Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm Wo.
Today we're going to be talking about uh kind of a grab
bag of doctrines that are in scripture that it at one point
the church held and then just sorta lost track of and today
has either actively repudiated them or just sort of forgotten about them
or pretends they don't exist because they're that's kind of awkward that
you know we have a a religion with some of this baggage.
Um following on last week's episode we talked about, you know, obviously
that as Christians we believe that the whole of scripture is suitable
for reproof and correction of error and for teaching.
So if there's something in the Bible that's not being taught, that's
not okay.
So at the outset I just wanna make clear that when Corey
and I are focusing on these things that you don't hear about
very much, it's not that we think that well the church doesn't
look quite right.
It should focus on all these things instead.
That's not the point.
We're not saying stop talking about the gospel, stop talking about the
cross, and start talking about these other arguably lesser doctrines.
The point that we are making is that if our claims of
truth are true, that that Christianity is sourced from God and is
eternal in its nature and unchanging, then if there are doctrines that
are blinking in and out of existence, something's wrong wrong between our
confession and the scripture that we claim to hold to.
So today we're going to talk about a handful of not really
connected things, but they are connected in the sense that we have
kind of just let them go by the wayside.
The uh the first doctrine we're going to talk about is the
doctrine of shaking the dust off your feet.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, um this is something that
Jesus directly commanded, and I'll quote that in a second.
And then it appears a couple times in Acts where it was
followed exactly as Jesus said it.
And then it just kind of vanishes.
I I can't remember ever hearing a pastor talk about it.
So we're going to begin there because I think it's one of
the most conspicuous examples of something that's a That's a clearly given
teaching that I Corey and I we we couldn't find examples of
it being upheld at any point in church history.
And so that's at least worth worth asking why.
So when Jesus sent the twelve out, he said, In whatever town
or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and
stay there until you depart.
As you enter the house, greet it.
And if the house is house is worthy, let your peace come
upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return
to you.
And if any one will not receive you or listen to your
words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that
house or town.
Truly I say to you, it will be more bearable on the
day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for
that town.
This is a passage that's repeated in the in the synoptic gospels
and it's told in slightly different ways.
that in totality makes it very clear that Jesus is saying: if
someone, if you take the gospel to someone and they reject it,
you are to curse them.
You are effectively to announce their damnation, to withdraw and to take
it elsewhere.
Now, to us today that sounds utterly shocking.
Like that's that's the antithesis of the gospel.
Like I said, I've never heard a pastor talk about this at
all. But Jesus said it, and then here's how the twelve responded
in Acts thirteen.
But the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the
leading men of the city, stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas,
and drove them out of their district, but they shook off the
dust from their feet against them, and went on to Iconium, and
the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
That's interesting because they weren't sad that they had to curse the
Jews in that town who rejected the the word of God.
They were rejoicing.
They were rejoicing that they were persecuted for the sake of Christ,
and they went on because they had other souls to reach who
would not reject the word of God.
So that was their response both to Jesus' command and to actually
implementing his command immediately after.
This was this was not many years after the command was given.
And again in Acts eighteen, when Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia,
Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that Christ
was that Christ was Jesus.
And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments
and said to them, Your blood be on your own heads, I
am innocent.
From now on I will go to the Gentiles.
Now that's even more explicit.
He's saying I brought the gospel, I brought the word of God
to you, you refuse to listen.
Now he didn't blaspheme, he didn't say damn you, as as is
recorded in uh Jude, when an angel was striving with the devil,
he refused to say damn you.
He said, May the Lord rebuke you.
And that's effectively what what Paul says here.
He says, Your blood be on your own heads.
I'm not guilty of the fact that you're going to hell for
rejecting us.
So that's twice an act where the disciples, the apostles, obeyed exactly
what Jesus said to
curse those who reject the gospel.
And yet today the the very notion of that uh really sets
our teeth on edge.
Like that's that's a it it it's pretty much unthinkable for a
Christian to speak in this way, in the way that Jesus spoke
and the way that the apostles acted.
Well
now that I'm thinking about it, it it really ties into a
misunderstanding, we'll be charitable, that we have in the modern church, most
people believe that you just keep giving others an infinite number of
chances. You keep going back, regardless of treatment, response, all of it,
you go back and you give another chance and another chance and
another chance.
And that's just not how things play out in scripture, and the
example that came to mind is probably an obvious one others will
have thought of it as well by now, and that's Pharaoh.
God did give Pharaoh chances to repent.
Pharaoh could have let the Israelites go.
Pharaoh could have seen these mighty works.
This is God, this is the Lord God.
Pharaoh didn't do that.
But God eventually hardens his heart and confirms him in his sin.
So it's not an infinite number of chances that you get at
some point.
It's the hardening of the heart or the shaking off the dust
from your feet.
And we've just totally abandoned that in the modern church.
As you said, I've never heard a pastor except when he has
read the passage say those words, and I've never heard anyone teach
about it.
and there it is, multiple times in scripture.
And as you mentioned, we even had trouble trying to find this
in the history of the church, not just the modern church.
This is something that we just we run right over it when
we encounter it in scripture.
It's you know, some people stumble over the truth, but they pick
themselves up and carry on their way.
And that's just what we've done with this teaching.
But we do find the exact opposite preach today.
Uh absolutely.
In the LCMS uh Concordia colleges have been closing recently because they've
been failures, because there have been no no people wanting to attend
anymore. And two in particular were closed, I think, in the last
five years.
Uh first Concordia Selma, which was a historically black college.
It was one of the earliest ones founded by the LCMS to
reach African Americans in the South.
And also the Bronxville College.
Those were closed because they were dismal failures.
They were dismal failures because those communities to which we had sought
to bring the Word of God and faithful teaching, roundly rejected it.
They wanted no part in it.
And yet for decades we poured good money after bad into those
places because they were black, ignoring places where there were others who
perhaps would have heard, but we never bothered to try.
We continue to scatter good seed on rock rocky and dead soil.
And when we finally close them, these two places, Selma and Bronxville,
are rallying claw cries for the race baiters in our own synod
who say look how racist these Lutherans are that they would close
the only two black colleges we have.
Well yes, we close them because those black people rejected God.
Why didn't we do it sooner?
Now, for anyone to hear that, like, that's just the most shocking,
hateful thing any man could possibly think, let alone say.
And yet, how is it different with what Jesus said?
When you look at his Jesus words, let me read them again.
If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake
off the dust from your feet when when you leave that house
or town, Jesus wasn't talking about a year or five years or
a decade or a century.
Jesus said, leave by the sunrise, the next day.
You leave the place and you curse them behind you.
Now, I am not advocating, we are not advocating that you go
and you try to share the gospel with someone, and the first
time they reject you, you say, okay, go to hell.
Not remotely what we're saying.
I again, I don't know what to say, except that what we
are telling people today is literally the opposite of what Jesus said.
And not only won't we say we said, we're going along with
it. So are we the church or not?
How is this fundamental teaching, what one of these passages in red
letters from Jesus, where did it go?
why is this scene is so insignificant that we can not only
delete it, but we can then contravene it in the advancement of
modern political goals.
I I think that as a as Christians we need to face
that. And again
the reason I gave the preface at the at the beginning of
this episode is we're not saying that I want to be a
church where we immediately go to people and if they don't like
what we say, you just turn tail and say, Well, screw those
guys. Not the point at all.
Obviously, there are people that need time to hear, but
what do you do with this?
You have to do something as a Christian, other than ignore it
or contramand it.
And yet today, those are the only two options we've been given.
Corey and I were talking about these things today because I think
maybe there's a third option.
Maybe we don't ignore scripture, maybe we don't contradict scripture scripture, maybe
we listen to it, and if scripture says that we have actually
been conducting ourselves in sinful ways, even when we did it with
a clean conscience, maybe we should take another look.
Maybe that rebuke and reproof and correction of error applies to us
too. Because if it doesn't, then it means that we're without sin.
And scripture says something about people who believe that as well.
And
we should also bear in mind we are actually causing harm to
some of these individuals.
Because what does it say in Mark?
It further goes on to say that you're shaking off the dust
as a testimony against them.
If you go to someone repeatedly and he repeatedly rejects the word
of God, that is worse for him than if he had heard
it once or never.
Because that is now high handed impenitent sin.
And so every time he hears the gospel and rejects it, that's
worse. He is making his eternity worse.
You are facilitating his making his eternity worse.
And so we have to bear in mind what exactly it is
that we're doing.
We're not really serving God when we're going out and repeatedly confirming
the impenitent in their sins.
We're not making anything better for anyone.
We are making it worse specifically for the person we are pretending
to attempt to reach.
And we're doing it for two reasons
that are the second topic we're going to talk about.
We want to give a winsome witness and we don't ever, ever,
ever want to hate, because those are the new commandments of the
church that that while there's scriptural warrant to some degree, the warrant
that is provided by those who advocate them isn't fundamentally scripture and
in in fact in many ways it's contradictory to what the word
says about hate and winsomeness.
Well
in the case of winsomeness, I actually have my ESV concordance right
here, so I'll go ahead and try to find that for us.
Oh the word whore certainly appears a lot in scripture.
Well
that's
not very winsome.
Almost two pages there actually.
Whore, whorings, whore, but that's a topic for another day, but here
we have
Wyn
Wynns Wine Wink Winnow
Winter
Weird. The Word winsome doesn't appear a single time in scripture, and
yet I constantly hear it.
Not so much from LCMS pastors, although every now and then I
do. But this is an evangelical thing in many ways.
But But the word literally doesn't appear.
And for those who think I'm playing fun little word games with
the ESV, I encourage you to go look at strongs for the
KJV. It's free, it's online.
So
this is just something that we've
well not we, but we as the church, as it were, have
made up out of whole cloth.
Because you have the verses that tell you to be persuasive, to
be ready and willing to give an answer But
what Winsom has come to mean in the church today is be
nice. It's just another way of saying don't be mean, don't tell
people they're sinners, it's just antinomianism, and it's all it's not even
gospel because they aren't really hearing the gospel if they never hear
the law.
But it's just be nice to people and then maybe at some
point slip in a little bit of Jesus.
I'm
just bringing up the uh verse in Titus, which is the least
uh winsome thing you could say to somebody.
There are a lot of good examples of not so winsome in
the modern sense things in scripture.
One
of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said Cretans are always
liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.
This testimony is true.
Therefore, rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith,
not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and commands of people who turn
away from the truth.
Now rebuking sharply is it's pretty much forbidden by by internet Christians,
by e Christians, by people who proudly wave the flag of their
faith while proclaiming words that are directly contradictory to scripture and seeking
to buy consciences would they do so?
Now, the case to be made for the the notion of winsomeness
is that you shouldn't behave in such a way that brings ill
repute to the faith.
And scripture says that repeatedly, and we agree with that.
I we I I personally do not have a clean mouth in
private. We keep this podcast clean so as not to give offense
and so as not to be shameful.
Now, that's not me pretending that that is not one of my
sins. It's demonstrating to the world and to myself that I can
be better than than I am, and that I sometimes even try
to be.
And so the the notion of giving a winsome witness is not
a bad thing per se.
The problem is that it becomes a binding spell that just gets
cast by these people into discourse whenever someone says something that upsets
them, suddenly the winsomeness command has been violated.
Like well, if scripture says that some people should be sharply rebuked,
maybe we need to discuss when the sharp rebuke is to come.
And how many times the rebuke may be given gently before it
must be given sharply.
Again, these are questions that we would have faithful pastors discussing if
they could even get into the fight to begin with.
But when the only discussions and accusations are coming from those who
seek to silence dissent, where the dissent is coming from scripture, we
frankly have bigger problems in people's tone.
And I think that's what a boils down to is that there
are people who want to tone police and they want to call
things hateful because as long as you're focused on the emotional content
of the disagreement, you're distracted from the fact that the disagreement is
about what's in scripture.
And you and I, Corey, are always focused on scripture.
And we will vigorously defend scripture.
And I generally try to be nice and to be polite and
be to direct and to the point at the beginning with someone.
But if someone comes back to me with slander inappropriate and disgust,
I'm not going to back down.
And that makes them even angrier and more filled with rage because
they're used to you their name calling silencing those who would question
them. And when the name calling spells don't work, it just gets
nastier and nastier.
And
it's unfortunate that the observer seeing, you know, particularly conduct online where
you see people talking back and forth, if things, if the tone
turns ugly, an observer who has not paid attention from the beginning
will just assume that it's a bad scene and it's it's shameful
and it never should have happened.
And they won't bother to unwind where did the evil enter the
discussion? Where did the slander enter the discussion?
Where did the dispute of scripture enter into the discussion?
Because that is where the sin began.
And if there's a sharp sharp rebuke that follows someone blaspheming God,
that's not sin.
That's obedience to God.
And that should be present.
Now, the degree again to which you rebuke someone should be a
function of of the situation and perhaps the context, but the rebuke
needs to come.
And just as as you mentioned a minute ago, in the case
where we go back and we go back and we go back
to people who roundly reject God entirely, that is to their condemnation.
The same thing is true if you fail to rebuke someone in
those circumstances.
That's exactly what's going wrong.
Failing to rebuke is not Christian.
Now, the fact that scripture says rebuke is not licensed for someone
to just be a jerk, but it's also not license for someone
to be a coward and to say nothing when the faith is
on the line and when God's Word is on the line.
And we need as Christians to find the balance between those two
things. I'm not I'm not saying balance in some sort of centrist
way, but
if you can fall off either side of the horse, let's stay
on the horse, but the horse involves rebuking error.
It sometimes involves speech that is not winsome.
It sometimes involves polemics.
And if that is obedience to God, then we're gonna obey.
And if you wanna if you want to be involved in the
discussions where there are sharp rebukes and and polemics involved and you
don't like the tone, get involved and use the tone that you
want to see used because your absence allows those who do things
in ways you don't like to define the terms of the discussion.
And if if Corey and I are doing it wrong, then pastors
who agree with these things, who can say things better than us,
need to get in front of these things and say them.
We're crying out as stones.
We're not crying out as pastors.
We are men who do not have a vocation to
rebuke or correct error in the sense that a pastor does.
And we're doing it precisely because it's not being done elsewhere.
So
I'm happy to step back and to let those who are called
to rebuke do so.
But if they're not going to do it, it's going to happen.
And I will do it with a clean conscience and with God
as my judge because I answer to him, I don't answer to
someone who is offended or upset by the tone of my voice
when I said something.
A
lot of the problem stems from the fact that modern pastors and
just modern men in general, don't want to be confrontational or controversial.
And when it comes to the church, when it comes to scripture,
and also politics, but that's a discussion for another time, another place,
if you If you are never controversial, if you are never confrontational,
well, one, you have the friendship with the world issue, which we'll
get into, if not in this episode, then another one in this
series, but you also have the issue of you are just slowly
losing. You all you've done is seed the field, you've given up,
and the world, sin, death, and the devil are going to flood
in and take over that field.
And that's what so many modern Christians have done.
They've just totally abandoned the field.
They are entirely derelict in their duty.
And
it it brings to mind some of the things we've discussed when
it comes to what could uncharitably be called a witch test.
But if you make two offensive statements and one is outright blasphemous,
and one is simply strongly against the moris of our current culture?
Most people, and including most pastors, will react more strongly to the
second. You can tell someone Jesus Christ is not the Son of
God, he is the first the first
of creation, he is the greatest creation.
And Christians will react to that.
That's outright blasphemous.
If you say that seriously, they will react less strongly to that
than if you say something that is simply not politically correct.
And that's a very real problem in the church.
Winsomeness is not the standard of what is true or what is
right. Truth is.
Something is true or it is false, and it's not a matter
of whether or not it is said in a pleasant way.
And quite frankly, I think men in general should learn to be
a little more combative when it comes to these things, perhaps locate,
acquire a spine, whatever it takes.
But specifically in the case of pastors, one thing that comes to
mind when we're talking about this would be Ezekiel, and I'm sure
any pastors listening probably already know what paragraph I'm about to read
And at the end of seven days the word of the Lord
came to me, Son of Man, I have made you a watchman
for the house of Israel.
Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them
warning from me.
If I say to the wicked, you shall surely die, and you
give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his
wicked way, in order to save his life.
That wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I
will require at your hand.
But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from
his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die for his
iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul.
Again, if a righteous person turns from his righteousness and commits injustice,
and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die, because
you have not warned him, he shall die for his sin, and
his righteous deeds that he has done shall not be remembered, but
his blood I will require at your hand.
But if you warn the righteous person not to sin, and he
does not sin, he shall surely live, because he took warning, and
you will have delivered your soul.
Now of course this applies to Christian men generally, but this applies
specifically to pastors, because pastors are the watchman, the shepherd, for the
house of Israel, for the church.
And so they are going to be held to this standard, and
so when there are things in scripture that they simply ignore, gloss
over, refuse to talk about, shove under the rug, One day they
will answer to God at the stricter judgment for what they did
and what they failed to
do.
And that passage from Ezekiel, which Paul certainly knew well, is exactly
what he was referencing in Acts eighteen when he said, Your blood
be on your own heads, I am innocent.
he knew what he was talking about.
He was referring to that.
He proclaimed the word of God faithfully, and those who rejected it
are damned of their own accord.
He did not fail in his duty in his office.
He upheld it, and he upheld it by cursing them, and by
turning his back on them, and by leaving, and by going to
the Gentiles, who would ultimately hear him.
The uh the winsomeness question is is tied really directly to
love and hate and how really the the winsomeness question is uh
it's an emotional content question.
It becomes not as you said, not about truth or falsity.
It becomes about did peop someone's feelings get hurt?
Because if someone's feelings got hurt, if they felt excluded or if
they felt like they weren't understood, something really bad has happened.
There's never any question that well, did they lie?
Did they deceive?
Did they falsely speak about what God said?
That should be the greater f concern for the Christian because
yes, if you're harming someone emotionally in a way that causes them
not to be able to hear the truth, you can certainly do
that wrong.
But the flip side of that is that if hearing the truth
harms them emotionally, they're evil people.
And you need to break them with the law.
And that's gonna hurt.
when iron sharpens iron, there's sparks and there's heat.
That's what should should happen when men discuss these things, so that
the truth may be proven by that which survives the discussion.
And emotion and feelings shouldn't have anything to do with it.
And yet
these these questions get cloaked under the misapprehension of what love means.
And this is this is really probably an episode unto itself, but
just briefly, the the notion of Christian love today has been co-opted
by Satan.
I've mentioned before the love is love slogan that basically encompasses all
manner of sexual depravity under the sun.
Thing things that are unthinkable and unrepeatable are
called love.
And it's hate if you don't uphold that sort of love.
Well, is that from God?
That's fundamentally the question.
Because love is one of the properties of God.
It flows from him.
God does not have love.
God is love.
It flows out of his nature.
It is part of his nature.
And the the thing that Christians don't want to understand or don't
even notice in scripture is how frequently the polarity of the words
that are being used makes clear what's going on.
One example of this is in the Old Testament, there are various
passages where God calls things abominations.
And it's phrased in one of three ways.
God will say that something is an abomination, period, or he will
say it is an abomination unto him.
Or the third option is he will say it shall be an
abomination unto you.
And in those cases he was referring specifically to the Israelites.
Now the first two are synonymous.
For God to say that's an abomination or say that's an abomination
to me means exactly the same thing.
For God to say that's an abomination to you means something completely
different. And this is made clear in Acts when Peter had the
vision, where God hold told him to kill and to eat unclean
animals, and he was horrified.
He said, Lord, I've never t eaten anything unclean, nothing has ever
touched my lips that was unclean.
And God said to him that everything that I have made is
clean, which is consistent with what's said in Genesis chapters one and
two, that God saw that it was very good.
God created nothing unclean.
So when people, particularly non-Christians, or people who think they're Christian but
they don't really have the Holy Spirit when they're reading scripture, when
they look at those passages in Exodus and in Leviticus and elsewhere
and see God saying that shellfish are unclean or abominations or or
two kinds of fabric woven together are an abomination.
They ignore the to whom, because in each of those passages where
God is saying this created thing is an abomination, God says very
specifically every time, this shall be an abomination unto you, O Israel.
Now what does that mean?
Abomination it's tied to abhorrence.
it's died to revulsion.
The the response that you should have to an abomination should be
as though you just smelled a cadaver.
It should be something so putrid and vile and contrary to your
essence, the you have to flee the room and try not to
throw up.
That's what an abomination is.
Now that's the reason that Peter had that response when God said,
hey, eat this stuff.
He was horrified.
He wanted to flee.
He wanted, he's like, I don't, I would never do that.
It's revolting.
And God clarified that no, that was within the ceremonial law to
preserve Israel as a people unto himself.
But it did not change the nature of shellfish or polyester or
any of the other things that are used as memes today to
either illustrate that God is capricious or to illustrate that Christianity is
just stupid.
When God says something something is an abomination to him, it means
exactly what I just said about putrescence in in a corpse.
That is the reaction that we should all have to anything that
is an abomination to God.
And that includes things like sodomy, it includes things like usury, which
we'll talk about here in a minute.
Those things God says are an abomination unto him, that he is
revolted by them.
Now that's the flip side of love.
That is hate.
Godly hate is against that which is contrary to God's nature.
And this is a very crucial distinction that that Christians don't really
think about and don't understand.
When we hear terms like love and hate, we hear emotion.
We hear someone talking about feelings.
That's not what God is talking about.
He's not talking about feelings.
When he says I love something or I hate something, he is
saying this thing is perfectly in accord with my nature and my
desire, or he's saying the opposite.
Now, when God so loved us, it was in spite of our
fallen nature, but it was for that very reason that he gave
us Christ's sacrifice on the cross, so that covered in Christ's blood,
we were restored to the perfect nature that He loved in the
first place.
So it's not contradictory to say that God hates us according to
our sin and yet loves us according to who he made us
to be.
And God does hate our sin and he hates us for sinning.
And he also simultaneously loves us because we were created in his
image before it fell.
And he loved us so much that he said That he sacrificed
his only son on the cross to fix it.
That is love.
That is his love for us, and it is his love for
creation. The hate is equally there.
And when people, when Christians talk about hate, well, we don't really
talk about it not in a scriptural way, but we should think
of hate in terms of that which is contrary to God's nature,
that which is abhorrent.
So when there is a sodomite on Twitter who is embraced and
not criticized or whatever, like anything that God finds a boring, anything
that is sinful, and that's the thing, like there are things that
are particularly egregious to God.
I think perhaps the the fruit of the of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil is the first example of this.
God it didn't use this exact word, but he effectively said, that
fruit shall be an abomination to you.
It's not for you.
You don't touch it.
It's not yours.
It wasn't that it was unclean, is that God had not given
it to him.
Perhaps he hadn't given it to him yet.
We don't know what it would have played out.
Maybe that fruit would have given it to him after they'd been
taught. We'll never know.
Or maybe we'll know in in in heaven.
We're not gonna know in this world, because Adam went the other
way. He embraced the abomination that God had had outlined, and he
became an abomination to God by doing it, and God had to
kill him, and God had to kill every one of us, so
that we would die
so that we could be redeemed.
Because and that's what that's what Genesis says when God cast them
out of the garden, it was so that they would die both
as punishment and to make their redemption possible.
So the hatred of the evil and the And the love of
the object of
God's creation occur at the same time in the fallen world.
And God's love is to redeem that which he hates according to
his perfect nature, and to remove all of the hateful things, all
of the abominations from the world, so that when the new heavens
and the new earth are created, there will be only things which
accord with God's perfect will, and there will be no more hate,
because there will be nothing left that is contrary to God's nature.
And that's the fundamental distinction between love and hate.
It's not emotional.
It's whether or not something is contrary to God's eternal will
In the modern sense, in modern usage, the term love is very
much akin is of a kind with the the issue of winsomeness
we were just discussing, because love today, what modern men mean when
they use it, is permissiveness.
It means I let you do whatever makes you happy, makes you
feel good, and you do the same in return.
It's permissiveness.
And of course, you're also supposed to approve of it because that
approval additionally makes that person happy and feel good.
And that's why it often comes up with the issue of sodomy.
So Leviticus eighteen twenty two, you shall not lie with a man
as with a woman, it is an abomination.
And so you mentioned the revulsion that Christians should have to things
that are an abomination, and normal men have an inherent revulsion to
male homosexuality.
And it is the kind of reaction that you have to, as
you said, a corpse or rotting meat or rancid garbage, that is
the actual visceral reaction that functioning men have to sodomy, to male
homosexuality, and that is correct.
That is how Christians should respond to these things.
Because it is an abomination.
In and of itself it is a wicked, evil thing.
It is something that God detests that God hates, and so as
Christians, we should hate it.
Because we are supposed to hate the things that God hates and
love the things that God loves.
And that's just not what is meant by love or even hate
these days.
Again, love is permissiveness, and hate is just
being mean.
Because that's the cardinal sin.
It's the the cardinal virtue is niceness and the cardinal sin is
being mean, is meanness.
That's how the modern world functions, and that's just that's nowhere in
scripture. That's not It's utterly Christian.
It's utterly
feminized.
Oh
yes, it's absolute.
That's why well that's why so many men leave the church, because
if you have a pastor who stands up there and just tells
you to be nice all day, what does that have to do
with anything of any importance or value?
If women want to be nice all day, fine, that's that's different.
There are different things in the nature of men, the nature of
women, masculinity, femininity, but
If Christianity is just be nice, I I can get that anywhere
else. Christianity's not a matter of being nice, it's a matter of
the truth, it's a matter of we serve the one true God.
That's what Christianity is.
And again, we could we could talk about the
little games that modern translations play with Dulos, because that is related
to serving the one true God, but that's a discussion for another
episode.
Yep.
the niceness thing and the fact that girls are much more focused
on harmony is a function of their domain.
You don't want strife in your in your home.
You want everyone to get along.
You want there to be accord.
You want there to be agreement.
You want peace and quiet.
And that's a blessing when you have it.
Scripture's clear about that.
But to apply those same rules to when there is a dr
a tranny drag demon story hour at your local library for children,
the time for niceness is over.
And it's not a domain for women to do anything.
The women should stay home, and the men should go out and
should get angry.
They should be revolted, they should be filled with a righteous perfect
hatred. Scripture uses the term perfect hatred in uh Psalm 1, I
believe 139, where it specifically talks about God's enemies.
An enemy friend enemy thing is another thing that we just get
wrong. Like we're we're living in a post Mr.
Rogers version of Christianity where Mr.
Rogers went around and like his his catchphrase was won't you be
my neighbor?
As though neighbor were a sort of sanctified emotional feeling or bond.
That's pure nonsense.
Neighbor has to do with your physical location.
the question in the Good Samaritan parable, who is my neighbor, what
did God say?
He said the guy who's right in front of you.
It had nothing to do with the race of the man or
the difference in their race.
It was the fact that the man who was injured was directly
in front of him.
They were neighbors because they were adjacent.
Those words are synonyms.
And so when Mr.
Rogers came along and said, well, anyone can be my neighbor if
I like them.
That's not what neighbor means.
But that shifting of the Overton window like we talked about mass
last week, well suddenly everyone in the world is your neighbor if
you like them, if you're winsome, if you love them enough, then
they're all your neighbors.
And then the word means nothing.
Because if the man six thousand miles away is my neighbor just
as much as the man who lives three hundred yards away, where
is my duty?
If my duty is equally to both of them, I can't do
the same things for the man six thousand miles away as the
man three hundred yards away.
But that's what that premise is telling me.
And where am I going to spend my energy?
I'm going to focus on the guy further away because you know
what? I can write checks and I can tweet and I can
do really lazy stuff to help quote unquote that guy who's six
thousand miles away.
Meanwhile, my neighbor has a broken leg and needs help around the
house and I didn't even know 'cause I haven't got bothered to
talk to him in three months.
But since the guy in Africa is just as much as my
neighbor as he is and I'm doing something for the other guy,
you know, I I've done my job.
I've taken care of my neighbor.
No. That that's pure evil.
that's a redefinition of a term that actually meant something, and when
we let it cease to mean something, it opened the door for
Satan. Uh C.
S. Lewis is a terrible theologian and people who like him generally
have awful theological views, but he was a decent fiction writer.
And
there's a there's a passage in the screw tape letters that's brilliant
where the the demon who is charged with trying to steal this
man's soul did precisely this.
He tried to make the man's affinity greater for the man who
was so far away that he could never actually do anything for
him than for the man right in front of him.
Because the demon knew that that was the way to separate his
soul from God because God wants you to look after the person
right in front of you.
It doesn't matter if you like them.
It doesn't matter if if you're different than them.
If they're in front of you in that moment, they're your neighbor
and you take care of them in that moment.
Now, that also doesn't imply the neighbor is a permanent state of
affairs. When the Samaritan found the man on the road, he took
him to an innkeeper and gave him some money and said, take
care of the guy, I gotta go.
And I'll pay you more if you need more when I come
back. And they ceased to be neighbors.
He did his duty to him by taking care of his physical
needs, his immediate needs, but he didn't say, hey, come live in
my house.
You're well, we'll be neighbors forever now.
He's like, no.
the adjacency, the physical proximity in that moment was God giving him
a chance to obey God by tending to the one who is
in need.
Just as God tends to all of our needs, that is the
lesson. The lesson is absolutely not that every man on earth is
my neighbor.
Well
now we've gone and done it, we've attacked Mr Rogers and everyone
loves him.
But of course they love him because they don't know anything about
Christianity. Yeah.
So they think that he was a great Christian because he was
nice.
Yeah. He he's peak winsomeness.
he's the poster child for winsomeness.
He's what
He's what everyone today thinks Christianity is supposed to look and sound
like. And yes, he was meek and he was gentle and he
was loving, loving to children.
That's wonderful.
That is good.
But that is not the totality of the Christian life.
If there's a drag queen story hour at your local library, you
don't send Mr.
Rogers. You send one someone who has all the qualities that frankly
Mr. Rogers lacked because he was not a complete man.
And maybe the man who can get pissed off and who can
shout and get in someone's face is not also a complete man
if he can also be gentle.
But that doesn't make his qualities less sanctified, less Christian than the
things that Mr.
Rogers was missing.
And again, these are the conversations that are that are missing from
the Christian faith today, because as the Overton window was shifted and
Christianity was subtly redefined to be about what's nice and what's loving
in, as you said, utterly tolerant and permissive ways, where where Christianity
means giving license to the world to do that which it's already
doing and then kind of trying to explain, well, you know, maybe
there's a better way.
Like no.
What you're doing in your bedroom makes me puke.
It's vile.
And y you had mentioned the the differences.
When something is an abomination to God, that means it's contrary to
nature. And there are numerous places in scripture where it is made
clear that even pagans understand this.
And that's absolutely the case.
You don't need to be a Christian to be revolted by the
behavior of two sodomites if you see it.
That is a human reaction.
And it's not a sinful reaction.
That's the distinction.
We have
we have a human nature that is in accord with God's will,
and we have a fallen nature that is the enemy of God's
will. We have both of them simultaneously.
Because while the image of God was damaged, it was not utterly
removed. Our will is set against God's will by virtue of our
sinful inheritance, but that doesn't make us utterly blind and deaf to
God's will as it's manifest in creation.
And so there are some things that are worse sins than others.
the man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart
has sinned.
He has committed a damnable sin, but he because he desired that
which was not his, because she's not his wife.
So
his sin is in accord with his nature as a man and
it is contrary to his sanctified nature because it was misdirected.
So the
the element that was a sin was not that he desired a
woman but he desired a woman who is not given to him.
For a man to desire another man violates two different principles.
One, he's desiring that which is not given to him, and two,
he's desiring that which is fundamentally contrary to the nature of the
universe, which is contrary to God's design.
That is a far worse sin.
And Christians need to understand that there are worse sins.
Scripture is replete with examples where God says the greater sin is
yours, the lesser sin is yours.
That doesn't mean that all sins are not damning.
The sin that damns us all is that Adam ate the wrong
piece of fruit?
It's the least significant sin probably in the history of all sins.
It's hard to sin a sin that's less sinful than that, and
yet it damns us all.
We all die because of it.
So saying that one sin is more sinful than another is not
saying that, well, you know, maybe that's okay.
You can do that and it's not a big deal.
They're all a big deal.
Some are worse deals than others.
And if Christians cannot speak in that way, you cannot possibly reach
the man who is behaving in a way that is destroying both
his body and his soul, which is how how Romans begins, that
they were given over to their their nature because it was so
abhorrent. And
it's okay for Christians to talk this way.
It's necessary for Christians to talk this way appropriately at the right
time and in the right place and with the right words, it
is not okay for Christians to refuse to talk this way at
all and to say, Oh, well you sin and I sin and
we're all sinners, thank God for Jesus.
No, absolutely not.
Some sins are worse than others, and they're physically destructive to those
who are doing them.
The man who looks at a girl with lust in his heart
has sinned, he's not destroyed anything.
All if he marries that girl, he can look at her with
lust for the rest of his life, and that is perfectly sanctified
obedience to God.
The man who looks in with lust in his heart at another
man can only ever bring destruction and damnation by that act.
There's no possible way to sanctify it.
It can only be sanctified by its complete destruction of the desire
and of the sinful impetus to do that.
There's no way in which that can be sanctified.
The lust of a man for a woman is sanctified when it
is with the bounds of matrimony.
And that's the fundamental difference.
And to say that all sins are equal is to deny one
of the central tenets of the faith.
This goes back to what we were talking about in past episodes
about the the Lutheran focus on justification.
We get sanctification right and then we kill everything else in the
Christian life with it.
Yes, if you sin once, if you if you don't quote unquote
sin at all but you were born with sin, you're still damned.
That's not the proper way to look at, but some people think
that way.
Even if, even for if for the sake of argument, a man
lived a perfect life, because he was born a man, he would
still be damned because he inherited sin.
And yet the sins that occur in the human life can be
worse, some can be worse than others.
And if we can't speak in that way, we can't warn those
of their tremendous wickedness.
it goes back to what Jesus said when he sent the twelve
out. That passage said, Truly I say to you, it will be
more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom
and Gomorrah than for that town.
Now, that's Jesus testifying to the fact that some some sins are
worse than others.
The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were worse than the sins of
their neighbors, you can tell, because God didn't destroy their neighbors.
Those cities were wiped off the map and not other cities.
It was a worse sin and it was destroyed in that manner.
And yet God says that these towns that reject his apostles are
even more wicked than Sodom and Gomorrah, because they have heard the
word and they have refused to s to believe, and that is
a worse sin than an abomination.
That is how Christians speak of these things.
And
that actually touches on one of two ways in which it should
be incredibly obvious for Christians
that certain sins are worse than others.
If you reject the gospel, what are you violating?
You're violating the first table.
If you are sexually abusing your neighbor, you're violating the second table.
The Ten Commandments are hierarchical.
Violating the ones higher up the list is worse than violating the
ones further down the list.
So it is worse to have a false god than it is
to steal from your neighbor.
That should just be obvious to the Christian.
And even to the pagan it should be obvious that it is
worse to murder your neighbor than to steal his cow.
So we know this.
This is obvious to just human beings, it's obvious to everyone.
But also in Scripture, there is the unforgivable sin.
Well it's pretty obvious the sin that cannot be forgiven is worse
than all of the ones that can be forgiven.
So there is at least one sin that's worse than all the
others. But again, there is a hierarchy.
There are sins that are worse than other sins.
And there are parts of hell that are worse than other parts
of hell.
Yes, one sin is sufficient to send you to hell for eternity,
if you are not forgiven and in Christ.
But again, there are worse parts of hell.
You would much rather be in the least terrible part than the
most terrible part, whatever that happens to be.
And you mentioned the Imago Dei and the nature of man and
what original sin does.
And because that gets botched in a lot of traditions, I'll actually
add to the show notes, the Book of Concord handles that at
length, does a very good job of explaining what is the nature
of man, what is the corruption of the nature of man post
fall. And so I'll I'll link to that in the show notes.
Uh
so next we're gonna talk about uh usury.
This is uh one of the commandments that was given in the
Old Testament and then was upheld in in the New Testament church
and was it's an example of one of the earlier
doctrines that was practiced for a long time and then was abandoned.
So we're trying to kind of go in order.
So we began with shaking the dust off your feet.
Jesus commanded it, the apostles obeyed it, and then we don't really
couldn't find a record of anyone obeying it after that.
Um
Usery was something that basically in the Old Testament, usury when a
Christian speaks of it historically, there is no distinction whatsoever between usury
and charging interest.
In other words, if I give you $100
and I expect you to give me $100 back, that's a loan.
If I expect you to give me $105 back, that's a loan
and it's also usury.
What God says to the Israelites is that that is prohibited to
do among yourselves.
Now he did make the exception that it was permissible for the
Israelites, for the Hebrews, to charge interest to aliens, which
I think actually illustrates the fact that it is an element of
warfare. there are many things that the God permitted his people to
do to aliens that were fundamentally destructive and hospital hostile.
And usury is one of them, charging interest is one of them.
No, it's interesting that God prohibited usury among the Hebrews because
it was common well but well before their day, um, or contemporaneous
to them, uh the the code of code of Hammurabi and other
contemporaneous records demonstrate that the charging of interest was was common in
the in the old in fifteen hundred BC it was it was
typical. Um some of the very first records we have are financial
records that were preserved and we can see the interest payments.
So we actually have we have better documentation of the type of
usury that was employed by pagan nations than in some cases we
have about their religions because the usury required adequate record keeping.
Uh which is we kind
of do know their religion then.
Yes. Yeah, I mean that's that that's really what it boils down
to. It's and the the percentage
are noteworthy.
Yeah. Yeah, it it's interesting when you look back to you know
fifteen hundred BC and so
the interest rates that were typical were tip were usually like twelve
to twenty percent, which is funny because that's literally the typical interest
rate range for a credit card today.
So in four thousand years of human history, we When interest is
being charged, it's pretty much always been in the same range.
Um and what God does is he condemns that out of hand
and says that you it's an abomination, you're not to do that
to your brother.
When When some of the early philosophers in in the West tac
tackled the subject, uh Aristotle and others, they actually objected on principle
to the charging of interest on philosophical grounds.
They took the approach that correctly that money is a medium of
exchange. It's not inherently productive.
It's only made productive
by the work that someone does with it.
And so their their premise was that if I give you a
hundred dollars and I say I want a hundred and five dollars
back, the money didn't r reproduce, the money is sterile.
And if I'm asking for five dollars more than you gave me,
I'm effectively stealing from you.
That was the the philosophical approach that was taken.
And it's one that was generally held in the early church from
the Council of Nicaea up basically through Thomas Aquinas.
That was more or less the view in most of the Christian
church was that Christians should not charge interest to other Christians.
It wasn't and it wasn't seen as is Judaizing.
It wasn't seen as, well here's this one Old Testament law that
we're just gonna keep round.
Um it was that there was understood that there was a principle
again the the principle of harm being done that it would be
excluded, you you wouldn't do this harm to your brother, you can
do it to an alien.
Well
it was seen as moral law, not ceremonial or civil law for
Israel. And so it was retained into the the New Testament church.
Yeah. And you'd mentioned in prep the the the Latter in Council,
I believe called it a heresy.
Yeah,
I mean it it was called a heresy and those who practiced
it were denied a Christian burial.
Which in some cases would have meant you had to be buried
outside the city like unclean garbage.
This wasn't something that the the church this was not a an
ancillary issue or something out on the fringe.
This was just something that was at the heart of Christianity, and
we all agreed this was a sinful, vile, evil practice, and we
will not engage in it.
Now, of course, that changes when we get to the Middle Ages,
as we'll get into in a minute, but that was the consensus
of the church for well over a thousand years.
Yeah.
Before you get into the history, I just want to briefly mention
a passage from Luke six where
Jesus is is preaching.
He says, If you love those who love you, what benefit is
that to you?
For even sinners love those who love them?
And if you do good to those who do good to you,
what benefit is that to you?
For even sinners do the same.
And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive,
what credit is that for you?
Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount.
Belove your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return,
and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of
the most high, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the
evil, be merciful even as your father is merciful.
So So while that doesn't directly discuss usury, the charging of interest,
it is worth noting that when Jesus said even sinners do this,
he was talking about lending, simply to receive back that which you
had been given.
Now
again back to the s philosophical point about the sterility of money,
if you ask to borrow my chainsaw because you have you need
to do a bunch of clearing on your on your property and
you don't return your chain my chainsaw for a year.
When the year elapses and you return the chainsaw, it would be
insane for me to demand that you give me two chainsaws.
You'd stare at me like like I had two heads.
And yet if I give you a hundred dollars and you come
back a year later, it's today in our minds it's seen as
perfectly reasonable that I would ask for more than I lent.
And Jesus is commanding the Christian: not only should we not ask
for more than we're lent, but we should forgive our debts as
we wish God to forgive our debts.
That if you have someone who to whom you've given something, expect
nothing in return.
And therefore, if he gives you something in return, you had been
blessed, and he has been blessed by doing something good to you.
But if he doesn't give you anything back, if he keeps the
money that you lent to him, wipe the slate clean.
That is the the essence of the Christian teaching on finance, which
goes a million miles away from whether or not you should charge
interest. And it goes directly to the fact that if you give
someone something, don't expect a back period.
And this is in the s this is in the Lord's Prayer.
And I I kind of regret that we replaced give forgive us
our debts as we forgive our debtors with forgive us our trespasses,
because they mean the same thing.
They're different connotations slightly, but fundamentally, sin is debt.
When Christ paid the price
for our cross, you know, listen to that language.
It's the language we use every time we speak about this.
Christ paid the price for our sin on the cross.
He didn't pay an infinite price for infinite sins.
He spayed he paid the specific price for the specific sins the
specific sinners committed in time, both before and after and even during
his crucifixion.
So So this is why the the Eastern Orthodox rejection of penal
substitutionary atonement is so fundamentally evil, because they fundamentally deny that there
is a price to be paid, and therefore they deny that Christ
paid it.
Because if there was no price, then there they're they're EOs that
actually say that Jesus died on the cross because it made the
story more dramatic.
That there was no there was no pay price to be paid
there, because God isn't a God with a ledger.
Well, scripture is abundantly clear that there is a ledger, both of
our names and of the sins that we've committed against God, and
they're each accounted for individually.
Now again, as we say in every episode we get into these
dangerous areas, that's not to suggest the works righteousness is in play.
No Christian will ever believe that he can make up for even
one of his sins, just as Adam couldn't make up for eating
the wrong piece of fruit, and yet the ledger that includes the
sins, all of them were checked off on the cross simultaneously and
for all time.
God paid Christ paid the eternal price in three hours on the
cross because he's God.
He can absorb an infinity in a finite time because he is
above and beyond all human comprehension.
Nevertheless, the price, the specific price, just like there's a price tag
on a piece of fruit, the price was paid.
We
may as well take the opportunity to cover how the the ledger
works in this case because some people will undoubtedly listen and be
in churches that do not teach this clearly.
And so how this works is God's ledger tracks all of your
sin and all of your works.
For the Christian, the sins are not counted against you, because Christ
paid the full price of sin for every one on the cross,
and so your sins are blotted out, your works remain, your works
are counted as good because you are in Christ.
Therefore you do get credit for your good works, but again, the
sins are blotted out.
Now in the case of the unbeliever, it is the inverse.
Your sins remain because you are not in Christ, and you have
chosen to pay the price for those sins in eternity because the
debt of sin is infinite, hell is infinite, you will be there
forever, paying back the price, the debt of those sins, and your
works count for nothing.
Because the status of the person who does the works matters.
Sinners cannot have good works.
If you are a sinner, not in Christ, and you go out
and feed the homeless.
That's a good work.
You don't get credit, because of your status as a sinner not
in Christ, not forgiven.
And so it is only Christians whose good works are counted.
And so that's how this actually works in reality.
And you mentioned the I have to plug German because of course,
but you mentioned the fact that we use forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I like that in German it's Schuld, and Schuld is both trespass,
guilt, debt, obligation.
It's all of it in one term, and so you you don't
have to choose between the two, as we've sort of had to
do in English.
My father was taught it forgive us our debts as we forgive
our debtors, but obviously most Lutherans use trespass and trespassers.
But
again, that's a good illustration of the fact that it's the same
thing. It is absolutely
yes. It's the same it's the same conception.
It's just in modern parlance, we've pared down the senses of trespass
and trespasser.
And so we we don't think of the fullness of what the
term means.
It was chosen because it does actually mean the fullness of the
concept in scripture.
It's just to modern ears we don't typically hear all of that.
We should.
Pastors and teachers need to teach people so that they know that.
And if you read scripture it's incredibly obvious, the legal language is
everywhere. It's spoken of God as judge, and it's his courtroom, and
there's a ledger, and there's a record, and there's evidence, and this
is a legal issue.
And yes, as mentioned, the EO hate that.
They say the West is too legalistic and too rationalistic.
And no, we're just quoting scripture.
God is your judge.
Judges have a courtroom.
Courts have prosecutors and defenders and you hear evidence, and there are
convictions. That's how this works.
And
there are penalties.
There are specific penalties that are tailored to the crime.
Which in this case is infinite, because the person harmed is God,
and so infinite.
We'll get into that another time, that's philosophical.
So even up to the time of Thomas Aquinas it was just
settled a settled matter in the church that you did not charge
interest, at least when it came to Christians and others within your
own nation, even to non Christians in your own nation.
Members of other nations, there was still some debate on that because
obviously in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy, you're permitted to charge foreigners
interest, Deuteronomy 23.
But one of the examples given by Thomas Aquinas, one of the
reasons he argued against it was saying it would be like charging
twice. It would be like charging a man for a bottle of
wine and then charging him again when he wants to drink.
But where things started to go off the rails, and I know
somewhere there's probably a papist listening who's going to be excredibly gleeful
and clap, but don't do it too quickly because it comes back
around. It goes off the rails a little bit before the Reformation
actually, but Luther whiffs this one a bit, but Calvin is really
the one who opens the door to the modern practice of usury.
It seems like what Luther was doing was trying to take a
conservative, but not a hardline stance, which is notable and odd for
Luther, but a conservative stance with regard to the charging of interest.
Because in his day, you had the beginnings of a market economy
starting up, you had the expansion of the economy, you had more
trade, and so merchants were charging interest.
They were setting terms on their contracts and things like this.
Calvin sort of took the position that merchants could set the terms
on their contracts, and so there was some level of interest they
could charge.
Luther was trying to, again, take a conservative position with regard to
debates the scholastics had been having.
They settled on this five percent figure I don't actually remember or
I couldn't find why, but there was a lot of wrangling over
five percent interest was the number they decided on.
And so he was taking a conservative position with regard to that
and trying to limit how much interest was charged, he still had
comments that were very much against any charging of interest, basically calling
it all usury.
But this is where we start to see less of the hard
line stance against all interest of all kinds.
And from there it's rapidly downhill, once the philosophers and the economists
get a hold of it and the church starts listening to them
them instead of to the word of God.
I think it's important to note that
that during in the in m the medieval period there were periods
of time where
Interest was permissible.
Again, never among Christians, but this is when the Jews became inextricably
linked to banking because the prohibition was on Christians not charging interest.
Jews were permitted to charge interest because, well, if they're going to
hell anyway, why you know let them do their thing because people
wanted money lent to them.
And there may be someone who will lend money to you at
interest who would not lend it to you, particularly as a Christian,
where you're obligated to
Jesus to not expect to be paid back.
And so what happened in the the medieval period was that
kings and other potentates wanted to fight their wars and they wanted
to build their palaces and they needed to finance it.
And so it became increasingly normal off on the periphery, not necessarily
Christians lending, but Christians relieve receiving that which was lent from the
Jewish bankers to facilitate war.
And so I think it's notable that the the first cracks that
appeared in Christendom giving up the moral stance
were fundamentally around dealing with unbelievers permissively and fighting and waging
wars and doing other things that should not have been done.
You wouldn't have done it with your own money, but if you
can borrow somebody else's at interest, suddenly it becomes a thing that's
permissible. I think that while that doesn't that directly speak to the
the moral tenor tenor of usury or interest itself.
It's some interesting color to to consider because it only those things
are always connected.
Yeah,
that is absolutely worth mentioning.
And we could also point out that the prohibition on usury
is not unique to Christianity, but it is unique to Christianity and
cults that have sprung up as cancerous cis from Christianity, so Islam
prohibits usury.
But of course, the Jews were permitted to charge usury because they
were looking at Deuteronomy 23 and saying, these Christian foreigners were allowed
to charge them, which isn't of course an admission, they're worshiping a
different god, and it's an argument for not having non Christians in
your country because these things happen.
We won't of course let the noblemen off the hook, the kings
who use this scheme to get around the Word of God, because
that's all they were doing.
The Word of God doesn't say Don't sin unless you hire another
man to sin for you.
That's also a sin.
In fact, that's a collection of sins.
It's not better, don't do that.
And so they should not have done what they did.
But at any rate, we get into the modern times, and something
it's worth noting, Chemnitz, the second Martin, as he has been called,
has a treatise on usury, condemning it, of course.
The problem is you do not get to read it unless you
know Latin or German, because the volumes of chemnitz that have been
translated, it's not a cheap collection, but Concordia Publishing House has this,
it does not include the treatise on Usury.
It also doesn't include the Treatise on Revenge and a few other
things. Noteworthy and strange that these things have been omitted.
And I don't think they're even tran I don't think there are
plans to translate them.
It's not just they were omitted, I don't think there's a plan
to add.
Additional volumes at present.
And
you had mentioned that they even omitted it from the index.
So if if you only knew English.
Yeah, the term's not even there.
Yeah. You would never have any idea that Chemnus ever wrote anything
about usury, which is fascinating because CPH is the captive arm of
the LCMS for publishing.
The LCMS also has another captive arm, the LCEF, the Lutheran Church
Extension Fund.
Guess what they do?
They're a bank, effectively.
Not they're not chartered as a bank, but they're a lender.
They lend to churches at interest.
Now, it's low interest loans relatively in theory, but we have we
have come so far from what the was his the historic practice
of believers to now we have a church which is refusing to
acknowledge the the discussion ever took place by omitting it from the
Chemnist volume and actively
engaging in what in the old testament was unequivocally user.
To charge interest to a Christian is usury, period.
The only argument then that could be made is well, yeah, but
it's permissible.
And yet we don't even have the argument, because again, is the
theme of this episode, it's not even a question.
It was in the Bible and then it just sort of fell
away and now it didn't fall away from the church.
It took fifteen hundred years or so for the church to really
get rolling and modernizing and saying, well, I guess maybe that's not
a sin anymore.
Maybe it was never a sin.
Do we really know if it's a sin?
Did God really say?
And so they spilled a lot of ink on that question.
And finally we're to the point today where not only does no
one ask the question, but the church is charging the church itself
interest on loans for things like building churches.
Which I only laugh because absolutely
ridiculous. I I I wicked
if
if it had never happened, I don't think I could possibly script
a fiction as evil as what we're doing today.
By the by the plain words of scripture.
So
again the the the point of this episode is where did this
stuff go?
Now in this case as as I mentioned we're kinda going in
chronological order.
we kind of lost usury a while ago and you know Luther
did Luther Luther ate it.
he didn't really get it right.
Luther Luther whiffed it, however, it is worth pointing out the Lutheran
church didn't actually go with Luther on this one because of course
it's not in our confession.
We are not bound to believe this.
Up until the early 1900s, at least in the US, the Lutheran
Church stood against usury.
We have writing from Pieper and Volter condemning it.
So we got this one right.
It was only in I don't know if it was the forties,
the fifties or the sixties, but it was in the last within
the last no eighty years or so that this started to slip
away in the Lutheran church.
Which makes sense because we found the the footnote from uh the
Sononical convention in I think No, it was eighteen ninety three where
they were still arguing over whether life insurance would be permissible.
Yeah. whether insurance of any kind, property insurance, whether that was immoral
because it wasn't trust in God.
So it's not a stretch to think that our Lutheran fathers in
the LCMS would be pretty surprised to learn that there's a lending
arm charging churches at interest to build churches.
Um and yet that's how quickly morality changes.
I mean
getting back to a recurring theme, God doesn't change.
Morality doesn't change.
Doesn't change.
Doctrine is changing, not because doctrine is being developed, but because scripture
is being abandoned.
When the whole council of God needs white out, when there are
things that we're ashamed of, that is when we really
have to seriously question whether we're even the church anymore.
Not even not in the big sea way, even in a little
sea. Are we are we a Christian church if we are adopting
these these beliefs?
Um
the next one I want to get on to is a much
more recent one.
And it also follows on the heels of developments from warfare.
So
while it wasn't necessarily seen as a strictly moral code in all
cases, it was generally just the norm.
Like it was it was it was such an essential element of
a Christian nation that it was almost unthinkable that a girl would
work outside of the home.
She would be productive within the home because as God created her,
she is a helpmate.
Helping your husband is going to naturally be productive and not only
a case of child child rearing.
There are things that are done around the house that are that
are productive for the sake of what the man is doing.
Particularly because jobs used to be also in the home.
Like the man the the idea of a man going off to
a factory thirty miles away is is a very modern thing.
The man's work and the woman's work were usually yards apart.
So her being a helpmeet and her doing work that was productive
was always in support of what the man did.
And then we came to World War II, where we sent so
many men overseas and we had so many men working in factories
there were sh there were shortages.
And so what happened?
We quickly normalized, not coincidentally, girls leaving their homes, young girls, older
women, going into the factories, either to make bombs or to do
math for calculating artillery tables.
But by the hundreds of thousands and by the millions, women left
their homes and they began doing jobs that had been limited to
men prior to World War II.
And then when World War II ended, the status quo ante wasn't
restored. There were a lot of women like, you know what, I'm
making more money.
if if my husband can come home, or if I can marry
a man who's gonna earn and I can earn too, wow, look
look how quickly we can get ahead with all this cash flow.
And so it became normalized again through warfare that girls would just
work outside the home.
And so there was a a tweet uh a couple days ago
from uh another LCMS pastor who's uh familiar to both you and
I for unspecified reasons, Dan uh Ross, who's a he's a pastor
in the absolute whitest part of Oklahoma, yet somehow he's a very
vehement anti-racist crusader.
It's funny.
The part of Oklahoma he lives and works in is so white
that even in Oklahoma it's a joke how white the place is.
So I love the idea of him pointing at other people and
saying, You're racist when by every measure of racism, simply living in
such a place is itself racism.
So he's a known quantity, but he uh he decided to Dan
decided to step into the ring yesterday with this bold claim or
two days ago he w he tweeted wives can work full time
jobs outside the home.
They can be the main breadwinners, and husbands can be stay at
home dads.
This doesn't violate scripture.
Now, this isn't just a guy tweeting, this is a pasture.
He's rostered.
He's credentialed.
I believe he has an actual M Div instead of one of
the the fake degrees like some of the other guys.
So to his credit, he probably actually knows Greek and Hebrew.
But it doesn't stop him from saying the opposite of what Scripture
says. Let's see what happens in Titus with regard to women outside
the home.
Titus responds They profess to know God, but they deny him by
their works, they are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.
But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.
Older men are to be sober minded, dignified, self controlled, sound in
faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanders or
slave too much wine.
They, meaning the older women, are to teach what is good and
so train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to
be self controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their
own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled, likewise
urge the younger men to be self controlled.
I had someone dispute with me yesterday on on Twitter whether the
passage the the part of that that said women are to work
from home, whether it applied only to older women, which was the
claim those made.
If you when go read it yourself, this is the end of
Titus one and the beginning of Titus II, there are clearly two
sections. There's a section that says older men are to be sober
minded and it parallels with what older w older women are to
be effectively the same.
And then it specifically tells older women to teach younger women a
series of things.
Everything that's listed after that point is what the older women are
to teach the younger woman.
And that includes working at home.
And the reason I included the last par the last sentence is
it says likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled.
Likewise urge shows that the likewise urge of the older women to
the younger women encapsulates every single word of that.
So Titus is explicit.
It is explicit.
They are to teach and train the young women to work at
home. That's not a paraphrase.
I just alighting the section so you can see of that one
element. Younger women are to work from home.
And the reason that the word of God may not be reviled.
So when a pastor says that doesn't violate scripture, what is he
doing? He is reviling scripture.
he's literally doing that which is damned.
So when Dan says that doesn't violate scripture, he's he's he's plainly
lying about what scripture says.
And the reason he's lying is that he's ashamed.
He's ashamed of scripture.
It's not it's not cool anymore.
There's some stuff in there that's pretty cringe.
it's stuff that, you know
I was talking to a friend yesterday, we were talking about the
the doctrine of closed communion.
And he described the the approach that a lot of pastors have
when explaining closed communion to a visitor, where they basically act like
an embarrassed assistant manager in a store apologizing for for store policies
that he's not really responsible for.
He's like, you know, these guys are just kinda hard about this
stuff and you and I both know it's silly, but we gotta
follow the rules.
That's how a lot of these guys are with all of Scripture.
And so Dan is lying about Titus and he's lying about the
rest of Scripture because he finds it embarrassing.
And in that thread, he went on to accuse another man that
I've uh gotten to know on Twitter, um, who was refuting him.
I the the guy was saying giving a number of reasons.
And Dan's responses were that that's misogyny, that's sexism, you're a chauvinist,
you're importing this stuff and you're calling this stuff Christianity.
Those were his rebukes to a man who was pointing to Scripture.
Now listen to what Jesus says in Luke nine.
For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole
world and loses or forfeits himself?
For whoever is ashamed of me and my words of him will
the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory
and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
Now what Jesus says in Luke 9 is that Dan Ross is
damned. If he doesn't repent of his shame for what God says,
he will go to hell.
And I I looked up what the the word shame there just
to make sure that you know it wasn't a mistranslation or something
that that couldn't be defended.
And it gets even better when you when you look at the
Greek word that's used there and a couple other times, it's related
to disgrace or dishonor.
And that's exactly what's going on here.
Jesus is saying if these men are disgraced by what I have
said in Scripture, I will be disgraced of them.
Now As Christians, we don't like to hear that the law applies
to us.
when scripture says you did something wrong, we always want to think,
well, that must be the other guy.
And so
I thought for a while about this passage in in Luke 9
because
the way that it's phrased, it's easy for Christians to think, well,
that doesn't apply to me.
But if you consider who could be ashamed of Jesus' words?
What does it mean to be ashamed of anything?
To be ashamed of something implies some sort of proprietary interest, it
div it implies a degree of possession.
So So
there are three non-overlapping categories of human beings in the world.
There are pagans who have never heard a lick of the word
of God.
They have only natural level revelation.
They have no idea what God has ever said.
This can't apply to them because how can they be disgraced by
words that they've never heard?
The second category people are pagans who have heard the word, the
word to some degree, and they just don't believe it.
they never have faith.
So, you know, maybe they've read some of Scripture, they've heard it,
or they've argued about it on the internet.
But it was never theirs.
Are they being ashamed of Scripture and of Jesus' words?
No, because it has no nexus to their lives.
They're mocking and deriding something alien to them.
But Jesus isn't talking about the unbeliever who's heard the word because
they couldn't possibly be ashamed or disgraced by it.
It's not theirs.
Jesus is speaking to people who claim to be Christians, who claim
the word of God, who say, Yeah, this is mine, this scripture,
the the the Bible, the Word of God belongs to me, because
I'm a Christian.
And Jesus says something that we leave out of our creeds and
we lead out leave out of our confessions, except by inference, which
is this passage, that if you say that you're mine, but you
are disgraced by what I say, I'm not going to recognize you
on judgment day.
You say Lord, Lord, did we not do X, Y, and Z?
And Jesus will say, I never knew you.
And he's talking about Dan Ross.
And he's talking about all these other pastors who when these questions
come up online, they don't say, Well, let's see what scripture says.
They lie and they say scripture says nothing.
There's Dan Dan let me read that again.
Dan says wives can work full time jobs outside the home, they
can be breadwinners, and husbands can be stay-at-home dads.
This doesn't violate scripture.
That can not be possibly more contradictory to Titus II.
Dan Ross is a damned liar if he doesn't repent.
And I don't say this to pick on him, I say this
is an example of the sort of thing that is occurring within
the church without pushback.
There's not a single pastor.
When I when I called attention to this, what was said, there
will never be a pastor who will speak out publicly.
Because as we mentioned previously, the LCMS has banned pastors from criticizing
other pastors and our bylaws.
You can get kicked out for doing that.
Apparently you can't get kicked out for denying scripture because these guys
do this all the time.
But if you criticize another man and you cause a stink and
you get hurt feelings by saying what God says, then you're actually
in jeopardy.
And for a pastor, that means potentially losing his income and losing
his parsonage and his children not being able to eat.
So I understand the motivation.
I I'm not excusing it, but I'm saying I understand why a
man would want to just pretend this didn't happen, just keep on
walking. Because I'm not his neighbor.
You know, y it's you cross by the other side of the
road and pretend like the none of the slander and stuff other
ever happens.
But it is happening and it's a denial of scripture.
And it's a denial of scripture by men who are ordained
and are told to the world this is a man who speaks
for Jesus.
Dan gets up every Sunday and sh says or should say, or
at least implies, by his conduct in the church service, that he
stands in the stead and by the command of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ.
And for a man to make that claim and say the scripture
says girls can work outside the home is plainly false.
Now again, I'm not saying that the question of to what degree
a girl may have income is
we're not talking about equations.
We're not talking with with usury, with all these things, we're not
talking about a set of rules and math.
We're focusing on the fact that the church used to do one
thing and people used to believe one thing and then we stopped
believing it.
And then we went a step further and we say that this
the word of God doesn't say what it says it says.
Are we still Christians?
Is it a Christian church that will do that, that will engage
in that?
And when a man comes along and raises these questions as we
are, rather than shouting him down and saying the worst things imaginable
about him, is it worth having the conversation?
Is that is it worth the question, does scripture actually say anything
about how women should conduct themselves and pastors should conduct themselves and
men should conduct themselves?
If Scripture is not silent, is it an acceptable part of Christian
discourse for us to have these conversations.
I say yes, Corey, you say yes.
We're doing this because it is not happening to the degree that
it should be.
And
the fact that there is silence everywhere else is a clear indication
to me that we are becoming, if not in fact already, an
apostate church, even while we have the creeds and we have the
confessions. Because as I said at the beginning, these these things, they're
not necessarily seminal doctrines, but they're in there.
And the fact that they weren't talked about a lot in the
past is because they were so obviously a fundamental part of the
Christian faith that it was just part and parcel.
If you're a Christian nation, you didn't have usury, you didn't have
women working out the side the home.
You didn't need a bunch of doctrinal treatises because it just didn't
happen. It was only once people started saying did God really say
that the discourse began and the the arguments and the discussions.
And now today the discussions are forbidden because the not that the
question has been settled, but that the question has been nullified.
The question is no longer a permissible question because it upsets people.
It gets feelings hurt.
It's not winsome to say, well, maybe Dan, you're if your wife
works at the home, I don't I don't know if she does,
she probably does, but I they almost all do.
Like there are a lot of good pastors whose wives work outside
the home.
Am I saying that they're all sinning?
Yes. Am I angry at them?
No. It's concerned.
It's the it's concern at the fact that we as a church,
we as Christians are living lives with clean consciences when our consciences
shouldn't be clean.
If God said something and we just ignore it and we pretend
it's not there, or we attack it and say we're ashamed and
disgraced by it, are we Christian?
I I it's a it's a question that you and I, Corey,
struggle in private conversation all the time.
Like, what do you do with a man who will continuously conduct
him this way, himself this way, in the face of scripture?
And
increasingly, when these guys say that we don't have the same the
same God, I believe 'em.
I will say yeah.
I I I have to agree.
I if if I say what scripture says clearly and what scri
what the church has always or almost always done and these guys
say something different.
What is my guidepost?
What are we as Christians to do with that?
They want you to believe the pastor because you got a collar.
I want to believe God because I don't want to go to
hell and I want to be a creature who obeys the creator,
who has given me everything, including pastors to teach these things.
It's not that I'm trying to do an end run about God's
created around God's created order.
It's that his created order is being usurped by wolves who lie
about God and that is a crisis.
It's a crisis that needs to be dealt with, and that's why
we're talking.
Well, and we've been incredibly clear.
Neither one of us is a pastor.
However, we are teachers.
No, we don't have degrees, but Christianity is not a matter of
which degrees you have acquired.
Yes, we do agree with seminary education and formal education, although we
are both educated, of course, but we do agree with these things
as part of proper order, but it is not absolutely required, and
when no one else is standing up and saying the things that
need to be said, it falls to all men in the church
to do so.
So if we weren't doing it, those of you who are listening,
it would be incumbent on you to do it instead.
And so a tree is known by its fruit.
What is the fruit of these pastors, of these men to abuse
the term?
Well, we know.
Young men are leaving the churches in droves, and they are not
coming back.
Because the church has been turned into
something other than the church.
It has become some sort of social club where you go and
hear that Jesus loves you, sing a little bit, and go home.
Maybe the sacrament is in there at some point.
Hopefully, at least with Lutheran churches it still is, although some still
don't practice it weekly, but that's another discussion for another day.
And so you drive young men away.
Well, if you're driving young men away, young men are supposed to
be the heads of future households, or if they're already married, the
head of that household.
And so if you drive them away, you are either not going
to wind up having Christian households formed, or you're going to wind
up with a church full of women who don't get married or
get married to unbelievers.
And so obviously what these men what they're doing, it's obviously wicked,
because the options are the tree is known by its fruit, well
we know this is a poisonous tree because it has poisonous fruit,
or God lied when he said his word doesn't return to him
void. God lied when we have all these blessings, when we when
David says, I believe that I will look on the good of
the Lord in the land of the living.
The church is anything but blessed today, and that is incredibly obvious
if you look at what is happening.
And so there is something dangerously wrong in the modern church.
And as mentioned, these doctrines, many of them, look like minor things,
and they are in fact minor compared to the major doctrines.
Yes it is worse to get justification wrong than to get usury
wrong. But Satan is crafty, and Satan knows if he comes out
with a full frontal assault on justification, okay fine, Rome will fall
for it, but the rest of us won't.
So he won't do that, because you don't attack your enemy full
on. You attack his flank, you attack him where he's weak, you
sneak in behind.
That's how you win in a battle, and that is exactly what
Satan is doing.
And so he'll find a minor doctrine.
Or he'll find a minor doctrine plus an opportunity because of the
current state of the world, so for instance, when we mentioned the
world wars, well, we need women to work because we don't have
a large enough workforce.
Well now we've set the precedent, so now women can just work
outside the home.
And of course we could talk about the actual economic fallout of
that, and no, you don't actually get twice the income, you get
significantly less income.
Because that's how economics works, but different discussion perhaps for a different
podcast. And so Satan attacks these seemingly minor doctrines.
And that's his toehold.
And that's all he needs.
Because once you seed that, you've actually seeded a major doctrine already,
because you have ceded that you truly believe Scripture is the Word
of God.
Because if you think that you are free to ignore anything in
Scripture, then you do not believe it is the Word of God.
You have rejected the author of Scripture by rejecting the nature of
Scripture. And that is where we are today, and that is the
reason we bring up these minor issues and why we'll continue to
do podcasts of episodes of this type to address these seemingly minor
issues. Because you cannot abandon a square inch of territory to Satan.
Because that's all he needs
And so to wrap up, I wanna mention just briefly, won't go
into too much detail on it, head cover coverings for girls in
church.
It's obviously a minor point.
It's uh it's a question that
really was forgotten like in in my lifetime.
I haven't heard it discussed elsewhere uh until fairly recently when when
as we alluded to in some a couple recent episodes, that there's
an increasing number of Zoomers and millennials, both young men and
young women and married couples who are beginning to head cover.
The wives are covering their heads in church.
And it's making people uncomfortable.
It's making people uncomfortable because it looks anachronistic and it raises a
question that no one wants to ask, let alone answer.
So I was actually shocked by this.
I didn't I didn't know until I was doing the research for
this part of the episode
where head covering was lost in the Christian church.
I knew it was fairly recent, you know, kind of from photographs
and stuff, but I had no idea.
So in the spirit of the genealogy of ideas, let me give
you the a brief genealogy here.
Betty Frieden was born Betty Naomi Goldstein on February 4th, 1921, in
Puria, Illinois, to Harry and Miriam Horowitz Goldstein, whose Jewish families for
were from Russia in Australia and Hungary.
In nineteen sixty-six Frieden Goldstein was instrumental in the founding and success
of the National Organization of Women, or Now.
In nineteen sixty-eight, Now became the first national organization to endorse the
legalization of abortion.
Now, you've probably heard some of that.
Maybe you didn't know she was Jewish or you don't care.
You don't think that means anything.
It's not relevant to this discussion.
It will be for for a future episode.
But listen to what else Betty Frieden Goldstein did in nineteen sixty
eight with the National Organization for Women.
Resolution on head coverings.
Whereas the wearing of a head covering by women at religious religious
services is a custom in many churches, and whereas it is a
symbol of subjection.
Subjection within these churches now recommends that all chapters undertake an effort
to have all women participate in a national unveiling by sending their
head coverings to the task force chairman immediately.
At the spring meeting the task force on women in religion, these
will these veils will then be publicly burned to protest the second
class citizen of women in all the churches.
Now holy cow.
Nineteen sixty eight.
That's living memory.
That means that the boomers in our congreg congregations, who might be
startled and and act like they've never seen a veil before, when
they were kids, they were veiling.
They had to be because everyone was doing it.
And even now recognized that it was the custom in many churches.
It was normal.
And as one of the most conservative bodies in the in the
country, it was certainly normal abundant among confessional Lutherans.
So what happened?
The Jewish lady and certain in charge of creating the national organization
for women who was personally responsible for setting off the firestorm that
caused abortion to be legalized, the mass murder of children, simultaneously in
the same year, incinerated veils in our churches.
Now Now, the reason that I mention this is that today when
the discussion of veiling, which is just it's we're just at the
cusp of this discussion actually being had in our churches, any pastor
you talk to, when you say, hey, there's you, I'm not going
to read the whole thing as we're getting long on time, go
read first first Corinthians 11.
There's an extensive passage there where God discusses the nature of men
and women and the headship of a man over a woman as
of Christ over the church and the symbol of submission and piety
that the veil represents and how it is commanded for girls to
cover their heads in church.
That's in scripture, plainly, unequivocally.
Now, when you talk to a pastor or most Lutherans who are
trying to be pious and you say, hey, this thing in scripture
says that we should be doing this practice, the immediate, almost guaranteed
response is gonna be to say, Well, let's go look back at
sixty AD and see what the cultural context was.
Let's go see what environment Paul was talking in.
Now, there are times when that's the right question.
Is it the right question for veiling?
No. It is utterly duplicitous.
The right question for veiling is when did it go away?
And the answer is it went away fift fifty years ago.
It went away after nineteen sixty eight because that was just the
kickoff. That was the very first time that there been an open,
overt attack on girls veiling their heads in church.
Specifically to liberate them from the subjugation by men.
That was the entire point.
That's the key point right there is Yeah.
The adversary knew exactly what he was doing and we'll precisely
and so it happened after that.
It was in the 70s that this stuff went away.
And here, just fifty years later, suddenly we have to go all
the way back to the first century church to try to understand
it. No.
Well, I'll put the link in the show notes so you can
read for yourself.
There's an there's a very good Wikipedia article on Christian head covering.
That's the title of it.
You can find yourself where you can follow the link.
It goes into detail or on where it was practiced, and it
was universal.
Not it not literally universal.
It was virtually universal.
It was found almost everywhere for two thousand years and before that
because the Jews covered their heads too.
So it is effectively the it's functionally the universal practice of believers
that girls are veiled in church until Betty Goldstein Frieden came along
in 1968 and changed church doctrine to the point today, then not
only will pastors agree with it and say, well, that's misogynistic, that's
chauvinistic, that's sexist.
They're parroting a Jewish woman who sacrificed children to Satan, to her
God. They're parroting one of the most ego evil organizations ever to
exist in the history of the world.
And they're doing it in the name of second wave feminism because
that's a good thing.
that's winsome.
That's loving.
how can you love women if you want them to cover their
heads? How is that not hateful?
How is that not subjection?
So go read first Corinthians eleven, go read the Wikipedia article, and
then think about the fact that church doctrine and practice changed because
of what a pagan organization did in the 70s.
Just think about that on your own.
I'm not even gonna draw a conclusion for you.
When I talk about genealogy of ideas, that's exactly what I mean.
Where did this come from?
Don't tell me it came from scripture.
Don't try to find a proof text to sanctify the modern practice.
Tell me why it went away after thousands of years of universal
continuous application.
Why did it disappear?
There's only one answer, and it has a name.
If pastors or others want to go back and look at the
cultural context, I am perfectly content to do that with them.
Because as soon as they're done with whatever their little spiel is,
I'm just going to point out, well, actually, what it says in
scripture here is that women have the covering because they are supposed
to have a symbol of authority.
So the symbol of authority
is required.
That is what scripture says.
The example given is the head covering, so if you're offering an
alternative to the head covering that is a symbol of authority for
women to have on them in church and you want them to
have that, by all means, please stand in front of the congregation
and announce that.
I will support you.
But the history of the church is the head covering, and the
head covering is good for order, and there is no reason to
abandon traditions that are good.
And not
merely tradition, but
it's not merely a tradition, it's a commandment from God.
I'm I'm glad you mentioned it.
The symbol of authority is a commandment from God, yes.
Yep. I'm gonna read just that one verse.
It's right from the middle of 1 Corinthians 11.
Read the whole thing, but this is just period cherry picking one
verse because I want to highlight one of the arguments that actually
illustrates our point perfectly.
That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority
on her head because of the angels.
Now, the insidious false Christian will read that whole thing and highlight
because of the angels and say, well, what does that mean?
I'll tell you truthfully, I've read a bunch of different answers and
ex speculation and explanation.
I don't know what because of the angels means.
And I don't care.
That's the entire point.
The reason that we did the episode last week talking about the
perspicuity of scripture and why it is so
You believe it and then you try to understand it.
And if you don't understand it, you still believe it.
So when God says that is why a wimble woman ought to
have a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her
head. And I I'm I didn't look, but I would guess that
wife is probably the feminine, probably means wife, girl.
It's uh it's it probably encompasses all of them.
She's to have a symbol on her head, and the clause because
of the angels, if I don't know what that means, if you
don't know what that means, that's not a get out of jail
free card.
You can't say well that could mean anything, so this doesn't apply.
Because it's not like he said because of the Roman laws or
because of the Egyptians.
when Paul wrote that, he wasn't talking about something material.
He was talking about something immortal.
When he says because of the angels, if we don't have an
explanation, all we have to know is that the because of was
intended to be explanatory.
Even if it's not explanatory, it's not the justification.
The justification is that God said it.
And when he specifically says because of the angels, and he's referring
to something eternal, all you have to know, even if you have
no idea what that means, is that the angels haven't changed.
So whatever Paul was talking about hasn't changed.
It applied then, it applies now, it applies in heaven, it applies
everywhere. Because girls do not stop having a head, that is their
husband or their father.
It is always going to be there.
My father will always be my father, even in heaven.
That doesn't change.
Headship doesn't change.
God is a god of hierarchy and order.
And it's not a free for all in heaven.
It's not going to be a free for all in the new
earth. There will still be ranks.
and when this alludes to the the passage about there being neither
marriage nor giving in marriage, I think that that's clearly about procreation
and not specifically about the relationship because the fourth commandment demonstrates that
those relationships are preserved.
they're eternal.
You have a father and a mother.
Well if if you say that no neither marriage nor giving in
marriage means that she's not but she's my mom, but he's my
dad, but they have no relation.
No, I I I can't accept that.
These are eternal matters and they're eternal commands because again, it's the
eternal will of God that these things be practiced and passed down.
as tradition because they're necessary.
The word there in First Corinthians is in fact gune, it is
wife or woman.
And so as we close out this episode, I want to go
over a few quick housekeeping matters and then a sort of summary
of
not just the episode, but also generally what we are doing with
this podcast.
And so you may have noticed this is a slightly different episode
type. It was a sort of grab bag.
We are going over various questions, issues in Christianity.
In this particular episode, we were going over things that are in
Scripture, but the church has largely abandoned.
In the future, this episode type, we may also be answering questions
or concerns from listeners.
And so toward that end, we now have a feedback form.
You can go to the website stone-choir.com slash feedback.
I just set up that form, very simple form right now, maybe
a little more complicated in the future, but feel free to send
us questions, concerns, hate mail if you're so inclined, whatever you feel
like sending
so that's pretty much the the housekeeping.
I may make a separate feed for these episodes for those who
want to have them segregated out from the regular ones.
So if you have
concerns or questions you want to quickly look at an episode, you
can sort of differentiate the types of episodes that we have.
And the housekeeping done as a sort of summary
of what we're doing here, ultimately we are defending the truth.
And we are defending the truth in this particular episode by defending
things that are in scripture, that are often very clear in Scripture,
and that modern Christians have abandoned, or in some cases not so
modern, when it comes to shaking the dust off your sandals.
And we defend these things because Satan today is attacking the first
article. During the Reformation and in the century or two leading up
to the Reformation, Satan was attacking the second article.
Satan was attacking justification.
He was attacking the heart of the faith.
But
if we lose the first article, we lose the faith no less
certainly than if we had lost the second article during the Middle
Ages. Because when you fight over truth, what is truth?
Well, God is truth.
And so if you abandon the truth, ultimately what you are actually
abandoning is God.
Because to deny
any truth is to deny all truth.
That is why we are fighting for these seemingly minor issues.
Because when it comes down to it, fighting over whether or not
a woman wears a veil in church is a relatively minor issue
in and of itself.
But it is not a minor issue because of what it represents
if you get it wrong, and ignoring it incidentally is getting it
wrong. Because the veil is a marker of headship, and so if
you get the veil wrong, you get headship wrong.
The veil and headship are both truths.
If you get those wrong, you get truth wrong.
If you get that wrong, you lose God.
There are no small doctrinal errors, and that is why they are
all worth the fight.
Every hill, when it comes to Scripture, is worth dying on.
So where Scripture is silent
we
do not necessarily have to speak.
We can speak, it is a matter of wisdom, where scripture is
silent, where scripture is not silent.
We are not permitted to be silent.
Those who decline to defend the truth sin in so doing, and
they risk losing God.
Fight Fight the good fight.