Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm still Woe.
On today's Stone Choir, we're going to begin the first of what
will be at least a three part series on the Jews.
As I said last week, towards the end of the episode, in
the next few weeks, we're going to get be getting into some
stuff that will probably cross some red lines for some people, probably
make some of you uncomfortable.
The reason that we're tackling it is that that's a problem.
The fact that someone simply saying the Jews may have made you
squirm, maybe you turned down the volume a little bit, that's a
big deal.
Because that came from somewhere.
And as Christians, we can't talk about our own religion without talking
about the Jews.
There's no way to talk about the history of the faith without
talking about these people.
The ethnicity, the religious beliefs, the history are all relevant to us
today, both in time and in the current year.
And so the fact that there's this sort of inherent requesting that
I think has been put in in many of our hearts to
even hear the word, you sort of flinch and think something's something
bad's gonna happen.
I I don't wanna be here anymore.
That's not an adult response.
That that's not something that should be the case.
And so today and over the next couple weeks, we're going to
be going through the history of the Jews in terms of scripture,
in terms of post-scriptural history, and then modern history, things that some
of the things have happened in living memory.
This first episode is going to be entirely focused around scripture, so
we're going to be begin in the garden and we're going to
take it all the way through the end.
And then you know uh obviously the Bible basically ends with some
prophecies and the destruction of the temple.
We're gonna be talking about some a few post temple destruction events
that are relevant to some of the points we're gonna make today,
but for the most part this will be ending right around the
second century.
The episode is going to be in three distinct parts.
They'll sort of flow into each other because we're going to do
this in chronological order.
The first part, the first third, will be basically the timeline of
you know from Adam through Noah to Abraham through Moses to Jesus
when did the Jews appear?
What did they do?
How did they act?
What was promised to them?
What was commanded to them?
How did they respond to all those things?
That basically takes us to the roughly the end of the Old
Testament, which is also called the Intertestamental period.
There's some things that happened in that time frame from the from
the conquering of the Northern Northern kingdom through the birth of Christ
that I think some Christians who know a little bit know some
bits and pieces, but I think we're gonna put some of those
details together in a way that will actually make sense for why
we talk about things like for example the Septuagint, why is there
a Greek old testament?
That's relevant.
So the second part is going to be the fact that many
of you would probably recognize the Hebrew language.
If you saw it written, you see a picture, and you're like,
yes, Hebrew.
What you don't know is that that's not Hebrew.
That is it's an Aramaic script and it's a language that is
disconnected from the original language of the Israelites.
And so we're going to talk about what happened in that time
period and why it's relevant today that we have these these confusions
about what happened in the past because some of the claims that
we're trying to disabuse in this episode are that when someone today
says I am a Jew and I speak Hebrew and I live
in Israel, those are all words from the Bible, and those are
therefore borrowing whatever affections we have as Christians for our connection to
those words in the Bible.
And the reason for going over some of the history is that
there is a not only a profound discontinuity between what we have
and what we see and what we hear today and what was
happening thousands of years ago, but the discontinuity is the result of
God's judgment against those people.
And that's mate what makes it a profoundly important religious matter.
This is this is a matter of the faith when God pronounces
judgment upon people and they're scattered and destroyed.
Every nation is to take that as a warning.
Whenever there's any sort of calamity that befalls someone, that should be
taken as a warning that this is God's judgment.
They did something bad, whatever it was, I should pay attention.
I should not do the bad thing that they did.
So it's important to learn, you know, from everything in scripture, when
God visits his wrath, let's make sure that doesn't happen to us
too. And that might involve not listening to the people to whom
God's wrath was poured out by the bucket load.
So the second part will be the intertestamental period and the the
fiction of the Hebrew language.
And third part is going to specifically deal with the time of
Christ in the New Testament as he was preaching, as he was
going around in Judea and Samaria, what did he encounter and how
do the Jews treat him?
One of the overarching themes of of all three of these sections
is that we're going to be saying many things that your pastors
probably are afraid to say.
And in some cases, your pastors don't know.
I've had pastors who literally didn't know that Jesus wasn't speaking Hebrew
every day.
Nobody spoke Hebrew every day.
It was a dead language.
It was like Latin is dead today.
It still existed in tiny corners, but it wasn't a going concern
at all.
That's relevant.
And the fact the pastors don't know is a big deal.
And in particular, pastors are terrified of telling people the Jews killed
God. Scripture makes that so clear that no one could possibly reach
any other conclusion other than by listening to voices that do not
come from scripture.
So the last third of this is going to go through many
verses that make it abundantly clear that the Pharisees were the leaders,
the Jews were the people, the angry crowd that was continuously chasing
Jesus around hundreds of miles or running in sandals, continuously trying to
kill him.
It wasn't the Pharisees.
It was the Jews.
Not all of them.
There were some Jews who were faithful.
His followers were Jews.
The disciples were Jews.
It's so again, you know, the knacks all things come into play.
Not all acts are like that.
There were Jews in that day who believed the promise.
Mary believed the promise of the Christ.
And so when the angels came to her and said that she
would be the vessel for that promise, she wasn't confused.
She knew exactly what the angel was talking about.
She couldn't believe that it was going to be her, but she
received it in faith because she was a faithful Christian.
She was a Christian who was a Jew.
And we've talked about that in the past, that the belief and
the promise from the garden is what makes one a Christian.
And so we're going to end as we're talking about me particularly
from Acts and from Romans where scripture discusses who are the true
children of Abraham because that's one of the fundamental questions that unfortunately
today it's a political question somehow.
That'll be a future episode.
We talk about how children of Abraham, how could that possibly be
a political live issue in the twenty-first century?
That's why saying the Jews makes people nervous, because something that should
be a scriptural historical term and concept has political ramifications today.
So today's episode is scripture.
Future episodes will deal with history and some politics, but we have
to lay the foundation first for the subject in what God reveals
in scripture.
So I think we'll begin at the very beginning just with who
is a Jew in the old testament.
I think one of the lazy things that we do is to
just kind of assume that well everybody in the Old Testament's a
Jew. Like that's the Jewish book and then the New Testament book
is a Christian book.
And there were some Jews who became Christians, but that was that
transition period.
And then post New Testament, everybody's Christian.
Or you're a Jew, but you went off in the other direction.
But the key element is that the misconception that everyone in the
Old Testament is a Jew opens the door to all sorts of
errors downstream.
We're not going to get to those errors today.
We're just going to make the case that Jews came into the
timeline by God's design at a certain time for a certain purpose.
And prior to that, there were no Jews.
Adam was not a Jew.
I think one of the tricky things about that is that Adam
is a Hebrew word.
And so it's just we're just sort of intellectually lazy and we
think, well, if if the name was Hebrew and that make must
make him a Jew, right?
They're Adam, they're Adams today who are Jews, many who are not,
because it's you know it's an ancient it's the oldest name we
have. When you start making these small errors, they don't seem to
have any consequence at the moment, but they will accumulate over time.
And that's a recurring theme on Stone Choir.
These small errors are doors that are being opened to make big
errors later.
So as we go through this, we're gonna nitpick seemingly small things,
but they're all going to point in the same direction to say
this man was a Jew, this man was not a Jew, here's
what the Jews were doing, and why all those things matter.
When
you mention that the name is in Hebrew, it brings to mind
a favorite argument that I've seen primarily from leftists, Marxists and others
like that, but you'll see it on posters and things that rallies
sometimes for them.
Because they like to appeal to scripture even though they don't believe
in it.
That should bring a certain meme to mind for certain people.
But they'll argue there are no white people in scripture.
Which of course just betrays a staggering ignorance of scripture because Japheth
is the father of all of Europe.
Obviously then he was white.
There are Romans in Scripture, there are Greeks in Scripture.
It's a complete nonsense argument.
It just betrays stunning ignorance of Scripture, and that's what we're dealing
with when it comes to pastors and many others who will say,
Well, no, all these people they were Jews.
Adam was not a Jew.
Noah was not a Jew.
Abraham was not a Jew.
You don't have any Jews in scripture until you get to Judah.
Because that is how you derive the term Jew is from the
tribe of Judah.
That's where that comes from, and from Judean.
So the modern term in English anyway enters basically through Latin.
The term for the people
living in Palestine, as the Romans renamed it, who were living in
Palestine at the time that Rome controlled the area.
And
it wasn't even a term that they used for themselves.
they didn't call themselves Jews.
It was it was just shorthand because the the northern kingdom had
been destroyed.
You had these people in the south and in Judah, so they
got called Jews by their conquerors.
Like it it wasn't out if it was a slur, but it
was just i it was a term applied to a group of
people that was alien to the people naming them.
They saidn care like oh yeah those are the the Jews down
there in in Judea.
Exactly.
And
there are some who will argue that the etymology for Hebrew, which
is the term they would have used before that, and still of
course, do use for themselves and for their language, which we'll get
into the language more.
That's derived either from Eber, which can have, of course, that initial
H sound in the Greek, Heber, or it is derived from an
older term from I can't remember which language it was now.
I think it was related to a handful of languages in the
area, so it's not necessarily just one, but it means across the
river. Or one who lives across the river.
And so it was just a term of place, essentially.
Also a person's name, obviously Eber being the son of Shela, son
of Arpakshad, son of Shem.
Shem being the the ultimate father after Noah, of course, after Adam,
after Noah, of the line from which Christ came.
And so the people who would become known as Jews, at least
a part of them would become known as Jews, because as was
said, the northern kingdom was destroyed.
The Assyrian captivity of the northern kingdom took those ten tribes, and
yes, there's some fuzz there, some gray area when it comes to
the numbering of the tribes, how many tribes exactly were in the
south, how many were in the the north, because you have ten
in the north, but then you have Judah, Benjamin, and Levi in
the south.
That aside, the Assyrian captivity is what took the northern kingdom and
destroyed it.
The people of the northern kingdom were destroyed because how the Assyrians
destroyed a conquered people was they would take some of those out
of the conquered territory, move them elsewhere in their empire, and then
take people from elsewhere in the empire and move them into the
conquered territory.
So in other words, what they did was they used interbreeding, interracial
relationships as a means of destruction of a nation.
And that's exactly what they did to the Northern Kingdom.
So the Northern Kingdom was completely and utterly destroyed, which of course
is the beginning of an argument against so-called Christian Zionism and many
other
well, heretical theologies that have sprung up more recently.
You can't have a restoration of the twelve tribes because ten of
them no longer exist.
They were destroyed by the Assyrians.
As opposed to the Southern Kingdom, the Kingdom of Judah, which was
taken into partial captivity by the Babylonians, but the Babylonians did not
destroy their conquered peoples in the same way the Assyrians did.
So the Southern Kingdom was not destroyed.
That would become the Judeans.
That would be the people who were living in the area, when
the Romans came and conquered them, those are the people who would
come to be called Jews.
And so earlier on in scripture, all of these men are not
Jews. Jews don't exist in the earliest parts of scripture.
There are no Jews in Genesis.
Unless you're talking just about names, in which case, yes, you have
obviously the genealogies.
But if your pastor is telling you that Abraham was a Jew,
your pastor is just wrong.
He needs to go back and read scripture.
The first occurrence in both the Septuagint and the Masoretic text for
the Old Testament of the word Hebrew is in Genesis thirty-nine when
Potiphar's wife describes Joseph as the Hebrew slave.
So that was several generations removed from Abraham.
That's not Jew, but it's the first instance of Hebrew.
There is one instance that's worth noting in Genesis thirteen where when
Abram has not yet received the name Abraham from God, the text,
the Masoretic text, that is the Hebrew text that is much newer
incidentally than the Septuagint, even though it's technically written to Hebrew and
we'll get to that later.
In Genesis thirteen, the Masoretic text does refer to or maybe it's
Genesis fourteen, I think it's fourteen thirteen, refers to Abram as the
Hebrew. Interestingly, in the Septuagint, the word Hebrew does not appear.
That word was added in the Hebrew text, which is notable I
think, because while we're not going to get into the disputation between
the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, it is important to acknowledge that
there are a few places where the Masoretic text is demonstrably corrupted.
The most prominent example is the prophecy in Isaiah of the Virgin
giving birth.
That is changed in what we call the Hebrew Bible today to
a young girl.
Septuagin doesn't have that error.
And if you remember from our genealogy episode, that's a particularly interesting
one because we actually have evidence from post Babel
expansion of humanity in all different directions.
People who were never part of any of this story had the
story of a virgin birth of a god That is something that
is a widespread story, a myth, a legend that exists in far
flung places like Vietnam, well
separated from any contact with anyone who would have known what was
going on in the days of Abraham.
So or Isaiah for that matter, because Isaiah was fairly late.
So it's crucially important to note that we know from outside of
Scripture that some notion of a virgin born God was a prophecy
that was given prior to Isaiah and it was shared among believers
and then corrupted among unbelievers.
So we can know with absolute certainty as Christians that when the
Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text that we are told to believe is
older says young girl instead of virgin, it's not correct.
So I think it's worth acknowledging that the word Hebrew does occur
one time in Abram's day, but I I I I I just
found this you know a couple hours ago.
I haven't had a chance to really dig into it too much.
Based on what I know of a couple of the other errors,
it's my assumption as I go digging into that that that was
probably added in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth century AD.
It was added well after by Jews who had been expelled from
Jerusalem, who hated the Christians and
were beginning to concoct this story that Hebrews are eternal.
You
know,
Noah's a Hebrew, Noah was a Jew.
No. Abraham wasn't a Jew, it was his grandson who was named
Israel by God.'s the other term that comes up that's very important.
Basically you have Jew, you have Hebrew, and you have Israel or
Israelite, all more or less used interchangeably at different places and different
times. Sometimes they mean the same thing, sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they mean different things.
And so when God wrestles with Jacob and then names him Israel,
that's the very first time that that word was used.
It was given to him by God as a new name.
And that name was carried by his descendants.
That's very important.
It's from God.
No Christian would ever besmirch that in the slightest.
But as we'll get to it in the last part, what does
that mean?
What does it mean to be a child of Abraham, to be
a child of the covenant?
When we get into the some of the later texts in the
New Testament, pointing back to the Old Testament makes it very clear,
it means those who have faith that it is not a genetic
lineage, it is a lineage of faith.
As we discussed in the election episode, which is very much a
part of this episode, please go back and listen to that if
you haven't listened to it in the last couple months.
It is key to understanding this episode because one of the other
terms that gets thrown around a lot is chosen.
You hear of the Jews called God's chosen people.
It's a word that God uses.
God says, I chose these people.
Many times that's how it's referred to, how how the Israelites are
referred to.
Chosen and elect are synonyms.
And this is something that we've completely lost sight of today.
When God says I chose you, doesn't that's literally saying I elected
you. And so in the election episode we exp explain in detail
that election is not a new doctrine that Calvin came up with.
Yeah, there's most people think that oh election or predestination, that's that
Calvinist stuff As Lutherans, we call what Calvinists hold double predestination, where
God elected some to be saved and God elected others to be
damned. We believe that Scripture doesn't say that.
Scripture says that God elected some to be saved, and that God
desires that all men be saved, and that God's sacrifice on the
cross was for all men.
And so those men who are damned are damned of their own
volition. They choose to remain evil, they reject God.
Those who are elect do not reject God.
And so we spend a couple hours dealing with how does that
make sense?
Because it sounds irrational.
Frankly, it is irrational.
You can't make a reasonable case for predestination that doesn't sound crazy.
So we do it there as best we can.
It makes sense if you believe scripture.
What you can believe is your own reason.
But the important thing to carry away is that whenever you hear
someone saying, particularly in the Old Testament, these people were the chosen
people of God, they were elect.
And that applied not only to the lineal descendants of Abraham, because
remember Jonah, who was a Jewish prophet, was sent by God to
go to Nineveh, which was one of the greatest of the Gentile
cities, was one of the largest cities on the planet at the
time. Jonah wouldn't go because he knew they would believe, and they
would repent and they would become children of God.
God said, The people of Nineveh are elect, go to them and
proclaim my word.
And Jonah's like, No, if I go, they'll believe me, and they'll
repent. I don't want that, because they're not Jews.
And so the whole story of Jonah is about him refusing to
go to people who weren't Jews because he didn't want to give
them the gospel.
God elected them.
Jonah disobeyed.
God won.
Because that's how election works.
God doesn't lose.
He doesn't lose any of us.
So these terms like Jew, chosen, Israelite, Hebrew, it's important to understand
which term you're using and why and where it's coming from, etymologically
because sometimes they do serve different purposes.
And for those who are maybe not particularly familiar with these source
texts, the Masoretic text is from roughly the earliest would be the
sixth century, and that's AD, not BC notably.
It wasn't completed until the ninth or the tenth century.
That is, say, as opposed to the Septuagint, which is from I
think the earliest copies we have are the third century BC.
So there's a significant difference in age between these two manuscript
sources. Notably, of course, the Masoretic text also has the so-called
Star of David all over it.
We see that see that in many of the copies of things
that we have related to that line of sources.
We'll get into that perhaps perhaps not in this episode, but soon
enough. That'll be for the next episode.
That's what I figured.
Yeah. That symbol does date back before that.
I think the earliest instance of that in a religious context is
the third or the fourth century.
Again, AD, not BC, but at any rate.
So it is arguably the more reliable text is the Greek text.
And that is the text the church has used for a very
long time until modern translations started using the Masoretic.
I
think it's important.
We're not going to get into textual criticism or anything today, but
uh
when people are hearing these things, one of the most common responses
internally in someone's mind will probably be to have their confidence undermined
and well is my Bible really the word of God?
I think that
the more manuscripts we get access to, the more clear it is
how much God has preserved his word through the millennia.
There's very few differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint in
Greek. There's very little difference between all the various manuscripts in Greek.
They're overwhelmingly almost identical.
The changes are typically small and incidental.
Oftentimes they're it's clear that they're just copyist errors.
Occasionally you will have things that were in the margin that then
got migrated where someone had made a note to himself and someone
said, Well that sounds good and ended up inserting it into the
text. So the reason it's important I don't want anyone who's hearing
us talk about these two different textual sources to think, oh no,
my Bible is wrong.
You're reading your Bible in English.
It's far removed from these languages.
It's translated by men for the most part.
We're doing the best they could.
Every translation today has some problems.
That's okay.
It's not going to destroy your faith.
God has preserved his word for thousands of years.
He will continue to do so.
Yes, we should seek to have the most reliable books of the
Bible that we can get our hands on.
We should seek to have faithful translations.
When errors are discovered, we should figure out why and how and
we should get rid of them.
But none of these conversations should ever be an excuse for you
to think, oh man, I I just I can't trust any of
this now.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't have confidence.
God has preserved his word.
He preserved it in the Masoretic text, even in spite of the
interference of the
post Christian Jews who were rabidly against the Christians, they still preserved
almost all the text completely intact.
So when there are variations, that should not be a source to
think, oh no, something terrible has gone wrong.
In a few cases, like yeah, this it's clear why this change
was made.
It's almost never the case otherwise.
So please don't conclude from listening to this episode I need to
get rid of my Bible and get a different one.
I have to learn about this or I'm not gonna have confidence.
That's not the case.
Whatever Bible you have, God is going to use for your edification.
As if you want to learn more about this stuff, there's plenty
to to learn and study and dig into it.
And to be enriched, I think that's the important part, is that
learning about these variations is enriching.
It doesn't undermine faith because the more you look at the different
copies, the more you realize how much they're on the same page,
which is miraculous.
The only way that this stuff could have been preserved across across
thousands of examples across millennia is if God was intervening in time
and space with the copias with the manuscripts with the papyri only
God could have done this.
So even when we find things like that doesn't seem quite right,
doesn't mean God didn't do this stuff.
It just means that when humans are involved, we have to pay
attention. That's why this podcast exists, because humans are involved, we have
to pay attention to stuff.
So please do not lose confidence in whatever Bible you have because
that is God's word given to you for your edification.
I personally primarily make use of the ESV.
That's I have most of my Bibles are ESV.
I have I don't even know how many Bibles at this point,
but that is in the Old Testament primarily relying on the Masoretic.
I have no problem trusting the text of the ESV.
Yes, there are some little problems here and there, they play some
games with a couple words.
But I'm not worried about it.
It is still God's word, it is still reliable.
And to give listeners an idea of the sort of differences between
the Greek source documents we use for translating the scriptures.
One of the more famous examples is the announcement of the angels
to the shepherds.
In some of the manuscripts, there's an iota missing.
Literally the smallest letter in Greek.
It's just a scribal error.
It was dropped.
It changes the meaning in terms of nuance, but it does not
change the meaning in terms of content.
It basically shifts from the angels announcing peace on earth and goodwill
toward men to peace on earth and goodwill toward men on whom
God's favor rests.
It's a minor thing, and obviously again, smallest letter in Greek, scribal
error. That's the sort of thing you're seeing when you see disagreements
between the manuscripts.
These are not big disagreements, they're usually relatively minor things.
So again, yes, your Bible in English or whatever language you're reading
it in is reliable.
You can rely on that.
Yes, it's helpful to have some resort to the underlying languages, but
you don't even actually have to know them in this day and
age, because you can go and find websites online where you can
click on a word in a verse and it will tell you
exactly what it means in the underlying language.
So you can verify for yourself.
if something you read, you have questions, talk to your pastor, talk
to someone who understands it, or find one of these sites and
do the study on your own.
There is a wealth of information and tools at our disposal today
that would have made scholars in the past incredibly envious.
So on the subject of language, as we As we you know
we mentioned, as I'm sure you all know, the the northern kingdom
of Israel was conquered in seven twenty two BC by the Assyrians.
As Cory mentioned, when the Assyrians conquered them, they used the importation
of foreigners to basically impose race mixing to wipe out those tribes.
And the result was the Samaritans.
Which is why in scripture we are all familiar with the notions
that the Samaritans were treated as as filthy as less than as
as half breeds, because they had been Israelites, they had been Hebrews
at one point.
But then when the Assyrians forcibly mixed them with other races, they
ceased to have the Israelite bloodline.
And the Jews of the first century found that disgusting.
They had they had always been disgusted by them.
The Samaritans in the And the Jews had disliked each other for
many centuries to that point.
The Samaritans were created by having been conquered.
What's important about the conquering is that
the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Persians and then the Greeks
and then the Romans in turn each conquering them, by the way,
all judgment from God, when you get conquered five times in almost
as many centuries by disparate people who were crushing you, that's a
bad sign.
God has turned his back on you.
And scripture makes that clear.
There were there was a sea of of prophets coming to them
calling to them the r to repent for their wickedness that had
led to the destruction of the two kingdoms in the first place.
One of the things that occurred under Assyrian then Persian rule is
that the original Hebrew language in which Moses had written the Torah,
when God transcribed the Torah for Moses and he wrote it down,
he used what is today called proto- Proto-Hebrew.
The Proto-Hebrew alphabet is similar to hieroglyphs.
They think is probably derived.
It's kind of downstream.
It's not it's not pictograms, but it's sort of similar in that
vein of kind of simple geometric shapes uh and some symbols, but
it's a fairly primitive language.
Today it's called proto-Hebrew because what replaced it just gets called Hebrew.
And that's one of the first big things that's really important to
to learn in this episode is that as I said earlier, what
you see today when you think, Oh yeah, that's Hebrew, it isn't.
It is an alphabet that was imposed.
it's the Aramaic alphabet, they're related, but it's related through the Persian
conquest. It has no relation whatsoever to the language of Moses.
And I think that's important.
Just as a fact.
You don't need to derive any particular theological conclusion from it, but
simply as a fact, when Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on the
stone tablets, it was not in what we call Hebrew today.
In fact, I think if if it's not the show art, we'll
definitely include the image.
Charlton Heston's Ten Commandments movie, the poster with him holding the Ten
Commandments actually has proto Hebrew on it.
It has the proto-Hebraic alphabet.
They got that detail right.
If they were to remake that today, they would never do that.
They would use the fake Hebrew script that's actually Aramaic today that
came from Persia.
Why? Because we think that we think that there's a direct continuity
between Abraham and Moses and Jesus and us.
And And languages go through those evolutions.
I was just looking earlier today at uh middle English and old
English, just to see for example, could I comprehend something that was,
you know, a thousand, twelve hundred years old?
Middle English.
I can I can read most of it.
Some of the vocabulary is strange.
There are a few symbols, a few letters that have been transposed
into other letters today, but it's intelligible for the most part.
That's still English.
And that's something that's from you know seven, eight hundred years ago.
You go back to old English that's you know over a thousand
years old, I can't read it.
I can pick out a few words if I know how to
phonetically describe them.
I can maybe guess at what some of them are, but although
it's called old English as an English speaker, it's not accessible to
me. So this happens all the time in language.
It's not it's not inherently that something is up, something is sneaky
for the Hebrew of today, what is called modern Hebrew, to not
match what existed in the first century or what existed five hundred
years before Christ.
But it is important because I think almost everyone thinks that's not
the case.
We think that we have this ancient stuff and that the you
know, the sort of scripted square, almost calligraphic letters that you know
is the Hebrew language.
You think that that's what Moses was reading and writing.
And probably what you know Adam was reading, right?
'Cause obviously Adam was a Jew too.
Well no.
The first Jew, you know, was Jacob, maybe, if you want to
say all Israelites are Jews.
I don't care.
We'll talk about some of the history of the terminology in the
next episode, but the important part Important part is that there's a
fundamental discontinuity.
And when they were conquered and they had their alphabet replaced, they
had their language replaced, the Hebrew language was lost.
It was completely lost in the Northern Kingdom.
They the Samaritans they preserved the uh interestingly, the Samaritan alphabet is
basically the Proto-Hebraic alphabet.
It preserves many of those same symbols.
It looks very similar.
It's completely disconnected from what is modern Hebrew or Aramaic.
If
you look at Old Hebrew or Proto Hebrew or whichever term you
want to use for it, it looks very similar to Phoenician.
So if you have seen Phoenician lettering before somewhere, museum or whatnot,
you know exactly what old Hebrew looked like.
And they are both derived from Protosenaic, which was Which was even
older than that.
That looks very similar, it's missing some letters, but as was mentioned,
modern Hebrew is not what scripture it's not the language in which
scripture was written, it's not the text the alphabet in which scripture
was written, because this is actually an alphabet that was written in
Old Hebrew, which actually another thing to which you could compare it
if you know runic, it looks much more similar to runic than
say modern Hebrew slash Aramaic or modern English Latin lettering.
But Hebrew itself, the language, was basically dead by the time of
Christ. It was still used to some degree in what would be
considered today perhaps academic circles.
So you would have had some handful of priests in Jerusalem who
could still read this language.
They didn't use the language, they didn't speak the language.
Maybe they read the language aloud at certain services on high holy
days. They would have had someone there to translate it into Aramaic
for the common people, because the common people did not know any
Hebrew. So at least they had more decency than the medieval Roman
church, which didn't even bother to translate from Latin.
But you can think of it in that same sort of light.
In the medieval era, you had church services being conducted in Latin.
The common people did not know Latin anymore.
Some of the educated class knew Latin, so it's not directly comparable,
because you did have Europeans who still knew Latin, who still learned
Latin, the sons The sons of noble houses and such, but the
common people did not know what was going on in the church
service because it was conducted in Latin, and they did not translate
it into the vernacular.
You had a similar thing happening around the the switchover, as it
were, from BC to AD, where Hebrew was no longer understood by
the common people.
They spoke Aramaic because they had been conquered a number of times
by Aramaic speaking peoples, and so they had used Aramaic in order
to deal with their new neighbors as it were, to handle trade.
All of these various things were conducted in Aramaic.
And so they lost their language over time.
That's what happens.
If you stop using your language, you lose your language.
And when they were conquered by Alexander around 330 BC, they began
to speak Greek.
They were probably speaking some before that, but
If you look at the original languages of the Apocrypha, the books
that were written in the intertestamental period after Malachi and before Matthew,
none of them were written Hebrew, none of them were written in
Aramaic. They're written in Greek.
The Septuagint was translated around 250 BC.
Now, this was in part because I believe it was Ptolemy II
had requested that the laws of the Hebrews be translated so that
they were accessible, but it was also because the people needed it.
There were certainly some Aramaic texts of of scripture that were available
to them, but increasingly there were people who were Jews ethnically who
in some cases may not have spoken Aramaic either.
The r the translation of Scripture and the Septuagint into Greek was
also for accessibility.
And so by the first century when Jesus was born and the
disciples were alive and were writing and speaking, they were, as Corey
said, none of virtually none of them would have been conversant in
Hebrew at all.
'Cause it would have been no point.
For someone to be speaking Hebrew would be identical to someone today
speaking maybe Latin or Old English.
You know, it's a dead language that isn't used at all.
So it's a party trick.
Maybe you can have an interesting conversation where you teach someone something,
but you can't converse.
It's not a language of commerce.
The The languages that were used were Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, and
that's reflected at Christ's crucifixion.
In
John nineteen, Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the
cross. It read Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
May of the Jews read this inscription for the place where Jesus
was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic
and Latin and in Greek.
It was not written incidentally in Hebrew, 'cause there would have been
no point.
It wasn't they ran out of room.
It was if they put Hebrew above Christ's head, no one would
have been able to read it.
That's a big deal.
Like it's a small detail.
I I don't think it's like some huge profound interest.
But oh by the way, did you know that no one who
is speaking Hebrew in Jesus Day?
Most people probably don't know that.
Please go look this stuff up.
I can tell you, you can spend hours just on Wikipedia going
through the various articles about the language of Jesus on Aramaic, on
Proto Hebrew, go do some reading and you know, go do some
wiki holding where you dig down and dig through.
You will find some places where some of the articles disagree, usually
around some of these sensitive areas that we're talking about directly.
Where they disagree th I would give the benefit of the doubt
to the version that's less friendly to the modern narrative, to the
idea everyone from Adam to Jesus just spoke Hebrew and wrote in
Hebrew because that was the universal language.
No. These Semitic languages were basically a dead end.
They're pretty primitive languages.
They're not remotely as sophisticated as something like Greek or Latin.
And nothing almost nothing is really downstream from 'em.
Like they they ran their course and then the civilizations went away,
and the languages went away.
So there was nothing that they contributed to later.
That's not the case with the languages we're speaking today.
English has had tributaries from many other languages, and they're languages of
the winners.
Hebrew is not a language of the winners.
It's a language of the conquered and of the losers.
It's worth putting special emphasis on the term that was actually on
the cross what Pilate actually put on the cross and that was
Yesus Nazarenus Rex Yudaiorum that last word Yudorum is Judeans.
That's the word from which we get Jews, as previously mentioned in
English. We ultimately derive it from the Latin.
It's a demonym, basically.
It is a term related to the people of a particular place.
That's how the Romans named that's how the Romans named everyone they
encountered was according to the land where they found them.
And so that's where we get this term.
It's not even the word Jew isn't even in scripture in the
original languages.
That's the term that we use in English.
Because in Scripture, it's Judean.
And as we mentioned the history, these are some of the tribes
descended from Israel.
On the subject of terms, I think it's important to note that
this is the one of the key places, particularly in scripture and
in conversation, where Hebrew ceases to mean the same thing.
So the the key example for this is John nineteen seventeen.
In the ESV it says and he went out, bearing his own
cross to the place called the place of the skull, which in
Aramaic is called Golgotha.
Now if you're a King James reader, you know that is and
he bearing his cross went forth into the place called the place
of the skull which is called in Hebrew Golgotha.
Now one of those is wrong because Hebrew and Aramaic are two
different languages.
I think it's notable that in many of the cases in Scripture
in the New Testament, when Jesus is quoted, when he says things
like Abba Father or Eloy, Eloi, Lama Saba Kfani, he's speaking Aramaic.
And growing up, no one ever taught me why.
I thought, wow, why like why did he slip into some other
language? It's Jesus.
He's a Jew.
he's why is this Hebrew guy talking Aramaic all of a sudden.
Did like did he speak Aramaic when he got excited?
No. He was always speaking Aramaic to those around him.
He's these things were recorded and God through the Holy the Holy
Spirit recorded these in the actual words that Jesus spoke, because there
were the words he was speaking all the time, but
they weren't translated even today.
So we hear Abba and we hear Eloi instead of the translated
word from the Aramaic.
The reason that the King James gets this wrong, and yes, sorry
guys, if you're a King James only, it gets a lot of
things wrong.
They're not hugely impactful.
They did the best they could.
If they had had more manuscripts, they would have translated a different
Bible than the one they translated.
It's useful.
I think it's outlived its use.
That's conversation for another day.
The important thing is if you look in Greek in John 19:17,
the word that King James translates in Hebrew is Hebraisty.
The problem here is that Hebrew means one of two things.
Either Hebrew language means the Hebrew language, as you would say the
English language.
You know, when when I say English language, you know that I
don't mean an Englishman.
And see, that's the distinction.
It could be the language of the Hebrew people, as in the
language of the English people, or it could be the specific language.
Now the distinction is that in Judah, in Judea, they were the
Hebrew people, and so whatever language they were speaking in Judea was
the Hebrew language because they were the Hebrew people.
The I hope making this clear, but the Hebrew language of the
Judean people was Aramaic.
When it says the Hebrew language, it doesn't mean they were speaking
Hebrew. It means the Hebrews were speaking their language, which was Aramaic.
And this is something that Josephus, who was the famous historian from
the first century AD, he said himself.
He was a Jew, he was he was well connected, he was
well favored, he is viewed by Jews today as a traitor.
For 1900 years they wouldn't translate anything he would said because they
were so angry at him for siding with the Romans.
Josephus differentiated Hebrew from his language and that of the first century
Israel. He refers to Hebrew words as belonging to the Hebrew tongue,
but refers to Aramaic words as belonging to our tongue, or our
language, or the language of our country.
So when Josephus, the Hebrew, the Jew of the first century, refers
to his language in the possessive, he always refers to Aramaic.
He never refers to Hebrew as in the Hebrew that was spoken
by Moses, or the Hebrew that was spoken in eight hundred BC,
because nobody spoke it anymore.
He was very well educated.
he may have known it, perhaps, because he was so well educated,
but again, it would have been an academic exercise and not a
social one.
And
this is also borne out as we find texts, for example, from
the Qumran Caves and other places.
When we find texts, if it's using what we see today as
the what we call the Hebrew alphabet, it's always written in Aramaic.
There's nothing written in Hebrew in what we call the Hebrew language
or the Hebrew alphabet today.
I realize some of this is probably getting confusing because that that's
the point of discussing it.
The same word is used t in different contexts to mean different
things and while that's not necessarily duplicitous, it's very easy to get
lazy or to get sloppy and then to make errors that downstream
have serious problems.
Because when you look in a place like the Qumran Cave and
you don't find much, if any Hebrew, there's a little bit in
there, but I think it's some of the the newer stuff.
It's important because this was an archive.
Like this was I think today when we think, oh, well, you
found something in one language and something in in another language, you
probably have hundreds of books in your homes.
Most people listening easily have many dozens, probably hundreds of books in
your home.
The threshold for writing something down today for s putting something on
paper is basically zero.
I have probably eight hundred books in my house.
A lot of them are crap.
They were things that didn't need to be put down on paper.
That wasn't the case two thousand years ago.
It was so incredibly expensive to record anything that for something to
be written down, whether on parchment or on papyrus, meant that it
was profoundly important.
And so the preponderance of the evidence when you're looking at whatever
was written tells you about the languages that they spoke.
If no one was speaking what we call Hebrew, then you're not
going to find much, if any, of it.
And that's what we find.
We find Aramaic in some of the other languages we do not
find what is called Hebrew today.
And it seems like this is somewhat confusing perhaps, but we really
have the same thing in English.
Typically a German will speak German.
Exact same noun, used in two very different ways.
The English speak English.
However, Americans speak English.
And perhaps one of the best examples, the Belgians, who live in
Belgium, don't speak Belgian.
They speak Dutch, French, and German.
So just because a term has multiple different meanings doesn't mean that
the meanings are identical.
Doesn't mean the term is always used in the same way.
And scripture also doesn't always record the language of the of the
original interactions.
So it is worth noting, Christ knew Greek.
He probably used Greek a lot in his ministry, because do remember
he was ministering at times in the vicinity vicinity
of Greek speaking cities.
He would probably have used Greek to speak to those people because
many of them probably were not particularly good at Aramaic.
They were, in some cases, Greeks who had moved from Greece to
these Greek colonies, or had moved to Roman colonies.
Perhaps they were from somewhere else in the Roman Empire, but the
language of everyday life in the Roman Empire at that time was
Greek. Yes, that seems confusing as well, but the Romans used Greek
because some of the peoples they had conquered, in particular the Greeks,
spoke Greek.
It was an easy language to use for everyday interactions, for commerce
and all the things you need to run everyday life in an
empire. Latin was still the language of the empire at the higher
level, so in the Senate, the laws and things like that, but
they spoke Greek.
And so Christ again would also have used Greek.
And this
is something that's made very clear in the New Testament itself.
As we all know, New Testament quotes the Old Testament over and
over and over again.
You can find numerous web pages that show all the connections of
direct quotes of the New Testament quoting the Old Testament.
The reason that's important is that many, I I think perhaps the
majority, you can correct me if I'm wrong, if you know off
the top of your head, but I think the majority of the
quotes of the Old Testament in the New Testament quote the Septuagint,
they quote the Greek.
Now it's not that it's two different Bibles, it's just that they're
different ways of phrasing things and perhaps different word order that would
be preserved differently in Aramaic or Hebrew versus Greek.
And so we know that that the writers of the New Testament,
that the men who are recorded as speaking, spoke Greek because they
quote scripture in Greek.
They frequently quote the Septuagint, not exclusively, which is important, as we
said earlier, I don't reject one over the other because scripture doesn't,
so I'm not going to do something that God didn't do.
But it's important to know that Greek is frequently used in as
the reference of the Old Testament in the New.
That is substantial.
That's important.
And it's something that you don't you don't hear very much unless
you actually get into these fiddly arguments about which one is better.
We're not trying to make the argument for which one is better.
I personally I I wish that Hebrew no longer existed.
I think it's doing more harm than good.
It's not an argument I'm gonna make here.
It's simply important to note that Greek is what Jesus spoke, it's
what Paul spoke, they all spoke it.
They spoke other languages too.
They're not like the average American.
They could hold more than one language in their head.
And they did so on a daily basis.
And so when scripture quotes scripture from the new to the old
the old, it frequently quotes Scripture, God in Greek
For
the percentage of quotes that come from the Septuagint versus other translations,
it would depend on whether you're counting direct or also indirect and
indirect starts to get difficult because there are a lot of those.
I believe the the standard number as it were for direct quotations
from the Old Testament is 283.
And 170 of those are essentially from the Septuagint.
So 60%.
So yes, the majority of the quotations that are direct quotations from
the Old Testament in the New Testament are from the Greek.
But just to emphasize what I said about scripture not always recording
the original language in which something took place, in what language did
Moses interact with Pharaoh?
Well scripture doesn't tell us.
It was probably Egyptian, because he was educated in Pharaoh's household, he
spoke Egyptian, it would have made sense for him to deal in
the language of the Egyptian court when he was dealing with the
Egyptian court.
Scripture doesn't tell us that, but from context we can of course
infer that as a reasonable conclusion.
Another thing that we can infer as a reasonable conclusion
from the New Testament, from what it actually tells us, when it
does tell us the language of the original, when Christ is speaking
Aramaic, in the cases where he is in Scripture, we are told
specifically that this was in Aramaic.
Well that implies he was not always using Aramaic.
He may have been using Greek Using Greek more than Aramaic, in
fact, because it is specifically noted when he used Aramaic.
Now you don't have to necessarily draw that conclusion.
I'm not saying this is a tenet of the faith, and you
absolutely have to believe Christ spent most of his time speaking Koina
Greek. I'm not saying that.
But it is a reasonable inference to draw from what Scripture does
tell us.
We know that he would have used Greek.
He lived in an area that spoke Greek.
He lived around people who spoke Greek.
He dealt with people who spoke Greek.
He undoubtedly used Greek.
And
the last point to Hammer Home is that the reason that was
happening is that nobody spoke Hebrew.
Nobody spoke Hebrew.
It may have been done ceremonially in the in the temple, that's
likely. It may be that a few of the educated men, including
probably Christ himself, because he was educated in the temple in the
temple would have been able to read the original Hebrew language actual
Hebrew alphabet scrolls, but they had to be translated because apart from
the few experts, nobody else knew it.
And yes, this is a small point.
This isn't this isn't earth shattering.
But it's really interesting that most people don't know this.
Because again, you see the what's called the Hebrew language smacked on
everything today.
And it's like, oh, that's the Bible language.
That's the language of Jesus.
That's what we automatically think.
I thought that until a couple of years ago when I learned
about this.
like what's going on?
Like, why didn't someone just tell me the truth?
What's the difference between the true version and the made up version?
Well, there are things downstream for the made up version that turned
out not to be very good for Christians.
I'll be in future episodes, but we're just making the case today
that just know for a fact that Jesus was not running around
talking Hebrew because no one would have understood him.
The Hebrews didn't speak Hebrew.
They were still Hebrew.
They were still descended from Abraham, which is is one of the
last things that we're going to get into here today.
The we're going to conclude this just by reading a number of
passages from the New Testament
that specifically refute the claim that's very often made.
It usually flares up around Easter during Holy Week.
Usually by Good Friday there have been think pieces and people fretting,
saying it's so anti Semitic for people to say that the Jews
killed Christ.
The Romans killed Christ, our sins killed Christ, anything killed Christ except
for the Jews.
It is true.
Your sins killed Christ.
My sins killed Christ.
Jesus died on the cross for our sins.
Saying how that happened does not diminish the soteriological aspect of it.
So there's no point in making any argument about the facts that
try to defend soteriology against men who don't dispute the soteriology.
We know how we are saved.
And we know why we need to be saved.
We need to be saved from our own sin.
God did that on the cross.
God's sacrifice on the cross was for us, and it was our
sins that caused it.
Our sins are the ultimate cause.
The penultimate cause was Was the Jews.
The Jews who had been trying to kill Christ for three and
a half years finally succeeded.
And then the proximate cause was the Romans.
Of course it was Pilate, Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, you know,
that's his epitaph for eternity in the creeds.
Talk about a legacy.
The guy shows up briefly in history and he's known as the
man who scourges the son of God.
And yet his actions are less egregious than what the Jews did.
And I can say that because that's literally what Jesus says.
He says that those who turn me over to you have the
greater sin.
When God says that, we don't get to disagree.
So when there are the hysterics around who killed Jesus, it is
not lying.
It's not lying to say if the Romans killed Christ, they crucified
him. Why?
Because they were the only ones with the legal authority to do
so. The Jews had been trying to murder Christ for years.
They had been trying to stone him, anything they could do to
kill him.
They finally got their ducks in a row politically and coerced Herod
and Pontius Pilate into doing it for them.
Not because they wouldn't have done it themselves, because they didn't have
the legal authority to do it.
And obviously Jesus was incarnate for our sins.
It's not dismissing or minimizing or taking anything away from the fact
that we are the reason that Christ had to die on the
cross for us.
It still matters who did it.
And when you when the reason we're doing these episodes is that
Christians have been
put in this box where we're not allowed to speak as God
speaks. And why?
Because the Jews, to say the Jews, again, as I said the
very beginning, maybe Makes people frightened, makes them nervous and scared, and
they don't know what's going to happen next, but they know it's
not going to be good.
That is not the Christian response to anything.
We should be fearless and we should be confident in our God
and in the truth, and especially the truth as it's found in
Scripture. And so these next passages we're gonna look at are specifically
all the cases that we're just cherry picking some some of the
myriad passages in the New Testament where it explicitly says that it
was the Jews who were trying to kill Christ because when they
ultimately succeeded in killing Christ, mission accomplished, you can't possibly look at
all these passages and then get to the crucifixion and think, wow,
I can't believe the Romans did that just out of nowhere.
It's just it would be laughable.
No Christian reading the Bible would ever reach that conclusion.
And yet so many Christians and pastors reach that conclusion today.
I've heard things that we're gonna read here refuted from pulpits, where
pastors are afraid to attribute to the Jews, to the crowd, to
the masses, to the group, that which scripture attributes to them
So one of the first ones is the the very beginning of
Matthew, at the at the beginning of Jesus' ministry.
Interestingly, this is actually sorry, this is prior to his ministry, the
very first time the Jew tried to kill him was Herod the
Great. As soon as he was born, and and the news came,
Herod the Great, who was a ruler, but he was also a
Jew, said the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a
dream and said, Rise, take this child and his mother, and flee
to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you.
For Herod the Great is about to search for the child to
destroy him.
So literally Jesus' entire life on earth was bookended by Jews trying
to kill him.
And I think that's important because one of the conversations that frequently
comes up is to try to shift the emphasis to the political.
In Herod's case, it was undoubtedly political.
All he knew was that someone was saying maybe some prophecy had
been fulfilled and maybe some messiah or something is happening.
I you know, he he knew the prophecies.
He just didn't competition.
He didn't want uprisings.
He'd had enough of that.
And so the easy thing was to go kill a few babies.
Later on, when the Jews are chasing Jesus around trying to stone
him repeatedly, it's not for political reasons.
It's for blasphemy.
It's for when he says he's the Son of God, that's when
they try to kill him.
And so when we finally get to the crucifixion on Good Friday
and everyone wants to line up and say it was the Pharisees
who were entirely responsible and it was because they were jealous of
the power, it doesn't bear out when you actually look at the
verses that lead up to that for three and a half years
that say the complete opposite.
Now
of course that is not to deny that the Pharisees did in
fact seek to destroy him.
The point is that when pastors and others try to minimize the
participation of the people, they are perverting scripture.
And so this next one does say that the Pharisees were seeking
to destroy him, Matthew twelve, fourteen.
But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him how to destroy
him. We should note the context of this, because this is what
often happens in the pages of Scripture.
Christ performs a miracle, and then the Jews seek to kill him
because of the miracle or some extraneous matter related to the miracle.
In this case, it is when Christ healed the man with the
withered hand.
Well he healed him on the Sabbath, and so the Pharisees decided
that that was prohibited by Scripture related to the keeping of the
Sabbath, the third commandment, and so they conspired to kill him.
Of course they had other reasons as well.
But Christ very clearly explained It is permissible to do good on
the Sabbath.
The point of this Sabbath is not to sit on your couch
and stare at the ceiling.
That's not what it means to keep the Sabbath, but that is
a discussion for another time.
The same thing played out when Jesus healed the blind man and
told him to go and wash his eyes and when he when
the people saw that he was healed, they became very upset.
And there was a long scene there where they interrogate his parents,
they interrogate all the witnesses, and they're angry that Jesus had healed
a blind man
on the Sabbath.
They it infuriated them.
And that's a particularly interesting one because in I think it's Isaiah
37 and Isaiah 42, healing the blind is one of the prophecies
of God, one of the prophecies pointing to the Messiah.
And when the scene erupts where Jesus healed the blind man and
people are exclaiming, one of them says this has never happened in
the history of the world.
So it wasn't that there had been other prophets in the past
who had healed the blind.
There have been other healings.
But Jesus was the first to ever heal the blind.
And that's profoundly important because it's a fulfillment of a messianic prophecy.
And yet what was the concern of the Jews?
Not that the the messianic prophecy had been fulfilled before their eyes,
not that a miracle had occurred, but that some guy broke the
rules, broke their rules as they interpreted them, which is crucial because
their interpretations of the Sabbath, as Jesus makes clear in those passages,
is not scriptural.
It's not a godly interpretation.
Jesus says if your ox falls in a ditch on the Sabbath,
are you not going to get it out?
Someone falls in a well, you're not going to get him out.
Of course you are.
Their definition of work was nonsense.
And so Jesus demonstrates through acting justly and in a godly fashion,
the hypocrisy and the evil of the Jews, who became incensed at
this miracle, at this blessing, for for a man who'd been blind
from birth.
That was one of the questions they who sinned, this man or
his parents?
And the when the man was healed, suddenly they don't care about,
you know, the the trick question.
Now they care about the gotcha question.
Because all that they ever wanted to do was to trip him
up to destroy him.
I don't think that any other people on the planet would have
acted this way.
If Jesus had come to the Japanese or to the Germans or
to the Ugandans and started performing miracles and healing them, I don't
think anyone else would have murdered him.
I think part of the reason that Jesus was born a Jew
among Jews was that no one else would behave in this way.
That's speculative.
Maybe I'm being unfair, but I sincerely believe it.
I don't think anyone else who shows up and can heal the
blind and the deaf and the lame is going to be murdered
by people f for what?
For fulfilling prophecy?
Like they were told that these things would happen, and when they
did, they became enraged.
And in fact, they frequently said, You have a demon.
One of the common refrains, I think it was in John, of
the crowds of Jews to scream at Jesus is you have a
demon. How could you say this?
I think it's very profound in exemplifying the spiritual nature of the
people to whom he was going.
Now, obviously it wasn't all of them.
There were followers, there were disciples who were Jews.
Just like the others, the difference was that they believed.
They believed in the promise of the Messiah, and when they saw
the promises fulfilled, they rejoiced.
That's the difference.
It's not that all Jews are bad or that all Jews are
saved. It's that when the promise of Scripture is fulfilled in Christ,
those with faith, those who are elect will receive it with gladness,
and the rest will shout he has a demon and try to
kill him.
And we see that sort of energy to this day.
And
yes, that is the same sort of accusation we see today.
Freud did not get the idea of projection from nowhere.
This is something
that the Jews and Satan have been doing for a very long
time. It is to accuse
the enemy of exactly what you yourself are doing.
This is Alinsky again as well, because all of this has the
same father.
And so that is why the Jews are flinging the accusation of
you have a demon at Christ.
Well, no, because the demon is on the other side, Satan's on
the other side.
Look at how many times Christ had to cast out demons during
his ministry.
There was a very real and active and widespread problem with possession
and demon oppression in this part of the world at this time.
And that's why they fling the accusation at Christ.
Of course, it's also an insult they like to fling at the
Samaritans, which is why at one point they accuse him of being
a Samaritan and having a demon.
Now there are other overtones there as well.
They're trying to gin up an excuse to murder him, because a
Samaritan was not allowed to be where he was located in the
temple at the time.
But that accusation of having a demon we see that all down
through history.
We see it here in the pages of scripture, and we see
it today on social media and elsewhere.
But the next reading we have is one of the most famous
or infamous, of course, and that's the crowd in Pilate's Courtyard.
I'll just read the whole section.
Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the
crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted, and they had then a
notorious prisoner called Barabbas.
So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them, Whom do you
want me to release for you, Barabbas, or Jesus who is called
Christ? For he knew that it was out of envy that they
had delivered him up.
Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent
word to him, have nothing to do with that righteous man, for
I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.
Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask
for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.
The governor again said to them, Which of the two do you
want me to release for you?
And they said, Barabbas.
Pilate said to them, Then what shall I do with Jesus who
is called Christ?
They all said, Let him be crucified.
And he said, Why, what evil has he done?
But they shouted all the more, let him be crucified.
It is not just the Pharisees, it is not just the leaders
of the Jews who scream for Christ to be crucified, and we'll
read another section that adds more to this as well.
It is the Jews themselves, it is the crowd that screams for
Barabbas for the murderer over Christ
That cannot be avoided, and we are not permitted to minimize that.
That is what Scripture says, that is what we are required to
believe. You don't subtract from Scripture, you don't add to Scripture.
Revelation is very clear about the warning for those who would do
either of those things.
And it is worth especially noting, Pilate tries repeatedly to free Christ.
Pilate asks multiple times why they want to kill Christ.
He picks Barabbas as the option.
Because do note that Pilate is the one who selects Barabbas.
Pilate doesn't just select a prisoner at random.
He doesn't say, Would you like me to free any prisoner?
He says would you like this murderous rebel who is probably going
to go out and murder someone the same day he's released?
Christ, or do you want Christ?
He stacks the deck as much as he possibly can to try
to free Christ.
The crowd will have none of it.
The crowd wants his blood.
And
I think that's the chief reason that we focus so much on
pastors and teachers, because the crowd was doing what they had been
taught, but the crowd did it.
The Pharisees and the high priests absolutely ginned up hatred against Christ.
Just as we see today.
We see church leaders on our own J ginning up hatred against
men, seeking their murder.
And people go along with it.
People will happily go along with it.
Because you know what?
When your church leader stands up and said, This man is a
Nazi, he needs to be thrown out and destroyed.
He needs to be killed.
Who's gonna argue?
Nobody likes that.
And so it's very easy for the crowd to go along.
God doesn't care what your station is, whether you were the leader
or you were someone at the very bottom in the crowd, just
a nameless face, if your voice speaks in opposition to that which
is godly, you were guilty of the same murder as everyone else.
In John five, it's written The man went away and told the
Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him, and this was
why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things
on the Sabbath.
But Jesus answered them, My Father is working until now and I
am working.
This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill
him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but he was
even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.
In the beginning of John seven it says after this Jesus went
about to Galilee, he would not go into Judea because the Jews
were seeking to kill him.
And then later in John seven he says, Has not Moses given
you the law?
Yet none of you keeps the law.
Why do you seek to kill me?
The crowd answered, You have a demon.
Who is seeking to kill you?
The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the
chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest him.
I think that's an interesting passage because it was the crowd that
wanted Jesus dead, and it was the Pharisees and the Chief Priests
who responded to the demand.
See, we're always told that oh, it was the it was the
chief priests that were the gang leaders.
It was a team effort.
The because the chief police and the Pharisees, they had their own
agenda, and it was a wicked one, but they often followed the
lead of the crowd.
The crowd of what?
The crowd of Jews.
Not every Jew, because obviously when Jesus went around in Galilee, he
was with Jews.
He was with his disciples, they were Jews.
It wasn't all of them, but it was a small minority who
were faithful.
The rest were either confused or they were murderous.
And the confused he'd preach to and the murderous he typically fled.
He would go to a place and speak for a little while,
and then he would disappear because they were trying to murder him
continuously for three years.
I mean it's it's like a Benny Hill skit where you have
a like three times speed and somebody's just running back and f
forth across the screen and you have the crowd chasing and waving
pitchforks and torches.
That was basically Jesus ministry.
He would go and do something miraculous and preach something wonderful and
then everyone tried to murder him and he had to flee with
a few followers he had that he could trust not to try
to murder him.
That was his entire life as Jesus the the minister to his
people. And for three and a half years he did that.
And finally, God permitted them to fulfill their murderous goal.
Because it was also God's goal.
Their evil, what they meant for evil, God intended for good.
God used the evil of the Jews.
He used the cowardice of Pilate, who knew that he was doing
something wrong, but he didn't want to take the political risk.
So he stacked the deck and then let the chips fall where
they may.
God used all of those failings to pour out the punishment for
our sins on Jesus on the cross.
All this was done for our benefit.
And that doesn't change the fact that all of it was evil
when it was happening.
To add to the narrative of the Jews in Pilate's courtyard, Pilate
at least twice in this narrative says that he will punish Christ
and then release him.
He is attempting to appease the Jews by punishing Christ, but attempting
not to have this innocent man's blood on his hands, and yes
he does wash his hands of the matter.
By releasing Christ, and so from Luke twenty-three.
When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean,
and when he learned that he belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent
him over to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time.
When Herod saw Jesus he was very glad, for he had long
desired to see him, because he had heard about him, and he
was hoping to see some sign done by him.
So he questioned him at some length, but he made no answer.
The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him, and
Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him.
Then, arraying him in splendid clothing, he sent him back to Pilate.
And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day,
for before this they had been at enmity with each other.
Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers of the
people, and said to them, You brought me this man as one
who was misleading the people, and after examining him before you, I
do not find this man guilty of any of your charges against
him. neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us.
Look, Nothing deserving death has been done by him I will therefore
punish and release him.
So again you see in this narrative, Pilate is attempting to do
anything he can to not kill Christ, to not have to deal
with this issue He sends him over to Herod, hoping that Herod
will be able to deal with it.
And so Christ stands before a Jewish ruler, accused by the Jews
standing by.
And so they treat him shamefully and send him back, after mocking
him, send him back to Pilate.
Pilate again tries to not have to crucify Christ, says, I will
punish the man and then release him.
And then to continue reading, but they all cried out together, Away
with this man, and release to us Barabbas, a man A man
who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the
city and for murder.
Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus.
But they kept shouting,
crucify him.
A third time he said to them, Why, what evil has he
done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death.
I will therefore punish and release him.
But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be
crucified, and their voices prevailed.
So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted.
He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection
and murder, for whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to
their will.
Scripture is very clear again.
It says that Pilate desires to release Jesus, but the crowd, the
Jews, want him crucified.
And more than that, because of course we have, from Matthew, in
Matthew twenty seven, and all the people answered, His blood be on
us and on our children.
That is in response to Pilate saying, I am innocent of this
man's blood, see to it yourselves.
The Jews call down a generational curse for Christ's blood on themselves,
on themselves and on their children.
That is what Scripture says.
So Christians are not, again, Christians are not permitted to minimize what
Scripture says about the guilt and the evil of the Jews?
That does not mean they can't be Christian, because of course they
can repent.
Even crucifying Christ isn't the unforgivable sin.
However, being impenitent is unforgivable.
And the Jews by and large are impenitent.
Ask them today.
You will see, even just go on social media and search for
it. There are many of them who will say if Christ came
back we'd crucify him again.
To this day they are proud of what they did in Pilate's
courtyard. Now again that does not apply to those who have repented,
who have converted, who have ceased to be Jews, and become Christians,
because that is what that in this case is what it takes.
You have to cease to be a Jew to be a Christian.
But many of them are proud of what their ancestors did.
That's the generational curse.
His blood on those in that courtyard and on their children.
That is the word of God, that is what scripture says, that
is what Christians are required to believe.
And it's of course the most ironic blasphemy imaginable because we too
pray for Christ's blood to be upon us and upon our children,
but from the complete opposite direction.
We wish to receive the forgiveness of sins found in that blood.
They had nothing but contempt for it, and they have nothing but
contempt for it to this day.
So the blood of Christ is upon everyone, but it doesn't mean
the same thing.
When the blood of Christ is upon the elect, it is for
their salvation.
When the blood of Christ is upon those who despise him, it
is for their eternal damnation, which is tragic.
And I think that we'll get into it in a future episode,
but I think it's worth noting that today you have the Zionists
and you have the John Hagees and even the Pope himself in
the sixties effectively saying we don't need to evangelize the Jews, they're
just fine the way they are.
Not only is that blasphemy, not only is it absolutely false doctrine,
but it's the worst possible thing for the Jews.
If you hate Jews, then yeah, leave them alone.
Don't tell them about God.
If you hate Jews and want to see them burning in turn
in eternity, then just let them be, because that's the track that
they're on.
The only loving thing that can be possibly done for this group
of people is to bring the gospel to them.
Something incidentally is illegal in Israel.
You'll be deported if you try to do that.
And that spirit
is exemplified after Christ's crucifixion.
I think it's important, like we said, part of the reason we're
talking about this particular thing is that there are many pastors who
are afraid to say this stuff from the pulpit or in Bible
starter. They want to hem and haw and try to deflect blame
from the crowd of Jews to the small group of people.
Listen to the preaching of Peter in Acts three.
While he clung to Peter and John and all the people, utterly
astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon's, and when
Peter saw it he addressed the people, Men of Israel, why do
you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us?
Is though by our own power or piety we have made him
walk. The god of Abraham, the god of Isaac and the God
of Jacob, the god of our fathers glorified his servant Jesus, whom
you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he
had decided to release him.
But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a
murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the author of
life, whom God raised from the dead.
To this we are witnesses.
In his name, by faith in his name has made this man
strong whom you see and know, in the faith that is through
Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of
you all.
And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did
also your rulers, but what God foretold by the mouth of all
the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.
Repent therefore, and turn back.
This is everything the Cory and I just said.
Peter, as soon as he gets us and preaches, he doesn't say
it was the Pharisees that did it.
He doesn't say your rulers were bad, that you're all right.
He says, Men of Israel, you murdered God.
And he also offers forgiveness.
He says, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also
your rulers.
As Corey just said, it wasn't the unforgivable sin.
Even murdering God on the cross was not unforgivable.
And yet they continued by and large to persist in their evil.
That is what the law and the gospel are for.
You must deliver the law to those who are impenitent in their
sins. Peter was looking at this crowd of Jews and saying you
murdered Christ, you must repent of this.
He wasn't begging them, but that was that was it.
You murdered Christ.
What possibly could be more horrific to a believer than to hear
that. And that's precisely why he told them.
When we have pastors today and we have leaders and we have
teachers who are afraid to say that, what happens to the Christian
faith when we become so ashamed of it that we have to
hide it in a corner and we can't proclaim it in its
fullness as scripture itself proclaims it, we don't get a vote on
this stuff.
We don't get to say it was the Pharisees, it wasn't the
crowds. We don't get to just blame the crowds either, because there
are numerous passages that say that the Pharisees, the rulers, the high
priests conspired off on their own.
Everyone was guilty, and everyone had the opportunity to be forgiven.
God says it, we have to say it.
We have to say it about the Jews, and we have to
say it about the Jews today.
And the fact that today, when you say the Jews, people get
really nervous and suddenly pastors have to get up in the pulpit.
I've actually heard pastors change the text to avoid saying the Jews,
they will say the Pharisees or some other thing to deflect blame
to that one little outgroup, to blame the leaders, to blame the
president of the synod.
It's not that guy, it's everyone who's listening.
It's everyone who's following evil that is equally evil.
You don't get an out because you're not senior.
The only out is forgiveness through repentance.
And in case anyone thinks that we are going beyond the bounds
of the evidence as it were, in our comments about what the
Jews believe today, I will read for you in English translation a
prayer from the Talmud, this one is from the Jerusalem version instead
of the Babylonian, but they are nearly identical.
The Jews traditionally pray three times per day.
This is the Birkat Haminim, and here is the prayer in English.
For the apostates, let there be no hope, and uproot the kingdom
of arrogance, speedily and in our days.
May the Nazarenes and the sectarians perish as in a moment.
Let them be blotted out of the book of life, and not
be written together with the righteous.
You are praised, O Lord, who subdues the arrogant.
You are a Nazarene, if you're a Christian.
That's what that means what that means.
Traditionally, and still today, Jews pray three times per day, cursing you
specifically because you are a Christian.
That is something they've been doing for centuries?
Thank you That is something again they still do today.
This was something they hid for a very long time.
But then I believe it was originally a German academic who got
a hold of a copy of some of these documents and started
translating them.
And as the Talmud has been translated, we've found more and worse
things, and I'm sure at some point we will go over the
Talmud in greater depth.
But this is the mindset of modern Jews.
They hate Christians.
And incidentally, when they're talking about apostates, they are cursing Jews who
have converted to Christianity.
They hold a particular hatred for Jews who convert.
But they hate Christians.
And they pray and curse you multiple times per day.
Now, of course, they are not praying to the Lord God, because
those who do not have the Son do not have the Father.
And they reject the Son, so they are not praying to God
the Father.
That is an important point.
There are many pastors and others who will say, Well, no, the
the Jews worship God, they just don't worship him correctly.
No. Scripture says that those who do not have the Son do
not have the Father.
The Jews do not worship the Lord God.
They do not worship the Father, they do not worship the Trinity,
they are not in any way, shape, or form, related to Christians
or Christianity.
They are vile pagans, and they pray to curse you three times
per day, at least there are other prayers they say that are
daily prayers that also call down curses.
That is the reality of the situation.
Yes, exactly.
Their prayers are to Satan.
They are praying to Satan to curse you.
There are so many pastors and leaders and others who are afraid
to say these things.
But this is the reality.
This is exactly what their own holy books say, so called holy
books. And this is just grazing the surface.
Incidentally, Christ responds to the Talmud in Scripture.
One of the most abused passages in Scripture is in part a
response to a wicked Jewish prayer from proto-versions of the Talmud, because
one of the prayers that is said by Jewish men traditionally, at
least once per day, sometimes multiple times per day, is a prayer
that basically says, thank you to God that I was not made
a Gentile, thank you to God that I was not made a
woman. And so you should be thinking of Galatians 3:28.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free.
There is not male and female.
Well they also add to their prayer that thank you God for
not making me a slave.
Well, there are the three categories that Christ uses
right there in a Jewish prayer.
He is responding in part to the evil of the Talmud as
it is taking form, because it was not finished until around the
five hundreds, perhaps a little earlier, but right around that time.
But some of the materials were obviously coalescing at the time of
Christ's ministry.
So Christians Christians should have some familiarity with these things because it
is responded to in our own holy documents, in scripture.
This is not just some esoteric issue that's off on the sidelines.
This is of the utmost importance because this deals with a very
real, very live controversy in our time.
And the reason for pointing these things out in time is that
none of these are flukes.
It wasn't a fluke that they just happened to be really mean
in the year that Jesus was ministering.
And it doesn't so happen that they just happen to be really
mean, you know, when they wrote those prayers, or that they're really
mean today.
First Thessalonians two says, For you brothers became imitators of the church
of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered
the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the
Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove
us out and displeased God and oppose all mankind by hindering us
from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved, so as
always to fill up the measure of their sins, but wrath has
come upon them at last.
This is Paul writing to a Greek city, but he's talking not
only about the murder of Christ, but how the Jews have been
murdering prophets for centuries.
This was not new behavior for them.
God kept sending prophets and they kept getting killed or ignored.
You know, profit being selected as a prophet is never good news.
it never went ends well.
I mean, the I think the one who got off the best
was Elijah.
he didn't die.
He was just taken up in a whirlwind or on a chariot.
He wasn't he didn't have to suffer as many others did in
death, but his life was no bowl of roses.
It's I think it's important to hearken back to something that we
have mentioned on previous episodes.
We didn't we were talking about the Old Testament today..
When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they were in the
desert, he went up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments
from God.
He was gone for forty days.
he That was when he received the books.
He was up there for forty days.
There was a pillar of fire at night and pillar of smoke
during the day.
It was a huge scene.
It was very visible.
The Israelites were down at the base of the mountain.
In the forty days that Moses was up there, they descended into
idolatry. They had Aaron melt down their gold and make a golden
calf for them, which was as Corey said previously, was almost certainly
one of the gods of Egypt that they chose to worship, and
they said to Aaron, make a god for us, make the god
that led us out of Egypt.
God's right there on the mountain.
God's in a pillar of fire talking to Moses, talking to the
prophet who led them out of captivity.
And what do they do?
They turn their back on him and say, No, we want to
make shift God.
We're going to worship this instead.
And they did.
Moses comes down and they're having a big party worshiping pagan gods.
In they just left Egypt.
They just seen all of these miracles.
They're be they're before a miracle with the physical special presence of
God through the fire and the smoke, and they apostatize.
This was the spirit of these people.
So I think one of the key things to understand about the
the Jewish period of time in scripture is that
I I think a good analog for it is a message in
a bottle.
The gospel was given to Adam in the garden, Genesis 3:15.
There was a promise made that God was going to fix this.
That was expand upon in future generations.
When the day came that God came to Abraham and made the
special promise to him and then wrestled with Jacob and named him
Israel. And then when Moses was given the books of God,
something changed.
What changed was that what had been a
broadly defined promise became much more narrowly defined in terms of additional
promises were being made.
A covenant was specifically made with Abraham and was renewed with his
descendants. And I think that in some ways that covenant and the
laws, the Levitical laws in particular, were were like the bottle.
You know, you throw a message in the bottle and you throw
it in the ocean, it's gonna bob away and then get somewhere.
The function that the Levitical laws or that the the ceremonial laws
had for the Israelites is that it made them weird.
They had to do weird stuff with their clothing and with their
food and with their their appearance.
They weren't going to be permitted to mix with their neighbors because
God knew that every time his people mixed with their pagan neighbors,
they became pagan.
There wasn't it didn't work the other way.
It should have worked the other way, but they were not faithful.
And so any exposure to foreign gods caused them to whore after
foreign gods.
That's how God describes it as whoring.
And that's what it is.
It's spiritual lust after that which is forbidden, which is a cheap
imitation, but people's passions get inflamed and they chase that which is
fake and they turn their back on that which is real.
And so God knew this.
And so He wrapped them in this bottle of these Levitical laws
that said you have to do this with your beard and you
can't eat these foods and you can't sow your grains like this
and the isolation that that caused from them relative to their neighbors
helped to preserve the message, which was the gospel.
It was the word of God and it was the promises of
the Messiah that were to be preserved through the people as well
as through the bloodline.
And so the word that was basically their DNA, the ACTG in
their genes, that would be passed down to Jesus in the flesh,
that was from Abraham's seed.
And there was also the word, the spoken word, the promises of
God were also passed.
And that was the function that the Jews served for two thousand
years. Now for two thousand years there were no Jews.
And then for two thousand years from Abraham to Jesus, The Jews
were in varying states of evolution preserving these messages from God so
that in the day when the Messiah came and fulfilled the prophecies,
everyone would know.
They would have a list and they would have been studying and
looking for it and being excited to see it come.
So that when a man appears and heals the blind and the
lame, you rejoice and you say at last the Messiah has come.
That was the purpose.
They did everything in their power to fail that purpose.
And yet God preserved them for his ends.
Because they were chosen not to be special in in some sense
of its own, but to be the vessel that would preserve these
promises until they were fulfilled.
And one of the things it's emphasized repeatedly, particularly in Paul's epistles,
is because the promises had been given to the Jews, they knew
about them.
Paul's very clear that when there's no knowledge, sin does not attach
in the same way as when there's knowledge.
And so the urgency of reaching the Jews with the gospel, especially
in his day, was but they had become apostate.
When the prophecies were not yet fulfilled, they could hope in their
future fulfillment, but now that they had been fulfilled, it was urgent
that the Jews would be told the prophecies are fulfilled, the Messiah
has come, and he has died and he is living again.
It was urgent for them to hear that because they were now
under condemnation for refusing to believe.
That's a fundamentally different thing than the the Greek or the Roman
or the Ugandan or the Indian who's never heard any of this
stuff. He's not in the same spiritual state as these people who
for hundreds and thousands of years had been told these stories, who'd
been given these promises, because the promises were made to them and
through them for all.
When Jesus came and fulfilled them and then they rejected them and
said, His blood be on us and our children, that was the
worst possible thing for them.
And part of Paul's urgency to reach the Jews was to try
to save them from their own wickedness, just as Peter did in
this sermon, where he said, You unknowingly did this, repent.
Because when they die, that's it.
There's there we get to read the book today that says here's
what happened bad two thousand years ago.
It wasn't written yet.
They were living it.
And so they had the choice in their lifetime, do I believe
in the promise that God has fulfilled or do I continue in
my hatred of those promises?
And it might not have been hatred before Christ came, but once
he came, that was the proof of who was elect and who
was faithless.
And so on the topic of the Jews and whether or not
they can convert to be Christian.
We should, of course, read Romans 9, the words of Paul here,
the words of the Holy Spirit, spoken, written through Paul.
I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying.
My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have
great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish
that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the
sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory the
covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises.
To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the
flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed for ever
Amen. But it is not as though the word of God has
failed, for not all who are descended from Israel
belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham, because they
are his offspring.
But through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
This means that it is not the children of the flesh, who
are the children of God, but the children of the promise are
counted as offspring.
For this is what the promise said about this time next year
I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.
And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by
one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born, and
had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God's purpose
of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him
who calls, she was told.
The older will serve the younger, as it is written, Jacob I
loved, but Esau I hated.
What shall we say then?
Is there injustice on God's part?
By no means, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy
on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom
I have compassion.
So then it depends not on human will or exertion but on
God but on God who has mercy.
For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have
raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and
that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.
So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens
whomever he wills.
I think that ties back perfectly into the the election episode that
we mentioned earlier.
Again, it's it's really an important one to understand this, and many
of the other things we say a lot of a lot of
what is misunderstood in twenty first century Christian theology is the result
of a bad understanding of election.
We don't take it seriously.
We don't we don't think it means anything.
And And neither did the Jews.
I mean, that was part of the problem.
They thought that being lineal sons of Abraham was all it took.
That and obeying the law.
You know, you keep the law and you're a child of Abraham
and you're in.
And everyone else is out no matter what.
That's not what God said.
It was never what God promised.
And so
as we look at these things, it's just important to remember how
God speaks.
He talks about them being important for these purposes, but it wasn't
they were not a purpose unto themselves.
The Jews didn't exist for the sake of the Jews.
They do today.
And frankly, in most times in history they did.
The few glory days that Israel had were the few days when
they were being faithful.
It wasn't much.
You had a period under David, a period under Solomon, and precious
few other times where there were really glory periods.
The rest was punishment from God for faithlessness.
I want to end here with a passage from John 8 that
um it comes up every year when Easter rolls around because it's
something that the Jews to this day explicitly condemn.
Whenever you hear a Jew talking about Christianity, they will bring up
John, John 8, particularly John eight forty four, but I'm going to
read the whole passage to put it in context.
We're going to talk next week about some of the early church
fathers and some of the quotes and sermons that are called anti-Semitic,
where were the notion arose that
you know that that's basically a a term of blasphemy to say
you were blaspheming against something.
And when something is called anti-Semitic, you're saying you're blaspheming the Jews.
Well, that is a religion.
to have that sort of blasphemy law is indeed a religion, but
it's not the Christian religion.
A Christian can only blaspheme God.
We can't blaspheme anything else.
No Now, there are ways that we can blaspheme God that don't
necessarily involve that which is overt.
So I'm not trying to draw a fuzzy line here where there's
a clear one.
But
we don't get to speak in ways that God doesn't speak.
So I'm gonna read this passage from John eight to close because
it's one that's despised and it's one that frankly makes Christians uncomfortable
this day.
And that really concerns us.
I mean that's why Stone Choir exists.
If there's a passage in scripture that you can read to Christians
and Christians start squirming, you have a problem.
Forget anybody else in the world, forget any other opinions you might
have. If If you are uncomfortable us about something in Scripture, you
have a spiritual problem.
So John eight.
Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide
in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know
the truth, and the truth will set you free.
They answered him.
We are offspring of Abraham, and have never been enslaved to anyone.
How is it you say you will become free?
Jesus answers them.
truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave
to sin.
The slave does not remain in the house forever, the sun remains
forever. So if the sun sets you free you will be free
indeed. I know that you're offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to
kill me, because my word finds no place in you.
I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you
do what you have heard from your father.
They answered him Abraham is our father, Jesus said to them, If
you were Abraham's children you would be doing the works Abraham did,
but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told
you the truth that I heard from God.
This is not what Abraham did.
You were doing the works your father did.
They said to him, We are not born of sexual immorality, we
have one Father, even God.
Jesus said to them, If God were your father, you would love
me, for I came from God and I am here.
I came not of my own accord, but he sent me.
Why do you not understand what I say?
It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to
do your father's desires.
He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand
in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he lies he speaks out of his own character, for he
is a liar and the father of lies.
But because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.
Which one of you convicts me of sin if I tell the
truth? Why do you not believe me?
Whoever is of God hears the words of God.
The reason why you do not hear them is that you are
not of God
This is a profound passage because Jesus is speaking directly to a
crowd of Jews and He's telling them, You are Satan's children.
You are deaf to my voice because you were born of the
father of lies.
Even as they stand there and they make claims of lineage, and
claims of being sons of Abraham, and claims of righteousness, he says
you have none of those things.
You do not do Abraham's works because you do not have Abraham's
faith, which was the root of election.
Abraham had faith, and it was counted to him as righteousness.
The circumcision came after.
The circumcision was not what made him righteous, he was circumcised because
he was righteous.
He was righteous and therefore he obeyed God.
The order of operations matters.
And Jesus understood that Jesus is God, as he said, when he
came to him and he did his father's things and they hated
it, it's because they are of their father.
When there is a man today, whether it's two thousand years ago
or today, when a man hates the things of God, that man
is of Satan.
It's not all Jews today.
There are a few Jews who actually become Christian and cease to
be Jews, and there are many who are not Jews who are
enemies of God today.
And today in our own churches, we have these same Jews.
They don't go by the name Jew, but they hate God just
as much.
They will thump their genealogy.
It won't be the genealogy of Abraham.
It will be the genealogy of some confession, a confession which points
God faithfully, but they will ignore that part.
They will just use whatever they can as an anchor to make
themselves a participant in something where they are not participants.
You can only participate in God's things if you were God's child.
And you're only his child by adoption through faith.
Those who do not have faith are not adopted sons of God.
They remain children of Satan.
And so as you see people in the world reacting to God's
things, many times in this preaching, whether it's from Jesus or Peter
or Paul or any other man, when they preach, some of the
people were confused.
They it wasn't ignorant confusion, it wasn't a confusion born of a
lack of faith.
They were hearing something for the first time and they didn't know
what to make of it.
That's okay.
That there's hope for that man.
Some believed immediately, some all already believed.
Those are saved.
The rest, and frankly the majority, in Jesus' day and in our
day, hear the things of God and they react by saying, You
have a demon, you are evil There's no middle ground when you're
dealing with people who are possessed by the devil.
They know when they're dealing with the Son of God, and their
reactions are violent.
They're filled with hatred.
We should expect that when we are faithful to God, there will
be times when it elicits those same responses.
That is not that there's been some miscommunication.
It's not that we should have been more winsome, we should have
been nicer.
It's not that if we'd only use different words they would understand.
It's that we are of our Father in heaven and they are
of their Father the devil.
You will face this in your lives if you're faithful Christians.
If you just if you hide and and try to ride it
out, it's not gonna work, but you'll you'll learn that the hard
way. You are going to have to take a stand for Christ
and there there will be days when that hurts.
There will be days where you suffer for it and you were
hated to your face
because that is the state that the world is in.
The father of lies, the father of Jews is running the show
today. There's not much left of the faithful remnant.
It exists and it will always exist, but only because God promised
it and God will preserve it.
God will preserve his people.
Everyone else is gonna try to kill us.
That's good news.
It means that we're on the right side.
It means that we're on God's side and God is on our
side. That's the thing we have to worry about.
So don't be afraid of topics that seem scary.
Be afraid of the fact that a topic that seems scary is
scary in the first place, because it shouldn't be.
The truth should not scare Christians.
When someone's afraid of the truth, that person has a bigger problem.
And we've said before, these are not problems that a podcast can
solve. You need to spend time in the Word.
You need to spend time studying scripture and contemplating and meditating on
these things.
And be aware in your life, not just on Sunday, not just
in Bible class, be aware every every day of where you're seeing
these things playing out.
And you will find that there's a spiritual tenor to things that
don't necessarily have a spiritual context.
Your workplace is going to have a spiritual tenor to things where
maybe 20 years ago it didn't, or if it did, it wasn't
at all obvious.
Today it's gonna be obvious.
This is where the battleground is, and this is where we will
prove ourselves to either be faithful children of God or to be
sons of Satan.
As Christians, we have only one choice.
And as we see others respond, we see them choosing as well.
All these sermons that were delivered in the old in the New
Testament served a winnowing function.
Many wandered away from Jesus preaching, upset or confused or angry, a
few stuck around because they believed.
The same math is going to work out today.
Be one of the few who sticks around and believes in God,
because on the last day he is going to welcome each of
us.
And
so I want to close out this episode by going over
a seemingly minor technical matter, but something that is really at the
foundation of all of this for this series of episodes and many
of the others as well, and that is the word concept fallacy.
This is really in a sense, related to the idea of essence
and accident.
Those who understand those terms can tie that together.
I won't go over that bit.
But the word concept fallacy has two essential forms.
The first one is that you believe you've studied a word and
therefore you understand the concept.
That's a fallacy you can study a word without understanding the concept
to which it refers.
But the second one, and perhaps the more important one here, is
the conflation of the two things.
The conflation of the word that symbolizes the concept and the concept
itself. That is what we have happening in many of these issues.
For instance, with the term Jew, there are those who will use
the term and then conflate it with the concept, and there are
several different concepts it covers.
You can be Jewish by blood, you can be Jewish by religion.
Those are not the same thing.
If you conflate those and then say the term always refers to
one or the other or both, you are You are running afoul
of this fallacy, you are committing this error.
And so it is important to understand the sense in which the
terms are being used, but perhaps more relevant to us as Christians
and more in our own backyard.
For instance, if you are holding a Bible and the book of
Concord, that doesn't make you a Lutheran.
If you just say that, well, I have these and I believe
them, that still doesn't make you a Lutheran.
If you believe them, that makes you a Lutheran.
Now, some will have brought to mind the idea of well, that's
no true Scotsman fallacy, but it's not.
And that's where that accident and essence issue comes in.
There are things that you are essentially, and there are things that
you are not essentially, they can change.
If you are male, you are essentially male, that cannot change.
You aren't male because you believe you're male.
You aren't male because you call yourself male.
You aren't male because you put pronouns at the end of your
email signature.
That's not how that works.
That is something you are essentially.
The same is true of your race.
If you are German, you are German because your parents were German.
If you are English, you are English because your parents were English,
the same for any race.
That is something you are essentially.
You are not
essentially a Christian
because you may not have been a Christian as a child.
You could apostatize.
That can change, and therefore it is not in this sense of
the term essential.
And so when you are dealing with the no true Scotsman issue,
that only applies to things that are essential, and that's why it's
no true Scotsman.
Because that is race.
That is blood.
You cannot change that.
And so if you say no true Scotsman would wear pink and
you find a Scotsman by blood who's wearing pink, well you can't
just say, well no true Scotsman.
Because you found a true Scotsman who's wearing pink.
Now there are other issues here, there's some nuance I could go
into, but we'll leave that aside for now.
The issue here is that when you are dealing with Christianity, when
you are dealing with religion, when you're dealing with a confession or
a political party, anything like that, these things have tenets.
They have doctrines, they have things they profess, things they assert that
are true.
If you believe those things, you belong to that group.
Because that is what defines the group.
Being a Scotsman is defined by blood, not by what color you
wear or which pattern you wear, whatever it happens to be.
That is not the case with Christianity.
To be a Christian, you must believe the things that scripture teaches.
That is what it means to be a Christian.
A Christian has faith in Christ, in the saving blood of Christ,
in his atonement, in his sacrifice.
That is what it means to be a Christian.
Being a Christian does not mean holding up the Bible and waving
it at people.
That doesn't make you a Christian.
Being a Lutheran doesn't mean holding up the book of Concord and
waving it at people.
Being reformed doesn't mean holding up the Westminster Confession and waving it
at people.
People, whichever group it is, you have to actually believe the contents
of that book.
And so if someone tells you, well of course I'm ex
of course I'm this kind of Christian.
Look, I have the collar and the book, and that's not what
it means.
What does he actually believe?
What does he actually teach?
What does he do in his life?
It is the same thing with the Jews.
There are Jews who can convert to Christianity and no longer be
a Jew and be Christian.
There are Christians who can be apostate in everything they do and
still claim to be Christian.
Simply labeling yourself with the term
does not make you the thing.
One would think that Christians living in an era when we have
men claiming to be women and women claiming to be men and
people claiming to be dogs and whatever else is happening out there,
one would think it would be obvious that simply claiming to be
a thing does not make you the thing.
And yet pastors and many others constantly get away with doing so.
That not let them get away with it.
Simply claiming that you are X does not make you X.
Simply claiming that you are Christian does not make you Christian.
Being a Christian means believing the Word of God, trusting in Christ
as your Lord and Savior.
And yes, it does also mean rejecting the various teachings of the
devil. That is why, as Lutherans, for instance, in our confirmation oath,
we reject the devil in all his works and all his ways
because that is part of what it means to be a Christian.
And so when the Jews told Christ, We're descended from Abraham, we've
never been slaves, of course we're saved, of course we're elect.
That's not what it means.
That's why in Romans it says not all who are descended from
Israel belong to Israel, those are two different things.
The first is the essential, that's race, descended from Israel.
The second is belong to Israel.
That's Christians, that's the church.
You can be descended from Israel by blood and not belong to
Israel, the church by faith.
You can belong to Israel, the church by faith, and not be
descended from Israel, the man by blood.
Being a Christian is a matter of faith.
That is the core of what we believe.
That is why we call it of faith
Believe the words of God as they are written in his book.
Don't water them down for the world.
Don't ignore them because they're uncomfortable.
Don't start editing the scripture because it makes you uncomfortable
or it makes your life more difficult.
As Christians we are called to proclaim the truth in season and
out of season.
And that is, in fact, regardless of the consequences.
Yes, we may apply wisdom to these things, but we do not
get to deny the truth.
Because denying God's truth is denying Christ before men.
We as Christians are going to spend eternity with Adam and with
Noah and with Abraham and with Moses and with Elijah and with
Jesus. We're going to spend eternity with them because they were Christian.
They are Christian.
We are Christian.
The essence of the Christian faith is belief in the gospel, belief
and the promise of the Messiah.
Those who lived before the Messiah believed in the promise
as it was yet to be fulfilled.
Those who lived in Christ's day believed in the promise of the
Messiah as they witnessed its fulfillment, and we who lived two thousand
years after the fulfillment of the Messiah's promise
believe it in retrospect.
We believe that which has been fulfilled and transmitted to us through
time, and in eternity, we will all be united as Christians because
every single person in heaven, every single person who will be in
the new earth is a Christian in essence.
The essence of the Christian faith is belief in the Messiah who
has delivered the eternal life to us.
Every man in fa in heaven believed that and received it.
That is how the Christian faith works.
Amen.