:09:41:	equivalent, equal, in which the God of the Old Testament, lowercase g, isn't a real God,

02:09:41 – 02:09:45:	and it's only the God of the New Testament who settled down. That's the real God.

02:09:45 – 02:09:50:	And then there is the denial of the flesh, the belief, the physical world is evil, that it is

02:09:50 – 02:09:57:	wicked, and those two are really part and parcel. Because if you have good versus evil and they're

02:09:57 – 02:10:03:	equivalent, then you have this follow on from it, that it is the evil God that created the

02:10:03 – 02:10:08:	natural world, the physical world, and it's the good God who created your spiritual nature,

02:10:08 – 02:10:15:	and you'll be freed from your physical nature by whatever secret knowledge it is that this cult

02:10:15 – 02:10:21:	imparts. And this is nothing new to mankind. We see this in old religions, we see this in

02:10:21 – 02:10:26:	Greek religion, we see this in Eastern religion, but we see it today as well in the church,

02:10:26 – 02:10:32:	and we see it being pushed by men who are supposedly leaders and teachers who are pastors,

02:10:32 – 02:10:40:	so-called in these cases, of the church. We see it rampant in some denominations more than others.

02:10:40 – 02:10:47:	This is a particular problem in the Eastern Orthodox churches as we went over in that episode,

02:10:47 – 02:10:53:	so I will not go over it here. But it is a problem in every single denomination.

02:10:54 – 02:10:58:	And so like we said at the beginning, we're not beating up on any one denomination or any

02:10:58 – 02:11:03:	three denominations. This is a problem for all of us that we all need to address together.

02:11:04 – 02:11:07:	This is something that needs to be ejected from the church,

02:11:08 – 02:11:14:	searched out, found in whatever dark corner it is hiding and removed, because it is incompatible

02:11:14 – 02:11:21:	with the worship of the one true God, because it demands that we believe things that are false

02:11:21 – 02:11:25:	and incompatible, things that are mutually exclusive with the Christian religion.

02:11:27 – 02:11:32:	And so we've alluded to it a number of times, but I just want to close this episode out

02:11:32 – 02:11:41:	with the actual reading from Job 19, because this is one of the greatest gospel passages

02:11:41 – 02:11:48:	in all of Scripture, and it's right here in the Old Testament, in arguably the oldest

02:11:48 – 02:11:49:	book of the Old Testament.