Dispensing with Dispensationalism

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of dispensationalism. This is something that's been discussed pretty widely uh online. Uh we're going to link in the show notes to a number of other podcasts from other Lutherans that we commend as not merely companions to this episode, but in a way, completion of some of the things that we're going to discuss here. We are going to spend you know an hour and a half or two hours today covering what could easily be a three-part series. We refuse to do a three-part series on dispensationalism. Frankly, it's just not worth it. So we're going to have kind of three chunks inside this one

1:25 episode that by themselves each could be a fully fleshed out episode. the other podcasts I mentioned, there's going to be uh brief history of power with Adam Koontz and Willie Grills. Recently, just this week, did another podcast where the on specifically on dispensationalism. Willie Grills also has another probably now defunct podcast called A Word Fitly Spoken that has three episodes, one dealing with Cyrus Schofield, one dealing with eschatology, and one dealing again with dispensationalism. We will We will recommend you listen to at least the first two of those, one from BHOP, one from WordFitly. And if you want to listen to all four, they're they're all great, they're all worth listening to.

2:06 But they were going to include more fleshed out stuff than we're going to get in here today. There are three parts to discussing the subject of dispensationalism. And the reason that we're mentioning there are these other episodes from other podcasts is that that they left out one of them and we think it's the most important part. So it's the part that we want to tackle here today. So when you're looking at a subject specifically like dispensationalism and not to breathe the lead, it is a heresy, full stop. There is nothing Christian about dispensationalism. So we'll make that case today. But when you're looking at a subject like this, there's a the historical context of the thing. Where did it come from?

2:46 What's the genealogy of this idea? In the case of dispes, came about in the nineteenth century. There are bits and pieces that were floating around before that for a couple hundred years, but there were newly injected false teachings that appeared two hundred years ago and have followed an arc until today. So it's brand new theology, which if you're a stone choir listener by itself, that should tell you full stop, this is not something that's Christian. If it were Christian, it would have been believed before eighteen thirty, and we're looking looking at a situation where that's simply not the case. So the history of the subject, even without getting into the theology of it, tells you a great deal about what is going

3:23 on. But it's you know, there's names and dates and and timelines and events. The other the other episodes about dispensationalism, as well as the Cyrus Schofield episode from Word Fitley, we'll get into more details. Incidentally, the Sword of Christ book review that we did recently also has a chapter about Schofield, precisely because it's so important to the arc of of things today. The second portion of the episode, which again will hopefully be fairly short, you know, for us anyway, is going to be on the theology. We're not going to go into debunking dispensationalism line by line. We're going to give you a few of the highlighted, just brazenly false things that they teach that are necessarily incompatible with Christianity full

4:08 stop. And we're going to go into some of the Bible passages that one must necessarily reject in order to be a dispensationalist. And so that's pretty much going to be the extent of our theological treatment because what more needs to be said? If you have to disbelieve the Bible in order to believe this teaching, you know it's not Christian teaching. So we're going to make that case in the second part. And then the third part that is not discussed elsewhere is the question of the impact of this stuff. Where and how is it actually playing out? Because most people when they want to tackle these subjects just want to treat it historically, you know, kind of neutrally, don't want to pick fights or, you know, really call people too bad.

4:51 Or you just want to deal with the Bible verses and and wrangle it out as though there's possibly a Christian view on both sides of the thing and so you trade you know shots with Bible verses or whatever. The reason that this is a live issue and the reason that a bunch of people have been talking about dispensationalism recently is that that unlike you know disagreements about baptism or you know election or some other things, dispensationalism in particular has geopolitical consequences. People are dying in the Middle East today because of dispensationalism. Marines are going to be dying next month in Lebanon because of dispensationalism. So this is unique in heresies in terms of getting people killed on

5:36 the ground. Yeah, we did the baptism episode. Probably quite a few of you disagreed with some of our conclusions about baptism. If we disagree about baptism, people don't get killed today. There's no downstream state action as a result of those disagreements. Anyone who is a dispensationalist is going to be rapidly in support of the extermination of anyone who gets in the way of the state of Israel. So the reason we're discussing it right now, the reason it's timely and that everyone is talking about it is precisely for that reason. That if you believe that the state of Israel as it exists today is the Israel of the Bible, well that was the whole point of the invention of the thing. So that's the case we're going to make today that two hundred

6:16 years ago a new doctrine was inserted falsely into really just the Western Church, basically America and Britain more or less. That has been bearing fruit in the last century in such a way that it makes it possible for the modern terrorist state of Israel to kill people pretty much with impunity. And a significant portion of the American electorate not only gives it a thumbs up, but will send their sons and daughters to die, will give all their money for it, and will shout you down if you disagree. Why? Because they they're defending their God. And so the theology coming out of history impacting geopolitics is why this is a live issue now and is is an ongoing live issue for the church and for the world.

6:58 So we're going to get into it first with the history as dispensationalism today was born in the West. And so to start off, we of course have to start with John Nelson Darby. Born in the year 1800, died in the year 1882. He is, even by dispensationalists, called the father of dispensationalism, which does in fact sort of give away the fact that this is a modern heresy. This is not an ancient teaching of the church. This is not something that you find in the Church Fathers. And I'll get into that a little bit more in a number of minutes here. There are some will argue the Church Fathers spoke of dispensationalism they did not. They spoke of economies, and sometimes dispensationalists attempt to conflate the terms

7:46 economy and dispensation. These terms have very different senses as used by the church fathers and used by dispensationalists. Now, Darby was an early member of the Plymouth Brethren. Essentially, they were a group that attempted to get back to what they thought were the early roots of Christianity, a a simpler church with less hierarchy. There have been a number of groups that have cropped up in church history that have rejected hierarchy, rejected the formal institutions of the church. This has never been a marker of solid true Christians. We are told not to forsake the gathering together of the saints. This does not just mean in your small local group, because there is a larger church, there's a wider church, there is, at least

8:42 there used to be, Christendom. And the church itself does have earthly institutions and hierarchy. I'm not saying they cannot err, obviously they can. We're recording this on Reformation Day. As Lutherans, by all means we know that the church, as an earthly institution run by men, can err, but that does not mean that you reject all hierarchy within the church. So anytime you see a group doing that, you should be on your guard. Something is wrong there. But to get into sort of what Darby started to teach here, actually before we get into what he taught, we'll talk a little bit about Darby himself, just very brief biographical sketch as it were. He was born into an Anglo Irish family in London, I already

9:29 said in the year eighteen hundred, but he supposedly had a profound conversion experience in eighteen twenty five. This is something you'll see with a number of different dispensationalists, and other men who prop themselves up as teachers like Darby and Schofield. Schofield incidentally also had such a supposedly profound conversion experience his in eighteen seventy nine. I will not go so far as to say that this sort of conversion experience is necessarily a bad sign, is necessarily an indicator that something is off. But I will say that this is not the standard. This is not how things are usually done, this is not how things were designed by God. Yes, there are exceptions, obviously. You have the most obvious being Saul who became Paul.

10:25 A special case, as Christ actually appeared to him to call him to be an apostle, a little different from what happens today certainly. But the standard for Christians, historically, and what the standard should be, and we've made this case in previous episodes, is that you're raised Christian. You're baptized as a child, go see the baptism The baptism episode. And as you are raised as a Christian, you you don't have this profound conversion experience. You don't have a sudden moment, you don't have an epiphany, and in that moment come to be a Christian or come to understand all things or whatever it happens to be, whatever the claim is. And so if you ask a Lutheran, for instance, if you ask

11:08 either of us, although notably I was raised sort of half-Lutheran and half not, I've explained that elsewhere and before. But if you ask someone who was raised as a Christian, he will not have this conversion experience. Because it's not part of the normal Christian life. It's not how things are supposed to go. If you were not raised a Christian, then there will be a conversion process. Because God will use the means he has instituted to reach out to you to give you faith. That will be the word, it will be baptism, depending on the order of things, we've discussed this previously. But there's a conversion process, it's not this instantaneous epiphany. And so that is not necessarily again a sign that things are

12:00 off or bad, but you should perhaps want to look more carefully at these sorts of claims. Because it's not the norm. This is not how things are supposed to go. It's notable that at this time and in this place charismaticism was also emerging where there are preachers saying that the solution for the modern problems are people speaking in tongues and having direct revelations from the Holy Spirit. And lo and behold, within a few years, that's exactly what the market began producing. What the preachers demanded, the people in the pews began to produce. They began having these experiences just as they'd been taught to. And And unfortunately a lot of theology is then downstream from this sort of self-fulfilling I mean it's not it's not prophecy.

12:50 They just they were taught you should be babbling and they started babbling. And everyone said, Look, it's a it's a new stage in the in the evolution of the church. That ties in very deeply with Edward Irving, who was a Scottish clergyman. He was an early influencer of the Plymouth Brethren. He was an advocate for this revival of Pentecostalism. And this occurred in and around Port Glasgow. There's another name that I'll bring up in a moment here who is particularly relevant to this entire narrative, and those who are familiar with the subject will probably already know which name I'm going to mention. But subsequent to the supposedly profound conversion experience that Darby had, he traveled

13:34 extensively spreading this new dispensationalism, which he had been working on this particular view of scripture, this iseges. But the name that I said I would mention is Margaret MacDonald. She is involved in this because this young woman supposedly had visions revealing certain truths about scripture and particularly eschatology, and it happened in this Port Glasgow area, and the Pentecostalism that was active in the area at the time latched on to this. Edward Irving was one man who thought that she had indeed seen something given as a vision by God. In her vision, or visions, she saw a two-stage return of Christ. First a secret return that would see the church taken from the earth, then the tribulation, and then the final judgment.

14:37 I don't personally understand how you can have a secret return of Christ in which some number of millions of people disappear, that doesn't seem very secret to me. But nonetheless, this is where we get the pre tribulation rapture idea, which is again simply the idea that before the period of tribulation spoken of in various points in scripture, particularly in Revelation, faithful believers will be taken from the earth, then the tribulation will take place, and then Christ will come back, and I'm not going to get into the various ideas of where the millennium literally in this case, slots into the timeline. But eventually Christ will return. Which isn't really a second coming at that point, it's a third

15:27 coming because the second coming would be for the church, and scripture doesn't speak of a third coming. But at any rate, Christ returns, and then you have the final judgment. That's in essence the pre tribulation, or really any of the various rapture ideas. It just depends on where in relation to the tribulation this supposed rapture takes place as to which term they use pre or post. And obviously pre or post millennium is just referring to their incorrect interpretation of the thousand years in Revelation, we'll get into that later, in relationship to where the rapture takes place. I think it's important to note just briefly that all three of the ecumenical creeds specifically speak about the end times, and they all use

16:14 exactly the same sequence of events. I'm just going to read it from the Apostles' Creed. He ascended to heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Now this is the Ascension, which was being confessed because it is in Scripture, and this is Judgment Day, which is being confessed because it's in Scripture. There are no other points of activity from the second person of the Trinity in any of the creeds, apart from he ascends into heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father, and comes again to judge the living and the dead. The fact that all of these other details that have emerged in the last few centuries are omitted from the historic definition of the

16:55 church, of the faith, I think is important. If you t if you take seriously what the creeds were capturing, if there were other steps for God, they would have mentioned them. And again, we'll get into some of the theology and the history down the road, but I think it's just important to note that as these things are emerging, you know, these things from charismatics and pentecostalists, incidentally, who today are the groups most predominantly who hold to dispensationalism. It is an overt denial of the creeds by adding a bunch of stuff that the church has never believed and the reason that the church has never believed it is that scripture doesn't contain it. And so to some extent it's an argument from silence, because

17:38 there's a lot of things in the Christian faith that are not included in the creeds. They're specifically crafted, as we've said before, to dispute previous heresies. They never needed to dispute any heresies about this stuff because they were not live issues. So it's just notable that when you look at the historic definition of the faith, it leaves no room for this sort of thing unless you imagine that Jesus is just super active doing these really important things, and we just forgot to talk about it when we define the Christian faith itself. In order to ward off, although it will probably not succeed in doing so in all cases, but in order to ward off a potential critique here in fairness to Darby, Darby later in life did reject and declare

18:26 that the visions of Margaret MacDonald were demonic. However, by the time he had done so, they had already become part of the foundation of dispensationalism, and the damage had already been done. This is a part of the history of dispensationalism, and his later in life, condemnation of this did not change the reality of that fact. This remains part of the history, it remains part of the teaching, most importantly. That condemnation was good, it is proper for a Christian man, if Darby was indeed, it is proper for a Christian man to condemn false teachings to which he has held earlier in his life, when he recognizes that. But that does not mean that the harm will be undone. And so the next man who is relevant is a name that

19:19 is probably better known, more widely known, for various reasons and very obvious ones. Cyrus Ingerson Schofield, usually just called C.I. Schofield. I'll start the same as I did with Darby with a very brief biographical sketch before we get into what Schofield Schofield did and why it matters. Schofield served, actually, for the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, he was a deserter. He deserted to the North. He eventually became the U.S. District Attorney for Kansas. He was forced to resign due to political corruption, including bribery. At the time, he also faced charges of forgery and desertion of his first wife. The latter one, at the very least, is historically proven he very much did do that.

20:12 He deserted his first family. As mentioned earlier, he also supposedly had a profound conversion experience his in 1879. Subsequent to this, he became a congregationalist preacher in Dallas. Subsequent to that, he would then take over the Congregational Church of Northfield, Massachusetts, a church he had attended. This church was founded by DL Moody, a name that will be familiar to some. There's a Bible college named after him, after all, one of the hellmouths that spreads dispensationalism to this day. And so Schofield becomes truly relevant historically because his Because his name gets attached to the Schofield Reference Bible. Many of the notes in this reference Bible, many of the ideas

21:02 come from Darby and some others. James H. Brooks was an early mentor of Schofield, he is the one who arguably introduced Schofield to dispensationalism. And so notes and ideas from these various other men are distilled into the Schofield reference Bible. And as we mentioned in the previous episode reviewing the Sword of Christ, the problem with this is that they were appended to the King James Version, to the King James translation of the Bible. And because of the archaic nature of that language, which was deliberately archaic when it was translated in the 1600s, because of that language that is increasingly difficult for modern readers to understand, modern readers increasingly rely on the footnotes, on the annotations, on the comments added to

21:56 scripture by Schofield. I am not condemning study Bibles. Study Bibles are fine and good. It depends on the quality of the notes. Scripture is always good. Notes written by men may be good or bad. I have on my desk right now a Lutheran study bible. I can recommend it for basically any of our listeners. There are a few notes with which I would quibble, but very few, which is impressive for a work of the size and scope of this study bible. Schofield's study Bible, on the other hand, was chalkful of heresies, and these heresies over time became the standard understanding in certain parts of Christianity because the men reading the Bible, reading the King James, could not understand the English of the King James, so they just repeated

22:53 the notes, they just repeated the footnotes. You will even find cases where they are citing the footnotes basically as if they were scripture, as if these were words from heaven interpreting God's words Word because they could not read the actual words of Scripture, which is why we have been so very clear in previous episodes and will continue to be so that the most important thing you do, yes, first and foremost, read Scripture. But equally important, read a version in a language you understand. We had this fight historically, this I mean again, this is Reformation Day. When we are recording, we don't attempt to be topical as it were, but it's relevant here. One of the major fights was over the use of the vernacular.

23:42 Scripture should be in a language that is understood by those who are actually reading it. Using Latin in the Middle Ages when the peasantry no longer knew Latin was ridiculous. Using the English of the sixteen hundreds today today is ridiculous. Get a modern translation. There are many reliable ones. Understand what you're actually reading. Another name here that is very important, related to Schofield, is Untermeyer. This gentleman was a Jewish lawyer, financier, slash banker, who funded the Schofield Reference Bible. He also helped secure connections for Schofield, got him into many prominent clubs and circles, propped up his name, built up his name, and got him the publishing contract he would need with the university press

24:36 that put out the Schofield Reference Bible. Untermeyer was a prominent member of the Zionist movement. He, in fact, was one of those who helped to organize boycotts against German goods in the latter part of his life. He died in 1940, he was born in 1858. You can see all these men, there's a lot of overlap here. But it's all mostly taking place in the middle of the 1800s into the very early 1900s. And so we see this connection between dispensationalism and Zionism very early on. It is Zionists who are funding dispensationalism, and there's no wonder for that. It's very obvious why they would do that. Dispensationalism is the necessary prerequisite for supposed Christians in the West to support Zionist aims, with regard not just to Israel, so called, but

25:34 to the world in general, for the world, because Zionists have aims certainly beyond the historical borders of the Old Testament state of Israel, as we see from their rhetoric today. But this forms the basic outline of the foundational history, as it were, of dispensationalism. There are many other individuals involved. There's one more man that we will a few more men will mention, but mostly in passing one more will get into what he has actually taught because he is more relevant today and gives a real summary of what dispensationalists believe, what they've taught, why they do the things they do. But I mentioned that Moody Bible College is one of the institutions spreading this particular heresy.

26:27 There are others we could mention, but one in particular is worth mentioning, and that is Dallas Theological Seminary. Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924. The first president of Dallas Theological Seminary was Lewis Chaffer. He was a student of Schofield. The second president was John Walvard. He is the gentleman who is largely credited with the development of the sort of intermediate or revised version of dispensationalism. There are essentially three kinds. We're not going to get into the details, but just for the sake of letting you know what they are. There's so called classic dispensationalism or classical, there's revised, and there's progressive. Various dispensationalists fall into one or the other of the schools.

27:21 They don't always disagree, but in large part they do. And we're speaking in generalities here because we're not getting into the specifics of dispensationalism. That's not the point here. We are not attempting to study the minutia of this heresy. We are simply highlighting why and how it is wrong on a higher level, on a scriptural basis, on a foundation of why this conflicts with what Scripture teaches and what the church has always believed and professed. One other very interesting overlapping name that popped up in looking at this was one of the men who was taught as a child by John Nelson Darby was Alistair Crowley. Crowley's childhood pastor was Darby. And so he was raised in an in an environment where this

28:16 stuff was taught. Now, I'm not blaming Darby for how Crowley turned out. That's what a man does with what he's taught is is in many ways completely independent from the teacher. So I just thought that was a an incredible overlap because Crowley separately went on in a parallel direction to achieve some of the same spiritual and political ends that Darby helped to set in motion along different lines. So their paths crossed early on, and then they sort of went in different directions, but not nearly as different as you might think. Before you get into the theology proper, I just want to name a couple more names that are of modern teachers just to give you a sense of how common this stuff is, because not everyone

29:00 necessarily knows who is pushing what and not all these men necessarily have all the same beliefs about everything, but when it comes to the basics of dispensationalism, they are in agreement. Uh John MacArthur, Charles Ryrie, Jerry Falwell, whom everyone knows, uh John Hagee and Hal Lindsey, all were working towards the same ends in living memory. Several of them are still alive today. I think one of the interesting things to me coming at this from a Lutheran looking back at some of these things is that the vast majority of people who have fallen for dispensationalism were Baptists, not all, but some Baptists. A lot of Pentecostalists and a lot of charismatics. As we mentioned, the Pentecostalist and Paracarismatic movement was also the genesis

29:50 for dispensationalism itself, produced other things, but they occurred at the same time. The reason that struck me is I know that this will probably come across as insulting to some as not intended that way. It's simply a demographic fact. You can look at some of the pew data, but within Baptists, Pentecostalists, and charismatics, you find some of the the least intelligent, least educated people in the West, really. And so I think that's very much kind of what we see today. When you look at the folks who are pushing dispensationalism, not not necessarily the teachers, but when you run into someone who is a a Bible thumping dispensationalist, and we'll get to what the Bible thumping stuff is about, like people accuse me of thumping the Bible

30:35 and I wouldn't reject that. So I don't it's not necessarily insulting, but when the When these guys come along today, they're generally not intelligent, well-educated men. There are a few, but it's rare. These are denominations that, again, Baptists means a lot of different things. A lot of guys that we would characterize as Baptists call themselves non denominational, but really when it comes down to a non denominational pretty much just means Baptist without, you know, some specific affiliation. It's very much a product of the same theology. So there are absolutely Baptists who reject dispensationalism. There are also a lot of Baptists who are fully on board with it. And the reason that's relevant today is something we'll get into in

31:16 a third part of this because again, this isn't simply a historical quirk that became a theological question. This also has modern geopolitical ramifications. So the fact that there are teachers today and there are a lot of people that believe this stuff, again, it's it's actually getting people killed. So this is very consequential theology. And the fact that it's erroneous explains the nature of the downstream consequences. And so the one additional name that I said I want to mention, not just in passing, well already said the name, but that is Charles Ryrie. And the reason I want to focus on him for a moment here is because he really pushed this forward in believe it was mostly the 60s and the 70s.

32:05 I don't remember when his study Bible came out, but he produced a study Bible that was essentially an updated version of Schofield's Bible. He wrote a number of books, including Dispensationalism today and basic theology, which was unfortunately anything but but he gives a definition of dispensation that is useful and with which I believe most dispensationalists would agree. And then I also have a quote to read from him from an article of his. I will put the article in the show notes for those who want to go and verify the quote or simply read the rest of the article. But his definition of dispensation is a dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God's purpose. Now for those who are more familiar with the subject, you're already

32:56 going to see a red flag there. He's playing games with the word economy. And the reason he's playing games with the word economy is that dispensationalists have to do this to attempt to tie themselves back to the historical teachings of the church. Because if you can conflate dispensation and economy You can try to argue that some of your ideas are present in the Church Fathers. And I will go over just briefly two of the Church Fathers who are often claimed by dispensationalists to have taught a form of, say, proto-dispensationalism. Very obviously they did not when you actually look at how they used the Greek word economy, which is what he's attempting to do here. But now I'll read a quote from him from this article

33:44 because it touches on many of the issues that we will be addressing in the remainder of this episode. Progressive revelation is the recognition that God's message to man was not given in one single act, but was unfolded in a long series of successive acts, and through the minds and hands of many men of varying backgrounds. God's truth was obviously not given all at one time, and the varying stages of revelation show that He has worked in different ways at different times. The Bible interpreter must observe carefully this progressiveness of revelation, and dispensationalism helps promote accuracy in this regard. The distinguishing characteristics of the dispensations are, one, a change in God's

34:31 governmental relationship with man two A resultant change in man's responsibility and three corresponding revelation necessary to effect the change. What marks off a man is a dispensationalist What is the sine qui non of the system? 1. A dispensationalist keeps Israel and the Church distinct. The dispensationalist believes that throughout the ages God is pursuing two distinct purposes, one related to the earth, with earthly people and earthly objectives involved, which is Judaism, while the other is related to heaven, with heavenly people, and heavenly objectives involved, which is Christianity. This is probably the most basic theological test of whether or not a man is a dispensationalist, and it is undoubtedly the most practical

35:18 and conclusive. A man who fails to distinguish Israel and the Church will inevitably not hold to dispensationalist distinctions, and the one who does will. two, the distinction between Israel and the Church is born out of a system of hermeneutics called literal interpretation. three to the dispensationalist, the soteriological or saving program of God is not the only program, but one of the means God is using in the total program of glorifying Himself. Scripture is not man-centered as though salvation were the main theme, but it is God centered because his glory is the center. The basis of salvation in every age is the death of Christ, the requirement for salvation in every age is faith, the object of

36:06 faith in every age is God, the content of faith changes in the various dispensations. End quote There are a lot of problems with this quote. We will be touching on them in the remainder of this episode, so I will not go over them specifically now. I will however highlight that last part is important. The content of faith changes in the various dispensations. That is simply not Christian. The content of our faith does not change. And this is related, of course, to his contention that God has progressively revealed the faith over time. That's simply not true. We see that in Genesis three fifteen, Adam understood the fullness of the faith back in Genesis three fifteen, even if today we may not be capable enough to understand it from those verses, although notably

37:04 we do have the advantage of looking back at the And seeing it in the context of living after the crucifixion, after the resurrection, after the ascension. Adam, who was undoubtedly our superior intellectually and otherwise, knew what God was telling him when he spoke to him in Genesis. But now I'll address the just two we'll do two of the supposed church fathers in whom dispensationalists contend that you can find the early roots of dispensationalism. They claim others as well. They claim Origen and Eusebius and even Augustine they try to claim. But we'll go over Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. And so starting with Justin Martyr. In chapter forty one, Justin Martyr speaks of the economy of human

38:03 birth, in reference to Isaiah's prophecy about the virgin birth of Christ. In this he argues that the prophecy is about Christ and not Hezekiah. There's no way in which you can interpret that as being a dispensation, as relating to dispensationalism. And so in chapter fifty six, Justin Martyr mentions the economy of the suffering of Christ, while discussing prophecies in the Psalms. Again, economy, the Greek word, does not relate to dispensations. Skip ahead a little bit, chapter eighty four. Justin Martyr discusses the economy of the Christians in contrast to that of the Jews, referring to the new covenant, and its distinctiveness from the old. Now perhaps the dispensationalists will go, Aha, here we are this is

38:52 clearly a dispensation. These are different treatments, but they're not. If we are distinguishing between the gospel and the law, that is simply proper Christian exegesis. No one was saved by the law. That is the teaching of Scripture. The Jews were not saved by the law. The ancient Israelites, more properly than Jews, were not saved by the law, because by the law no man will be justified. They were saved by belief, if they were saved at all. The same as every single man throughout all church history. And that is what Justin Martyr actually teaches, if you read the rest of the chapter. One more example from Justin Martyr before we move on to Irenaeus. In chapter one hundred and twenty-six, he describes the economy of his

39:43 suffering. That's a paraphrase. In discussing how Christ's sacrifice surpasses the sacrifices of the old covenant. This is speaking of typology. This is not a dispensation. There is no way you can interpret this to be dispensational, to be an early form of it. The only way you can get Justin Martyr to seem like some sort of proto-dispensationalist is if you twist his words. Which is the theme that we will see throughout this entire subject when dealing with how dispensationalists argue and how they treat both Scripture and the Church Fathers. And so second, amongst the supposedly proto-dispensationalists we have Irenaeus, from his book Against Heresies, from Book III, Chapter eleven, Irenaeus speaks of God's

40:34 economy in becoming man The Word of God our Lord Jesus Christ who did, through his transcendent love, become what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself. You cannot possibly read that as dispensationalist. It is a use of the word economy, but again, unless you are practicing eisegesis, unless you are trying to be deceptive, you cannot conflate the words economy and dispensation, they are not the same thing. And so Book three again, chapter eighteen this time, Irenaeus speaks of the economy of incarnation, explaining how the Son of God became incarnate for the salvation of humanity. This Greek word economy again at risk of ad nauseum does not mean dispensation. I will get into the actual word in a second here, to

41:31 give you a better idea of the scope of the Greek term. Two more examples from Irenaeus first, though. From Book four, chapter 20, Irenaeus mentions the economy of the Lord's Passion, referring of course to the salvific purpose behind Christ's suffering and death. Again, cannot possibly be translated or conflated with dispensation. And, finally, from Book V, chapter one, he speaks of the economy of the Son of God in reference to the divine plan which culminates in Christ's incarnate life and redemptive work. At this point I hope that I don't have to say that's not a dispensation. But to define the word economy from the Greek economia is the actual Greek word. It has in essence three senses. Pull these from B Dag, the definitive dictionary for these things.

42:29 The first is responsibility of management, typically of a household. That's what the term really means. The second is the state of being arranged, ordered, or planned, and the third is that it can refer to a program of instruction. Now the argument from the dispensationalist is that according to these first two definitions, they attempt to say that the whole of creation is God's household, which isn't necessarily wrong to some degree it's an abuse of the term. But yes, everything belongs to God, and so he is the manager over all of it. But the argument is instead that God has created a plan and that And that he has made man the manager of that plan, and that his plan changes over time. Well, this is a problem first because God doesn't change.

43:23 Second, it is a problem because God's plan in Scripture very clearly doesn't change. It is the same from beginning to end, beginning with Genesis 3.15, the proto-gospel, the proto-evangelian, all the way through to the end. There is only one way to the Father, and that is through Christ. Scripture is abundantly clear on that point. And so you can't have this change. You can't have the different dispensations, which is what the dispensationalists are arguing, what is central to their theology. It is the idea after which it is named. And so what it actually refers to in the Greek fathers is That responsibility of management of the household when speaking of men, as we are stewards in creation, that is what we are called in

44:11 scripture, we are God's stewards. We are his icons, his idols, in the proper sense of the term, in creation. But it does also refer to that state of being arranged in the specific sub sense of being God's unique plan of salvation or God's arrangement in nature if they're talking about the natural world. And that is what we saw from the selection of quotes that I went through in Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, and lest anyone think that I cherry picked them. I essentially pulled out a handful of places in which they speak of those and then chose at random the ones that I would use. I have many others, they're all the same. There are no places in either of those authors, in either of those church fathers, where you could possibly construe

45:02 their use of economy to be coterminous with the modern dispensationalist use of the word dispensation, or sometimes they will attempt to say administration, or economy, in order to further conflate, in order to muddy the waters. And that's a general takeaway. If someone is attempting to create additional gray area, or to muddy the waters, or to make scripture unclear, that man is attempting to mislead or deceive you That is a man you should not follow because Scripture is as a general rule abundantly clear. And where scripture is less clear because we lack perspective or understanding, we have some deficit that makes it difficult for us to understand a particular passage. We have the entire weight of church history and the clear teaching

45:55 of Scripture. You use the parts of Scripture that are clear to interpret those that supposedly are not, because God is consistent and the whole will agree. You do not use passages that are uncertain in order to write your priors, your presuppositions, your theology back into the other passages that are clear. That's where you get the use of something that is supposedly unclear to muddy the waters for something that is abundantly clear. That is what false teachers do, and as Christians we have to be aware of that and be careful of these wolves. In the specific use and an abuse well entirely abuse of language, not its proper use that's occurring here is a trap that I I think part of the reason that

46:45 in particular some Baptists but other the other denominations, Pentecostalists, charismatics and some others. I think part of the reason that they fell for it, and I think part of the appeal of it, naively, is that one of the other things that Ryrie said, which is is part of the dispensationalist shtick, is that one must be literal with the sort certain words that they pick out. And the problem with it is that sometimes that's true. There's like we made the argument in the six thousand years and counting Episode that when God says six days in Genesis for the creation, it was six days. There's not special kinds of days that only occurred in creation and then we get a different kind of day now.

47:28 It was six twenty-four hour periods. So that sort of appeal to clarity is very easy to make someone adopt in all cases. And the particular issue with the dispensationalist abuse of that is twofold. One, when they're talking about things like the Millennium, that is language that appears almost exclusively in Revelation. And the problem with treating Revelation literally is that it itself says it is a vision. It is it is John's apocalypse. He was having a dream, a vision from God. Things were revealed to him that were clearly figurative. They're clearly figurative. There are many dreams in Scripture that are revealed to men of God, and it's very clear within the dream and then the interpretation

48:18 of the dream that they're symbolic. When Joseph interpreted the dream about the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows, it wasn't about cattle. It wasn't about how plump the livestock were. It was the seven fat years and the seven skinny years. And fat and skinny were an allusion to plenty and famine. So that sort of symbolic language is inherent to how God uses visions. It's how God does it. That's not man-made. That's what God has done throughout scripture with visions. And so the issue is that when you take a literalist approach that in some cases is appropriate, it's not always absolutely necessary because different parts of scripture are different types of literature. God uses illusion, he uses storytelling, he uses songs, and he also

49:13 uses just the delivery of facts. You know, when you go through something like 1st and 2nd Kings, it's a bunch of facts. There's not a lot of illusion there because it's a it's a telling of events. The events that are told in Revelation are symbolic in a dream and a vision. And so when you read millennium, which is means a thousand years, it's possible that that's one thousand year periods of three hundred and sixty 65 days each. But it's not necessary. And in fact, when you look at the other places where thousand is used, it's very clear that that is a symbolic number. it's numerological, which is something else that God uses. You know, there's some guys who go completely off the rails with

49:57 numerology and try to make everything about it. Just there's some guys who go completely off the rails with typology trying to make everything typological. These are These are tools that God uses, that God enjoys and He's given us, but they're tools. It's not a universal hermeneutic for every single thing in the Bible, just like literalism. There are places where you cannot possibly accept the literal reading of a word when it cannot possibly mean that according to the rest of scripture, which is Corey was saying, the unclear passages are interpreted by the clear passages. And so just as a basic approach to all of scripture, when you take something from a vision that that is inherently packed with

50:39 symbolic language, and Revelation, when you look at it, it's the same series of events being told three times over in three different ways. It's all symbolic through and through. That millennium, that thousand-year period has been ripped from its context in a vision where it does mean something. It has a meaning. We're not saying it's meaningless, but when they say it must necessarily be a thousand years, and then therefore we can put plug it into the timeline as that sort of period, there's already an abuse of of scripture. And the other word that gets abused here, and then the one I want to focus on is Israel. Now this episode in a lot of ways is a continuation of one of the very first episodes that we did of Stone Choir

51:27 on election in view of headship. At the time we were shy about doing two hour episodes, so that was a two hour episode that we basically called a two-parter that we concatenated, the first hour was entirely about the doctrine of election. Now, election and chosen mean the same thing. That's one of the things that we make the case in that just linguistically they they they don't even have a lot of daylight between them. They're completely interchangeable. If I say that I elect a man president, I'm saying I choose him to be president. It's the same thing. If you you elect something from a menu, you choose something from a menu. Now, we might use one term over the other preferentially when depending

52:09 on context, but it's not because the word means different things. So when scripture speaks of election, it speaks of it identically to how scripture speaks of God choosing and whom did God choose. In the old testament, there was a time where he chose the people of Israel, where he made specific promises to Abraham and said that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars and that theirs would be the inheritance. This is another aspect of of taking literalism from Abusively, because scripture is clear, clear as day, that both historically in the Old Testament and when it is taught in the New Testament, you have passages like this from Romans nine, where God says, For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel,

53:01 and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but quote through Isaac shall your offspring be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Now note that in that one passage, Paul shifts between descended from Israel, belonging to Israel, and children of the flesh and children of God. They mean the same thing. See, in many cases, especially in the New Testament, most of but notably, not all statements that refer to Israel are talking about the lineal genetic descendants of Abraham. A few of them do, and it's clear in context when that is the case. But over and over in the New Testament, w one of the

53:49 key points of the New Testament, one of the chief arguments that that Paul had to struggle to hammer into the heads of the stubborn Jews of that day, was that they didn't simply get to be saved because they were children of Abraham. That's not how it works. God said he could raise up children of Abraham from the stones if he wished. God God can make children of Abraham any way he pleases. It doesn't need to be linearly. And it says elsewhere that the faith that Abraham was counted to him is righteousness. It wasn't his own blood. It w or even that God had made him a promise. The promise was fulfilled in the giving of the gift of faith, but it was the faith that God gave as a gift that received the salvation that God had intended for Abraham and for his

54:35 offspring. And so And show the children of the flesh of Abraham account for nothing. They're not children of God. They don't belong to Israel unless they have the faith of Israel. And when that is said, it can only possibly be speaking of actual saving faith. And so the the I think really the most crucial mistake that is in Ryrie's description, which is completely apt, is the definition of all dispensationalism. It is the defining characteristic. I think even over and above all the talk of the dispensations, the time periods themselves, the statement, the the we must as Christians, you have I don't know you've even said that. But he said we must necessarily treat the church as one thing and Israel as something else.

55:23 And see, this is something that emerged back in Darby's day 200 years ago, and it's accelerated and it's continued. And you know, we did a four-part episode on Jews. We've talked numerous times about the various aspects of the history of those people. One of the things that has occurred in the last century that makes this geopolitically relevant, as we're going to get to in a bit, is that there was There was an inversion of the historic nature of Christ's fulfillment of prophecy. When Jesus was scourged and he was killed for our sins, and then he rose again on the third day, all of the creeds and all of our hope and our faith points to the cross and to the risen Christ as our hope for our own salvation,

56:14 delivered by God through the faith that we have in that gift and in that promise. So Jesus, who fulfilled all prophecy and scripture and made manifest God's will as God Himself, his death and his resurrection three days later, and then his ascension into heaven, sitting at the right hand of God, are the basis of the Christian faith. This is relevant because as we went over in the Big Lie episode, there was another scourging and death that occurred in the 20th century where the Where the six million were sacrificed. And then three years later, the state of Israel was resurrected from the dead. And the state of Israel is used interchangeably with Israel today. And so what Darby helped give birth to in 1830, 120 years

57:07 later, after all this work done by Schofield and all the other Zionists, this multi-century project that involved people from all walks of life with all different agendas of their own. Schofield was just a shyster. Like the guy was a crook. There's n there's n there was an honest bone in the man's body. When you hear some of the other stuff that's said about him, there's no doubt that he was in this to get rich and to be influential and he slapped his name on him because he was basically the front man. These frauds need a front man. That's not the case with all of them. There are other men who had other agendas, but they were all working inexorably towards the same goal. And the fulfillment of the Zionist project occurred in nineteen forty eight,

57:48 three years after the end of World War II, the state the state of Israel was born. And it was very much treated as a rebirth of is a rebirth of the historic Israel, the historic Jewry of the Old Testament. It was completely false. False genetically, far false spiritually, false religiously. Everything about it is a lie. But it was an inversion that was done in the vacuum created by this ignorance about confusing Israel with Israel in the Bible with these people who just slap the name Israel on themselves. I think is one of the most important things. You know, another early episode was on framing. The frame of calling themselves Israel is it's catnip for any dispensationalist, for anyone who's been taught their entire life, we must support and

58:35 defend Israel because of the apple of God's eye. If you believe that that refers to any Jew who's alive today, and any Jew who's alive today has has right of return to the state of Israel. So they're all Israel, wherever they are on the planet, they're all the state of Israel. If religiously you adhere to the claim that Israel means these people with this passport, then necessarily you are bound morally to follow a certain political course. And voila, there it is. You have no choice as a Christian but to do whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says, whoever's in charge at the time. That's wild. And so the last part of this we're going to talk about the the geopolitics, but just keep in mind that that switcheroo that's

59:20 being done that Ryrie described is the key element of dispensationalism. If you say that Israel is one thing and the church is another thing, which we completely agree with, like that's totally factual. The problem is that they say that Israel has a plan from God that is separate from Scripture, that's separate from the cross. As Corey said at the end of that, they you know Ryu is trying to like, well yeah, you know, the cross is still there, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. And incidentally, this isn't just limited entirely to them. Vatican II adhered to this. They issued a statement nostrilate referring to the gifts and promises of God being inevitable. I think about nineteen sixty-five, that more or less reiterated dispensationalism said

1:00:06 that the Jews alone have a special promise from God and basically said it's anti anti Semitic to proselytize to them, to take the gospel to them. God will take care of them because he made promises thousands of years ago. You don't need to worry about it. They have a separate deal. That's what the Vatican put out. that's false doctrine. And it's crazy false doctrine that came from well outside of Roman Catholicism. Like that that's not like that was a development of their theology, but it was absolutely an importation of something that again played out geopolitically. So it's, you know, is this a religion podcast or is it a politics podcast? Are we talking about race? Are we talking about religion or genes?

1:00:48 It's all those things simultaneously. And that's the reason that a lot of the topics that we cover kind of muddled because when all these things play out, when you look at the history and you look at the theology and then you look at the impact, if you ignore one of those, you're gonna be missing the whole picture. You're really gonna be missing the whole picture. And dispensationalism by defining itself is saying that Israel, and whoever calls himself Israel is Israel automatically, if it's a Jew, it's Israel, is separate from the church. We can judge them and we can't proselytize to them, and we must do whatever they say. Because one of the key elements of of dispensationalist doctrine is that

1:01:26 they are superiors, that the Jews are first and we are second. Now There are passages in scripture that speak to that in a f in a fashion. In particular, I I commend reading Romans 10 and 11 back to back because particularly because it's a warning, I think, to many on the right today. You know, if you're listening and you think you're kind of dissent right or something in that vein, you have certainly seen and heard men saying the the glory of Europe is because of our genes. And it didn't really have to do with God, where the white man were strong and proud and blah blah blah. And that's why European history was great. When they remove Christianity from European history, they're doing exactly what Romans

1:02:11 11 warns of us. I think that historically there have been many, even in the post-Reformation church, including in Luther's Day, who read Romans 11 talking about grafting of branches and cutting off of branches as as hope for the future restoration of ethnic Jews to come to faith. I wish that. I wish that nothing more than anything in the universe. The only cure for a Jew being a Jew and being evil continuously is to become Christian. The Jew who becomes Christian ceases to be a Jew. He's just going to obey God and stop doing all the things that I have a problem with and Corey has a problem with. We'd have nothing left to complain about with these people if they would be Christian. So above all men, we heartily wish that Romans 11 were making

1:02:57 a promise that they would one day become Christian. But I think the reason it's important for us today is that we should look at that as a warning to the West. I think if you look at the warnings Romans eleven, what you'll find is that God is saying, I made the promise first to the Jews, and when they abandoned me, I cut them off and threw them into the fire. Do you think you're gonna fare any better? That's the gist of it. Is a warning from God to the sons of Jasph, to Europe, to say you were Christian for a thousand years and then you abandoned me. Do you think I'm not going to do the same thing to you that I did to the Jews? And we see the state of the Jews today and we see the state of the West.

1:03:38 I think that it is I'm not going to call it a prophecy, but it is certainly applicable. What God said is being done to us because we are abandoning God just as they did. So I don't read Romans eleven and flex on the Jews today. I don't that's it's a chastisement to anyone in the West because we have done the very thing that God warned us not to do. Our fathers inherited the faith and then at some point it began to be thrown away. And now And now so many in the West today don't think it's even even matters. And God's warning to us is the same as it was to them in Paul's day. I'm gonna cut you off and throw you in the fire. This is what I do to those who betray me and who defy and do not have faith.

1:04:22 And we should expect to have every bit the same out bad outcome that the Jews have had when we continue down this path. So theologically, this is a live issue for us. I don't think it's about the restoration of the Jews to the church, which again would be wonderful. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think that Paul is promising that. That he specifically says that when he's talking about Israel and the promises that God made, he also says that in those days there were only seven thousand who didn't bend the knee to Baal. God killed the rest. The rest are in hell. There's only seven thousand who were saved. And he says the same in his day, that all the promises was were extended to all Jews, only a remnant would have faith.

1:05:05 And that's always been the case. Now there's a substantial remnant in Paul's day who did become Christian and basically vanished as Jews. They just became wherever they lived in their place. They ceased to have their ethnic identity because they just you know, they lived in Palestine or Turkey or Iraq or wherever. They just became locals and they were Christians in those places. I don't think it's coincidental that when you look closely at the headlines today, if you can read through the top line stuff, you'll find that those very populations are being exterminated today. The Christians who trace their roots, the Arab Christians, the you know, the the Eastern Eastern, Middle Eastern Christians in those places who have

1:05:42 roots going back thousands of years, they're being genocided today. They're being exterminated. They were faithful and they are paying the price for living among wicked men. So these these promises do plan out pan out over time, not in terms of dispensations, and again not in terms of genetics, but in terms of faithfulness. When it comes to hermeneutics, we see a problem with dispensationalists that is sort of the inverse of the problem that we see with liberals in the academic sense of the term or the theological sense of the term, liberals fall off the left side of the horse by allegorizing literal books of the Bible. The most obvious example, of course, is creation, the days of creation.

1:06:33 They allegorize those by saying that, oh, well, it's an epic or it's an era or there's a gap between the days. Whatever it happens to be that they're currently arguing. And so they fall off the left side of the horse by taking the first five books, say, which are very clearly history books written by Moses, almost exclusively literal, and turning them into a metaphor or an allegory. On the other hand, you have dispensationalists and those adjacent to them, who take books like Daniel, parts of Ezekiel, some of the other parts of the prophets, Revelation, books that are prophetic, that are metaphorical, that are symbolic, and attempt to interpret them in a literalistic fashion. And so they fall off the right side of the horse.

1:07:28 It doesn't matter off of which side of the horse you fall. You don't want to fall off the horse. You want to stay on the horse. Yes, if there's a cliff on one side, you probably prefer to fall off the other. Sometimes some heresies are worse than others. We've seen what liberalism has done to major denominations, but we can see what dispensationalism is currently doing to the world. So don't fall off either side of the horse. You have to interpret the books of Scripture according to the type of book it is. Because that is something that must always be in your mind when you are reading Scripture. Scripture is a single book insofar as it is a single work from the mind of God. It flowed out of the pens of many scribes, of many inspired

1:08:18 men, but it is the work ultimately of a single mind. However, it is a collection of books from that mind. God did not write one kind of book. God did not write one single book, beginning to end. He wrote a collection of books that are intertwined, interrelated. We've gone over this previously in other episodes, but he wrote a collection of books that are related to each other, but there are distinct genres within that collection. And so you do not read Genesis in the same way that you read Psalms. You do not read the Psalms in the same way that you read, say, Revelation. Matthew is going to be more like Genesis because Matthew is more of a literal account, but it contains parables that are going to

1:09:10 be interpreted differently from the genealogy at the beginning of the book. Different genres call for different assessment. That doesn't mean that we ignore what the text says. In fact, the only way in which you can interpret the text literally is to interpret it in the way that God literally meant it to be interpreted. If you take the text, if you take something that is in fact spiritual, or allegorical, or metaphorical, symbolic, what have you, if you take that text and attempt to make it a purely literal reading, you will get it wrong. Christ is not literally a lamb with seven horns. That's in scripture. You cannot take that in the literalistic sense. The same is true, speaking of the number of one thousand, which

1:10:03 is where we get the millennium supposedly from Revelation, in the Psalms it says that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. God owns the universe. God does not own, literally, the cattle on literally a thousand hills. You have to interpret that as what it is. It is a symbolic use of a number. One thousand, of course, just representing complete perfection, God's perfection. That is what the number actually means. It's ten to the power of three. And so that 1,000 years, the supposed millennium, is the church age. It is the perfect amount of time from Pentecost to the last day in which God will ingather his church. It is the church age, that is what the millennium actually is. Just as the cattle on a thousand hills is meant to represent

1:10:57 a number of perfection in that all things belong to God. It is a statement of his complete and total ownership over all that exists. That is how you interpret these things. You have to know what they are to know how to interpret them. Or else again, you fall off one or the other side of the horse. Now we'll recommended that you read Romans ten and eleven. I would second that. Read the entire book. Set aside the time. It's not that long of a book. Yes, it's a very long letter for the era, and it was very expensive for the time, but it doesn't take that long to read. I will include in the show notes Luther's preface to the book of Romans, I believe that is available online. I know it's in the Lutheran study Bible, at least in part,

1:11:46 so if you have that you can just read it. But it's worth reading. He gives a good summary of how to read Romans, what the book of Romans is, why Paul organized it the way that he did, how a Christian reads it, and in part it echoes what Woe said about the book, because it isn't part of warning. Part of the reason that I said chapters 10 and 11 and not 9 is I'm going to read most of 9 right now because it's there's so many different places in the New Testament where if someone just comes along and they have the Holy Spirit, they're a Christian and they're reading this stuff, they could never possibly conclude that on one hand you have Israel that belongs to God, and on the other hand you have the church that also belongs to God.

1:12:35 Either the is either Israel is the church or Israel is damned. Because the church is the whole universe of the elect. Period. That's what the elect means, is what the chosen means. Those who were chosen in the Old Testament were elected unto salvation. They were given the gift of faith and they received the gift of salvation. Jews, Ninevites, wherever they were, when the word of God came to them and they repented, they were saved. So and read from Romans nine now. What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured much patience, vessels of wrath prepared for induct and destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even

1:13:21 us whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles. As indeed he says in Hosea, Those who were not my people I will call my people, and her who is not beloved I will call beloved. And in the very place where it was said to them, You are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God. And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully and without delay. And Isaiah predicted, if the Lord of hosts has not left had not left us offspring, we would have been like Sodom and become like Gomorrah. What shall we say then?

1:14:06 The Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is a righteousness that is by faith, but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works, they have stumbled over the stumbling stone as it is written. Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. So what is the difference between the church and the Israel of the Old Testament that is excluded from the promise. It's whether or not they stumbled on the stone of stumbling. When Jesus came and fulfilled all of the promises and prophecies, there

1:14:52 were many Jews who believed and converted. They left the Phariseaic world and they became Christians. But it was a continuation of the faith that they had held under a new covenant. And that was the shift that occurred. It wasn't a new religion. It was that Jesus came to fulfill all the law and all the testimonies of the Old Testament. They were then freed from that, and we are freed from that. The burdens there were placed on them, the ceremonial burdens going to the temple, were replaced. They were removed entirely. And God finalized what he said on the cross when Christ said, It is finished. And remember at the moment that Christ said that, what happened? He died. There was a great earthquake.

1:15:40 And I think equally important symbolically with the rest, the temple curtain was torn in two. Now this wasn't like a curtain in your house. This was a huge, incredibly tall, incredibly thick, heavy curtain. It was torn into like it was nothing. And this is important because that curtain separated the Holy of Holies, in which God's special presence on earth in the temple, the reason for the temple, the reason for the sacrifices, was contained within the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, and where God's special presence existed. God left that place when Christ died. Because when He said it was finished, it was over. The temple sacrificial system that Jesus had participated in when he was

1:16:26 alive, he had fulfilled all of those requirements. When he died, that ended, and God left the temple. And then forty years later he completed it by using Titus to destroy and sack the temple and to kill and scatter and destroy the Jews who were no longer Christian. They were still trying to hang on to something that God had said, This is over, this period has ended. I've given you a new covenant in Christ in his blood, the perfect blood for which the blood of all the previous sacrifices were only typological. And there are numerous places in the New Testament that specifically says that the blood of beasts can never save anyone. They can't forgive your sins. Those Those were there pointing to Christ's atoning sacrifice.

1:17:12 It's typological. The smaller points to the greater. And there's nothing greater than Christ's atoning blood on the cross. So when the Jews stumbled on the stumbling block, it was Jesus coming to them as had been promised as their Messiah, who for us is the Christ, because it's just Greek versus Hebrew. It was over. No. They rejected it. And so to this day, they continue to reject it overly. You lose legal standing if you are an Israeli citizen and you convert to Christianity. If you attempt to proselytize in the state of Israel, you will go to prison or you'll be deported because it's illegal to do so. They have Muslims there and they'll permit Christians to come and to spend lots of money as part of their grift, getting people

1:18:01 to come as tourists, but you're not allowed to stay, you're not allowed to be a Christian there. That is forbidden. Why? Because they continue to reject Christ to this day. And so this dispensationalist stuff that tries to say that there's an Israel on one hand, and yet by the way, it's clearly the state of Israel today. And on the other hand, just forget about the Jesus stuff. Like that's that's for us, that's for the church, but it's not really even as important as what's going on with these Jews. That's a satanic inversion. That is that is a complete inversion of the Christian faith. And yet there's so many who call themselves Christians today that are full bore with this stuff. And they're doing it with a clean conscience, which is tragic.

1:18:43 This is theologically bankrupt, and it's completely at odds with all of Scripture. We're We're not going to belabor this by reading fifty verses or fifty passages, but we very easily could. There's one last passage I want to read because it's it's often cited as one of the clear proof texts for for for this notion that there's Israel and then separately there's Christianity. It's at the very end of Galatians. It's after Paul says you can tell I'm writing this with my own hand. Paul concludes the letter. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even among those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the

1:19:26 law, but they desire to have you circumcised, that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world, for neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. And then there's a couple of lines he finishes the epistle. This is the very end of Galatians. There's several key things that we've said numerous times. I want to just hammer home the point here. One, this is at the end of the epistle. No one who reads all of Galatians. And again, you should just go sit down and read the whole

1:20:09 thing. It's not that long. It you can do it in 15, 20 minutes at the outside. You could not possibly read Galatians and come to the conclusion of the dispensationalists that when Paul says peace and Peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. That somehow they're talking about two different things. That the Israel of God is in one category and then what's in the other category? Well, if you go back and read, he says, Far be it from me to boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Christ Jesus. Well, is is that the Israel of God? Not by the dispensationalist standard, but that's exactly the one and only Israel of God that Paul is referring to. It's very clear in the rest of the epistle because Galatians is

1:20:56 also very heavily about the grafting of branches and about inheritance. He's talking about how we are heirs of God and co heirs with Christ because we have been adopted. There's a lot of adoption language talking about Christ being our brother and therefore we have legal rights as brothers according to adoption. No one can possibly get through this epistle and think that somehow there's some other separate version of God's people apart from the one that boasts in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's just it it's it's absurd. And frankly they they they hinge the whole thing on and peace be and mercy be upon them and upon Israel of God. Well, I might say that Cori is my friend and my brother.

1:21:42 Does that mean that there are two Cories? No, it means that there's one man who's two different things. And rhetorically when you look at the very end of this letter, Paul's just, he's ending with a flourish. And for all those who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. It's just he's he's raising his hands and saying everybody who's a believer, he's not invoking a separate group of people. So no natural reading of this passage or the certainly in the context of the book would ever cause someone to say, well, actually, yeah, this means that Israel is a separate thing, and that's what I see on a map today. It's retarded. There's another word for it. It's just, it's, it's dumb.

1:22:21 It's inexcusably dumb. And yet this sort of laziness is the predicate for believing all the other dispensationalist beliefs. You know, so when we call it a heresy, we're not we're not playing games here. They reject the plain words of scripture throughout. Like I said, we could s we could spend an hour and a half just reading the passages that lay bear how stupid it is and impossible and faithless to say that there's Israel on one hand and there's a church on the other. Elect is elect is elect. Elect is chosen. Chosen are the people of God who are in the church, who are the bride of Christ, those are Christians. All of them. That's why we always make the rhetorical point of saying that Adam

1:23:03 is a Christian and Noah's a Christian and Mary's a Christian. Some of them were also Hebrews by birth, but it was their faith in God that saved them. And that is why definitionally they're Christian. When you start having these other dispensations and these other separate things, what are you fundamentally doing? You're removing God from the picture. You're saying, well, some people don't need God. Some people, you know, like God is just delivering it to 'em in some other way and they don't even know it. And even if they hate and despise God to this day, they're still gonna have something because God keeps his promises. Well, the passages where God talks about keeping his promises, he makes

1:23:41 very clear that I'll keep promises to those who are faithful to me, but I'll find more people. If you don't want to be my people, okay. In Hebrews 80 talks about the old covenant and the new covenant and it's made very clear. When one set of people abandoned me, okay, it wasn't that the covenant failed because God didn't do a good job with it, it was that they rejected it. And so he needed a new people of the covenant, and that's us. That's all it means. And so all the errors are downstream from abusing and misreading simple, clear passages that are reinforced. Like it's not like this one this one place here and there's one other place somewhere else that maybe you could see them being the same.

1:24:20 It's consistent throughout. If you just read the New Testament, you will never reach these conclusions. That's why I I say that a lot of these people are just dumb and I'm I'm I'm sorry, I don't want to be abusive, but like this is not it's not an intelligent position. But you know, intelligence aside, it's one that's at odds of scripture. And whether you're reading intelligently or you're reading simply, you can read scripture simply. Please do. I I most people should just stick to the simple reading of scripture. Even if you make an error, it's going to be far less bad than the elaborate ones made by the clever people who want to come in and just layer on so many ridiculous things that they end up creating more distance between themselves and God.

1:25:02 That's not why he gave us these words. Never underestimate the pettiness and the ability to hold a grudge of the Jews. And the reason that I say this is to emphasize what Woe said about the fact that so called modern Israel is founded in large part and sustained by an explicit rejection of Christ and a hatred of Christ. An example of this in their mathematics textbooks, how they teach math to their children, how they write their math, they do not use the plus symbol. They use what is properly called the falsum or the up tack, depending on how you're using it really. It's an upside down T. They get rid of the lower part of the plus symbol because it looks like a cross. Doesn't even look that much like a cross, quite frankly, because the

1:26:03 cross the lower part's supposed to be longer, but it's enough like a cross that they get rid of it. This is not the only case of this. In some cases, when Jews have immigrated, they have been asked to sign a particular piece of paper because that is what you do when someone immigrates to your country, and in some cases they would refuse to use an X because sometimes if you're illiterate you just make an X, well that also looks too much like a cross. This is the level of pettiness and hatred that these people have for Christ. And dispensationalism says that we're supposed to support them. That's not what Scripture says. Scripture says that we are to support our brothers, both those according

1:26:51 to blood and those according to faith, particularly those who are brothers according to both. Supporting a foreign nation that is hostile to Christianity is observing neither of those injunctions in Scripture. It is not the Christian thing to do, and yet it is what every dispensationalist says that we are supposed to do. They all, to a man, particularly amongst the teachers, command Christians, basically, to virtually worship Israel because anything that is against the so called nation of Israel, is seen as blasphemy, is seen as a rejection of the Christian faith. And really that's a good working definition of what a heresy is. A heresy is a false teaching that rises to the level of a litmus test.

1:27:42 If a false teaching is used as a test of whether or not someone is Christian, then that false teaching has become a heresy. Now in the broader sense, of course, all false teaching is heresy, because it is all blasphemy, but there are different levels of blasphemy, the same as there are different levels of sin. Certainly the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is more egregious than saying something that is a minor falsehood as it were about God, not to say that any falsehood is minor, but I have to speak in human terms to be understandable. But this is another case of falling off one or the other side of the horse. On the one hand, the Israelites thought they were special. They thought, Abraham is our father, certainly we are saved by our

1:28:36 blood. Christ very clearly rebuked them, as did John the Baptist. God can raise up for Abraham new sons from these stones. They were not saved by their blood. They should not have boasted in their blood. It was not wrong for them to be proud of their heritage. Every man should be proud of his heritage in so far as there is good in that heritage. And of course you must according to the fourth commandment honor your father and your mother, and that includes grandparents, great grandparents, your ancestors, all the way back, indeed through Noah to Adam. But it does not give you a special place before God. You are not saved by your blood. We continue to state this bluntly, because it is a problem for

1:29:24 some on the right, but more than it is a problem on the right, because quite frankly, it's not that big of a problem. It's a big problem in terms of its import, but not in terms of the widespread nature of it. Only a handful of people think it. But it is more of a problem because it is a constant accusation from our adversaries and enemies. They say that we think we're saved by our blood, and that's the second part of this. That's falling off the other side of the horse. I won't say which one's right and which one's left. You decide that for yourself in this case. But the other one would be those who think that simply because we're white we are somehow immune to these things, that we're inoculated

1:30:07 against apostasy or whatever it happens to be, that everything will be good simply because we're white. And if you just had white people, everything would be great. And that's not the case. Look at the actual history of various white nations when they were not Christian. Yes, they were certainly better off than most of those in Africa, than basically any of those in Africa, quite frankly. But that doesn't mean that things were good. Look at how the Romans treated their slaves. Slavery itself isn't a sin. Abusing your slaves in the way the Romans did certainly was. Look at how, in some of the far northern reaches, disabled children were treated. They were left out to die. They were exposed, as it was called, was death by exposure.

1:30:55 That's certainly not Christian, that's not permissible. Euthanasia, of that variety at the very least, is not permissible, because that is of course infanticide. That is the reality of any human group without God, without Christ. It doesn't matter if you're black, if you're white, if you're Asian, whatever you happen to be, your nation is going to go down the drain if you are not Christian. You will get worse with time, you will stray further and further from God, the longer you are away from Christ. Yes, some will fall farther will fall further and faster. But that doesn't mean that you are in a good position if you are If you are the ones who fell only a little ways, because any falling away from God, in which you do not

1:31:52 return to him, eventuates in hell. And so for those who think that we can save the West by just returning it to being ethnically pure or whatever term they want to use are deeply mistaken. Because if you are just producing more Europeans, and they aren't Christian, all you're doing is filling hell with your brothers and sisters. And quite frankly, that is a worse future than simply going extinct. I would rather there were no more Europeans, then we return to paganism. Because filling hell with your own people is the worst possible thing you can do. Contrast that with what Paul says of his people. He would have had his name stricken from the book of life if it would have saved his own people.

1:32:43 That's what it means, to love your own people. Damning them all to hell is certainly not loving them. But when it comes to dispensationalism and this particular belief that there are two ways to God if we're being uncharitable, and quite frankly, it's not even that uncharitable, because many of them have come out and said that. Not in so many words, but they'll essentially say the Jews have another way. On the one hand, this accuses Christ, accuses God of being a polygynist. Polygyny is not morally impermissible for men. God is not a polygynist. God is God has one bride. Scripture is very clear about this. God's bride, Christ's bride, is the church. She is the only bride of Christ. There is no other.

1:33:42 And that is why when we used to have statuary and proper design and aesthetics for our churches, you had ecclesia and synagoga somewhere outside the church. You had ecclesia, the church triumphant, head held high, holding scripture, and you had synagoga blinded with usually the Old Testament falling out of her hand, possibly with a snake somewhere incorporated as well. Because that is the proper Christian view of these things. You have the bride of Christ, you have the wise virgins, and then you have the synagogue that rejected Christ, you have the wicked, foolish virgins. There is no second way to God. It is Christ alone. Scripture is abundantly clear on this, and so any theology that even

1:34:34 hints that there is a second way, is obviously false, is obviously anti Christian, not merely unchristian, but anti Christian. And that is why we call dispensationalism a heresy. it is a particularly vile heresy, not only for the damage it has done to the church, not only for how many souls it has shipwrecked and destroyed, but for also what it continues to do in the world, because as Wo stated earlier, it has geopolitical consequences. It is not only a damning heresy, if you believe the extreme version, I'll call it of what it teaches. But it is also a destructive heresy. It destroys the church, it destroys nations, it is tearing apart the world. And we are not being extreme. We are not being hyperbolic in what we are saying.

1:35:28 If anything, we are understating the case. Because without dispensationalism, you would not have the power behind Zionism that we see today. Without Zionism, you would not have the complete and utter disaster that has been the last two hundred years or so in the West. We are in the position in which we find ourselves today, in no small part due to dispensationalism. There are many other factors, of course, and we've gone over those in various other episodes, and we'll go over more of them in the future. But dispensationalism has played an outsized role, and it continues to do so particularly in the United States, so particularly in our context. And so there are a couple of teachings of the dispensationalists that I would like to cover.

1:36:21 I would like to refute what they teach on these specifically. As we said, we are not going to go into all of the points. We are not going to examine the minutia. We're not going to take a magnifying glass to what the dispensationalists teach. Not least of all because they all disagree with each other and there's no coherent statement of dispensationalism to which they would all subscribe. It's the same problem we will have when we go over the EO in a future episode. Because the classic dispensationalists don't agree with the revised or modified, whichever term you prefer and they don't agree with the progressives. Essentially, what you have there, just for those who want a sort of idea of how they differ, you have an increasing incorporation

1:37:12 of covenantal or covenant theology into dispensationalism. You have not so much of it in classical dispensationalism, you have more in revised and even more in progressive, which is what you see in many of the churches that hold to this today. That's essentially how you can think of the difference in those. They're all heresies. And part of how you can tell that is theology does not develop in the sense of development as change. And so you you see change in dispensationalism, what it teaches changes over time. What it teaches from the beginning is a significant change, is a break with what the church teaches, what Scripture teaches. Theology can be fleshed out But those additional details, the fleshing out, does not change

1:38:11 the core content. The core teachings do not change, and they do not change notably from the creeds, because the creeds, as we stated before, are based firmly in scripture. And I will put a page in the show notes for this episode that links to a table showing those verses. I should have done that in a previous episode, but I'll do it in this episode. Dispensationalism is false. One of the ways you can tell is that it changes over time because false theology changes. True theology is going to sound the same today as it will a thousand years from today if Christ doesn't return in the intervening time, and will sound the same then as it did a thousand years ago. Because God doesn't change, God's word doesn't change, so theology cannot change.

1:39:06 The core content will not be different. And that is why, if you read the theologians of your church, if you read the men writing for your church body today, and they do not sound like the men from a thousand years ago, there is a very real problem somewhere. Because again, when men disagree, at least one man is wrong. The same is true here, so if you find that you have a thousand years, fifteen hundred years, two thousand years, of men all saying the same thing about Scripture, and you go and compare that to Scripture, and Scripture says the same thing that they are saying, and then you look at what your church body is saying, and it is different from that tradition in the proper sense of the

1:39:52 term. You are part of a false church, and you need to reconsider what you are doing with your Christian life because you are endangering your soul. As Lutherans Corey and I are both ah millennialists, for the sake of clarity for the rest of this, I'm gonna slightly mispronounce and say a millennialist just so it doesn't get misinterpreted as a hum or something. I'm gonna read a passage on amillennialism from Wikipedia just to give you a good overview of kind of the history. I know some people laugh at me for referring to Wikipedia. I'll say again, it's very good generally for theological subjects somehow. They don't mess with it. It's generally just a neutral factual accounting of the moving parts.

1:40:38 Amillennialism gained ground after Christianity became a legal religion. It was systematized by Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, and this systematization carried amillennialism over as the dominant eschatology of the medieval and reformation periods. Augustine was originally a premillennialist, but he retracted that view claiming the doctrine was carnal. Amillennialism was the dominant view of the Protestant reformers, the Lutheran Church formally rejected Killiasm in the Augsburg Confession and condemned the Anabaptists. Historically, most Anabaptist groups were amillennial. And others, quote, who now scattered Jewish opinions that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall occupy the kingdom of the world,

1:41:24 the wicked being everywhere suppressed. Likewise the Swiss reformer Heierich Bullinger Bullinger wrote up the second Helvetic Confession which asserts we also reject the Jewish dream of a millennium or golden age on earth before the last judgment. John Calvin wrote in the Institutes The Killiasm is a quote fiction that is quote too childish either to need or to be worth a refutation. He interpreted the thousand year period of Revelation twenty symbolically, applying it to the various disturbances that awaited the church while still toiling on earth. Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches have long held amillennial positions, as well as the Roman Catholic Church. So going to Cory's point a minute ago, you won't find a

1:42:10 lot in church history disputing these specific subjects because almost all of church history until the seventeenth century was a millennial. And And I want to bring this up here to to draw a distinction between when we go after dispensationalism and the pre-tribulation rapture stuff, I want to distinguish it from I know we have a lot of post-millennialist listeners. I don't have a problem with the approach that they generally take. I think that the postmill guys are not pursuing something that I have any problem with. You know, it's the same thing that we say on Stone Choir all the time. Hey, let's believe God, let's go to church, let's read our Bibles. It's basically the eternal gospel of Revelation fourteen.

1:43:05 Fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water. So I think that the way the the guys who call themselves post-millennial today are pursuing things I don't have a problem with. When we say that we are a millennial and we believe that that's correct, and we say that dispensationalism is a haircut. I want to draw a very clear line between that heresy and what we think is an error on the part of the postmillennialists. And so I wanted to point to this, you know, quotation of just facts from Wikipedia to make clear to you guys your doctrine is less than four hundred years old. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the beginnings of post millennialism

1:43:52 began to emerge. And so you have like a 150-year head start on the dispensationalists, but it is still a novel eschatology in the history of the church. Again, even the reformers, like you know, Calvin and Luther agreed on something. That didn't happen a great deal, but it occurred here. There was really no one debating anything about eschatology. Now there were certainly discussions are these the end times? That's That's Christian. There's a theme throughout all of the New Testament that is pointing towards the end times. Yeah, much of Jesus preaching was talking about the end days. It's referred to in numerous epistles, obviously, the very last book in the Bible, as we order it today, is entirely, almost entirely about

1:44:37 end times. So it's entirely Christian to talk about these things. I think I think that amillennialism is the only defensible scriptural position, but I don't think that most of the errors, at least on the post-millennial side, are significant, with one key exception. The reason I wanted to bring it up here, in addition to say we all think you're going to hell because you disagree with us on this. If you are post-millennial, if you believe that the thousand years is now, whether it's a literal thousand years or not, I know a lot of guys don't believe it's a literal. Thank you for that at least. If you believe that Christ's church is ascendant and that we are capturing the kingdom on earth for God today.

1:45:23 And you believe that's the arc that we're on. If you turn out to be wrong and I turn out to be right, and the world is going to blow up in the next 10 years, not as a planet exploding in space, but like everything that we know going away, suffering, apostasy, churches being destroyed, Christians being persecuted. If these things, which have happened in many places historically, if they happen to us, and that blows up your postmillennial views, are you going to despair? Because as a millennialist, we're gonna be just fine with that. No, it's terrible. Like it's it's gonna be suffering and misery and chastisement, and a lot of people are gonna die if I'm right. I hope I'm wrong, but you know, we'll see.

1:46:10 You know, as we've said in past episodes, the a lot of these debates around doctrine are not simply about winning the argument. I mean, that's that's the key thing here. I'm not trying to win an argument with you and say, don't be post-mill, be amil. I'm trying to warn you that by the way, the thing that both the Lutheran confessions and the other reformers called Jewish lies that you hold, the post millennialist view, the idea that the millennium is a period of prosperity, that was a Jewish myth. It was something that was being spread in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. That's important because there were a lot of Jews in parts of Europe then, ethnically. They were not people who held to the faith of the first century Jews.

1:46:59 Talmudic Judaism completely, completely replaced whatever remnant of Judaism may have existed in Jesus' day, it's dead and gone for nearly 2,000 years. So the Jews of the days of the Reformers who were talking about what you call the millennium, what everyone calls the millennium, believing that it's a period of of prosperity. That was a Jewish lie. It was a Talmudic lie. And the reason that's crucial is if you remember in a couple episodes, we've talked about Tik and Olam. What is the the belief of Tikin Olam is the perfection of this world? The Jews believe today that it is their duty to be the agents of God on this earth perfecting things. That's why they're willing to do genetic engineering and organ harvesting and

1:47:51 the most horrific abuses of man and creation. They will do it if they can rationalize as perfecting the world. That's kind of part of postmillennialism. Now to be explicit, I'm not accusing you guys of being secret TikTok Lom agents. I don't believe that, I'm not saying that. I am, however, saying that when you look at the genealogy of that specific idea, it came from the Talmud. It came from these people. Today you're not in serious error. it's a I think a small mistake. But frankly, like a lot of you agree with us about this stuff. That's fine. Like it's not it's not that it's an egregious doctrinal error. In the specific case, I I just want to warn you that if things get worse in such a fashion that, you know, many

1:48:38 church denominations are in the process of collapsing today. The people at the top, the men at the top are by and large evil, and they're actively seeking evil ends against those in the pews. If that continues, you're gonna be run out of your churches and you can form more churches, that's gonna be happening, that as that's always happened. But if those bodies get smaller and smaller, as it seems like they probably will, if we're no longer ascendant as Christendom was for a thousand years, I don't want you to lose hope. I don't want you to think, well, yeah, I got that wrong, you know, maybe the Bible's not right. And so that's the specific reason I want to point to amillennialism being the historic view of the church is that we just like

1:49:20 as Lutherans we didn't change anything. And so when there's the ebb and flow of these things, we're not worried about it because we don't see don't see the ebb and flow being a fulfillment of prophecy. Now, we've said in the past that you know Revelation and Daniel and some of the things that Jesus says, it's clearly it's prophecy about the future. As a matter of disclosure, I reject preterism. I I believe specifically that Revelation was written probably about in 96 AD. I think it was written well after the fall of the temple. This has long been a matter of dispute within the church. I think that I have a defensible position. I also freely admit I could be wrong. I think it is possible that Revelation was written in 68 AD.

1:50:09 I think it is possible that those prophecies were partially fulfilled. And we'll get into what that means because you know fulfillment. I don't think it could be partial. Being partially fulfilled is like being partially pregnant. Fulfillment means it's completed. So I was talking to Corey before we started recording. I don't know if there's another word for it. So if I'm wrong, and the revelation prophecies were exclusively about the future, then I don't think it really changes anything because the prophecies are still typological. And it's very clear that some of the prophecies, it certainly, you know, they're prophecies from Jesus, you know, either thirty or sixty years prior, that were at least partially fulfilled by the destruction of the

1:50:54 temple. He was very clearly at that time warning the Jews of that day. And here's the trick with typology, including typology with prophecy. The fact that it occurred once does not preclude the possibility that it can never occur again. Because if the fulfillment of the prophecy is typological, then then the anti-type when it comes in the future, the full fillment of the thing will be greater than the smaller one that was pointing to it. I think that it's very, to me at least, it's a very plain reading of all the prophecies and all the history that line up with the destruction of the temple and the scattering of the Jews from Roman territory. I believe that that is completely typological of the end days.

1:51:43 I think that when the world ends, it's going to be a much bigger version of that. And so the reason I mention this is I think it's important when we're looking at these prophecies, which if they're future looking exclusively, if if they have not yet been fulfilled, then we're not gonna know until either we see it with our own eyes or a prophet who is not yet born explains it to us. Absent a prophet explaining a future prophecy, we cannot fully understand it. It's only when we see it and we have faith that we can remember the prophecy and say, Yep, there it is. God promised it, now I see it. It's always good for Christians, as was done in the you know in the days of the Reformation and done even from the very

1:52:23 first days of the church. They looked around and they said, Are these end times? That's something that God frankly wants from us. You know, one of the prophecies of Jesus event times would be there will be wars and rumors of war. Maybe some autist has already done it, but I would imagine that that has been true certainly every decade in the history of humanity, at least since Jesus days, that there were either wars or rumors rumors of wars going on. So does that mean that it's not a prophecy of end times because it's always true? No. That means we should always be looking around and taking these things seriously, not to the extent that as Corey was talking about the at the beginning about reading the newspaper and trying to, you

1:53:05 know, correlate scorpions and flying at creatures in revelation to particular military programs. That's please don't do that. That's not the point. When it's clearly fulfilled, you're not gonna need to you're not gonna need to decoder ring. We may never see those things with our own eyes, but we should expect that we may, because that's why God gave it to us to warn us, to warn every Christian, and to warn unbelievers too. Prophecies can be delivered to unbelievers and sometimes they come to believe. You know, when Jonah went to Nineveh, if you read Jonah, it's a short book, just go read it. There's no gospel. God sends Jonah to Nineveh and he says God's gonna kill you all. And that was it.

1:53:48 That he went around, he walked around the very large city and said, God's killing you all in forty days. And they all repented, and they prayed to God for mercy, and God heard their pleas and saw that they had relented and God relented. But those were unbelievers who were given a prophecy and it became the source of their repentance. And I think that as we talk about Jews in the world and and in the evils that come from them, if we actually hated those people, the very last thing that we would want would be for them to become Christian, or for them to hear God's word, or crucially, for them to be told that what they're doing is evil. Because just as when Jonah went to Nineveh and said, God's going

1:54:32 to kill you all because you're wicked, they repented. They only were capable of repenting because God gave them the gift to be able to do that. For us today to say that anyone is doing something evil is not itself evil. To call evil evil is scriptural. It's obedience to God. There are good ways and bad ways to approach it, but fundamentally, to call out an evil man and say this is wickedness is the greatest act of love you can have for him. Because what's gonna happen if he repents? He's going to turn to God and he's going to be forgiven. His evil will cease. He will receive eternal life as a gift for God's sacrifice for the evil that he has relented from. When you do not call a man who is in fact evil

1:55:21 evil, you're letting him continue in his wicked ways. And so when we see these things in the world, if we're not, if we're too afraid to speak to them, we're making things worse for our neighbor and for the very man who's acting evilly. So there are times where I don't I don't want to talk to some of these people. I don't want to talk about some of these things. I'm not like I'm not saying I always do a great job. I certainly fail many times, but there are times when I absolutely will speak against something, knowing it's going to be unpleasant for me to do it, because I feel as a matter of conscience I have to. I have to warn someone that they're on a precipice and that they are about to fall off.

1:56:01 The end times prophecies help to reinforce the urgency of such things to remind us that we don't have forever to repent. We don't have forever to bring our families to God. It's part of the reason for the baptism episode. Don't wait till your kid is twelve to give them the gift of the Holy Spirit. That's God's gift. It's not yours to stand in their way. So all of these things, when we have a sense of urgency, it doesn't need to be in the in terms of I'm gonna go fix the world. It's simply in terms of let's obey God and do whatever he says, and then he'll take care of the rest. And if the world were to repent today, as it should, and I think certainly will not, I think that God would relent.

1:56:44 I think that when we were blessed as as Christendom, they were the times when we were largely in obedience to God. We certainly confessed him collectively, even when though there were many unbelievers among us, you know, historically in Christendom. Today, Christians are the absolute minority, you know, single digits in most places, including in the West. When you look at actual Christian belief, it's easily single digits, and that's in free fall. So I don't think we can fix anything by being better. And I don't think that we should worry about it. I think one of the key distinctions as we talk about what do we do when we're living in the world and trying to obey God, they're two separate questions.

1:57:27 What should I do? And what is the result going to be? We should always obey God simply because He's God. If you confess that God is God, you do whatever He says, and that's it. And so the permission slip that that gives us is that the outcome is not for us to achieve. If I do the right thing, knowing that if everyone were also doing the same right thing, there would be a good outcome, that God would bless it. I don't have to worry about success. If I do the right thing and it fails, that's not on me. And if it succeeds, if it succeeds, that's from God. So I think that's a that's one of the weaknesses of of post postmillennialism is that if all the impetus is on the tikanolam, let us make the world better now, to the exclusion of God's

1:58:16 providence, you're setting yourself up for being put in a situation where if things don't pan out, you might be left worse off in your faith than if you had simply done the right thing and not worried about the outcome. It's very difficult. You know, we talked about in the the travails of young men episode. Outcome independence is really hard. To do the thing that you know that you should do, knowing that it may well fail, it takes some fortitude. And it's something that as men and as Christians we need to develop because it it's preciously short in the world, and its absence is a tremendous danger. So, yes, we should look to the end and we should look to God's promises and trust that He'll take care of us as

1:58:58 He promised. And so whether things get better or they get worse, we at least know that God is going to continue to be God. And that's completely missing from what the dispensationalist view is. They basically push the whole church out of the way and say, you know, it's all about Israel. Let's do whatever they need, whatever they want. Well, they want to do evil. They're going to continue to do evil. That's making the world worse. As Christians, we must fight that. We must resist that. And we must know that we may fail. We may do everything right, and it may fail. All of all of our obedience may be brought to nothing. If it's God's will, then that's what's gonna happen. And we can't despair if and when that day comes.

1:59:43 Frankly, that's one of my chief concerns. I don't want anyone to despair because whatever beliefs they have carrying them into the hardest times of their lives I don't want errors in their beliefs to make it easier for them to lose faith because God has given us these gifts for our comfort as well as for our salvation. And anything that gets in a way of comfort when it's true comfort according to God's will, is a sign that maybe there's something wrong. And sometimes comfort is is just you're gonna die. Pray that you'll die peacefully. That maybe that's the only comfort you can have. It's not prosperity gospel. It's just do what God says and trust the let rest in his hands. And if the world ends in in ten years, be ready for

2:00:28 it. And if the world lasts another thousand years, be ready for that too. We should do the things that we're told by God to do regardless of the outcome. Not planning for the end or even necessarily hoping for the end, but in obedience to whatever God demands today, because we don't live in the future. We live in the now knowing that when we are faithful to God, He will deliver His promises in the future, whether it's the blessing of a peaceful life and a good church and a strong nation, or whether it's the blessing of kingdom come, he's gonna deliver. For my part, I've never really thought that worrying about how close the end times are is particularly worthwhile. And the reason for that is not because thinking about Scripture or

2:01:18 attempting to understand Scripture is unimportant or irrelevant to one's life. Although spending an inordinate amount of your time in Scripture and Revelation is probably not a good sign, and will not be good for your faith, you should be spending your time elsewhere, in large part read more of Genesis and Romans and the Psalms and Proverbs. Read these things. I'm not saying avoid revelation. But if you're immature in the faith, yes, do avoid revelation. There are other things you need to read first. But the reason that I've never found it a particularly worthwhile or sensible thing to do to worry about the proximity of the end times to our current day, is that the end times are always right around the corner for any given man, because each and every

2:02:09 one of us is a handful of missed heartbeats or a missed step as you're going down the stairs, or a car accident, whatever it happens to be. We are all seconds away from death. Basically at every moment of the day. Now we don't think about that as we go through our day, and I'm not saying to dwell on that, that will drive you insane. Don't do it. But a meteor could strike me right now as we're recording. Lightning could strike me, sideways lightning is a thing. There are all these problems. I don't worry about them. I'm not concerned about them. The hour of my death is known to God, and I don't concern myself with it. The same thing is true of the end times no man knows the hour, no man knows the day, save God alone.

2:02:53 And so I don't have to worry about it. It will come when it comes. For me it could come tomorrow because I am mortal, I will one day die. God knows when that will happen. And so as a Christian, it is incumbent on me to live my life as if two things were true, because both are in fact true. First, as if I would die in the next moment or the next hour or to morrow And so I should live my life being prepared and in preparation for that. That doesn't mean becoming a monk or living in a cave or any of these silly things that people do, because you serve God in the vocation he has given you, in the life He has given you, by serving those around you whom He has put into your life, you serve God by serving others.

2:03:43 Because as Luther said, God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does. And the second way, in addition to not worrying about these things and serving our neighbor, We have to recognize that we will live forever. Because human beings are not conditionally immortal. From the second God decided to make you, you were immortal. You were going to live forever. The only question is where you will spend that eternity. You will spend that eternity either in paradise or in hell. And so both are simultaneously true. You are mortal and you will die soon. It could be eighty years from now, could be ten years from now, could be ten minutes from now. Doesn't matter. But you are also immortal and you will live forever.

2:04:38 And so bearing both of those in mind with that sort of tension is how Christians are supposed to live their lives. You don't live it with worry because God will provide. That is what he has said he will do, and all things work together for the good of those who are called according to his purposes. I'll slip in my confirmation verse whenever I can. But we live without that worry, but at the same time we prepare ourselves for the inevitable. And in the case of the Christian, the inevitable is good news. Because for the Christian, death is merely a doorway to the next life, to a perfect life, free of all of the cares and the sin and all the problems of this life. That doesn't mean that we want to go through that doorway immediately.

2:05:30 Paul contemplates this in his writings. We have duties here, we have things we are called to do, we have work while it is day, and so we do those things. Of course I am awillennial so that's that does factor into this. And what Woe read, that quote, was essentially all of Article seventeen, insofar as it relates to eschatology from the Augsburg Confession. It was so little of an issue at the time, it was so not a live issue that it was addressed in a single paragraph, and not even a long one at that. And bear in mind that these things were written in German, some of the paragraphs are very long. This one very short. Because the historical position of the church is all millennialism. That's not to say that you aren't Christian if you interpret these

2:06:26 things differently. It is simply to say that you are in fact standing outside the historical interpretation of the church, and as Will mentioned, there are some concerns that come along with that. That is in part between you and God and between you and your teachers. Read the scriptures, see what it is that God says about these things These things, come to a firm conclusion in your own conscience. That is the most vitally important matter. We would, of course hope that you come to the same conclusion that we have reached, but you may not. Now I said that there were two additional things that I wanted to mention about dispensationalist teaching, and really And really, there are three, but two that I will go into in a little bit of

2:07:16 depth, just to leave you with something from this episode, so that you can try to refute at least, because quite frankly, many of these discussions will be unproductive. I don't want to bury the lead or hide that from you. If you try to discuss these issues with someone who has been steeped in dispensationalism, particularly particularly for decades, you will probably not get anywhere. You have to keep that in mind, because otherwise you are going to despair of dealing with these people. Do not despair of it. In some cases you will not be able to address the issue. If it happens to be your father, your mother, your parents, your grandparents. The best you can do honor them according to the fourth

2:08:04 commandment, and probably try to avoid these issues to some degree. If they come up, then yes, you are arguably duty bound to speak the truth, because it is defending God and His Word. But you do that with wisdom, and with care, and with the fourth commandment in mind. But anyway, the the two main issues that I wanted to address were the so called Rapture The promises to Abraham, and then I mentioned a third thing, but this one I can mention very quickly, but it is a useful arrow to have in your quiver. Woe read Romans nine in Romans 9, there is a particularly important verse for those who are attempting to refute the heresy of dispensationalism. Some dispensationalists will try to use this as a proof of

2:08:57 what they believe. They shouldn't because that's insane. But many times you'll meet a dispensationalist who will tempt to argue that Israel can mean only ethic Israel, descended from the man God renamed to Israel, Jacob. But we know that isn't the case, because in Romans 9, 6, and I'll read through verse 7 because 6 ends halfway through the verse, really. But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham, because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named. Two points here. The second point is that Abraham's true offspring are named through Isaac. They are children of the promise, which is what the next verse

2:09:58 says, of course. But the first point The word Israel is used twice in two distinct senses they cannot be equivalent or the verse is incoherent. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. Well there you have both Israels. There are more, of course, there are about seven senses of Israel used in Scripture, but these are the two most salient. You have Ethnic Old Testament Israel that would be those descended from Israel, Israel here being Jacob. They are the lineal blood descendants of that man. And it says not all of them belong to Israel. That is the Israel of God. That is the Ecclesia, that is the Church, that is the elect. That is what is meant by the true Israel. And so here we have two senses of Israel in one verse.

2:10:56 You cannot possibly claim that all mentions of Israel refer only to ethnic Israel, because right here we have an absolute categorical refutation of that contention. And then we'll close out with these two issues, the rapture and the promises to Abraham. We're already running a little long, so I may put the promises to Abraham as a separate audio file and link to that. We'll see how this goes. For the rapture there are a few verses, a few sections of scripture. It's never one verse really, it's usually multiple verses, and you don't want to cherry pick too much. You want the context along with the verse. But we'll start with first Thessalonians four, starting from verse thirteen. But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those

2:11:49 who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, Even so through Jesus God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

2:12:33 Therefore encourage one another with these words. I mentioned this one first, because this is the verse where in the Latin of the Vulgate we get the term rapture, because the word therefore caught up in the Vulgate is raptus, which simply means caught up, that's why it's translated as caught up. It has a broader definition. It can mean a number of different things. It can even encompass kidnapping, for instance, but here it means caught up together. The focus here in this section, as should be obvious, when read in context, which is why I started at verse 13, instead of where dispensationalists will typically start, the focus is on addressing the ancient and quite frankly silly worry about those who died before Christ returned.

2:13:25 There were some in the ancient church who were worried that Christ hadn't come back yet, and some of those who believed had died. It's a fairly ridiculous position for members of a religion where the core of the religion Religion is God incarnate dying and coming back to life. That some die before God returns does not mean they won't be resurrected or they won't be part of the new kingdom. That's the main thrust of this. This has nothing to do with a supposed rapture, or some being left behind during the tribulation. This is simply a teaching of Christian doctrine. This is what we see in the creeds the resurrection of the dead all will come to life in Christ. Some of us who are alive if we happen to be, I'm

2:14:16 not saying that we speaking here will necessarily be so, but those who are alive will be changed in the blinking of an eye, and the dead will come to life. And the reason that it says first is that it is simply saying that this will happen before we are all caught up together. It's not saying the dead rise first or there's this group that first in time have something happen to them. This is a logical ordering that is one of the senses of the term first, or in the Greek protos. So neither of the teachings that are usually drawn out of this by dispensationalists is present here. You don't have a rapture, you don't have anyone left behind for the tribulation. This is just addressing an ancient worry that's not really a live

2:15:07 issue in the church anymore. After two thousand years, we've kind of figured out that some Christians will die before Christ returns. This is just no longer a concern for us. Then there are three additional sections of scripture that I want to address on this point. Two of them essentially mirror each other, and the last is a section of Revelation because of course we have to address something from Revelation in an episode on dispensationalism. The first is Luke 17. Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them: The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, Look, here it is, or there, for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst

2:15:54 of you. I'll pause here for a second before reading the rest of this. If there is a literal millennium, it would most certainly be visible. It would be something that can be observed. Here Christ is saying, The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed. The second coming will be observed, and I will get to that. But the kingdom of God is the church. The kingdom of God comes as the church age, it comes as the gospel is spread to more and more people. It comes as God gathers in his saints from every nation and tongue. It is not a literal rule upon the earth. Now he will stand upon the earth, as we see in Job, and we have quoted that many times, but that But that is the second coming, and then also of course in paradise.

2:16:45 But to continue the reading. And he said to the disciples, The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it, and they will say to you, Look there, or look here. Do not go out or follow them, for as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the Ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot, they were

2:17:32 eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all. So will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day let the one who is on the house top, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot's wife whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed, one will be taken, and the other left. There will be two women grinding together, one will be taken, and the other left. And they said to him, Where, Lord?

2:18:17 He said to them, Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. As I've mentioned many times before, you have to take sections of scripture as a whole, not chop them up into little chunks. This all flows together. And perhaps that last bit is a little difficult to exegete for some, anyway. Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. This is a quip by Christ pointing out this is an obvious thing. If vultures are gathered, there's a corpse. This is used typologically as it were, of the coming of the Son of Man, of the return of Christ, the second coming, the return to judgment. It'll be obvious, like the fire from heaven that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, like the flood that wiped out the ancient world.

2:19:13 These things were not secret, these things were not difficult to discern, they were not hidden from the world, they were open and obvious, notorious even. That is how the second coming will be. Everyone will see it, from the east to the west. And so there is no rapture. There's no secret coming where Christ secretly steals into the world and takes out his saints, and then comes again at some later point to judge the world. That is what he very clearly denies here, for as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. The rapture cannot be true, because Scripture says it is not. And so when you have those who teach that there will be

2:20:07 a secret second coming, or a coming in between, the incarnation and the second coming, you know that's false. Scripture says it is false, right here, and so we must according to Scripture, reject the idea of a rapture. And notably, I would like to pull out one more thing before moving on to Matthew 24. Some will attempt to use this, broken up into little pieces to teach a rapture, because they will say, Well look right here it says, There will be two women grinding together one will be taken, and the other left. Does it say which one will be taken? The answer is no. It does not say if the believer will be taken or the unbeliever. So bear that in mind, as we go through two more sections here.

2:21:03 Matthew twenty four. But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, burying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the Ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away. So will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field, one will be taken, and one left, two women will be grinding at the mill, one will be taken, and one left. Therefore stay awake, for you do not know on what day your lord is coming, but you know this, that if the master of

2:21:47 the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake, and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time. Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that wicked servant says to himself, My master is delayed, and begins to beat his fellow servants and eat and drinks with drunkards, the master of that house, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him, and

2:22:33 at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. You will notice that again, it is not mentioned which is taken and which is left. Scripture does not tell you if the believer is taken or if the believer is left, if the unbeliever is taken, or if the unbeliever is left. Those who attempt to use these verses to justify a supposed rapture assume, without scriptural warrant, that these verses teach that the believers will be caught up, that believers will be taken. Now believers are at some point in this caught up, because that's what we get from the earlier passage that I read. But that does not mean that here the believer is taken or

2:23:29 the believer is left, and we know this from two of Christ's parables. I'll use these two parables before I read the final section from Revelation. The first parable is the parable of the net, from Matthew thirteen. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the fiery furnace, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So which is gathered first here, the believer or the unbeliever? Similarly, the parable of the wheat and the tares, again Matthew thirteen.

2:24:20 He put another parable before them saying, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also, and the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds? He said to them, An enemy has done this. So the servants said to him, Then do you want us to go and gather them? But he said, No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, gather the weeds first, and bind them in

2:25:06 bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn. And so I ask again, which is gathered first, the believer or the unbeliever? The exegesis, the eisegesis, of the previous verses by those who believe in a rapture, is not consonant with what Christ teaches in his parables. In his parables, he uses the wicked being taken away as his example. The wicked are taken out of the world first, and thrown into the fire. Now I'm not saying that is necessarily how this will take place. Christ is using parables to explain Using these, what is going to happen in the end times. It is not necessarily an exact chronological statement of what will happen in the end times. However, it does tell us that we cannot interpret these other sections

2:26:05 as those who believe in dispensationalism do, because they do not agree with Scripture. You cannot make Scripture contradict itself. If you make Scripture contradict itself, you have erred. It is not that Scripture is wrong, it is not that Scripture contradicts, it is that your interpretation of Scripture is necessarily wrong, and so in light of these parables, you cannot interpret the previous two passages from Luke and Matthew that are often used to attempt to justify a rapture Because they are not consonant if you use dispensationalist or rapture understanding. And so the final section here of scripture, I think I will do the promises to Abraham separately just to keep this episode from running too long.

2:26:55 I will link to that in the show notes. It's from my notes on Genesis when I was teaching a class on that book. But the last section of scripture from Revelation three and to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write, the words of the Holy One, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one will opens. I know your works, behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word, and have not denied my name. Behold I will make those of the synagogue of Satan, who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie, behold I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will

2:27:41 learn that I have loved you, because you have kept my word about patient endurance. I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth. I am coming soon, hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name, he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Now this passage This passage does not precisely tell us what Christ means when he says that he will keep them from the hour

2:28:27 of trial. Dispensationalists will attempt to interpret this as proving a rapture. This is again not permissible because this is importing one's priors into the text instead of taking the text as it appears. As stated earlier, the exegetical rule that Christians do, that Christians must follow, is that we use clear text to interpret difficult texts or ones that are, from a human perspective, less clear. We do not do this the other way around. We do not make clear text gray by attempting to use hard text to make them say what we would prefer they say instead of what they actually say. And so we know from the previous passages, from all that we've reviewed in this episode, dispensationalism cannot be true.

2:29:20 And there is, of course, no rapture. I demonstrated that conclusively with the previous verses, showing that rapture theology necessarily makes of God a hypocrite, makes his word conflict and contradict. And so we cannot attribute error to God the error must lie with those who misinterpret his word. And so this section from Revelation, which is sometimes used in an attempt, often used, quite frankly, in an attempt to prove a supposed rapture, proves no such thing That God will save these referenced individuals, and do remember there are multiple letters to multiple churches, it's not just this one letter to the church. That God will save these individuals from this particular trial does not say there will be a pre-tribulation rapture.

2:30:12 It is simply not what the text says. And as Christians, we are bound by what the text says, not what we would like to think the text says, not what we believe, as our own interpretation, arrived at outside of Scripture, and then brought to Scripture and imported into it. You take God at His Word. You don't take God at the Word of fallible men who say, Well no, this must be true because X, Y, and Z show me in God's word. No, you don't have to show me everything in God's word that it's true I know that water is wet. You don't have to prove that from Scripture. Because not all truth is contained in Scripture, but all things in Scripture are true. And so anything in Scripture, because all truth is one, must agree

2:31:06 with everything else in Scripture. If you can show that a particular understanding, that a particular theology, that a particular doctrine or dogma, necessarily make scripture conflict with itself, you have conclusively proven that particular theology, or doctrine, dogma, whatever it happens to be, you have proven conclusively that it is wrong. You haven't necessarily proved that any other particular interpretation is correct, but you have proved that that one is wrong. And so I would contend and I firmly believe that in this episode we have shown, according to the history, according to in large part the scripture, because the scripture is obviously the most important thing here, but according to the history and the theology, and yes, the

2:31:59 worldly consequences to some degree, we have shown that dispensationalism is necessarily false. It is a heresy. It is something that is impermissible for Christians to believe. And so the bottom line is very simple. Christians must reject dispensationalism. It is a modern innovation that does not have a basis in Scripture, that has a basis in the wicked secular world, and it has been used as a cudgel against Christians and against the Church, and, yes, also against the West. If we are to preserve the Church and yes, our own nations, our own peoples, the West, if we are to preserve Christendom, we must reject dispensationalism and those who teach it, because it is a wicked lie, and every wicked lie has an animating intelligence behind it.

2:33:00 And so dispensationalism is not of God, it is not of scripture, it is not truth. It is of Satan, it is a lie, it is pernicious, it is a heresy.