WEBVTT 00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:39.600 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:40.480 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:41.840 Mahler. And 00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:43.920 I'm still woe. 00:00:43.920 --> 00:00:48.480 Today's Stone Choir is part three of our four part series on 00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:52.160 the subject of the state of the church today and terms of 00:00:52.160 --> 00:00:56.560 foreign beliefs being imported into the church and being passed off as 00:00:56.720 --> 00:01:02.480 Christian. The first episode that we did specifically dealt with defining Christianity 00:01:02.560 --> 00:01:07.360 or defining religion in general in terms specifically of the source of 00:01:07.360 --> 00:01:09.680 right and wrong of morality. 00:01:09.680 --> 00:01:12.160 Because there are a lot of different sources of morality that we 00:01:12.160 --> 00:01:17.120 use today that we believe are giving us moral answers to things, 00:01:17.120 --> 00:01:18.720 but they're not from the Bible. 00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:21.440 But then we think they're Christian after the fact because we think 00:01:21.440 --> 00:01:22.160 they're moral. 00:01:22.160 --> 00:01:24.320 And so we talked for a couple hours about the fact that 00:01:24.320 --> 00:01:27.920 that's really dangerous because if you're getting your morality from the world 00:01:28.080 --> 00:01:31.600 and the world is evil, you're getting your morality from Satan, and 00:01:31.600 --> 00:01:32.720 we should care. 00:01:32.720 --> 00:01:36.080 Last week's episode we specifically dealt with Judaizing. 00:01:36.080 --> 00:01:40.240 This was the very first heresy that attacked the early church, and 00:01:40.240 --> 00:01:44.880 we talked specifically about two big areas, and gave a couple other 00:01:44.880 --> 00:01:49.680 examples of ways in which the early church faced an attack from 00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:54.400 Satan that did not directly attack the gospel, not overly. 00:01:54.560 --> 00:01:58.400 It did subtly, and it did ultimately, but the attack was to 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:01.680 say, okay, you're Christian, that's fine, but you still need to do 00:02:01.680 --> 00:02:03.200 the Jewish stuff. 00:02:03.200 --> 00:02:06.000 And the case we made in the Judaizing episode, and although I 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:08.080 didn't say this explicitly during the episode. 00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:10.240 I realized when I was re-listening to it. 00:02:10.240 --> 00:02:14.480 I think that we made the case the point repeatedly throughout that 00:02:14.640 --> 00:02:17.680 we didn't want to just give a list of here are the 00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:20.800 top five ways that the church today is Judaizing. 00:02:20.800 --> 00:02:24.560 Because if you leave something off of the list, then someone will 00:02:24.560 --> 00:02:26.480 say, okay, it was on the list, so it must not be 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:30.080 Judaizing. What we did was we established the principle by which you 00:02:30.080 --> 00:02:34.560 can determine whether or not anything is in fact a Judaizing heresy. 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:38.320 And so we highlighted a couple examples to show here's something that 00:02:38.320 --> 00:02:39.680 was stamped out in the church. 00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:41.520 It ceased to be Christian practice. 00:02:41.520 --> 00:02:44.320 And then it came roaring back in the last couple centuries. 00:02:44.320 --> 00:02:47.920 And now more and more we're told here's another new thing that 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:48.720 you need to do. 00:02:48.720 --> 00:02:50.960 Sure, you're Christian, that's fun that's fine. 00:02:50.960 --> 00:02:54.400 But if you want a more authentic version of your Christianity, you 00:02:54.560 --> 00:02:57.200 gotta go back and you gotta have more of this Jewish stuff 00:02:57.360 --> 00:03:00.640 that sure yeah, Christians never did, but we should be doing it 00:03:00.720 --> 00:03:02.560 so we can be more authentic. 00:03:02.560 --> 00:03:05.600 The reason we gave that premise is that you don't need a 00:03:05.600 --> 00:03:08.400 list of the things if you understand the principle. 00:03:08.400 --> 00:03:12.560 So by trying to teach the principle, I can almost guarantee this 00:03:12.720 --> 00:03:16.240 some point in current year, some new form of Judaizing is going 00:03:16.240 --> 00:03:19.200 to come along where someone will discover some new word or some 00:03:19.200 --> 00:03:25.280 new tradition or some new idea that is blessed by ancient Judaism, 00:03:25.280 --> 00:03:28.560 not the version of God, but the version of the people who 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:30.320 killed Christ. 00:03:30.320 --> 00:03:33.440 And we'll be told, if you want your Christianity to be more 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:36.000 authentic, you need to do this thing too. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:39.600 And for those of folks who listened and who got the point, 00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:42.160 you'll be able to say to something that couldn't possibly be on 00:03:42.160 --> 00:03:44.480 anyone's list, hey, that's Judaizing. 00:03:44.480 --> 00:03:46.640 I recognize what's going on. 00:03:46.640 --> 00:03:51.760 Because Satan will use the old tricks, but he'll use new forms 00:03:52.320 --> 00:03:52.880 of it. 00:03:52.880 --> 00:03:55.520 He'll use the old sales pitch, but he's not going to try 00:03:55.520 --> 00:03:57.520 to sell exactly the same thing. 00:03:57.520 --> 00:04:00.560 And so the danger that we have today is if we just 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:03.440 want a checklist to say, well, if it's this, this, and this, 00:04:03.440 --> 00:04:05.040 then I understand what's going on. 00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:08.640 Otherwise, it's fine, because there's nothing bad going on. 00:04:08.640 --> 00:04:12.080 This is a very vulnerable place where all Christians really have been 00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:15.600 left today because there's no one left who can think about new 00:04:15.600 --> 00:04:22.000 threats. Today we're specifically talking about Gnosticism as it's been roaring back 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:26.080 in the last century, not only in the church, but in our 00:04:26.080 --> 00:04:27.440 world at large. 00:04:27.440 --> 00:04:32.320 And when explicitly state at the outset, if you are autistic or 00:04:32.320 --> 00:04:36.800 if you're very knowledgeable about the history of Gnosticism as it's been 00:04:36.800 --> 00:04:40.560 recently researched and uncovered from the past, you're going to be really 00:04:40.560 --> 00:04:44.480 annoyed at our approach today because we don't care about the specific 00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:48.080 veins of Gnosticism in the first and second century. 00:04:48.080 --> 00:04:51.200 What we're gonna do today is we're gonna distill a few key 00:04:51.200 --> 00:04:55.120 elements that were present in all of the Gnostic cults, and we're 00:04:55.120 --> 00:04:59.200 going to present a case that those key elements are represented in 00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:01.600 new lies that are told today. 00:05:01.600 --> 00:05:05.440 And so when we're doing an episode on Gnosticism, I want to 00:05:05.440 --> 00:05:09.040 at least make the plea that we are not being some of 00:05:09.360 --> 00:05:12.080 the sort of idiotic people you see online that they learn a 00:05:12.080 --> 00:05:14.960 word and want to just say, well, any I know that Gnosticism's 00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:17.600 bad, so anything I don't like is Gnosticism. 00:05:17.600 --> 00:05:18.960 There are people who do that. 00:05:18.960 --> 00:05:22.720 And so I'm going to acknowledge we're not being sloppy with the 00:05:22.720 --> 00:05:26.880 definition because we don't care about the specific implementation details. 00:05:26.880 --> 00:05:31.840 We're being specific about the underlying premises shared among all the Gnostic 00:05:31.840 --> 00:05:37.520 cults. Because this was the second key heresy that was frontally attacking 00:05:37.520 --> 00:05:41.920 the church is denounced uh obliquely in scripture. 00:05:41.920 --> 00:05:45.440 It's denounced very frequently in the early church fathers because it was 00:05:45.440 --> 00:05:49.760 one of the very first attacks that Satan waged sort of from 00:05:49.760 --> 00:05:52.320 outside the church and sort of within. 00:05:52.320 --> 00:05:55.280 So we'll get up very briefly into the history of what we 00:05:55.280 --> 00:05:59.840 used to be believed, but we fundamentally don't care because once you 00:05:59.840 --> 00:06:01.840 understand a few of the key points that we're going to make 00:06:01.840 --> 00:06:09.040 about what beliefs were underlying their specific doctrinal claims, the specific doctrinal 00:06:09.040 --> 00:06:12.400 claims, some of which are coming back today and some of which 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:13.360 are not. 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:16.000 If someone's going to be completely autistic and will say, well, it 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:18.880 doesn't meet any of these specific criteria that I found on this 00:06:18.880 --> 00:06:21.360 page, therefore it's not Gnosticism. 00:06:21.360 --> 00:06:23.920 Don't care, not the point. 00:06:23.920 --> 00:06:26.800 The point is that when you understand that there's a form of 00:06:26.800 --> 00:06:30.080 a thing that can creep back in in a new form. 00:06:30.080 --> 00:06:33.840 The underlying principles are the same, but then the substance is the 00:06:33.840 --> 00:06:36.240 same, but the form can change subtly. 00:06:36.240 --> 00:06:37.520 That's what we have today. 00:06:37.520 --> 00:06:39.440 And so we're going to make the case that once you understand 00:06:39.440 --> 00:06:44.320 that there are a few key principles in the early Gnostic religion, 00:06:44.320 --> 00:06:48.320 you will find them playing out over and over today. 00:06:48.320 --> 00:06:51.280 And this is one of the cases, even more so than Judaizing, 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:53.680 although there's a lot of parallels. 00:06:53.680 --> 00:06:56.960 I think the Gnosticism in some ways is even more dangerous of 00:06:56.960 --> 00:07:00.800 a heresy to the church because we're adopting it wholesale and we'll 00:07:00.800 --> 00:07:02.880 we'll make the case for some of that. 00:07:02.880 --> 00:07:05.920 The so we have kind of four basic areas that we're going 00:07:05.920 --> 00:07:10.080 to cover from the type of type of Gnosticism that it used 00:07:10.080 --> 00:07:12.240 to exist that we're starting to see again. 00:07:12.240 --> 00:07:15.280 The first two examples I'm gonna get out of the way because 00:07:15.280 --> 00:07:18.960 they're they're important and they're interesting and they'll sort of pop up 00:07:18.960 --> 00:07:22.000 a few times throughout this episode, but they're not really the main 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:24.160 point, which is why we're front loading them. 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:26.560 The main point is going to be the last two elements that 00:07:26.560 --> 00:07:29.280 are going to be the bulk of this episode. 00:07:29.280 --> 00:07:34.160 The first element of Gnosticism that is sort of definitional to all 00:07:34.160 --> 00:07:36.960 the views that used to be held, regardless of kind of which 00:07:36.960 --> 00:07:43.280 permutation nearly 2,000 years ago, is that gnosis is the mystical or 00:07:43.280 --> 00:07:49.040 esoteric knowledge coming from directly partaking of the divine. 00:07:49.040 --> 00:07:52.720 What I found interesting when I found this description was that this 00:07:52.720 --> 00:07:56.640 almost perfectly describes what Bonhoeffer was doing. 00:07:56.640 --> 00:07:59.600 I recently re-listened to the Bonhoeffer episode 'cause it was kind of 00:07:59.600 --> 00:08:02.800 part two of the MLK episode, and since MLK Day was recent, 00:08:02.800 --> 00:08:07.040 I was I was going back through the back catalog, and Bonhoeffer 00:08:07.040 --> 00:08:12.640 almost says this verbatim when Bonhoeffer talks about what he was trying 00:08:12.640 --> 00:08:18.880 to do to and in Christianity, he was specifically pursuing a post-Christian 00:08:19.200 --> 00:08:23.440 religion, one where the doctrines and the dogmas fall away, but the 00:08:23.520 --> 00:08:26.320 But the spirit and the essence of the thing can live on. 00:08:26.320 --> 00:08:30.480 Even when people stop being Christian, per se, they can still have 00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:35.120 God because they've they've partaken of the divine essence that they're getting 00:08:35.120 --> 00:08:36.080 from wherever. 00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:39.120 And the thing that Bonhoeffer and MLK had in common was that 00:08:39.120 --> 00:08:40.960 they believed religion was man-made. 00:08:40.960 --> 00:08:44.160 They didn't believe that Christianity came from God and was revealed to 00:08:44.160 --> 00:08:45.680 man. They believed that men 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:51.120 created religion in specific ways and specific times. 00:08:51.280 --> 00:08:54.080 And the way that that played out in the early Gnostic cults 00:08:54.080 --> 00:08:57.840 is that it was very much of the same vein. 00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:01.920 It was men because one of the elements of the Gnostic heresies 00:09:01.920 --> 00:09:04.400 was that we're just going to discover new secrets. 00:09:04.640 --> 00:09:06.400 We want esoteric knowledge. 00:09:06.400 --> 00:09:08.320 We want this mysticism. 00:09:08.320 --> 00:09:10.880 And that is how we're going to know that we're getting closer 00:09:10.880 --> 00:09:11.600 to the truth. 00:09:11.600 --> 00:09:14.560 And the truth is in their mind God. 00:09:14.560 --> 00:09:17.840 Now we called God truth as well because that's what God calls 00:09:17.840 --> 00:09:21.600 Himself. But the question is when you contrast what they're doing with 00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:23.040 scripture, it falls apart. 00:09:23.040 --> 00:09:25.280 They're clearly not looking for the true God. 00:09:25.280 --> 00:09:30.080 What they're looking for is deep dark mysteries of things that are 00:09:30.080 --> 00:09:35.520 hidden that are occult because there's always an appeal in in every 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:39.280 man in every age there's a certain appeal to hidden knowledge. 00:09:39.280 --> 00:09:41.840 We've done episodes in the past where we've sort of briefly touched 00:09:41.840 --> 00:09:45.600 on those things and specifically said we're not gonna go into them 00:09:45.760 --> 00:09:49.120 because we don't want to inflame those passions in the men who 00:09:49.120 --> 00:09:50.320 are vulnerable to them. 00:09:50.320 --> 00:09:54.640 Neither Cory and I are interested in delving into that crap because 00:09:54.640 --> 00:09:57.040 we know just enough to know how wicked it is. 00:09:57.040 --> 00:09:58.800 There's no enticement. 00:09:58.800 --> 00:10:04.400 There's some men when they hear about secrets, hidden knowledge, it piques 00:10:04.400 --> 00:10:04.880 their interest. 00:10:04.880 --> 00:10:06.160 Like, okay, I want to learn more. 00:10:06.160 --> 00:10:08.480 That's that sounds juicy. 00:10:08.480 --> 00:10:11.680 I think it's part of the midwit trap that they're guys who 00:10:11.680 --> 00:10:14.800 are used to maybe knowing a little bit more than others. 00:10:14.800 --> 00:10:18.000 And so if you can learn some esoteric bit of knowledge, something 00:10:18.080 --> 00:10:21.200 you've leveled up, if you know a secret bit that nobody else 00:10:21.600 --> 00:10:23.840 knows, it makes you smarter, right? 00:10:24.080 --> 00:10:26.480 you are clearly the smartest man in the room when it comes 00:10:26.480 --> 00:10:27.680 to that one thing. 00:10:27.680 --> 00:10:31.760 And so someone who's sort of striving to climb the ladder of 00:10:31.760 --> 00:10:36.560 what's perceived as intelligence, will see hidden knowledge as a way of 00:10:36.560 --> 00:10:37.760 getting there. 00:10:37.760 --> 00:10:43.040 And the Gnostic esoteric impulse, there really is fundamental to man, and 00:10:43.040 --> 00:10:43.920 we find it everywhere. 00:10:43.920 --> 00:10:47.200 You find it in Freemasonry, you find it in all the cults, 00:10:47.200 --> 00:10:52.880 you find in Mormonism, Scientology, there's a progressive revelation of new bits 00:10:52.880 --> 00:10:56.160 and pieces of knowledge, so you level up and you go deeper 00:10:56.160 --> 00:10:59.440 into the thing, which is in stark contrast from Christianity. 00:10:59.760 --> 00:11:01.920 Christianity does not have levels. 00:11:01.920 --> 00:11:04.640 There's complexity to Christian doctrine. 00:11:04.640 --> 00:11:08.800 And so as a newcomer, you're gonna receive spiritual milk because that's 00:11:08.800 --> 00:11:10.000 all you can digest. 00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:12.160 And then as you get more into your faith, you can you 00:11:12.160 --> 00:11:13.600 can handle solid food. 00:11:13.600 --> 00:11:15.920 But that's not progressive revelation. 00:11:15.920 --> 00:11:17.840 It's not levels of secrecy. 00:11:17.840 --> 00:11:21.120 It's simply that when you're early on, you have very simple questions, 00:11:21.120 --> 00:11:22.560 very basic questions. 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:26.320 And as you start making more mistakes, subtle mistakes, by asking the 00:11:26.720 --> 00:11:29.360 obvious human questions, like, how does this work? 00:11:29.360 --> 00:11:30.080 Well what about this? 00:11:30.080 --> 00:11:31.680 What about this edge case? 00:11:31.680 --> 00:11:35.680 That is when the heretics of old invented all sorts of false 00:11:35.680 --> 00:11:40.320 doctrines to fill in the blanks when God had not revealed something. 00:11:40.320 --> 00:11:44.560 And And so although Christianity can be as complicated as you want 00:11:44.560 --> 00:11:49.040 it to be, the simplest version of Christianity is just as true. 00:11:49.040 --> 00:11:50.480 In some ways it's more true. 00:11:50.480 --> 00:11:54.080 We said in the IQ episode, if you are literally retarded and 00:11:54.080 --> 00:11:59.200 you have good parents and faithful teachers, you will be a blessed 00:11:59.200 --> 00:12:02.560 Christian and you will have everything of Christianity you need. 00:12:02.560 --> 00:12:05.520 You don't need a bunch of facts and figures and details and 00:12:05.520 --> 00:12:07.360 arguments to be a better Christian. 00:12:07.360 --> 00:12:12.000 You need faith in receiving what is given correctly and just believing 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:15.200 it. So if you have an IQ of sixty and you can't 00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:18.480 function and your parents tell you about Jesus and that you did 00:12:18.480 --> 00:12:22.480 something bad and that Jesus forgives you because you are sorry for 00:12:22.480 --> 00:12:24.640 it, ta da, you're Christian. 00:12:24.640 --> 00:12:25.120 That's it. 00:12:25.120 --> 00:12:29.520 It's law, it's gospel, it's sanctification, it's justification, it's everything. 00:12:29.520 --> 00:12:33.360 And even though someone of that limited ability doesn't understand any of 00:12:33.360 --> 00:12:36.960 those words, he understands he did something bad and he understands he's 00:12:36.960 --> 00:12:40.160 forgiven and he's reconciled and he knows that Jesus is the reason 00:12:40.160 --> 00:12:40.720 for it. 00:12:40.720 --> 00:12:42.880 That's the entirety of the Christian faith. 00:12:42.880 --> 00:12:45.440 So right at the outset, just want to make the case that 00:12:45.440 --> 00:12:50.640 there's no there's no comparison between the fact that teaching more and 00:12:50.640 --> 00:12:52.000 more things about God 00:12:52.960 --> 00:12:54.640 is certainly a lifelong pursuit. 00:12:54.640 --> 00:12:57.360 You can spend your entire life reading the Bible and only begin 00:12:57.360 --> 00:12:59.200 to scratch the surface. 00:12:59.200 --> 00:13:03.680 That's not the same as a sort of Gnostic, esoteric, hidden knowledge 00:13:03.920 --> 00:13:06.480 that is so appealing, and it's one of the ways it gets 00:13:06.480 --> 00:13:09.520 people distracted from what God actually wants for us. 00:13:09.520 --> 00:13:12.720 So this impulse is always present and it's really a dangerous 00:13:12.720 --> 00:13:13.120 one. 00:13:13.520 --> 00:13:17.120 To give a concrete example here of where this crops up in 00:13:17.120 --> 00:13:23.920 the modern church with the greatest frequency, I would highlight Pentecostalism. 00:13:23.920 --> 00:13:27.040 And I use that as an umbrella term. 00:13:27.040 --> 00:13:32.000 Because we see in Scripture very clearly that God works through means, 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:35.200 not least of all being Scripture itself. 00:13:35.200 --> 00:13:38.720 God is given us His Word, and He has given us the 00:13:38.720 --> 00:13:44.240 sacraments. God works through means to create faith. 00:13:44.240 --> 00:13:50.240 And largely even those Christians who are listening now and disagree with 00:13:50.240 --> 00:13:53.360 us on the sacraments, I would recommend you go listen to those 00:13:53.360 --> 00:13:54.240 episodes again. 00:13:54.240 --> 00:13:57.520 But even if you would disagree with us on the sacraments, you 00:13:57.520 --> 00:14:01.360 will at a bare minimum, as a Christian, agree that the word 00:14:01.520 --> 00:14:01.680 of God 00:14:02.560 --> 00:14:07.360 is a means God uses to create faith, and he uses that 00:14:07.360 --> 00:14:09.600 when it is read or when it is heard. 00:14:09.600 --> 00:14:13.520 Scripture is very clear that is how this works. 00:14:13.600 --> 00:14:18.240 Pentecostalism, as an umbrella term, would be all of those strains that 00:14:18.240 --> 00:14:25.360 are Christianity adjacent that claim direct revelation, inspiration, some 00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:30.640 direct connection to God where absent the means of grace which God 00:14:30.640 --> 00:14:35.040 has instituted, man can come to a saving faith of God, a 00:14:35.040 --> 00:14:37.120 saving faith in God. 00:14:37.120 --> 00:14:41.520 That is fundamentally Gnostic, and Well will get to that with the 00:14:41.520 --> 00:14:43.360 second point here in a minute, but 00:14:44.800 --> 00:14:49.280 that is what you should think of when you hear or see 00:14:49.280 --> 00:14:55.040 Pentecostalism. It is a fundamentally Gnostic perversion of the Christian faith but 00:14:55.600 --> 00:14:58.560 Because again, God works through means. 00:14:58.560 --> 00:15:02.320 You do not go out and sit under a tree and just 00:15:02.480 --> 00:15:05.920 contemplate God or wait for God to come to you. 00:15:05.920 --> 00:15:08.080 He's given us his word. 00:15:08.080 --> 00:15:11.120 If you want to learn about God, if you want to learn 00:15:11.120 --> 00:15:15.360 about the things of God, use what he has provided. 00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:19.040 He has revealed himself to us in his word. 00:15:19.040 --> 00:15:21.600 And so anyone who tells you that you don't need the word 00:15:21.680 --> 00:15:25.760 of God, you just need to have a relationship with God, or 00:15:25.760 --> 00:15:30.400 you just need to contemplate God or anything like that, you're dealing 00:15:30.400 --> 00:15:34.000 with a religion, but that religion is not Christianity. 00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:37.680 That is a strain, that is a thread, that is a form 00:15:37.680 --> 00:15:39.920 of Gnosticism. 00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:43.440 One other thing that stands out when you look at that definition 00:15:43.440 --> 00:15:49.440 is In terms of partaking directly of the divine, that's pretty much 00:15:49.440 --> 00:15:51.760 Eastern Orthodoxy as well. 00:15:51.760 --> 00:15:57.040 All of the meditating on God and the navel gazing and pursuit 00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:00.080 outside of Scripture, trying to find God where God does not say 00:16:00.080 --> 00:16:03.840 he reveals himself is it's the same sort of thing. 00:16:03.840 --> 00:16:08.000 It's the same sort of pursuit that's it's funnel fundamentally a Gnostic 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.120 pursuit. And if you're EO, we're gonna beat up on everybody, but 00:16:11.040 --> 00:16:13.200 we're gonna spend most of the time, I'm gonna go spend most 00:16:13.200 --> 00:16:14.880 of this time going after Lutherans. 00:16:14.880 --> 00:16:16.960 So please don't tune out if like, oh man, they call me 00:16:16.960 --> 00:16:18.400 Gnostic, what a jerk. 00:16:18.640 --> 00:16:23.440 Lutherans have some serious problems now, so we we'll we're gonna deal 00:16:23.440 --> 00:16:24.800 with Roman Catholics too. 00:16:24.800 --> 00:16:28.640 Like everybody has this problem because we're all vulnerable to it. 00:16:28.640 --> 00:16:32.800 So it's if we ever finger point in some other denomination, rest 00:16:32.800 --> 00:16:35.680 assured, we are at least as unhappy as things that are going 00:16:35.680 --> 00:16:37.120 on in our denominations. 00:16:37.120 --> 00:16:41.760 So So this is going to be a a pan-denominational bloodbath in 00:16:41.760 --> 00:16:44.000 this episode because we all have these problems. 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:46.160 And sometimes they're subtle, sometimes they're profound. 00:16:46.160 --> 00:16:48.160 Like the Pentecostal thing is just wide open. 00:16:48.160 --> 00:16:50.880 They're just sitting there waiting for Jesus to tune in and drop 00:16:50.880 --> 00:16:52.720 new revelation on them. 00:16:52.720 --> 00:16:56.160 If anyone comes to you with a new revelation that is not 00:16:56.160 --> 00:16:59.120 from God, that isn't from Scripture, you need to put them out 00:16:59.120 --> 00:17:02.640 the window, whether it's somebody in your church or it's some new 00:17:02.800 --> 00:17:05.520 teacher or it's a podcaster, that is deadly. 00:17:05.520 --> 00:17:07.040 Scripture condemns that. 00:17:07.040 --> 00:17:09.520 You need to deal with those people as a threat to your 00:17:09.520 --> 00:17:12.240 soul because it's not what happens. 00:17:12.240 --> 00:17:18.320 And so one of the other aspects of Gnosticism that it's not 00:17:18.320 --> 00:17:23.120 a huge issue in the church today, but it's always a danger. 00:17:23.120 --> 00:17:26.160 And this is the one of the other key elements from from 00:17:26.160 --> 00:17:30.560 the origins of Gnosticism is that this sort of secret knowledge or 00:17:30.560 --> 00:17:35.440 gnosis? Incidentally, they have the same proto-Indo-European root, G N O and 00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:37.760 KNOW pronounced the same. 00:17:37.760 --> 00:17:40.640 That's originally the word for no. 00:17:40.640 --> 00:17:44.640 So six thousand years ago you could have said no to someone 00:17:44.880 --> 00:17:47.760 and you would have been saying the same thing. 00:17:48.240 --> 00:17:49.840 that that's just very interesting. 00:17:49.840 --> 00:17:52.800 But like it it it's that ancient a word to say you 00:17:52.800 --> 00:17:56.160 know something, same root as gnosis as gnosticism. 00:17:56.160 --> 00:18:00.560 And so it's I think important to highlight that the pursuit of 00:18:00.560 --> 00:18:02.560 knowledge is not itself bad. 00:18:02.560 --> 00:18:05.040 In fact, some of the the early context of the use of 00:18:05.040 --> 00:18:08.720 Gnostic was in some ways talking about learned men. 00:18:08.800 --> 00:18:11.200 He was kind of talking about some of the men that we 00:18:11.200 --> 00:18:15.040 find that were opponents of the early church, but they weren't dumb. 00:18:15.280 --> 00:18:17.520 You know, it was the Pharisees and some of the teachers, and 00:18:17.520 --> 00:18:21.040 even those who were outside of the Judaic cult, which was trying 00:18:21.360 --> 00:18:22.800 to destroy Christianity. 00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:25.680 There were other learned men that you know Paul went to in 00:18:25.680 --> 00:18:29.520 the Areopagus and elsewhere where they're philosophers. 00:18:29.520 --> 00:18:33.680 They were always pursuing knowledge as just part of their daily life. 00:18:33.680 --> 00:18:35.840 It's not It's not inherently bad to pursue knowledge. 00:18:35.840 --> 00:18:38.080 The problem is where are you getting it from and then where 00:18:38.080 --> 00:18:39.200 are you doing with it? 00:18:39.200 --> 00:18:43.040 And so as Christians, our concern is if these n if this 00:18:43.040 --> 00:18:47.680 knowledge of religion and specifically of God is not coming from where 00:18:47.680 --> 00:18:51.520 God told us we would find it, we're in danger. 00:18:51.520 --> 00:18:54.640 And uh one of the one of the other aspects of of 00:18:54.640 --> 00:18:56.400 Gnosticism is that 00:18:57.280 --> 00:19:01.840 there was a belief then that knowing these specific things were the 00:19:01.840 --> 00:19:03.440 means of salvation. 00:19:03.440 --> 00:19:07.280 So it wasn't knowing that Jesus died for your sins and believing 00:19:07.280 --> 00:19:10.000 that and having faith in that the saved. 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:12.000 It was specifically the knowledge. 00:19:12.160 --> 00:19:14.880 It was the one small portion of okay, now I have the 00:19:14.880 --> 00:19:19.360 fact. And the problem with this sort of approach is that it 00:19:19.360 --> 00:19:22.080 turns the faith into magic. 00:19:22.080 --> 00:19:25.520 It turns it into a sort of witchcraft where if you have 00:19:25.520 --> 00:19:30.160 the secret word, then you've captured the power behind it. 00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:31.840 We talked about last week in Judaism. 00:19:31.840 --> 00:19:33.040 We talked about Yahweh. 00:19:33.040 --> 00:19:34.480 That's an example of that. 00:19:34.480 --> 00:19:38.080 Not necessarily of imparting salvation, but of the secret knowledge that we 00:19:38.080 --> 00:19:40.480 think is being progressively revealed. 00:19:40.480 --> 00:19:43.760 And so some we've discovered, you know, Jehovah in the fifteen hundreds 00:19:43.840 --> 00:19:47.440 or whenever, and then Yahweh less than two centuries ago. 00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:50.480 And now that's the new secret name of God that you have 00:19:50.480 --> 00:19:52.640 to use if you want to refer to God. 00:19:53.600 --> 00:19:56.400 And it becomes it becomes a case for some people that they 00:19:56.400 --> 00:19:58.320 won't refer to God as God. 00:19:58.320 --> 00:19:59.840 They won't say I am. 00:19:59.840 --> 00:20:01.520 They'll say Jehovah. 00:20:01.520 --> 00:20:02.720 They won't call Jesus Jesus. 00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:04.560 They'll have to call him Yeshua. 00:20:04.560 --> 00:20:08.400 Why? Because it's somehow more authentic, even though it's absurd, even though 00:20:08.400 --> 00:20:13.440 it's not scriptural, but it's it's fundamentally Gnostic in a very small 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:16.160 way. And so I want to make explicit in in this first 00:20:16.160 --> 00:20:20.240 section that when we say that these things are Gnostic in nature, 00:20:20.240 --> 00:20:24.240 that's not saying that anyone who says Yahweh or Yeshua is a 00:20:24.240 --> 00:20:25.840 Gnostic. That would be stupid. 00:20:25.840 --> 00:20:27.440 That would be what people who I don't like that. 00:20:27.440 --> 00:20:28.320 That's just Gnostic. 00:20:28.320 --> 00:20:29.840 No, we're not saying that. 00:20:29.840 --> 00:20:34.400 We're saying that the the impulse underneath the desire to do that 00:20:34.560 --> 00:20:37.040 to say, well, I need a better name for God than God. 00:20:37.040 --> 00:20:37.840 God's not good enough. 00:20:37.840 --> 00:20:39.600 I need I need the secret name. 00:20:39.600 --> 00:20:42.160 Congratulations, that's a Gnostic impulse. 00:20:42.160 --> 00:20:43.360 Full stop. 00:20:43.440 --> 00:20:46.880 In any century. 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:50.560 I think it's interesting to note that one of the things that 00:20:50.560 --> 00:20:53.600 you see a lot, particularly on social media with a lot of 00:20:53.600 --> 00:20:58.560 guys, particularly younger guys who are what's called cage stage, where you 00:20:58.560 --> 00:21:02.160 just discover your faith, you or you're just reinvigorated. 00:21:02.160 --> 00:21:05.120 Especially if they're if they're a little bit intelligent, you want to 00:21:05.120 --> 00:21:06.080 dig into the stuff. 00:21:06.080 --> 00:21:08.640 You want to read more, you want to learn more, you want 00:21:08.640 --> 00:21:11.280 to learn as much as you can because you're you're excited about 00:21:11.280 --> 00:21:14.400 God, you're excited about Christianity and about your faith. 00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:19.520 And the very subtle error that I would caution is potentially Gnostic 00:21:19.520 --> 00:21:24.640 in that space is that when the desire to accumulate knowledge and 00:21:24.640 --> 00:21:25.280 facts 00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:29.760 ends up being the intermediate point that you focus on, instead of 00:21:29.760 --> 00:21:33.200 focusing on you like you at some point you accumulate so much 00:21:33.200 --> 00:21:35.840 knowledge and you get such a big library and you have so 00:21:35.840 --> 00:21:40.960 many arguments and talking points for all these different fiddly sixth century 00:21:40.960 --> 00:21:44.320 councils almost no one's ever heard of, but you have really strongly 00:21:44.320 --> 00:21:46.560 held opinions on them. 00:21:46.560 --> 00:21:51.280 When that becomes your predominant focus, it's entirely possible to begin to 00:21:51.280 --> 00:21:52.480 lose sight of God. 00:21:52.480 --> 00:21:55.600 Because although those arguments in those days were pointing to God, they 00:21:55.600 --> 00:21:59.200 were about God, your focus can potentially be 00:22:00.080 --> 00:22:02.240 on having the knowledge itself. 00:22:02.240 --> 00:22:05.360 And you think, okay, I've accumulated this stuff, I have these facts, 00:22:05.360 --> 00:22:08.160 I have all these details, now I'm a better Christian. 00:22:08.160 --> 00:22:09.200 And you're just not. 00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:11.920 You could be totally ignorant of all that stuff and potentially be 00:22:11.920 --> 00:22:13.760 a better Christian than you are with it. 00:22:13.760 --> 00:22:16.880 Not because the knowledge itself is bad, but because the emphasis it 00:22:16.880 --> 00:22:20.880 was placed on pouring out all that energy, like to what end? 00:22:20.880 --> 00:22:25.200 If you can eloquently argue with somebody on Twitter about a sixth 00:22:25.280 --> 00:22:28.000 century church council, so what? 00:22:28.240 --> 00:22:30.160 What has that done for anyone? 00:22:30.160 --> 00:22:32.800 Now maybe there's some interesting point, like you know, we're talking about 00:22:32.800 --> 00:22:36.560 a historical point here, but I want to highlight that when Corey 00:22:36.560 --> 00:22:42.480 and I tackle historical subjects, it's superficially, and that's deliberately. 00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:45.600 It's not that we're not capable of digging deeply into these things, 00:22:45.600 --> 00:22:49.920 is that I am very pragmatic about what I want to talk 00:22:49.920 --> 00:22:53.600 about. When we approach a subject, it needs to be immediate, it 00:22:53.600 --> 00:22:57.200 needs to actually be hurting people today. 00:22:57.200 --> 00:23:00.640 Sixth century councils aren't hurting anybody. 00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:04.240 First century Gnosticism isn't hurting anybody. 00:23:04.240 --> 00:23:08.320 If you go down the checklist of the specific cults that existed, 00:23:08.320 --> 00:23:10.400 you're not going to find them by and large. 00:23:10.400 --> 00:23:15.440 What you will find is the underlying spirit of those cults re-emerging 00:23:15.440 --> 00:23:18.080 in all these little pace places by varying degrees. 00:23:18.080 --> 00:23:19.920 And so that's what can certainly. 00:23:19.920 --> 00:23:22.560 It's not that there was some weird thing in the first century 00:23:22.560 --> 00:23:26.240 that's re-emerged and so let's spend all this time talking about history. 00:23:26.240 --> 00:23:28.480 It's that when we know that the evil thing in the first 00:23:28.560 --> 00:23:33.600 and second century bore evil fruit, it had nothing but evil surrounding 00:23:33.600 --> 00:23:36.960 it. In all of the church history it was always condemned it. 00:23:36.960 --> 00:23:39.680 And I if I can say, yeah, this new thing has the 00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:43.280 same roots as that, I don't need to worry anymore about how 00:23:43.280 --> 00:23:44.160 good or bad it is. 00:23:44.160 --> 00:23:47.280 I know it's evil because I know that there's a Gnostic root 00:23:47.280 --> 00:23:48.560 underneath it. 00:23:48.560 --> 00:23:51.920 Now I'm not saying that cage stage guys are Gnostic at all. 00:23:51.920 --> 00:23:54.240 It's I'm not being stupid about it. 00:23:54.240 --> 00:23:56.800 I'm just saying that there's a there's a desire that we all 00:23:56.800 --> 00:23:59.440 have to want to know more, to want to level up. 00:23:59.440 --> 00:24:01.680 And Christianity doesn't have levels. 00:24:01.680 --> 00:24:05.120 Christianity has depth and substance, but it's not the same thing. 00:24:05.120 --> 00:24:09.040 It's like there are ranks, there aren't secret tiers, there's no, there's 00:24:09.040 --> 00:24:12.720 no paywall, there's no Patreon level for Jesus. 00:24:12.880 --> 00:24:15.280 You're in or you're out, and that's all. 00:24:15.280 --> 00:24:17.280 And the more you know, the better off you are. 00:24:17.280 --> 00:24:20.000 But all the things that God gives us are free and they're 00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:20.880 in scripture. 00:24:21.120 --> 00:24:24.880 It's interesting when you look at the transition from Hebrew to Greek 00:24:24.880 --> 00:24:30.000 in the Old Testament, that was the end of the oral tradition, 00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:33.840 because the oral tradition was only needed when you had vowel pointing, 00:24:33.840 --> 00:24:37.440 when everything had been written down in the Tanakh, and then it 00:24:37.440 --> 00:24:42.960 was translated by those faithful scribes into Greek, it was fully fleshed 00:24:42.960 --> 00:24:46.560 out. There was no longer a need for an oral tradition to 00:24:46.800 --> 00:24:49.200 explain anything from scratch. 00:24:49.200 --> 00:24:52.960 Now it was certainly still valuable because insofar as they were teaching 00:24:52.960 --> 00:24:55.600 faithfully, it was consistent with the text. 00:24:55.600 --> 00:24:58.960 But at that point you could hand a Greek Old Testament, a 00:24:58.960 --> 00:25:03.920 Greek Tanakh, the Septuagint, to anyone and if he understood Greek well 00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:06.880 he could come to faith by it all by himself he didn't 00:25:06.800 --> 00:25:10.240 need any secret knowledge to be able to access it and I 00:25:10.240 --> 00:25:12.480 think that was it was a very interesting moment in history where 00:25:12.560 --> 00:25:17.520 in a way God really put oral tricks tradition to death. 00:25:17.520 --> 00:25:20.640 And what we've seen since then is wherever oral tradition is preserved, 00:25:20.640 --> 00:25:25.040 it causes problems because it's invariably departing from the text. 00:25:25.040 --> 00:25:28.880 And so just knowing a bunch of stuff isn't going to save 00:25:28.880 --> 00:25:32.080 you, but it can potentially create a problem for your faith if 00:25:32.080 --> 00:25:33.520 you think, well, I gotta know more. 00:25:33.520 --> 00:25:34.800 I'm not a good enough Christian. 00:25:34.800 --> 00:25:35.440 You don't. 00:25:35.440 --> 00:25:37.440 You don't have to listen to a podcast to be a good 00:25:37.440 --> 00:25:40.320 Christian. You have to know what we know or care about what 00:25:40.320 --> 00:25:42.240 we care about to be a good Christian. 00:25:42.240 --> 00:25:45.840 Being a good Christian is very simply believing in God and obeying 00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:48.400 Him. And if your conscience says, you know what, I think I'm 00:25:48.400 --> 00:25:51.360 missing out on something, I should spend more time in your Bible, 00:25:51.360 --> 00:25:52.000 do that. 00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:54.080 And you'll have more of what God wants for you. 00:25:54.080 --> 00:25:55.600 But there's no progressive revelation. 00:25:55.600 --> 00:26:02.000 It's all right there for uh for the taking. 00:26:02.080 --> 00:26:05.360 For those who spend a lot of time on some of these 00:26:05.520 --> 00:26:10.640 ancient conflicts and various minutia, and by that I don't necessarily mean 00:26:10.640 --> 00:26:13.840 that they are unimportant, because they may very well be important. 00:26:13.840 --> 00:26:18.000 But there's a difference again, as Wo has just said, between importance 00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:20.160 and relevance. 00:26:20.240 --> 00:26:22.960 But I think a good standard, a good question for you to 00:26:22.960 --> 00:26:27.120 ask yourself if you think you may possibly be in that camp. 00:26:27.120 --> 00:26:30.560 Would you be just as happy arguing with someone on the internet 00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:35.520 about your favorite fantasy army or military or faction. 00:26:35.520 --> 00:26:38.880 And if that's the case, then maybe you just like arguing and 00:26:38.880 --> 00:26:42.640 you've found a niche in which you can argue about something that 00:26:42.640 --> 00:26:48.320 really doesn't actually have any import or any importance in the current 00:26:48.320 --> 00:26:53.360 context. And if you are trying to invest that time in a 00:26:53.360 --> 00:26:56.960 Christian way, I'm not saying that investing your time in a hobby 00:26:56.960 --> 00:27:00.320 isn't Christian, because of course Christians can have hobbies, but if you're 00:27:00.240 --> 00:27:02.960 trying to invest that time in a way that you believe is 00:27:02.960 --> 00:27:06.480 explicitly a Christian use of that time, which is to say a 00:27:06.480 --> 00:27:13.040 pursuit of the Christian faith itself, then maybe just read scripture instead 00:27:13.040 --> 00:27:18.000 of the old counsels, because by and large, those battles aren't live. 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:21.680 These are not things over which we are having actual fights today. 00:27:21.680 --> 00:27:25.680 These are not things that are endangering souls today. 00:27:25.680 --> 00:27:30.880 So just read scripture, rather than reading whatever counsel it happens to 00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:33.680 be. Go and read several books of scripture. 00:27:33.680 --> 00:27:36.240 You can probably do it in about the same time. 00:27:36.240 --> 00:27:39.840 It's going to be of greater utility to you to read through 00:27:39.840 --> 00:27:40.240 scripture 00:27:41.360 --> 00:27:43.840 again, however many times you've read the book. 00:27:43.840 --> 00:27:48.160 It's always profitable to read it again. 00:27:48.160 --> 00:27:51.680 There is another issue that I want to bring up here because 00:27:51.680 --> 00:27:54.000 it's an important way to frame 00:27:54.880 --> 00:28:01.520 the issue of knowledge and the division here between the sort of 00:28:01.520 --> 00:28:07.200 Gnostic conception of knowledge and what it does, and the Christian conception. 00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:09.840 This has come up in a number of other episodes, but I 00:28:09.840 --> 00:28:13.600 will go over it again here because repetition is how we remember 00:28:13.600 --> 00:28:21.200 things. There's the There's the tripartite division within Christianity with regard 00:28:21.200 --> 00:28:25.360 to knowledge and how we react to that knowledge. 00:28:25.360 --> 00:28:29.600 And that would be notitia, as sensus, and fiducia. 00:28:29.600 --> 00:28:32.320 So to take notice of the thing, to assent to the thing, 00:28:32.320 --> 00:28:34.000 and to trust in the thing. 00:28:34.000 --> 00:28:38.400 These are terms that have basically direct equivalents in English, so you 00:28:38.400 --> 00:28:40.640 can readily understand even the Latin. 00:28:42.400 --> 00:28:45.360 What distinguishes Christianity is the third. 00:28:45.360 --> 00:28:48.480 It is fiducia, it is trust. 00:28:48.480 --> 00:28:53.920 It does not save you that you recognize the Bible exists. 00:28:53.920 --> 00:28:58.000 It does not even save you if you recognize the things in 00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:00.880 the Bible are true. 00:29:00.880 --> 00:29:05.120 What saves you, what saving faith is, is the trust in those 00:29:05.120 --> 00:29:08.320 things that those things were undertaken by God 00:29:09.200 --> 00:29:10.480 for you. 00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:14.720 No, they were undertaken, of course, for the entirety of creation, because 00:29:14.720 --> 00:29:19.200 Christ redeemed creation in his death and resurrection. 00:29:19.200 --> 00:29:24.160 However, It is that personal faith that applies that salvation to you. 00:29:24.160 --> 00:29:26.880 This is the subjective justification. 00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:28.320 This is what saves you. 00:29:28.320 --> 00:29:30.400 And that is fiducia. 00:29:30.640 --> 00:29:34.880 The distinction here is that these Gnostic cults inevitably 00:29:35.760 --> 00:29:38.800 rely heavily on a sensus. 00:29:38.800 --> 00:29:42.400 Now they do play around with notitia as well because a big 00:29:42.400 --> 00:29:47.440 part of the cult, the initiation into the cult, is just to 00:29:47.440 --> 00:29:52.960 recognize the existence of this secret knowledge, to be given access to 00:29:52.960 --> 00:29:57.360 it, and then to accept it at a sensus level, that's what 00:29:57.360 --> 00:29:59.440 makes you a part of the Gnostic cult. 00:29:59.440 --> 00:30:04.000 That is what they really are at their core, at their foundation. 00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:10.080 And you see this in basically the division between any religion that 00:30:10.080 --> 00:30:13.680 is not Christian and Christianity. 00:30:13.680 --> 00:30:14.640 Because Christianity 00:30:15.520 --> 00:30:20.800 relies on faith, relies on that trust, relies on that third level, 00:30:20.800 --> 00:30:22.560 the belief. 00:30:22.560 --> 00:30:25.040 That is what saves you. 00:30:25.040 --> 00:30:30.800 Whereas in every other religion, it's generally works, but they also have 00:30:30.800 --> 00:30:35.680 this aspect of secret knowledge, particularly the mystery cults in ancient Greece 00:30:35.840 --> 00:30:39.440 and Rome and other places, but we're not getting into the specifics 00:30:39.440 --> 00:30:43.440 of the history in this episode, as Woe already said. 00:30:43.440 --> 00:30:49.280 But it's helpful to have this framework in mind not only during 00:30:49.280 --> 00:30:52.000 this episode, but when you are listening to things out in your 00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:55.600 Out in your everyday life, when you are assessing things in our 00:30:55.600 --> 00:31:03.040 culture, is this Gnosticism that is being sold to me as Christianity? 00:31:03.040 --> 00:31:07.120 Because that is often the case, you'll have a Gnostic cult that'll 00:31:07.120 --> 00:31:09.200 wear a Christian mask. 00:31:09.200 --> 00:31:12.320 The Mormons are one of the best examples of this, even though 00:31:12.320 --> 00:31:15.680 very few people in this audience are going to fall for the 00:31:15.680 --> 00:31:16.960 Mormon claim to being Christian. 00:31:16.960 --> 00:31:21.200 There are plenty of people in the United States and elsewhere who 00:31:21.200 --> 00:31:23.440 believe the Mormons are Christian. 00:31:23.440 --> 00:31:26.400 Maybe a little weird, off in their little corner doing their own 00:31:26.400 --> 00:31:30.080 thing, although there are now millions of them, but still Christian, because 00:31:30.080 --> 00:31:32.160 they Because that's what they pretend to be. 00:31:32.160 --> 00:31:35.200 They will wear that mask until you're a temple Mormon, then they 00:31:35.200 --> 00:31:37.920 drop the mask and tell you that Satan is Jesus Christ's brother 00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:40.080 and all these other things, and you're going to rule a planet 00:31:40.080 --> 00:31:41.200 when you die. 00:31:43.280 --> 00:31:46.160 But you need to be careful as a Christian, to make sure 00:31:46.160 --> 00:31:49.600 that you aren't falling for a demon that just happens to be 00:31:49.600 --> 00:31:51.760 wearing a mask. 00:31:51.760 --> 00:31:54.720 Because Satan appears as an angel of light. 00:31:54.720 --> 00:31:57.120 He's not going to come to you as Satan, because if he 00:31:57.120 --> 00:31:59.920 comes to you as Satan, the odds you're going to fall for 00:31:59.920 --> 00:32:01.520 that are pretty low. 00:32:01.520 --> 00:32:05.520 But if he comes to you and says, I'm Christian just like 00:32:05.520 --> 00:32:09.840 you, brother, and I've discovered something, and you need to hear about 00:32:09.840 --> 00:32:12.320 it. Your hackles should go up, the hair on the back of 00:32:12.320 --> 00:32:14.000 your neck should stand up. 00:32:14.000 --> 00:32:17.680 You are in danger with regard to your eternal soul. 00:32:17.680 --> 00:32:23.520 And so bear this framework in mind, because Christianity is fundamentally different. 00:32:23.520 --> 00:32:26.960 It is different in kind from these false religions. 00:32:26.960 --> 00:32:30.240 Because what distinguishes Christianity is faith. 00:32:30.240 --> 00:32:32.320 It's not secret knowledge. 00:32:32.320 --> 00:32:34.880 Now I'm not saying that knowledge isn't important, because again, all three 00:32:34.880 --> 00:32:37.760 of these levels also apply in Christianity. 00:32:37.760 --> 00:32:42.080 It is important to take notice of the fact that Christ did 00:32:42.240 --> 00:32:47.120 become incarnate, that he did die, that he was resurrected. 00:32:47.120 --> 00:32:52.080 It is also important to assent to those facts as facts. 00:32:52.080 --> 00:32:56.080 But a Christian believes in them, trusts in them, has faith in 00:32:56.080 --> 00:32:58.720 them. That is what distinguishes Christianity. 00:32:58.720 --> 00:33:01.200 And that is one of the ways that you can tell false 00:33:01.200 --> 00:33:06.640 religion from true religion and Gnosticism from Christianity in this case. 00:33:07.680 --> 00:33:13.360 The fact that Mormons today masquerade as Christian is just historically absurd. 00:33:13.360 --> 00:33:16.640 Until like the last thirty or forty years, it was never the 00:33:16.640 --> 00:33:20.960 case. They saw us as separ they saw Christianity as a separate 00:33:21.120 --> 00:33:22.720 competing religion. 00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:25.920 Just as it's it's a say it's just as absurd as the 00:33:25.920 --> 00:33:28.320 claim today that Jews are white. 00:33:28.320 --> 00:33:30.160 Forty years ago it wasn't the case. 00:33:30.160 --> 00:33:32.240 It was never the case historically. 00:33:32.240 --> 00:33:34.800 The identity of the thing was one way. 00:33:34.800 --> 00:33:39.440 And then suddenly when it becomes advantageous for the group to identify 00:33:39.440 --> 00:33:42.240 differently, they just morph. 00:33:42.240 --> 00:33:45.600 And this is this is one of the fundamental problems that we're 00:33:45.600 --> 00:33:47.120 facing continuously. 00:33:47.120 --> 00:33:51.280 If something has no actual roots, if it can just transform on 00:33:51.280 --> 00:33:54.800 the fly like a hallucination, you you can never get your hands 00:33:54.800 --> 00:33:55.920 around it. 00:33:55.920 --> 00:33:58.160 It's always a hallmark of deception. 00:33:58.160 --> 00:34:01.840 Something that's true today will still be true in a hundred years. 00:34:01.840 --> 00:34:05.600 Even if things change, maybe it's no longer true because the thing 00:34:05.600 --> 00:34:08.000 is wiped out, but it was true today. 00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:14.560 You can't undo the truth retroactively, which incidentally is really the next 00:34:14.560 --> 00:34:20.400 point. One of the other key fundamental elements of Gnosticism, the early 00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:24.080 religions, that is where we spend a lot of time today, is 00:34:24.080 --> 00:34:25.280 the demiurge. 00:34:25.280 --> 00:34:26.800 We've talked about this before. 00:34:26.800 --> 00:34:32.240 One of the key doctrinal claims in the Gnostic cults was that 00:34:32.240 --> 00:34:34.720 there were two opposing gods. 00:34:34.720 --> 00:34:39.040 And the cults varied depending on whether or not the demiurge of 00:34:39.200 --> 00:34:46.160 before Jesus was equal to the the newer god or if they 00:34:46.160 --> 00:34:48.320 were subservient did one create the other. 00:34:48.320 --> 00:34:51.520 There were they argued over that, which is why the fiddly autistic 00:34:51.520 --> 00:34:54.560 arguments over well that's not Gnosticism because blah don't care. 00:34:54.560 --> 00:34:57.840 The demiurge is the important part because the demiurge is the old 00:34:57.840 --> 00:34:59.280 testament god. 00:34:59.280 --> 00:35:00.640 That's a phrase that you've heard. 00:35:00.640 --> 00:35:02.480 Oh that's the old testament god. 00:35:02.480 --> 00:35:04.880 Well if the old testament god is not the same as the 00:35:04.880 --> 00:35:10.800 new testament god then they're both satan because god is eternal he 00:35:10.800 --> 00:35:12.800 doesn't wink in and out of existence. 00:35:12.800 --> 00:35:15.680 There's no one God here and then he changes and he's something 00:35:15.680 --> 00:35:16.640 else later. 00:35:16.640 --> 00:35:18.880 That is not our God. 00:35:18.880 --> 00:35:23.520 And we've talked about particularly in the perfect hatred episode, talking about 00:35:23.520 --> 00:35:28.560 how it's become common in Lutheranism in particular, but certainly everywhere, that 00:35:28.560 --> 00:35:33.440 men will say sure, the Old Testament, which is a terrible name, 00:35:33.440 --> 00:35:37.200 by setting old and new in opposition, suddenly it becomes you can 00:35:37.200 --> 00:35:39.840 just discard it like well that's it doesn't really count because Jesus 00:35:39.840 --> 00:35:41.200 came so now we have this new stuff. 00:35:41.200 --> 00:35:43.920 Well, Jesus came pointing to the old stuff. 00:35:43.920 --> 00:35:48.640 The scripture that Jesus preached from, that the apostles preached from, that 00:35:48.640 --> 00:35:51.120 Paul reasoned from, was the Old Testament. 00:35:51.120 --> 00:35:52.320 It was the Tanakh. 00:35:52.320 --> 00:35:55.120 It was all the stuff that we call old. 00:35:55.120 --> 00:35:56.240 For them it wasn't old. 00:35:56.240 --> 00:35:57.760 It was it was the faith. 00:35:57.760 --> 00:35:59.680 It's still the faith. 00:35:59.680 --> 00:36:03.040 What we have the benefit of today is everything that they said 00:36:03.360 --> 00:36:06.000 and wrote down is also recorded for us. 00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:08.240 But it's all an explication of what was said before. 00:36:08.240 --> 00:36:09.760 So there's not two religions. 00:36:09.760 --> 00:36:13.440 There's not a Judeo portion and then a Christian portion. 00:36:13.440 --> 00:36:16.240 It's all Christian because it's all pointed towards God. 00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:17.840 It's a fundamental element. 00:36:17.840 --> 00:36:20.640 Like if you if you never learn anything else from Stone Choir 00:36:20.640 --> 00:36:23.680 that you can hang your head on, please let that be it. 00:36:23.680 --> 00:36:25.360 Christianity is eternal. 00:36:25.360 --> 00:36:26.400 Adam was a Christian. 00:36:26.400 --> 00:36:27.920 You're a Christian. 00:36:27.920 --> 00:36:30.960 It's all pointed to God. 00:36:30.960 --> 00:36:37.360 What we see with this Gnostic heresy actually manifesting today is that 00:36:37.360 --> 00:36:40.320 guys will actually say, well, the old testament God did this and 00:36:40.320 --> 00:36:42.000 then things changed. 00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:46.480 And it's very notable that in in the in the Gibbs essay 00:36:46.480 --> 00:36:50.000 that I referenced in that perfect hatred episode, in what we see 00:36:50.000 --> 00:36:53.840 today in many of the new Lutheran commentaries, they go out of 00:36:53.840 --> 00:36:58.000 their way to reference the God, the God in the Old Testament 00:36:58.160 --> 00:36:59.040 as Yahweh. 00:36:59.040 --> 00:37:00.480 They don't call him God any more. 00:37:00.480 --> 00:37:02.800 Well he don't say I am, where it's relevant. 00:37:02.800 --> 00:37:04.320 They say Yahweh. 00:37:04.320 --> 00:37:08.880 We talked at length last week about how that is a Judaizing, 00:37:08.880 --> 00:37:11.280 and B it's a satanic invocation. 00:37:11.280 --> 00:37:14.400 To say Yahweh is invoking the Antichrist. 00:37:14.400 --> 00:37:18.960 There's no other explanation for what happened in the last two centuries 00:37:18.960 --> 00:37:21.360 to produce those sounds. 00:37:21.360 --> 00:37:25.280 And one of the reasons that they won't call God God is 00:37:25.280 --> 00:37:27.760 because demons can't call on his name. 00:37:27.760 --> 00:37:32.320 If they call him Yahweh or Yahweh God, they're changing the variable. 00:37:32.320 --> 00:37:35.520 They're talking about something different, and they will explicitly say that. 00:37:35.760 --> 00:37:40.480 Anytime someone talks about Yahweh in the Old Testament and doesn't also 00:37:40.480 --> 00:37:44.080 talk about Yahweh in the New Testament as the immediate God in 00:37:44.080 --> 00:37:48.480 that age and in our age, they're talking about the demiurge. 00:37:48.480 --> 00:37:53.280 They're talking about a bifurcation of multiple deities, competing deities. 00:37:53.280 --> 00:37:56.640 And one of the key elements of the demiurge was he was 00:37:56.640 --> 00:38:00.800 evil. The evil of the Old Testament, the God who killed people, 00:38:00.800 --> 00:38:06.320 the God who was was judgy, the God who didn't just had 00:38:06.320 --> 00:38:09.280 these rules, that is seen as evil. 00:38:09.280 --> 00:38:12.560 And that's that's a perception that some people have today of their 00:38:12.560 --> 00:38:14.720 God, or who they claim to be their God. 00:38:14.720 --> 00:38:16.720 Can God be your God if you call him evil? 00:38:16.720 --> 00:38:17.840 I don't think so. 00:38:17.840 --> 00:38:21.440 I don't think you can call God evil and have a promise 00:38:21.440 --> 00:38:22.640 of salvation. 00:38:22.640 --> 00:38:25.680 And in our own denomination, this happened last year. 00:38:26.000 --> 00:38:30.480 In direct condemnation of this podcast, the LCMS put out a press 00:38:30.480 --> 00:38:34.400 release where in the name of every pastor in the synod they 00:38:34.400 --> 00:38:38.720 explicitly denounced numerous teachings of the Bible. 00:38:38.720 --> 00:38:41.520 They specifically highlighted one that's incredible. 00:38:41.520 --> 00:38:44.480 They said that genocide is always evil. 00:38:44.480 --> 00:38:46.720 When you look at the Old Testament, we made the case in 00:38:46.720 --> 00:38:50.640 the episode against the Antichrist, went into detail on how to say 00:38:50.640 --> 00:38:54.240 something like that is inherently to say that God is evil Is 00:38:54.240 --> 00:38:58.720 evil. When the president of the LCMS and all the pastors and 00:38:58.720 --> 00:39:03.280 all the district presidents who participated willingly in publishing that in the 00:39:03.280 --> 00:39:06.960 name of all Christians, and indeed, this was said in the name 00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:08.160 of Christ we condemn it. 00:39:08.160 --> 00:39:10.640 That was how Harrison ended that paragraph. 00:39:10.640 --> 00:39:13.440 Specifically said that to commit genocide is evil. 00:39:13.440 --> 00:39:17.200 He was talking about the demiurge because the old testament God was 00:39:17.200 --> 00:39:20.640 evil. And then there's a new God when Jesus showed up. 00:39:20.640 --> 00:39:24.800 We have a new set of deities and everything's hunky dory now. 00:39:24.800 --> 00:39:27.840 That's that is straight up Gnosticism. 00:39:27.840 --> 00:39:32.160 No holds barred, no equivocation, no need to play any games with 00:39:32.160 --> 00:39:36.240 definitions. This is a Gnostic heresy full stop. 00:39:36.240 --> 00:39:39.680 It's on full display today, not only in Lutheranism, but in all 00:39:39.680 --> 00:39:43.520 Protestantism and really in pretty much everywhere, because it's a necessary part 00:39:43.520 --> 00:39:45.280 of the global religion. 00:39:45.280 --> 00:39:48.720 Because when you look at the Old Testament, you find slavery, you 00:39:48.720 --> 00:39:52.800 find racism, you find women being treated as women and not as 00:39:52.800 --> 00:39:58.320 equals, you find the slaughter of wicked people on moss. 00:39:58.320 --> 00:39:59.440 Everybody gets killed. 00:39:59.440 --> 00:40:02.720 They even like there were places where God said not only kill 00:40:02.720 --> 00:40:05.680 every living human, he said kill all the animals and all the 00:40:05.680 --> 00:40:08.000 livestock. So kill everything. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:09.520 That's our God. 00:40:09.520 --> 00:40:12.080 If that's not your God, then you don't have the God of 00:40:12.080 --> 00:40:13.040 the Bible. 00:40:13.040 --> 00:40:15.920 Like there's not an Old Testament one and then a New Testament 00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:17.600 one. There's one God. 00:40:17.600 --> 00:40:19.920 That is the Christian confession. 00:40:19.920 --> 00:40:25.360 So this is one of those places where Christianity today has come 00:40:25.360 --> 00:40:29.440 to a crossroads where guys who will just they'll they'll subtly adopt 00:40:29.440 --> 00:40:32.560 the Judaizing practice of saying, Well, yeah, I was Yahweh God in 00:40:32.560 --> 00:40:34.720 the old testament, and then Jesus came. 00:40:34.720 --> 00:40:37.520 And so, you know, they play games and say it's the same 00:40:37.520 --> 00:40:42.080 God, but when the confession is called into question, they'll say racism 00:40:42.080 --> 00:40:42.480 is bad. 00:40:42.480 --> 00:40:44.480 There's lots of racism in the Old Testament. 00:40:44.480 --> 00:40:46.560 There's lots of slaves in the Old Testament. 00:40:46.560 --> 00:40:48.560 And the Old Testament never says it's bad. 00:40:48.560 --> 00:40:51.920 Like we did in a whole episode on slavery as a Bible 00:40:51.920 --> 00:40:53.440 study. There's nothing. 00:40:53.440 --> 00:40:55.440 Even the New Testament doesn't say it as well. 00:40:55.440 --> 00:40:57.920 But so we try to make sure that we call out when 00:40:57.920 --> 00:41:01.680 people play these games to try to set the so-called old against 00:41:01.680 --> 00:41:03.040 the so-called new. 00:41:03.200 --> 00:41:06.720 Scripture is scripture, it's all breathed out by God. 00:41:06.720 --> 00:41:10.960 It's all useful for reproof and rebuke and correction of error. 00:41:10.960 --> 00:41:14.160 Every word of it, every jot and tittle, that's what it says. 00:41:14.160 --> 00:41:16.640 So we have to believe that or we have to say God's 00:41:16.640 --> 00:41:19.200 a liar and why are we wasting our time? 00:41:19.200 --> 00:41:21.680 There are much easier things to do with your life if there 00:41:21.680 --> 00:41:23.760 is no God than this. 00:41:23.760 --> 00:41:25.040 It's not fun. 00:41:25.040 --> 00:41:29.760 You like the rewards are few and fleeting, the punishments are frequent 00:41:29.920 --> 00:41:32.560 and sometimes more than some people can bear. 00:41:32.560 --> 00:41:35.360 This is not what you would invent as a religion. 00:41:35.360 --> 00:41:37.920 It's what God has given us because it's true. 00:41:37.920 --> 00:41:40.160 And so when people come along and say, Oh, I have the 00:41:40.160 --> 00:41:42.640 secret revelation, let me improve it. 00:41:42.640 --> 00:41:44.320 Let me find a new sin. 00:41:44.400 --> 00:41:48.800 As the the racism episode And the feminism episode, these things that 00:41:48.800 --> 00:41:52.480 were not sins for thousands of years became sins by virtue of 00:41:52.720 --> 00:41:54.480 Gnostic Revelation. 00:41:54.480 --> 00:41:58.240 Now, the game that they have played is that they didn't say 00:41:58.560 --> 00:41:59.920 what the Mormons say. 00:41:59.920 --> 00:42:02.800 They didn't say this is a new revelation of Jesus Christ, because 00:42:02.800 --> 00:42:04.320 that would be a bridge too far. 00:42:04.320 --> 00:42:09.040 Even idiotic Christians, even Christians who are almost asleep, would detect, hey, 00:42:09.040 --> 00:42:12.560 new revelation from Jesus Christ, that doesn't sound like Christianity. 00:42:12.560 --> 00:42:13.440 So what they do? 00:42:13.440 --> 00:42:15.040 They said, Oh, it was always a sin. 00:42:15.040 --> 00:42:17.120 It's always been a sin to do these things. 00:42:17.120 --> 00:42:18.480 This has always been wrong. 00:42:18.480 --> 00:42:21.600 And when someone like us comes along and says, well, doesn't that 00:42:21.600 --> 00:42:23.760 mean that everybody in the Bible is in hell? 00:42:23.760 --> 00:42:26.400 Like, oh no, don't worry, but they didn't, they didn't get it. 00:42:26.400 --> 00:42:27.440 We get it now. 00:42:27.440 --> 00:42:29.280 That's progressive revelation. 00:42:29.280 --> 00:42:32.000 That is a type of Gnosticism. 00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:35.440 And so we're not again, we're not making the fiddly case that 00:42:35.440 --> 00:42:38.400 we just want to shout Gnostic and call everything Gnostic. 00:42:38.400 --> 00:42:42.000 When you look at the moving parts and you see that this 00:42:42.080 --> 00:42:48.080 these specific details are the machinery of the Gnostic cult, you'll find 00:42:48.080 --> 00:42:49.920 it emerging in new forms. 00:42:49.920 --> 00:42:53.840 You know, if if I say the Yahweh is not only Judaizing, 00:42:53.840 --> 00:42:57.520 but it's also fundamentally Gnostic, if you want to be autistic about 00:42:57.520 --> 00:43:01.280 the definition of Judaizing in in the Bible, well, there were things 00:43:01.280 --> 00:43:05.440 that we said last week that are not condemned in scripture, not 00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:08.000 in the t in terms of they this were this was Judaizing 00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:11.120 heresy. Yahweh in particular, the word hadn't been invented yet. 00:43:11.600 --> 00:43:15.680 So if we say that that's Judaizing and you use what was 00:43:15.680 --> 00:43:19.920 Judaizing in the first century, obviously we're wrong because there was no 00:43:19.920 --> 00:43:21.680 Yahweh, so it can't be the same. 00:43:21.680 --> 00:43:25.760 That's why the conveyance of these principles is why we're doing these 00:43:25.760 --> 00:43:29.120 episodes. If we can explain to you, when you see these moving 00:43:29.120 --> 00:43:33.520 parts acting as a machine and they're producing certain results, you can 00:43:33.520 --> 00:43:35.200 identify the underlying cause. 00:43:35.200 --> 00:43:38.720 And the underlying cause, when you have guys running around saying Yahweh 00:43:38.720 --> 00:43:42.880 and saying that God sinned in the Old Testament, and your ancestors 00:43:42.880 --> 00:43:48.000 who were Christians sinned and they didn't repent, and so according to 00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:51.040 Christian doctrine, they must necessarily be in hell. 00:43:51.040 --> 00:43:54.400 They would usually won't get go that far, but there's no way 00:43:54.640 --> 00:43:57.600 to reconcile that with what the Christian faith teaches. 00:43:57.600 --> 00:44:00.880 If you have unrepentant sin, you're damned for it. 00:44:00.880 --> 00:44:03.280 Only the sins that we take to the cross are those that 00:44:03.280 --> 00:44:06.880 are forgiven, which is why it's a Christian duty to throw everything 00:44:06.880 --> 00:44:07.680 on the cross. 00:44:07.680 --> 00:44:11.360 Say, Lord have mercy on me, a poor, miserable sinner. 00:44:11.360 --> 00:44:12.560 That's every one of us. 00:44:12.560 --> 00:44:16.720 Doesn't the more you learn about Christianity, the more miserable a sinner 00:44:16.720 --> 00:44:18.080 you will realize you are. 00:44:18.080 --> 00:44:21.120 Because the more bad things you get rid of, the more you'll 00:44:21.120 --> 00:44:23.360 realize how many little subtle things are lurking. 00:44:23.360 --> 00:44:24.880 But it doesn't beat you down. 00:44:24.880 --> 00:44:29.520 It's supposed to give you an appreciation for the gospel that God 00:44:29.520 --> 00:44:32.880 loves you so much that He paid for the price for all 00:44:32.880 --> 00:44:35.920 this crap these these evil things you tried to do and the 00:44:35.920 --> 00:44:37.440 stupid things you didn't even know about. 00:44:37.440 --> 00:44:39.760 He paid for all of 'em because he loved you even when 00:44:39.760 --> 00:44:40.960 you were his enemy. 00:44:40.960 --> 00:44:43.200 That's the gospel. 00:44:43.200 --> 00:44:43.440 This 00:44:43.440 --> 00:44:48.720 is one of the things about Gnosticism that should be somewhat easy 00:44:48.720 --> 00:44:54.080 for most Christians to detect, at least when it is blatant, because 00:44:54.080 --> 00:44:58.560 this sort of dualism is rampant in the world. 00:44:58.560 --> 00:45:02.640 It is a standard feature of most of the false religions of 00:45:02.640 --> 00:45:04.960 the world to various degrees. 00:45:04.960 --> 00:45:09.360 Sometimes good is stronger than evil, sometimes evil is stronger than good. 00:45:09.360 --> 00:45:11.360 It depends on which mythology. 00:45:11.520 --> 00:45:15.040 But you have this sort of balancing between good and evil that 00:45:15.040 --> 00:45:20.160 you see across the world in these false religions. 00:45:20.240 --> 00:45:22.960 And that is not the case in Christianity. 00:45:22.960 --> 00:45:25.360 Satan is not God's equal. 00:45:25.360 --> 00:45:29.600 Satan is not God's opponent in the sense of being equally matched 00:45:29.680 --> 00:45:32.880 as you would be in a tennis match or something. 00:45:32.880 --> 00:45:37.600 Satan exists because God permits him to continue to exist for a 00:45:37.600 --> 00:45:41.360 time before damning him to hell for eternity. 00:45:41.360 --> 00:45:44.080 He'll still exist, which is not good news for him. 00:45:44.080 --> 00:45:47.520 It's not good news for anyone in hell. 00:45:47.520 --> 00:45:50.480 But there's no dualism in Christianity. 00:45:50.480 --> 00:45:54.800 There's good and evil, but good wins and it's not even close. 00:45:54.800 --> 00:45:59.360 Evil is permitted for a time. 00:45:59.360 --> 00:46:00.960 Evil does not have control. 00:46:01.360 --> 00:46:02.480 Evil did not create. 00:46:02.480 --> 00:46:04.080 Evil cannot create. 00:46:04.080 --> 00:46:06.240 It can only pervert. 00:46:06.240 --> 00:46:11.680 And so the sort of dualism that we see in these Gnostic 00:46:11.680 --> 00:46:18.080 groups, which often takes the form of the demiurge being responsible for 00:46:18.080 --> 00:46:20.640 the creation of the physical world. 00:46:20.640 --> 00:46:25.040 Now of course we're not talking about Plato and his conception were 00:46:25.120 --> 00:46:29.440 talking about the later form of Gnosticism for those who are familiar 00:46:29.440 --> 00:46:32.160 with, say, Timaeus. 00:46:32.160 --> 00:46:35.600 But this later form of Gnosticism that is the kind that is 00:46:35.600 --> 00:46:38.560 a problem for the church that is creeping back into things things 00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:46.160 places the creation of the material world within the demiurge. 00:46:46.160 --> 00:46:50.000 The demiurge is what created your physical body. 00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:54.080 It may be that God created your soul and created the parts 00:46:54.080 --> 00:46:56.400 of you that are actually good, and we'll get more into that 00:46:56.400 --> 00:47:00.720 issue of the distinction between the spirit and the flesh and how 00:47:00.720 --> 00:47:04.560 Gnosticism conceives of that distinction. 00:47:06.560 --> 00:47:12.080 But that simply is not Christian, because God created you, and you 00:47:12.720 --> 00:47:15.200 are spirit and flesh. 00:47:15.200 --> 00:47:18.320 Again, we're not going to get into whether you are spirit and 00:47:18.320 --> 00:47:20.800 flesh or spirit mind and flesh in this episode. 00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:22.000 That's not the point here. 00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:26.240 And having that debate, although it may be interesting, is not actually 00:47:26.240 --> 00:47:28.400 that relevant to this topic. 00:47:28.400 --> 00:47:29.040 The distinction 00:47:29.920 --> 00:47:34.400 is between the spirit and the flesh, and both are good. 00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:38.640 We'll get into this more at the end of the episode. 00:47:38.640 --> 00:47:41.520 But they're both good because God created both. 00:47:41.520 --> 00:47:45.520 As Christians, we do not get to deny that God is the 00:47:45.520 --> 00:47:49.600 author both of our body and of our soul. 00:47:49.600 --> 00:47:53.360 If you deny that He created one or the other, then you 00:47:53.360 --> 00:47:58.000 are attributing the powers of God to something that is not God. 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:01.600 Because if God didn't create your body, something created your body, because 00:48:01.600 --> 00:48:03.920 your body certainly exists. 00:48:03.920 --> 00:48:08.000 And so this is an error that sometimes comes up and has 00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:10.320 come up in the Christian church in the past, this is one 00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:14.240 that is actually relevant because people today still get this one wrong. 00:48:14.240 --> 00:48:18.000 And they may not even understand they are getting it wrong. 00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:23.440 In our fallen state, as we currently find ourselves. 00:48:23.440 --> 00:48:27.200 We are corrupted by original sin. 00:48:27.200 --> 00:48:30.960 Our nature is not original sin. 00:48:30.960 --> 00:48:34.240 Our flesh is not original sin. 00:48:34.480 --> 00:48:39.200 These things are in their essence good, because they are still creations 00:48:39.200 --> 00:48:42.000 of God, even in your fallen state. 00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:47.200 God created your body, God created your soul, God gave you life. 00:48:47.200 --> 00:48:51.440 These things, in so far as they are the creations of God, 00:48:51.440 --> 00:48:53.120 are good. 00:48:53.120 --> 00:48:58.000 They are tainted, they are corrupted by original sin in this life 00:48:58.080 --> 00:49:01.520 until you are restored fully in the next life. 00:49:02.560 --> 00:49:06.640 That corruption is the work of Satan, but it is not an 00:49:06.640 --> 00:49:07.760 original creation. 00:49:07.760 --> 00:49:09.520 It's not a creation at all. 00:49:09.520 --> 00:49:12.560 It is a corruption of God's good creation. 00:49:12.560 --> 00:49:17.600 And it is vitally important for Christians to distinguish these things, because 00:49:17.600 --> 00:49:22.160 if you say, for instance, that your nature in your fallen state 00:49:22.240 --> 00:49:27.600 is original sin, then what you are saying ultimately is that Satan 00:49:27.600 --> 00:49:29.520 created human nature. 00:49:29.520 --> 00:49:33.600 Because Because the corruption that is sin can be attributed to Satan 00:49:33.600 --> 00:49:36.640 bringing it into the world through our first parents. 00:49:36.640 --> 00:49:39.680 And so as a Christian, you must be careful here. 00:49:39.680 --> 00:49:43.360 God created human nature. 00:49:43.360 --> 00:49:45.200 Satan has corrupted it. 00:49:45.200 --> 00:49:46.400 There is a distinction there. 00:49:46.400 --> 00:49:50.320 Satan has not created any part of you. 00:49:50.320 --> 00:49:52.800 You can attribute again the corruption to him. 00:49:52.800 --> 00:49:55.040 He can be blamed for that. 00:49:55.040 --> 00:49:56.880 And he should be blamed for that. 00:49:56.880 --> 00:49:59.760 That's not to say we don't also bear blame, of course, because 00:49:59.760 --> 00:50:03.120 we bear blame for our sins, we have inherited original sins from 00:50:03.120 --> 00:50:04.240 our parents, etc 00:50:06.080 --> 00:50:10.480 But our nature again not at risk of ad nauseum because this 00:50:10.480 --> 00:50:13.760 is important and Christians need to understand it and take it to 00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:19.920 heart. Your nature, even in your fallen state is a creature of 00:50:19.920 --> 00:50:24.560 God created by God, and so any system that attempts to prop 00:50:24.560 --> 00:50:29.600 up this sort of dualism, where this part of creation is attributable 00:50:29.600 --> 00:50:32.480 to the demi urge and this part And this part of creation 00:50:32.480 --> 00:50:35.600 is attributable to God, and this part is good because it's from 00:50:35.600 --> 00:50:38.320 God, and that part is evil because it's from Satan. 00:50:38.320 --> 00:50:40.240 That is from Satan. 00:50:40.240 --> 00:50:43.360 That idea, that thinking is from Satan. 00:50:43.360 --> 00:50:47.440 Because that is Satan attempting to elevate himself to the level of 00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:48.080 a God. 00:50:48.080 --> 00:50:50.880 He'd like to elevate himself to the level of God. 00:50:50.880 --> 00:50:52.720 He can't do that. 00:50:52.720 --> 00:50:57.440 But if you believe that he has created something, that he has 00:50:57.440 --> 00:51:01.840 created your nature, whatever it happens to be, you are attributing to 00:51:01.840 --> 00:51:05.600 him the powers of deity and you are making him your god. 00:51:05.600 --> 00:51:09.200 Now you may also have other gods, but you now have a 00:51:09.200 --> 00:51:10.480 false god. 00:51:10.480 --> 00:51:11.520 And so this dualism 00:51:12.640 --> 00:51:15.520 is alive and well in the world today. 00:51:15.520 --> 00:51:19.600 We see this not just in other religions, but we see it 00:51:19.600 --> 00:51:22.400 being imported into Christianity. 00:51:22.400 --> 00:51:24.720 And we see it primarily in this 00:51:25.760 --> 00:51:30.080 distinction, this false distinction that is drawn between the Old Testament and 00:51:30.080 --> 00:51:33.120 the New Testament, as Woe was highlighting. 00:51:33.120 --> 00:51:36.400 Because if you can say, Well, that was then and this is 00:51:36.400 --> 00:51:39.840 now. You're saying that God changed. 00:51:39.840 --> 00:51:43.600 And if you're saying that God changed, well God doesn't change. 00:51:43.600 --> 00:51:48.080 So that's a different God you have in the Old Testament if 00:51:48.080 --> 00:51:50.240 you say that He is different from the one in the New 00:51:50.400 --> 00:51:57.360 Testament? Because Jesus Christ is the God who walked in the garden. 00:51:57.360 --> 00:52:02.080 Jesus Christ is the God who met and ate with Abraham. 00:52:02.080 --> 00:52:05.200 And then And then went on with the angels to oversee the 00:52:05.200 --> 00:52:07.760 destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. 00:52:07.760 --> 00:52:11.840 Jesus Christ is the one who took on flesh and walked around 00:52:11.840 --> 00:52:14.000 ancient Israel with the apostles. 00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:17.760 Jesus Christ is the one who was nailed to the cross. 00:52:17.760 --> 00:52:21.520 These are things that He did bodily. 00:52:21.520 --> 00:52:24.320 And He is God then, He is God now, He will always 00:52:24.320 --> 00:52:25.120 be God. 00:52:25.120 --> 00:52:29.120 You cannot say that the Old Testament God is a different God. 00:52:29.120 --> 00:52:31.520 It is the triune God in the Old Testament and it is 00:52:31.520 --> 00:52:34.080 the triune God in the New Testament. 00:52:34.080 --> 00:52:37.440 And so if you find something that God did in the Old 00:52:37.440 --> 00:52:40.720 Testament and you disagree with that, you think it's wrong, oh God 00:52:40.720 --> 00:52:41.600 couldn't do that. 00:52:41.600 --> 00:52:43.840 You have a different God. 00:52:43.840 --> 00:52:47.440 You don't get to pick and choose what God may do or 00:52:47.440 --> 00:52:48.560 may not do. 00:52:48.560 --> 00:52:52.800 What God has done is right and true and good. 00:52:52.800 --> 00:52:55.760 If you think it is not, you are an error. 00:52:55.760 --> 00:52:57.760 God is not an error. 00:52:57.760 --> 00:53:01.360 This is something that the modern world seems to think it can 00:53:01.360 --> 00:53:05.440 just declare, this is good and right, and so anything else that 00:53:05.440 --> 00:53:08.960 doesn't agree with what I have said is good and right, must 00:53:08.960 --> 00:53:12.640 be evil and wrong, and they will go to any length in 00:53:12.640 --> 00:53:14.080 order to justify that. 00:53:14.080 --> 00:53:18.960 You'll have men like Bonhoeffer who will go through the Old Testament, 00:53:18.880 --> 00:53:21.440 and disagree with this piece and that piece, and oh well that 00:53:21.440 --> 00:53:23.600 was a different God, or that was a different time, or you 00:53:23.600 --> 00:53:25.840 have to interpret this, or you have to deal with it differently. 00:53:25.840 --> 00:53:29.520 You'll have some in the East who will say the conquest of 00:53:29.520 --> 00:53:32.640 Canaan was actually metaphorical and they didn't actually kill anyone. 00:53:33.280 --> 00:53:37.360 These are people who are trying to make excuses for God or 00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:40.960 for their own religion, often both. 00:53:40.960 --> 00:53:43.680 And that is not Christian. 00:53:43.680 --> 00:53:49.280 Because a Christian reads what God has done, and says Amen. 00:53:49.280 --> 00:53:52.640 What God has done is right and good. 00:53:52.640 --> 00:53:56.640 If you disagree, you are in error, and so when God commands 00:53:56.640 --> 00:54:00.480 the Israelites to take slaves, if you think that slavery is a 00:54:00.480 --> 00:54:02.320 sin, you are in error. 00:54:02.320 --> 00:54:07.680 When God commands the Israelites to genocide the cities and the peoples 00:54:07.920 --> 00:54:11.600 in the promised land, if you think that genocide is a sin, 00:54:11.600 --> 00:54:14.160 you are an error. 00:54:14.160 --> 00:54:18.400 Anything that God has ever commanded a man to do was not 00:54:18.400 --> 00:54:21.120 sin, because God does not command sin. 00:54:21.120 --> 00:54:25.600 Anything that God has ever done was not sin, because God does 00:54:25.600 --> 00:54:26.160 not sin. 00:54:26.400 --> 00:54:28.720 There isn't even a way to say that in our language. 00:54:28.720 --> 00:54:30.400 We don't have a word for it. 00:54:30.400 --> 00:54:34.240 Because merely to imply that the possibility of God sinning is a 00:54:34.240 --> 00:54:36.720 thing is incoherent. 00:54:36.720 --> 00:54:39.680 So it's not actually fully correct to say God does not sin 00:54:39.760 --> 00:54:43.920 or God did not sin, because it is above and beyond that, 00:54:43.920 --> 00:54:47.200 even to put God in sin, other than saying God hates sin 00:54:47.280 --> 00:54:50.240 in the same sentence, is basically incoherent. 00:54:50.240 --> 00:54:55.200 But our language doesn't really encompass the necessary concept there. 00:54:55.200 --> 00:54:59.680 But this distinction that we draw, not we in this episode and 00:54:59.680 --> 00:55:04.880 not we personally, but the general we, this distinction that is drawn 00:55:06.160 --> 00:55:10.880 by many, particularly many pastors and teachers today, who will say that 00:55:11.040 --> 00:55:15.440 was then, and this is now, that is Gnostic dualism being brought 00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:19.440 back into the church in order to deal with the fact that 00:55:19.440 --> 00:55:24.000 these men are one uncomfortable with what God did in the Old 00:55:24.000 --> 00:55:29.680 Testament, because it's God, it's the same God, and to hide the 00:55:29.680 --> 00:55:32.800 fact that they don't actually worship that God. 00:55:32.800 --> 00:55:34.640 They have a totally different God. 00:55:34.640 --> 00:55:37.280 They have created in their image. 00:55:37.280 --> 00:55:41.120 And if you look carefully, this is a problem that we have 00:55:41.120 --> 00:55:45.120 with many Christians that perhaps reveals they don't really read the Bible. 00:55:45.120 --> 00:55:48.320 If you look at the things that they say about their supposed 00:55:48.320 --> 00:55:51.200 New Testament God, right, this is a different God. 00:55:51.200 --> 00:55:54.880 He just loves everyone and he never hates and he doesn't use 00:55:54.880 --> 00:56:00.400 mean words, it never says anything that's coarse or never's blunt or 00:56:00.400 --> 00:56:02.720 anything like that. 00:56:02.720 --> 00:56:06.640 Anyone who would agree with that has clearly not read scripture, as 00:56:06.640 --> 00:56:09.760 well was mentioned in other episodes, just go read the words in 00:56:09.760 --> 00:56:10.880 red letters. 00:56:10.880 --> 00:56:14.800 If you think that Christ never said anything that was harsh or 00:56:14.800 --> 00:56:17.200 blunt, or brusque. 00:56:17.200 --> 00:56:20.320 I don't know which scripture you're reading, but it's clearly not the 00:56:20.320 --> 00:56:28.240 one written by God, using men as his scribes inspired men. 00:56:28.240 --> 00:56:34.000 Even if you just read the words of Christ, the God being 00:56:34.000 --> 00:56:38.720 prophet being propped up by these prophets of the modern world, that's 00:56:38.720 --> 00:56:41.360 not the God of Scripture. 00:56:41.360 --> 00:56:45.760 And there is a consistency through all of Scripture. 00:56:45.760 --> 00:56:50.640 God is not inconsistent between the Old Testament and the New Testament. 00:56:50.640 --> 00:56:54.800 God didn't have a manic episode in the Old Testament and he's 00:56:54.720 --> 00:56:58.320 settled down in the New Testament, now things are good again. 00:56:58.320 --> 00:57:02.880 God is consistent because God does not change, and if your God 00:57:02.880 --> 00:57:07.680 changes, if your God has changed, then you have a God, but 00:57:07.680 --> 00:57:09.920 it is not the Lord God. 00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:13.520 The last of the main points that we want to make today, 00:57:13.520 --> 00:57:16.240 which is going to take up the rest of the episode, is 00:57:16.800 --> 00:57:21.840 another of the key tenets of all of the early Gnostic heresies, 00:57:21.840 --> 00:57:24.480 and that is that the human body is a prison for the 00:57:24.480 --> 00:57:27.200 true self rather than a part of it. 00:57:27.280 --> 00:57:31.760 In other words, your spirit, your soul, your mind is trapped in 00:57:31.760 --> 00:57:33.440 a meat suit. 00:57:33.440 --> 00:57:37.840 You are you are not your body, fundamentally, because as Corey was 00:57:37.840 --> 00:57:41.200 saying, the body was created by the demiurge. 00:57:41.200 --> 00:57:43.120 The demiurge was evil. 00:57:43.120 --> 00:57:46.560 All of material creation was evil. 00:57:46.560 --> 00:57:50.880 And one of the first false prophets of this teaching was Marcion. 00:57:50.880 --> 00:57:53.040 We've talked about him before. 00:57:53.040 --> 00:57:59.440 I've publicly accused Jeff Gibbs, the retired professor from LCMS's Saint Louis 00:57:59.440 --> 00:58:05.680 Seminary, who wrote the wicked essay on hatred a Marcionite, particularly because 00:58:06.480 --> 00:58:11.120 he set the so-called Old Testament God against the New Testament God. 00:58:11.120 --> 00:58:13.200 And it's it's everywhere. 00:58:13.200 --> 00:58:16.640 Let me read this passage about Marcian to you and we're going 00:58:16.640 --> 00:58:19.920 to talk about a couple different things that emerge because it's fascinating 00:58:20.320 --> 00:58:22.960 how relevant these bits are today. 00:58:23.200 --> 00:58:24.880 Again, that's why we're talking about this. 00:58:24.880 --> 00:58:28.480 It's not that Marcionism has been resurrected wholesale, but when you look 00:58:28.480 --> 00:58:31.840 at the bits and pieces and you see them being recycled in 00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:33.040 Christian churches. 00:58:33.040 --> 00:58:34.880 That's notable today. 00:58:34.880 --> 00:58:38.640 And it doesn't matter if you say, well, it's Marcionite or not, 00:58:38.640 --> 00:58:39.600 I don't care. 00:58:39.600 --> 00:58:40.400 It's evil. 00:58:40.400 --> 00:58:43.920 This is one of the earliest, most prevalent heresies that was directly 00:58:43.920 --> 00:58:47.120 condemned by the entire church, caused a firestorm. 00:58:47.120 --> 00:58:49.920 It was a huge problem for the church. 00:58:49.920 --> 00:58:51.680 Here's what this says. 00:58:51.680 --> 00:58:54.880 According to Marcion, the god of the Old Testament, whom he called 00:58:54.880 --> 00:58:58.960 the Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal 00:58:59.360 --> 00:59:04.480 deity of the Jews, whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who 00:59:04.480 --> 00:59:08.640 punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death. 00:59:09.600 --> 00:59:13.920 In contrast, the God that Jesus professed is an altogether different being, 00:59:13.920 --> 00:59:17.760 a universal God of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with 00:59:17.760 --> 00:59:20.000 benevolence and mercy. 00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:24.480 Marcian also produced a book called Antithes, which is no longer extant, 00:59:24.480 --> 00:59:28.320 contrasting the demiurge of the Old Testament with the Heavenly Father of 00:59:28.320 --> 00:59:29.600 the New Testament. 00:59:29.600 --> 00:59:33.280 Marcian held Jesus to be the Son of the Heavenly Father, but 00:59:33.280 --> 00:59:38.560 understood the incarnation in a docetic manner, that is, that Jesus' body 00:59:38.560 --> 00:59:43.760 was only an imitation of material body, and consequently denied Jesus' physical 00:59:43.760 --> 00:59:47.600 and bodily birth, death, and resurrection. 00:59:47.600 --> 00:59:49.360 So So there are a couple things here. 00:59:49.360 --> 00:59:53.120 One, you know, Marcion confessed the demiurge. 00:59:53.120 --> 00:59:55.520 He said there were two different gods, just as we find in 00:59:55.520 --> 00:59:57.440 our pulpits today. 00:59:57.440 --> 01:00:01.360 But he also, how did he describe the demiurge, the tribal deity 01:00:01.600 --> 01:00:06.640 of the Jews whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice. 01:00:06.640 --> 01:00:11.920 You may remember something almost exactly like that described in the very 01:00:11.920 --> 01:00:18.560 eastern less orthodox episode where we talked about the orthodox so-called hatred 01:00:18.560 --> 01:00:21.120 of penal substitutionary atonement. 01:00:21.120 --> 01:00:22.880 Because that's precisely what it is. 01:00:22.880 --> 01:00:29.360 Legalistic reciprocal justice is just Marcian's way of saying penal substitutionary atonement, 01:00:29.360 --> 01:00:33.040 saying that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins. 01:00:33.040 --> 01:00:35.840 Because the Orthodox will say that there's no penalty for our sins 01:00:35.840 --> 01:00:36.720 that Jesus paid. 01:00:36.720 --> 01:00:39.920 They say Jesus died on the cross to make the story better. 01:00:40.160 --> 01:00:45.440 But the idea that a God would punish Jesus for our sins 01:00:45.760 --> 01:00:47.440 is hateful. 01:00:47.440 --> 01:00:51.200 They go right to the limit of calling God the Father the 01:00:51.200 --> 01:00:54.080 Demiurge, but they get around it by saying, well, that didn't really 01:00:54.080 --> 01:00:56.160 happen because it's not Christianity. 01:00:56.160 --> 01:01:00.160 PSA is hated in Marcionism. 01:01:00.160 --> 01:01:01.920 It's hated in Eastern Orthodoxy. 01:01:01.920 --> 01:01:04.320 And again, if you're listening, I'm not picking on you guys. 01:01:04.320 --> 01:01:06.160 Look, we're picking on Lutherans too. 01:01:06.160 --> 01:01:08.160 We're all under the same bus here. 01:01:08.160 --> 01:01:12.800 This is a disaster for the church because whenever these false beliefs 01:01:12.800 --> 01:01:16.800 got picked up, the fact that things of Marcion, the damned heretic, 01:01:16.800 --> 01:01:21.360 who's universally condemned by the church, are being recycled in our pulpits, 01:01:21.360 --> 01:01:23.120 or whatever the EO have. 01:01:23.120 --> 01:01:24.560 That's a bad thing. 01:01:24.560 --> 01:01:27.520 It shouldn't happen to any of us. 01:01:27.520 --> 01:01:30.800 And the second part of that, towards the end, specifically talked again 01:01:30.800 --> 01:01:31.680 about what Corey was saying. 01:01:32.480 --> 01:01:38.080 If the demiurge produced the material world and Jesus was God, then 01:01:38.080 --> 01:01:40.240 Jesus couldn't have a physical body, could he? 01:01:40.240 --> 01:01:44.880 Because he could not participate in evil by taking on human flesh. 01:01:44.880 --> 01:01:47.840 So see, this is where the rubber meets the road with this 01:01:47.840 --> 01:01:49.680 denial of the flesh. 01:01:49.680 --> 01:01:53.840 Jesus, because he's perfect, can't have a body, but then you've denied 01:01:54.000 --> 01:01:56.720 his his birth, his death, his resurrection. 01:01:56.720 --> 01:02:01.440 Christians, according to the creeds, according to scripture, believe if you deny 01:02:01.440 --> 01:02:03.360 those things, you deny God. 01:02:03.360 --> 01:02:06.080 You are not Christian and you are going to hell. 01:02:06.080 --> 01:02:10.240 Jesus had to be born bodily as a man, because it was 01:02:10.240 --> 01:02:13.760 prophesied, because it's what God said he was going to do, and 01:02:13.760 --> 01:02:16.800 it's what God said he did, and he showed us that he 01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:17.360 did it. 01:02:17.360 --> 01:02:20.640 And Jesus died the same way, and he was resurrected the same 01:02:20.640 --> 01:02:26.160 way. The only way for Christianity to be true is for this 01:02:26.160 --> 01:02:27.840 Gnostic heresy to be false. 01:02:27.840 --> 01:02:31.040 And so the reason that this matters today is not necessarily they're 01:02:31.040 --> 01:02:33.680 not recycling this part of Marcionism. 01:02:33.680 --> 01:02:37.200 They're not saying that Jesus wasn't necessarily resurrected bodily. 01:02:37.200 --> 01:02:40.880 What they will say is the other stuff about the body, that 01:02:40.880 --> 01:02:43.600 the the b your body is not your true self. 01:02:43.600 --> 01:02:45.680 And this is a case where, as we spend the rest of 01:02:45.680 --> 01:02:50.480 this episode talking about this, we find that the church today of 01:02:50.480 --> 01:02:55.440 the new global religion is in perfect accord with the global religion 01:02:55.440 --> 01:02:58.960 appreciators in every other walk of life. 01:02:58.960 --> 01:03:03.040 Men who have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever will agree 01:03:03.040 --> 01:03:05.440 with all the things we're going to say for the rest of 01:03:05.440 --> 01:03:09.840 this. Because the notion that your body is not yourself, well, that 01:03:09.840 --> 01:03:13.120 is necessary to deny the race is real. 01:03:13.120 --> 01:03:18.000 If the only way for race to be real is if 01:03:18.960 --> 01:03:22.480 God did something bad because the other side of the equation that 01:03:22.480 --> 01:03:25.280 these guys will say is that race is a product of sin. 01:03:25.280 --> 01:03:28.720 There would never have been any human races if not for sin. 01:03:28.720 --> 01:03:32.640 We went over in the DNA episode and in the soteriology episode 01:03:32.640 --> 01:03:35.120 on race about how that's a lie. 01:03:35.120 --> 01:03:37.360 But it's something that I still hear regularly online. 01:03:37.360 --> 01:03:40.400 People think, well, yeah, like we have race, but that's only because 01:03:40.400 --> 01:03:41.280 Adam fell. 01:03:41.280 --> 01:03:44.080 If not for the Tower of Babel, there'd be no race, which 01:03:44.080 --> 01:03:45.600 is just complete nonsense. 01:03:45.760 --> 01:03:49.840 But fundamentally and much more importantly, it's a denial of the flesh. 01:03:49.840 --> 01:03:54.080 Because it goes to the point the Cory made about the demiurge 01:03:54.080 --> 01:03:56.080 producing the physical. 01:03:56.080 --> 01:04:00.000 If you believe that your the fact that you are white or 01:04:00.000 --> 01:04:04.400 black or Asian or whatever is a product of sin, you are 01:04:04.400 --> 01:04:07.920 saying that your body per se is a product of sin. 01:04:07.920 --> 01:04:10.960 And where that becomes a problem is in the resurrection. 01:04:11.040 --> 01:04:14.400 Because forget this life, you assume for the sake of argument that 01:04:14.400 --> 01:04:18.720 that is true, that you only have a race today because there's 01:04:18.720 --> 01:04:21.680 sin, and therefore your race is sinful. 01:04:21.680 --> 01:04:25.120 Even if you ignore Revelation seven, where it makes very clear that 01:04:25.120 --> 01:04:28.400 all the races of men stand before the throne of God in 01:04:28.400 --> 01:04:33.040 perfection, where nothing evil can exist, only that which is perfect can 01:04:33.040 --> 01:04:33.680 be there. 01:04:33.680 --> 01:04:36.320 So that proves that wrong all by itself. 01:04:36.640 --> 01:04:40.320 Even if you ignore that, you were still left with the question 01:04:40.320 --> 01:04:44.800 of if my body is sinful per se because I am white 01:04:44.880 --> 01:04:47.920 and I was never meant to be white, whatever I am, it's 01:04:47.840 --> 01:04:48.960 not a white man. 01:04:48.960 --> 01:04:50.800 It's not a man at all, incidentally. 01:04:50.800 --> 01:04:53.760 It's just a spirit being trapped in this meat. 01:04:53.760 --> 01:04:56.320 What's going to be resurrected on the last day? 01:04:56.320 --> 01:05:01.920 The Christian faith, scripture says that you, I, my actual physical body, 01:05:01.920 --> 01:05:05.840 the one sitting here and speaking to you right now, waving my 01:05:05.840 --> 01:05:08.160 arms in the air as I'm talking, you can't see 'cause thank 01:05:08.160 --> 01:05:11.040 God this isn't a video podcast. 01:05:11.040 --> 01:05:14.480 This body will be raised on the last day. 01:05:14.480 --> 01:05:15.760 That's what Job said. 01:05:15.760 --> 01:05:18.000 He said, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I will see 01:05:18.000 --> 01:05:19.440 him with my own eyes. 01:05:19.440 --> 01:05:22.560 He believed that he was going to be resurrected, his body, his 01:05:22.720 --> 01:05:25.760 eyes, my body, and my eyes will be resurrected, and so will 01:05:26.320 --> 01:05:28.560 yours, and so will the unbelievers. 01:05:28.560 --> 01:05:32.480 As Cory said, that's really bad news for them, because the bodily 01:05:32.480 --> 01:05:34.960 resurrection applies to everyone. 01:05:34.960 --> 01:05:37.840 Incidentally, this is something that divides some of the other cults from 01:05:37.840 --> 01:05:41.760 Christianity. There are those who subscribe to annihilationism. 01:05:41.760 --> 01:05:42.880 They say that 01:05:43.760 --> 01:05:47.040 only the the those who are saved, only the elect will actually 01:05:47.040 --> 01:05:48.560 be resurrected from the dead. 01:05:48.560 --> 01:05:50.160 And everyone else just vanishes. 01:05:50.160 --> 01:05:53.840 Why? Because you can separate the body from the soul permanently and 01:05:53.840 --> 01:05:55.120 there's no more you. 01:05:55.120 --> 01:05:58.720 Now death itself is clearly a separation of the body from the 01:05:58.720 --> 01:06:00.320 soul. That's absolutely a fact. 01:06:00.320 --> 01:06:03.600 And that's why it's traumatic and it's evil and we see it 01:06:03.600 --> 01:06:04.320 as a corruption. 01:06:04.320 --> 01:06:08.240 We see it as the worst thing that it can be imagined. 01:06:08.240 --> 01:06:11.600 You can suffer any indignity as long as you're still alive. 01:06:11.600 --> 01:06:14.160 But to die, it's finished. 01:06:14.160 --> 01:06:18.400 When annihilationists say, No, only the saved are raised from the dead, 01:06:18.400 --> 01:06:21.520 or when someone says, Well, sure, you're going to be raised from 01:06:21.520 --> 01:06:23.840 the dead, but it's not going to be this body with these 01:06:23.840 --> 01:06:28.720 sinful things like being white, then what is raised from the grave? 01:06:28.720 --> 01:06:32.480 Because it's no longer your body, it's no longer you. 01:06:32.480 --> 01:06:36.000 And this is why this is such an incredibly deadly and very 01:06:36.000 --> 01:06:37.520 active heresy today. 01:06:37.520 --> 01:06:42.080 That we've Cory and I have triggered this heresy on the spot, 01:06:42.080 --> 01:06:46.320 on contact with LCMS pastors, by discussing racism. 01:06:46.320 --> 01:06:50.240 When we talk about the races, we specifically pointed to them personally. 01:06:50.240 --> 01:06:53.360 Brian Wolfmueller, pastor in Austin, Texas. 01:06:53.360 --> 01:06:55.600 He's very well liked and on YouTube. 01:06:55.600 --> 01:06:56.720 I used to like him. 01:06:56.720 --> 01:06:59.600 I used to think he was a good faithful pastor. 01:06:59.600 --> 01:07:04.240 Until he started attacking the resurrection of the dead in order to 01:07:04.240 --> 01:07:09.520 defend against racists, because Galatians 3.28 says there's no neither Jew nor 01:07:09.520 --> 01:07:13.200 Greek. And so Corey made the point to him on Twitter, well, 01:07:13.200 --> 01:07:16.160 what's going to be resurrected for the dead Jew and the dead 01:07:16.160 --> 01:07:18.960 Greek and the dead me and the dead Corey and the dead 01:07:18.960 --> 01:07:21.680 Brian? What's going to come out of the grave? 01:07:21.680 --> 01:07:27.440 And Scripture says, Job says it's my eyes, this flesh, my body, 01:07:27.440 --> 01:07:29.120 is what's going to be raised. 01:07:29.120 --> 01:07:32.480 Brian had to deny the resurrection of the dead in order to 01:07:32.480 --> 01:07:36.720 defeat racism, because he's on the other side of the Gnostic heresy. 01:07:36.720 --> 01:07:40.640 He ceased to be Christian when it comes to these subjects, because 01:07:40.960 --> 01:07:44.240 Gnosticism that hates the body, that says it's the product of the 01:07:44.240 --> 01:07:50.480 demiurge, must necessarily have something different resurrected from the dead. 01:07:50.480 --> 01:07:55.040 Now, there's absolutely open questions in Christianity about what is resurrected. 01:07:55.040 --> 01:07:57.280 It's my body, but I don't know which version. 01:07:57.280 --> 01:07:58.320 What age will I be? 01:07:58.320 --> 01:07:59.600 Will I have gray hair? 01:07:59.600 --> 01:08:02.320 You know, when I was born, I had a heart defect. 01:08:02.320 --> 01:08:04.880 I didn't know until I was about forty years old when the 01:08:04.880 --> 01:08:06.400 valve started failing. 01:08:06.400 --> 01:08:09.440 I would have been dead six years ago if they hadn't replaced 01:08:09.440 --> 01:08:10.080 the valve. 01:08:10.080 --> 01:08:12.240 The valve that I have in my heart now is a cow 01:08:12.240 --> 01:08:16.720 valve. When I'm resurrected from the dead, am I gonna be 0.2% 01:08:16.960 --> 01:08:19.280 cow? Probably not. 01:08:19.280 --> 01:08:21.360 I don't think there'd be any purpose in that. 01:08:21.360 --> 01:08:23.840 But you know, all these things go wrong with all of us. 01:08:23.840 --> 01:08:27.280 If someone has an arm amputated, if you lose your eyesight, if 01:08:27.280 --> 01:08:30.960 you're born without body parts, what comes out of the grave? 01:08:30.960 --> 01:08:31.840 We don't know. 01:08:31.840 --> 01:08:33.760 We know that it will be perfect. 01:08:33.760 --> 01:08:37.920 And we know what the perfect form of humanity is, because we 01:08:38.080 --> 01:08:40.960 we can clearly discern that from creation. 01:08:40.960 --> 01:08:44.400 We can discern what Adam's body would have been like by looking 01:08:44.400 --> 01:08:49.440 at all the variations of human bodies with their different flaws, and 01:08:49.440 --> 01:08:51.760 we can see the good in individuals and say, well, if you 01:08:51.760 --> 01:08:56.240 mash on the good together and you extract all the evil, Adam's 01:08:56.240 --> 01:08:57.760 gonna be a lot like that. 01:08:57.760 --> 01:09:00.160 God doesn't give us specifics and we don't need to worry about 01:09:00.160 --> 01:09:02.000 it. I don't worry about it. 01:09:02.000 --> 01:09:06.240 But I want to distinguish between that and what we have with 01:09:06.480 --> 01:09:10.640 heretics like Wolfmuller, who will openly deny the resurrection of the dead, 01:09:10.640 --> 01:09:13.840 saying well it's it's some sort of spirit body that comes out 01:09:13.840 --> 01:09:14.560 of the grave. 01:09:14.560 --> 01:09:15.840 That's Gnosticism. 01:09:15.840 --> 01:09:19.840 That's saying that your body that you have today is fundamentally evil 01:09:19.920 --> 01:09:22.560 and God has to give you something different for it to be 01:09:22.560 --> 01:09:24.880 perfect. This is dangerous stuff. 01:09:24.880 --> 01:09:27.200 This is the death of Christianity. 01:09:27.200 --> 01:09:30.720 Because when you lose the resurrection of the dead, whether you deny 01:09:30.720 --> 01:09:33.920 that the damned are also resurrected bodily, they are. 01:09:33.920 --> 01:09:36.640 They're going to be cast bodily into fire. 01:09:36.640 --> 01:09:39.440 What is a spirit carriage if it's cast into fire? 01:09:39.440 --> 01:09:41.760 The damned are cast bodily into fire. 01:09:41.760 --> 01:09:43.680 We're all going to get up on the last day. 01:09:43.680 --> 01:09:45.520 We're all going to be put back together. 01:09:45.520 --> 01:09:47.840 And the sheep go in one direction, the goats go in the 01:09:47.840 --> 01:09:52.640 other, and then it's either paradise or it's eternal suffering, bodily suffering. 01:09:52.640 --> 01:09:53.520 That's horrible. 01:09:53.520 --> 01:09:55.040 I don't want that for anyone. 01:09:55.040 --> 01:09:57.440 Even the men who hate me, I don't want them to suffer 01:09:57.440 --> 01:10:00.560 that, particularly for my case, 'cause it would be stupid. 01:10:00.560 --> 01:10:04.480 Why hating some podcaster would put someone in hell is beyond me. 01:10:04.480 --> 01:10:08.240 Please just I wish they would repent, and I forgive them for 01:10:08.240 --> 01:10:12.800 my sake, but ultimately, when they hate me, it's not me, they 01:10:12.800 --> 01:10:15.120 don't care about me, they hate God. 01:10:15.120 --> 01:10:17.120 These men hate God because 01:10:18.080 --> 01:10:21.040 God is the God of the old and the New Testament. 01:10:21.040 --> 01:10:24.240 God is the God that did a racism and did a genocide 01:10:24.400 --> 01:10:28.560 and did a misogyny, and scripture is unapologetic about that, and they 01:10:28.560 --> 01:10:29.280 hate it. 01:10:29.280 --> 01:10:31.040 They hate everything about it. 01:10:31.040 --> 01:10:33.440 And so they will go to the very heart of the Christian 01:10:33.440 --> 01:10:37.920 faith by denying the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, 01:10:37.920 --> 01:10:41.760 according to the creeds and according to scripture, because it's necessary to 01:10:41.760 --> 01:10:43.600 own the racists. 01:10:43.600 --> 01:10:46.080 Think about how serious that is. 01:10:46.080 --> 01:10:50.000 The fundamental parts of the Christian faith just go out the window 01:10:50.000 --> 01:10:52.640 in order to deal with these new made-up sins. 01:10:52.640 --> 01:10:55.040 So we're talking about Gnosticism today. 01:10:55.040 --> 01:10:57.280 These aspects of it are not a dead issue. 01:10:57.280 --> 01:11:01.520 They're alive and they're destructive and they're sending men to hell. 01:11:01.520 --> 01:11:04.320 This is serious stuff and it's happening right now. 01:11:04.320 --> 01:11:07.520 That's why it's worth us discussing because we got to get in 01:11:07.520 --> 01:11:08.720 front of this. 01:11:08.720 --> 01:11:12.720 And one of the problems that the church has today that Satan 01:11:12.720 --> 01:11:18.080 is exploiting is that these are new variations on the old theme. 01:11:18.080 --> 01:11:21.040 Satan didn't use these attacks in prior centuries. 01:11:21.040 --> 01:11:22.240 So what does that mean? 01:11:22.240 --> 01:11:25.440 It means that there are no prior church fathers to which we 01:11:25.440 --> 01:11:28.000 can reference and say, well, here's where he said this and we 01:11:28.000 --> 01:11:30.720 can trust his judgment, and here's a good sound argument. 01:11:30.720 --> 01:11:32.560 Okay, this is a settle issue. 01:11:32.560 --> 01:11:35.120 That's bad, this is good, we have an argument. 01:11:35.120 --> 01:11:39.200 We have to actually recognize first, here's the pattern, it's replaying, it's 01:11:39.200 --> 01:11:43.360 not completely novel, it's a form of Gnosticism, it's a form of 01:11:43.360 --> 01:11:48.080 Judaizing, but it's the same heresy, but it's wearing a new skin 01:11:48.080 --> 01:11:51.360 suit. And so things that weren't even done in the first and 01:11:51.360 --> 01:11:53.840 second centuries are being done in the church today. 01:11:53.840 --> 01:11:56.640 They're being done in Christian pulpits today. 01:11:56.640 --> 01:11:59.600 The sheep and the pews don't know any better. 01:11:59.600 --> 01:12:02.800 And I said earlier, if you're retarded and you have a good 01:12:02.800 --> 01:12:03.920 teacher, you're fine. 01:12:03.920 --> 01:12:04.800 That'd be fine. 01:12:04.800 --> 01:12:09.040 There'd be no problem with that The problem is that we don't 01:12:09.040 --> 01:12:10.080 have good teachers. 01:12:10.080 --> 01:12:13.440 We have men who will, for the sake of owning the racists 01:12:13.440 --> 01:12:16.400 on Twitter, they will deny the resurrection of the body. 01:12:16.400 --> 01:12:19.280 And at that point, all of Christianity is canceled. 01:12:19.280 --> 01:12:21.600 That man cannot come back from that without specifically 01:12:22.560 --> 01:12:24.240 repenting of that blasphemy. 01:12:24.240 --> 01:12:26.080 Wolfmüller's a blasphemer. 01:12:26.080 --> 01:12:27.920 Harrison's a blasphemer. 01:12:27.920 --> 01:12:31.680 These men who participate in these lies thinking, oh, it's a small 01:12:31.680 --> 01:12:35.200 thing. Like it's it's better to say this than to let someone 01:12:35.200 --> 01:12:37.680 be racist in our church. 01:12:37.680 --> 01:12:39.600 So we did that their episode earlier. 01:12:39.600 --> 01:12:45.200 Like this stuff, these seemingly minor peripheral issues, they will always ultimately 01:12:45.520 --> 01:12:47.200 cut to the heart of the Christian faith. 01:12:47.200 --> 01:12:48.880 Because Satan knows what he's doing. 01:12:48.880 --> 01:12:50.480 Satan's not dumb. 01:12:50.480 --> 01:12:54.720 And the fact that he's recycling this stuff century after century, it's 01:12:54.720 --> 01:12:57.920 not just that he's lazy, as he doesn't need to be creative. 01:12:57.920 --> 01:12:58.640 We're stupid. 01:12:58.640 --> 01:13:04.240 We're fundamentally evil in our fallen nature. 01:13:04.240 --> 01:13:08.000 The things that we are attracted to are always going to be 01:13:08.000 --> 01:13:13.680 bad. God has to replace that with a sanctified nature by perfecting 01:13:13.680 --> 01:13:16.240 what was originally supposed to be us. 01:13:16.240 --> 01:13:20.240 It was the us that God desired when He foreknew us before 01:13:20.400 --> 01:13:24.320 eternity. But then sin came along and it corrupted us. 01:13:24.320 --> 01:13:27.840 And so we're naturally turned towards all these tricks that Satan can 01:13:27.840 --> 01:13:30.880 play over and over again and we gobble it up. 01:13:30.880 --> 01:13:35.040 So again, we're not being fiddly with historical points and we're not 01:13:35.040 --> 01:13:38.480 playing fast and loose with a definition to try to play a 01:13:38.480 --> 01:13:42.000 game here, but to say that if you believe that the first 01:13:42.160 --> 01:13:48.400 century heresy was was demonic, as it demonstrably is, you must necessarily 01:13:48.400 --> 01:13:52.080 conclude that these new teachings from these men who call themselves Christian 01:13:52.560 --> 01:13:55.040 pastors are also demonic. 01:13:55.040 --> 01:13:56.560 And the fruit is right there. 01:13:56.560 --> 01:13:59.200 When the discussion came up about, well, you know, what about the 01:13:59.200 --> 01:14:01.600 resurrection of the dead if there's neither Jew nor Greek? 01:14:01.600 --> 01:14:03.920 The first response from these guys is, well, God's not going to 01:14:04.160 --> 01:14:05.040 resurrect us. 01:14:05.040 --> 01:14:06.320 He's going to resurrect something else. 01:14:06.320 --> 01:14:08.560 We don't even know what it'll be, but it won't be us. 01:14:08.560 --> 01:14:12.320 Well, if you're not your race, what about your sex? 01:14:12.320 --> 01:14:14.720 That's the next part of this, transsexualism. 01:14:14.720 --> 01:14:17.440 It we open the door to every modern thing. 01:14:17.440 --> 01:14:19.760 And that's where the stuff outside the church comes in. 01:14:19.760 --> 01:14:21.920 Because then it's not just about church doctrine. 01:14:21.920 --> 01:14:25.920 It's about what we see playing out all around the world today. 01:14:26.480 --> 01:14:32.080 Make sure that we are abundantly clear with regard to Woe's rhetoric 01:14:32.080 --> 01:14:34.480 about the resurrection. 01:14:34.480 --> 01:14:39.680 We do have some information about the resurrection and the state of 01:14:39.680 --> 01:14:44.240 things in the resurrection in Scripture, because of course Christ during his 01:14:44.400 --> 01:14:49.440 ministry on earth was a foretaste of that kingdom, and he restored 01:14:49.440 --> 01:14:52.960 sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and the ability 01:14:52.960 --> 01:14:54.480 to walk to the lame. 01:14:54.480 --> 01:14:56.560 And yes, those are the terms that we should use. 01:14:56.560 --> 01:15:00.240 It's a tangential issue here, but an important one nonetheless. 01:15:00.240 --> 01:15:04.880 He restored these things because he was restoring the way these men 01:15:04.880 --> 01:15:06.320 were supposed to be. 01:15:06.320 --> 01:15:08.240 He was removing the defects. 01:15:08.240 --> 01:15:11.520 He was removing these things that are not supposed to be part 01:15:11.520 --> 01:15:14.720 of creation, because they are the result of sin. 01:15:14.720 --> 01:15:16.640 They are the result of corruption. 01:15:16.640 --> 01:15:19.680 They are not part of God's good design. 01:15:19.680 --> 01:15:23.680 And so, yes, if you are blind, you will see in eternity. 01:15:23.680 --> 01:15:26.400 If you are deaf, I don't know how you're listening to the 01:15:26.400 --> 01:15:27.600 podcast, but you will hear. 01:15:27.600 --> 01:15:30.400 I guess we do have transcripts. 01:15:30.400 --> 01:15:33.680 These things will be cured in the resurrection. 01:15:33.680 --> 01:15:37.120 So woe is not going to be some certain percentage cow. 01:15:37.120 --> 01:15:40.480 He will have a heart that no longer has that defect. 01:15:43.040 --> 01:15:50.000 But to turn to the issue, the fundamental, the core issue here. 01:15:50.000 --> 01:15:54.720 There are two reasons that Woe and I talk about things such 01:15:54.720 --> 01:15:59.280 as racism, such as the races, and by racism I mean the 01:15:59.280 --> 01:16:00.800 fact that it essentially does not exist. 01:16:00.800 --> 01:16:05.280 Exist. Yes, of course, if you hate someone purely because he's a 01:16:05.280 --> 01:16:09.200 different race, that is actual racism, and that is impermissible for a 01:16:09.200 --> 01:16:14.240 Christian. Preferencing your own is not racism, but we're not really discussing 01:16:14.240 --> 01:16:15.280 racism in this episode. 01:16:15.520 --> 01:16:18.800 We've gone over that previously, you can go and re-listen to that. 01:16:18.800 --> 01:16:22.480 But the point that I want to make here is the twofold 01:16:22.480 --> 01:16:27.280 reason that we constantly return to these issues. 01:16:27.280 --> 01:16:30.800 One is because they are relevant to society and we do talk 01:16:30.800 --> 01:16:33.600 about things that are relevant to society. 01:16:33.600 --> 01:16:36.960 We talk about them in a Christian light, but we talk about 01:16:36.960 --> 01:16:40.560 them because they are relevant, they are important, they have very real 01:16:40.560 --> 01:16:45.120 consequences for the society in which we live, and the societies the 01:16:45.120 --> 01:16:49.040 societies in which all of you live, because we have listeners from 01:16:49.040 --> 01:16:50.400 around the world. 01:16:50.400 --> 01:16:54.480 We have listeners from quite a few countries at this point. 01:16:54.480 --> 01:16:58.960 The second reason, and to deal specifically with the issue of race, 01:16:58.960 --> 01:17:01.840 that we talk about the issue of race or any of these 01:17:01.840 --> 01:17:07.120 other controversial issues, is that they matter to the Christian, and the 01:17:07.120 --> 01:17:14.160 reason for this is very simple logic and yes, basic very, very 01:17:14.160 --> 01:17:18.000 basic logic course that it's important to understand. 01:17:18.080 --> 01:17:20.880 This is called modus ponens if you want the Latin name. 01:17:20.880 --> 01:17:22.400 The Latin doesn't matter. 01:17:22.400 --> 01:17:26.160 It's just if P, then Q. 01:17:26.160 --> 01:17:27.440 So hold that in your mind. 01:17:27.440 --> 01:17:29.760 The reason this matters. 01:17:29.760 --> 01:17:31.200 If A, then B. 01:17:31.200 --> 01:17:32.240 If P then Q. 01:17:32.400 --> 01:17:37.360 And so if you have one thing, another thing necessarily follows. 01:17:37.360 --> 01:17:43.040 Okay? So if you say that you have P, then you will 01:17:43.040 --> 01:17:46.400 necessarily have Q. 01:17:46.400 --> 01:17:49.920 But to summarize this, without getting deep into the weeds, the reason 01:17:49.920 --> 01:17:55.920 that this matters is that issues like race and sex and all 01:17:56.000 --> 01:18:01.920 these core aspects, these fundamental parts of our physical bodies, if you 01:18:01.920 --> 01:18:08.160 deny them, you are denying the physical created reality, which means you 01:18:08.160 --> 01:18:10.320 are denying the creator. 01:18:10.320 --> 01:18:13.760 So these issues that we'll bring up that may seem like they're 01:18:13.760 --> 01:18:20.400 tangential or not particularly important or why on earth are Christians focusing 01:18:20.400 --> 01:18:22.720 on these things? 01:18:22.720 --> 01:18:27.120 Well the reason that we're focusing on these things is that if 01:18:27.120 --> 01:18:31.840 you deny the reality of race, you're denying the reality of the 01:18:31.840 --> 01:18:38.160 flesh, you're denying the reality of a creation, you are effectively asserting 01:18:38.160 --> 01:18:40.480 a form of Gnosticism. 01:18:40.480 --> 01:18:46.000 And as Woe said, and as we've highlighted elsewhere, how does the 01:18:46.000 --> 01:18:50.000 resurrection work in this sort of scheme that is being built up 01:18:50.000 --> 01:18:54.800 by these men who claim to be Christian and yet deny fundamental 01:18:54.800 --> 01:18:57.440 aspects of the creation? 01:18:57.440 --> 01:19:02.640 If you say that race isn't real, then as what are you 01:19:02.640 --> 01:19:09.200 resurrected? I am ethnically German and a little Scottish. 01:19:09.200 --> 01:19:12.720 That is what I will be in eternity, because if I were 01:19:12.720 --> 01:19:14.480 anything else, I would not be me. 01:19:14.480 --> 01:19:18.080 It is incoherent to say to say, Well, if I were Chinese, 01:19:18.080 --> 01:19:20.400 if I were Chinese it wouldn't be me, it would be a 01:19:20.400 --> 01:19:22.080 Chinese man. 01:19:22.080 --> 01:19:24.480 And I am not Chinese. 01:19:24.480 --> 01:19:26.480 The same thing works in reverse. 01:19:26.480 --> 01:19:30.000 If a man who is Chinese were German, well he wouldn't be 01:19:30.000 --> 01:19:31.360 the same man. 01:19:31.360 --> 01:19:33.200 These things are fundamental. 01:19:33.200 --> 01:19:36.960 The same is true of sex, and hopefully Christians are still in 01:19:36.960 --> 01:19:39.520 a position, and I know that those who are listening are, but 01:19:39.520 --> 01:19:42.640 hopefully still in a position to recognize that there's a fundamental difference 01:19:42.640 --> 01:19:46.880 between between the sexes, and so it is utterly incoherent to say, 01:19:46.960 --> 01:19:50.320 Well, if I had been born a woman, I would not be 01:19:50.320 --> 01:19:53.840 me. I am male. 01:19:53.840 --> 01:19:57.360 All of these things are part of my nature as God created 01:19:57.360 --> 01:20:02.240 me they cannot be otherwise, because if they were otherwise, I would 01:20:02.240 --> 01:20:03.680 not be me. 01:20:03.680 --> 01:20:09.920 And so God must resurrect these things in order to resurrect me. 01:20:09.920 --> 01:20:14.800 Because if these things are not resurrected, then God has resurrected something 01:20:14.800 --> 01:20:18.560 else. God has created something else, and that would be to make 01:20:18.560 --> 01:20:23.040 God a liar And ultimately, that is the accusation that these men 01:20:23.040 --> 01:20:25.280 are leveling against God. 01:20:25.280 --> 01:20:29.360 Because ultimately, they're not disagreeing with me, they're not disagreeing with Woe, 01:20:29.360 --> 01:20:32.800 they're not disagreeing with any of you who have interacted with them 01:20:32.960 --> 01:20:35.680 on Twitter or elsewhere. 01:20:35.680 --> 01:20:40.560 They are disagreeing with God because they are denying what he created. 01:20:40.560 --> 01:20:44.240 If a man stands up and speaks the word of God and 01:20:44.240 --> 01:20:48.240 someone shouts at him that he's a liar, he's not shouting at 01:20:48.240 --> 01:20:52.320 the man who stood up and spoke, he's shouting it at God. 01:20:52.320 --> 01:20:55.840 And that is why, for instance, in scripture, when we see those 01:20:55.840 --> 01:20:58.880 who rise up against a prophet and say the prophet is a 01:20:58.880 --> 01:21:01.840 liar or say the prophet shouldn't have that position or someone else 01:21:02.240 --> 01:21:05.760 should be able to unseat him from his position. 01:21:05.760 --> 01:21:10.160 God will take offense because it is God who was insulted. 01:21:10.160 --> 01:21:15.040 Yes, the prophet is also insulted, but the ultimate insult, the ultimate 01:21:15.040 --> 01:21:17.360 accusation is directed at God. 01:21:17.360 --> 01:21:20.960 And so that is true any time you speak the things of 01:21:20.960 --> 01:21:24.720 God. And so these men who attack these things aren't ultimately attacking 01:21:24.720 --> 01:21:28.720 us. They're attacking God, and they will have to answer for that 01:21:28.720 --> 01:21:30.720 one day. 01:21:30.720 --> 01:21:35.040 But as Christians, we have to affirm these things because if you 01:21:35.040 --> 01:21:36.240 hold a belief 01:21:37.200 --> 01:21:45.840 that necessarily entails a denial of Christianity, you are necessarily denying Christianity. 01:21:45.840 --> 01:21:51.600 You cannot hold beliefs that are contrary to Christianity, to state it 01:21:51.600 --> 01:21:52.640 more simply. 01:21:52.800 --> 01:21:56.320 If you have mutually exclusive beliefs, so there's a set of things 01:21:56.320 --> 01:21:59.200 that Christianity says are true, and there's a set of things you 01:21:59.200 --> 01:22:03.760 believe, if these do not agree, you have an idol, at least 01:22:03.760 --> 01:22:08.320 one. You need to purge that idol from your life. 01:22:08.320 --> 01:22:11.920 And so it may be that it's one of these idols that 01:22:11.920 --> 01:22:15.760 is very common, that are very common in our culture. 01:22:15.760 --> 01:22:20.400 It may be race, it may be sex, it may be ability, 01:22:20.400 --> 01:22:23.120 it may be disability, maybe any of these various things that have 01:22:23.120 --> 01:22:26.560 been turned into idols either in and of themselves or by proxy 01:22:26.560 --> 01:22:28.320 in our culture. 01:22:28.320 --> 01:22:32.320 If you have them as part of your religion, whether you call 01:22:32.320 --> 01:22:36.400 it a religion or not, then you have a religion that is 01:22:36.400 --> 01:22:39.120 a different religion from Christianity. 01:22:39.120 --> 01:22:41.520 It is incompatible with Christianity. 01:22:41.520 --> 01:22:44.320 And that is why we keep talking about these issues, why we 01:22:44.320 --> 01:22:47.680 raise them, why we word things the way we do, in particular 01:22:47.760 --> 01:22:51.200 I will word things in order to elicit these responses from people, 01:22:51.200 --> 01:22:55.360 because I am highlighting where they have an idol, where they are 01:22:55.360 --> 01:23:00.080 worshipping a false god, where they are using language that is incompatible 01:23:00.080 --> 01:23:01.920 with Christianity. 01:23:01.920 --> 01:23:04.800 It is that pinch of incense to Caesar. 01:23:04.800 --> 01:23:07.600 There were Christians who were willing to go to the lions 01:23:09.040 --> 01:23:13.520 because they wouldn't give a pinch of incense to Caesar. 01:23:13.520 --> 01:23:16.480 I don't know how we could possibly think that the things that 01:23:16.480 --> 01:23:20.400 we see supposed Christian leaders and teachers doing every single day could 01:23:20.480 --> 01:23:24.960 possibly be conceived of as less than a pinch of incense. 01:23:24.960 --> 01:23:29.120 These are men who are devoting their time, their name, their honor, 01:23:29.120 --> 01:23:33.840 their lives in some cases, to defending these tenets of a false 01:23:33.840 --> 01:23:38.960 religion. They're defending a form of Gnosticism. 01:23:38.960 --> 01:23:40.560 This is a new secret knowledge. 01:23:40.560 --> 01:23:42.480 This isn't something they got from Scripture. 01:23:42.480 --> 01:23:44.720 This is something they got from the world, and then attempted to 01:23:44.720 --> 01:23:48.880 shoehorn into Scripture because they want to deceive you as well. 01:23:49.680 --> 01:23:52.640 So when someone tells you that, for instance, because it's one of 01:23:52.640 --> 01:23:55.600 the best examples, we will keep using it, when someone tells you 01:23:55.600 --> 01:24:00.960 that racism is a sin, tell them to give you a verse. 01:24:00.960 --> 01:24:05.520 There is no verse that says that racism is a sin because 01:24:05.520 --> 01:24:08.480 it simply is not in Scripture. 01:24:08.480 --> 01:24:12.160 There are things that God says in Scripture that to day, if 01:24:12.160 --> 01:24:15.360 you took them out of context, or you changed a couple of 01:24:15.360 --> 01:24:19.360 words but kept the meaning the same, all of these priests of 01:24:19.360 --> 01:24:22.080 the new modern religion would tell you that's racist and you can't 01:24:22.080 --> 01:24:23.280 say that. 01:24:23.280 --> 01:24:26.320 If you said that all Cretans are liars, well they're going to 01:24:26.320 --> 01:24:29.120 understand that one because that's a quote from scripture, they might catch 01:24:29.120 --> 01:24:30.400 that one. 01:24:30.400 --> 01:24:35.120 But if you change it and pick another stereotype from somewhere else, 01:24:35.120 --> 01:24:37.760 make fun of any other group, which is fine, you're allowed to 01:24:37.760 --> 01:24:41.120 engage in that sort of humor, but pick one and use that. 01:24:41.120 --> 01:24:43.280 They'll tell you all that's racist, you can't do that. 01:24:43.280 --> 01:24:46.960 It's the same sort of statement that God makes in scripture. 01:24:46.960 --> 01:24:51.360 If you think that God sinned, then the religion you have is 01:24:52.080 --> 01:24:53.440 not Christianity. 01:24:53.440 --> 01:24:54.640 It is another religion. 01:24:54.640 --> 01:24:56.400 It is a competing religion. 01:24:56.400 --> 01:25:00.800 It is, in fact, this modern Gnostic religion that says, we are 01:25:00.800 --> 01:25:02.160 more enlightened. 01:25:02.160 --> 01:25:03.520 We have progressed. 01:25:03.520 --> 01:25:09.920 We have these new beliefs that are distinct from those backwards, less 01:25:09.920 --> 01:25:14.640 progressive, less advanced people we find in the pages of scripture. 01:25:14.640 --> 01:25:18.720 And so what we believe is right and so we'll rewrite scripture 01:25:18.720 --> 01:25:22.000 to fit the things we believe, which is what they're actually doing. 01:25:22.000 --> 01:25:26.880 When you change the meaning of a word, you are not actually 01:25:26.880 --> 01:25:29.600 interpreting the underlying text. 01:25:29.600 --> 01:25:32.000 You are changing the meaning of the text. 01:25:32.000 --> 01:25:34.960 You are rewriting the text in effect. 01:25:34.960 --> 01:25:39.760 And that is what we see happening with these false teachers, with 01:25:39.760 --> 01:25:44.640 these false pastors, these wolves, these false shepherds Shepherds. 01:25:44.640 --> 01:25:48.240 In particular, with the case of racism, they'll try to say that 01:25:48.400 --> 01:25:51.280 well, partiality and racism are the same thing. 01:25:51.280 --> 01:25:54.720 And so when it says that you can't be partial, well there's 01:25:54.720 --> 01:25:55.840 a ban on racism. 01:25:55.840 --> 01:25:58.880 They'll try to use that one, because that's the comeback for the 01:25:58.880 --> 01:26:00.640 ones who are a little better trained. 01:26:00.640 --> 01:26:03.120 They'll immediately use that one against you when you tell them to 01:26:03.120 --> 01:26:04.080 point to racism. 01:26:04.080 --> 01:26:06.080 That's not what partiality means. 01:26:06.080 --> 01:26:08.160 Partiality is the use of false scales. 01:26:08.160 --> 01:26:09.760 It's the use of a false measure. 01:26:09.760 --> 01:26:11.360 And scripture is clear about that. 01:26:11.360 --> 01:26:13.200 God hates false measures. 01:26:13.200 --> 01:26:14.960 He hates a false scale. 01:26:14.960 --> 01:26:19.120 That's in multiple places in Scripture. 01:26:19.120 --> 01:26:24.000 But as Christians, we need to be very careful about these things, 01:26:24.000 --> 01:26:26.480 and you do need to think of them. 01:26:26.480 --> 01:26:30.560 It's not necessarily in a philosophical sense, but it is in a 01:26:30.560 --> 01:26:32.320 logical sense. 01:26:32.320 --> 01:26:36.480 You need to think, if I believe A, or if I agree 01:26:36.480 --> 01:26:40.880 with this person who says I must believe A, what are the 01:26:40.880 --> 01:26:44.000 consequences of this belief? 01:26:44.000 --> 01:26:47.120 Because it may not be so simple that it's A and then 01:26:47.120 --> 01:26:48.400 B is rank heresy. 01:26:49.120 --> 01:26:52.960 Satan is often more subtle than that, because most people can figure 01:26:52.960 --> 01:26:55.920 out if there's that immediate connection there. 01:26:55.920 --> 01:27:00.880 But it may be that if I believe A, I must necessarily 01:27:00.880 --> 01:27:05.520 believe B, which necessarily entails C, and it happens to be that 01:27:05.520 --> 01:27:07.200 C is the heresy. 01:27:07.200 --> 01:27:11.840 Well you can't believe A, because necessarily entails means that it must 01:27:11.840 --> 01:27:15.280 follow. And that's the goal. 01:27:15.280 --> 01:27:19.920 The goal of Satan is to extrapolate this out just enough that 01:27:19.920 --> 01:27:21.600 it gets past your defenses. 01:27:21.600 --> 01:27:24.240 Well that sounds Jesus. 01:27:24.240 --> 01:27:27.920 That sounds kind of Christian, and it's said by someone who has 01:27:28.240 --> 01:27:32.480 M Div behind his name and pastors a large church and all 01:27:32.480 --> 01:27:34.640 of these things that are supposed to be signals to tell me 01:27:34.640 --> 01:27:37.120 that this is a Christian. 01:27:37.120 --> 01:27:40.320 The signal that tells you whether or not it's Christian is whether 01:27:40.320 --> 01:27:43.200 or not it is in God's word. 01:27:43.200 --> 01:27:46.160 So if that person is just telling you, Well, to be a 01:27:46.160 --> 01:27:50.080 good person, to be nice, you can't do X, Y, and Z, 01:27:50.080 --> 01:27:53.200 and you must do A, B, and C, no tell me where 01:27:53.200 --> 01:27:54.640 it is in God's Word. 01:27:54.960 --> 01:27:57.840 Because God has given me His Word. 01:27:57.840 --> 01:27:59.840 He has given me His revelation. 01:27:59.840 --> 01:28:02.800 He has told me what I am to believe and not to 01:28:02.800 --> 01:28:10.080 believe. Now, yes, we will abide, of course, continue to hold there 01:28:10.080 --> 01:28:14.000 is both special revelation, which is to say scripture, and there is 01:28:14.000 --> 01:28:17.040 natural revelation, which is to say the natural world. 01:28:17.040 --> 01:28:21.040 There are things that you can discern from the natural world. 01:28:21.040 --> 01:28:21.600 However, 01:28:22.480 --> 01:28:27.040 nothing you discern from the natural world will ever contradict what God 01:28:27.040 --> 01:28:30.080 has revealed of Himself in Scripture. 01:28:30.080 --> 01:28:32.880 And so if you find that these men are telling you things 01:28:33.120 --> 01:28:37.840 that disagree with God's word, that you cannot reconcile with Christianity, that 01:28:37.840 --> 01:28:43.200 necessarily entail some false belief, they are trying to drag you into 01:28:43.200 --> 01:28:44.080 a false religion. 01:28:44.080 --> 01:28:47.360 They are trying to get you to give that pinch of incense, 01:28:47.360 --> 01:28:50.400 they are trying to get you to bow down before an idol, 01:28:50.400 --> 01:28:55.600 and ultimately they are trying to drag you with them to hell. 01:28:55.680 --> 01:29:00.800 As we've mentioned, two of the most obvious examples of created reality 01:29:00.800 --> 01:29:06.240 being accessible even to the unbeliever is sex and race. 01:29:06.240 --> 01:29:10.080 Any man can look at a man and a woman and tell 01:29:10.080 --> 01:29:10.960 the difference the difference. 01:29:10.960 --> 01:29:12.160 Any child can. 01:29:12.160 --> 01:29:13.360 Animals can. 01:29:13.360 --> 01:29:17.200 Dogs will have preferences for one sex versus the other. 01:29:17.200 --> 01:29:20.960 Incidentally, dogs also have preferences for race among humans. 01:29:20.960 --> 01:29:24.560 They know which humans are more likely to mistreat them. 01:29:25.520 --> 01:29:28.000 The sexes are plainly discernible. 01:29:28.000 --> 01:29:32.560 It's a created reality at every level, at the level of DNA, 01:29:32.560 --> 01:29:36.640 at the level of the body, particularly even before puberty, but especially 01:29:36.640 --> 01:29:41.840 after puberty, when the secondary characteristics become predominant. 01:29:41.840 --> 01:29:45.280 And then even in death, when when a fully grown male and 01:29:45.280 --> 01:29:49.760 female die thousand years later you can dig up those skeletons, and 01:29:49.760 --> 01:29:52.560 tell which one was a man and which one was a woman. 01:29:52.560 --> 01:29:56.240 Not only by the size, not only by the bone density, not 01:29:56.240 --> 01:29:59.840 only by the shape of certain types of bones, particularly by the 01:29:59.840 --> 01:30:04.800 pelvis. Because a woman's pelvis needs to be able to transit a 01:30:04.800 --> 01:30:07.840 human skull when she gives birth to a baby. 01:30:07.840 --> 01:30:10.160 It's got to go from one side to the other. 01:30:10.160 --> 01:30:12.000 Man's pelvis doesn't need that. 01:30:12.000 --> 01:30:17.520 There's no possibility of getting a baby's head through a man's pelvis. 01:30:17.600 --> 01:30:20.400 It's literally physically different. 01:30:20.400 --> 01:30:24.400 You could have an entire lifetime with without a shred of knowledge 01:30:24.400 --> 01:30:28.480 of God or of scripture, and still come to the correct scriptural 01:30:28.480 --> 01:30:32.160 conclusion about the fact that the two sexes are different, that the 01:30:32.160 --> 01:30:36.720 two sexes are unequal, and that they were made for different purposes. 01:30:36.720 --> 01:30:40.240 I've said before, I am a physically completely average man, and yet 01:30:40.320 --> 01:30:46.800 I am stronger, meaner, and more capable of violence than almost any 01:30:46.800 --> 01:30:51.440 girl. And a man whose one standard deviation bigger than me is 01:30:51.440 --> 01:30:55.600 going to be basically superior to every girl who exists unless there's 01:30:55.600 --> 01:30:57.120 a complete freak. 01:30:57.120 --> 01:30:58.560 Because that's just how it works. 01:30:58.560 --> 01:31:02.480 I'm totally average, totally normal, totally nothing, and yet I'm bigger, stronger, 01:31:02.480 --> 01:31:04.560 and meaner than almost every girl. 01:31:04.560 --> 01:31:06.240 Because I'm a man and that's it. 01:31:06.240 --> 01:31:10.160 It's just free and it's automatic. 01:31:10.320 --> 01:31:12.720 This is not a distinction of 01:31:14.000 --> 01:31:17.360 better or worse in terms of the way we usually use those 01:31:17.360 --> 01:31:19.120 words. It's just different. 01:31:19.120 --> 01:31:22.720 If I'm bigger, stronger, and meaner than a girl, and I'm not 01:31:22.720 --> 01:31:26.880 using that to be big, strong, and mean against her, then if 01:31:26.880 --> 01:31:31.040 for whatever reason she's with me and there's a benefit to those 01:31:31.040 --> 01:31:35.680 qualities, I can protect her better than she can protect herself. 01:31:35.680 --> 01:31:39.840 Now of course, in a world with sin where there is always 01:31:39.840 --> 01:31:43.520 the possibility that the bigger, stronger, and meaner could hurt the smaller 01:31:43.520 --> 01:31:48.240 and weaker, girls instinctively understand that they that they shouldn't ever be 01:31:48.240 --> 01:31:49.920 alone with certain guys. 01:31:49.920 --> 01:31:53.600 Arguably, girls should never be alone with anyone who isn't, you know, 01:31:53.600 --> 01:31:55.520 a relative or a husband. 01:31:55.520 --> 01:31:59.600 Now that sounds incredibly extreme, but it's worked for many cultures. 01:31:59.600 --> 01:32:02.640 One of the reasons that it has worked is that the guy 01:32:02.640 --> 01:32:05.760 who's bigger, stronger, and meaner, if he sees a pretty girl who's 01:32:05.760 --> 01:32:08.160 weaker and he's like, well, I want her, and I don't care 01:32:08.160 --> 01:32:11.600 what she thinks, and I don't care about the law, he can 01:32:11.600 --> 01:32:15.040 do something harmful and she has no choice. 01:32:15.040 --> 01:32:15.360 And 01:32:16.960 --> 01:32:20.160 we're gonna talk here for a minute about some things that some 01:32:20.160 --> 01:32:23.760 people may want to fast forward for five minutes or so, because 01:32:23.760 --> 01:32:29.360 it's necessary in refuting the Gnostic heresy of your body not being 01:32:29.360 --> 01:32:34.800 yourself, unfortunately to talk about some some things that are harmful. 01:32:34.800 --> 01:32:37.440 So we're gonna talk for a minute about things that some kids 01:32:37.440 --> 01:32:40.800 might not want to hear if you've been the victim of a 01:32:40.800 --> 01:32:45.440 a physical crime, especially one of that type of nature, you might 01:32:45.440 --> 01:32:48.000 want to skip ahead because this might be unpleasant. 01:32:48.000 --> 01:32:51.360 You know, it's funny when we we hear things like trigger warnings, 01:32:51.360 --> 01:32:53.680 the thing, Well that's just stupid, that's just weak. 01:32:53.680 --> 01:32:57.280 Frankly, if someone has had something terrible happen to them, and you 01:32:57.280 --> 01:33:00.560 can do them a favor by not reminding them, that's a good 01:33:00.560 --> 01:33:06.160 thing. It's obviously taken to absurd extremes by leftists, but the principle 01:33:06.160 --> 01:33:07.280 is not a bad one. 01:33:07.280 --> 01:33:07.760 You know what? 01:33:07.760 --> 01:33:11.280 There's some content in this thing that it's not for everyone. 01:33:11.280 --> 01:33:14.400 It doesn't mean it's sinful or that it's bad per se, but 01:33:14.400 --> 01:33:17.040 if someone wants to opt out of that, let them. 01:33:17.040 --> 01:33:20.240 So just saying now, skip ahead for five minutes if you don't 01:33:20.160 --> 01:33:23.520 want to hear that sort of thing. 01:33:23.520 --> 01:33:28.720 For everyone else, one of the key proofs that the Gnostics are 01:33:28.720 --> 01:33:30.880 lying about the 01:33:31.920 --> 01:33:36.000 fact that the body is not self is that when there's physical 01:33:36.000 --> 01:33:40.400 violence done to yourself, to your body, it's personal. 01:33:40.400 --> 01:33:42.240 It's completely personal. 01:33:42.240 --> 01:33:46.240 And it's why some people become permanently traumatized by that sort of 01:33:46.240 --> 01:33:52.160 injury. If someone is is violently attacked, if someone if a girl 01:33:52.160 --> 01:33:56.880 is raped or otherwise assaulted in such a manner, it's personal in 01:33:56.880 --> 01:33:58.960 a way that nothing else is. 01:33:59.280 --> 01:34:02.160 It's violative in a way that nothing else is. 01:34:02.160 --> 01:34:04.080 Because it involves your body. 01:34:04.080 --> 01:34:05.600 It's not hypothetical. 01:34:05.600 --> 01:34:06.880 It's not external. 01:34:06.880 --> 01:34:08.400 It's not conceptual. 01:34:08.400 --> 01:34:09.760 It's physical. 01:34:09.760 --> 01:34:14.560 And the physical damage and harm that is done to an individual 01:34:16.080 --> 01:34:20.240 bypasses all the intellectual and all the other protections that we may 01:34:20.240 --> 01:34:25.280 have. There's not necessarily an amount of mental toughness that can insulate 01:34:25.280 --> 01:34:29.200 you from being physically injured by by deliberate cause. 01:34:29.200 --> 01:34:32.080 You know, if someone wants to hurt you, if they're malicious and 01:34:32.080 --> 01:34:37.040 they do something harmful, it affects a in some cases a lifelong 01:34:37.120 --> 01:34:39.920 permanent change in that person. 01:34:39.920 --> 01:34:43.360 That's one example we gave last week with circumcision. 01:34:43.360 --> 01:34:49.120 Circumcision of an infant where they're strapped cruciform in thirty-six thousand nerve 01:34:49.120 --> 01:34:52.400 endings are sliced off without anesthesia. 01:34:52.400 --> 01:34:55.840 They go from being comfortable in the n womb for nine months, 01:34:55.840 --> 01:35:01.280 completely protected, to the most unimaginable excruciating pain possible, and it causes 01:35:01.280 --> 01:35:02.400 permanent changes. 01:35:02.400 --> 01:35:07.040 The baby doesn't remember, but the brainwaves remember, the body remembers, the 01:35:07.040 --> 01:35:14.080 self remembers, because the the platonic separation of mind and soul 01:35:14.240 --> 01:35:15.360 and body is 01:35:16.880 --> 01:35:23.120 they're distinctions that are valuable to a point, but they're not distinctions 01:35:23.120 --> 01:35:23.440 of 01:35:25.520 --> 01:35:27.040 they're details of self. 01:35:27.040 --> 01:35:31.760 We're every man is effectively a type of trinity. 01:35:31.760 --> 01:35:35.600 You know, God has the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 01:35:35.600 --> 01:35:37.600 Man has body, mind, and soul. 01:35:37.760 --> 01:35:42.720 I'm not suggesting that they correlate directly, but there's there's a sense 01:35:42.720 --> 01:35:47.680 of typology there, even if it's not actually typological. 01:35:47.680 --> 01:35:53.040 What we are as our bodies, as ourselves, is it's indistinguishable. 01:35:53.040 --> 01:35:57.360 You cannot separate the man or the woman from her body and 01:35:57.360 --> 01:35:59.280 take it somewhere else. 01:35:59.280 --> 01:36:04.960 And these sorts of of violative attacks on the person prove it 01:36:05.120 --> 01:36:07.920 because in some cases they'll fracture people. 01:36:07.920 --> 01:36:12.480 One of the horrible examples that we've alluded to before, and I'll 01:36:12.400 --> 01:36:18.000 say just briefly here, torture as it relates to MKUltra, a program 01:36:18.000 --> 01:36:21.360 that was developed in the nineteen sixties by the United States government 01:36:21.680 --> 01:36:23.760 specifically exploited this fact. 01:36:23.760 --> 01:36:28.160 Exploited the fact that you could cause psychological and physical torture of 01:36:28.160 --> 01:36:34.880 a person to split the mind from the body to cause disassociation. 01:36:34.880 --> 01:36:39.120 And they tried all these experiments and they created a methodology of 01:36:39.120 --> 01:36:40.640 doing this specific thing. 01:36:40.640 --> 01:36:42.240 And they mastered it. 01:36:42.240 --> 01:36:45.520 And you know, we think about that as sort of being ancient 01:36:45.520 --> 01:36:49.200 history, and that's just it doesn't happen anymore, and that's really extreme. 01:36:49.200 --> 01:36:52.560 And you know, the Manchurian candidates are who cares about you know 01:36:52.720 --> 01:36:55.600 disassociation, that's not a big deal. 01:36:55.600 --> 01:36:57.840 One of the ways that this has played out since then is 01:36:57.920 --> 01:37:02.320 in the form of things like nuclear drills, and today we have 01:37:02.800 --> 01:37:08.240 active shooter drills, where little children, who probably don't understand mortality yet, 01:37:08.240 --> 01:37:12.640 are told there's an existential threat outside the door that's about to 01:37:12.640 --> 01:37:13.360 kill you. 01:37:13.360 --> 01:37:16.160 I don't know what kill means, but I'm terrified. 01:37:16.160 --> 01:37:18.880 I my teacher is telling me this is serious. 01:37:18.880 --> 01:37:22.240 You know, they they make these things so elaborate that they're actually 01:37:22.240 --> 01:37:24.000 terrifying for little kids now. 01:37:24.960 --> 01:37:28.800 That is the end stage of MK Ultra because what does it 01:37:28.800 --> 01:37:32.240 do? It takes a child in an innocent state where they don't 01:37:32.240 --> 01:37:36.240 know about death and they don't know about terror, and it imposes 01:37:36.400 --> 01:37:39.280 that sort of terror in a way that rips them away from 01:37:39.280 --> 01:37:42.240 what they thought was a safe, comfortable place. 01:37:42.240 --> 01:37:45.280 In this sort of mass conditioning that's done now, it's not the 01:37:45.280 --> 01:37:49.920 full version of MK Ultra, it's it's a distinct diluted version for 01:37:49.920 --> 01:37:54.240 a slightly different purpose, but the conditioning effects are similar. 01:37:54.240 --> 01:37:59.840 When kids are continuously told, you may suffer grievous bodily harm or 01:37:59.840 --> 01:38:00.960 death at any moment. 01:38:00.960 --> 01:38:02.000 That's horrifying. 01:38:02.000 --> 01:38:04.560 We talked, I think, last week or the week before about the 01:38:04.560 --> 01:38:08.800 fact that there's certain types of evil knowledge that children should be 01:38:08.800 --> 01:38:10.000 spared from. 01:38:10.000 --> 01:38:12.000 People shouldn't know these things. 01:38:12.000 --> 01:38:14.400 And yet unfortunately we all learn them at some point. 01:38:14.400 --> 01:38:17.760 And so the sole purpose of talking about it is to illustrate 01:38:17.760 --> 01:38:20.880 that when when you do something to the mind, when you do 01:38:20.880 --> 01:38:26.400 something to the body, you can actually permanently damage a person internally 01:38:26.560 --> 01:38:29.680 so that they can never completely but be put back together. 01:38:29.920 --> 01:38:32.640 That's not to suggest that that's hopeless or that there's no forgiveness 01:38:32.800 --> 01:38:35.200 or whatever is applicable in the situation. 01:38:35.200 --> 01:38:38.880 It's to say that just like cutting off your arm or gouging 01:38:38.880 --> 01:38:43.040 out your eyes, these internal damages, this sort of psychic damage to 01:38:43.040 --> 01:38:46.400 the mind and to the soul, can be just as permanent and 01:38:46.400 --> 01:38:47.760 just as scarring. 01:38:47.760 --> 01:38:51.280 And so when someone has suffered that, we need to be empathetic. 01:38:51.280 --> 01:38:54.560 Don't laugh when they need a little more cushioning to stay away 01:38:54.560 --> 01:38:56.080 from these things. 01:38:56.080 --> 01:38:58.320 That's a that's something that's Christian. 01:38:58.320 --> 01:39:02.960 If you can spare them suffering something that hurts, do it. 01:39:02.960 --> 01:39:05.600 And thank God that you're in a position that you can, because 01:39:05.680 --> 01:39:07.040 not everybody will care. 01:39:07.440 --> 01:39:11.040 Because the division of the body, body, mind, and soul is an 01:39:11.040 --> 01:39:12.880 artificial one ultimately. 01:39:12.880 --> 01:39:15.120 You are all of those things at once. 01:39:15.120 --> 01:39:17.360 You are either a man or a woman. 01:39:17.360 --> 01:39:22.080 And that informs everything, informs your body, informs your psyche, import informs 01:39:22.080 --> 01:39:25.200 your personality, it informs your intelligence even. 01:39:25.200 --> 01:39:29.440 Because although men and women on average are about the same intelligence, 01:39:29.440 --> 01:39:31.920 men go much further to the extreme. 01:39:31.920 --> 01:39:35.760 There are not nearly as many female geniuses or female retards as 01:39:35.760 --> 01:39:36.560 there are men. 01:39:36.560 --> 01:39:38.720 Men go much further to either side. 01:39:38.720 --> 01:39:41.920 So if you imagine the bell curve, the female bell curve for 01:39:41.920 --> 01:39:44.160 any particular race is much narrower. 01:39:44.160 --> 01:39:48.000 The male bell curve is wider because we have greater variety. 01:39:48.000 --> 01:39:49.120 That's intrinsic. 01:39:49.120 --> 01:39:52.640 So that's in part about the mind, but it's also about sex 01:39:52.800 --> 01:39:54.160 because it's at the body. 01:39:54.160 --> 01:39:56.720 And it's ultimately about the self. 01:39:56.720 --> 01:40:01.440 You know, and something like retardation is a it's a regression from 01:40:01.440 --> 01:40:04.080 the norm, and it's something that is a defect. 01:40:04.080 --> 01:40:08.080 It just as being blind is a defect, being lame is a 01:40:08.080 --> 01:40:10.240 defect, being paralyzed. 01:40:10.240 --> 01:40:16.080 When Jesus performed miracles, as Corey said earlier, he removed those things. 01:40:16.080 --> 01:40:20.560 Men who were either suffered injury or sickness or were blind or 01:40:20.560 --> 01:40:23.760 lame from birth, God healed their bodies. 01:40:23.760 --> 01:40:25.680 And he did it for three reasons. 01:40:25.680 --> 01:40:28.240 One, it fulfilled prophecy. 01:40:28.240 --> 01:40:31.600 Two, it proved that he was master of creation, that he was 01:40:31.600 --> 01:40:32.400 the creator. 01:40:32.400 --> 01:40:36.000 And so when he said I can forgive your sins, and he 01:40:36.000 --> 01:40:38.960 will fix the lame, and he will in fact cause people to 01:40:38.960 --> 01:40:42.240 be raised from the dead by speaking, you can believe that it's 01:40:42.160 --> 01:40:44.320 that he can actually deliver on that promise. 01:40:44.320 --> 01:40:48.480 And three, as Corey said, it's undoing the effects of the fall. 01:40:48.480 --> 01:40:51.600 If someone is certainly dead, or if they're lame or deaf or 01:40:51.600 --> 01:40:55.040 mute or blind or paralyzed, if they have leprosy or some other 01:40:55.040 --> 01:40:57.600 sickness, this is the fall. 01:40:57.600 --> 01:40:59.920 This is damage to the self. 01:40:59.920 --> 01:41:01.680 It is not intrinsic to the self. 01:41:01.680 --> 01:41:03.280 No one's intrinsically a leper. 01:41:03.600 --> 01:41:05.760 No one is naturally blind. 01:41:05.760 --> 01:41:08.400 Even if they're born blind, even if you've never been able to 01:41:08.400 --> 01:41:11.440 see for a day in your life, that is not how God 01:41:11.440 --> 01:41:13.440 intended to create you. 01:41:13.440 --> 01:41:16.000 And this is a key point because this is something that's happening 01:41:16.000 --> 01:41:17.920 very often in our churches. 01:41:17.920 --> 01:41:20.000 It didn't used to be the case until the last twenty or 01:41:20.000 --> 01:41:21.040 thirty years. 01:41:21.040 --> 01:41:24.720 But now we have churches where people are afraid to say, this 01:41:24.720 --> 01:41:27.200 is a disability, this is a defect. 01:41:27.200 --> 01:41:30.480 If you're listening and you're blind, as Corey said, you weren't supposed 01:41:30.480 --> 01:41:31.920 to be blind at birth. 01:41:31.920 --> 01:41:33.920 Now it's I'm not making fun of you. 01:41:33.920 --> 01:41:37.680 I'm not saying you're worse than, but the fact that you can't 01:41:37.680 --> 01:41:39.920 see is something that God will fix. 01:41:39.920 --> 01:41:41.920 When you're raised on the last day, you will be able to 01:41:42.720 --> 01:41:46.480 see. And God proved that by healing the blind, as he was 01:41:46.480 --> 01:41:48.720 prophesied to do. 01:41:48.720 --> 01:41:52.480 God fixes the products of sin because there won't be any in 01:41:52.480 --> 01:41:54.800 creation. What didn't he remove? 01:41:54.800 --> 01:41:56.160 He didn't turn men into women. 01:41:56.160 --> 01:42:00.080 He didn't turn people from one race into another, erase their race 01:42:00.080 --> 01:42:03.360 entirely. They were still the same body that they had before. 01:42:03.360 --> 01:42:04.800 And it wasn't a fluke. 01:42:04.800 --> 01:42:06.480 It wasn't they forgot something. 01:42:06.480 --> 01:42:09.040 It wasn't that he hadn't proven that point yet. 01:42:09.040 --> 01:42:10.880 It was that those things are intrinsic. 01:42:10.880 --> 01:42:12.720 Those are how God made you. 01:42:12.720 --> 01:42:15.440 When God wrote my name in the book of life from before 01:42:15.440 --> 01:42:17.600 eternity, it was the name of a man. 01:42:17.600 --> 01:42:19.280 Same with Cory, same with you. 01:42:19.280 --> 01:42:20.800 If you're a woman, it's the same thing. 01:42:20.800 --> 01:42:24.000 You are You are what you are because God made you that 01:42:24.000 --> 01:42:28.240 way. And yet today we see first we had the equality of 01:42:28.240 --> 01:42:31.760 the sexes saying, Well, sure, they're the same and they're interchangeable, which 01:42:31.760 --> 01:42:36.880 needs leads necessarily into transgenderism, because that is one of the most 01:42:36.880 --> 01:42:43.360 pure expressions of Gnosticism to say this this body, this flesh, it's 01:42:43.360 --> 01:42:44.400 not really me. 01:42:44.400 --> 01:42:45.760 I feel like I'm a woman. 01:42:45.760 --> 01:42:47.120 I'm feeling girly today. 01:42:47.120 --> 01:42:49.040 I think I'm gonna do all the things I need to do 01:42:49.040 --> 01:42:51.920 to butcher this body and turn into a woman. 01:42:52.080 --> 01:42:53.040 Doesn't work. 01:42:53.040 --> 01:42:56.000 All I've done is wrecked a man's body and turned into something 01:42:56.000 --> 01:42:57.040 that's neither. 01:42:57.040 --> 01:43:00.480 I'm still a man inside, and therefore tormented. 01:43:00.480 --> 01:43:01.840 And that's what we find. 01:43:02.160 --> 01:43:06.000 the suicide rates for those people are horrific because they're being tormented. 01:43:06.000 --> 01:43:08.400 They're being demonically oppressed. 01:43:08.400 --> 01:43:11.840 And then when people don't say, Stop, this is evil, don't do 01:43:11.840 --> 01:43:15.520 any of this, when there's no one to intervene and condemn the 01:43:15.520 --> 01:43:19.360 deception and the damage is done to the body, it's permanent. 01:43:19.360 --> 01:43:22.720 And there are many accounts from people who have repented from having 01:43:22.720 --> 01:43:26.160 gone through one of those evil procedures. 01:43:26.160 --> 01:43:29.360 And they come out the other side and they realize that they 01:43:29.360 --> 01:43:32.240 were always the sex that they were born. 01:43:32.240 --> 01:43:33.920 You know, oh I was born that way. 01:43:33.920 --> 01:43:35.520 As though that's some accident. 01:43:35.520 --> 01:43:38.080 No. That is the substance of who you are. 01:43:38.080 --> 01:43:40.960 And this is crucial because it own doesn't only apply to us. 01:43:41.520 --> 01:43:45.120 To go back to what Marcian said about denying the birth, death, 01:43:45.280 --> 01:43:49.360 death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus was born a man. 01:43:49.360 --> 01:43:50.880 He was not born human. 01:43:50.880 --> 01:43:52.320 He was born a man. 01:43:52.320 --> 01:43:54.960 Because Adam was created a man. 01:43:54.960 --> 01:43:58.080 Woman was taken out of man. 01:43:58.080 --> 01:44:02.560 Jesus on the cross was fully anatomically correct just like any other 01:44:02.560 --> 01:44:06.880 man. He wasn't some hermaphrodite, he wasn't splitting the difference, he wasn't 01:44:07.040 --> 01:44:11.600 a spirit being, he was a man, and he died bodily as 01:44:11.600 --> 01:44:15.760 a man, he was resurrected the same way. 01:44:15.760 --> 01:44:18.880 When we go down this path where we say that your body 01:44:18.880 --> 01:44:21.840 is not yourself, you will ultimately get to the point where you 01:44:21.840 --> 01:44:25.360 have to deny the resurrection, which is where Marcians started out. 01:44:25.360 --> 01:44:27.360 And this is something else we're seeing today. 01:44:27.360 --> 01:44:33.280 Wells recently changed their hymnals, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which is 01:44:33.280 --> 01:44:37.440 generally considered more m conservative than the LCMS is not really, but 01:44:37.440 --> 01:44:39.200 they have a different set of problems. 01:44:39.200 --> 01:44:41.360 We're all fighting these battles together. 01:44:41.360 --> 01:44:45.440 They recently changed the Apostles' Creed to say to say that Jesus 01:44:45.440 --> 01:44:51.120 was born human, not born a man, because of egalitarianism, because of 01:44:51.120 --> 01:44:54.880 anti-misogyny. Because well, Jesus died for everyone, and so we want to 01:44:54.880 --> 01:44:56.000 be inclusive. 01:44:56.000 --> 01:45:00.240 You have to include everyone by denying that Jesus is a man. 01:45:00.240 --> 01:45:04.320 And it's a small thing, but that's what Satan loves. 01:45:04.320 --> 01:45:07.360 He'll take generations to do this damage. 01:45:07.360 --> 01:45:11.040 He doesn't care if you're not tricked by switching from Jesus as 01:45:11.040 --> 01:45:15.200 a man to Jesus as human, he'll wait for the next round. 01:45:15.200 --> 01:45:17.600 And he'll come back and say, Well, human, what does that even 01:45:17.600 --> 01:45:24.320 mean? This sort of incrementalism is made possible in part by our 01:45:24.320 --> 01:45:26.160 appetite for Gnosticism. 01:45:26.160 --> 01:45:30.320 And when you deny the body as everyone is today, I mean, 01:45:30.320 --> 01:45:33.920 identifying with pronouns and all that crap, all these things that we 01:45:33.920 --> 01:45:38.320 all know about and tend to laugh about when it is not 01:45:38.320 --> 01:45:42.720 fought facially and condemned not only as false but as evil, but 01:45:43.040 --> 01:45:46.400 particularly because as Corey's saying it is a denial of how God 01:45:46.400 --> 01:45:47.200 made you. 01:45:47.200 --> 01:45:50.000 If you refer to a man as a woman, you are denying 01:45:50.400 --> 01:45:51.520 how God made them. 01:45:51.520 --> 01:45:53.680 You are denying God. 01:45:53.680 --> 01:45:58.720 You cannot deny their creator or your creator without denying that that 01:45:58.720 --> 01:46:00.000 creator saved you. 01:46:00.000 --> 01:46:01.600 It's part and parcel. 01:46:01.600 --> 01:46:05.600 And see, we're not trying to make race an issue of salvation. 01:46:05.600 --> 01:46:08.880 We're making confession of God an issue of salvation. 01:46:08.880 --> 01:46:10.400 Because we don't need to do that. 01:46:10.400 --> 01:46:11.280 God did that. 01:46:11.280 --> 01:46:16.160 You can't confess false gods and have the one true god's forgiveness. 01:46:16.160 --> 01:46:18.400 If you call God a liar and say, Well you didn't make 01:46:18.400 --> 01:46:21.600 this, I'm I'm actually a girl or, you know, I'm I'm Hindu, 01:46:21.600 --> 01:46:24.000 I'm I'm Chinese, I I'm all these different things. 01:46:24.000 --> 01:46:25.200 I don't care what you say. 01:46:25.200 --> 01:46:26.960 You're not the boss of me, Dad. 01:46:26.960 --> 01:46:28.480 That's a spirit behind all of it. 01:46:28.480 --> 01:46:30.880 It's just it's it's facially absurd. 01:46:30.880 --> 01:46:31.920 It's stupid. 01:46:31.920 --> 01:46:34.000 And yet we're told to tolerate it. 01:46:34.000 --> 01:46:38.240 Because self identification is the purest form of Gnosticism. 01:46:38.240 --> 01:46:42.240 It's saying this body, this evil garbage, this this meat sack, none 01:46:42.240 --> 01:46:43.040 of this is me. 01:46:43.280 --> 01:46:44.720 don't pay an attention to this. 01:46:44.720 --> 01:46:45.680 I'm just a spirit. 01:46:45.680 --> 01:46:48.800 I'm s a spirit trapped and listen to my ideas and blah 01:46:48.880 --> 01:46:49.360 blah blah. 01:46:49.440 --> 01:46:52.720 It's it destroys what God has made. 01:46:52.960 --> 01:46:57.280 Because you're not just an idea, you're not just a soul. 01:46:57.280 --> 01:46:58.800 You're everything at once. 01:46:58.800 --> 01:47:03.120 And whenever any one of them is damaged, it damages all of 01:47:03.120 --> 01:47:08.080 you. This becomes an issue of salvation because it's a denial of 01:47:08.080 --> 01:47:09.920 how God created you. 01:47:09.920 --> 01:47:13.920 Not only transgenderism, but also transhumanism, which isn't a problem in the 01:47:13.920 --> 01:47:17.840 church yet, but it's certainly a problem in the pagan world where 01:47:17.840 --> 01:47:20.160 there are guys who think that they will be able to live 01:47:20.160 --> 01:47:24.320 forever. Some are trying to enhance their human bodies. 01:47:24.320 --> 01:47:28.240 Others are looking at ways of extracting their consciousness, of jumping into 01:47:28.240 --> 01:47:32.160 a robot, or jumping into another human body, or uploading into the 01:47:32.160 --> 01:47:35.840 cloud so they can just live on AWS and pay the fees 01:47:35.920 --> 01:47:38.800 and then they'll always be present, even if they don't have a 01:47:38.800 --> 01:47:42.000 body. And we laugh at those things and we think they're absurd, 01:47:42.000 --> 01:47:46.880 but by measuring in degrees, they're gonna get someplace place. 01:47:47.360 --> 01:47:48.960 they're gonna do portions of it. 01:47:48.960 --> 01:47:52.080 They won't do it perfectly, because as soon as you remove a 01:47:52.080 --> 01:47:57.680 body from the from the mind, you have you've broken the person, 01:47:57.680 --> 01:47:59.600 just as death breaks us. 01:47:59.600 --> 01:48:02.880 When the when the mind dies with the body and the soul 01:48:02.880 --> 01:48:06.000 departs, there's a rending that is terrible. 01:48:06.000 --> 01:48:10.000 It's something that we can visually see as bad. 01:48:10.000 --> 01:48:12.960 If you've ever been to the funeral with open casket of a 01:48:12.960 --> 01:48:18.000 loved one or a relative, you look at that and you're like, 01:48:18.000 --> 01:48:19.840 that's it's them, but it's not. 01:48:19.840 --> 01:48:25.040 And it it's a very viscerally unsettling, uncanny valley thing because it 01:48:25.040 --> 01:48:28.480 still looks like them but and you know they do stuff with 01:48:28.480 --> 01:48:31.680 makeup and things so like it seems realistic but you know that 01:48:31.680 --> 01:48:34.960 if you touch them they're cold and no mammal is cold. 01:48:34.960 --> 01:48:38.400 This you know that it's naturally awful. 01:48:38.640 --> 01:48:40.560 it's completely terrible. 01:48:40.560 --> 01:48:43.920 And that's why it's so traumatic because it's not natural, it's a 01:48:43.920 --> 01:48:48.080 separation. And so these lies that are being told today about trannyism 01:48:48.320 --> 01:48:52.080 and about your race not being who you are, and about transhumanism 01:48:52.080 --> 01:48:57.120 being able to separate these things cleanly, ultimately they're all destructive. 01:48:57.120 --> 01:48:58.480 And that's what Satan wants. 01:48:58.480 --> 01:49:00.000 He wants to destroy. 01:49:00.000 --> 01:49:03.840 He wants to remake and destroy creation because he hates God and 01:49:03.840 --> 01:49:04.800 he hates us. 01:49:04.800 --> 01:49:07.520 He hates us more than you can possibly imagine. 01:49:07.520 --> 01:49:10.800 Because we were created in God's image and we were given a 01:49:10.800 --> 01:49:13.920 gift. And he doesn't have those gifts. 01:49:13.920 --> 01:49:18.720 And he despises us and he's devoting everything Every moment that he 01:49:18.720 --> 01:49:22.000 has, I'm gonna say I was saying waking moment, but he never 01:49:22.000 --> 01:49:25.600 sleeps. He's always prowling like a roaring lion. 01:49:25.600 --> 01:49:29.440 He hates us because we're different than because as an angel, he 01:49:29.440 --> 01:49:30.720 is spirit. 01:49:30.720 --> 01:49:34.400 To whatever degree he can manifest, it's not truly who he is. 01:49:34.400 --> 01:49:37.840 The supernatural is a totally separate category. 01:49:37.840 --> 01:49:40.720 And that's fundamentally what we get into here when we deal with 01:49:40.720 --> 01:49:43.520 these Gnostic things where men say we can separate 01:49:44.480 --> 01:49:47.840 body and mind and soul, we're gonna create new things, we're gonna 01:49:47.840 --> 01:49:51.520 have subsets of things, and it's still gonna be you. 01:49:51.520 --> 01:49:56.320 You're playing with a fabric of creation, and it's not that it's 01:49:56.320 --> 01:49:58.480 impossible to do any of it. 01:49:58.480 --> 01:50:01.840 It's that it's impossible to do what they're claiming to do. 01:50:01.840 --> 01:50:05.360 They can destroy and they can create horrors, but they're not going 01:50:05.360 --> 01:50:10.000 to deliver on their promises because all the promises are satanic promises 01:50:10.160 --> 01:50:12.320 intended to deceive and to destroy. 01:50:12.320 --> 01:50:18.480 They're not intended for immortality, which incidentally is another defiance of God. 01:50:18.480 --> 01:50:22.480 The entire reason that the flaming sword in the hand of the 01:50:22.480 --> 01:50:25.760 angel was placed outside the garden was to keep Adam and Eve 01:50:25.760 --> 01:50:28.320 out of the garden because if they could still eat from the 01:50:28.320 --> 01:50:30.640 the tree of life, they wouldn't die. 01:50:30.640 --> 01:50:32.720 What happens if you don't die? 01:50:32.720 --> 01:50:34.880 You can't be resurrected. 01:50:34.880 --> 01:50:39.440 Our death is necessary for us to be reunited with God in 01:50:39.440 --> 01:50:43.840 perfection. So all of this stuff, all this denial of the body, 01:50:43.840 --> 01:50:46.720 the least of the dun denial of the resurrection of the dead, 01:50:46.720 --> 01:50:48.480 it's not coincidental. 01:50:48.480 --> 01:50:52.080 It is a it's an arrow pointed directly at the heart of 01:50:52.080 --> 01:50:53.120 the Christian faith. 01:50:53.120 --> 01:50:56.160 And all these bits and pieces that we pulled together today, they 01:50:56.160 --> 01:50:57.760 all work towards that same end. 01:50:57.760 --> 01:51:00.640 When you start looking at this pattern, you find that there is 01:51:00.640 --> 01:51:05.760 hatred of this doctrine in this form that God has presented in 01:51:05.760 --> 01:51:07.600 this way that He's given us things. 01:51:07.760 --> 01:51:09.760 It's just all hatred for what God does. 01:51:09.760 --> 01:51:12.800 And it's substituting something that the world embraces. 01:51:12.800 --> 01:51:15.280 The global religion loves all this stuff. 01:51:15.280 --> 01:51:18.320 It says no, you that's maybe you're burdened with it and we'll 01:51:18.320 --> 01:51:20.080 pray for you, but you don't have to change. 01:51:20.080 --> 01:51:24.560 You know, it's it's very common now among deaf ministry for those 01:51:24.560 --> 01:51:27.520 people to be told they're not going to be healed from being 01:51:28.000 --> 01:51:30.400 deaf. That you're going to be deaf in the resurrection. 01:51:30.400 --> 01:51:32.240 You're fine just the way you are. 01:51:32.240 --> 01:51:33.360 You're not fine. 01:51:33.360 --> 01:51:34.800 There's something wrong with you. 01:51:34.800 --> 01:51:36.320 Your body is defective. 01:51:36.320 --> 01:51:38.880 Just as my body was defective when I had a flap, that 01:51:38.880 --> 01:51:40.240 it was just it was flapping around. 01:51:40.240 --> 01:51:41.040 It was it never worked. 01:51:41.280 --> 01:51:42.640 My cardio was always terrible. 01:51:42.640 --> 01:51:43.680 I had no idea why. 01:51:43.680 --> 01:51:45.920 Turned out I had a valve that eventually failed. 01:51:45.920 --> 01:51:47.280 So they had to fix it. 01:51:47.280 --> 01:51:49.360 And now I things work again. 01:51:49.360 --> 01:51:52.240 I was born defective in lots of ways. 01:51:52.240 --> 01:51:53.520 That was one particular one. 01:51:53.840 --> 01:51:57.280 I can hear, I can see, but my heart didn't work quite 01:51:57.280 --> 01:52:00.640 right. Some people can't see, they can't hear, they're missing arms or 01:52:00.640 --> 01:52:04.640 legs. They you know all these things are less than what God 01:52:04.640 --> 01:52:05.920 wanted us to be. 01:52:05.920 --> 01:52:09.200 All these things are what God will restore in the resurrection of 01:52:09.200 --> 01:52:10.000 the dead. 01:52:10.000 --> 01:52:12.640 As soon as you start pretending that your body is not you, 01:52:12.640 --> 01:52:14.080 you're saying, I don't care what you do. 01:52:14.320 --> 01:52:17.360 It's whatever, just let my soul go, you know, play a harp 01:52:17.360 --> 01:52:17.840 in heaven. 01:52:17.840 --> 01:52:18.960 Like that absurdity. 01:52:18.960 --> 01:52:22.880 No. This body will be resurrected on the last day. 01:52:22.880 --> 01:52:25.600 I know that my Redeemer lives, and I will live to see 01:52:25.600 --> 01:52:26.880 him with my own eyes. 01:52:26.880 --> 01:52:30.640 That's a that's a promise from God, and it's one that we 01:52:30.640 --> 01:52:33.600 have to remember, because Satan's trying to take it from us. 01:52:33.600 --> 01:52:37.040 And if he can take that away, then all these other lies 01:52:37.040 --> 01:52:38.240 are up for grabs. 01:52:38.240 --> 01:52:41.520 And the more you adopt and the more you're not terrified of, 01:52:41.520 --> 01:52:44.320 the more you think, well, maybe I can baptize that doesn't doesn't 01:52:44.320 --> 01:52:45.920 seem like it's a threat on Christianity. 01:52:45.920 --> 01:52:48.640 You know, annihilationalism, like I don't want people to go to hell. 01:52:48.640 --> 01:52:50.240 So, you know, maybe they just vanish. 01:52:50.240 --> 01:52:52.640 No. They're resurrected bodily just like you. 01:52:52.640 --> 01:52:54.240 And then they're thrown into fire. 01:52:54.240 --> 01:52:57.200 If that seems bad to you, maybe tell 'em about Jesus. 01:52:57.200 --> 01:53:01.200 If damnation is inconsequential, then who cares? 01:53:01.200 --> 01:53:06.000 Like it's this sort of separation of act and consequence is something 01:53:06.000 --> 01:53:07.280 else Satan wants. 01:53:07.280 --> 01:53:11.120 It's all about separation from God's word, from his will, and from 01:53:11.120 --> 01:53:12.960 his promises to us. 01:53:12.960 --> 01:53:16.320 Everything that God has told us about and has given us is 01:53:16.320 --> 01:53:17.280 for our benefit. 01:53:17.280 --> 01:53:20.640 Everything that Satan has given us and told us about is terrible. 01:53:20.640 --> 01:53:22.400 It's the worst possible thing. 01:53:22.400 --> 01:53:26.080 And more and more our churches are adopting what Satan is giving 01:53:26.080 --> 01:53:30.000 us and despising what God has in the same breath. 01:53:30.000 --> 01:53:31.920 The church is not going to make it. 01:53:31.920 --> 01:53:34.880 The church will not make it if we continue down that path. 01:53:34.880 --> 01:53:39.360 So these narrow episodes about this seemingly weird stuff, we have to 01:53:39.360 --> 01:53:42.400 nip it in the bud because it will corrode the church from 01:53:42.400 --> 01:53:45.840 the inside just as it's corroding the world around us. 01:53:45.840 --> 01:53:48.400 And we are the ones who have to stop it because we 01:53:48.400 --> 01:53:51.520 have no guarantee that if we screw this up and let all 01:53:51.520 --> 01:53:55.040 this stuff slide that there's gonna be anything left for the next 01:53:55.040 --> 01:53:59.520 generation to even know what Christianity was about in the first place. 01:53:59.600 --> 01:54:04.160 You are like most of the other things in your environment surrounding 01:54:04.160 --> 01:54:07.200 you, what is called a gestalt. 01:54:07.200 --> 01:54:10.240 And that is simply a German word that means a thing that 01:54:10.240 --> 01:54:12.320 is greater than the sum of its parts. 01:54:12.320 --> 01:54:15.360 And it is also an English word because we just straight imported 01:54:15.360 --> 01:54:17.040 that one into English. 01:54:17.040 --> 01:54:22.720 So capitalize the G or don't capitalize it as you prefer. 01:54:22.720 --> 01:54:26.320 But this is true of so many of the things that surround 01:54:26.320 --> 01:54:29.520 us, the pen that I'm holding is a gestalt. 01:54:29.520 --> 01:54:33.920 Because certainly it is made of I believe this one is macrolon, 01:54:33.920 --> 01:54:37.520 it has some metal, few other components. 01:54:37.520 --> 01:54:40.240 If those were all separated out and set on my desk, no 01:54:40.320 --> 01:54:42.320 one would call that a pen. 01:54:42.320 --> 01:54:46.000 It would just be a handful of miscellaneous materials. 01:54:46.000 --> 01:54:49.920 Useful, certainly, they have utility still, but it wouldn't be a pen. 01:54:49.920 --> 01:54:51.520 It wouldn't be the same thing. 01:54:53.680 --> 01:54:59.280 And we see this, as Wo mentioned, when someone or a pet 01:54:59.840 --> 01:55:03.360 something dies. 01:55:03.680 --> 01:55:08.720 is the separation Of the spirit and the mind as well from 01:55:08.720 --> 01:55:10.560 the body. 01:55:10.560 --> 01:55:14.000 The gestalt is gone. 01:55:14.000 --> 01:55:19.040 Which means the person is not there because you are the gestalt. 01:55:19.040 --> 01:55:23.120 You are not just your finger, you are not just your spirit, 01:55:23.120 --> 01:55:24.320 you are not just your mind. 01:55:24.320 --> 01:55:26.560 You are all of those things. 01:55:26.560 --> 01:55:31.520 You can't take one part and rip it away and have the 01:55:31.520 --> 01:55:33.120 whole remain. 01:55:33.600 --> 01:55:38.560 And that is why death is a traumatic thing, not just for 01:55:38.560 --> 01:55:41.840 the one who dies, but also for those who witness it, who 01:55:41.840 --> 01:55:43.680 are around after it. 01:55:43.680 --> 01:55:47.120 Because it is unnatural, it is not meant to be a part 01:55:47.120 --> 01:55:48.320 of nature. 01:55:48.320 --> 01:55:52.880 Death was brought into the world by sin. 01:55:52.880 --> 01:55:56.880 Death will be removed from the world, defeated by Christ. 01:55:56.960 --> 01:56:01.840 It already has been, but that ultimately resolves itself in the second 01:56:01.840 --> 01:56:07.200 coming and the new heavens and the new earth. 01:56:07.200 --> 01:56:08.880 And so when we think about 01:56:09.840 --> 01:56:16.400 this Gnostic tendency to deny the reality of the flesh. 01:56:16.400 --> 01:56:20.240 The reason that it is such a danger to Christians and to 01:56:20.240 --> 01:56:25.440 Christianity to the Church is that again it is ultimately a denial 01:56:25.440 --> 01:56:31.360 of the creation and therefore a denial of the creator. 01:56:31.360 --> 01:56:33.520 There are a number of reasons for this. 01:56:33.520 --> 01:56:36.400 One is that Satan just wants to destroy 01:56:37.280 --> 01:56:40.800 hates God, he hates the things of God, he hates the people 01:56:40.800 --> 01:56:44.880 of God, he hates all that is good and true and beautiful. 01:56:44.880 --> 01:56:48.000 And so he just wants to destroy. 01:56:48.000 --> 01:56:51.360 But there's a nuance to it here. 01:56:52.160 --> 01:56:55.920 God took on human flesh. 01:56:55.920 --> 01:57:00.400 That sets man apart in a way that the angels and the 01:57:00.400 --> 01:57:02.240 demons are not. 01:57:02.640 --> 01:57:04.560 The demons hate that. 01:57:04.560 --> 01:57:08.640 The angels want to look into the mystery of the incarnation and 01:57:08.640 --> 01:57:10.000 what these things mean. 01:57:10.000 --> 01:57:12.080 The demons hate it. 01:57:12.080 --> 01:57:15.920 But at the same time, they envy us, and we see that 01:57:15.920 --> 01:57:23.120 envy in a number of places, in the reliable recountings of exorcisms, 01:57:23.120 --> 01:57:27.520 we see this, we see it in Christ's interaction with the demoniac 01:57:27.520 --> 01:57:30.640 and the herd of pigs. 01:57:30.640 --> 01:57:33.920 On the one hand they hate the flesh, but on the other 01:57:33.920 --> 01:57:38.880 hand they envy the flesh, but they want to destroy it. 01:57:38.880 --> 01:57:42.640 And so if you participate in this denial 01:57:43.520 --> 01:57:46.960 of the flesh, and this denial of the reality of what it 01:57:46.960 --> 01:57:49.920 means to be a person, because again, you are not just your 01:57:49.920 --> 01:57:53.360 spirit, you are spirit, mind, and body. 01:57:53.360 --> 01:57:56.400 I'll go ahead and just state that you are tripartite, we're not 01:57:56.400 --> 01:57:59.440 getting into the finer details of that, we're just going to assert 01:57:59.440 --> 01:58:04.800 it. But you are that Gestalt, so if you deny some component 01:58:04.800 --> 01:58:08.960 part of that, you are ultimately really denying the whole. 01:58:08.960 --> 01:58:10.960 You are denying what you are. 01:58:10.960 --> 01:58:16.080 And this works out as a denial of the resurrection. 01:58:16.080 --> 01:58:19.040 Because here in time you'll have those who will say that, well, 01:58:19.040 --> 01:58:22.160 you're not really German, you're just German because you had a piece 01:58:22.160 --> 01:58:24.560 of paper that says it, or you're American because you have a 01:58:24.560 --> 01:58:25.760 piece of paper that says it. 01:58:25.760 --> 01:58:29.360 It's not because you were born American. 01:58:29.360 --> 01:58:32.960 You're a man because that's just what you feel like today. 01:58:32.960 --> 01:58:36.080 You're not a man or a woman because you happen to have 01:58:36.080 --> 01:58:40.400 the chromosomes that tell you you are that. 01:58:40.400 --> 01:58:42.080 Because that's what it is. 01:58:42.080 --> 01:58:45.440 It is according to the biological nature of your body that you 01:58:45.440 --> 01:58:47.200 are male or female. 01:58:47.200 --> 01:58:51.440 Now, of course, there are those who will scream about, well, what 01:58:51.440 --> 01:58:54.160 happens for those who have a genetic defect of any of a 01:58:54.160 --> 01:58:55.840 various number of kinds? 01:58:55.840 --> 01:58:58.560 It's a defect. 01:58:58.560 --> 01:59:02.640 If a man is missing a leg, that does not mean that 01:59:02.640 --> 01:59:05.840 it is in the nature of man to be missing a leg. 01:59:05.840 --> 01:59:09.200 It means that that man is missing a leg. 01:59:09.200 --> 01:59:13.600 And so if someone has a genetic defect that causes a problem 01:59:13.600 --> 01:59:15.920 with the reproductive system. 01:59:15.920 --> 01:59:19.280 That does not mean that it is in the nature of man 01:59:19.280 --> 01:59:21.600 or woman to have that defect. 01:59:21.600 --> 01:59:23.920 It means it is a deviation from the norm. 01:59:23.920 --> 01:59:27.680 It is a defect that will be fixed by God in the 01:59:27.680 --> 01:59:33.280 resurrection, which is great news if you're a Christian, terrible news and 01:59:33.280 --> 01:59:36.880 sad news if you are not. 01:59:36.880 --> 01:59:42.800 And so you cannot deny any of these fundamental aspects of the 01:59:42.800 --> 01:59:45.600 flesh of the body. 01:59:45.600 --> 01:59:49.680 These are, if we want to use the distinction, essential. 01:59:49.680 --> 01:59:53.280 They are not accidental. 01:59:53.280 --> 01:59:56.960 The color of the coat you're wearing, if you're wearing a coat 01:59:56.960 --> 02:00:00.000 right now, or socks, or whatever it happens to be, is accidental. 02:00:00.000 --> 02:00:03.520 It's not intrinsic to your nature. 02:00:04.400 --> 02:00:09.840 Whether you are German or Scottish or French or Japanese or Ugandan 02:00:10.000 --> 02:00:14.160 or any of the other races of men that I could list, 02:00:14.160 --> 02:00:16.640 that is essential to your nature. 02:00:16.640 --> 02:00:19.920 You are that now in time because you were born that, because 02:00:19.920 --> 02:00:21.920 God created you as that. 02:00:21.920 --> 02:00:26.000 You will be that in eternity because he will raise you on 02:00:26.240 --> 02:00:27.760 the last day. 02:00:27.760 --> 02:00:33.920 Because again, if he were to raise some other thing from what 02:00:33.920 --> 02:00:38.880 you are, so if you are, say, a French woman, and he 02:00:38.880 --> 02:00:41.680 raises a Chinese man, that isn't you. 02:00:41.680 --> 02:00:43.760 That would not be you. 02:00:43.760 --> 02:00:46.880 It's not to say that oh well now you're saying God can't 02:00:46.880 --> 02:00:50.720 do no, I'm saying it is incoherent to assert that. 02:00:50.720 --> 02:00:54.080 It's the same as the stupid arguments where you see an atheist 02:00:54.080 --> 02:00:57.120 say, well can God make a rock so heavy that God couldn't 02:00:57.040 --> 02:00:59.040 lift it. 02:00:59.040 --> 02:01:02.800 In brief the reason that's incoherent and stupid, and we should be 02:01:02.800 --> 02:01:07.760 clear it is stupid, is because God, what you are premising in 02:01:07.760 --> 02:01:12.960 the beginning of your question is defined as omnipotent, so as soon 02:01:12.960 --> 02:01:17.200 as you get to the word cannot, your sentence is incoherent, and 02:01:17.200 --> 02:01:20.560 anything after it is just a string of sounds. 02:01:20.560 --> 02:01:23.600 You could say purple moose banana, and it would make as much 02:01:23.600 --> 02:01:25.920 sense as the rest of that supposed question. 02:01:25.920 --> 02:01:28.880 Just because you can intone so that it sounds like a question 02:01:28.880 --> 02:01:32.880 in English at the end of your rambling sound doesn't mean it's 02:01:32.880 --> 02:01:33.360 a question. 02:01:33.360 --> 02:01:34.880 It's incoherent. 02:01:35.120 --> 02:01:38.240 The same thing is true if someone tries to say that God 02:01:38.240 --> 02:01:42.160 is going to raise you as these things that you are not 02:01:42.320 --> 02:01:44.000 change your essence. 02:01:44.000 --> 02:01:48.720 That cannot happen because it is incoherent to say it. 02:01:48.720 --> 02:01:52.000 And so when we see the promise of the redemption and the 02:01:52.000 --> 02:01:55.920 resurrection, when we see these things in Scripture that are the core 02:01:55.920 --> 02:01:59.600 of the faith, if we give up what it means to be 02:01:59.600 --> 02:02:03.680 resurrected, what it means for you to be resurrected, not something to 02:02:03.680 --> 02:02:07.360 be resurrected, because if God just said he's going to burn the 02:02:07.360 --> 02:02:10.880 current universe to ash and then make a new one, that's not 02:02:10.880 --> 02:02:13.280 good news for anyone living in this one. 02:02:13.280 --> 02:02:16.560 It's good news if you're resurrected in the new one, which is 02:02:16.560 --> 02:02:19.840 what God promises, incidentally, because he is going to burn this one 02:02:19.840 --> 02:02:22.160 to ash. 02:02:22.160 --> 02:02:27.520 But believers will be resurrected into the new life, into the eternal 02:02:27.520 --> 02:02:31.360 life, in the new heavens in the new earth. 02:02:31.360 --> 02:02:35.120 And notably, we spend our eternity in the new earth. 02:02:35.120 --> 02:02:38.400 We're not saying what the exact contours of that are because Scripture 02:02:38.400 --> 02:02:39.680 doesn't give us all the details. 02:02:39.680 --> 02:02:40.240 We don't need them. 02:02:40.800 --> 02:02:44.080 We know it's perfect, because that is what God promises, it is 02:02:44.080 --> 02:02:49.440 paradise. But what God says is new earth, because you are going 02:02:49.440 --> 02:02:53.600 to be flesh and blood, you will still be spirit, mind, and 02:02:53.600 --> 02:02:58.080 body, but that But that body part is important. 02:02:58.080 --> 02:03:04.880 We cannot import this Gnostic understanding, this Gnostic contention, that well, all 02:03:04.880 --> 02:03:07.600 of the things of the flesh don't matter because it's ultimately the 02:03:07.600 --> 02:03:08.960 spirit that matters. 02:03:10.000 --> 02:03:14.720 Quite frankly, you are male or female according to your spirit, because 02:03:14.720 --> 02:03:18.320 you are male or female in your essence. 02:03:18.320 --> 02:03:23.120 And so if you are a German man, you are going to 02:03:23.120 --> 02:03:26.320 be resurrected as a German man. 02:03:26.320 --> 02:03:29.440 If you are a Scottish woman, you are going to be resurrected 02:03:29.440 --> 02:03:32.640 as a Scottish woman, because that is who you are. 02:03:32.960 --> 02:03:37.120 God is going to resurrect you. 02:03:37.120 --> 02:03:40.480 And that is why these verses that we will get into in 02:03:40.480 --> 02:03:44.560 another episode in more detail, these verses that say there is neither 02:03:44.560 --> 02:03:48.320 Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not 02:03:48.320 --> 02:03:50.400 male and female. 02:03:50.400 --> 02:03:53.040 They're not a denial of those categories. 02:03:53.040 --> 02:03:57.120 They are an affirmation of those categories as real things, because what 02:03:57.120 --> 02:04:01.520 matters is what follows all are one in Christ. 02:04:01.520 --> 02:04:06.480 It is saying that these categories do not preclude you from saving 02:04:06.480 --> 02:04:12.160 faith, do not preclude you from being included in the resurrection and 02:04:12.160 --> 02:04:16.080 the new life, and the new heaven and the new earth. 02:04:16.080 --> 02:04:18.880 That is what is being said there, and so when you see 02:04:18.880 --> 02:04:22.560 pastors and teachers and others who stand up and use these verses 02:04:22.560 --> 02:04:28.080 to deny the reality of the creation as God has made it. 02:04:28.080 --> 02:04:31.680 Those are false shepherds, those are wolves, those are liars, and those 02:04:31.680 --> 02:04:33.120 are demons. 02:04:33.120 --> 02:04:38.560 Because what scripture, as we have highlighted, previously calls teachings of demons. 02:04:38.560 --> 02:04:43.120 Those things are trivial compared to the things being put forward today 02:04:43.280 --> 02:04:47.040 as supposed tenets of the Christian religion. 02:04:47.040 --> 02:04:51.680 And so the fundamental question that you need to ask yourself when 02:04:51.680 --> 02:04:55.920 it comes to these matters is the question that I raised earlier, 02:04:55.920 --> 02:05:00.400 and really we've been illustrating it in this episode. 02:05:00.400 --> 02:05:06.320 Does this thing that I am being told I must believe or 02:05:06.320 --> 02:05:14.320 I must not believe conflict with what the Christian faith actually is? 02:05:14.320 --> 02:05:18.880 And do the consequences of say the thing I am being told 02:05:18.880 --> 02:05:22.720 to believe conflict with the Christian faith? 02:05:22.720 --> 02:05:26.720 Because if you are being told that you must believe A, and 02:05:26.720 --> 02:05:32.560 as it turns out, what is entailed by believing A is something 02:05:32.560 --> 02:05:36.880 that is incompatible with the Christian religion, then what you are being 02:05:36.880 --> 02:05:40.320 told with A is that you must bow down to a false 02:05:40.320 --> 02:05:44.560 God. You must render unto Caesar something that does not belong to 02:05:44.560 --> 02:05:47.440 Caesar. You must bow before this idol. 02:05:47.440 --> 02:05:51.040 You must give the pinch of incense, whatever it happens to be. 02:05:51.040 --> 02:05:55.120 And we see this rampant in our culture. 02:05:55.280 --> 02:05:59.120 We see this with things that are extremely obvious. 02:05:59.120 --> 02:06:02.160 We see those who say, Well, it's not nice and it's not 02:06:02.160 --> 02:06:05.520 kind if you oppose abortion, because that's health care for women. 02:06:05.520 --> 02:06:09.040 No, it's murder, and it is incompatible with the Christian religion, and 02:06:09.040 --> 02:06:13.600 if you support it and promote it, you will go to hell. 02:06:13.600 --> 02:06:18.640 Because that is high handed, impenitent violation of the fifth commandment, that 02:06:18.640 --> 02:06:21.600 is incompatible with what it means to be a Christian. 02:06:22.400 --> 02:06:24.800 But there are also more subtle things. 02:06:24.800 --> 02:06:28.480 And that is why we keep returning to the issue of race 02:06:28.480 --> 02:06:33.040 and sex and related matters, because those are more subtle. 02:06:33.120 --> 02:06:35.600 If you just look at it at a surface level, it may 02:06:35.600 --> 02:06:39.440 seem like, well, if I just say that we're all equal and 02:06:39.680 --> 02:06:46.160 these things don't matter, how can that possibly conflict with the gospel? 02:06:46.160 --> 02:06:48.880 Because that's the tact they will often take. 02:06:48.880 --> 02:06:51.520 How does that conflict with the gospel? 02:06:51.840 --> 02:06:54.240 Well, it does conflict with the gospel. 02:06:54.240 --> 02:06:58.960 But fundamentally, foremost and first, it conflicts with what we confess in 02:06:58.960 --> 02:07:02.880 the first article of the Creed Because we believe in God the 02:07:02.880 --> 02:07:06.720 Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. 02:07:06.720 --> 02:07:10.000 And if we deny the reality of the creation, we are denying 02:07:10.000 --> 02:07:12.240 the reality of the Creator. 02:07:12.240 --> 02:07:16.800 You cannot have the Son if you deny the Father, the same 02:07:16.800 --> 02:07:20.400 as you cannot have the Father if you deny the Son. 02:07:20.400 --> 02:07:24.880 But it does also conflict with the gospel, because the good news 02:07:25.040 --> 02:07:29.840 is that you're forgiven, and to be forgiven means that you are 02:07:29.840 --> 02:07:33.440 adopted as a son of God and you will see eternal life 02:07:33.440 --> 02:07:35.040 in eternity. 02:07:35.040 --> 02:07:40.320 And if you deny the creation, you are denying that resurrection. 02:07:40.320 --> 02:07:44.880 And so again, as Christians, what we are urging you to do 02:07:45.520 --> 02:07:50.480 is to take all of these things and assess them in light 02:07:50.480 --> 02:07:54.320 of Scripture, in light of what it means to actually be a 02:07:54.320 --> 02:07:59.840 Christian, because you are going to be constantly bombarded from all sides 02:07:59.840 --> 02:08:04.640 in this life, particularly as things currently stand in our culture, with 02:08:04.640 --> 02:08:08.640 demands that you give your pinch of incense, that you bow down 02:08:08.640 --> 02:08:13.840 before whatever idol it happens to be, that you affirm whatever the 02:08:13.840 --> 02:08:18.160 lie happens to be, and it changes seemingly every day. 02:08:18.160 --> 02:08:22.320 But as soon as you give that inch, Satan is going to 02:08:22.320 --> 02:08:26.640 take not a mile, but whatever you'll give him, right up to 02:08:26.640 --> 02:08:28.960 it, including your soul. 02:08:28.960 --> 02:08:32.400 Because as we've said before, Satan is a rat, he's a snake. 02:08:32.720 --> 02:08:35.760 If he can get his head in, the rest of Satan is 02:08:35.760 --> 02:08:38.480 coming in as well. 02:08:38.480 --> 02:08:42.240 And so we do these episodes that may seem like something that 02:08:42.240 --> 02:08:48.160 is perhaps a minor issue, or if you're thinking about classical Gnosticism, 02:08:48.160 --> 02:08:49.680 not a live issue. 02:08:49.680 --> 02:08:52.640 But we do them because they are live issues. 02:08:52.640 --> 02:08:55.680 Some of them may be a problem that we see that is 02:08:55.680 --> 02:09:00.640 going to be a live issue in the church, or currently a 02:09:00.640 --> 02:09:03.040 minor issue that is going to become a major issue for the 02:09:03.040 --> 02:09:04.400 church. This is not one of those. 02:09:04.400 --> 02:09:08.160 This is today a major issue for the church. 02:09:08.160 --> 02:09:11.600 Because when you start looking at what is being pushed in the 02:09:12.240 --> 02:09:15.680 world, you see a Gnostic religion. 02:09:15.680 --> 02:09:17.280 Because you see this dualism. 02:09:17.280 --> 02:09:20.080 Because really the third and the fourth points of the episode were 02:09:20.080 --> 02:09:21.920 the the meat of it, as it were. 02:09:21.920 --> 02:09:27.280 Yes, there's the secret knowledge aspect, and there's the impartation of salvation, 02:09:27.280 --> 02:09:30.800 the belief that just the knowledge alone will save you. 02:09:30.800 --> 02:09:35.280 But the meat of the episode really is the dualism that good 02:09:35.440 --> 02:09:39.040 versus evil in which they're equivalent, equal, in which the God of 02:09:39.040 --> 02:09:42.400 the Old Testament, lowercase G isn't a real God, and it's only 02:09:42.400 --> 02:09:45.040 the God of the New Testament who settled down, that's the real 02:09:45.040 --> 02:09:48.800 God. And then there is the denial of the flesh, the belief, 02:09:48.800 --> 02:09:51.840 the physical world is evil that it is wicked. 02:09:51.840 --> 02:09:55.200 And those two are really part and parcel. 02:09:55.200 --> 02:09:59.040 Because if you have good versus evil and they're equivalent, then you 02:09:59.040 --> 02:10:03.360 have this follow-on from it, that it is the evil God that 02:10:03.360 --> 02:10:06.800 created the natural world, the physical world, and it's the good God 02:10:06.800 --> 02:10:11.040 who created your spiritual nature, and you'll be freed from your physical 02:10:11.040 --> 02:10:11.680 nature 02:10:12.640 --> 02:10:18.000 by whatever secret knowledge it is that this cult imparts. 02:10:18.000 --> 02:10:19.760 And this is nothing new to mankind. 02:10:19.760 --> 02:10:22.720 We see this in old religions, we see this in Greek religion, 02:10:22.720 --> 02:10:25.680 we see this in Eastern religion, but we see it today as 02:10:25.680 --> 02:10:28.560 well in the church, and we see it being pushed by men 02:10:28.560 --> 02:10:33.760 who are supposedly leaders and teachers, who are pastors, so called in 02:10:33.760 --> 02:10:37.280 these cases, of the church. 02:10:37.280 --> 02:10:40.480 We see it rampant in some denominations more than others. 02:10:40.480 --> 02:10:46.480 This is a particular problem in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, as we 02:10:46.480 --> 02:10:49.200 went over in that episode, so I will not go over it 02:10:49.200 --> 02:10:54.640 here. But it is a problem in every single denomination. 02:10:54.640 --> 02:10:56.800 And so like we said at the beginning, we're not beating up 02:10:56.800 --> 02:10:59.760 on any one denomination or any three denominations. 02:10:59.760 --> 02:11:02.400 This is a problem for all of us that we all need 02:11:02.400 --> 02:11:04.320 to address together. 02:11:04.480 --> 02:11:08.720 This is something that needs to be ejected from the church, searched 02:11:08.720 --> 02:11:13.200 out, found in whatever dark corner it is hiding and removed, because 02:11:13.200 --> 02:11:17.920 it is incompatible with the worship of the one true God, because 02:11:17.920 --> 02:11:22.800 it demands that we believe things that are false and incompatible, things 02:11:22.800 --> 02:11:27.760 that are mutually exclusive with the Christian religion. 02:11:27.760 --> 02:11:30.240 And so we've alluded to it a number of times, but I 02:11:30.240 --> 02:11:34.640 just want to close this episode out with the actual reading from 02:11:34.640 --> 02:11:37.680 Job nineteen, because this is 02:11:38.560 --> 02:11:43.360 one of the greatest gospel passages in all of Scripture, and it's 02:11:43.360 --> 02:11:48.960 right here in the Old Testament, in arguably the oldest book of 02:11:48.960 --> 02:11:52.240 the Old Testament. 02:11:52.240 --> 02:11:55.760 For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that the last he 02:11:55.760 --> 02:11:59.840 will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus 02:11:59.840 --> 02:12:04.640 destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall 02:12:04.640 --> 02:12:08.960 see for myself, and my eyes shall behold and not another, my 02:12:08.960 --> 02:12:21.120 heart faints within me.