WEBVTT 00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:39.600 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:40.480 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:44.080 Mahler. And I'm still Wo. 00:00:44.080 --> 00:00:44.400 On 00:00:44.400 --> 00:00:48.320 today's Stone Choir, we are going to be discussing the subject of 00:00:48.320 --> 00:00:50.560 religion. What is a religion? 00:00:50.560 --> 00:00:53.920 This will be the beginning of a three-part arc where we discuss 00:00:54.400 --> 00:00:57.440 religion in specific terms we'll get into in a minute. 00:00:57.440 --> 00:01:00.400 In the second episode of this arc we're going to be discussing 00:01:00.400 --> 00:01:07.360 specifically Judaizing and Gnosticism within Christianity, because those are two key examples 00:01:07.360 --> 00:01:11.760 of false religions that have been inserted into the practices and beliefs 00:01:11.760 --> 00:01:13.440 of many of us today. 00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:16.960 And the final third episode in this arc is going to deal 00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:19.360 specifically with apostasy. 00:01:19.360 --> 00:01:22.480 We're going to deal with the fact that much of the New 00:01:22.560 --> 00:01:27.680 Testament speaks directly to Christians in the church in terms of falling 00:01:27.680 --> 00:01:30.880 away. There are a lot of things that we today read as 00:01:30.880 --> 00:01:34.160 pronouncements that we think, well, that must apply to pagans because it's 00:01:34.160 --> 00:01:35.840 talking about people going to hell. 00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:40.160 when you look at in proper context, it's clearly talking to Christians 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:44.000 in the church who have or are falling away and will be 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:47.840 damned because they have lost the faith that was given to them. 00:01:47.840 --> 00:01:50.560 So this is going to be an arc that's going to be 00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:51.360 a lot of law. 00:01:51.360 --> 00:01:53.520 There's not going to be a lot of good news in this 00:01:53.520 --> 00:01:54.160 for us. 00:01:54.160 --> 00:01:57.920 And the reason that we're tackling it is that this is fundamentally 00:01:57.920 --> 00:02:00.160 about the state of the church today. 00:02:00.160 --> 00:02:04.000 As we look at all of our churches, you know, multiple denominations, 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:07.200 they're all in varying states of this decay. 00:02:07.200 --> 00:02:11.440 And the distinction that we're going to highlight today with the definition 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:16.160 of religion is specifically going to exclude what God you're talking about 00:02:16.320 --> 00:02:19.200 or what practices you perform. 00:02:19.200 --> 00:02:22.560 It's going to focus entirely on what is your moral compass? 00:02:22.560 --> 00:02:26.320 What is the origin of the right and wrong that you hold 00:02:26.320 --> 00:02:28.240 to in your heart and in your life? 00:02:28.240 --> 00:02:32.480 Because there's a degree of passion that we bring to our morality, 00:02:32.480 --> 00:02:36.640 that we bring to what violates our conscience that is absent from 00:02:36.880 --> 00:02:38.160 when we discuss doctrine. 00:02:38.160 --> 00:02:41.040 So we'll differentiate between the two of those in this episode. 00:02:41.040 --> 00:02:43.760 As I said, this is going to be a weighty series to 00:02:43.760 --> 00:02:44.800 begin the year. 00:02:44.800 --> 00:02:47.360 If you're a regular listener, we're coming back after a three week 00:02:47.680 --> 00:02:50.480 hiatus. Thank you to everyone who was you know checking the back 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:52.160 catalog along the way. 00:02:52.160 --> 00:02:55.840 I had an interesting exchange with somebody on X uh couple days 00:02:55.840 --> 00:02:59.360 ago talking about listening to old episodes and he said something that 00:02:59.360 --> 00:03:01.840 I that I hadn't really thought about, but I wanted to highlight 00:03:01.920 --> 00:03:03.520 just to say to everybody. 00:03:03.520 --> 00:03:06.640 He mentioned that when he first found Stone Choir, he jumped around 00:03:06.640 --> 00:03:09.600 topically and sort of picked the episodes that seemed like they were 00:03:09.600 --> 00:03:10.960 the most interesting to him. 00:03:10.960 --> 00:03:14.080 And he said that when he did that, it was depressing. 00:03:14.240 --> 00:03:16.240 It really hit him over the head. 00:03:16.240 --> 00:03:19.600 And so he went back to the beginning and listened in order 00:03:19.760 --> 00:03:21.920 and he had the opposite experience. 00:03:21.920 --> 00:03:24.800 And I realized that that's something that we wouldn't have really thought 00:03:24.800 --> 00:03:27.600 about because we very consciously 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:33.360 manage kind of the the psychic ebb and flow, like the energy 00:03:33.360 --> 00:03:34.320 of the episodes. 00:03:34.320 --> 00:03:36.800 You know, these are woo-woo terms, but you know what I mean. 00:03:36.800 --> 00:03:39.440 Like it's kind of like making an album or a mixtape. 00:03:39.440 --> 00:03:42.400 We don't want to hammer every every week because that's brutal. 00:03:42.400 --> 00:03:43.360 Nobody wants that. 00:03:43.360 --> 00:03:46.480 At the same time, if it's all just light and and less 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:51.840 not interesting, but maybe less serious, less urgent, you need to mix 00:03:51.840 --> 00:03:53.760 those up because we we all need a break. 00:03:53.920 --> 00:03:56.800 We personally need a break from some of the heavy stuff, and 00:03:56.800 --> 00:03:58.800 you as as listeners certainly do. 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:02.880 So I will say once again, if you've discovered us recently, whenever 00:04:02.880 --> 00:04:06.240 you're jumping in, we highly, highly encourage you to go back to 00:04:06.240 --> 00:04:08.880 the very beginning and just listen to them in order. 00:04:08.880 --> 00:04:11.280 Yeah, if you get 20 minutes into an episode and like this 00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:13.360 is dumb, I don't care about this crap, that's fine. 00:04:13.600 --> 00:04:16.080 we're not telling anyone to hang on our every word. 00:04:16.320 --> 00:04:17.920 There's nothing like that about this. 00:04:17.920 --> 00:04:22.160 It's just that there's a lot of interesting information and points that 00:04:22.160 --> 00:04:26.160 are vital in one episode that carry over in a future episode. 00:04:26.160 --> 00:04:29.120 So when we speak, we expect that you've heard the rest. 00:04:29.120 --> 00:04:32.240 And while we try to make sure each episode stands alone, the 00:04:32.240 --> 00:04:34.640 continuum also tells a story. 00:04:34.640 --> 00:04:38.080 And additionally, you know, some of the episodes are gnarly. 00:04:38.080 --> 00:04:40.080 There's some heavy things in there. 00:04:40.080 --> 00:04:42.640 If those are the only ones you listen to, this is going 00:04:42.640 --> 00:04:45.520 to be a fundamentally different sort of podcast than if you listen 00:04:45.600 --> 00:04:48.480 to them the way that we're presenting 'em, but because we're conscious 00:04:48.480 --> 00:04:51.520 of that and we want the time that you spend with us 00:04:51.520 --> 00:04:55.200 to not to to be edifying and you know, to challenge you, 00:04:55.200 --> 00:04:57.520 but not just to completely be you up and leave you bruised 00:04:57.520 --> 00:04:59.520 and broken, because that's that's not the point. 00:04:59.520 --> 00:05:03.280 The point is for us to come out of these discussions strengthened 00:05:03.280 --> 00:05:05.600 and better off than we were before. 00:05:05.600 --> 00:05:08.480 Uh before we get into the the main subject, I just want 00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:11.600 to give a brief thanks to everyone who has donated to us 00:05:11.600 --> 00:05:12.480 in the past year. 00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:15.760 We've had everyone who donates anything is generous, you know, great or 00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:18.880 small. Uh we had a couple of particularly large donations at the 00:05:18.880 --> 00:05:22.400 end of this year that I wanted to acknowledge, but for anyone 00:05:22.400 --> 00:05:25.760 to give anything of value to a stranger is an act of 00:05:25.760 --> 00:05:29.040 of kindness and generosity, and it means a great deal to both 00:05:29.040 --> 00:05:31.600 Corey and myself and it makes a big difference. 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:33.440 So thank you to everyone who's done that. 00:05:33.440 --> 00:05:37.200 Additionally, and at least as much, thank you to everyone who shares 00:05:37.200 --> 00:05:41.520 the stone choir with friends and family, whoever's gonna benefit from it. 00:05:41.520 --> 00:05:44.720 And thank you to you know for leaving five star ratings and 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:48.400 letting people know that this is content worth sharing. 00:05:48.560 --> 00:05:52.000 Honestly, I think the most valuable thing to us is the fact 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:55.600 that people would spend time listening to a couple guys talk about 00:05:55.600 --> 00:05:56.160 this stuff. 00:05:56.160 --> 00:06:00.320 Because like you said, some of these episodes and subjects are challenging. 00:06:00.640 --> 00:06:01.680 they're hard to hear. 00:06:01.680 --> 00:06:05.760 And they're they're intentionally hard to hear because nobody's talking about 'em. 00:06:05.760 --> 00:06:09.120 Uh that's why we started and begin with to tackle issues that 00:06:09.120 --> 00:06:10.720 are being neglected. 00:06:10.720 --> 00:06:13.680 So for you to spend two hours out of 168 in your 00:06:13.760 --> 00:06:15.920 week listening to us, it means a great deal. 00:06:15.920 --> 00:06:18.320 And anyone who doesn't donate, God bless you too. 00:06:18.320 --> 00:06:20.960 Like it's none of this has ever had anything to do with 00:06:20.960 --> 00:06:21.840 what we receive. 00:06:21.840 --> 00:06:22.880 It's a podcast. 00:06:22.880 --> 00:06:23.760 It's free. 00:06:23.760 --> 00:06:26.160 Please take it, enjoy it, benefit from it. 00:06:26.160 --> 00:06:28.080 If there's a good episode, listen to it more than once. 00:06:28.080 --> 00:06:30.800 You're going to learn some things, even the second or third time 00:06:30.960 --> 00:06:34.640 through. Nothing that you know we ever do here is gonna be 00:06:34.640 --> 00:06:36.080 for our own benefit. 00:06:36.080 --> 00:06:39.200 Um clearly, like I got doxxed and punishment for this. 00:06:39.200 --> 00:06:43.040 Corey has been attacked and you know, whatever. 00:06:43.120 --> 00:06:45.920 The fact that anyone would think anything kindly of us and and 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:47.360 share with us means a great deal. 00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:49.120 So thank you. 00:06:49.120 --> 00:06:53.040 The reason that we're going to be tackling this arc the in 00:06:53.040 --> 00:06:56.000 the coming weeks as we come back from our break, which by 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:56.720 the way was great. 00:06:56.720 --> 00:06:59.680 I thank you for coming back after three weeks off. 00:06:59.680 --> 00:07:01.600 That helped me a lot. 00:07:01.840 --> 00:07:05.120 It's it it takes a lot of time and effort and energy 00:07:05.120 --> 00:07:08.080 to to produce these and I didn't realize going in how much 00:07:08.080 --> 00:07:09.040 work it was going to be. 00:07:09.040 --> 00:07:11.760 So I actually have a lot of respect now for the guys 00:07:11.760 --> 00:07:13.440 who churn this stuff out all the time. 00:07:13.680 --> 00:07:14.880 it's really difficult. 00:07:14.880 --> 00:07:15.840 Not that I'm whining. 00:07:15.840 --> 00:07:17.120 Like this is not work great. 00:07:17.120 --> 00:07:19.600 It's just it was nice to have a few weeks off and 00:07:19.600 --> 00:07:22.640 uh Corey and I actually kickstarted a couple other things as as 00:07:22.640 --> 00:07:26.160 we add that downtime that will be paying dividends in the coming 00:07:26.160 --> 00:07:29.120 year. So that's I'm looking forward to when some of those other 00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:32.080 things come to fruition. 00:07:32.080 --> 00:07:37.440 This particular arc where we're talking about religion as a subject itself 00:07:37.600 --> 00:07:41.280 and how we define it in terms of we can see inside 00:07:41.280 --> 00:07:45.200 our own Christian churches and even inside our own hearts where 00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:51.040 one religion ends and another one begins is a really tricky subject. 00:07:51.040 --> 00:07:56.480 The reason that it's challenging is that particularly as Christians, we 00:07:57.440 --> 00:08:00.560 go to church, believe the Bible, confess God. 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:03.920 We do all the normal Christian stuff. 00:08:03.920 --> 00:08:07.040 And we think in terms of okay, I'm a Christian, and that 00:08:07.040 --> 00:08:09.280 means exclusively I'm a Christian. 00:08:09.280 --> 00:08:11.040 That's the way it's supposed to be. 00:08:11.040 --> 00:08:13.920 But the reality is that as not the case for any of 00:08:13.920 --> 00:08:15.920 us because we're not perfect. 00:08:15.920 --> 00:08:20.080 The only time we will be perfect Christians is when we die, 00:08:20.080 --> 00:08:22.320 and God perfects us in eternity. 00:08:22.320 --> 00:08:25.040 Until then we are imperfect Christians. 00:08:25.040 --> 00:08:28.800 And that doesn't simply mean that we are free from sin. 00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:34.000 It means that we are incapable of having the perfect relationship to 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:37.040 God and the perfect confession of God that He demands. 00:08:37.680 --> 00:08:41.120 And those are also sins that Christ paid the price for. 00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:44.400 So when we talk about these things, we don't want people to 00:08:44.400 --> 00:08:46.720 be sitting around and fretting like, oh no, am I am I 00:08:46.720 --> 00:08:49.680 doing something terrible and God is going to hate me and send 00:08:49.680 --> 00:08:50.560 me to hell. 00:08:50.560 --> 00:08:52.080 That's not the point. 00:08:52.080 --> 00:08:55.360 The point is for us to keep in mind what it is 00:08:55.360 --> 00:09:00.640 that we're thinking and believing and confessing, if it's contrary to scripture. 00:09:00.640 --> 00:09:04.480 So the specific focus of today, when we're talking about religion in 00:09:04.480 --> 00:09:10.400 terms of source of morality, deliberately excludes who is your God. 00:09:10.400 --> 00:09:13.280 Because scripture is clear, we're gonna talk about that in the third 00:09:13.280 --> 00:09:14.880 episode on apostasy. 00:09:14.880 --> 00:09:18.240 There are many within the church for all times and in all 00:09:18.240 --> 00:09:20.640 places, who will say I am a Christian, I am a God 00:09:20.640 --> 00:09:24.080 fear, I am a believer in God, who in fact are not, 00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:28.880 whatever false beliefs, whatever false religion they hold is in fact their 00:09:28.880 --> 00:09:29.840 true religion. 00:09:29.840 --> 00:09:35.200 And so the fact that someone says I'm a Christian, especially today, 00:09:35.200 --> 00:09:37.120 is fundamentally meaningless. 00:09:37.120 --> 00:09:39.360 It's truly meaningless to say you're Christian. 00:09:39.360 --> 00:09:41.520 Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't say it. 00:09:41.520 --> 00:09:43.360 But what does it mean to be Christian? 00:09:43.360 --> 00:09:45.120 And that's the question. 00:09:45.120 --> 00:09:47.440 And the reason that's important is that there are people who say 00:09:47.440 --> 00:09:51.200 that they're Christian and they'll have some of the religious beliefs of 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:57.120 Christianity, but they will additionally have other religious beliefs, other beliefs of 00:09:57.120 --> 00:10:01.360 right and wrong of morality that will not have come from scripture. 00:10:01.360 --> 00:10:05.520 And when you're not getting your morality from scripture, you're still getting 00:10:05.520 --> 00:10:06.400 it from somewhere. 00:10:06.400 --> 00:10:09.280 And so the definition of religion that we're going to talk about 00:10:09.280 --> 00:10:14.480 today, as I said, it excludes practices, it excludes names, it excludes 00:10:14.480 --> 00:10:21.040 deities, it excludes anything, all the trappings, it only focuses on what 00:10:21.040 --> 00:10:22.960 is What is your moral compass? 00:10:22.960 --> 00:10:25.920 Where are you getting your right and wrong? 00:10:25.920 --> 00:10:29.840 Because if you're getting them from God, you're getting them from scripture, 00:10:29.840 --> 00:10:32.000 and you're going to be a good Christian. 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:34.480 You're going to have only Christian beliefs. 00:10:34.480 --> 00:10:38.800 However, the second that anyone begins to get his moral compass, his 00:10:38.960 --> 00:10:44.640 right and wrong definitions from anywhere other than scripture, he is importing 00:10:44.640 --> 00:10:45.680 a false religion. 00:10:45.680 --> 00:10:47.360 And he now has two religions. 00:10:47.360 --> 00:10:48.800 And we all have at least two religions. 00:10:49.200 --> 00:10:54.400 it's inherent because we're sinners, because we are incapable of perfectly worshiping 00:10:54.400 --> 00:10:58.800 God. One of the crucial things that Luther really gets right in 00:10:58.800 --> 00:11:02.800 the small catechism when he talks about the first commandment, you shall 00:11:02.800 --> 00:11:04.480 have no other gods before me. 00:11:04.480 --> 00:11:07.440 As we've talked about this in the past, before doesn't mean in 00:11:07.440 --> 00:11:08.400 terms of rank. 00:11:08.400 --> 00:11:11.360 It means in the presence of, as in I see before me 00:11:11.360 --> 00:11:12.640 tons of soil. 00:11:12.640 --> 00:11:15.280 What you're beholding is before you. 00:11:15.280 --> 00:11:18.240 That is not what it means when God says we are to 00:11:18.240 --> 00:11:20.640 have no other gods before him. 00:11:20.640 --> 00:11:22.720 It means in the presence of. 00:11:22.720 --> 00:11:26.960 And when God is omnipresent, there is nothing that is not present 00:11:26.960 --> 00:11:27.680 for God. 00:11:27.680 --> 00:11:30.320 So when he says you can't have any gods in my presence, 00:11:30.320 --> 00:11:31.600 he's saying period. 00:11:31.600 --> 00:11:35.920 He's saying anywhere in a superset of the finite universe, there's no 00:11:35.920 --> 00:11:38.640 place where you can have any gods other than me. 00:11:38.640 --> 00:11:41.920 So it's not ranking, it's not that God's one and football's two, 00:11:41.920 --> 00:11:44.480 and you just try to keep football becoming number one. 00:11:44.480 --> 00:11:47.680 There's one and one God only. 00:11:47.680 --> 00:11:50.160 Every time we sin, we violate that. 00:11:50.160 --> 00:11:54.480 Every single time we sin, we Whether knowingly or unknowingly, we are 00:11:54.480 --> 00:11:58.880 disobeying God's will and we are saying, I reject God, I'm my 00:11:58.880 --> 00:12:01.440 own God for the next thirty seconds or five minutes or the 00:12:01.440 --> 00:12:04.640 next day, I'm gonna do this other thing, and then make me 00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:05.920 I'll get back to God later. 00:12:05.920 --> 00:12:08.960 For right now, this thing that I'm doing, I am my own 00:12:08.960 --> 00:12:12.560 God. Because God has told me one thing, I'm gonna do another. 00:12:12.560 --> 00:12:17.680 And whether it's conscious or unconscious, that is enacting a separate religion. 00:12:17.680 --> 00:12:20.400 And you don't need to think of yourself in terms of being 00:12:20.400 --> 00:12:21.120 a god. 00:12:21.120 --> 00:12:23.120 You're just like, well, I'm just gonna do what I want. 00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:24.720 I don't think it's so bad. 00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:26.480 And that's the root of this. 00:12:26.480 --> 00:12:29.600 If your morality is not coming from God, if it's not coming 00:12:29.600 --> 00:12:35.120 from scripture, you're going to go down a path where all manner 00:12:35.120 --> 00:12:36.400 of errors can occur. 00:12:36.400 --> 00:12:38.240 We've seen this from the very beginning. 00:12:38.240 --> 00:12:41.440 In the Garden of Eden, God said to Adam and Eve, where 00:12:41.600 --> 00:12:44.720 he this was what Eve was taught by Adam, you may surely 00:12:44.720 --> 00:12:46.880 eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of 00:12:46.880 --> 00:12:49.760 knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the 00:12:49.760 --> 00:12:52.560 day that you eat of it you shall surely die. 00:12:52.560 --> 00:12:57.440 Now it's interesting that this is the origin of morality. 00:12:57.440 --> 00:13:01.760 This is God not only giving Adam a command of what is 00:13:01.760 --> 00:13:06.480 good and evil, but the tree itself, the fruit embodied knowledge of 00:13:06.480 --> 00:13:07.840 good and evil. 00:13:07.840 --> 00:13:11.760 And so this was imperfection, this was in perfect creation, there was 00:13:11.760 --> 00:13:13.920 still the ability to have knowledge of evil. 00:13:13.920 --> 00:13:16.640 And while we don't know what that means because we're fallen and 00:13:16.640 --> 00:13:19.440 we're on the other side of knowing all sorts of evil, we 00:13:19.440 --> 00:13:24.240 at least know that God's will is that which is good, and 00:13:24.240 --> 00:13:26.640 anything contrary to it is evil. 00:13:26.640 --> 00:13:33.360 And so that fruit embodied the moral compass that they were to 00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:37.680 have, and every religion ever since then, by whatever form always does 00:13:37.680 --> 00:13:40.080 the same thing, it always teaches good and evil. 00:13:40.080 --> 00:13:43.200 And the distinction is what does Satan say to her? 00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:46.240 But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, 00:13:46.240 --> 00:13:48.240 for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will 00:13:48.240 --> 00:13:51.520 be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. 00:13:51.520 --> 00:13:54.080 So he turned it on its head, and he said This knowledge 00:13:54.080 --> 00:13:55.120 is beneficial. 00:13:55.120 --> 00:13:58.640 This thing that God said is evil, I'm telling you it's it's 00:13:58.560 --> 00:13:59.520 gonna be fine. 00:13:59.520 --> 00:14:01.920 And she saw that it looked delicious and so she ate some, 00:14:01.920 --> 00:14:04.640 gave it to her husband, and he was like, Okay, great. 00:14:04.640 --> 00:14:07.840 He listened to her, he sinned, he ate the apple, we all 00:14:07.840 --> 00:14:09.680 die because of it. 00:14:09.680 --> 00:14:15.440 That mor moral compass right there in the garden is reflected throughout 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:20.080 every other sin and every other religion true or false that has 00:14:20.080 --> 00:14:21.200 ever existed. 00:14:21.200 --> 00:14:25.360 There's always what is good, what is evil, and then what choices 00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:28.400 are we going to make when confronted with it? 00:14:28.400 --> 00:14:31.440 And Eve didn't listen to God's voice. 00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:34.400 She didn't listen to Adam's voice when he told her what God 00:14:34.400 --> 00:14:35.440 had said. 00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:38.880 She said something and Satan tricked her. 00:14:38.880 --> 00:14:40.720 She's like, okay, well, that sounds good. 00:14:40.720 --> 00:14:42.800 She stopped having God as her God. 00:14:42.800 --> 00:14:44.320 She let Satan be her God. 00:14:44.320 --> 00:14:45.520 Just for a few seconds. 00:14:45.520 --> 00:14:47.760 He told her something different than what God said. 00:14:47.760 --> 00:14:49.600 And he's like, I like your morality. 00:14:49.600 --> 00:14:52.720 I like your good and evil better than God's good and evil. 00:14:52.720 --> 00:14:53.680 I'm gonna go that way. 00:14:53.680 --> 00:14:57.600 And everything that's happened ever since is a result of that moral 00:14:57.600 --> 00:14:58.880 decision. 00:14:59.360 --> 00:15:03.200 I think it is helpful to go through a few terms as 00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:05.440 we start out this episode. 00:15:05.440 --> 00:15:05.920 Just 00:15:07.040 --> 00:15:10.800 in general some of the terms that are related to the matter 00:15:10.800 --> 00:15:11.680 of religion. 00:15:11.680 --> 00:15:13.680 For instance, where do we get the word religion? 00:15:13.680 --> 00:15:16.880 What does it mean in its core sense? 00:15:16.880 --> 00:15:18.160 What does it mean today? 00:15:18.160 --> 00:15:21.200 What does it mean for us when we say religion? 00:15:21.200 --> 00:15:23.200 And so religion has 00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:28.880 the word itself has a relatively complicated etymology because it is related 00:15:28.880 --> 00:15:33.760 to a number of terms, a number of verbs in Latin and 00:15:33.920 --> 00:15:39.760 if you understand those terms it gives you a general idea of 00:15:39.760 --> 00:15:43.040 what religion in its core sense means. 00:15:43.040 --> 00:15:48.080 And so the two big ones are religio and religo, the difference 00:15:48.080 --> 00:15:51.040 of an E versus an I in the verb there. 00:15:51.040 --> 00:15:54.400 Religo is obviously from Lego. 00:15:54.400 --> 00:15:58.400 Re in Latin is just again or an intensifier, much like in 00:15:58.400 --> 00:16:03.840 English, but religo means to gather, collect again, or this is the 00:16:03.840 --> 00:16:08.240 most salient one in the case of the etymology of religion, to 00:16:08.240 --> 00:16:12.080 go over or through again, for instance, in reading or thought. 00:16:12.720 --> 00:16:15.600 And so of course we can see where we get this sense 00:16:15.600 --> 00:16:22.160 of part of religion is going over the religious texts themselves, and 00:16:22.160 --> 00:16:22.720 this is true. 00:16:22.720 --> 00:16:28.080 True both of true religion, in this case scripture, and of false 00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:33.440 religion, because false religions also have their scriptures, they have their beliefs 00:16:33.440 --> 00:16:36.400 that you go over again and again and again. 00:16:36.400 --> 00:16:41.680 The other verb, religo, an I, is to bind fast. 00:16:41.680 --> 00:16:46.800 And so religion binds you to a certain set of beliefs and 00:16:46.800 --> 00:16:52.400 actions. It binds you to these tenets, to these beliefs, these claims 00:16:52.400 --> 00:16:55.440 of the system itself. 00:16:55.440 --> 00:17:01.040 So between these two Latin verbs, you get the sense of what 00:17:01.040 --> 00:17:05.200 we have in English as religion. 00:17:05.920 --> 00:17:11.360 Additionally, there is the issue of obligatio, which is tangentially related, which 00:17:11.360 --> 00:17:14.400 is just you can probably guess from the word itself, it's an 00:17:14.400 --> 00:17:18.960 obligation or a binding related to Religo. 00:17:18.960 --> 00:17:23.440 But related to this, there is the term cult. 00:17:23.440 --> 00:17:28.720 This is a vitally important term to understand, generally speaking, because this 00:17:28.720 --> 00:17:32.560 is more of what we see in our culture today with regard 00:17:32.560 --> 00:17:34.400 to false religion. 00:17:34.400 --> 00:17:37.520 But cult itself is actually a neutral term. 00:17:37.520 --> 00:17:42.720 In English it has started to take on almost an exclusively negative 00:17:42.720 --> 00:17:48.560 term except in specialized usage but that's false. 00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:50.800 Cult is a neutral term. 00:17:50.800 --> 00:17:56.240 Cult simply means a system of religious veneration and so for instance, 00:17:56.240 --> 00:18:00.240 we all belong to the cult of Christ, we belong to the 00:18:00.240 --> 00:18:05.840 cult of God, we belong to the Christian cult, in the neutral 00:18:05.840 --> 00:18:08.320 sense which is the proper sense of the word 00:18:09.200 --> 00:18:15.040 cult. Now, there is of course the negative sense that is largely 00:18:15.040 --> 00:18:18.960 come to predominate in common usage in English, so Mormonism is a 00:18:18.960 --> 00:18:23.680 cult in that sense, cult meaning people who are strange in some 00:18:23.680 --> 00:18:26.960 way, who are out there, who have a weird religion. 00:18:26.960 --> 00:18:30.720 And so a cult would be a smaller group with strange practices. 00:18:30.720 --> 00:18:34.320 But bear in mind that cult, again, is a neutral term. 00:18:34.240 --> 00:18:37.120 it simply means a system of religious veneration. 00:18:37.120 --> 00:18:39.840 There's a system of religious practice. 00:18:39.840 --> 00:18:45.040 That comes from cultus, which just means the same thing in Latin. 00:18:45.040 --> 00:18:48.080 We dropped the US, we brought it into English. 00:18:48.720 --> 00:18:53.200 It comes from a verb that means to cultivate land, or to 00:18:53.200 --> 00:18:56.160 till or to take care of a field or a garden, also 00:18:56.160 --> 00:19:01.040 means to inhabit, to frequent, or, in the figurative sense, it came 00:19:01.040 --> 00:19:04.880 to mean to worship, honor, or revere. 00:19:04.880 --> 00:19:07.360 There is a connection here, we won't get into it in this 00:19:07.360 --> 00:19:09.840 episode, we'll get into it in a future episode on a different 00:19:09.840 --> 00:19:14.320 topic, but there is a connection here between this land and worship, 00:19:14.320 --> 00:19:16.560 honor, and reverence. 00:19:16.560 --> 00:19:20.240 But that is what we mean when we say cult and it 00:19:20.240 --> 00:19:24.320 is notable that one of the words we get from cult, from 00:19:24.320 --> 00:19:27.520 cultus is culture. 00:19:27.520 --> 00:19:32.640 And so at a very base level, at a foundational level, our 00:19:32.640 --> 00:19:36.560 culture is an outgrowth of our religion. 00:19:36.560 --> 00:19:40.240 Because culture is an outgrowth of cult. 00:19:40.240 --> 00:19:44.320 And so what you have in your culture is going to be 00:19:44.320 --> 00:19:48.400 based on a religion or multiple religions. 00:19:48.400 --> 00:19:52.560 And so some of these things that we just assume are so-called 00:19:52.560 --> 00:19:56.640 secular, they are actually religious. 00:19:56.640 --> 00:20:01.200 Because the culture itself is religious by nature. 00:20:01.200 --> 00:20:04.640 And so you may think that something is neutral in the sense 00:20:04.640 --> 00:20:08.080 of secular, or secular in the sense of neutral, and that it's 00:20:08.080 --> 00:20:11.440 something about which Christians can disagree or we can ignore it, it's 00:20:11.440 --> 00:20:13.600 not that important. 00:20:13.600 --> 00:20:16.960 But there's a reason the second episode we did We did was 00:20:16.960 --> 00:20:19.600 on the genealogy of ideas. 00:20:19.600 --> 00:20:21.680 Because the source of these things matters. 00:20:21.680 --> 00:20:23.280 It matters. 00:20:23.280 --> 00:20:26.240 The foundation upon which you build your life. 00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:30.400 We should think of a very obvious example here, a very obvious 00:20:30.800 --> 00:20:32.160 parable from Christ. 00:20:32.160 --> 00:20:34.320 Upon what sort of foundation are you building? 00:20:34.320 --> 00:20:37.920 The same thing applies not just to your life, but also to 00:20:37.920 --> 00:20:40.560 your culture, to your civilization. 00:20:40.560 --> 00:20:45.760 What is the source from which you have derived these ideas or 00:20:45.760 --> 00:20:47.040 these beliefs? 00:20:47.040 --> 00:20:52.240 If your culture tells you that you have to believe A, why 00:20:52.240 --> 00:20:54.240 is it saying that you have to believe A? 00:20:54.240 --> 00:20:56.480 What is the source of that? 00:20:56.480 --> 00:21:01.040 Because if you go back, you will eventually find religion. 00:21:01.040 --> 00:21:06.080 And if the religion you find is not Christianity, then the culture 00:21:06.080 --> 00:21:09.040 is telling you you have to believe something false from a false 00:21:09.760 --> 00:21:12.240 religion. That's worship. 00:21:12.240 --> 00:21:14.800 That's worship of a false god. 00:21:14.800 --> 00:21:19.280 That is something that we are not permitted to do. 00:21:19.280 --> 00:21:24.480 And woe mentioned Luther's commentary on the first commandment. 00:21:24.480 --> 00:21:26.960 I actually want to read just one paragraph. 00:21:26.960 --> 00:21:30.320 This is from the large catechism instead of the small catechism, which 00:21:30.320 --> 00:21:32.960 the large catechism is obviously larger. 00:21:32.960 --> 00:21:36.480 It expands on what is said in the small catechism. 00:21:36.480 --> 00:21:40.560 I'll actually read two paragraphs so I can give you the context. 00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.280 The first paragraph is just going over the actual text of the 00:21:45.280 --> 00:21:48.160 first commandment, but I'll read the second half of it. 00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:50.560 What is the force of this and how is it to be 00:21:50.560 --> 00:21:54.560 understood? What does it mean to have a god or what is 00:21:54.880 --> 00:22:00.160 God? Answer A God means that from which we are to expect 00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:03.280 all good, and to which we are to take refuge in all 00:22:03.280 --> 00:22:07.440 distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to 00:22:07.440 --> 00:22:10.080 trust and believe in Him from the whole heart. 00:22:10.080 --> 00:22:12.880 As I have often said, that the confidence and faith of the 00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:18.800 heart alone make both God and an idol. 00:22:18.800 --> 00:22:22.240 That is an important point for us to bear in mind. 00:22:22.240 --> 00:22:25.920 When it comes to belief in something. 00:22:26.160 --> 00:22:30.880 If we rely on something that is not God, if we place 00:22:30.880 --> 00:22:35.840 our trust in a thing that is not God, we are giving 00:22:35.840 --> 00:22:39.520 worship to that thing that is part of a false religion, that 00:22:39.520 --> 00:22:41.040 is cult. 00:22:41.040 --> 00:22:45.040 That is the worship of a deity. 00:22:45.040 --> 00:22:47.840 And if it is not Christ, if it is not God, then 00:22:47.840 --> 00:22:50.400 it is a false worship of a false deity. 00:22:50.400 --> 00:22:52.080 It is idolatry. 00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:56.400 And we find that all over our culture, practically in every nook 00:22:56.400 --> 00:22:57.600 and cranny. 00:22:57.600 --> 00:23:01.360 Now I want to be very clear: we do not mean that 00:23:01.360 --> 00:23:05.520 you cannot, as a child, look to your parents for good. 00:23:05.520 --> 00:23:09.600 Your parents were provided to you by God, the good that they 00:23:09.600 --> 00:23:12.480 render to you ultimately comes from God. 00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:15.040 And so it is fine, in fact it is required by the 00:23:15.040 --> 00:23:19.200 fourth commandment and elsewhere in scripture, to be thankful to your parents, 00:23:19.200 --> 00:23:24.240 to honor your parents, but you are doing that in recognition that 00:23:24.240 --> 00:23:28.240 the good they have provided you ultimately comes from God. 00:23:28.240 --> 00:23:33.040 The problem is when you are looking to something as ultimate in 00:23:33.040 --> 00:23:38.160 itself, or when it is something that has an ultimate object that 00:23:38.160 --> 00:23:42.400 is not, or an ultimate source, that is not God. 00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:44.000 And we find that in our culture. 00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:45.760 Every time you are looking for 00:23:46.800 --> 00:23:53.840 comfort or meaning somewhere that is not ultimately grounded in the things 00:23:53.840 --> 00:23:57.040 of God, you are worshiping an idol. 00:23:57.520 --> 00:24:03.920 And Woe mentioned that the sense of having no other gods before 00:24:03.920 --> 00:24:06.960 God simply means to have no other gods. 00:24:06.960 --> 00:24:11.680 Thou shalt have no other gods is a permanent perfectly good paraphrase 00:24:11.680 --> 00:24:13.600 of the first commandment. 00:24:13.600 --> 00:24:17.680 You don't need the before me if that confuses you. 00:24:17.680 --> 00:24:22.000 But we can look to Deuteronomy to get God's answer on this 00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:26.880 question. See now that I, even I am He, and there is 00:24:26.880 --> 00:24:29.040 no God beside me. 00:24:29.040 --> 00:24:33.280 I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, and 00:24:33.280 --> 00:24:36.720 there is none that can deliver out of my hand. 00:24:37.200 --> 00:24:39.680 There is no other God. 00:24:39.680 --> 00:24:43.520 The issue of the first commandment is not whether you are going 00:24:43.520 --> 00:24:47.840 to worship God as supreme or have God as one of a 00:24:47.840 --> 00:24:51.520 pantheon. The issue of the first commandment is that there is one 00:24:52.320 --> 00:24:56.240 God, and that if you have anything else to which you are 00:24:56.240 --> 00:25:00.320 looking for this ultimate source of meaning or comfort or whatever it 00:25:00.320 --> 00:25:03.680 happens to be, then you have an idol, you have a false 00:25:03.680 --> 00:25:06.480 God, you have a false religion. 00:25:06.480 --> 00:25:10.320 And as Christians, and the point of this episode, we need to 00:25:10.320 --> 00:25:15.120 be looking at the things we believe, and figuring out the ultimate 00:25:15.120 --> 00:25:19.040 source of those beliefs, because if we cannot trace them back to 00:25:19.040 --> 00:25:22.960 the things of God, then they are not of God, and if 00:25:22.960 --> 00:25:27.200 they are not of God, they are part of another cult, they 00:25:27.200 --> 00:25:30.880 are part of some other system of worship because they are the 00:25:30.880 --> 00:25:35.760 worship of some other god, which is to say, an idol, a 00:25:35.760 --> 00:25:36.800 false god. 00:25:37.280 --> 00:25:42.960 And this sort of genealogical examination of these ideas is something we've 00:25:42.880 --> 00:25:44.880 talked about since the very beginning. 00:25:44.880 --> 00:25:46.800 I want to clarify something. 00:25:46.800 --> 00:25:51.600 When we talk about the genealogy of ideas on Stone Choir, we 00:25:51.600 --> 00:25:58.320 are not talking about encouraging some sort of exhaustive historical examination of 00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:01.360 every nook and cranny of a subject. 00:26:01.360 --> 00:26:05.200 We're saying you hold a belief. 00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:06.800 Where did you get it from? 00:26:06.800 --> 00:26:08.080 Where did they get it from? 00:26:08.080 --> 00:26:09.200 Where did he get it from? 00:26:09.200 --> 00:26:10.320 Where did he get it from? 00:26:10.320 --> 00:26:12.560 It it's just like your own genealogy. 00:26:12.560 --> 00:26:13.920 It doesn't need to be complicated. 00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:16.320 Just you know, give me the names and the dates and the 00:26:16.320 --> 00:26:19.440 locations. That that's the origin of the thing. 00:26:19.440 --> 00:26:23.440 If you go back far enough, you're going to find the ultimate 00:26:23.440 --> 00:26:25.680 origin in in whatever sense. 00:26:25.680 --> 00:26:28.560 An example of this, I was having a conversation a couple weeks 00:26:28.560 --> 00:26:33.920 ago with someone who used to not be Christian and had explored 00:26:33.920 --> 00:26:37.120 Kabbalah and some other things and I don't remember what we were 00:26:37.120 --> 00:26:42.080 talking about briefly, but he referenced something else. 00:26:42.080 --> 00:26:46.000 And I said, yeah, if you dig down that path far enough, 00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:51.280 you're inevitably going to find the Sephirot, which is the Kabbalistic tree 00:26:51.280 --> 00:26:52.080 of life. 00:26:52.080 --> 00:26:53.680 And that's about all I know about it. 00:26:53.680 --> 00:26:56.080 And he got really excited because he knew a whole lot about 00:26:56.080 --> 00:26:58.880 it. And I didn't know at the time that he had studied 00:26:58.880 --> 00:27:02.560 Kabbalah. I just knew from my own experience that whenever I looked 00:27:02.560 --> 00:27:06.160 at the genealogy thing, just superficially, like this guy said this thing 00:27:06.240 --> 00:27:08.480 and then he learned it from this other guy, I could go 00:27:08.480 --> 00:27:10.960 back just a few steps and I'm going to find this sort 00:27:10.960 --> 00:27:14.320 of Kabbalistic hermeticism and I'm going to find you like if you 00:27:14.320 --> 00:27:17.200 look on Wikipedia, you're going to find the Sephirot over on the 00:27:17.200 --> 00:27:21.280 right. Because there's an entire series of articles that deal with that 00:27:21.280 --> 00:27:24.720 stuff. And so for my purposes, that's all I want to know. 00:27:24.720 --> 00:27:25.920 I don't delve into that crap. 00:27:26.160 --> 00:27:26.960 it's demonic. 00:27:26.960 --> 00:27:29.360 I don't want to know anything. 00:27:29.360 --> 00:27:31.920 But so I think when I talked to him, he probably thought 00:27:32.000 --> 00:27:33.280 like I had been interested too. 00:27:33.280 --> 00:27:33.920 I'm not. 00:27:33.920 --> 00:27:35.680 I don't I don't want to know. 00:27:35.680 --> 00:27:40.720 For me, the genealogy, the examination of whatever idea I'm running down, 00:27:40.720 --> 00:27:45.360 when I go back far enough and I find Jewish black magic, 00:27:45.360 --> 00:27:46.800 that's the end of the search. 00:27:46.800 --> 00:27:48.720 I know the origin of that thing. 00:27:48.720 --> 00:27:50.480 I don't need to go back further. 00:27:50.480 --> 00:27:54.000 I don't need to understand any more about it than the fact 00:27:54.000 --> 00:27:56.960 that it has a wicked origin, the end. 00:27:56.960 --> 00:28:00.480 So when we talk about the genealogy of ideas on Stone Choir, 00:28:00.480 --> 00:28:02.240 sometimes it's very superficial. 00:28:02.240 --> 00:28:05.040 Yeah, I think one of the best examples that we gave in 00:28:05.040 --> 00:28:10.240 another early episode, we did one on the neglected matters in scripture. 00:28:10.240 --> 00:28:13.920 One of the five examples we gave was of head coverings in 00:28:13.920 --> 00:28:14.880 the church. 00:28:14.880 --> 00:28:20.880 And we mentioned that for 1960 years it was the almost universal 00:28:20.880 --> 00:28:24.960 practice in the Christian church for girls to cover their heads in 00:28:24.960 --> 00:28:29.040 church. Heads were to be covered because that's what God says in 00:28:29.040 --> 00:28:30.880 the New Testament. 00:28:30.880 --> 00:28:38.880 And in the late 1960s, the perfidious Jewess Betty Frieden Goldstein 00:28:39.280 --> 00:28:43.600 declared in the same year when she established the National Organization for 00:28:43.600 --> 00:28:43.760 Women 00:28:44.800 --> 00:28:48.640 and she made the push to get abortion, the sacrifice of infants 00:28:48.800 --> 00:28:53.200 legalized, simultaneously at the very same time, the other project that Betty 00:28:53.280 --> 00:28:56.000 Fried and Goldstein had was to get 00:28:57.040 --> 00:28:59.440 head coverings out of churches. 00:28:59.440 --> 00:29:04.320 There is a concerted campaign by now to reach out to Christian 00:29:04.320 --> 00:29:09.280 women. This Jewess told Christian women, take off your head coverings, they're 00:29:09.280 --> 00:29:13.840 a symbol of the patriarchy, they're a symbol of your subjugation, remove 00:29:13.840 --> 00:29:18.400 them, send them in to now headquarters, we're going to ceremonially burn 00:29:18.400 --> 00:29:25.600 them. So today in our churches, when the subject of head coverings 00:29:25.600 --> 00:29:30.480 come up, pastors don't want to engage with a genealogy of ideas 00:29:30.480 --> 00:29:34.960 of how head coverings were destroyed sixty years ago. 00:29:34.960 --> 00:29:38.480 No. They want to deal with the genealogy of the idea of 00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:39.680 where did it begin? 00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:43.760 Because if they can lock it into the cultural context of Corinth, 00:29:43.760 --> 00:29:45.440 then they can say, well, that doesn't apply to us. 00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:47.360 That's one of those things that's like shellfish. 00:29:47.360 --> 00:29:50.160 Whatever, doesn't matter. 00:29:50.160 --> 00:29:54.560 That'd be fine, except that no Christian believed that for 1960 years. 00:29:54.560 --> 00:29:56.240 Every Christian did the opposite. 00:29:56.240 --> 00:29:59.200 There are Christians alive today who remember the opposite. 00:29:59.200 --> 00:30:01.840 There may be some older ladies listening to this very podcast who 00:30:01.840 --> 00:30:06.160 remember when it was still common in your churches for every woman 00:30:06.160 --> 00:30:07.520 to cover her head. 00:30:07.520 --> 00:30:09.520 Why? Because it was cultural? 00:30:09.520 --> 00:30:13.360 Well, as Corey was just saying, yeah, it was cultural because it 00:30:13.360 --> 00:30:14.480 was Christian. 00:30:14.480 --> 00:30:18.400 It was the Christian belief, it was the Christian religion of what 00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:21.840 is right and wrong that was the norm. 00:30:21.840 --> 00:30:26.160 It was culture because it was part of the religion of Christendom. 00:30:26.640 --> 00:30:30.320 And it was only when this wicked Jewess came along and told 00:30:30.320 --> 00:30:32.400 Christians, You're free from that. 00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:33.520 You don't have to do that. 00:30:33.520 --> 00:30:34.880 In fact, it's bad. 00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:39.280 You shouldn't be doing that because patriarchy is evil. 00:30:39.280 --> 00:30:42.800 She was making a moral claim against head coverings. 00:30:42.800 --> 00:30:47.760 See, the demon-worshiping wicked woman who told girls to take their head 00:30:47.760 --> 00:30:51.840 coverings off wasn't making a positive case from scripture. 00:30:51.840 --> 00:30:55.920 She wasn't making the arguments the pastors are making today falsely. 00:30:55.920 --> 00:31:00.480 She was making an overt attack on heaven itself to say there's 00:31:00.480 --> 00:31:04.800 no God, you have no masters, be your own girl boss. 00:31:04.800 --> 00:31:08.080 And she didn't use those term, that term, but that's exactly what 00:31:08.080 --> 00:31:09.200 we have today. 00:31:09.200 --> 00:31:13.600 We see girls left and right running around headless, not realizing that 00:31:13.600 --> 00:31:14.480 they're headless. 00:31:14.480 --> 00:31:15.920 And so what do they do? 00:31:15.920 --> 00:31:17.360 They follow their base or instincts. 00:31:17.360 --> 00:31:21.120 They do what they do because no one will stop them. 00:31:21.120 --> 00:31:25.120 If all all the moral complaints that we have girls these days 00:31:25.440 --> 00:31:29.360 and the misbehavior, the things that they shouldn't be doing that they 00:31:29.360 --> 00:31:33.600 are, would they do those things if their heads were covered? 00:31:33.600 --> 00:31:37.520 It's a it's a ridiculous question, because the answer is obviously no. 00:31:37.840 --> 00:31:42.640 there's no possible world where a girl who was actually devoutly covering 00:31:42.640 --> 00:31:46.240 her head would engage in the sort of behaviors that are the 00:31:46.240 --> 00:31:49.360 very opposite moral end of the spectrum. 00:31:49.360 --> 00:31:51.520 Because it's a real thing. 00:31:51.520 --> 00:31:56.240 And I think that head covering is a perfect example of the 00:31:56.240 --> 00:31:59.600 sort of morality that we're talking about today because it's such a 00:31:59.600 --> 00:32:00.400 minor point. 00:32:00.400 --> 00:32:02.080 It's a small thing. 00:32:02.080 --> 00:32:05.120 It was never something that was a crucial part of the church 00:32:05.120 --> 00:32:05.840 in history. 00:32:05.840 --> 00:32:07.280 It was simply always done. 00:32:07.280 --> 00:32:09.040 Why? Because scripture said to. 00:32:09.040 --> 00:32:11.360 And everyone's like, okay, well, God says to do it, this is 00:32:11.360 --> 00:32:11.920 what we do. 00:32:11.920 --> 00:32:13.040 And it was cultural. 00:32:13.040 --> 00:32:17.440 It was normative for all Christians in all places and all times, 00:32:17.440 --> 00:32:20.720 almost without exception, until it was really fifty years ago, because it 00:32:20.720 --> 00:32:24.400 was the end of the nineteen sixties, when Goldstein came along and 00:32:24.400 --> 00:32:29.200 changed everything, in our churches, a wicked woman outside the faith, a 00:32:29.200 --> 00:32:33.520 child of Satan, said she gave us permission, just as Satan gave 00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:36.560 Eve permission in the garden, you will not surely die. 00:32:36.560 --> 00:32:38.400 You don't have to wear a head covering. 00:32:38.400 --> 00:32:40.000 That's what you what are you doing? 00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:41.440 That that's not how it works. 00:32:41.440 --> 00:32:42.160 You'll be fine. 00:32:42.160 --> 00:32:45.280 In fact you'll be better off after you take it off than 00:32:45.280 --> 00:32:46.400 you were before. 00:32:46.400 --> 00:32:48.720 Eat the fruit, you'll be like God. 00:32:48.720 --> 00:32:50.640 It's the same proposition. 00:32:50.640 --> 00:32:52.800 It's always the same proposition. 00:32:52.800 --> 00:32:54.400 And so it's a small thing. 00:32:54.400 --> 00:32:57.280 It's not, it's not something that lights my hair on fire. 00:32:57.280 --> 00:33:00.400 Like when we discussed that in that early episode, it wasn't it 00:33:00.400 --> 00:33:01.840 wasn't in vehemence. 00:33:01.840 --> 00:33:05.920 It wasn't in vigorous moral condemnation of the fact that probably virtually 00:33:05.920 --> 00:33:08.720 every girl listening right now doesn't cover her head. 00:33:08.720 --> 00:33:10.400 We're not worked up about that. 00:33:10.400 --> 00:33:14.640 We're simply pointing to the fact that scripture says that should be 00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:15.680 the case. 00:33:15.680 --> 00:33:18.720 And it's not for us as podcasters to tell you. 00:33:18.720 --> 00:33:22.640 Your husbands, your fathers, your pastors should be telling you. 00:33:22.640 --> 00:33:27.440 What do we find instead in the church today, in current year, 00:33:27.440 --> 00:33:31.840 in some of the congregations where girls have begun head covering, something 00:33:32.000 --> 00:33:37.440 has just taken off in the last couple years, it causes pastors 00:33:37.440 --> 00:33:39.840 to become very uncomfortable. 00:33:39.840 --> 00:33:45.360 And in some cases, they will arouse moral indignation against the practice 00:33:45.360 --> 00:33:50.480 of head covering that they don't find for any doctrinal issues. 00:33:50.480 --> 00:33:54.160 Which is fascinating, because the church always did it until 50 years 00:33:54.160 --> 00:33:56.320 ago, almost without exception. 00:33:56.320 --> 00:33:59.040 And you know, for a lot of ladies, it took until the 00:33:59.040 --> 00:34:02.160 seventies or eighties, usually some of the older ones didn't break with 00:34:02.160 --> 00:34:05.680 tradition. They kept doing it because they didn't feel comfortable not doing 00:34:05.680 --> 00:34:08.960 it. But as new generations rose and everyone said it's honky dory 00:34:09.120 --> 00:34:14.400 do it, today in our own seminaries and our own churches, pastors 00:34:14.640 --> 00:34:16.560 are deeply uncomfortable. 00:34:16.560 --> 00:34:19.840 They're angry about this particular issue. 00:34:19.840 --> 00:34:20.880 Why is that? 00:34:21.200 --> 00:34:24.640 Scripture said to do one thing, and yet they have a moral 00:34:24.640 --> 00:34:26.880 response against that thing. 00:34:26.880 --> 00:34:30.800 And the nature of their moral response is egalitarianism. 00:34:30.800 --> 00:34:35.440 They are defending feminism against Christianity. 00:34:35.440 --> 00:34:38.720 And so the purpose of today's episode is to illustrate that this 00:34:38.720 --> 00:34:40.080 is what happens. 00:34:40.080 --> 00:34:44.480 You know, these pastors who will teach through very patiently all manner 00:34:44.480 --> 00:34:48.000 of of doctrinal error, confusion in in a man or a woman 00:34:48.160 --> 00:34:49.840 when something comes up. 00:34:49.840 --> 00:34:54.160 But if you do something like re-establish, even for yourself, you know, 00:34:54.160 --> 00:34:57.280 if a woman privately wears it, doesn't say a word to anyone, 00:34:57.280 --> 00:35:00.880 she just shows up on Sunday with her head covered, everybody's gonna 00:35:00.880 --> 00:35:03.920 notice. A lot of people are gonna get uncomfortable. 00:35:03.920 --> 00:35:08.000 Some of the men in particular, who are feminists, whether they admit 00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:10.800 it or not, they get really uncomfortable. 00:35:10.800 --> 00:35:12.320 And some of them get angry. 00:35:12.320 --> 00:35:17.040 Their pastors in the LCMS in particular, at the highest levels who 00:35:17.040 --> 00:35:21.120 are angry that there are girls in our congregations who are doing 00:35:21.120 --> 00:35:22.000 this because 00:35:23.280 --> 00:35:28.000 it reasserts the fact of male headship. 00:35:28.240 --> 00:35:32.000 It's not that wearing a head covering is dominating a girl. 00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:37.840 It's an acknowledgement of the pre-existing ontological nature of the relationship of 00:35:38.240 --> 00:35:39.200 the sexes. 00:35:39.200 --> 00:35:42.320 We did a couple episodes specifically on the nature of woman and 00:35:42.320 --> 00:35:45.840 on the history of feminism, and we cover this in more depth 00:35:45.840 --> 00:35:51.120 there. And so when today you have a moral indignation against that 00:35:51.120 --> 00:35:54.320 which is scriptural, that's a separate religion. 00:35:54.320 --> 00:35:58.160 Even when it's a pastor, even with someone who is he does 00:35:58.160 --> 00:36:01.360 all the stuff, you know, he doesn't curse, he doesn't cheat on 00:36:01.360 --> 00:36:04.080 his taxes, he doesn't do any of the morals things that you 00:36:04.080 --> 00:36:06.480 would think, well, clearly that guy's you know he's a good Christian. 00:36:06.480 --> 00:36:07.360 And he's a pastor. 00:36:07.360 --> 00:36:08.320 He's devoted his life. 00:36:08.560 --> 00:36:09.920 he's doing everything right. 00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:12.800 But when this thing comes up, he flips. 00:36:12.800 --> 00:36:15.920 He gets so angry that they will go around in secret and 00:36:15.920 --> 00:36:19.920 they will try to root out anyone who would deign to permit, 00:36:19.920 --> 00:36:23.280 let alone encourage this sort of behavior in our churches. 00:36:23.280 --> 00:36:26.960 That is a separate religion because that's there are all sorts of 00:36:26.960 --> 00:36:31.520 errors in the church today that are tolerated, what won't they tolerate? 00:36:31.520 --> 00:36:35.120 Because what you will not tolerate, what is way over your line, 00:36:35.120 --> 00:36:38.800 whatever your personal line is, that is your true religion. 00:36:38.800 --> 00:36:44.240 And in today's world, our true religion isn't from God anymore. 00:36:44.240 --> 00:36:47.920 The things that get us fired up are not the things that 00:36:47.920 --> 00:36:49.200 God established. 00:36:49.200 --> 00:36:52.320 The things that get us fired up are the things that culture 00:36:52.320 --> 00:36:56.480 have established as moral and the problem is that the culture is 00:36:56.480 --> 00:36:57.600 still religious. 00:36:57.600 --> 00:37:01.040 It is simply no longer predicated on Christian beliefs. 00:37:01.040 --> 00:37:04.320 And so left and right you will find, you know, in the 00:37:04.320 --> 00:37:08.400 back catalog of Stone Choir, we dealt with head coverings, slavery, racism, 00:37:08.400 --> 00:37:11.520 feminism, all substitute moralities. 00:37:11.520 --> 00:37:14.320 And those are the hot button issues of this day. 00:37:14.320 --> 00:37:17.680 And one of the reasons we did those episodes is that they 00:37:17.680 --> 00:37:19.040 were Bible studies. 00:37:19.040 --> 00:37:24.000 They weren't simply political streeds because this is not political in nature. 00:37:24.000 --> 00:37:27.040 This is moral in nature because it's coming from scripture. 00:37:27.040 --> 00:37:28.720 It's all coming from God. 00:37:28.720 --> 00:37:31.840 And when we try to separate the two, when we try to 00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:34.640 say, well, no, you can we're gonna carve all this stuff out 00:37:34.640 --> 00:37:35.520 and call political. 00:37:35.520 --> 00:37:36.960 We're gonna call woke. 00:37:36.960 --> 00:37:39.520 As soon as you do that, it ceases to be a moral 00:37:39.520 --> 00:37:42.560 matter, but it's still moral because you still defend it with a 00:37:42.560 --> 00:37:45.680 vehemence that you don't even bring to things like you know, the 00:37:45.680 --> 00:37:49.520 creeds in the Lord's Prayer and these things that are basic tenets 00:37:49.520 --> 00:37:51.600 of the Christian faith. 00:37:51.600 --> 00:37:54.720 Your religion is that which you defend the most vigorously. 00:37:54.720 --> 00:37:59.440 And even in the smallest, least significant example that we could think 00:37:59.440 --> 00:38:05.280 of, something like head coverings will elicit the greatest degree of vehemence. 00:38:05.280 --> 00:38:07.520 That itself is the issue. 00:38:07.520 --> 00:38:11.280 That is illustrating that there's a separate religion occurring, even in the 00:38:11.280 --> 00:38:14.480 same pulpit, that also espouses Christianity. 00:38:14.480 --> 00:38:16.080 And that's why this is so dire. 00:38:16.080 --> 00:38:21.120 Because it's not Satan coming into our pulpits manifest and saying, forget 00:38:21.120 --> 00:38:24.000 the justification stuff, forget Jesus on the cross. 00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:25.760 We're going to do all this other evil stuff. 00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:28.400 No, he says you can have all your Jesus stuff, just just 00:38:28.400 --> 00:38:29.440 do this one thing. 00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:31.200 You know, you will not surely die. 00:38:31.520 --> 00:38:32.560 don't worry about it. 00:38:32.560 --> 00:38:33.760 That's the distinction. 00:38:33.760 --> 00:38:37.200 See, Satan doesn't care how he gets you as long as he 00:38:37.200 --> 00:38:42.160 gets you, whatever trick works, and if you start disobeying God, you're 00:38:42.160 --> 00:38:44.000 off to the races. 00:38:44.480 --> 00:38:48.400 There's a particular set of questions that I have used a few 00:38:48.400 --> 00:38:52.560 times in order to highlight one of the points that Woe just 00:38:52.560 --> 00:38:56.640 made. I am going to modify them slightly for the sake of 00:38:56.640 --> 00:39:01.680 the podcast, but I have two statements I am going to make. 00:39:01.680 --> 00:39:08.720 See which one, initially, just viscerally, offends you more. 00:39:08.720 --> 00:39:13.840 Jesus Christ is not God that's the first statement. 00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:17.920 Martin Luther King was not a Christian. 00:39:17.920 --> 00:39:20.160 That's the second statement. 00:39:20.160 --> 00:39:21.680 Now there is 00:39:22.960 --> 00:39:26.800 another word that I could use instead of Christian that usually elicits 00:39:26.800 --> 00:39:30.000 a stronger response, and it proves the point just as well, but 00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:33.280 again for the sake of the podcast I will refrain from using 00:39:33.280 --> 00:39:34.800 that word here. 00:39:34.800 --> 00:39:42.000 Most people in our culture will respond more negatively, significantly, 00:39:41.920 --> 00:39:47.040 more negatively, to criticism of Michael King, or any of a number 00:39:47.040 --> 00:39:52.880 of other secular saints, as it were, than they will to the 00:39:52.880 --> 00:39:55.760 other statement, which is blasphemy. 00:39:56.320 --> 00:40:00.000 Jesus Christ is not God is blasphemous. 00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:02.880 It is a violation of the first commandment. 00:40:02.880 --> 00:40:06.000 It is the violation of the second commandment as well. 00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:06.320 But 00:40:07.760 --> 00:40:08.960 even pastors 00:40:10.080 --> 00:40:16.320 And I have tested this personally, even pastors will respond more negatively 00:40:16.560 --> 00:40:22.720 to their critique of one of these secular saints, so-called, than a 00:40:22.720 --> 00:40:28.560 statement that is directly against the core of the Christian religion. 00:40:28.560 --> 00:40:34.160 What that tells you is that the individual who responds more negatively 00:40:34.160 --> 00:40:36.960 to the first statement or the second, depending on the order you 00:40:36.960 --> 00:40:37.680 read them in. 00:40:37.680 --> 00:40:40.320 If you're going to perform the test, reading the statement about the 00:40:40.320 --> 00:40:42.960 secular saint second is more effective. 00:40:42.960 --> 00:40:45.760 But the person who responds more negatively to that 00:40:47.600 --> 00:40:49.440 has a different God. 00:40:49.680 --> 00:40:54.560 And holds that God in higher esteem than he holds the Lord 00:40:54.560 --> 00:41:00.720 God. That's not just having another God, that's having another God as 00:41:00.720 --> 00:41:02.720 your supreme deity. 00:41:02.720 --> 00:41:06.240 Now granted you're not supposed to even have lesser gods in addition 00:41:06.240 --> 00:41:10.480 to the Lord God as your supreme deity, but making the Lord 00:41:10.480 --> 00:41:13.520 God a lesser deity is even worse. 00:41:13.520 --> 00:41:16.080 And that is what we see in our culture. 00:41:16.080 --> 00:41:21.200 Because people are more offended when you speak against these idols than 00:41:21.200 --> 00:41:23.680 when you speak against the Lord God. 00:41:23.680 --> 00:41:28.160 We have comedians all the time making jokes about Christ. 00:41:28.160 --> 00:41:29.680 Christians don't bat an eye. 00:41:29.680 --> 00:41:33.360 Many Christians listen to that filth and laugh at it, find it 00:41:33.360 --> 00:41:39.680 funny. But these very same comedians wouldn't go anywhere near these secular 00:41:39.680 --> 00:41:43.840 saints. Because that is the actual religion of our culture, that is 00:41:43.840 --> 00:41:50.320 the actual cult that forms the basis of our culture today. 00:41:50.320 --> 00:41:54.720 That is our system of religious veneration, because these are the actual 00:41:54.720 --> 00:41:58.240 gods in our system, or in this case, if you name the 00:41:58.240 --> 00:42:01.520 individuals, they are the priests of the gods of our system. 00:42:01.520 --> 00:42:04.640 And one of those gods, of course, is egalitarianism. 00:42:04.960 --> 00:42:09.360 is the belief, the contention, false on its face, that all men 00:42:09.360 --> 00:42:11.040 are equal. 00:42:11.040 --> 00:42:14.560 They'll even attempt to appeal, of course, to scripture and say that, 00:42:14.560 --> 00:42:16.320 well, God made all men equal. 00:42:16.320 --> 00:42:18.240 That's not what Scripture says. 00:42:18.240 --> 00:42:20.960 We've been over that in other episodes and will undoubtedly go over 00:42:20.960 --> 00:42:26.560 it in the future in other episode contexts as well. 00:42:26.560 --> 00:42:31.760 But you have a rampant worship of false gods in our culture 00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:36.800 and Christians just go along with it, because they do not examine 00:42:37.040 --> 00:42:41.040 their priors, they do not examine their presuppositions, they do not look 00:42:41.040 --> 00:42:43.520 at the things that they believe and the things that they are 00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:49.760 doing. If you have a visceral reaction to someone critiquing some particular 00:42:49.760 --> 00:42:54.240 person, you need to look at why that is the case. 00:42:54.240 --> 00:42:57.040 If that is because the person was a Christian and he is 00:42:57.040 --> 00:43:00.400 being attacked for his Christian faith, then that is a good Christian 00:43:00.400 --> 00:43:04.400 response. And you should be proud to have that, quite frankly, that 00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:05.600 is a good thing to have. 00:43:05.600 --> 00:43:08.400 That is a mark of a true Christian. 00:43:08.400 --> 00:43:13.120 But if the person being attacked as it were, being critiqued, was 00:43:13.120 --> 00:43:16.320 not a Christian, which is the case with Michael King, of course, 00:43:16.320 --> 00:43:19.840 as we went over in our series on that. 00:43:19.840 --> 00:43:22.560 But if the person being critiqued is not a Christian, you have 00:43:22.560 --> 00:43:24.400 that same response Response 00:43:26.240 --> 00:43:32.000 you are participating in a false religion because you have a learned 00:43:32.080 --> 00:43:37.680 and indoctrinated most likely visceral response to an implicit attack 00:43:38.720 --> 00:43:42.800 on one of your idols, and whether or not you recognize that 00:43:42.800 --> 00:43:46.720 you have that idol, if you have the response, you have the 00:43:46.720 --> 00:43:50.800 idol. And that is a point that I want to make very 00:43:50.800 --> 00:43:52.160 clear here. 00:43:52.160 --> 00:43:52.800 This is 00:43:53.920 --> 00:43:57.120 something that many don't recognize. 00:43:57.120 --> 00:44:01.920 Our culture is suffused with propaganda. 00:44:02.320 --> 00:44:06.640 much of it propaganda for false gods, for false worship, for false 00:44:06.640 --> 00:44:10.560 religions. Now, of course, everyone listening is going to go, Well, of 00:44:10.560 --> 00:44:12.000 course I know there's propaganda. 00:44:12.000 --> 00:44:13.840 That's not what I mean. 00:44:13.840 --> 00:44:17.200 There is propaganda in places you do not expect it. 00:44:17.200 --> 00:44:21.600 There is propaganda in forms you do not see. 00:44:21.600 --> 00:44:26.160 Because there are very intelligent and also very evil, but very intelligent, 00:44:26.160 --> 00:44:31.280 very well compensated men, very well educated men who dedicate their entire 00:44:31.280 --> 00:44:31.920 lives 00:44:32.880 --> 00:44:39.840 to drafting, to tweaking, to optimizing the sort of propaganda that just 00:44:39.840 --> 00:44:42.560 gets right past your filters. 00:44:42.560 --> 00:44:48.960 Because not everything that you see or hear or encounter is run 00:44:48.960 --> 00:44:51.280 through all of those conscious filters that you have in place. 00:44:51.280 --> 00:44:53.040 And you may have very good ones. 00:44:53.040 --> 00:44:57.840 You may spot the more obvious propaganda immediately, but the problem is 00:44:58.080 --> 00:44:59.440 you watched it. 00:44:59.440 --> 00:45:01.520 You still saw it. 00:45:01.520 --> 00:45:04.880 And part of the way that the human mind works is it 00:45:04.880 --> 00:45:06.080 integrates those things. 00:45:06.080 --> 00:45:10.640 It's basically Bayesian updating without getting into the specifics, but you see 00:45:10.640 --> 00:45:14.720 these things, you encounter these things, they seep in over time. 00:45:14.720 --> 00:45:19.760 And so even if you are watching say television or Netflix, whatever 00:45:19.760 --> 00:45:23.920 it happens to be, you're watching these obvious propaganda programs, and you 00:45:23.920 --> 00:45:27.120 say, Well, I know the propaganda and I could see it's propaganda 00:45:27.200 --> 00:45:30.160 and so it's not dangerous to me because I recognize it. 00:45:30.160 --> 00:45:31.600 No, it's still dangerous to you. 00:45:31.600 --> 00:45:34.640 It is seeping into your mind over time. 00:45:34.640 --> 00:45:38.480 And if you find that you have some of these visceral reactions 00:45:38.720 --> 00:45:43.600 to certain critiques or certain attacks, there's your source. 00:45:43.600 --> 00:45:48.240 You have been indoctrinated, and we have this stuff all over our 00:45:48.240 --> 00:45:51.360 culture. There is a reason that we are instructed to avoid even 00:45:51.360 --> 00:45:55.440 the appearance of evil, that we are instructed to avoid spending time 00:45:55.440 --> 00:45:56.720 with the wicked. 00:45:56.720 --> 00:46:01.680 We are to guard ourselves against these things because they can infect 00:46:01.680 --> 00:46:04.720 us even when our guard is up. 00:46:04.720 --> 00:46:10.080 And so Christians should not be essentially watching television, really. 00:46:10.080 --> 00:46:11.520 Most of it is wicked. 00:46:11.520 --> 00:46:12.960 Are there some exceptions? 00:46:12.960 --> 00:46:15.440 Sure. Should you be paying for it? 00:46:15.440 --> 00:46:17.600 I'm going to go ahead and just say no, because if you're 00:46:17.600 --> 00:46:20.400 paying for it, you are propping up the wicked system. 00:46:20.400 --> 00:46:23.200 You are literally tithing to Satan. 00:46:23.200 --> 00:46:25.120 As a Christian, you shouldn't doing that. 00:46:25.520 --> 00:46:27.680 We said this is going to be a law heavy episode and 00:46:27.680 --> 00:46:31.360 it's going to be, because there are some realities of which you 00:46:31.520 --> 00:46:36.080 as a Christian need to be aware. 00:46:36.080 --> 00:46:40.320 Satan is prowling about as a roaring lion seeking to devour whom 00:46:40.320 --> 00:46:41.920 he can. 00:46:41.920 --> 00:46:44.560 He doesn't care if your guard is up or your guard is 00:46:44.560 --> 00:46:48.480 down. If he can get past it, it's irrelevant. 00:46:48.480 --> 00:46:50.640 And he is very good at this game. 00:46:51.440 --> 00:46:55.200 Now I'm not telling you to despair, I'm not telling you that 00:46:55.200 --> 00:46:58.560 there's no hope because Satan is so good at his job. 00:46:58.560 --> 00:47:02.080 What I am saying is that as a Christian, you are to 00:47:02.080 --> 00:47:06.800 guard your eyes, your heart, your mind from these wicked things. 00:47:06.800 --> 00:47:11.040 If you expose yourself to them, they will have an effect, even 00:47:11.040 --> 00:47:15.200 if you recognize them as the wickedness that they are. 00:47:15.200 --> 00:47:18.400 That is why when we go over certain topics, we don't tell 00:47:18.400 --> 00:47:21.440 you, go and read this stuff for yourself. 00:47:21.440 --> 00:47:27.280 There are very real harms, at least potential harms, involved in exposing 00:47:27.280 --> 00:47:29.520 yourself to certain things. 00:47:29.680 --> 00:47:33.440 As a Christian, you should want to deal with holy things, with 00:47:33.440 --> 00:47:35.280 things that are good, with things that are of God. 00:47:35.280 --> 00:47:40.720 Now, obviously, living in a fallen world, we cannot exclusively deal with 00:47:40.720 --> 00:47:41.280 those things. 00:47:41.280 --> 00:47:43.840 We are going to have to deal with the wicked world and 00:47:44.240 --> 00:47:47.280 its products to some degree. 00:47:47.280 --> 00:47:50.640 But you can control to how much of that you're exposed and 00:47:50.640 --> 00:47:53.440 the way in which you're exposed, and certainly whether or not your 00:47:53.440 --> 00:47:55.200 children are exposed. 00:47:55.200 --> 00:47:59.760 And too many Christians just let the television babysit their children. 00:47:59.760 --> 00:48:02.800 Do you think that the people in Hollywood who are producing those 00:48:02.800 --> 00:48:05.120 programs have your best interests in heart? 00:48:05.120 --> 00:48:08.400 Do you think that they have your children's best interests in heart? 00:48:08.400 --> 00:48:11.840 Do you think that they worship the Lord God? 00:48:11.840 --> 00:48:15.040 They are training your children to be religious. 00:48:15.040 --> 00:48:18.800 They are training them, they are indoctrinating them, they are initiating them 00:48:18.800 --> 00:48:22.080 into the cult, at least one of the cults, on which our 00:48:22.080 --> 00:48:25.520 culture is currently based. 00:48:25.520 --> 00:48:30.080 If something is not oriented toward God, it is necessarily oriented against 00:48:30.080 --> 00:48:32.000 or away from God. 00:48:32.000 --> 00:48:34.880 Christ is very clear about this. 00:48:34.880 --> 00:48:36.160 If you are not for him, you are against 00:48:37.040 --> 00:48:42.240 him. And so as Christians, we have to be careful about these 00:48:42.240 --> 00:48:45.520 things. And we have to look at the things that we believe 00:48:45.600 --> 00:48:49.120 and the way that we react to certain things, or attacks or 00:48:49.120 --> 00:48:52.960 critiques of certain people and certain ideas, and we need to pay 00:48:52.960 --> 00:48:55.840 attention to how other Christians react as well. 00:48:55.840 --> 00:48:59.520 Because just because someone says that he is a Christian does not 00:48:59.520 --> 00:49:02.800 mean that he is He is. 00:49:02.800 --> 00:49:07.040 This is a problem that we see in church history and still 00:49:07.040 --> 00:49:11.040 today in the church generally. 00:49:11.040 --> 00:49:16.480 Many will look at just Adjust the external appearance of the thing. 00:49:16.480 --> 00:49:21.440 And they will say, Well, that looks Christian. 00:49:21.440 --> 00:49:24.080 Now there is something to be said for appearances. 00:49:24.080 --> 00:49:25.360 They do matter. 00:49:25.360 --> 00:49:27.920 Anyone who tells you appearance doesn't matter is lying to you. 00:49:28.160 --> 00:49:28.880 That's wrong. 00:49:28.880 --> 00:49:30.480 Appearances matter. 00:49:30.480 --> 00:49:32.240 We're never going to say they don't. 00:49:32.240 --> 00:49:34.480 We're not going to say that the liturgy isn't important. 00:49:34.480 --> 00:49:37.520 We're not going to say that decorating the church to be beautiful 00:49:37.520 --> 00:49:38.240 isn't important. 00:49:38.240 --> 00:49:39.440 All of these things matter. 00:49:39.440 --> 00:49:42.400 Of course beauty flows from God, it is one of the transcendentals, 00:49:42.400 --> 00:49:44.880 so beauty does matter. 00:49:44.880 --> 00:49:49.360 But we would caution you not to make that the totality of 00:49:49.360 --> 00:49:50.560 your assessment. 00:49:50.560 --> 00:49:55.440 There are other things that matter in addition to beauty, in addition 00:49:55.440 --> 00:49:56.880 to that external appearance. 00:49:56.880 --> 00:50:00.400 And sometimes if you dig more than skin deep, as it were, 00:50:00.400 --> 00:50:03.840 you may find that it's not so beautiful on the inside. 00:50:03.840 --> 00:50:07.760 But there's the issue of the word concept fallacy. 00:50:07.760 --> 00:50:11.440 I've gone over this previously, and we see a version of this 00:50:11.680 --> 00:50:14.080 when someone will claim to be a Christian. 00:50:14.080 --> 00:50:15.600 He'll say he's a Christian. 00:50:15.600 --> 00:50:16.800 He'll may even go to church. 00:50:16.800 --> 00:50:19.760 He may even religiously go to church. 00:50:19.760 --> 00:50:23.600 He may go Sunday and Wednesday. 00:50:23.600 --> 00:50:28.080 But then you start asking questions, or you start discussing certain topics, 00:50:28.080 --> 00:50:32.960 and it turns out he has a totally different set of gods. 00:50:32.960 --> 00:50:38.320 He has a collection of idols in his heart that are contrary 00:50:38.320 --> 00:50:41.520 to the Lord God, that have taken up residence in place of 00:50:41.520 --> 00:50:42.880 the Lord God. 00:50:44.720 --> 00:50:48.560 That is far easier to do in a culture such as ours 00:50:48.640 --> 00:50:50.960 that is not Christian. 00:50:50.960 --> 00:50:54.480 In a Christian culture, that would be that would be very difficult 00:50:54.480 --> 00:50:55.120 to do. 00:50:55.120 --> 00:50:57.920 Because in a Christian culture, you would go to church and then 00:50:57.920 --> 00:51:01.040 you would go back out into the world for your daily life 00:51:01.120 --> 00:51:07.440 and you would still be surrounded by Christians, Christian beliefs, Christian culture, 00:51:07.440 --> 00:51:08.800 Christian society. 00:51:08.800 --> 00:51:09.680 That is easier 00:51:10.880 --> 00:51:13.680 for someone to remain Christian in that setting. 00:51:13.680 --> 00:51:16.560 And that is one of the reasons that we want nations, we 00:51:16.560 --> 00:51:19.600 want governments, we want states to be Christian. 00:51:19.600 --> 00:51:23.040 Because if you live in a Christian context, the odds of you 00:51:23.040 --> 00:51:23.600 staying Christian 00:51:24.480 --> 00:51:26.400 are much higher. 00:51:26.400 --> 00:51:30.560 When we had Christendom in the West, by and large the majority 00:51:30.560 --> 00:51:32.560 of people were Christian. 00:51:32.560 --> 00:51:37.040 Even those who were relatively marginal Christians stayed Christian because they lived 00:51:37.040 --> 00:51:39.040 in a Christian context. 00:51:39.040 --> 00:51:40.080 It matters. 00:51:40.080 --> 00:51:41.680 Scripture speaks to this. 00:51:41.680 --> 00:51:43.760 Train up a child in the way he should go, and when 00:51:43.760 --> 00:51:46.240 he is old he will not depart from it. 00:51:46.240 --> 00:51:49.600 You are raising that child in a Christian context. 00:51:49.600 --> 00:51:51.600 That is part of what it means to train him up in 00:51:51.600 --> 00:51:53.520 the way he should go. 00:51:53.520 --> 00:51:58.240 And by doing that, you are keeping him in the faith. 00:51:58.240 --> 00:52:01.040 These things matter. 00:52:01.040 --> 00:52:03.920 And so when it comes to religion, when it comes to this 00:52:03.920 --> 00:52:08.400 cult, when it comes to our culture, you need to look at 00:52:08.400 --> 00:52:11.760 the things to which you are exposing yourself, and you need to 00:52:11.760 --> 00:52:14.640 look at the things you believe, perhaps as a consequence of the 00:52:14.640 --> 00:52:17.280 things to which you to which you were exposed or you allowed 00:52:17.280 --> 00:52:22.640 yourself to be exposed, or you just outright exposed yourself deliberately. 00:52:22.640 --> 00:52:27.520 You cannot assume that just because, well, I go to church and 00:52:27.520 --> 00:52:31.760 I believe this, so it must be Christian, that doesn't follow. 00:52:31.760 --> 00:52:34.800 What is the source of the thing you believe? 00:52:34.800 --> 00:52:40.800 If it came from someone, for instance, a Jewish feminist, then it 00:52:40.800 --> 00:52:42.640 isn't Christian. 00:52:42.640 --> 00:52:47.520 That idea, feminism, did not originate with God. 00:52:47.520 --> 00:52:49.520 It originated with Satan. 00:52:49.520 --> 00:52:53.200 It has been shoehorned into the church, and now we have men 00:52:53.200 --> 00:52:58.160 in the church, some sometimes even men in robes, defending feminism. 00:52:58.160 --> 00:53:00.320 That is incredibly wicked. 00:53:00.320 --> 00:53:04.240 And as Christians it is our duty to push back against that. 00:53:04.240 --> 00:53:07.840 But first and foremost, before you can push back against it, you 00:53:07.840 --> 00:53:10.720 have to remove it from your own life, you have to remove 00:53:10.720 --> 00:53:12.400 it from your own heart. 00:53:12.400 --> 00:53:16.240 You have to root out those idols and destroy 00:53:16.240 --> 00:53:16.880 them. 00:53:17.280 --> 00:53:22.240 And this is why the definition narrowly of religion as focusing on 00:53:22.240 --> 00:53:25.520 morality is the test. 00:53:25.520 --> 00:53:29.440 Because you can confess the triune God with your lips, you can 00:53:29.440 --> 00:53:35.520 go to church, you can do the superficial trappings of that religion 00:53:35.680 --> 00:53:39.760 that has a name and a deity and a logo, has all 00:53:39.760 --> 00:53:42.320 the stuff that says, yeah, that that looks like a religion. 00:53:42.320 --> 00:53:46.080 And then the other things in your life that that don't necessarily 00:53:46.080 --> 00:53:49.120 have a logo that the gods don't necessarily have names, at least 00:53:49.120 --> 00:53:51.520 not ones you know. 00:53:51.520 --> 00:53:54.880 But if those are the sources of your active morality in your 00:53:54.880 --> 00:53:57.040 life, those are your gods. 00:53:57.040 --> 00:53:59.680 Even while you're simultaneously confessing to be Christian. 00:54:00.640 --> 00:54:04.160 And while that's probably not as common with most of the Stone 00:54:04.160 --> 00:54:09.040 Choir audience, I guarantee you it is much more common with your 00:54:09.040 --> 00:54:14.000 pastors and with the leaders of your churches, because they have all 00:54:14.000 --> 00:54:19.120 been taught by their own institutions, we are the experts, we are 00:54:19.120 --> 00:54:23.440 the more godly ones, we're gonna run this stuff well. 00:54:23.440 --> 00:54:27.280 And if they were testing their inputs, as Corey was talking about, 00:54:27.280 --> 00:54:31.040 if they were carefully discerning that all of their doctrines and all 00:54:31.040 --> 00:54:34.560 of their beliefs and all their morality was only to be derived 00:54:34.560 --> 00:54:37.280 from scripture, that would be true. 00:54:37.280 --> 00:54:40.160 But what we see today and what we've seen for the certainly 00:54:40.400 --> 00:54:44.880 last two centuries, especially in America, is that 00:54:45.840 --> 00:54:53.920 morality, right and wrong, is being originated in new fashions in secular, 00:54:53.920 --> 00:54:59.600 increasingly secularized unchristian culture, and then it's being imported into the church, 00:54:59.600 --> 00:55:02.560 and then they find a proof text somewhere in scripture to say, 00:55:02.560 --> 00:55:05.360 look, this new thing that I just scraped off the sidewalk and 00:55:05.360 --> 00:55:08.400 I dragged in here, this is actually from the Bible. 00:55:08.400 --> 00:55:09.760 Well, it's nothing of the sort. 00:55:09.760 --> 00:55:11.200 It's a dog turd. 00:55:11.200 --> 00:55:15.280 You brought in filth and then you baptize it and then you 00:55:15.280 --> 00:55:18.560 give it to people and tell them that's Christian teaching. 00:55:18.560 --> 00:55:21.760 That is the second commandment, as it's ordered by Roman Catholics and 00:55:21.760 --> 00:55:25.360 Lutherans. Do not bear falsely God's name. 00:55:25.360 --> 00:55:29.600 Lying about what God says is a violation of that commandment. 00:55:29.840 --> 00:55:33.360 When you say that God says something and he didn't say that, 00:55:33.360 --> 00:55:36.160 that is much worse than what we typically think of. 00:55:36.240 --> 00:55:40.000 We think of cursing using God's name profanely as you know, using 00:55:40.160 --> 00:55:41.760 G D it, that's bad. 00:55:41.760 --> 00:55:42.240 It's evil. 00:55:42.640 --> 00:55:45.680 It's not as evil as saying, I'm from God and let me 00:55:45.680 --> 00:55:47.280 tell you what God really said. 00:55:47.280 --> 00:55:49.120 God didn't really say that. 00:55:49.120 --> 00:55:51.120 He actually said the opposite. 00:55:51.120 --> 00:55:52.720 And let me explain how. 00:55:52.720 --> 00:55:56.080 That's typical in our churches today, across the board. 00:55:56.480 --> 00:56:00.080 One of the verses that Cory and I will most frequently refer 00:56:00.080 --> 00:56:03.680 to is from the beginning of first Timothy four. 00:56:03.680 --> 00:56:07.600 Now the Spirit expressly says that afterwards some will depart from the 00:56:08.480 --> 00:56:13.520 faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through 00:56:13.520 --> 00:56:18.800 the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and 00:56:18.800 --> 00:56:23.600 require abstinence for foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving 00:56:23.600 --> 00:56:26.240 by those who believe and know the truth. 00:56:26.240 --> 00:56:30.320 There's a lot just in this one passage that teaches many different 00:56:30.320 --> 00:56:32.480 aspects of this lesson. 00:56:32.480 --> 00:56:36.480 One, some will depart from the faith. 00:56:36.480 --> 00:56:38.320 It's not talking about unbelievers. 00:56:38.320 --> 00:56:40.000 We're not talking about pagans here. 00:56:40.000 --> 00:56:42.960 We're talking about people who were in the church who had the 00:56:42.960 --> 00:56:44.880 faith. And then what did they do? 00:56:44.880 --> 00:56:50.720 They devoted themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. 00:56:50.720 --> 00:56:53.360 Where are the sources of these teachings? 00:56:53.360 --> 00:56:57.520 Either their scripture or their wickedness? 00:56:57.520 --> 00:57:02.720 Because everything that is true, everything that is from God is either 00:57:02.720 --> 00:57:06.240 naturally revealed in nature or it's in scripture. 00:57:06.240 --> 00:57:09.040 Not every single thing that is true is found in scripture. 00:57:09.040 --> 00:57:11.040 That's not how God arranged things. 00:57:11.040 --> 00:57:14.720 But when you start talking about morality, when you start talking about 00:57:14.720 --> 00:57:18.320 right and wrong, that is distinct. 00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:21.760 Now right and wrong is written on the hearts of men. 00:57:21.760 --> 00:57:25.360 That is part of the image of God, which is damaged in 00:57:25.360 --> 00:57:26.080 the fall. 00:57:26.640 --> 00:57:30.240 For some, it is so damaged that some of those things are 00:57:30.240 --> 00:57:31.600 gone entirely. 00:57:31.600 --> 00:57:34.960 I'm going to give another example of something from past episodes that 00:57:34.960 --> 00:57:38.000 again illustrates the point we're trying to make here today. 00:57:38.000 --> 00:57:43.840 There are some races that are inherently more wicked than others. 00:57:43.840 --> 00:57:47.200 Some of you listening right now will get very angry at that. 00:57:47.200 --> 00:57:48.640 That's blasphemy. 00:57:48.640 --> 00:57:50.560 Is it blasphemy against Scripture? 00:57:50.560 --> 00:57:54.720 No. actually Scripture says the same thing in multiple places, and we 00:57:54.720 --> 00:57:58.240 see it in reality, and we can explain it theologically. 00:57:58.240 --> 00:58:02.320 We devoted an entire episode in the race series of Stone Choir 00:58:02.480 --> 00:58:06.560 to the biological nature of race and then to criminality. 00:58:06.560 --> 00:58:11.440 And how criminality directly correlates with certain races. 00:58:11.440 --> 00:58:17.840 Now criminality is the government word, it's the the secular world word 00:58:17.840 --> 00:58:19.280 for sin. 00:58:19.280 --> 00:58:23.360 If something is sinful, we typically make a law around it. 00:58:23.360 --> 00:58:25.200 We used to have a lot more of those laws because we 00:58:25.200 --> 00:58:26.880 said a lot more things were sinful. 00:58:26.880 --> 00:58:30.160 As we found fewer and fewer sins in scripture, we got rid 00:58:30.160 --> 00:58:30.960 of those laws. 00:58:30.960 --> 00:58:33.360 But we didn't end up with fewer laws, incidentally. 00:58:33.360 --> 00:58:36.080 We have more laws than ever because there are all these new 00:58:36.080 --> 00:58:39.280 sins. Things that weren't sins sixty or a hundred or two hundred 00:58:39.280 --> 00:58:39.760 years ago. 00:58:39.760 --> 00:58:40.880 Today they're sins. 00:58:40.880 --> 00:58:42.960 Today they're crimes. 00:58:42.960 --> 00:58:46.240 But they're not Christian sins. 00:58:46.240 --> 00:58:48.480 They're not crimes against God. 00:58:48.480 --> 00:58:51.200 And so this is the crucial distinction here. 00:58:51.200 --> 00:58:56.240 If you look at these matters as something being less Christian or 00:58:56.240 --> 00:58:59.520 more Christian, and your only concern is to have the more Christian 00:58:59.520 --> 00:59:02.960 version, you're missing out on the fact that either it is of 00:59:02.960 --> 00:59:05.840 Christ or it is of the devil. 00:59:05.840 --> 00:59:08.160 There are only two sources for morality. 00:59:08.160 --> 00:59:10.480 Either it's God or it's hell. 00:59:10.480 --> 00:59:14.320 And if you're getting your morality from hell, well the end conclusion 00:59:14.320 --> 00:59:16.000 there is obvious. 00:59:16.000 --> 00:59:21.760 When 1 Timothy sets the floor so low for teachings of demons 00:59:21.920 --> 00:59:26.400 and what deceitful spirits are bringing into our midst again when this 00:59:26.480 --> 00:59:31.120 this devotion to teachings of demons is in the church. 00:59:31.120 --> 00:59:32.480 That's what scripture says. 00:59:32.480 --> 00:59:34.640 So when Cory and I say the same thing, we say that 00:59:34.640 --> 00:59:38.320 they're wicked men in the church, in pulpits teaching the teachings of 00:59:38.320 --> 00:59:41.440 demons and we look at the examples, what are they? 00:59:41.440 --> 00:59:44.320 Is it worshiping false gods overtly? 00:59:44.320 --> 00:59:47.120 Is it sacrificing infants to Moloch? 00:59:47.120 --> 00:59:53.920 No, it's it's abstinence from marriage and it's abstaining from foods and 00:59:54.160 --> 00:59:57.200 making those commandments, saying you must do this. 00:59:57.200 --> 00:59:59.600 Incidentally, that's going to be part of next week's episode. 00:59:59.600 --> 01:00:00.960 We talk about Gnosticism. 01:00:00.960 --> 01:00:04.240 That's part of what was being addressed there in this passage was 01:00:04.240 --> 01:00:10.960 the already extant Gnostic cult that existed within Christianity against it. 01:00:10.960 --> 01:00:14.240 The Gnostic tendencies are one of the ways that from the very 01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:17.840 beginning Satan was attacking the church from within. 01:00:17.840 --> 01:00:23.440 And what we see right now as these seemingly closing days of 01:00:23.440 --> 01:00:27.360 the church, we see the same Gnosticism roaring back. 01:00:27.360 --> 01:00:33.360 We see Galatians three twenty eight quoted against creation, where God says 01:00:33.520 --> 01:00:37.360 there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, 01:00:37.360 --> 01:00:40.240 there is no male and female, for all are one in Christ 01:00:40.240 --> 01:00:44.800 Jesus. That is an argument that is used by those who have 01:00:44.800 --> 01:00:49.040 devoted themselves to deceitful spirits as an attack on creation. 01:00:49.040 --> 01:00:50.880 They say there's neither male nor female. 01:00:50.880 --> 01:00:52.160 There's no male and female. 01:00:52.160 --> 01:00:54.800 It's like the the ands and then the or separate. 01:00:54.800 --> 01:00:55.520 We'll talk about that. 01:00:55.520 --> 01:00:58.960 After the sarcastic we're gonna be doing an episode entirely on Galatius 01:00:58.960 --> 01:01:02.240 three twenty eight, 'cause we've said before, it is the key that 01:01:02.240 --> 01:01:06.240 unlocks all these attacks on creation and on the church. 01:01:06.240 --> 01:01:09.040 The fact that there are pastors today who are using that as 01:01:09.040 --> 01:01:14.880 a proof text to attack God's order, to attack headship of man 01:01:15.200 --> 01:01:19.120 over woman, to say that man was not created for woman, but 01:01:19.120 --> 01:01:20.800 woman was created for man. 01:01:20.800 --> 01:01:22.960 That's That's quoting scripture. 01:01:22.960 --> 01:01:26.320 And yet if you say it on social media, you're gonna get 01:01:26.320 --> 01:01:28.320 dogpiled. Why? 01:01:28.320 --> 01:01:30.320 Because it's against the culture. 01:01:30.720 --> 01:01:32.080 it's it's wrong. 01:01:32.080 --> 01:01:34.080 It is absolutely wrong. 01:01:34.080 --> 01:01:35.520 Is it wrong in Christian terms? 01:01:35.760 --> 01:01:37.040 No. It's quoting God. 01:01:37.040 --> 01:01:38.880 It can't be wrong in Christian terms. 01:01:38.880 --> 01:01:41.600 It is wrong in terms of the morality of this age. 01:01:41.600 --> 01:01:44.240 And yet many of the people who will attack the sort of 01:01:44.240 --> 01:01:48.080 man who will say that in public are are themselves Christians. 01:01:48.080 --> 01:01:52.720 They think that they're defending God when they attack Scripture. 01:01:52.720 --> 01:01:56.560 And the point in this episode is that when someone attacks Scripture 01:01:56.560 --> 01:01:59.680 and says they're defending God, they're telling the truth. 01:01:59.680 --> 01:02:01.520 They're telling the truth. 01:02:01.520 --> 01:02:04.560 They're not telling you the truth about who their God is. 01:02:04.560 --> 01:02:06.480 Their God is Satan. 01:02:06.480 --> 01:02:08.720 Their God is not the triune God. 01:02:08.720 --> 01:02:10.480 But they are defending their God. 01:02:10.480 --> 01:02:13.520 And see, the distinction we're trying to make here is when you 01:02:13.520 --> 01:02:18.160 take these things as doctrinal matters, as measuring them only against scripture, 01:02:18.160 --> 01:02:21.040 and saying, well, this is more Christian or this is less Christian, 01:02:21.040 --> 01:02:24.160 you completely lose sight of the fact that these teachings are either 01:02:24.160 --> 01:02:26.560 from God or they're from demons. 01:02:26.560 --> 01:02:30.320 If Satan put this in someone's head and in his heart and 01:02:30.320 --> 01:02:33.120 on his lips, that is an immediate threat to the souls of 01:02:33.120 --> 01:02:35.440 everyone who hears it. 01:02:35.440 --> 01:02:39.280 And from the garden to this day, we have all manner of 01:02:39.280 --> 01:02:44.080 false prophets, including at the head of our denominations, saying things like, 01:02:44.080 --> 01:02:47.600 slavery is the original sin of the United States. 01:02:47.600 --> 01:02:52.080 When we did the episodes devoted to slavery and racism and feminism, 01:02:52.080 --> 01:02:56.960 they were largely Bible studies, because again, those are religious matters in 01:02:56.960 --> 01:02:58.320 both directions. 01:02:58.320 --> 01:03:02.320 Christianity says one thing about slavery and racism and religion, and the 01:03:02.800 --> 01:03:05.920 modern religion says the opposite thing. 01:03:05.920 --> 01:03:10.880 And so today, when we have these conversations in public, Corey said, 01:03:10.880 --> 01:03:17.120 you can say these things and be canceled, doxxed, fired, unemployed, forever. 01:03:17.120 --> 01:03:18.800 Why? Because you're bad? 01:03:18.800 --> 01:03:21.040 Because you're a neo-Nazi podcaster? 01:03:21.040 --> 01:03:23.440 No. Because you said the same thing that God said. 01:03:23.440 --> 01:03:25.280 And that's all it takes. 01:03:25.280 --> 01:03:27.120 That is a moral calculus. 01:03:27.120 --> 01:03:29.040 That is absolutely a religious 01:03:29.920 --> 01:03:33.120 decision. What it is not is Christian. 01:03:33.120 --> 01:03:35.200 Christianity doesn't do that. 01:03:35.200 --> 01:03:37.760 Satan's religion does that. 01:03:37.760 --> 01:03:41.840 And the reason that it's crucial to identify that it's Satan's religion 01:03:42.400 --> 01:03:44.560 is that it doesn't call itself Satanism. 01:03:44.560 --> 01:03:46.640 There's no pentagram on this stuff. 01:03:46.640 --> 01:03:51.040 There's no usually, although hilariously in a lot of places, when you 01:03:51.040 --> 01:03:55.920 see anti-racism marches, you will frequently find pentagrams and stars of Rem 01:03:56.080 --> 01:03:57.520 fan in the crowd. 01:03:57.520 --> 01:03:59.440 Happens quite a bit. 01:03:59.440 --> 01:04:00.720 But it's not always there. 01:04:00.720 --> 01:04:03.760 And you also find it in Christian churches, where pastors will say 01:04:03.760 --> 01:04:05.040 the very same things. 01:04:05.040 --> 01:04:08.480 The men's like Magnus Hirschfeld said a century ago in his book 01:04:08.480 --> 01:04:13.920 on racism, they are preaching from Satan's gospel. 01:04:13.920 --> 01:04:15.840 And it's a true religion. 01:04:15.840 --> 01:04:21.040 It is absolutely a complete religion that calls itself Christianity. 01:04:21.040 --> 01:04:25.520 So the genealogy of your morality, whatever it is, whatever specific moral 01:04:25.520 --> 01:04:29.360 tenet, if it's from Scripture, it's Christian. 01:04:29.360 --> 01:04:32.400 If it's not from Scripture, and yet it's still your morality, that 01:04:32.400 --> 01:04:38.560 is a false, competing anti-Christian religion, and we all hold them simultaneously. 01:04:38.560 --> 01:04:42.160 Part of the sanctified Christian life is figuring this stuff out to 01:04:42.160 --> 01:04:46.800 realize I in good conscience believe this for twenty, thirty, forty years. 01:04:46.800 --> 01:04:50.560 And then I realized, because someone told me or because I studied 01:04:50.720 --> 01:04:53.200 that I was in error, that I had sinned. 01:04:53.200 --> 01:04:54.640 Is that a surprise? 01:04:54.640 --> 01:04:57.840 No. He who says he is without sin decees himself and the 01:04:57.840 --> 01:04:59.280 truth is not in him. 01:04:59.520 --> 01:05:02.800 So if you find out that you got something wrong and you've 01:05:02.800 --> 01:05:06.080 been sinning for most of your life, it should make you feel 01:05:06.080 --> 01:05:09.200 bad. But it shouldn't. 01:05:09.520 --> 01:05:10.240 It shouldn't 01:05:11.120 --> 01:05:14.640 possible. It should certainly be a shock and it should be alarming, 01:05:14.640 --> 01:05:18.320 but to realize that you got something wrong, particularly when you've been 01:05:18.320 --> 01:05:21.600 taught falsely, and that's the most crucial thing about this, is that 01:05:21.600 --> 01:05:27.360 it's the pastors who bind people's consciences with these demonic lies from 01:05:27.360 --> 01:05:31.360 these deceitful spirits, that men who don't know any better are going 01:05:31.360 --> 01:05:32.320 to parrot them. 01:05:32.320 --> 01:05:35.360 And in good conscience, they will say that's a violation of my 01:05:35.360 --> 01:05:38.400 morality to be racist or to be anti-fan. 01:05:38.400 --> 01:05:42.240 You know, Cory, when he was falsely excommunicated, one of the charges 01:05:42.240 --> 01:05:45.040 was literally misogyny. 01:05:45.040 --> 01:05:46.480 Think about that. 01:05:46.480 --> 01:05:51.040 A Christian denomination excommunicates for misogyny. 01:05:51.040 --> 01:05:52.880 It's a new sin. 01:05:52.880 --> 01:05:55.440 They cited falsely the Ten Commandments. 01:05:55.600 --> 01:05:58.240 It was a complete fabrication. 01:05:58.240 --> 01:06:01.520 On one hand, that is not Christian doctrine. 01:06:01.520 --> 01:06:02.480 So it's an error. 01:06:02.720 --> 01:06:03.360 It's not binding. 01:06:03.360 --> 01:06:07.440 It's complete falsehood and it's a condemnation to hell of every man 01:06:07.440 --> 01:06:11.280 involved. On the other hand, it is their true confession. 01:06:11.280 --> 01:06:12.720 And that's a crucial part of this. 01:06:12.720 --> 01:06:16.480 And that's why we're gonna do uh the third episode on apostasy. 01:06:16.480 --> 01:06:20.320 These things that get people fired up are their true confession. 01:06:20.320 --> 01:06:23.600 Stone Choir is Corey and Mike true confession. 01:06:23.600 --> 01:06:26.400 This is the stuff that we think is the most important because 01:06:26.400 --> 01:06:28.800 it's destroying the church. 01:06:28.800 --> 01:06:32.880 Now, we don't talk a lot specifically about the gospel, not because 01:06:32.880 --> 01:06:34.000 it's not important. 01:06:34.000 --> 01:06:36.080 And we refer to the gospel all the time. 01:06:36.080 --> 01:06:38.960 There are numerous people who have begun going to the church for 01:06:38.960 --> 01:06:41.360 the first time in their lives because of what they've heard on 01:06:41.360 --> 01:06:42.160 Stone Choir. 01:06:42.160 --> 01:06:44.000 And it wasn't that we scared them about hell. 01:06:44.000 --> 01:06:46.480 It wasn't that we were so law oriented. 01:06:46.480 --> 01:06:48.880 It was that they realized that God had died for them because 01:06:48.880 --> 01:06:50.640 we talk about that all the time. 01:06:50.640 --> 01:06:54.320 So the emphasis that we have is the same emphasis that you 01:06:54.320 --> 01:06:55.760 find in the New Testament. 01:06:55.760 --> 01:06:59.680 I've said before, if you read only the words in red, only 01:06:59.760 --> 01:07:04.080 only Jesus' own recorded words, it's almost all law. 01:07:04.080 --> 01:07:05.680 There's very little gospel in there. 01:07:05.680 --> 01:07:08.560 There's a whole lot of believe, obey, do. 01:07:08.560 --> 01:07:11.600 Is that because Jesus didn't preach well? 01:07:11.600 --> 01:07:13.760 Did he forget to say what was important? 01:07:13.760 --> 01:07:16.480 No. He told the people what they needed to hear. 01:07:16.480 --> 01:07:18.720 And what they needed to hear was repent. 01:07:18.720 --> 01:07:20.640 They didn't need to hear your hunky dory. 01:07:20.640 --> 01:07:22.400 They didn't need to hear you got everything figured out. 01:07:22.400 --> 01:07:23.360 You go girl. 01:07:23.360 --> 01:07:25.600 They needed to hear what was going to send them the health. 01:07:25.600 --> 01:07:26.800 They didn't stop. 01:07:26.800 --> 01:07:31.680 That's a crucial part of Christian preaching to warn the specific listeners 01:07:31.840 --> 01:07:35.920 in whatever congregation, whatever context, here are your sins. 01:07:35.920 --> 01:07:37.280 That is not hateful. 01:07:37.280 --> 01:07:39.120 That is the opposite of hatred. 01:07:39.120 --> 01:07:43.920 If Cory and I hated any particular group, we would just let 01:07:43.920 --> 01:07:48.000 them go, ignore whatever errors they were gonna make, and know that 01:07:48.000 --> 01:07:50.160 that was going to lead them closer to hell. 01:07:50.160 --> 01:07:53.680 Instead, we shout and point and warn and say, This over here, 01:07:53.680 --> 01:07:55.360 this is endangering your soul. 01:07:55.360 --> 01:07:56.480 You need to stop. 01:07:56.480 --> 01:07:59.040 And you have to put that in stark terms because in a 01:07:59.040 --> 01:08:01.280 lot of cases, there's no time to negotiate. 01:08:01.280 --> 01:08:03.840 There's no time to explain this stuff. 01:08:03.840 --> 01:08:07.600 It's your people are careening towards a cliff. 01:08:07.600 --> 01:08:10.720 And if they don't make a 90-degree turn right away, they're gonna 01:08:10.720 --> 01:08:13.120 go over the edge, and there's nothing that any man can do 01:08:13.120 --> 01:08:14.640 to save them. 01:08:14.640 --> 01:08:20.560 So these questions of morality are crucial inside the church because they're 01:08:20.560 --> 01:08:23.760 masquerading as Christian when they're simply not. 01:08:23.760 --> 01:08:27.680 The genealogy of where you got your morals will tell you what 01:08:27.680 --> 01:08:28.560 your God is. 01:08:28.560 --> 01:08:31.120 As Corey gave that example, there are plenty of other examples we 01:08:31.120 --> 01:08:34.960 could give, like the one I gave about some races are inherently 01:08:34.960 --> 01:08:36.240 more wicked than others. 01:08:36.240 --> 01:08:37.520 This is demonstrable. 01:08:37.520 --> 01:08:42.560 There are entire races, entire parts of certain continents that have no 01:08:42.560 --> 01:08:45.680 concept of some crimes, no concept whatsoever. 01:08:45.680 --> 01:08:47.920 And we can't even believe it in the West. 01:08:47.920 --> 01:08:51.680 Because in our race, in our entire history as a culture, as 01:08:51.680 --> 01:08:55.680 a people, it's always been evil to do certain things that I'm 01:08:55.600 --> 01:08:59.440 not even going to name here because you know, we talked about 01:08:59.520 --> 01:09:02.720 I mentioned earlier on, you know, the knowledge of good and evil. 01:09:02.720 --> 01:09:05.600 A lot of parents listen to Stone Choir with their kids, which 01:09:05.600 --> 01:09:06.320 is awesome. 01:09:06.320 --> 01:09:09.760 And so we try to not make too many episodes things that 01:09:09.760 --> 01:09:11.680 parents can't listen to their kids. 01:09:11.680 --> 01:09:14.240 If you're a kid and you're listening now with your parents, when 01:09:14.240 --> 01:09:17.120 they say, you know what, this portion or this episode is not 01:09:17.120 --> 01:09:20.080 for you, they're not depriving you of something great. 01:09:20.080 --> 01:09:22.160 They're not holding out the good stuff. 01:09:22.160 --> 01:09:25.120 They're trying to protect you from something that is evil. 01:09:25.120 --> 01:09:27.920 There's knowledge that is terrible knowledge. 01:09:27.920 --> 01:09:28.240 And 01:09:29.760 --> 01:09:34.000 what happened when Adam and Eve sinned is what we see so 01:09:34.000 --> 01:09:37.920 much in the world today where people are robbed of their innocence. 01:09:37.920 --> 01:09:40.160 They were in a state of innocence in the garden. 01:09:40.160 --> 01:09:42.720 As a young child, to a degree, you have a state of 01:09:42.720 --> 01:09:46.240 innocence in terms of knowledge of evil. 01:09:46.240 --> 01:09:49.680 Once you learn about certain things, you can never unknow them. 01:09:49.680 --> 01:09:51.200 There's no going back. 01:09:51.200 --> 01:09:53.840 And you for the rest of your life will be burdened with 01:09:53.840 --> 01:09:55.920 things that you wish you could unlearn. 01:09:55.920 --> 01:09:58.960 So every time your parents try to protect you from something, or 01:09:58.960 --> 01:10:01.760 even as adults, you know, this happens a lot, you know, especially 01:10:01.760 --> 01:10:04.400 on the internet where you're interacting more with strangers. 01:10:04.400 --> 01:10:08.960 If someone has an innocent ignorance of something, there's a part of 01:10:08.960 --> 01:10:11.600 some of us that gets really excited and wants to rob them 01:10:11.600 --> 01:10:12.240 of it. 01:10:12.400 --> 01:10:13.600 That's evil. 01:10:13.600 --> 01:10:17.840 If someone is blissfully ignorant, if they're innocent of some evil, thank 01:10:17.840 --> 01:10:19.200 God that they've been spared. 01:10:19.200 --> 01:10:22.400 Because you know something terrible and awful that they don't know. 01:10:22.400 --> 01:10:25.520 Give thanks that they've been spared that and don't take it from 01:10:25.520 --> 01:10:27.200 them. Don't rob them. 01:10:27.200 --> 01:10:29.920 So when kids are listening, your parents say, you know what, not 01:10:29.920 --> 01:10:30.960 this, not this stuff. 01:10:30.960 --> 01:10:33.200 You can you can listen to the next episode. 01:10:33.200 --> 01:10:36.480 They're doing you one of the greatest favors anyone will ever do 01:10:36.480 --> 01:10:38.240 for you in your entire life. 01:10:38.240 --> 01:10:43.760 Because certain knowledge that we have as adults is can't be unlearned. 01:10:43.760 --> 01:10:46.160 There are things I know and things I've seen and things I've 01:10:46.160 --> 01:10:48.560 heard that I would dearly like to get out of my head. 01:10:48.560 --> 01:10:49.600 And I can't. 01:10:49.600 --> 01:10:51.920 When I die, God will take that stuff away. 01:10:51.920 --> 01:10:54.240 But until then, I'm stuck with it. 01:10:54.240 --> 01:10:57.440 Once you learn things when you get older, you're stuck with them. 01:10:57.440 --> 01:10:58.880 You can't get rid of them. 01:10:58.880 --> 01:11:00.960 The knowledge of evil is a burden. 01:11:00.960 --> 01:11:05.760 It's a bad, terrible, harmful thing. 01:11:05.760 --> 01:11:10.000 Robbing of innocence is something that it's almost normal now. 01:11:10.000 --> 01:11:13.680 There used to be laws against it, but when the culture ceased 01:11:13.680 --> 01:11:17.680 to be a Christian culture, the laws ceased to be Christian laws. 01:11:17.680 --> 01:11:22.400 And suddenly that which was immoral and wicked was not only removed 01:11:22.400 --> 01:11:26.320 from the law, but became promoted everywhere you look. 01:11:26.320 --> 01:11:29.840 You know, Corey's talking about media, you know, you should cancel Netflix 01:11:30.320 --> 01:11:30.720 right now. 01:11:30.960 --> 01:11:35.920 You should pause the podcast and cancel Netflix because you're paying for 01:11:35.920 --> 01:11:38.160 absolutely wicked things. 01:11:38.160 --> 01:11:39.680 Cartoons, it doesn't matter. 01:11:39.680 --> 01:11:44.400 Everything that they produce is suffused with satanic agendas and they're not 01:11:44.400 --> 01:11:45.840 remotely subtle about it. 01:11:45.840 --> 01:11:49.760 And if you can't see it, you're in dire spiritual state because 01:11:49.760 --> 01:11:51.760 it is wildly overt. 01:11:51.760 --> 01:11:54.000 There's nothing about it that's hidden. 01:11:54.000 --> 01:11:57.120 This stuff is so out in the open now because the culture 01:11:57.120 --> 01:12:01.440 has shifted so far that it's Satan's culture right out in the 01:12:01.440 --> 01:12:03.520 open. And Christians like, well, yeah, that's normal. 01:12:03.520 --> 01:12:04.080 That's fine. 01:12:04.080 --> 01:12:08.160 You know, why wouldn't I tell someone something, some horrible innocence robbing 01:12:08.160 --> 01:12:09.760 thing that they can never get back. 01:12:09.760 --> 01:12:10.480 Why wouldn't I? 01:12:10.480 --> 01:12:11.360 Like it's it's knowledge. 01:12:11.360 --> 01:12:12.720 Isn't all knowledge neutral? 01:12:12.720 --> 01:12:15.520 No. Some things are terrible and shouldn't exist. 01:12:15.520 --> 01:12:17.840 Some knowledge should be destroyed. 01:12:17.840 --> 01:12:20.560 That's a Christian position. 01:12:20.560 --> 01:12:26.080 When the sorcerers brought together all their sorcery material and acts and 01:12:26.080 --> 01:12:30.000 burned it and it was worth fifty thousand whatever's of silver. 01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:34.960 That was a tremendous amount of wealth that was incinerated because it 01:12:34.960 --> 01:12:38.960 was evil knowledge, and they acknowledge that it's part of their repentance, 01:12:38.960 --> 01:12:42.160 as part of turning away from their wickedness, they had to destroy 01:12:42.160 --> 01:12:44.800 the evil that they had done in the past. 01:12:44.800 --> 01:12:46.080 That should be the case with us. 01:12:46.080 --> 01:12:49.760 When we discover that some part of our morality turns out not 01:12:49.760 --> 01:12:53.040 to be Christian morality, you gotta torture it. 01:12:53.520 --> 01:12:55.440 that's a good thing to do. 01:12:55.440 --> 01:12:58.880 And the big struggle is getting from I thought I was fine 01:12:58.960 --> 01:13:00.240 to actually, this is crap. 01:13:00.320 --> 01:13:01.760 I need to torch it. 01:13:01.760 --> 01:13:03.840 That process is it hurts. 01:13:04.160 --> 01:13:04.720 it's painful. 01:13:04.720 --> 01:13:08.160 It's why some of these episodes are downers, because we're not free 01:13:08.160 --> 01:13:08.960 from sin. 01:13:08.960 --> 01:13:11.680 We do some bad stuff and it piles up. 01:13:11.680 --> 01:13:15.120 But getting to the other side is the whole point of the 01:13:15.120 --> 01:13:16.640 Christian life. 01:13:16.960 --> 01:13:24.160 The old testament reading for yesterday was from Ezekiel three, and 01:13:24.160 --> 01:13:25.840 it brought to mind a 01:13:26.800 --> 01:13:31.120 section of the same book, Ezekiel, that we have had on the 01:13:31.120 --> 01:13:36.320 Stone Choir website from day one, and that is from Ezekiel 33. 01:13:36.320 --> 01:13:38.400 I won't read the whole thing, you can go read it if 01:13:38.400 --> 01:13:39.360 you're so inclined. 01:13:39.360 --> 01:13:44.320 That's Ezekiel thirty-three verses one through nine. 01:13:44.320 --> 01:13:48.080 And the point of the section is that 01:13:49.600 --> 01:13:53.280 I'm going to extrapolate out the point, not the immediate point God 01:13:53.280 --> 01:13:56.480 is making to Ezekiel to whom he is speaking in the passage, 01:13:56.480 --> 01:13:59.520 but the point of the passage for Christians when you read this 01:13:59.760 --> 01:14:04.640 is that if you have been given the ability to warn someone 01:14:04.960 --> 01:14:09.280 about some evil that he is doing, and you do not warn 01:14:09.280 --> 01:14:15.360 him, you have made that evil your own, you have committed sin 01:14:15.520 --> 01:14:19.760 in not warning that man, because God having given you the ability 01:14:19.760 --> 01:14:25.120 to warn him and you having failed to exercise that duty using 01:14:25.120 --> 01:14:29.040 the abilities given you by God, you have sinned through an action 01:14:29.280 --> 01:14:31.040 in action. 01:14:31.040 --> 01:14:35.440 When we started the podcast, we knew that is exactly what we 01:14:35.440 --> 01:14:36.240 were doing. 01:14:36.240 --> 01:14:39.680 Now we put it off for a while for various reasons, but 01:14:39.680 --> 01:14:42.080 we knew that the reason we had to do this for us 01:14:42.240 --> 01:14:44.560 that it was not an option for us. 01:14:44.560 --> 01:14:47.440 This was not something that we could pick up or set down 01:14:47.600 --> 01:14:48.720 or do or not do. 01:14:48.720 --> 01:14:50.560 We were required to do it. 01:14:50.560 --> 01:14:54.960 That is our state of mind, that is our opinion, our firm 01:14:54.960 --> 01:14:57.360 belief with regard to the podcast. 01:14:57.360 --> 01:15:01.840 God has given us the ability to understand this material and to 01:15:01.840 --> 01:15:02.800 teach this material. 01:15:02.800 --> 01:15:04.880 And that is what we are doing on this podcast. 01:15:04.880 --> 01:15:06.160 This is teaching. 01:15:06.160 --> 01:15:09.920 And as we said in an early episode, we recognize that does 01:15:09.920 --> 01:15:11.760 subject us to the stricter judgment. 01:15:11.760 --> 01:15:15.040 We've elected that in full knowledge. 01:15:15.040 --> 01:15:20.240 But what we are doing is warning anyone who will listen about 01:15:20.240 --> 01:15:25.840 the evils that we see, about the evils in our culture, about 01:15:25.840 --> 01:15:32.320 all of these wicked things that, to us, are obvious, are incredibly 01:15:32.320 --> 01:15:38.320 obvious, are out in the open, that some do not see. 01:15:38.320 --> 01:15:43.440 We're warning men of traps, of which they may not be aware. 01:15:43.440 --> 01:15:44.640 We know the trap is there. 01:15:44.640 --> 01:15:47.200 We are telling you do not step on it. 01:15:47.200 --> 01:15:50.720 That is why we're doing this, and it is a duty for 01:15:50.720 --> 01:15:53.840 Christian men, again, who have been given the ability to do so 01:15:54.080 --> 01:15:54.880 from God. 01:15:54.880 --> 01:15:59.840 This is clear in many parts of Scripture, particularly clear in the 01:15:59.840 --> 01:16:05.600 passage we chose from Ezekiel, Ezekiel thirty three again. 01:16:05.600 --> 01:16:10.640 But I actually want to speak for a moment specifically to teachers 01:16:10.640 --> 01:16:11.440 and pastors. 01:16:11.440 --> 01:16:15.840 Now this is applicable To all Christians, of course, because it is 01:16:15.840 --> 01:16:19.440 dealing with one of the commandments, and the commandments, of course, are 01:16:19.440 --> 01:16:24.160 applicable to all Christians, to all persons, actually, because whether or not 01:16:24.160 --> 01:16:28.640 you're Christian, God's will and God's law still holds, and you will 01:16:28.640 --> 01:16:30.800 be judged by it. 01:16:30.800 --> 01:16:35.600 But Woe spoke of the second commandment Thou shalt not take the 01:16:35.600 --> 01:16:38.880 name of the Lord thy God in vain. 01:16:38.880 --> 01:16:46.000 And this brought to mind a particular paragraph from the large catechism. 01:16:46.000 --> 01:16:52.400 Luther says of this commandment, the greatest abuse occurs in spiritual matters, 01:16:52.400 --> 01:16:57.760 which pertain to the conscience, when false preachers rise up and offer 01:16:57.760 --> 01:17:01.920 their lying vanities as God's word. 01:17:01.920 --> 01:17:07.120 And of course this applies to teachers as well, not just pastors. 01:17:08.160 --> 01:17:13.360 The worst thing you can do when it comes to violations, transgressions 01:17:13.360 --> 01:17:19.360 of the second commandment, is to stand up and offer that which 01:17:19.360 --> 01:17:23.520 is false as God's word. 01:17:23.520 --> 01:17:28.160 To lie in God's name and say that God said you must 01:17:28.160 --> 01:17:32.640 do this is the most wicked thing you can do with regard 01:17:32.640 --> 01:17:34.720 to this commandment. 01:17:34.720 --> 01:17:39.840 And in fact, doing so inevitably entails violating the first commandment as 01:17:39.840 --> 01:17:43.520 well, because you have shown that you have this other God, and 01:17:43.760 --> 01:17:47.760 you are actually speaking on his behalf, you are simply attempting to 01:17:47.760 --> 01:17:51.360 deceive using the name of the Lord God to dress up your 01:17:51.360 --> 01:17:52.320 lies. 01:17:54.480 --> 01:17:56.720 Some will think that this is 01:17:57.600 --> 01:18:01.680 uncommon, that this is unusual, that this is something that would be 01:18:01.680 --> 01:18:06.880 obvious. For instance, the wicked Bible, if a pastor were to stand 01:18:06.880 --> 01:18:10.160 up and quote that and say thou shalt commit adultery. 01:18:10.160 --> 01:18:13.200 That would most certainly be wicked, that would be a violation of 01:18:13.200 --> 01:18:16.640 the second commandment, that would be lying and deceiving in God's name, 01:18:16.640 --> 01:18:19.360 and it would be obvious, we would all catch that, I would 01:18:19.360 --> 01:18:26.400 hope. But this happens constantly, particularly with teachers 01:18:26.720 --> 01:18:30.800 and even more particularly with pastors. 01:18:30.800 --> 01:18:34.960 Because if you are a pastor and you stand up and say 01:18:34.960 --> 01:18:40.720 that this thing, racism, sexism, whatever it happens to be, this modern 01:18:40.720 --> 01:18:45.600 sin, if you say that is contrary to God's word, you are 01:18:45.600 --> 01:18:49.440 lying in God's name about the things of God. 01:18:49.440 --> 01:18:54.800 And worse, as a pastor, you are doing it while standing in 01:18:54.800 --> 01:18:56.160 God's place. 01:18:56.160 --> 01:18:59.280 Because that is the authority, that is the position that has been 01:18:59.280 --> 01:19:00.880 given you by God. 01:19:00.880 --> 01:19:01.920 You are standing up there 01:19:02.880 --> 01:19:08.160 in his stead and lying in his name to his sheep. 01:19:08.160 --> 01:19:13.200 Now we'll get into apostasy in the third episode in this series. 01:19:13.200 --> 01:19:16.240 But I can certainly say now that I would not want to 01:19:16.240 --> 01:19:19.840 be in your shoes on judgment day if that is what you 01:19:19.840 --> 01:19:22.080 have spent your life doing. 01:19:22.080 --> 01:19:26.000 And so if you're listening to this podcast and you find that 01:19:26.000 --> 01:19:31.680 that applies to you, then You need to repent and reconsider some 01:19:31.680 --> 01:19:35.920 things. Now that may be somewhat unlikely for the audience of this 01:19:35.920 --> 01:19:40.240 podcast, although perhaps this is where you started listening, and perhaps it 01:19:40.240 --> 01:19:41.840 does apply to you. 01:19:41.840 --> 01:19:47.520 But again, that is the worst violation of the second commandment possible 01:19:47.920 --> 01:19:53.120 is to lie in God's name while standing in his place about 01:19:53.280 --> 01:19:55.360 his things to his sheep 01:19:58.000 --> 01:20:00.080 Such men are anti Christ. 01:20:00.080 --> 01:20:03.760 They are false prophets, including many men in our own church, some 01:20:03.760 --> 01:20:05.520 of whom are listening right now. 01:20:05.680 --> 01:20:07.840 We know their names, we know what they're up to. 01:20:07.840 --> 01:20:09.440 They'll answer to God. 01:20:09.440 --> 01:20:10.640 But this sort of wickedness is 01:20:11.680 --> 01:20:16.960 it's common today and it's been common since the very beginning. 01:20:17.120 --> 01:20:20.000 Between now and a couple weeks from now, I would encourage all 01:20:20.000 --> 01:20:22.800 of you to read Revelation 2 and three. 01:20:23.440 --> 01:20:28.800 These are chapters that include the seven epistles that Jesus transcribed to 01:20:28.800 --> 01:20:32.560 John from heaven to the seven churches. 01:20:32.560 --> 01:20:37.600 And they're very interesting because they make clear many of the principles 01:20:37.600 --> 01:20:43.280 that we outline in terms of different churches having different problems. 01:20:43.280 --> 01:20:47.840 Different individual Christians have different problems, different pastors have different problems, different 01:20:47.840 --> 01:20:52.480 congregations have different problems, and groups of congregations, which today we call 01:20:52.480 --> 01:20:56.400 denominations, all have their own unique sets of issues. 01:20:56.400 --> 01:21:00.800 When you read the seven Letters from Christ to the churches, what 01:21:00.800 --> 01:21:05.120 you find is that they're addressed in very different terms. 01:21:05.120 --> 01:21:08.480 When you read the letter to Smyrna, they're in good shape. 01:21:08.480 --> 01:21:12.880 God doesn't really have much criticism of them Pergamum has a few 01:21:12.880 --> 01:21:15.360 faults, but for the most part they're pretty good. 01:21:15.360 --> 01:21:19.280 When Christ writes to the church at Sardis, it's dire. 01:21:19.280 --> 01:21:21.840 Listen to what Christ writes to Sardis. 01:21:21.840 --> 01:21:23.120 I know your works. 01:21:23.120 --> 01:21:26.000 You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 01:21:26.000 --> 01:21:29.280 Wake up and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for 01:21:29.280 --> 01:21:31.840 I have not found your works complete in the sight of my 01:21:31.840 --> 01:21:35.600 God. Remember then what you received and heard, keep it and repent. 01:21:35.600 --> 01:21:38.160 If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, 01:21:38.160 --> 01:21:41.040 and you will not know at what hour I will come against 01:21:41.040 --> 01:21:45.200 you. Ye you have still a few names in Sardis, people who 01:21:45.200 --> 01:21:48.480 have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in 01:21:48.480 --> 01:21:50.240 white, for they are worthy. 01:21:51.040 --> 01:21:54.400 Now he says what remains and is about to die, he's talking 01:21:54.400 --> 01:21:57.680 about damnation, and he's addressing it to a church. 01:21:57.680 --> 01:22:01.520 So seven churches, some of them are okay, some are kind of 01:22:01.520 --> 01:22:05.680 shaky. Church at Sardis, he's saying most of you are going to 01:22:05.680 --> 01:22:07.680 hell unless you repent right now. 01:22:07.680 --> 01:22:08.880 That's in the church. 01:22:08.880 --> 01:22:11.440 That's people who all called themselves Christians. 01:22:11.440 --> 01:22:12.960 They were doing the stuff. 01:22:12.960 --> 01:22:14.240 They were showing up. 01:22:14.240 --> 01:22:16.080 You know they're all the practices. 01:22:16.080 --> 01:22:19.920 They confessed God, he said, I look at your works and I 01:22:19.920 --> 01:22:24.320 do not see Christians, because the works are an outpouring of the 01:22:24.320 --> 01:22:27.120 heart of the believer or the unbeliever. 01:22:27.120 --> 01:22:32.720 You will always confess with your actions and with your energy, what 01:22:32.720 --> 01:22:34.240 your true God is. 01:22:34.240 --> 01:22:37.920 If your true God is the true God, then your actions and 01:22:37.920 --> 01:22:39.920 your words are going to be in accord with scripture. 01:22:39.920 --> 01:22:42.080 You're going to do the stuff that God says to do, and 01:22:42.080 --> 01:22:43.840 you're not going to do the stuff that He says not to 01:22:43.840 --> 01:22:47.920 do. We are judged by our works in terms of them being 01:22:48.240 --> 01:22:51.040 an example of our belief. 01:22:51.040 --> 01:22:54.000 Now, no one can possibly keep God's word perfectly. 01:22:54.000 --> 01:22:55.680 Scripture's clear about that. 01:22:55.680 --> 01:22:58.000 We cannot possibly save ourselves. 01:22:58.000 --> 01:23:02.720 Our works are filthy rags before God, and they are only washed 01:23:02.720 --> 01:23:05.680 white by Christ's sacrifice. 01:23:05.680 --> 01:23:08.960 Nevertheless, there are things that are endemic to the Christian life 01:23:09.840 --> 01:23:13.520 that will be absent necessarily from the life of an unbeliever. 01:23:13.520 --> 01:23:15.200 And that's what God is talking about. 01:23:15.200 --> 01:23:18.720 He's looking at him saying, basically, you're going through the motions, but 01:23:18.720 --> 01:23:19.840 you're not saved. 01:23:19.840 --> 01:23:23.440 You're going to be damned if you do not repent. 01:23:23.440 --> 01:23:26.160 And this happens in in the rest of the New Testament too. 01:23:26.160 --> 01:23:27.920 It's what the third episode is going to be about. 01:23:27.920 --> 01:23:32.080 God is calling Christians to repent, to turn away from their wickedness 01:23:32.080 --> 01:23:33.360 inside the church. 01:23:33.600 --> 01:23:36.000 How can you be wicked inside the church? 01:23:36.000 --> 01:23:39.440 By having a God other than God, by having a morality other 01:23:39.440 --> 01:23:41.040 than that which is from God. 01:23:41.040 --> 01:23:43.680 See, their errors weren't simply doctrinal. 01:23:43.680 --> 01:23:46.400 When you go back to first Timothy four and he's talking about 01:23:46.400 --> 01:23:50.400 absurd Abstaining from marriage and certain foods are those doctrines? 01:23:50.400 --> 01:23:54.080 I mean, in some cases they become doctrines, but sometimes it's like, 01:23:54.080 --> 01:23:55.120 well, you know, don't do that. 01:23:55.120 --> 01:23:57.280 You know, we're just gonna do this other thing instead. 01:23:57.280 --> 01:24:00.880 It's not sold necessarily as a big ticket, here's a top line 01:24:00.960 --> 01:24:02.480 belief of this religion. 01:24:02.480 --> 01:24:04.320 It's just no don't do that. 01:24:04.320 --> 01:24:06.320 God says that's a teaching of demons. 01:24:06.320 --> 01:24:10.640 God says that the liars with seared consciences who bring those things 01:24:10.640 --> 01:24:13.200 from false spirits are damned. 01:24:13.200 --> 01:24:14.640 Inside the church. 01:24:14.720 --> 01:24:19.200 Because pagans from outside the church usually aren't coming into our churches 01:24:19.200 --> 01:24:20.080 and lying. 01:24:20.080 --> 01:24:24.240 Although you have men like Ben Shapiro and James Lindsay, who are 01:24:24.240 --> 01:24:28.800 now speaking alongside pastors, talking to us about the body of Christ 01:24:28.800 --> 01:24:30.240 in the public square. 01:24:30.240 --> 01:24:33.280 I it's inconceivable to me that these things would happen. 01:24:33.280 --> 01:24:37.280 And yet men like Corey and myself are seen as worse than 01:24:38.400 --> 01:24:41.920 we're certainly not free from sin, but do we sin by telling 01:24:41.920 --> 01:24:43.840 people to believe God and go to church? 01:24:43.840 --> 01:24:49.520 No. we sin against the world religion by condemning the Ben Shapiros 01:24:49.600 --> 01:24:53.120 and the James Lindsey's because they're wicked evil men who have only 01:24:53.600 --> 01:24:54.800 evil in their hearts. 01:24:54.800 --> 01:24:57.520 And the fact that some of what they say is able to 01:24:57.520 --> 01:25:00.640 sneak into the church is precisely the threat. 01:25:00.640 --> 01:25:03.440 And the fact that they're pastors that can't discern that is a 01:25:03.440 --> 01:25:04.720 tremendous threat. 01:25:04.720 --> 01:25:05.760 That's intolerable. 01:25:06.320 --> 01:25:10.000 It's utterly intolerable for there would be men in positions of authority 01:25:10.000 --> 01:25:13.600 in our churches who do not have the spiritual discernment to see 01:25:13.600 --> 01:25:17.920 that they are inviting wolves inside the sheepfold because the sheep don't 01:25:17.920 --> 01:25:18.800 know any better. 01:25:18.800 --> 01:25:23.680 Most people are not equipped to discern these things reliably. 01:25:23.680 --> 01:25:26.320 The best you can do is stick to what you've been taught 01:25:26.400 --> 01:25:28.480 and hope that your teacher was good. 01:25:28.480 --> 01:25:31.920 When you're given a false morality, when you're given a Ben Shapiro 01:25:32.160 --> 01:25:37.200 morality or a James Lindsay morality, when you're told that the Constitution 01:25:37.200 --> 01:25:41.200 and John Locke are better sources of morality than some of the 01:25:41.200 --> 01:25:44.560 old teachings, we've improved on that stuff in the last couple hundred 01:25:44.560 --> 01:25:47.520 years. Let's use the new stuff because it's even better. 01:25:47.760 --> 01:25:50.320 that is the morality as a religion. 01:25:50.320 --> 01:25:52.480 It's an absolutely a religion. 01:25:52.480 --> 01:25:58.880 With a god with a pantheon of beliefs, it's just not Christian. 01:25:58.880 --> 01:26:02.240 And so when an antichrist speaks in the stead of God from 01:26:02.240 --> 01:26:06.480 the pulpit or wherever he's teaching, you know, podcasters can do the 01:26:06.480 --> 01:26:09.600 same sort of damage, frankly, more in some cases. 01:26:09.600 --> 01:26:15.040 Our audience is is hundreds of times bigger than almost all congregations. 01:26:15.040 --> 01:26:17.440 That bears weight. 01:26:17.440 --> 01:26:18.800 We take that seriously. 01:26:18.800 --> 01:26:21.040 On the other hand, if we were saying nothing, we would also 01:26:21.040 --> 01:26:23.520 stand condemned for saying nothing. 01:26:23.520 --> 01:26:27.120 So the only way we can avoid condemnation is to speak and 01:26:27.120 --> 01:26:28.560 to speak faithfully. 01:26:28.560 --> 01:26:31.920 And we do our very best to do that every week. 01:26:31.920 --> 01:26:35.760 The morality of the world is coming into the church by the 01:26:35.760 --> 01:26:36.800 back door. 01:26:36.800 --> 01:26:38.800 It's not coming in through the front. 01:26:38.800 --> 01:26:43.680 It's not saying we're gonna just burn up this Bible and replace 01:26:43.680 --> 01:26:47.840 it. Because it not it's not gonna work in some denominations. 01:26:47.840 --> 01:26:49.040 In others, it has worked. 01:26:49.040 --> 01:26:49.760 It has happened. 01:26:49.840 --> 01:26:50.560 It has worked. 01:26:50.560 --> 01:26:57.040 Most of Methodism, Elka, a lot of denominations are just absolutely openly 01:26:57.040 --> 01:26:59.840 apostate. And they freely act that way. 01:26:59.840 --> 01:27:02.000 And yet they still call themselves Christians. 01:27:02.000 --> 01:27:05.600 And so we smugly from the conservative denominations look at them and 01:27:05.600 --> 01:27:08.640 say, Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. 01:27:08.640 --> 01:27:12.800 The problem is that we're in even worse jeopardy than they are 01:27:12.800 --> 01:27:16.800 in terms of falling for things, because we still think that we're 01:27:16.800 --> 01:27:20.800 holding to what Christianity teaches and what the Bible says when in 01:27:20.800 --> 01:27:24.480 reality our morality is every bit as wicked as theirs, because we're 01:27:24.400 --> 01:27:27.280 getting it from the same source, maybe different parts of it. 01:27:27.280 --> 01:27:33.360 But I'll tell you this, there are many pastors whose morality is 01:27:33.360 --> 01:27:39.360 indistinguishable from the terms of service of Facebook or X formally Twitter. 01:27:39.360 --> 01:27:44.960 If your morality is entirely compatible with the TOS for a social 01:27:44.960 --> 01:27:47.600 media site, you are going to hell. 01:27:47.600 --> 01:27:50.800 Because that is the world religion encapsulated. 01:27:50.800 --> 01:27:55.360 It's very positive, it's very friendly, it's very respectful, all sorts of 01:27:55.360 --> 01:27:59.280 bad things are off the menu that you can't do or say. 01:27:59.280 --> 01:28:01.520 What they protect is evil. 01:28:01.520 --> 01:28:05.360 They prevent you from naming wicked things, from saying things that are 01:28:05.360 --> 01:28:10.240 true. In fact, on X, you will be instabanned if you quote 01:28:10.240 --> 01:28:15.040 Revelation 2:9 and Revelation 3.9, because it calls the Jews the synagogue 01:28:15.040 --> 01:28:16.080 of Satan. 01:28:16.080 --> 01:28:20.640 Using that term, using synagogue of Satan will get your account instalocked. 01:28:20.640 --> 01:28:22.880 They won't even let that be posted. 01:28:22.880 --> 01:28:25.840 Quoting God will get you banned. 01:28:25.840 --> 01:28:30.320 Because calling Jews a synagogue of Satan is a moral statement. 01:28:30.320 --> 01:28:32.080 It is a Christian statement. 01:28:32.080 --> 01:28:35.360 It is at odds with the morality of the world that says 01:28:35.360 --> 01:28:37.840 that's racist, that's anti-Semitic. 01:28:37.840 --> 01:28:40.880 You can't do that and be a good person. 01:28:40.880 --> 01:28:43.040 According to the world religion, that's absolutely true. 01:28:43.040 --> 01:28:46.000 That is a confession of their religion. 01:28:46.000 --> 01:28:48.560 What it is not a confession of is the true God, because 01:28:48.560 --> 01:28:50.480 the true God literally said that. 01:28:50.480 --> 01:28:52.640 Those are red letter words too. 01:28:52.640 --> 01:28:56.320 That is Jesus from heaven proclaiming the Jews are the synagogue of 01:28:56.320 --> 01:28:59.120 Satan, as he said before that they are the children of their 01:28:59.120 --> 01:29:00.240 father the devil. 01:29:00.240 --> 01:29:04.480 That is what God said about those people, about that race of 01:29:04.480 --> 01:29:09.360 people. We did four-part episode dealing with all the details of that. 01:29:09.360 --> 01:29:12.160 If you say that, you get banned. 01:29:12.160 --> 01:29:16.640 Most pastors will have exactly the same response as Elon Musk. 01:29:16.640 --> 01:29:18.800 They will ban you for saying what God says. 01:29:18.800 --> 01:29:22.080 There's a whole lot of the Bible that is off limits in 01:29:22.080 --> 01:29:23.120 our churches. 01:29:23.120 --> 01:29:24.480 And what what are the parts? 01:29:24.480 --> 01:29:27.520 They're things about when the Jews do something bad, they're thing about 01:29:27.520 --> 01:29:30.640 when there are differences between men and women, there are things about 01:29:30.640 --> 01:29:35.200 sexual sins that differentiate from one and another, to say that Sodom 01:29:35.200 --> 01:29:38.480 and Gomorrah was worse than the neighboring sent towns that were not 01:29:38.480 --> 01:29:43.840 incinerated. These are all moral propositions that are scriptural propositions that are 01:29:43.840 --> 01:29:47.600 at odds with the morality of the world religion. 01:29:47.600 --> 01:29:50.960 And so all of this is about distinguishing where is my morality 01:29:51.040 --> 01:29:54.000 from? If you get upset when someone says that the Jews are 01:29:54.000 --> 01:29:58.320 the synagogue of Satan, you are angry at God Almighty. 01:29:58.320 --> 01:30:04.480 Your visceral moral repugnance at those words is hatred of God. 01:30:04.480 --> 01:30:06.880 You're violating the first and second commandments. 01:30:06.880 --> 01:30:10.080 You are serving Satan when you have that response. 01:30:10.080 --> 01:30:13.600 Elon Musk serves Satan when he bans people for saying that. 01:30:13.760 --> 01:30:15.840 Doesn't matter if he knows or not, he is. 01:30:15.840 --> 01:30:18.080 It's baked right into the system. 01:30:18.080 --> 01:30:20.480 The machinery literally enforces it. 01:30:20.480 --> 01:30:23.520 And the machinery in our churches enforces it too. 01:30:23.520 --> 01:30:28.320 There has been a massive manhunt across numerous denominations in the past 01:30:28.800 --> 01:30:34.240 year specifically trying to root out racists and anti Semites, because you 01:30:34.240 --> 01:30:38.640 can deny the Trinity, you can deny the the sacraments, you can 01:30:38.640 --> 01:30:41.200 deny pretty much anything in the Christian faith. 01:30:41.200 --> 01:30:44.080 You cannot deny the tenets of the world 01:30:44.080 --> 01:30:45.680 religion. 01:30:45.680 --> 01:30:46.000 The 01:30:46.000 --> 01:30:49.040 episodes we've named in the past and some of the others specifically 01:30:49.040 --> 01:30:51.920 go after the world religion, but we want to make clear in 01:30:51.920 --> 01:30:55.920 this episode that moral compass is pointed to hell. 01:30:55.920 --> 01:30:59.520 And many of us, by bits and pieces, have our own moral 01:30:59.520 --> 01:31:04.240 compass that when it comes to those issues, we lose our point 01:31:04.240 --> 01:31:06.160 towards God and it swings. 01:31:06.160 --> 01:31:09.280 It swings to hell and says, Nope, I'm gonna believe this other 01:31:09.280 --> 01:31:12.240 religion just for this one thing and I'll swing right back. 01:31:12.240 --> 01:31:14.320 You know, it comes to going to church, when it comes to 01:31:14.320 --> 01:31:18.080 saying the creeds or what whatever your profession is, sure, you got 01:31:18.080 --> 01:31:18.880 that down. 01:31:18.880 --> 01:31:22.400 When it comes to racism, uh no no no, that's I this 01:31:22.400 --> 01:31:24.400 is my religion too. 01:31:24.400 --> 01:31:27.120 If it were Christianity, that would be good. 01:31:27.120 --> 01:31:29.760 That's why the episode that we did on that was largely a 01:31:29.760 --> 01:31:30.800 Bible study. 01:31:30.800 --> 01:31:32.880 Because the truth is the opposite. 01:31:32.880 --> 01:31:37.440 It is a worldly modern invention that is an attack on Christianity. 01:31:37.440 --> 01:31:40.720 And that is why it's so important on Twitter and Facebook and 01:31:40.720 --> 01:31:42.080 in our pulpits. 01:31:42.080 --> 01:31:47.760 Christianity itself is under attack from without and within. 01:31:48.320 --> 01:31:52.720 As we've said many times before, you are in your life, in 01:31:52.720 --> 01:31:56.480 your actions, in your beliefs, trending Godward or hellward. 01:31:56.480 --> 01:31:58.720 Those are the only two options. 01:31:58.720 --> 01:32:03.840 And Satan, for his part, does not particularly care 01:32:04.960 --> 01:32:08.320 when it comes to the things about which you are wrong. 01:32:08.320 --> 01:32:11.920 Yes, he would prefer that you were a truly awful person and 01:32:11.920 --> 01:32:15.920 that you led many others to hell with you, but he's fine 01:32:16.400 --> 01:32:21.920 with it if when presented with two options, you pick the one 01:32:21.920 --> 01:32:24.080 that leads you toward him. 01:32:24.080 --> 01:32:29.120 Small thing, big thing, medium sized thing, doesn't matter. 01:32:29.120 --> 01:32:32.960 As long as you are doing the thing that God does not 01:32:32.960 --> 01:32:36.640 want you to do, Satan is happy. 01:32:36.640 --> 01:32:41.200 And so many of these things may seem small in the grand 01:32:41.200 --> 01:32:44.960 scheme of things, they actually are not, because these are many of 01:32:44.960 --> 01:32:48.880 the things that have destroyed our culture, that have destroyed Christendom, that 01:32:48.880 --> 01:32:54.240 are dragging all of us, hellward, along with our people and our 01:32:54.240 --> 01:32:58.480 culture, the whole world in fact, but they may seem small in 01:32:58.480 --> 01:33:00.480 and of themselves. 01:33:00.480 --> 01:33:04.560 When you decide to profess one of the tenets of the world 01:33:04.560 --> 01:33:08.800 religion, instead of pushing back against it and saying what Scripture says, 01:33:08.800 --> 01:33:10.880 well that seems small. 01:33:10.880 --> 01:33:14.560 Particularly if it seems like it's a peripheral or a tangential issue, 01:33:14.560 --> 01:33:16.560 a minor issue. 01:33:16.560 --> 01:33:18.800 But it's not. 01:33:18.800 --> 01:33:22.320 Because again, the only goal of Satan is to get you to 01:33:22.320 --> 01:33:25.120 do the thing that God does not want you to do, and 01:33:25.120 --> 01:33:28.000 not to do the thing that God wants you to do. 01:33:28.160 --> 01:33:30.800 Doesn't ultimately matter what it is 01:33:32.160 --> 01:33:35.520 He just wants you to rebel. 01:33:35.520 --> 01:33:36.560 That's the point. 01:33:36.560 --> 01:33:38.720 That's the whole point. 01:33:38.720 --> 01:33:43.520 It is whether you are obedient to God or rebelling against God. 01:33:43.520 --> 01:33:48.240 Now, I'm not saying that every single choice is binary 01:33:49.200 --> 01:33:51.120 hellword or heaven word. 01:33:51.120 --> 01:33:52.000 That's not the point. 01:33:52.000 --> 01:33:55.840 There are things that are legitimately audiophora. 01:33:55.840 --> 01:33:58.560 There are things in a grand In a grand sense of the 01:33:58.560 --> 01:34:02.320 term. There are things that it doesn't matter which you pick. 01:34:02.320 --> 01:34:06.640 If you pick chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, that's not 01:34:06.640 --> 01:34:09.760 moving you closer or further away from God. 01:34:09.760 --> 01:34:12.000 That's not how that works. 01:34:12.240 --> 01:34:15.840 When it comes to matters of morality, when it comes to matters 01:34:15.840 --> 01:34:19.600 of religion, when it comes to matters of cult, when it comes 01:34:19.600 --> 01:34:23.040 to whether you affirm the words of scripture or deny the words 01:34:23.040 --> 01:34:26.720 of scripture, these are the things where it matters. 01:34:26.720 --> 01:34:30.880 And as a Christian, and this may be a hard teaching, but 01:34:30.880 --> 01:34:35.200 it is the teaching of Scripture as a Christian, you are required 01:34:35.200 --> 01:34:40.560 to affirm the words of Scripture every time, and that is regardless 01:34:40.560 --> 01:34:44.080 of consequences. 01:34:44.080 --> 01:34:50.160 In our modern world, that seems like an impossible task. 01:34:50.160 --> 01:34:53.280 That seems like something that is insane to ask. 01:34:53.280 --> 01:34:56.960 Because as Wo mentioned, we live in a world where you can 01:34:56.960 --> 01:34:59.040 be fired from your job. 01:34:59.040 --> 01:35:04.800 You can essentially be unpersoned if you simply quote Scripture, if you 01:35:04.800 --> 01:35:08.080 repeat the words of God after him. 01:35:08.080 --> 01:35:12.240 There are those out there who will attempt to destroy you. 01:35:12.240 --> 01:35:14.000 But that should tell you something. 01:35:14.880 --> 01:35:19.680 They're not attempting to destroy you because you said something false. 01:35:19.680 --> 01:35:22.560 If you just said something false, they wouldn't care. 01:35:22.560 --> 01:35:25.920 If you believe in a different false God from their false god, 01:35:25.920 --> 01:35:28.720 chances are they will leave you alone. 01:35:28.720 --> 01:35:32.320 If you worship Molok, they don't care. 01:35:32.320 --> 01:35:34.720 If you worship Baal, they don't care. 01:35:34.720 --> 01:35:38.640 If you worship money, they don't care. 01:35:38.640 --> 01:35:42.640 Mammon. If you worship capitalism, they don't care. 01:35:42.640 --> 01:35:44.080 Pick your false god. 01:35:44.080 --> 01:35:46.560 Now, of course, there are some who are going to attack you 01:35:46.560 --> 01:35:49.600 for capitalism, but that's just because they don't realize that they're worshiping 01:35:49.600 --> 01:35:52.320 the other side of the same coin, as we went over in 01:35:52.320 --> 01:35:55.520 our episode on on capitalism. 01:35:55.520 --> 01:35:59.680 But they care a great deal when you say the things of 01:35:59.680 --> 01:36:04.240 God, and that's because those are true. 01:36:04.240 --> 01:36:08.320 And that is why you see those who are the acolytes, who 01:36:08.320 --> 01:36:11.440 are the priests or the high priests of the world religion. 01:36:11.440 --> 01:36:16.400 It's why you see them respond so violently, so vehemently, when you 01:36:16.400 --> 01:36:20.960 say things that are just quotes from Scripture, because they go against 01:36:20.960 --> 01:36:25.840 the world religion, and demons cannot bear to hear the word of 01:36:25.840 --> 01:36:29.840 God. That is one of the things we see throughout the book 01:36:29.840 --> 01:36:34.080 of Concord, but particularly in some of the sections from Luther himself, 01:36:34.080 --> 01:36:36.880 where he says that one of the reasons we should have the 01:36:36.880 --> 01:36:40.720 Word of God in our hearts, on our lips, in our mouths 01:36:40.720 --> 01:36:44.080 why we should speak, read, discuss the Word of God as scripture 01:36:44.640 --> 01:36:49.440 of course instructs us to do, is because Satan cannot bear to 01:36:49.440 --> 01:36:50.400 hear it. 01:36:50.400 --> 01:36:52.720 It drives him away. 01:36:52.720 --> 01:36:56.160 One of the ways that you can drive Satan out of your 01:36:56.160 --> 01:36:59.200 life is to spend time in the things of God, to spend 01:36:59.200 --> 01:37:00.400 time in God's Word. 01:37:00.400 --> 01:37:03.760 That's one of the ways that you are sanctified. 01:37:03.760 --> 01:37:06.720 And so doing this is one of the ways you protect yourself 01:37:06.720 --> 01:37:10.320 as a Christian, and it is why those who are not of 01:37:10.320 --> 01:37:12.800 the church, those who are not of Christ, those who are not 01:37:12.800 --> 01:37:18.560 of God cannot stand to hear these things, because it enrages their 01:37:18.560 --> 01:37:22.160 master, and so it enrages them. 01:37:22.160 --> 01:37:27.600 But again, as a Christian Christian, if you have the option to 01:37:27.600 --> 01:37:31.200 speak the word of God or to deny it, as a Christian 01:37:31.360 --> 01:37:35.120 you do not have a choice, you are required to speak the 01:37:35.120 --> 01:37:36.240 Word of God. 01:37:36.240 --> 01:37:39.280 Again I will give the same caveat that I have given elsewhere 01:37:39.440 --> 01:37:41.600 when this issue has arisen. 01:37:41.600 --> 01:37:44.480 This does not mean be a fool. 01:37:44.480 --> 01:37:48.720 Now, in a certain sense, perhaps it does but you are still 01:37:48.720 --> 01:37:51.200 instructed to be wise. 01:37:51.200 --> 01:37:55.440 The word there is actually shades into crafty even because it's the 01:37:55.440 --> 01:37:57.600 same description used of the serpent. 01:37:57.600 --> 01:38:00.480 Wise is a serpent. 01:38:00.480 --> 01:38:02.240 But that does not permit you to lie. 01:38:02.960 --> 01:38:06.560 We are not Muslims, we are not permitted to lie about our 01:38:06.560 --> 01:38:09.440 faith in order to protect ourselves. 01:38:09.440 --> 01:38:13.360 There may be very real costs associated with speaking the things of 01:38:13.360 --> 01:38:15.760 God, being bold and truthful. 01:38:15.760 --> 01:38:18.240 But that is what we are called to do. 01:38:18.240 --> 01:38:21.200 Because again Satan just wants you to rebel, he wants you to 01:38:21.200 --> 01:38:25.600 deny whatever it happens to be, small or large. 01:38:25.600 --> 01:38:30.400 His goal is to get you to deny Christ, to deny God's 01:38:30.400 --> 01:38:33.760 word. It's the camel's nose under the tent flap. 01:38:33.760 --> 01:38:36.000 Before you know it, you'll have the entire camel in the tent 01:38:36.080 --> 01:38:37.280 and there'll be no more tent. 01:38:37.280 --> 01:38:40.000 It's just you and the camel. 01:38:40.000 --> 01:38:44.400 That is Satan's goal. 01:38:44.400 --> 01:38:48.000 And so, yes, obviously, we've had a lot of law in this 01:38:48.000 --> 01:38:54.000 episode. But Christians still need to hear God's law. 01:38:54.160 --> 01:38:56.960 The world most certainly needs to hear God's law. 01:38:56.960 --> 01:39:00.480 This is one of the things that we have not we specifically, 01:39:00.480 --> 01:39:04.880 but Christians in general have gotten wrong in the last couple decades 01:39:04.960 --> 01:39:08.960 or really more than that, the last half century perhaps, the law 01:39:08.960 --> 01:39:12.080 has fallen by the wayside. 01:39:12.080 --> 01:39:17.200 But the gospel isn't good news if the law doesn't exist. 01:39:17.200 --> 01:39:20.880 Because if there's no law, then I don't need a savior. 01:39:20.880 --> 01:39:23.840 Because if there's no law, I haven't transgressed. 01:39:23.840 --> 01:39:27.840 There must be a law that you have transgressed for the gospel 01:39:27.840 --> 01:39:28.800 to be good news. 01:39:28.800 --> 01:39:30.640 The gospel is good news. 01:39:30.640 --> 01:39:33.840 Because you're a sinner, if you were not a sinner, the gospel 01:39:34.400 --> 01:39:35.440 would just be news. 01:39:35.440 --> 01:39:38.480 It wouldn't be good news because it wouldn't apply to you. 01:39:38.480 --> 01:39:43.440 It applies to you, it applies to the world because we are 01:39:43.440 --> 01:39:47.040 sinners. Because you are a sinner the gospel is good news. 01:39:48.000 --> 01:39:49.920 And so we need to hear the law. 01:39:49.920 --> 01:39:52.560 As Christians we need to be reminded the law. 01:39:52.560 --> 01:39:55.760 And not only does the law remind us of what we should 01:39:55.760 --> 01:39:59.440 do, what we should have done, what we have failed to do, 01:39:59.440 --> 01:40:02.640 but it guides us, we forget that there are three uses of 01:40:02.640 --> 01:40:05.360 the law, and one of the uses of the law is to 01:40:05.360 --> 01:40:08.560 guide us in the Christian life. 01:40:08.560 --> 01:40:12.000 And it should not just be individually, it should also help to 01:40:12.000 --> 01:40:14.240 guide our societies. 01:40:14.240 --> 01:40:18.400 God's law should be the basis of our positive law. 01:40:18.400 --> 01:40:22.160 For those who are unfamiliar with the terms, moral law would be 01:40:22.160 --> 01:40:22.800 God's law. 01:40:22.800 --> 01:40:24.240 The Ten Commandments are moral law. 01:40:24.240 --> 01:40:27.920 That is the law that flows from God's nature Positive laws simply 01:40:27.920 --> 01:40:30.000 means laws that are enacted by men. 01:40:30.000 --> 01:40:32.000 That's what positive means in this sense. 01:40:32.000 --> 01:40:35.520 And so by that I mean our criminal laws primarily. 01:40:35.520 --> 01:40:38.800 Civil laws are less of a matter for the moral law. 01:40:38.800 --> 01:40:43.120 They should be compliant with the moral law, but the amount that 01:40:43.120 --> 01:40:47.280 you set for a parking fine is only tangentially an issue of 01:40:47.280 --> 01:40:49.840 the moral law. 01:40:49.840 --> 01:40:54.800 No Making homicide illegal is a moral law matter. 01:40:54.800 --> 01:40:57.680 Making adultery illegal, which it still should be, it is in the 01:40:57.680 --> 01:41:01.280 military code of justice, just not in the civil courts anymore. 01:41:01.280 --> 01:41:04.000 Adultery should be illegal in our societies. 01:41:04.000 --> 01:41:07.680 As Christians, we should want that to be part of our laws. 01:41:07.680 --> 01:41:12.000 Again, we want to have a Christian society because those are the 01:41:12.000 --> 01:41:18.880 guardrails. Those help you to remain a Christian, not to stray. 01:41:18.880 --> 01:41:26.320 Sheep folds, sheep pens, have fences, because without them the sheep wander. 01:41:26.320 --> 01:41:31.760 A good shepherd will have fences, and a prince, a proper ruler, 01:41:31.760 --> 01:41:34.880 a godly king, is supposed to be a good shepherd. 01:41:34.880 --> 01:41:38.480 He will place fences, he will maintain the fences that have been 01:41:38.480 --> 01:41:42.320 placed, in order to preserve the flock that is entrusted to his 01:41:42.480 --> 01:41:45.760 care, and that is the duty of a godly prince no less, 01:41:45.760 --> 01:41:50.560 although in a different way, from a pastor or teacher. 01:41:50.560 --> 01:41:54.720 Both are under shepherds, both will one day answer to the good 01:41:54.720 --> 01:41:57.600 shepherd for what they did or did not do with regard to 01:41:58.080 --> 01:42:02.880 those sheep entrusted to their care by the Good Shepherd. 01:42:02.880 --> 01:42:05.600 The one thing that I want to leave everyone with in this 01:42:05.600 --> 01:42:09.760 episode beyond what Corey just said, which is very important, is 01:42:10.880 --> 01:42:15.680 the idea of using what we've discussed here today as a tool 01:42:15.680 --> 01:42:19.680 for evaluating whatever you hear others talking about. 01:42:19.680 --> 01:42:24.240 When you hear someone making a moral claim, someone saying this is 01:42:24.240 --> 01:42:28.960 right and this is wrong, your first instinct should be, okay, where 01:42:28.960 --> 01:42:30.400 did you get that? 01:42:30.400 --> 01:42:33.120 And the trick is that Christians are always going to say, Well, 01:42:33.120 --> 01:42:34.000 I got it from God. 01:42:34.000 --> 01:42:36.160 The response is okay, show me. 01:42:36.160 --> 01:42:40.880 And they're usually going to have garbage proof texts because what they 01:42:40.880 --> 01:42:45.840 won't be able to do with many of these new moral issues 01:42:45.840 --> 01:42:49.840 that are invented in the last couple of centuries, they won't be 01:42:49.840 --> 01:42:54.000 able to point to the historic Christian belief because these things are 01:42:54.000 --> 01:42:55.680 a departure from it. 01:42:55.680 --> 01:42:56.320 And so 01:42:57.200 --> 01:43:01.360 it's not simply a question of the Christian saying, well, show me 01:43:01.360 --> 01:43:03.840 that where you're morality came from and then they show you a 01:43:03.840 --> 01:43:05.760 Bible version, okay, well, it's in the Bible. 01:43:05.760 --> 01:43:06.960 I guess that's fine. 01:43:06.960 --> 01:43:10.640 That is a superficial and useless application of what we're trying to 01:43:10.640 --> 01:43:11.760 teach here. 01:43:11.760 --> 01:43:17.680 The point is that if Christianity is true, then is eternal, because 01:43:17.840 --> 01:43:20.000 God is true and God is eternal. 01:43:20.000 --> 01:43:24.720 God's will is eternal, his will does not change, Christianity doesn't change. 01:43:24.720 --> 01:43:26.880 Right and wrong doesn't change. 01:43:26.880 --> 01:43:31.040 So when someone says that used to be right, but now it's 01:43:31.040 --> 01:43:34.720 wrong, that person is from Satan, period. 01:43:34.720 --> 01:43:36.160 That's all you need to know. 01:43:36.160 --> 01:43:38.240 That's the genealogy of that idea. 01:43:38.240 --> 01:43:41.760 If they come to you and say, Well, sure, 200 years ago, 01:43:41.760 --> 01:43:44.560 no one knew that it was bad, but today we know it's 01:43:44.560 --> 01:43:47.600 bad, that person is from hell. 01:43:47.600 --> 01:43:50.720 Even if it's a pastor, even if they're a big expert in 01:43:50.720 --> 01:43:55.200 theology, if they tell you about a new sin, they're lying. 01:43:55.200 --> 01:43:58.960 And you can you should apply this first to us, to everything 01:43:59.120 --> 01:44:01.520 Corey and I say on this podcast. 01:44:01.520 --> 01:44:05.200 Are we coming up with new sins or are we saying what 01:44:05.200 --> 01:44:08.800 Scripture says and what the church has dealt with in the past? 01:44:09.040 --> 01:44:11.920 As we've said, one of the tricks that Satan is playing today 01:44:12.080 --> 01:44:15.680 is he's taking new attacks, he's taking new approaches. 01:44:15.680 --> 01:44:20.240 So when the new sin of racism was invented invented, there's not 01:44:20.240 --> 01:44:24.880 much discussion in the historical Christian context about racism. 01:44:24.880 --> 01:44:28.880 Is that because it used to be okay and now it's bad? 01:44:28.880 --> 01:44:31.120 Or is it because it didn't exist at all? 01:44:31.120 --> 01:44:32.640 The notion didn't exist. 01:44:32.640 --> 01:44:36.960 What they call racism has always existed because it's not evil. 01:44:36.960 --> 01:44:42.080 The overwhelming majority of what is called racism or misogyny or any 01:44:42.080 --> 01:44:45.440 of these other things is actually obedience to God. 01:44:45.440 --> 01:44:48.400 It's actually telling the truth about things. 01:44:48.400 --> 01:44:52.480 The small subset that they want to hold up that's actual hatred, 01:44:52.480 --> 01:44:57.040 that's actual wickedness that scripture condemns, there's no need for a separate 01:44:57.040 --> 01:44:59.360 word for it because God calls that murder. 01:44:59.360 --> 01:45:01.600 It's murder in the heart to hate someone. 01:45:01.600 --> 01:45:04.320 It is not murder in the heart to say this person is 01:45:04.320 --> 01:45:05.360 not like this person. 01:45:05.360 --> 01:45:06.160 That's not murder. 01:45:06.160 --> 01:45:07.280 That's not hatred. 01:45:07.280 --> 01:45:10.640 There's nothing of the sort present to say you are not like 01:45:10.640 --> 01:45:14.000 you. God does it repeatedly in Scripture. 01:45:14.000 --> 01:45:16.480 We have permission from God to do it. 01:45:16.480 --> 01:45:19.120 In fact, we may command from God to do it, because we're 01:45:19.120 --> 01:45:21.200 commanded to tell the truth. 01:45:21.200 --> 01:45:26.960 So when you're evaluating people's claims about morality, just check their work. 01:45:26.960 --> 01:45:29.280 If it's wrong, has it always been wrong? 01:45:29.280 --> 01:45:32.480 If you just discovered it's wrong, where did it come from? 01:45:32.480 --> 01:45:35.280 And as soon as you go back far enough in their genealogy 01:45:35.520 --> 01:45:38.720 that you that you find, well, yeah, it came from some girl's 01:45:38.720 --> 01:45:40.720 vision in eighteen twenty three. 01:45:40.720 --> 01:45:41.600 You're done. 01:45:41.600 --> 01:45:45.200 You don't need to examine, you know, whether the vision was checked 01:45:45.200 --> 01:45:46.640 out by any experts. 01:45:46.640 --> 01:45:48.560 You know that's a teaching of demons. 01:45:48.560 --> 01:45:52.320 You know that it's evil because because evil is going to continuously 01:45:52.320 --> 01:45:55.360 attack the church from within. 01:45:55.360 --> 01:45:58.000 There's evil in the world that has nothing to do with the 01:45:58.000 --> 01:46:02.160 church because Satan is the prince of this world, but there's also 01:46:02.160 --> 01:46:05.680 e evil within the church that behaves in different ways because Satan 01:46:05.680 --> 01:46:06.320 needs to. 01:46:06.320 --> 01:46:10.480 He needs to trick us into worshiping him while we're calling on 01:46:10.480 --> 01:46:11.760 the name of God. 01:46:11.760 --> 01:46:15.600 In the episode on apostasy, we'll talk about more God says people 01:46:15.600 --> 01:46:18.480 will come and say, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy and cast 01:46:18.480 --> 01:46:19.840 out demons in your name? 01:46:19.840 --> 01:46:23.920 And he will say, truly, I tell you I never knew you. 01:46:23.920 --> 01:46:25.120 That's dire. 01:46:25.120 --> 01:46:29.120 That's something that leaves us feeling like that's scary. 01:46:29.120 --> 01:46:32.160 So we'll treat that entirely in that episode. 01:46:32.160 --> 01:46:36.080 But just remember, when someone comes to you speaking in God's name, 01:46:36.080 --> 01:46:38.080 he's not necessarily from God. 01:46:38.080 --> 01:46:41.600 And frankly, today, in the current state of the world, and in 01:46:41.600 --> 01:46:45.200 the current state of our churches, when someone comes to you and 01:46:45.200 --> 01:46:50.080 says they're from God, starting with a podcaster, you should test the 01:46:50.080 --> 01:46:52.560 spirits. You shouldn't automatically believe them. 01:46:52.560 --> 01:46:55.840 Don't believe what they say because they're clever or they flashy or 01:46:55.840 --> 01:47:01.920 gimmicky. Whatever appeals to you intrinsically cannot be relied upon. 01:47:01.920 --> 01:47:05.200 What you can rely upon is that God's word is true, that 01:47:05.200 --> 01:47:11.200 scripture is eternal, that is existed outside of time and was transmitted 01:47:11.200 --> 01:47:12.640 to us for our benefit. 01:47:12.640 --> 01:47:17.040 When God has revealed something that's true that says right and wrong, 01:47:17.040 --> 01:47:19.440 that's it, that's a whole shooting match. 01:47:19.440 --> 01:47:22.720 Anyone else who comes along later and says, Hey, I found a 01:47:22.720 --> 01:47:26.960 new sin, you test that spirit and then you judge according to 01:47:26.960 --> 01:47:28.400 what's going on. 01:47:28.400 --> 01:47:31.520 And when you look at these things in this simple heuristic, you're 01:47:31.440 --> 01:47:34.720 gonna find all the new stuff is lies, all the new stuff 01:47:34.720 --> 01:47:37.600 is wickedness, and all the new stuff is what's popular. 01:47:37.600 --> 01:47:40.640 The old Christian teachings about these things are gone. 01:47:40.640 --> 01:47:42.240 Obeying God, that's gone. 01:47:42.240 --> 01:47:44.240 Then no one wants to hear about that. 01:47:44.240 --> 01:47:48.400 Nevermind, it's what Jesus exhorts continuously. 01:47:48.400 --> 01:47:51.200 We don't want to hear that because it condemns us. 01:47:51.200 --> 01:47:52.560 And that's okay. 01:47:52.960 --> 01:47:58.400 we should be aware the scripture condemns us, even as Christians, because 01:47:58.400 --> 01:48:02.960 that is the law that explains why the gospel is our good 01:48:02.960 --> 01:48:07.760 news. We are forgiven, we are washed white in the blood of 01:48:07.760 --> 01:48:12.720 the lamb by virtue of God paying for those sins, paying for 01:48:12.720 --> 01:48:16.080 our unbelief, faying for our failures. 01:48:16.080 --> 01:48:20.080 But having received that payment and having received the knowledge of that 01:48:20.080 --> 01:48:22.640 payment, that's the beginning of the Christian life. 01:48:22.640 --> 01:48:24.480 It's not the end of it. 01:48:24.480 --> 01:48:28.880 So as we navigate these days that are hard and getting harder, 01:48:28.880 --> 01:48:33.120 as we seemingly have fewer and fewer pastors and teachers who will 01:48:33.120 --> 01:48:37.840 speak as God has always spoken, it's there's unfortunately it's going to 01:48:37.840 --> 01:48:41.360 fall more and more to men who have not necessarily been trained 01:48:41.360 --> 01:48:44.880 in these things to evaluate the claims of those who are saying 01:48:44.960 --> 01:48:46.000 I'm here from God. 01:48:46.160 --> 01:48:48.720 Let me tell you what he really meant. 01:48:48.720 --> 01:48:53.200 To some degree that is part of the reason for this podcast. 01:48:53.200 --> 01:48:59.840 Our hope with this podcast, with these episodes, is to equip you 01:49:00.000 --> 01:49:03.040 in order to assess the claims of others. 01:49:03.280 --> 01:49:08.960 equip you in order to find these things in Scripture, again, we 01:49:08.960 --> 01:49:12.560 will reiterate, we have said many times before, but we will continue 01:49:12.560 --> 01:49:16.320 to say, do not simply trust the things we say. 01:49:17.280 --> 01:49:19.920 We're not saying you cannot trust us, I would say you can 01:49:19.920 --> 01:49:20.400 trust us. 01:49:20.400 --> 01:49:24.000 I believe that we have amply demonstrated that at this point. 01:49:24.000 --> 01:49:29.520 However, when it comes to the things of God, we have Scripture. 01:49:29.520 --> 01:49:32.240 Scripture is the test. 01:49:32.240 --> 01:49:35.200 Scripture is the one standard. 01:49:35.200 --> 01:49:40.400 Scripture is that against which the words of any teacher, any pastor, 01:49:40.400 --> 01:49:43.840 anyone claiming to speak the words of God or to speak on 01:49:43.840 --> 01:49:47.520 behalf of God must be tested. 01:49:47.520 --> 01:49:52.160 And so take anything we say and test it against Scripture. 01:49:52.160 --> 01:49:55.760 If what we say conflicts with Scripture, then we are liars and 01:49:55.760 --> 01:49:59.920 wrong. It may not be intentional on our part, or it may 01:49:59.920 --> 01:50:01.200 be intentional. 01:50:01.200 --> 01:50:06.240 You to some degree will have to make that call for yourself. 01:50:06.240 --> 01:50:08.880 We're not saying you cannot trust anyone. 01:50:08.880 --> 01:50:12.800 Part of human life is trust, and we have to trust others 01:50:12.800 --> 01:50:14.240 to some degree. 01:50:14.240 --> 01:50:18.240 What we are saying is the things of God must be subjected 01:50:18.240 --> 01:50:19.840 to the Word of God. 01:50:19.840 --> 01:50:23.440 That applies to us as teachers, and that applies to any other 01:50:23.440 --> 01:50:24.880 teacher or pastor. 01:50:24.880 --> 01:50:28.640 It applies to all men in all places at all times. 01:50:28.640 --> 01:50:33.120 When we read the church fathers, we subject them to scripture. 01:50:33.120 --> 01:50:38.480 When we read sermons by famous pastors or famous theologians, the works 01:50:38.480 --> 01:50:43.280 of the great men of church history, we subject them to scripture. 01:50:43.280 --> 01:50:46.800 We should do the same thing with modern teachers. 01:50:46.800 --> 01:50:47.600 Because again, 01:50:48.480 --> 01:50:51.920 it is scripture that is the only standard, because it is the 01:50:51.920 --> 01:50:55.040 standard given us by God. 01:50:55.040 --> 01:50:59.520 Scripture is absolutely true and absolutely reliable. 01:50:59.520 --> 01:51:05.040 It is the rule against which all other things must be measured. 01:51:05.440 --> 01:51:11.200 I want to add a quick comment here before we close out 01:51:11.200 --> 01:51:12.720 this episode. 01:51:14.320 --> 01:51:18.560 Woe mentioned the burning of the magic books that occurs in the 01:51:18.560 --> 01:51:24.480 Book of Acts that is mentioned there, and the large value, the 01:51:24.480 --> 01:51:29.280 sum, the value for which those books could have been sold. 01:51:29.280 --> 01:51:31.760 It was a great deal of money. 01:51:31.760 --> 01:51:33.920 It was a great deal of money then, it would be a 01:51:33.920 --> 01:51:36.240 great deal of money today. 01:51:36.240 --> 01:51:41.280 But there is another example that is slightly different because of the 01:51:41.280 --> 01:51:47.440 way it was executed, but is still an example for Christians, a 01:51:47.440 --> 01:51:52.640 godly example of how Christians are to behave, and that is the 01:51:52.640 --> 01:51:55.360 Disputation of Paris. 01:51:55.360 --> 01:51:57.840 This was, of course, the trial of the Talmud as one of 01:51:57.840 --> 01:52:02.880 the other names of it, carried out under King Louis the Ninth. 01:52:02.880 --> 01:52:05.680 We won't go into the details here because that's not the relevant 01:52:06.160 --> 01:52:14.080 matter. The issue is that a godly Christian monarch, a godly sovereign, 01:52:14.080 --> 01:52:17.680 investigated a matter, discovered that it was wicked, and 01:52:18.560 --> 01:52:20.080 destroyed the evil materials. 01:52:20.080 --> 01:52:22.880 The Talmud is evil and should be destroyed. 01:52:22.880 --> 01:52:25.760 It is an absolutely wicked book. 01:52:25.760 --> 01:52:28.080 Collection of books, really. 01:52:28.080 --> 01:52:33.520 But the value of the copies of the Talmud that were destroyed 01:52:33.520 --> 01:52:38.720 in front of Notre Dame by Louis IX. 01:52:38.720 --> 01:52:43.200 I will admit it is difficult to estimate in current dollars for 01:52:43.200 --> 01:52:44.000 various reasons. 01:52:44.000 --> 01:52:48.480 These were handmade, they were made of various different materials. 01:52:48.480 --> 01:52:53.040 Some of the editions were better than others, as to be expected. 01:52:53.040 --> 01:52:56.720 But it is somewhere between ten and twelve thousand copies of the 01:52:56.720 --> 01:52:58.240 Talmud were burned. 01:52:58.240 --> 01:53:02.960 This was not a small number, that is an immense number of 01:53:02.960 --> 01:53:04.720 books for that day and age. 01:53:04.720 --> 01:53:09.200 Again, remember, handwritten, and the Talmud is not short. 01:53:09.200 --> 01:53:13.840 In modern printing it is thousands of pages long. 01:53:13.840 --> 01:53:18.560 If you were to roughly estimate the value of those books burned, 01:53:18.560 --> 01:53:22.000 in modern dollars it would be between two hundred million and eight 01:53:21.920 --> 01:53:27.040 hundred and twenty billion dollars. 01:53:27.040 --> 01:53:29.760 That is the Christian response. 01:53:30.160 --> 01:53:35.360 The Christian response is to destroy evil, regardless of the supposed value 01:53:35.360 --> 01:53:39.280 of it And that is what a godly prince does. 01:53:39.280 --> 01:53:42.320 And so it is right that we have statues in various places 01:53:42.320 --> 01:53:43.600 for Louis the Ninth. 01:53:43.600 --> 01:53:48.240 He was a Christian prince and should be remembered. 01:53:48.240 --> 01:53:51.920 But now to close out this episode. 01:53:51.920 --> 01:53:55.360 I know that many will, again, notice that we focused on the 01:53:55.360 --> 01:53:57.040 law in this episode, and that's true. 01:53:57.040 --> 01:53:57.600 We did. 01:53:57.600 --> 01:53:58.480 The law is important. 01:53:58.480 --> 01:54:02.160 I went over that previously. 01:54:02.160 --> 01:54:07.200 But there is a statement that is common in particularly Lutheranism, but 01:54:07.200 --> 01:54:11.680 others have adopted it as well, that the gospel should be permitted 01:54:11.680 --> 01:54:12.960 to predominate. 01:54:12.960 --> 01:54:16.000 Now, of course, that applies primarily to sermons, and we are not 01:54:16.320 --> 01:54:18.000 pastors. We will never be pastors. 01:54:18.000 --> 01:54:20.000 We have no intention to be pastors. 01:54:20.000 --> 01:54:24.480 Unless God sends a giant fish to swallow me, I am not 01:54:24.480 --> 01:54:25.920 becoming a pastor. 01:54:25.920 --> 01:54:28.880 I suppose here in Tennessee perhaps it would have to be something 01:54:28.880 --> 01:54:33.120 other than a fish since we're rather landlocked. 01:54:33.120 --> 01:54:40.240 However, many misunderstand what it means for the gospel to predominate. 01:54:40.240 --> 01:54:40.800 The gospel 01:54:41.680 --> 01:54:45.840 does not predominate in terms of volume. 01:54:45.840 --> 01:54:51.360 The gospel predominates in terms of weight. 01:54:51.360 --> 01:54:55.760 And the reason for this is that no matter how many or 01:54:55.760 --> 01:54:59.920 how terrible my sins may be, or your sins, or anyone else's 01:54:59.920 --> 01:55:03.200 sins, they are finite. 01:55:03.200 --> 01:55:08.320 Yes the transgression itself is infinite in its nature because it is 01:55:08.320 --> 01:55:12.320 against an infinite God, and the party against whom a transgression is 01:55:12.320 --> 01:55:17.120 committed does factor into the weight of the transgression. 01:55:17.120 --> 01:55:22.640 And so yes, the weight of our sin is infinite, but the 01:55:22.640 --> 01:55:27.040 number of our sins, again regardless of the heinousness of them, is 01:55:27.040 --> 01:55:29.360 finite. Because your life is finite. 01:55:29.360 --> 01:55:30.640 You can commit only so many sins. 01:55:30.640 --> 01:55:33.760 Even if you spent every waking second sinning, you could commit only 01:55:33.760 --> 01:55:36.400 so many in your life. 01:55:36.400 --> 01:55:43.680 The gospel predominates because Christ's sacrifice is of infinite value, is of 01:55:43.680 --> 01:55:45.680 infinite weight. 01:55:45.680 --> 01:55:50.800 And also your sins, if you are a Christian, are finite in 01:55:50.800 --> 01:55:53.200 that they will be erased by God 01:55:54.560 --> 01:55:57.600 when you are renewed at the second coming. 01:55:57.600 --> 01:56:00.160 God doesn't just promise that your sins 01:56:01.200 --> 01:56:04.160 no longer count against you. 01:56:04.160 --> 01:56:07.200 God promises to forget your sins. 01:56:07.200 --> 01:56:11.200 That which God forgets is gone in a way that gone does 01:56:11.200 --> 01:56:14.400 not even begin to approach describing. 01:56:15.040 --> 01:56:19.920 It will be as if they never existed, as if those sins 01:56:19.920 --> 01:56:21.520 had never been committed. 01:56:21.520 --> 01:56:25.440 What God forgets doesn't exist Doesn't exist, it's gone. 01:56:25.440 --> 01:56:28.480 It I don't even have the words to describe. 01:56:28.480 --> 01:56:30.720 It is no longer a thing. 01:56:30.720 --> 01:56:34.880 That is what God promises. 01:56:34.880 --> 01:56:38.080 The weight of that is infinite. 01:56:38.400 --> 01:56:41.600 Nothing can predominate against that. 01:56:41.600 --> 01:56:46.000 That is the way in which the gospel predominates. 01:56:46.000 --> 01:56:50.720 And so, yes, even if most of the episode was law, the 01:56:50.720 --> 01:56:57.120 fact that we even mention the gospel permits it to predominate, because 01:56:57.120 --> 01:56:59.280 it predominates in weight. 01:56:59.280 --> 01:57:04.000 It does not predominate in the number of words dedicated to it, 01:57:04.000 --> 01:57:09.840 because Christ's sacrifice again is of infinite value, and the glory that 01:57:09.840 --> 01:57:14.080 awaits us in the next life is of infinite value and of 01:57:14.080 --> 01:57:16.720 infinite duration, because of course it is eternity. 01:57:17.440 --> 01:57:23.360 And so the good news, the gospel, predominates, because it is infinite, 01:57:23.360 --> 01:57:27.600 and all else compared to it is finite. 01:57:27.600 --> 01:57:32.640 And so I just want to close with the second paragraph from 01:57:32.640 --> 01:57:39.440 the Nicene Creed, because it is a good summary of the gospel. 01:57:39.440 --> 01:57:43.680 I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of 01:57:43.680 --> 01:57:48.640 God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light 01:57:48.640 --> 01:57:54.000 of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of 01:57:54.000 --> 01:57:58.320 one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, who, 01:57:58.320 --> 01:58:02.560 for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and 01:58:02.560 --> 01:58:06.080 was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was 01:58:06.080 --> 01:58:10.560 made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. 01:58:10.560 --> 01:58:14.160 He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again 01:58:14.160 --> 01:58:18.480 according to the scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits at the 01:58:18.480 --> 01:58:21.920 right hand of the Father, and he shall come again with glory 01:58:21.920 --> 01:58:25.440 to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no 01:58:25.440 --> 01:58:27.360 end. Amen