Election in View of Headship

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Cory J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. As a sort of warning to the listener, today's episode does run a little long. Undoubtedly your podcast app has already notified you of the length of the episode so I don't need to repeat it, not least of all because I do not yet know the exact length. It is over two hours. Really it is a two part episode, but we do have ask that you listen to the entire episode, preferably in one sitting, and preferably with minimal distractions. This is an important topic, and the entire thing hangs together. It is important to listen to the entirety of the episode to get the proper doctrine and theology and the proper context, because all

1:27 of it is connected. We try to aim for roughly an hour with episodes, but some things simply require more time, because they are important, and we want to make sure that we cover them adequately and correctly. Welcome to the delayed election episode when we originally originally decided we wanted to tackle election next the timing was Timing was that it was going to be the day after the midterm election, so I was going to make a stupid joke about that. But you've been spared by that, by uh multiple hardware malfunctions. Uh my very expensive microphone died, and it died in such a way that it took me about 40 hours of debugging and buying several hundred dollars more equipment to isolate that it was in fact

2:16 the microphone. So I apologize for the two weeks that we were down. Um I love listening to podcasts too, and I always count on showing up on time, and our goal is absolutely to make sure that we always deliver every episode on time. So that will be the case in the future, I think. Uh now that we're back up and running, we will get try to get a couple episodes in the can so that we'll be able to deliver even in the event that uh calamity befalls us. Uh on that note, I would like to ask for something of our our listeners. Uh first thank you to everyone who's been sharing the podcast with friends and online and elsewhere. Uh means a lot because it's this is obviously an incredibly niche sort of thing that we'll also never have any marketing budget.

2:59 So the only way anyone's gonna hear it is if someone shares it with someone and says, hey, we think this is worth your time. Uh so we appreciate each and every uh share that you provide. Um when Corey and I d set out to do this, when we finally decide to pull the trigger on a project we've been talking about pretty much since we were introduced, within about 40, 24 hours of us deciding to do this, all hell broke loose. Uh we started having equipment malfunctions, software malfunctions, not just related to the stuff we were using for the podcasting, um, but just in general in life. A whole lot of stuff went wrong and some of it some of it went wrong in ways that are literally impossible. Like some of the malfunctions that my

3:46 microphone and recording stuff exhibited it was the technological equivalent of water flowing uphill. There was no rational explanation for what was going on. Um which is part of why it took me so long to figure out that it was in fact the mic that needed to be replaced. Um so my er my request to to the audience if you would uh consider saying a prayer for us once in a while to keep Cory and I faithful and steadfast to to God's Word and to give us the strength to persevere through the slings and arrows that that Satan is throwing at us. Um, you know. Uh audio hardware is is uh kind of a possessed all by itself without any special intervention by the devil. But I th the the volume and the nature of the things

4:33 that have gone wrong are such that I I personally think there's no argument that Satan really doesn't want us to be doing this thing. Which we knew going into it, that's precisely why we're doing it, despite not really wanting to to undertake this, we knew that we had to because of the the challenges that were being faced in the world. So if you would just say a prayer for our protection and and faithfulness, it would be greatly appreciated Well just the the sheer unlikeliness of both of us having a mic die because I also had a mic that bricked itself And it happened within the same week. Totally different mics, different manufacturers, purchased at different times, died within a week of each other.

5:16 Very unlikely. Yeah. I mean and a microphone is it's basically a stalled state device. there's one moving part and it barely moves. Like it's just it's not something you would expect to fail. Yeah, mine's a digital. Anyway it yeah. Yeah. It's just the the things that we're talking about and the people that we're addressing and the problems that we're addressing are we believe vital and that's that's why we're here. So we thank you for listening and we hope that uh you'll consider keeping us in your prayers once in a while. The reason that we're talking about election today, it was not a it wasn't just a gimmicky choice based on the timing. Uh but election uh uh other words for it are predestination, uh

6:03 or having your name written eternally in the book of life in heaven from before eternity. Uh th these are all ways that the doctrine of election are described in scripture. The reason that we wanted to talk about it next is that it flows naturally from episodes episode two's discussion of genealogy and episode three's discussion of uh nationality. Uh when you look at how election plays out both as it is described in scripture and then what happens in the world and time and space, it is clear that it is also a manifestation of God's will through lineal inheritance, um, which is not to say that it is only inherited, and we'll we'll get into that, but it does flow naturally from from our previous discussions.

6:56 And all of these are laying the groundwork for additional future episodes that are gonna get into some of the most controversial issues that are frankly they're gonna split the church in a in some really ugly ways. And And our fear is that there will be good men on the wrong side of those splits because they have not thought these things through. So that's why we're talking about 'em now. The three things that I I hope uh the audience today will keep in mind as we're talking about this particular doctrine. Uh first, this is not going to be a systematics podcast. We're not going to be doing deep dives on doctrines as a matter of course. The reason that we are tackling election in particular is that it

7:34 touches directly on things that we're facing today. In the second half of the episode, we'll we'll be making that case. But election is a doctrine that is found everywhere in Scripture. Uh once you realize the different terms that are being used for it by God, you basically can't turn from from Genesis to Revelation. You're gonna find it smacking you in the face continuously. So it's a doctrine that is universal. It's not Lutheran doctrine, it's not Protestant doctrine, it's Christian doctrine. And it is the key way that God helps to explain our salvation and the gift of faith that is given to us. So the first thing I want everyone to keep in mind is that doctrine the doctrine of election is given for our comfort.

8:22 When we're talking about election and predestination, it should never be thought of in the sense of the condemnation of those who are not believers. And we'll get into why that that is. Um but election is given for comfort. It is not given for punishment or for doubt. The second thing that you need to keep in mind as you're listening to this episode is that this is one of the very short list of doctrines in Scripture that is beyond reason. Uh it's like the Trinity in that sense. When you look at everything in Scripture that describes the Trinity, uh, in a great encapsulation of this, if you haven't seen it before, not only the Apostle and Nicene Creeds, but the Athanasian Creed. Uh it's something that in Lutheran churches is typically only read once

9:10 a year. It is well worth studying. Um I actually memorized it in seventh grade for extra credit and that was that was fun. Because it's a couple pages long. When you read the Athanasian Creed, what you will find is a faithful confession of what Scripture says about God in such a way that there are no errors in the Athanasian Creed because it agrees with scripture, but when you look at it in totality, it's kind of confusing. It doesn't really make sense how there can be not three eternals but one eternal. What's the difference between a person and the God? How can there be three persons but one God? Our human reason fails when we're trying to introspect God, which shouldn't shouldn't surprise us.

9:57 We're creatures. We're we have a creator who is infinite. So the idea that we can't fit our creator inside our little tiny created meat minds shouldn't surprise or upset us. The essence of the Christian faith is believing that which is taught, not making it subject to intellectual assent. And that's that's a place where some denominations kind of go off the rails. they look at f scripture faithfully and and they say, okay, I'm gonna believe this, but then they run into things where it seems like it doesn't add up and reason has made the master over their doctrine. And that is how you invent heresies. the reason that the creeds were originally written was to deal with the heresies that came from the very intelligent men who were looking

10:43 at scripture and trying to make sense of the Trinity and they made a mess because they made their reason the master when God must be the master and what he reveals must be binding upon us, whether or not we understand it. When Christ talks about us having the faith of a child, that's what it means to to receive teaching without requiring that it pass some smell test of of our own reason. That's not to say that you should b just blindly listen to whatever you hear. And this is the reason why faithful teachers, faithful pastors are so crucial, because most people are not equipped to understand and reason these things out. We have thousands of years of faithful doctrine being developed and understood

11:30 developed as is a weak word, being properly fleshed out in such a way that when you say everything that Scripture says in a certain way, you can know that you're being faithful. And so there are a few doctrines like the Trinity, uh like the nature of Christ, the hypostatic union, how can he be both fully God and fully man? It doesn't make sense. And as Lutherans, we're comfortable saying that we don't understand. It's a mystery. We can say what God says, but we can't make sense of it in such a way that it's going to add up in our minds. Uh the same is true of of communion of the Eucharist when God says this is my body, this is my blood, he also says this is bread and this is wine. And the Reformed and the Catholics both agree that it can only

12:17 be one or the other by reason. It can't possibly be blood if it's wine, and it can't be wine if it's blood. So each of them pick one and they go in opposite directions. Uh Lutherans and to their credit the the Eastern Orthodox say, look, we don't understand how it works, but God says it's bread, God says it's his flesh, so it is. This is the same God who spoke the universe into existence. He's the same God who spoke Lazarus back to life by saying, Lazarus, come out. That wasn't a descriptive thing, that was proscriptive. When God speaks, it is true. So when there are doctrines that are revealed in such a way that we can't make them subject to our reason, once we've exhausted all of the possibilities as faithful Christians, we simply have a duty to

13:00 believe them. And election predestination is one of those where it's it's challenging. So as you hear us talking about it today, please don't cherry pick 30-second or two minute segments of this and try to say, well, that's wrong. that's contrary to scripture. Because in isolation, you're probably right. The doctrine of predestination, the doctrine of faith, the doctrine of salvation it doesn't make sense. And you can say what God says, but if you try to apply reason to it rigorously, you're gonna make a mess. And so I would just encourage people to please listen to the whole thing as one piece and then take it as a coherent whole because that's the only way it can be presented. This is not something that can fit on a bumper sticker.

13:48 U Uh and the third point I'd just like to make before we launch into this is that election is not simply some hypothetical doctrine that doesn't have any applicability. It is a doctrine which is Central to all of the most painful problems that the church and the world are facing today. And this is the case we're going to be making in the second half of the episode. Every major modern fight about racism, about colonialism, about cultural and racial supremacy, about patriarchy, all of these things are ultimately attacks on doctrine and on salvation. And we are doing this episode in order to make the case for the necessity of us returning to a faithful belief of election, because frankly, while Lutherans certainly say that we uh we we subscribe to

14:43 the doctrine of election, when push comes to shove, our churches are full of universalists. They're chur they're full of people who reject election, who try to be so quote unquote gospel focused that they end up contradicting scripture left and right and they're doing it in the name of love. So we're going back to first principles here in order to try to get our feet under us so that when these discussions are had in future episodes and elsewhere, you'll be equipped to understand what it is that you're facing because like you said, this is not just an academic thing. This is a live issue that is it's it's shaping the world around you. And that is something the doctrine of election is not novel, it's

15:27 something that's it'd been around forever. Everyone in Christianity and the faith has always known about it. But the modern implications are something that personally I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. And that's the reason we're doing this episode is to make the connection between the doctrine of scripture and and the events that we're seeing in the world today. So that like the preamble out of the way, let's get into what election is. Just briefly before we get into election proper, I want to address at the outset an issue that some will have approaching the matter of election and related things, and that is as you said, it's a mystery. Now the word mystery is going to raise the hackles of some people.

16:12 Some people are trained so that they don't like the idea that some things are beyond our knowledge. And we'll we'll get into that later in the episode. But I just want to point out the word for mystery, the word that is translated as mystery appears thirty five times in Scripture, twenty seven of which are in the New Testament, that is Musterion in the Greek. This is not, as mentioned, something that appears in one place, this appears throughout the scriptures, and it is mystery or secret, a thing that is hidden. There are things that are beyond our understanding, and that just makes sense we worship an infinite God who created the universe, there are going to be things in His counsel that we cannot understand fully.

16:53 We can understand them to the extent that they are revealed to us, primarily in Scripture. And so I just wanted to deal with that issue of the word mystery and the fact that it makes some people uncomfortable. And I as a as a lifelong Lutheran, that's one of the things that I appreciate the most about our doctrine is that we are content to run out of runway and say, you know what? We we're not going to be able to understand this. We can say what God says, but we're not going to be able to make sense of us, and that's okay because we acknowledge that we are creatures and that our God, our creator, is greater than us, and we say right back to him what he says. And if we don't make sense of it, that's okay.

17:39 we are children in the faith. We do not need to be the masters of these things. And in a very real sense, we do actually have these things revealed to us in scripture. So they're a mystery in the sense of they are unknowable with regard to human reason, but they are knowable with regard to revelation because we actually can understand election in a final sense. We understand what election is, what election does. We cannot necessarily get all of the steps leading up to election explain the why and the how and all of these things, but the actual doctrine itself is revealed in Scripture in a way that it is knowable to those who have the Holy Spirit. And it's very simple. the when when we talk about it being a mystery, the mystery

18:25 is that when you I mean, election in a nutshell is that God is the cause of our salvation solely, not us, only God. We are the cause of our damnation, solely, not God. When you try to synthesize those two things, when you try to rationalize them and say, well, if X and not Y, then I'm gonna infer a bunch of things. You can't. Your inferences are gonna be wrong. And so when we talk about reason failing, that's where it fails. It's the reasonable inferences that try to fill in the blanks between God cheese chooses those whom he saves, but God did not choose those who are damned. It that's where it doesn't make sense. And when people try to reconcile those two things beyond saying what God says, you're going to make some profound errors that that will

19:12 themselves have knock-on effects that are very harmful. It's the crux the allegorum. It's the problem of attempting to resolve the statements in Scripture God does not wish that any would perish, but that all would repent, turn and be saved. And And God chose those who are saved by giving them faith in time. Now he chose them in eternity, and through faith in time is how he saves them, but attempting to reconcile those two things is beyond the capabilities, at least of fallen human reason, and possibly of human reason entirely. Yep. So do you want to get into making the scriptural case for where this came from and why we speak the way we do? Sure. We could at some point, I guess, go through the the

20:02 eight points that the book of Concord makes. That's we'll do that in a little bit. It's actually very brief section there in one of the last articles in the s the Solid Declaration. But just as a summary of election, I think it's best to turn to Romans eight. And that is starting with verse twenty eight, which I am obligated to mention is my confirmation verse every time I bring it up. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called, according to his purpose, for those whom he forenew, he also predestined, to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, and those whom he predestined he also called,

20:44 and those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. We have the entirety of the Christian life in these verses, and we have what it means to be a Christian, how you are made a Christian, why you are made a Christian in these verses. It is only those who are predestined to faith who are ultimately saved. All of those who are predestined will ultimately be saved. Which is to say the elect these these terms are interchangeable. God in eternity, chose those that he would save in time via faith, by grace through faith. That's how we're saved. He uses means in time to effect what he decided in eternity. And that's all that predestination is. Now, as mentioned in the opening, it is important to understand that

21:42 to bring up the law-gospel distinction: predestination is gospel. Predestination is not law. Some take it as really not even law, so much as just a depressing military muster as is as it has been described in the literature from time to time. Because if you take a lecture election predestination to mean that God simply rolled dice or in eternity saw everyone and pointed left and right, a military muster, then that's depressing. And that leads to the problems of either security, because well if I'm elect then I can do anything I want, and regardless of that, ultimately I will be safe because I am elect. Or it leads to despair, on the other hand, being, well it doesn't matter what I do because if I am not elect, anything

22:33 I do doesn't matter because I am ultimately damned. And that is the wrong way of looking at the doctrine. Again, we can judge trees by their fruit. Not to directly apply that here, but it can be used as a guide. Predestination election is gospel because what it means is you were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, and he will not lose you out of his hand. Your faith is not in your own hands, it is in his hands, and he will see you through to the end. He who began the good work will see it through. And that is why it is gospel. This is something that is meant to be preached to the sheep in the church. Because it is for the comfort of consciences, it is to secure those who are feeling weak in the faith, who are weighed down

23:27 by the troubles of the world, it is to let them know God knew them before anything had been created, and chose them in His Son to save them, and that He will see them through to the end. That is the right way of looking at election, of looking at predestination, any other way of looking at it is incorrect. And this is why God has given us the sacraments. That's why we have baptism. It's why we have communion. Because in addition to the assurances and the reassurances in the Word, God knows that we will doubt. He knows that we will need something more concrete than a promise because we're faithless, we're weak. And because of that, in baptism, God knows his name on us to seal us into himself, to say, I mark this child as

24:16 an adopted son of myself. This child is now my son because I place my name on him in baptism. It connects us it connects the the flesh and blood world, the the physical reality of our lives to the eternal promise in such a way that it takes it out of our hands. And like you said, it's it's for comfort when it's it's the reason that the Lutherans continuously point back to baptism as the touch point in the Christian life when even if someone had faith before baptism by hearing the word, which happens very often, God promises that no matter what, He has given He has given faith in baptism and that that is a comfort to those who who need to hear it most is one of the reasons that Lutherans tend to die well.

25:09 Ask a pastor who has been bedside with a number of dying Lutherans. Lutherans don't die in fear and uncertainty and doubt, Lutherans die secure in the knowledge that they belong to Christ, and that when they wake up on the other side of that door, they will be face to face with their Savior. That is true doctrine. Comforts the sheep. It does not terrify the sheep. It does not make them doubt whether they are saved. If a doctrine brings those who are on their deathbed to the point of despair and doubt, that doctrine is false, if that person, of course, is a sheep. Because the sheep are comforted by the words of the shepherd. And with regard to the sacraments, there are those who contend that

26:02 God doesn't work with means at all. Largely this would be the enthusiast Pentecostals. And there are those who contend that God uses only one means, which is to say scripture, although they typically those who consider it one means wouldn't call it a means, but nonetheless. Lutherans look at it, and those who believe in the sacraments look at it rightly. God has multiple means of bringing his grace to us, of bringing forgiveness of sins to us. God is super abundant with his grace, he is not stingy. God does not give us no means or just one means. He gives us the word, he gives us absolution, he gives us baptism, he gives us the Lord's supper. We have these many ways that God comes to us and comforts

26:48 us, lets us know that yes, we are his children. Even though we are still in this world, we are still beset by sin and death, we are beset by the flesh and the devil in the world. We are still his, we are in his hands, he will see us through, and he is super abundant with his grace. That's why there are these multiple means, not just one or none. And it is also because, as Luther and some other theologians have pointed out, my mind, my soul, can grasp the promises, the words of God. My flesh really can't. But my flesh understands water, my flesh understands bread and wine, and human beings are not just a soul, you are not a spirit operating a meat suit. That conception of what human beings are is Gnostic, it is false,

27:41 it's heretical. You are your body. Because human beings are a body, a mind, and a soul, is as one. We're our own four sort of minor trinity, as it were. And so it is important to have these things that the flesh can also grasp, because it's meant so the totality of the human being can grasp what God is doing and hold tightly to something when weighed down by the world. One of the things that is a a classic tell that you're dealing with a Lutheran is that we constantly point to the cross at As the moment in time when God fulfilled all of his promises. And so I can I can imagine someone hearing us today pointing to the doctrine of election, pointing to the book of life, which had our full names first and last written in eternity as

28:36 a source of comfort and I can see someone potentially saying, Well you're not pointing at the cross when in fact that's the exact opposite of what's happening. When you point to election, when you point to the book of life, those are pointing to the cross because the cross where Christ sacrificed his precious blood is where the promise was fulfilled, it is where salvation took place, it is where the punishment for every sin that every person in the history of the universe has ever or will ever commit were paid by God. And that's one of the things that we'll we'll get into here shortly is that there's the question of completeness when you're talking about both the book of life and the cross.

29:18 When you apply reason to this, you're like, well, if God omitted some names, then did Jesus not pay for their sins on the cross? And that's one of the things that five point Calvinism says absolutely. Jesus didn't die for everyone, he only died for the elect, which is a tremendously harmful false representation of what scripture says. And I I think the the reason that we point to to election and to the book of life in this episode is because as we as I'll I'll m demonstrate later, there are aspects of these promises that were known throughout the world before the cross that the prof the prophecy of the Christ which began in Genesis three fifteen and then we see it coming to to a greater completion

30:09 in Isaiah just seven hundred years before Christ's birth there were other things that were told to believers in between those two periods of time, that some of which are not recorded in Scripture, but which are observable in time. And so the reason that we want to point today to election and and to connect it to genealogy and to the the religions of kings and of their nations is that that is how the faith is propagated and ultimately your name is is is Corey, as you just said, your name is written in the book of life, and God gives you faith, which receives the sacrifice on the cross and you are saved. All of that goes together, and God speaks of it as a unified whole. God doesn't speak of these as as piecemeal things.

30:57 these ideas are all connected repeatedly in scripture. And it's it's one of the weaknesses of systematic theology is when you start when you take scripture and you try to break it down like a butcher and say, well the liver goes over here and the shanks go over here, you end up with something that doesn't look like what you started with, because you've chopped it up in little pieces. So when we talk about specific doctrines, it's never to separate it from the whole. It is to highlight, to x ray, or to do an MRI on how this one piece of the whole works within the whole. And again, it's always for comfort. It's never for for judgment or for condemnation. And it should be never used as as a distraction.

31:41 It should never the the book of life should not be the focus of the Christian faith apart from the cross, but we can't forget about it either because God talks about it many times. I happen I found just seven verses among many that specifically talk about the book of life. In Exodus thirty two, God said to Moses, Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. In Psalm six sixty nine it's recorded, let them be blotted out of the book of the living, let them not be enrolled among the righteous. In Luke ten, nevertheless, do not rejoice in this that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. In Philippians four it says, Yes, I'll ask you also, true

32:28 companion, help these women who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life. Now it's an interesting one because Paul's making a pronouncement in time of believers whom he he knows their confession and he knows their works and he says, these people, their name, their names are in the book of life. I can tell by looking at their Christian lives that this is the case. So again, that's not judgment. It's not talking about fruit checking to determine if you're saved or not, but it is saying the Christian life is not a hypothetical. It's not just a name in a book, it's not a line item and a ledger. It is a real and living thing that God has given to

33:09 us to live for his glory, and our names are recorded in eternity as a part of that whole. In Revelation 3, Jesus Himself writes to the church at Sardis: the one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my father and before his angels. And again in verse in chapter thirteen of Revelation. And all who dwell on earth will worship it. Everyone whose name was na has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. Now that's an interesting verse because it's it points to one of the really difficult things about speaking about this subject In that Revelation

33:55 13 acknowledges there are names that are not written in the book of life. And we'll talk about predestination, double predestination here in a minute, but this is this is why I did that that lengthy preamble is that when you try to apply reason to this, you're gonna say, well, God picked some people to be damned. And that's not the case. And that should never be the conclusion that is drawn from scripture because it's not there. But it is permissible under the right circumstances to say there are names that are not in the book of life, and that those names who are not written there, those people are damned, not because of God's actions, because of their own. But we'll in the second half of of the conversation we're going

34:39 to talk about why that's relevant to what's blowing up today. The last verse I wanted to highlight is from uh chapter seventeen, even Revelation. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come. So again, there are names in the book of life, and there are names that are not, and those whose names are not present will be damned, not because God didn't write their name in the book of life, but because they rejected God's sacrifice on the cross. So maybe that's a good place for us to speak briefly about intuitu fide, uh because that's one of the areas where Lutherans in

35:18 particular have contributed to some false teachings about this in uh periods of time where we struggled with trying to be too reasonable and and reach some conclusions that were false. Before we get into into a dufidei, I just want to highlight that you actually reinforced the fact that when we point to election and predestination, when we point to the book of life, we are in fact still pointing to the cross. Because that's exactly what Revelation thirteen says. And far be it from me to give the king James only crowd any ammunition not that this is ammunition, but I like the formulation in the King James of Revelation thirteen, because it is and all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are

36:05 not written in the book of life of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world. I like the placement of that modifying phrase slain from the foundation of the world applying to the Lamb because that is what we are pointing to. We are pointing to Christ was slain from eternity. That was God's plan, that was God's purpose to bring humanity, the elect, back to himself, to restore us, to cleanse us from our sins. And so when we point to election, we point to predestination, we are in fact still pointing to the Lamb. And just to point out the Luther translation has the same wording. So just like that that wording a little more than the the way the ESV moved that phrase around. I'm not saying the ESV is wrong.

36:54 It's just a different way of writing that particular verse. But then to speak of intuitu fidei, and this is going to come up in mostly Lutheran circles, but other places as well, because it has become a common error in some denominations and some traditions, whether or not the term is used to view election in this light. Now there are multiple ways that intuitive fidei has been used, and we should probably define it, that means just in view of faith in Latin or in view of foreseen faith, sometimes. It has been used in multiple senses, not all of which are incorrect. Because some of them get into hypertechnical philosophical discussions of Aristotelian cause and you know what is the formal cause or the final

37:47 cause or the instrumental cause or when you get into that kind of stuff, one there's a question of the utility of it. I'm not saying that philosophy is always useless, but I am saying that philosophy is often useless, particularly when you are trying to pick apart doctrines of scripture that are largely beyond human reason when it comes to those let's call them finer details. And also these were Yes, exactly. It's harmful. And these were discussions in part it's to they were discussions being had by academics. And in that setting, okay, fine, maybe you can have these discussions, but they bled out into the church and the These cause real harm to the sheep when they are exposed to these things, because

38:30 they will not be understood correctly, or they were be filtered through false teachers who corrupt them. And so for instance, in the Lutheran tradition we have Gerhard, who did use intuitive fide in his writings, but he used it in a way that was sound doctrinally and theologically, and I could list off many quotes from him to that effect. He In fact, he was sound on the doctrine. He used it in the sense of faith is the instrumental cause used by God in order to save us in time, according to his eternal ordination, which is predestination or election. That is a fine formulation, that is correct. The incorrect formulation, how it has been used in a heretical sense, from really around the same time as Gerhard to now, is that

39:19 God in eternity foresaw those who would in time persevere in faith to the end, and therefore their names are written in the Book of Life because God foresaw that they would persevere, and so it's the same Arminian problem, it's the same free will issue that constantly recurs. It's the idea that man saves himself And that's not what Scripture teaches, because Scripture teaches that you were dead in your sin and your trespass. Corpses do not act. Go to the morgue. Wait around. None of them are going to stand up. Unless someone really botched something. The dead do not act, and so you who were dead in your sin and trespass cannot save yourself. So a doctrine that tells you Oh, you just have to persevere

40:08 to the end, and then God will elect you because of the faith that you held on that's not how it works. God gave you faith. Faith is a gift. God creates faith in you via means of grace, baptism, reinforced with the Lord's supper, hearing of the word, reinforced with the absolution. God gave you faith as a gift. It is that gift that receives forgiveness of sins and eternal life. It is reliant on God, it is not reliant on you. And so if a theology is telling you, if a tradition is telling you, that you have to grasp this faith and hold it to the end, and it is reliant on you, it is not reliant on God, that is a recipe for despair. How will I ever know that I have done enough to persevere? Yes, Scripture tells us to persevere, yes, you should make your election

41:06 certain, yes you should have good works. We are not denying any of that. But, as soon as you make justification a matter of your works, a matter of your perseverance, a matter of what you do, you are taking the glory from Christ, you are denigrating Christ's death, his work. And you are dooming yourself, because ultimately you will figure out I cannot do this. And so if you believe that you have to do it, and you figure out that you cannot do it, you will despair. And that is a recipe for being an apostate. And that is why this doctrine matters. You have to get the doctrine right. And it it seems like a subtle distinction and when when the philosophers were tackling it. They were originally taking it making a subtle distinction because you said

41:55 it it leaked out into the world and it does tremendous harm because again, by pointing to your name being in the book of life, you're pointing forward to the cross and to Christ propitiation propitiation uh for your sins. There's no you in there except as the object of God's mercy. You are not ever the subject in true Christian doctrine. You were always the object. Even when you do good works, you are doing the good works which you received from God, which were also prepared from before the foundation of world for you to do them for God's glory. So So there's nothing that we can ever take credit for, ever, not a single thing that we can take credit for for our salvation. On the other hand, because God is so merciful, because he

42:43 paid for all of our sins, every single good thing that we do that he gave us to do, he gives us credit for it. Just as he gave us unfairly the credit for Christ's death on the cross, he also gives us credit for the good works that we do that he gave us to do, just as he gives us salvation because he gave us faith, like it's it's all just God pouring out continuously and eternally for our benefit. None of it is ever fair. And that's what we're going to be talking about in the second half is that none of this is fair in either direction. It's not fair for the elect, and it's not fair for those who are not elect. And that is not accusing God of sin because God simply isn't fair. And that's one of the places where our reason rebels against

43:29 God anytime we hear it. Anytime someone says, Well, people aren't equal, the human mind in the twenty first century raves furiously against God at the idea that all men are not equal. It's nonsense. Scripture denies it, our own reason denies it, everything we see denies it, and yet And yet when we come into contact with these things in the world, people either attribute sin to God or they deny that God has anything to do with it, which is equally bad. And so these discussions must always be focused on the comfort to the believer and the warning to the unbeliever. Now, the book of life is not given as a warning to the unbeliever in the sense that well, as you said, if if your name's not in the book of lace, I guess you're just

44:18 addle up, so you know, you drink and be merry 'cause there's nothing you can do. That's not the message, but the message is all of these benefits which accrue to the elect, which accrue to believers, are just are denied to those who deny Christ. And if someone is an unbeliever, if they're living a godless life, if they do not confess that all of their sins were also paid for at the cross, they don't receive that, those gifts. They don't receive the forgiveness. Because although Christ did pay for them, if you reject the credit, you got a debit on your bill. You have a huge debit and you will spend eternity paying for it. And so these discussions ultimately either end up in a faithful confession of election or they end up in some flavor of universalism,

45:05 which is what we're literally seeing in the Missouri Senate today. We are seeing pastors openly espouse universalism in opposition to election for the sake of anti racism, which we'll get to later. Yeah. Universalism has been a constant plague for the church for basically all of history, but it does wax and wane in cycles. It is currently growing globally, realistically, but it is a problem we notice in our own backyard because well it's our backyard. But you touched again on an important thing that we should probably expand on a little bit, that is the scope of the atonement. You have those who argue Argue based on reason, I don't want to go into their actual argument. They know the argument well enough themselves, but they argue that there

45:56 is a limited atonement, that it is only for the elect. And part of the reason that they are able to maintain that delusional belief, because it is in fact delusional and wrong, is that they don't understand from the outset what Christ said about to do, what God did in Christ with the atonement. The atonement does not cover just the elect. The atonement does not cover just men. The atonement was of all things, ton cosmon, the universe, everything, absolutely everything in existence, was redeemed through Christ. And so if you try to limit it to men, then yes, you can maybe argue yourself into a position where it makes some sense to believe in a limited atonement. But if you're dealing with the actual scope of the atonement, God

46:53 redeemed plants and animals and rocks and stars. He redeemed everything. And so if you deal with that frame, well now it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to try to argue that some men aren't covered by the atonement. And so you have to take scripture at its word, and the word it uses is tan cosmon, from which we get, of course, Cosmos. And the reason, and this is this is going to be one of the recurring themes probably in virtually every episode we do is headship. The universe fell because Adam was its head. Adam was the head of everything because God gave him that crown. He was the first fruits of creation to be the ruler over the world. And when Adam as the head of the world sinned, the whole

47:42 world fell. The rocks, the trees, the animals, everything fell into disobedience because Adam was its head, because of his disobedience. And this is this is another place where when people talk about, well, that's fair or that's not fair. Shut up. There's no fair with God. There's no such thing as fair with God. You will die. I will die. I will be eaten by worms and I will decay into dust because Adam ate the wrong piece of fruit. Even if I led a perfect life, I would still be killed by God and I would be worm food because Adam ate the wrong piece of fruit. Now I've committed a dozen sins today more serious than eating the wrong piece of fruit, and I'll commit more once we hang up. Hopefully I won't commit any on this podcast, but the Christian life

48:31 is is knowledge of how evil we are. What Adam did was insignificant by any standard of fairness, but it was disobedience to God. Adam elevated himself above God and said, I don't like what you told me not to do. I think I can be a better God than you. I think I can do it. And he did. And because we are his children, because we are of his seed, we inherit his sin. And that is the reason that Jesus had to come into time and into creation as a man to be the new Adam, to undo the damage that Adam did to the whole universe. And Christ is the ultimate head of the universe, both of the church and of all creation. He's the king over all things, not only those things that were that believe in him. His perfect redemption redeemed the whole universe, as you said.

49:21 And that's why when when you start talking about limited atonement, y if you understand it in terms of, well, this isn't about individuals, this isn't about persons, this is about everything, then the notion that there would be some small carve out only for unbelievers starts to not even make a lot of rational sense. Like you said, like you can get into it rationally if you have the wrong understanding of the redemption. But if Christ did in fact redeem all things as he says he did, then it doesn't add up. Just have one other point that I wanted to draw out and make sure that we're abundantly clear. What we're talking about here is a number of different issues when we talk about the the Christian life and modergism versus synergism.

50:11 Monergism being a single actor, in this case God, synergism being multiple actors, in this case, God and man. Justification is monergistic. God alone acts in your justification, and that is good news because your debt was infinite. You would never be able to repay it no matter how long you suffer in hell. And so it is good news that justification is monergistic. Sanctification, which will include good works because good works naturally flow from a living faith, Christians will have good works. Good works do not save you, but you must have them. Sanctification is synergistic because as a not fully yet restored, because of course you won't be fully restored until the second resurrection, which is

51:08 a into eternal life, baptism being the first, of course, you participate in those good works, you work with the Holy Spirit in sanctification, because your will is restored to the extent that you can work toward God in that way, you can work with the Holy Spirit. And so monergistic for justification, synergistic for sanctification. Which is to say we are not saying that Christians cannot do good works, or God forbid we're not saying Christians should not do good works. We are saying that Christians will cooperate, will have good works. And both the cooperation and the good works themselves are also gifts of God through the Holy Spirit. Again, it's all receiving. God gets all the credit. Which is good news for us.

52:02 We don't want the credit, because if you have the credit, well now you you also have duties and things are reliant on you. You don't want it reliant on you because again, infinite debt. Yeah. I don't want the blame. I'm not gonna take the credit. let God take everything. I'm a creature and he's the creator and I don't I I want to be a slave to that kind of God because I don't have anything to worry about. the little brick that says the buck stops here, you want it to stay on God's desk. Yeah. don't try to steal it for yourself. That ends poorly. So I think one of the other doctrines, the the most obvious one that we need to speak to, because when most people hear predestination, they probably think of the Calvinists don't call it this, but but

52:49 the doctrine of double predestination, which is the law of the logical conclusion that if God predestined some to be damned or to be saved, and that's a subset of all of those men who were born, you have a leftover set they must also have been predestined to be damned, because it's the only thing that makes sense. And that's true. It is the only thing that makes sense. The problem is it's contrary to scripture, because there are many places where God says he desires that all men be saved, and he says that the sacrifice on the cross was for all men, not only those who believe. And so predestination is heard in most people's minds as double predestination, which is is false. And as we've said earlier, when you get these things wrong, you

53:38 will cause despair in the hearer. You any false doctrine will ultimately potentially lead to damn because if a false doctrine is a lie, and a lie has a father, and his name is Satan. And I I don't mean to be to be harsh against the tulip Calvinists, but double predestination to say that there is limited atonement and that na all men are able to receive the sacrifice that that God paid on the cross is false. And it is as we described, it does tremendous harm to hearers to to hear that. So the reason that we the reason it's so difficult to talk about this is that like I said up front, like if if you just listen to two minutes as this, you're gonna think that it's crazy because you're saying that God picked some men and that

54:26 means that He picked other men and I either I don't like the sound of that or I believe that and both of those are wrong. You shouldn't believe it and you shouldn't really like the sound of it because it doesn't it's not true. it is true that God is the sole reason for our salvation and we are the sole reason for our damnation. And there's no math that can fill in the blanks or connect the dots between those two scriptural facts. And so it's vital for us when we're thinking about this and applying this doctrine elsewhere in the Christian life, and it does have application, never to think that God created a man in order to damn him because that's that's utterly false and it's a terrible thing.

55:09 To quickly address an argument directly to the reformed, this is one That should be compelling for the reformed if they will simply hear it out and listen to it. The reformed have a tendency to want to reduce things to reason. We know that, the reformed know that as well. I don't think they would necessarily say that that characterization is wrong or unfair. And so we have Calvin's famous comment The finite is not capable of the infinite, which is a generally true statement with regard to human reason. But of course we have the incarnation in which an infinite god because the fullness of deity dwelt bodily in Christ, as Scripture says, so you have finite human form containing the infinite. That's not my argument though.

56:09 My argument for the reformed is this if you try to say that these statements in scripture, whatever they happen to be, do not make sense together, and so we have to do something, you know, thinglies, aliosis, whatever it happens to be, in order to make them make sense, what you are ultimately saying is that I, you, in this case, are saying I a finite, the finitum, in Calvin's statement, am capable of understanding the infinite. And of course, to understand the infinite, you must be infinite. That's incoherent. It's contradictory. It's self-defeating. And so the central claim of reformed doctrine in this way doesn't even stand up to the general rules of reformed doctrine that things must submit to reason.

57:04 So if you actually think through your statement, your axiom, finitum non infiniti, capax, if you think it through, it doesn't even meet its own standard. Just believe what the Word of God says. We have an infinite God who is infinitely good, who has elected us before the foundation of the world in his Son, believe what he tells us, because that's the right way to come to all of these things. You don't come to it first by looking at Scripture, resolving all of the issues and saying, okay, this makes sense to me, therefore there must be a God. That's exactly wrong. You come to Scripture with the knowledge there is a God, and believe what Scripture says because God is the one who has given it to you.

57:54 The causation flows the opposite way from the way many people approach Scripture. And so if you look at it as God gave me this we're to believe and then we're to try to understand, not the other way around. Yeah, now believing it makes perfect sense. I don't have to be able to resolve everything in scripture to the satisfaction of my fallen reason. Because I know the source and I can trust him, so I can trust what it says. And that's that should be the root of all all sound doctrine is that if you if you fear love and trust in God above all things You don't worry when you're confused. You don't worry when you're scared. You don't worry when you're worrying. Because I realize that sounds silly, but it I mean it when

58:46 when you are facing the worst moments in your life, your faith should and will, when you are faithful and you understand God as a human can, you'll know that the when the worst thing is happening to you, if when you're when you're dying, maybe you're dying terribly, you are still gods, and God is still God. You belong to Him because he put His name on you in baptism, because He wrote your name down in the book of Life before eternity. So there's nothing that can happen to you, even if it's falling into an industrial shader shredder, it's it's gonna hurt a lot and then you're gonna die. But that's nothing in comparison to the promises of the God who created you. And a faith that is rooted in that sort of certainty of

59:36 God, of who God is, is a faith that cannot be shaken. And it's the reason that the everything that we say tries to point us away from ourselves. And Christian Christian doctrine should always seek to point away from the individual and his actions as a means of salvation or as a means of comfort, because if that's where you're rooting your confidence, you're gonna fail yourself. And on the day where you need yourself the most and you're failing, you have nothing. Whereas if you're rooting your confidence in God, on the day when you need God the most, he's there because he's been there every day since before there were days. And that sort of certainty defies the worst things that could happen

1:00:21 to anyone. And that is the comfort of the gospel properly understood. And just to repeat myself and to repeat what you've said, we do not ultimately have to understand everything God tells us. Because we understand enough of what God tells us and we understand enough of God to know that we should trust him. My dog is the same way, and the difference between my dog and me is significantly smaller than the difference between me and God. My dog trusts me. He does not always understand what I am telling him to do, but he does it because he trusts me. I believe what God has told me because I trust God. I have excellent warrant. I have perfect warrant to trust God. And so it makes sense. It is actually ultimately rational to believe what God says in his

1:01:23 word, because God is trustworthy. Is there anything else that you would like to say about election before we move on to how it Well, I th I think we're that's actually what we're just about to get into. That's actually true. Fairness is nonsense is the short version, but let's go with the longer one. So we've been talking about election and in your name being written in the book of life from before eternity, which is a mouthful, but it's it's vital to get every word in there because each of those words is comforting and each of those words means something, including that your name was written in the book of life, not not a your social security number, not a uh an ID number or something, your name.

1:02:15 And we'll we'll get into that in a minute. But first, as we've been saying all along, God foreknew you, he foreordained your salvation, He gave you the gift of faith to receive that salvation. You receive faith, you are saved. How do you come to faith? And that's where all the people who say they believe in the doctrine of election, when push comes to shove in the modern world, many of them fall away and they no longer believe it. In Romans 10, it's recorded: How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how are they to believe in him whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? Now when you take that in the context of Romans in the in

1:03:05 the first century, after Jesus has come and ascended, as Christians we think about that strictly in terms of the New Testament gospel. That Jesus the promise of the Messiah was fulfilled, the sacrifice on the cross was made, he was raised from the dead, he ascended into heaven. It's done. As Christ said is finished on the cross, the propitiating work is complete. And so when we think about how will they believe in him and whom they have never heard, we're thinking about that. But the point that I want to make now is that when you look at human history, not only Christian history, not only history of believers in God, but of every people, of every tribe and every nation, the manner in which they have believed believed

1:03:57 reflects upon this too. No, as we've talked about in in previous episodes, as Europeans we are as humans, we're sons of Adam. As humans we're sons of none. As Europeans were sons of Japheth, Bar Noah that was his father. I have, and you have, as a European, the faith of Japheth The faith that Noah gave to him as his father, transmitting to him by teaching him. Now Noah predated Abraham, predated the covenant that God gave Abraham that included circumcision, that included the the law as it was it was laid out to preserve the Hebrew people as they were bounced through time as as frankly objects of wrath on many occasions. The faith that Noah had is the same faith that we have today. And I was watching a show recently that talked about uh uh ancient

1:05:00 history. It was done by a pagan who's was clearly denied God and he was clearly an evolutionist and so some of his dates were wrong. But the work that he would done had done I found invaluable as a Christian who believes That the earth is about 6,000 years old and that the flood was a global event as recorded in Scripture. What he found as he's traveled all over the world doing excavations and learning about cultures uh that were separated from the tower of Babel. Like these are people who clearly went in different directions. We're talking about Aztecs, we're talking about Egyptians, we're talking about people in in far the far eastern Asia, people who never heard about Isaiah promising the virgin birth, people who never heard that Jesus had

1:05:48 died until after it had occurred. There is still the case even in those scattered civilizations, those scattered nations, where some of the nascent elements of the Christian faith are found. Now they're not found in a salvific sense. I'm not saying that these people were Christians secretly. But if you look at, for example, uh Egyptian mythology. The Egyptians about thirteen fifty BC they they were originating the myth of Osiris and Iris and Horus, where there was a virgin birth of a god who w then died sacrificially. Now the timing of that is interesting because the virgin birth thing doesn't show up in scripture until seven hundred BC, six hundred fifty years after they were coming up with this is the first time

1:06:44 it's recorded that there would be a virgin born. The import of that is that the first record that we have is in Isaiah. But if you look at how many places this shows up, now with the Egyptians, you could say maybe they heard it from the Hebrews who had been who had just left a hundred years earlier. So for the four hundred years that the Hebrews were there, they may have been sharing the faith. But even then, for the Egyptians to have picked up the virgin birth of a god who would sacrifice himself, that that story, that myth would have had to have been known to the Hebrews centuries prior to Isaiah. And even then you would have contact between the Hebrews and the Egyptians to transmit that.

1:07:32 And they were in the same place and time. So So th that's conceivable. we don't know if that was the case or not. However, you can look even further far afield to the Vietnamese and to the Aztecs, who also have similar, more corrupted stories, but stories that repeat some of the same elements that there would be a virgin birth of a god and that there would be some sort of sacrifice. And there are some other cultures where some of those elements are present but they're bastardized to the point that it's really impossible to infer whether they came via transmission or they they arrived at independently not not as some sort of prophecy that was originally rooted in Christianity. But the point I'm I'm making with this is that

1:08:18 The only way that the Egyptians and the Aztecs and the Vietnamese and others would have heard about the virgin birth of a god would have come from the time of the Tower of Babel, long before there was an Abraham, long before there was a covenant, a covenant, long before there was an Isaiah, they would have heard those promises. And that's entirely consistent with scripture, which doesn't say anything about it. But the promises that are given in Scripture were given to the Hebrews and were given to us. Noah was a prophet. The men of Noah's day and earlier, many of them were prophets. They walked with God. They spoke with God. There is every reason for us to believe that they would have had more than just the Genesis three fifteen promise.

1:09:02 Because there's not much there. You could read it and if you didn't know anything about Jesus you might not it it might not occur to you that that was a fulfillment. And it is only later on in scripture where other elements of I think there are at least three hundred odd prophecies of of Christ's birth and his life and his death and his resurrection in the Old Testament. That doesn't mean that that was a complete picture. There may well have been more and the the the the anthropological evidence strongly, strongly indicates that that was the case. That the promise of a messiah was known, we know it was known to Noah and his children, because they were Noah's. Their faith was transmitted by their father to them.

1:09:49 We know that Japheth was blessed, and we know that Shem was blessed. We know that Ham was cursed by God, and his descendants bear that curse. Noah was a prophet. He didn't have any authority to curse anyone or to bless anyone. Any curses or blessings coming from him came from God. That's the only Christian conclusion that we can reach. So when we look in the historical record and we see those people who branched out from Babel scattered across the earth as God had commanded them to do, carrying elements of the true Christian faith, again, bastardized to the point that they were no longer salvific, they no longer knew God, but they they all knew about the flood. That's something that's preserved even in pla even in cultures that have

1:10:39 no record whatsoever of anything that we would consider Christian doctrine, they still record that historical event. And after that, many of them do also record things that could be considered to have been elements of the Christian faith. Now, this is a tricky area to get into because most of the people talking about it are atheists. They're worldly men who deny and hate God simultaneously. And those men will twist what has occurred. So you have Jordan Peterson today, and you have his spiritual father Joseph Campbell and you have Carl Jung before him all basically making the claim that the reason that we have these repeated stories popping up globally, their rationalization for how that could occur, they say that

1:11:29 it's a it's an upwelling of man's own spirit, that there's some indwelling of our own human nature that manifests these stories, these myths that that are not connected to God because God doesn't exist. They're just us. they're us doing our own thing in space and time and across space and time. And when they delete God, that's the best they can do. It it's silly. But if you look at it scripturally, you see you can see that the opposite was true. That when the people got off the ark, they were Christians. they had a belief in the in the Messiah who was to come at that time. They knew what God had revealed to them, which was clearly more than is revealed in scripture at that point for our benefit, because

1:12:18 it's recording what we need and not what they needed at the time. Noah was talking directly to God. He didn't have to write this stuff down. If he did, it was for the benefit of future generations. So as we look at this, it's important to understand that the transmission of faith, how can they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? How do you hear? You hear from your father. You hear from the man that God has placed in your family as your head. You are his seed, you are your father's seed, and he transmits the faith to you, or he fails to transmit the faith to you. And so in time we see that there were some fathers who came off the ark and their children and their children's children

1:13:05 who preserved the faith that was transmitted to them by their fathers. We see other fathers who were faithless, who were evil, who abandoned God just as quickly as their ancestors before the flood had abandoned God, and went off in tremendously evil directions. And so the inheritance of those men for both good and evil is either faith or lack of faith. And that's where the we're going to get into the intersection of election and faith in time, because you inherit faith one way or another, either it's inherited directly from your parents who give it to you, or if you were not blessed with faithful parents, you may have to rebel against them and inherit it through adoption, and we're all adopted sons of God through baptism.

1:13:52 I'm not saying that there's there's not a sense here where there is a hereditary claim to God, which was what the the Israelites misunderstood the the Pharisees later on. They thought that it was a genetic claim That was never the case. Trevor Burrus And what CI claims today. Aaron Powell Yeah, absolutely. It's the the Christian identity and various other heresies all make a complete mess of these things because they don't want to believe what is true. Abraham's faith was counted to him as righteousness. It wasn't that God had given him a covenant and made a promise to him. It was that he believed the promises of God. That was counted to him as righteousness. That's another way of saying faith.

1:14:30 Abraham had faith because he received faith. He gave faith to his children by transmitting the word to them. He preached to them, he told them about God, and they received faith. So when we talk about election It is always in terms of faith, and faith is always transmitted. And the the point of that, that historical snippet is that the faith was transmitted for a time outside of the sons of Shem, outside of the line that became the line of David. It was transmitted by fathers to their sons. That's hereditary. Their posterity received the blessing of their faith. There were uh couple recent surveys in the last decade that were done by uh some Reformed and Baptists. According to data collected by Promise Keepers and Baptist Press, if a

1:15:24 father does not go to church, even if his wife does, only one child in fifty, one child in fifty, that's two percent, will become regular worshiper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of what the mother does, between two thirds and three quarters of their children will attend church as adults. That's a difference of either two percent without the father, or between sixty six and seventy five percent with the father. That is radical. And that is far more than simply a sociological effect. Because what we found what what another survey showed was that Is that uh if the first person in a household to become a Christian was a child, there's about a three and a half percent chance that everyone else in the house would follow.

1:16:09 If the mother is the first person to become a Christian, there's about a seventeen percent chance. So quite a bit better than than a child adopting Christianity first if the mother did. When the father was the first to become a Christian, there's a ninety three percent chance that everyone else in the house will follow. Now, this is not a sociological consequence. This is not this is not something for demographers or demographers and sociologists to discuss. This is a theological discussion. This is a theological discussion of headship. The father is the head. That's not just a metaphor, it is a reality. The father is the head of the wife, the father is of his wife, he's the head of his children, he's the head of

1:16:52 everyone, under his house house under his roof, in his household. And his faith becomes their faith on contact. Now this is remarkable. We're talking about what we must presume to be true faith. if children began attending church because their father does, and they do it into adulthood, for the most part, those are probably Christians. Whereas if only the mother does, it's inconsequential. And so it's it's a fundamental element of the manner in which election is delivered in time that the faith of the father becomes the faith of the children, and the faithlessness of the father also becomes the faithlessness of the children. Well, and that's that's also why in in Scripture, when we look at how God deals with humanity, he doesn't actually typically deal with

1:17:52 individuals. God works with families and nations. Yes, individuals are also involved, but God didn't just call Abram to who would become Abraham. He called him to bring his family, at the time, of course, just his wife and his uh cousins, but it is the head of the family that represents the family, this in the same way that Adam represented creation and so creation fell when Adam sinned, in the same way that Christ is the head of the new creation, and so those of us who are in Christ are also part of that new creation. That's why you have to be in Christ in order to actually be part of that new creation, in order to see paradise, in order not to spend eternity in hell. But to go back briefly, I guess we're going to mention CI,

1:18:48 we may as well also mention a little more paganism. When it comes to myths and the various peoples who preserved them or failed to preserve them, I think one of the best examples, and I know there are those who will comment that this was written down in the 10th century, and that's true, but it was an oral history before that, and I happen to believe it's an ancient one. The Havamal is a great example of a corruption, but also a maintenance of some Christian truths. In a number of places, I think one of the best ones though, Odin, in part of the Havamal, is hanged on the world tree, Yggdrasil. He offers himself to himself, on the world tree. He's stabbed with a spear. He receives neither food nor drink.

1:19:39 He peers into the deep, one could consider that a corruption of the descent into hell. These parallels are extremely close to what we actually have as the truth in Christianity, and so you can see a preservation of the faith of the forefathers, even if corrupted by demons, by Gnosticism over a course of time, and these sorts of things do not just happen. This is not something people in far flung parts of the world do not create the same myths out of whole cloth with no interaction. And the Vikings and the Vietnamese were not really interacting in BC. That just wasn't a thing. But just another example of the carrying forward of Mythology, Christian mythology, and it's not wrong to call it that because the term has

1:20:35 multiple senses, the carrying forward, if also the corruption in time, because of the faithlessness of some of the fathers in that line. They failed to transmit the faith correctly. They permitted it to become corrupted, and so their children, instead of carrying forward the true faith, carried forward that corruption. Now we have an advantage today. that basically none of our ancestors until the last handful of centuries did. And that advantage figuratively is the printing press. Today, of course, we have iPads and computers and all that, but ultimately printed books do have more staying power, computers can die. Yes, books can burn, but they are typically easier to preserve. And so we have the advantage if we have a number of

1:21:23 faithless generations as we have recently had, we can still return to the true faith. And what are we doing? We are returning to the faith of our fathers who gave us the sound doctrine, who preserved for us the Bible, who gave us these truths, carried them forward. We don't have to, as many of our ancestors did, carry on the false and the corrupted faith of our immediate forebears Because that is all they had, because theirs would have been orally transmitted, and if all you heard was the corrupted version of the truth, well all you had was the corrupted version of the truth, because that's what you received from your head, whether it was your father or your grandfather or your king, or just the leader of

1:22:09 your tribe, you received that from your head. Today again, we can actually go back to the truth. We can go back to things before they were corrupted by faithless generations, because we have that luxury, thanks be to God. But it is still a matter of headship because that was transmitted to us by a far distant head. So for instance, Japheth is head of the European peoples. Ashkenaz is head of the Germans. And so you you have nations descended from individual men. All mankind descended from Adam, and all mankind descended from Noah, because of course there was a little bit of a bottleneck there. Europe descended from Japheth. The East, roughly speaking, descended from Shem. Africa descended from Ham, and so those men are the heads of

1:23:07 those large people groups, but within those you have nations and tribes, and then under that you have families. It's all a matter of hierarchy and headship and what is transmitted faithfully or faithlessly. Alright, ready to go. And that's why I mentioned up front that election is connected to all of this, to the way that the gospel is spread, to the way that we come to faith and the way that the problems that we're facing in the church today are are really rooted in this. Uh when you when you look in scripture you see that men are identified by name, but it's not just their name. It's for example Jonah, the son of Amitai. Uh the prophet Zechariah was a son of Barakiah, son of Edo, and When Samuel's born there was a certain man of the hill

1:24:03 country whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jerobam, and he gives his father's name and his father's name and his father's name, and the country that he was from. That wasn't simply Simply genealogy for the sake of narrowing down which Samuel or which Zechariah or which Zona Jonah it was. That was identifying the men in space and time as God created them. And most of the names that are that are given in scripture in those ways are usually of faithful men. There are not a lot of faithless men whose names are given. In the show notes, there's going to be two video links on YouTube that are an absolutely vital part of understanding that the the point that we're trying to make with this episode.

1:24:50 Uh the the reason that there are two of them, it's split into two parts. It's not very long. Uh one is the spread of Christianity. It's basically just a map, a visual representation of where Christianity was held between year one and uh eighty one thousand and then from eighty one thousand to current day. And the the reason that I want to talk about those videos as we wrap up here is that when we talk about election, when we talk about Christianity, we're not simply talking about the hypothetical, well, one may have faith and one may be saved. But we can point to particular people in space and time who were saved, and we know that they were saved just as Paul knew when he was referring to those people who were known to

1:25:40 him whose names he said were written in the book of life. Because of their confession and because of their Christian life. So there is an immediate connection between their life and the fact that they were saved. That those are demonstrable facts. No, it's not it's not to suggest that you can perfectly judge someone's heart the way that God can and will. But in general, you're going to be able to tell a Christian from a non-Christian just by talking to 'em, by looking at how they live. Um, and that's always been the case throughout time. So the reason that these videos are important is where the video shows Christianity spreading. Like we said a minute ago, the faith was transmitted from Adam

1:26:26 through Noah, through Japheth, and through Shem to their sons, and then most of them lost it over time. But they lost it to varying degrees. Some lost it entirely. not to not to say that salvation comes by degrees, but a memory of the true faith can be lost by degrees, and that's clearly what we see in the historical record. When you get back to Jesus' birth, death, death, and resurrection in the beginning of the church, the spread of the knowledge of the truth faith begins again. Now, it was always the case. It wasn't the great commission that Jesus gave to his disciples saying, go and baptize all nations in my name. That wasn't the first time that that had ever been true, but it was a command that was specifically given that to them in

1:27:17 the place of Rome and Judea, in the time when Greek and Latin were widely spoken, and in a place and time where the roads could carry the message of the gospel faster than the guards and the men chasing the apostles trying to kill them. So it was a very eff efficacious moment that God chose God chose to enact the Great Commission. And the maps in the video show where and how that Great Commission was followed. And what you see in the maps is that almost immediately uh Saint Mark, I believe, goes to the western coast of India, uh where to this day there's a tiny sliver on the coast of India where there have been Christians for two thousand years. It was an apostolic church that has been preserved there by God's

1:28:11 grace throughout time. Now it never spread beyond that place. It never went to the rest of the Indian people, but it But at least within that tiny sliver, the word was rightly preached and those people did have faith. The first thousand years of the video omits something that's important for this conversation, but it does show up in the second thousand years. And that is Ethiopia and Sudan or the modern countries thereof. Uh Ethiopia is interesting because they claim a Solomonic dynasty. They claim that they're descended from the house of Solomon incontinuously to the to living memory that some of their leaders have had that blood and the faith has been preserved there as well. Uh what's interesting is if if you look at the many of

1:28:59 the leaders w for whom we have photographs in modern Ethiopia, they look more Persian than they do sub Saharan African, even though Ethiopia is a sub Saharan African country. Uh Ethiopia and Sudan, modern day, have had the faith since the beginning. There were churches that were planted there because although it's sub-Saharan Africa, it's also adjacent to the Red Sea. So there was maritime travel that was able to get there. It didn't have to go too far inland in order for those people to receive the gospel and to believe it. And they too have kept it and preserved the faith faith unto this day. So as I said, the the first thousand years of the video will omit Africa, but it's there continuously in that one tiny corner.

1:29:45 Now Africa's a uh unfathomably large continent. It's three three times the size of North America And but in that one small place there were believers continuously. Real quick, in the case of Ethiopia, it's also worth mentioning that the language they use, Amharic, is not a Hamitic, not an African language, but a Shemitic language, a Near Eastern language. And so we we also see that that interchange, that relationship of the peoples in the area in the language they speak, which is further proof that you had this interaction and explains why they had the faith. Yep. That's a very good point. And the the reason that I've highlighted India and Africa is because the Those are the only places outside of the Mid Middle East and Europe

1:30:34 where Christianity existed prior to the six the 1500s. And this is what the video shows. It shows the spread of uh Christianity proper. It shows the spread of Arianism, which is a heresy, a bastardization of Christianity. Um one thing that's omitted in the video, it doesn't show that Arianism did make inroads as far as China, and I believe was preserved until well into the the tenth and eleventh century, and then it was stamped out. Now the Aryan doctrine, which d denies the divinity of Christ fully, does it's properly condemned as a heresy, but it is fair to say that even when there were Aryan heretics that were in control The word of God was still in those places. So while their confession may not have been true, there are many cases

1:31:28 where people are taught one thing and they believe another and they believe what's in scripture. That's something that as Lutherans, you and I run into all the time, where we're we're talking to someone who has been raised Baptist or raised Reformed or something, and we're talking about areas where we know that Lutheran and Baptist doctrine differ, and they say, Oh no, that's what I've always believed. And it's always interesting because we know for a fact that that's not what any Baptist would have ever taught them, but it is what they read in the Bible. And so it's called felicitous inconsistency that you may you may say one thing, you may be taught one thing, but in your heart if you're if you have faith and you're receiving God's word, you

1:32:09 may ultimately believe something that is true even if what you're taught and maybe even what you think about when you're just sort of mouthing the words is contrary to it. So I wouldn't go so far as says to say the where Arianism was spread, everyone is damned, although it is it is a false confession. But I will say that where the word of God is spoken, it does not return to him void. So there's there's hope in those places. It's better to be partly right than entirely wrong. And that's it's we're not saying that it will save you being partly right if you're wrong about the core things. If you get the atonement wrong, you're right and you're right about some ancillary things that's not going to save you.

1:32:54 But there are still blessings. There is still good that is attached to believing the truth. And if you get some of the things right, you are still believing some of the truth, and there are still benefits to that. And as mentioned, if at least these heretics believe that they are Christian, the Word of God will be present, and the word of God does not return to him void. Yep. And so in the in the early part of the video, in the first five centuries or so, you'll see that there's a back and forth between Ari and Christianity, and I think they call it Nicene Christianity in the video. Eventually Nicene, which is to say Trinitarian Christianity, which is to say Christianity. it's redundant, but proper Christian doctrine did begin to prevail and

1:33:44 eventually Arianism was effectively wiped out in Europe. The the import of the videos and the the reason that we are talking about it is that If we truly believe the doctrine of election, that God elected those unto salvation for Himself from before creation, and He knew those men's names and he wrote them in the book of life, then when you watch that video, you cannot help but conclude that virtually all of those who were elected to faith were sons of Japheth. It's a it's the only possible conclusion when you look at the map because it's showing the whole known world where Christianity was believed. And then it eventually zooms out in the the second uh in the second thousand years to show the entire globe.

1:34:40 And there's nothing until Columbus comes to the Americas outside of Europe and in the uh Middle East. Now when I say Japha obviously many of the sons of Shem, not many, but some of the sons of Shem did come to faith in the in the Middle East. There were some Jews who converted. Those men ceased to be Jewish in not too much time. they simply became men of of their area, but they eventually abandoned those those cultures and that custom and became integrated as as Europeans with their their neighbors and brothers. But that was still a small portion of those who received the faith. Overwhelmingly, the the number throughout time has been in Europe, which is is Cory mentioned, you mentioned Christian identity.

1:35:34 They're heretics, they believe that only white people can be fa saved. They believe that only white people I think are human. they say some terrible things that are simply false that are blatantly contrary to Scripture. They also happen to ny the Trinity because once you're being a heretic, why not go all in? But their history is also wildly incorrect because it they couldn't be right about anything, so they have to be wrong about everything. I mean they they try to argue that the the kings of in some cases, the kings of England are descended from David. Yeah. Yeah. It's c it's insane, it's false. And these are people with whom we are lumped in by those who say that we're going to hell for what we're saying right

1:36:17 now, which is straight from Scripture, and it's straight from history, not in contradiction to scripture in scripture. I I did some math. This is this is my own work. That's these are very rough estimates. Basically what I did, I took the best estimates by century of the population of Europe. Uh so 700, 800, 900,000 Up through the year 1900. I took a look at the estimates of the population of Europe. I then took a look at the estimate of approximately what percent of those people were nominally Christian. That is to say that they their king was Christian, they were baptized and lived Christian lives. Now, obviously that is not by itself proof that any particular individual is a Christian. That's not what I'm saying.

1:37:12 But when someone's confession in their life claims to be Christian, that's not something that I'm not going to question that when uh when I'm looking back through time. So these are very rough estimates, but what I found was that uh and part of the reason it's possible to give a very rough rough estimate of the number of believers is when the king's converted. Because and that's what's borne out in history. When the king converted, the head of a nation converted generally within a generation or two, most of the people followed. So in about the year seven hundred AD, about twenty five percent of Europe's population of about thirty two million people were Christian. So there were around eight million Christians in Europe in the year

1:37:59 seven hundred, roughly. That's an interesting number because that is at least four tim five times more than the number who have ever lived in Ethiopia and Sudan. The area that we're talking about where Christianity has been preserved there was never was never very populous. the land simply couldn't sustain it. The people couldn't sustain it. So when we're talking about I don't want to call it a numbers game, because this is we're talking about salvation. We're not talking about a game. But when we're talking about the number of names that are in the book of life, the number of African names prior to European colonization of Africa, which we'll get to, was very small. There were some, by God's grace, and thank God that there were

1:38:46 uh Ethiopians who were preserved. But by and large they were believers in Europe and nowhere else. And I by Europe I mean Greater Europe, so the Mediterranean, Northern Africa, which is like the Mediterranean is effectively Europe, not Africa. Those countries were soon lost to Islam, which began to make inroads even into to the rest of Europe. By uh eighty one thousand, the population had gone up about ten million to about forty-two million, and the percentage of Christians was probably about eighty-five percent give or two. So you're looking at about thirty six, thirty-five, thirty-six million Christians in eighty-one thousand. Fast forward another three hundred years and the population has gone up

1:39:30 about fifty percent to around sixty million. And probably about ninety-five percent of those were at least culturally Christian. Again, I'm not claiming that virtually everyone in who's ever been European has saved. There's no way to know that. And it's realistically that's probably not the case. But they were in Christians land Christian lands with Christian kings. They were living as Christians, they were attending church, they were hearing the word of God. There's more hope for them than there is for the vast majority of America. So if I'm gonna place a stake somewhere, it's gonna be to say that most of those people are probably in heaven. By 1900, Europe's population had increased to about 240 million and still

1:40:12 about ninety About 90% were Christian. Um, adding all of those up just it just at the century marks was about roughly a billion souls would have likely been Christian in Europe. Now, when you compare that billion people, and and that's only at the century marks, obviously there are people who don't who who lived and died in between the century marks. So um again, these are these these are numbers that I did this work myself. I'm not claim claiming that these are these are absolute or they're precise, but they're definitely in the ballpark in terms of the ratios relative to other people groups. So why I would not stake a claim on these numbers being precision numbers. They're not at all unrealistic.

1:40:57 They're based on on what we know of history. And so if there were a billion people alive right at the century marks between seven hundred and nineteen hundred. My guess is that there's probably about two and a half billion Christians in that time period in those places. Uh in beginning in the eighteen hundreds, I also included the Americas, which was was a spare very small number. In eighteen hundred there was about five point three million Christians in America. Uh five million. in nineteen hundred there was about sixty nine million. So not about ten percent of the total European population of Christians was in the Americas. So give or take, you're looking at about two and a half billion Christians, all of European descent, all of all sons of Japheth,

1:41:44 all holding to the faith of Japheth in that time period. Now, as I said, when you look to to Sudan and E in Ethiopia, those numbers are minuscule by comparison. And the tiny slit in uh in Somalia or sorry, Ethiopia and India, those numbers are necessarily minuscule by comparison. And we as Christians should be able to say this without fear that we're going to be murdered by someone calling us rape and racist, calling us evil, calling us hateful. I am simply recounting what has happened in time. I was not the causal effect of that. It is not what I would have wished. I wish what God wishes, which is that all people would know Christ and would come to salvation. The reality is that that is not what has happened in time.

1:42:33 And so the reason for discussing election in terms of genealogy and nationality, and now specifically honing in on the sons of Japheth, is that Japheth's children were faithful where other children were not. When you look at the map, the second half, the second video, and it shows beginning with European exploration and colonization of the Americas, and then in about the 1700s, colonization and exploration began in Africa. Those are the very first times for 4,000 years since the flood, that the people living in those places would have actually heard the Christian faith. Now, like I said earlier, there were elements of the faith that had been preserved as mythology among them, but it was no longer

1:43:32 efficacious. It was just a few tiny mangled bits and pieces. But that is in fact the demonstration that they had lost the faith. There's no way to say that someone who is an Aztec in the year 1300 went to heaven. One hundred percent of them went to hell. I can say that with certainty because the Christian faith The true faith could not have existed in those places. And when the Spaniards showed up and they saw what the Aztecs were doing, when Pizarro and his men went into the Aztec temples, they literally vomited because the stench was so vile from the death, the murder of humans who were sacrificed to the demon gods of the Aztec. So all they although they had preserved some tiny piece of the

1:44:21 virgin birth of a god and his death for some purpose, they were worshiping demons. The ancestors of those people were worshipping demons until the Europeans showed up, the sons of Japheth showed up, colonized those places, and gave them the gospel for the first time. And that's why we're talking about this story, because when you look at the video and you see the way in which Christianity spread after about the first couple centuries, where you know Paul obviously was a Jew who went to the Gentiles. There were other Jews who converted to Christianity and became Christian, they ceased to be Jews. Apart from that little explosion in the Middle East at the at the very beginning of the church, virtually all of the spread and

1:45:10 keeping of the gospel has been in white lands. So So think about that fact if you're Satan. if you seek that all men be destroyed, that every life is a life of evil, and that they are cast bodily and soul upon death into the eternal lake of fire with Satan, who will be right there with them being punished. To have white people showing up in the 1500s and 1600s and 1700s in Africa and in the Americas, going to people who had all been going to hell for three and four thousand years, and suddenly they began converting to Christianity. When the colonizers showed up with crucifixes and they told these people about the gospel and they baptized them, in some cases forcefully, forcibly, those people were converted to Christianity and many of them were saved.

1:46:06 And there are places to this day that are now Christian in Africa and the Americas among native populations who would never have had the gospel if the sons of Japheth had not shown up. So think about that when you hear rabid anti white hatred, when you hear hatred against colonialism, when you hear hatred against patriarchy, when you hear hatred against kings versus democracy, where it's a free-for-all and we do whatever we think is best in our own eyes. Think about that like Satan would think about that. When white people showed up happy, when they came under the cross, what was the response of the demons that the Aztecs were worshiping and sacrificing all those innocent people to? They were They were not happy.

1:46:55 And they're still not happy because be demons don't die. Those demons didn't go away. They were still out there in the jungle. And by many accounts, they are back on the prowl today. And the backlash that we see against Europeans in particular, against Germans in particular, against Christianity, against patriarchy, against every form of headship that is ordained by God both for salvific purposes and for the purpose simply of proper order in this life. Those are the things that the most evil people on the planet hate. And I f fundamentally believe that that is the root of all of these societal issues that we're seeing. That God's election, his predestination, which was unfair, predominantly predestined

1:47:48 Europeans for salvation. I didn't do it. God did it. But again, when you look at how they were saved, they weren't saved because they were white. They weren't saved because their parents were anything in particular. They were saved because their fathers were faithful. And the Africans and the South Americans and the North American Indians were damned because their fathers were faithless. They abandoned God, they ceased to teach his word, and just as you will die because Adam sinned, those people are in hell because their fathers failed to transmit the faith to them. They inherited damnation and they lived up to it and now they're they're suffering under it. Is that fair? No. But at the same time we we look at that in

1:48:36 the context of the spread of the gospel from the first century and think, oh well they were never told about Jesus. How could they know? They were told about Jesus. Their fathers were told about Jesus four thousand years ago when they got off the ark. And those fathers ceased to believe, and that is why their children are not believers. And just as salvation is transmissible, not as a physical inheritance, but as a spiritual inheritance that comes directly by hearing from one's father in an absolutely efficacious manner, so too unbelief is transmissible, it is heritable, and it's inevitable. If your father is evil, and as you said, Corey, without the benefit of access to go around your father, to go around your

1:49:21 nation, to find the truth, as we can do today, there's no ways for someone to be saved. And that's not fair, but that is God's will. Because if their fathers had been faithful and had obeyed, they would have been saved. So election intersects with reality in ways that makes us make us extremely uncomfortable. Because all of this sounds like it's totally contrary to the gospel, and it's certainly contrary to modern beliefs of morality outside the church. But it's true. The reason it makes so many people uncomfortable is because it runs counter to the enlightenment. It's not that it runs counter to scripture, because obviously we have demonstrated this is all grounded in Scripture, this is readily discoverable for

1:50:07 anyone who reads Scripture, at least anyone who has the Holy Spirit. But heaven looks rather a lot like Europe at present. Now of course, depending on how long things continue, and which areas become or remain Christian and which ones do not, that composition could change. But as of today, paradise is going to be very white. And that is simply the fact of the matter from history. That is how things have worked out in time. And those who say that, well, that's not fair, like I said, they are appealing to the enlightenment to hearken back to an earlier episode where I pointed out that that's not fair is the cry of a child who didn't get his way. And that's ridiculous to side with the child in that.

1:50:59 Because fairness is incoherent. No one really actually wants fairness in the final assessment. When we speak about fairness, if we are using it in a way that makes any sense whatsoever, then that would be that we want justice, not fairness. You don't want fairness, because if God is perfectly fair, you get to spend eternity in hell. Because charging your sin to Christ, crucifying Christ, and then attributing his righteousness to you, is not fair. But it is the only way that you can be saved. It is the only way that any of the sons of Japheth were saved. And so fairness is this concept that comes from the Enlightenment. It is built on Tabla Rasa, it is built on that blank slate idea that human beings are just little lumps of clay that

1:51:55 arise by chance in a time and place. They're not really connected to the time, the place, their ancestry, any of that. God flings a soul at random into this little lump of clay, and we should treat that as a blank slate. Whatever that person does in life is the only thing that matters. But of course that's completely ridiculous, because what the person does in life flows from what the person is, flows from where the person was born, flows from the family, flows from headship and hierarchy and all of these things we have been mentioning, because you are not an individual. You are not an individual with no tethers, no ties, no connections. You are the son of your father, who is the son of his father, who is the son of his father, all the way

1:52:43 back through whichever son of Noah, through Noah, to Adam. You are part of that line, you are part of a tribe and a nation, you are part of a people, and these things matter. This is the way God has designed creation, this is the way God has designed humanity. And so these appeals to concepts like fairness are not born of Scripture. Find it in Scripture. If you want to argue for fairness, go ahead. Try to find it. See if God is acted in that way. See if that is what God wants us to do. You won't because it isn't there. That is something born of the mind of secular, which is to say atheist philosophers, not of Christians. And you had mentioned the composition of Europe today, or sort of the composition of heaven.

1:53:37 I think that it's important to to acknowledge and to be grateful for the spread of Christianity in Asia and Africa, uh in places that historically have rejected the gospel, have rejected rejected God's Word. They are now turning around and although African Christianity has some very serious problems with syncretism and and demon worship and things, there are at least there there are certainly many believers there. And there there are based on looking at the numbers that have lived in Ethiopia for the last two thousand years and before that, there are more living Africans who are Christians who will go to heaven than there are Africans in heaven. That is an easy easy claim to make if you look at

1:54:24 the simple numbers of history. And again None of this is what you or I would wish for anything. I am thankful. I am grateful. It gives me joy to see Christians in Africa worshiping in their own languages. It's amazing in particular to see some of the churches there that are Lutheran churches that are trying to be confessional who are happily adopting the liturgy and the vestments that they're inheriting from their European brothers. They're saying if this is how God is worshipped, we want to worship this God. This is how we want to do it. They don't seek to do it in their own way. They don't seek to do it as the is worship of old took place for the demons. New God, new worship. They're fine with that.

1:55:11 And so it's it's a wonderful thing to see. And frankly, it's at odds with some of the pastors in the Missouri Synod. There is a man in uh the Northwest District named McN Rick McCafferty, who is on the Northwest District's webpage, on the Vimeo page, giving a talk about how he and his Eskimo and other Indian ancestors always worshiped God. Long before the white man showed showed up, they knew the Creator and they worshiped the Creator. And they knew the Holy Spirit who was the great spirit. These are his words, these are his direct claims. And the reason that he made the video, which is an anti racist video directed at us, was to implore all of the Lutherans who want to evangelize the Indians to stop telling those Indians who

1:56:02 have been communing with demons for four thousand years to stop telling them that the way they're worshipping is wrong. he literally says in the video, we'll link it. He says, Don't tell us we can't beat drums at the sunrise to our God. He's always been the same God you guys worship. Don't tell us we need to have a liturgy. Don't tell us how to worship. We've always known God. The only thing we just we're missing the details about the great warrior who is Jesus, again, his words. So that's pure syncretism and that's pure universalism. Because I say that all of Rick McCaffrey's ancestors are burning in hell. He says that they're in heaven. He says that they've always worshiped God. And that it's these Lutherans who are coming to their reservations, trying

1:56:45 to tell them about the triune God and show them how to worship as cr as Christians have always worshipped. We are the problem. Well, one of us is wrong and one of us is going to hell because we do not worship the same God. And again, this this is a this is an LCMS pastor. We're not talking about someone who's, you know, just a a random person on the internet. He was ordained to evangelize to these people who need to hear the word of God, and he's depriving them of it because he's a universalist. He's saying the exact opposite of what God says. He's saying, You've always worshiped God. You guys are great. Let me tell you about Jesus, but it's a Jesus you already knew you just you knew him by another name.

1:57:25 Which is not at all the point of the discussion early about mythology. We are not saying that these people knew God. No. We're saying that a reflection of the truth echoed through time, but it was never salvific. It was simply evidence of the fact that the truth at one point had been transmitted to them by their fathers, and then the children of some of those fathers at some point long ago abandoned God and damned their children to hell. They damned Rick McCafferty's ancestors to hell Because they did not worship the true God. They communed with demons, and they did so in many cases to this day. We there I have heard stories of actual Lutheran churches near reservations where the people come off the reservation targeting the Lutheran churches and

1:58:12 they will have demonic ceremonies in their parking lot to try to bind the spirits in those churches to keep them from threatening the reservation. Those people serve demons today, in the current year 2022, they are having demonic ceremonies in our church parking lots to stop the spread of the gospel. Don't tell me that this isn't spiritual warfare. We're not talking about hypotheticals. We're not talking about some leth node doctrine that that's not relevant relevant to life. We're talking about souls that will either go to heaven if they repent and believe the true God, or they will go to hell if they continue to worship as these demon worshiping Indians do. And in in a future episode we'll talk about some of the other

1:58:56 rejected doctrines in scripture, but one of them is The doctrine of shaking the dust off your feet is a curse against those who refuse to hear the gospel. This is something that Jesus repeatedly commanded to his apostles, to the disciples. And in Acts, as soon as Jesus ascended into heaven, there are multiple instances of them doing that very thing. They literally shake the dust off their feet against a t a place to curse it, to say, You have rejected God, you are now rejected. We take the gospel elsewhere. Find a Christian who will do that today. Find a Christian who will not spend a hundred years pouring good money after bad to people to who want to worship demons. They don't want to hear about Jesus.

1:59:41 They want to do what they're doing. And in the name of a false gospel, we think that we have to just continue pouring out our treasure when there are people who need it. There's a there's an example of a a pastor in Ohio, Ben Meyer, an LCMS pastor, who was called to to rural Ohio. That's kinda the middle of the nowhere. Very uh an area without many people. They're all white. And he gets up in the morning and he drives 45 minutes to Columbus so that he can spend time spreading the gospel, in his words, to Ethiopian immigrants. Now I was fascinated by that because when he's raising money for this project, when he's telling all the gullible Lutherans, oh, this is so wonderful, we have these Africans who are coming here who who

2:00:30 need to hear the Word of God? Well, yes, everyone needs to hear the Word of God. But for you to suggest that the Ethiopian immigrant an immigrant is not a word, these people are being shipped here. When an Ethiopian leaves Ethiopia and comes to Ohio, he's going from a Christian country to a pagan state. There are more Christians in Ethiopia today by percentage than there are in Ohio. But where is Ben Meyer's heart? Is it with the people that God sent to him? To whom he s God sent him? No, it's forty five minutes away where he can plead preach to black people 'cause they're foreign and he gets the benefit of all the social status of oh look at me, I'm I'm so good, I'm I'm reaching out to these Africans when they're Christian.

2:01:16 Now some of them are Muslim because that's the other problem that Ethiopia has. It's been there's they've had problems with Muslims for many years, centuries. But to pretend that it's a non-Christian place where these people have never heard the gospel is insane. It's a lie. It is a damnable lie. Ethiopia is a Christian country, and as a Christian, I'm thankful for that. I don't want anyone to go to hell. And it's got nothing to do with their skin color, their race, with their fathers. I want the same thing that God wants, which is all for all men to be redeemed. But guys like Ben Meyer will drive right past all of those souls in Ohio. You know, the the the Lutheran population is high in Ohio is

2:02:01 something like zero point four percent or something. it's minuscule. it's effectively zero. It's a rounding error. And the number of Christians is not a whole lot better. When you look at actual church attendance at actual churches and people who actually believe what the actual church teaches, it's a tiny number. He is neglecting white people because they're white, even though they're his neighbors in the place where God sent him, so that he can tell people who already know Jesus about Jesus because that scores good boy points. That's what these fights are about. That is how much race matters to people who despise election, that they will drive past their white neighbors for the sake of an

2:02:46 alien from three, four thousand miles away, because that person who looks completely different and sounds completely different has And seems exotic, somehow is more worthy of the gospel than the men who live down the road from this man who will never tell them. He's not gonna he's not gonna spend all that time. He's gotta go somewhere else and do it for strangers. This is not love, and this is not the gospel. This is how the church dies. And the men who were engaged in syncretistic arguments and worship, if we're being very loose with the term, they are going to damn people to hell. Because those who hear well, no, your ancestors who were worshiping demons, he won't say that of course, but your ancestors, they were worshiping

2:03:31 the true God, you can continue to do what they were doing. That's the voice of Satan speaking, that's what that is. I'm looking at a a picture right now. It's a class of seminarians from Madagascar. There are about three million Lutherans, baptized Lutherans in Madagascar. It's a country of about twenty eight million, give or take a bit. And the reason there are three million Believing baptized Christians in the Lutheran churches in Madagascar is because two Norwegian men, John Eng and Niels Nilsson, I'm sure I didn't get the last names entirely right, but you can look up their names, because those two Norwegian Lutheran men went there and spread the gospel to them, set up a seminary, started instructing them so they could

2:04:19 teach their own people, so you could have proper headship, so you can have fathers who learn from their pastors, who then turn around and teach their wives and their children. And that's the reason that you have them. And they didn't go over there and tell them keep worshiping your ancestors because ancestor worship is a problem in Madagascar, a huge problem in large parts of Africa. They didn't say continue your animistic practices. No, they said your ancestors worship demons. We are going to tell you about the true God. We are going to tell you about Christ. We are going to tell you how to be saved. They did not let them continue syncretistic practices. They fought against those, because these are men who actually want their

2:05:03 brothers in Africa to be saved. The men here and other places who tell them to continue traditional so-called practices, which aren't even traditional, because if you go back far enough, the actual practices would have been worshiping the Lord God, the men who tell them to continue those syncretistic and pagan practices are damning them to hell. Maybe not the men who hear it, but their grandchildren? How do you think all this stuff was lost in the first place? It was lost in the first place because someone loosened something here. Changed something there. Said, No, it's okay if we engage in this heterodox practice over time that accumulates. It never gets better, it always gets worse, and that's why you

2:05:47 have to fight against it as soon as it crops up, no matter how trivial it may seem, and it would be a blessing from God if the issues we have today were trivial. We have serious issues that are matters of eternal life or eternal death. We're not dealing with squabbles over the color of the pyramids or something of that nature. We are dealing with core issues of the faith, core truths about creation, and if you deny core truths about creation, you are denying the first article of the Creed, because we believe in God, who is the creator of heaven and earth. And so these issues that over which we are fighting are vitally important to the church. The outcome of these issues will det will determine, will decide whether

2:06:39 or not there is a Christian church on this continent in a hundred years. Because we've seen it elsewhere. You can have the gospel, you can have the truth, you can have the worship of the Lord God. And a hundred years later, all of your children are apostate. Look at Europe. Because it depends on exactly look at look at Ham. How quickly did the children of Ham apostatize? It seems in scripture like it was almost immediate. And then you had thousands of years of almost no Christians in Africa because of that. Most of the children of Shem apostatized, and so you had thousands of years, of most of those in the near and Middle East, no Christians. There are real consequences for this, and that's why it matters.

2:07:24 Fathers have to be faithful, or else they will not have faithful children. It takes one faithless generation to lose this. And we have had several. We are in dire straits. Again, we do have the advantage of we have the written material to which we can return that is sound, so we are not in as bad of a situation as those four thousand, six thousand years ago, whatever it happens to be. But we are still living in a country where a tiny percentage of people believe that Christ is God. Look at the survey data. If you ask the question Is Jesus Christ God? Most who claim to be Christian, even those who claim to be evangelical Christians, will say no. We are surrounded by apostates because of faithless fathers and grandfathers.

2:08:18 And you're absolutely right. There's we we have a presumption that we're living in the ashes of the faithful grandsons of Japheth. Obviously, at some point they they lost their way and descended into paganism. They quickly took back to the true God when he came to them in the Word. And that was the inheritance that their children received. That's the reason that we are Christian today, because our fathers were Christian, going back 1,500 years in some cases, including my own. The inheritance only works when it is transmitted, and that is why there's never been any claim that there is a genetic inheritance of faith. That's not the claim. But the same father who gives you genes gives you belief in

2:09:11 something, for better or worse, your father's gonna teach you. And either your the only choice you have when your father teaches you is to obey him, or to rebel. And if your father is faithful and you obey him, you're blessed. If he's faithful and you rebel, you fall away. Now if he's faithless, you must ob rebel in order to obey God, but only narrowly within the confines of what is necessary to believe in God and to obey Him. In other ways, you should still obey your Father, even if He's faithless, as much as is possible within your conscience. But we live in a time today where if the pastors who are running things in our synod and in the other Christian denominations in this country, if they continue continue on the trajectory they have

2:10:03 chosen, not only will there not be any Lutheranism in a century, Christianity will be wiped out on this continent because there is no one left defending it. And as I've said before, you can recite the creeds all you want, you can point to scripture and you can point to the book of Concord all you want. But if you tell lies in God's stead, you are serving Satan no matter what else you do. You can't lie about any of this stuff. And all that we see online, all that we see whenever these questions come up about race, about evangelism, about colonialism, and all these things that are when those words are used, things like colonialism and patriarchy, they're thought of as secular, they're thought of as political things.

2:10:52 They're not. They're Christian things. They are profoundly fundamental and vital to the faith, to saving faith. And their absence proves the absence of that faith. And we are in churches today where those things are despised, those things are attacked, those things are forbidden. To speak truthfully is forbidden on many subjects. In our churches That's only going to end one way. That's why we're talking about these things. If we can change minds, if we can help point people to scripture to understand that this is going on, and here's why it matters, hopefully a few more voices will arise and eventually we will begin to see the only sort of change that will be able to present the death of Christianity on this continent.

2:11:43 Because who knows what sort of faith came across the land bridge when when the American Indians came here? Probably none. But if they had anything, it long since died. It's gonna die again if it's not preserved. And as you said, it is up to us to preserve it because it doesn't take more than a generation to lose something entirely, and we are several generations deep in that apostasy. We often hear that everything is political, particularly given the realities of the age in which we live. what we never hear is the the more true and The more important statement, everything is also theological. Yes. Because everything you do or fail to do is a confession of what you believe or what you do not believe.

2:12:35 And so when we have pastors lying about demonstrable facts, what does that say to the world about what those pastors believe? It certainly isn't good. There are many things you could take away from that. You could take away from it that they don't really believe the things they say on Sunday morning. You could take away from it that lying about these core truths is entirely fine. You could take away from it that maybe they don't really believe in a creator god who created this world and all the constituent parts of it, who set it up in a certain way, if they are willing to lie about the way that he did things. And so the witness that they are presenting, they are giving to the world, is going to, if not drive men away from Christianity,

2:13:27 at least prevent them from ever coming into the church. And that is exactly what we see happening. The Zoomer generation and younger, many of them are not even going to consider Christianity because of what these faithless pastors are doing, because they see these faithless pastors just parroting all of the lies and the condemnation and the slander of the world. So when they see that, why on earth would you go to s to service on Sunday morning? Why would you do that? If I'm just going to hear the exact same thing that I hear from university professionors and the media and all of these others. Why would I wake up early? To go hear it at church. Makes much more sense just to wake up late and go get

2:14:15 brunch. And this is not a hypothetical. borne witness to this over and over again personally with our own eyes online as we talk to people. It it's gotten so bad in in the Missouri Senate that I honestly in good faith and good conscience could not recommend that someone join our churches anymore. Now, that's not to say that there are not specific congregations with pastors who are known to me to be faithful where I could direct someone. But as a church body, we are apostate. We are shameful. I am I am disgraced by what I see our pastors, by what I see our seminaries, by what I see our synod doing. They're a disgrace to God. These men are ashamed of Jesus and they think that they're gonna go to heaven because they said the right words in church

2:15:04 God warns them differently. And the worst part is w we're basically the best off. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's the thing. That's the that's the terrible part. Yeah. We're not there is there is we cannot make a black a blanket recommendation for our own churches. We can make recommendation for specific ones, and I do that all the time, a as I know you do as well, but we cannot make the general recommendation because we know there are these apostates in some of our pulpits, and nothing is being done to remove them, and as we have mentioned many times, you know, the district presidents and the presidents so called, God is not going to judge you differently from a bishop because you declined to use the term.

2:15:49 You are going to receive the stricter judgment of a bishop because you held the office. And so those men should fear, even though they don't. But when it comes to the other churches in the U.S., absolutely cannot make a recommendation to join them because we know the false doctrines that are being taught in those churches, so we can't any longer just tell someone go to church on Sunday. I mean, yes, I do post go to church tomorrow every Saturday evening. But But we have so many apostate churches that it is nearly impossible to give a general recommendation. And in particular parts of the country, there are no faithful churches. None. Not one. I I mean I live in the South now, and I can say with absolute certainty that the number of truly faithful churches here

2:16:44 is tiny. I can probably count on one hand the number of faithful ones within driving distance of where I live. And I am I'm being quite liberal in terms of driving distance. I used to live in LA, so driving distance for me is a considerable thing. And you're also lucky because that's an incredible concentration. Many people in most parts of the country are would be lucky to have one. It's why we're doing this podcast. It's why we're talking about these things. Because the intersection of everything that people see on M S M B C that's called politics, that's called worldly, that's called left-hand kingdom, all of it is rooted in attacking the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It's not ta attacking justification.

2:17:28 It's not attacking Jesus died for you. And that's why all these Lutherans have lost their minds, they've lost their bearings. They have no understanding of what's going on because all they can see is a battlefield in terms of sixteenth century wars that they're not fighting. We're not fighting a battle for justification. We're fighting a battle for creation. We're We're fighting a battle for how God operates in space and time. And He operates using election through fathers who transmit the faith to their sons. That is racial. Whatever the race is, you are of your father's race going back to Adam. But as those races branched out, they became distinct. They became distinct physically, they became distinct intellectually, they became distinct func

2:18:14 culturally, but and those things are permissible. Those are part of God's order. What is not permissible is that they also became distinct religiously. They adopted different faiths. These men who went to all these various parts of the world began worshiping the demons they found there instead of worshiping the true God. And you know, it happened as soon as they got off the ark. You by the time you get to the the story of Babel, they've lost their minds. They're doing evil on an industrial scale again. After God literally destroyed everything on the planet except for eight people, they're right back at it. And And Noah was probably still living. Yeah. I I I uh Noah wasn't even dead yet. Yeah. So these these subjects and these fights, I hope that these

2:19:07 I hope that the narrative arc that we're starting to build here will become clear to people in the fullness of time. These things are connected. And the reason that we talk about race is not because we care about race. It's because we care about how God made us. And we care about how God made us Christian. And our race is part of both of those. And And to deny that or to attack that is to deny and attack your creator, which is the first article of the creed. If you don't have the first article, you don't get the second article. You don't get Christ's salvation on the cross if you deny your creator. And we have churches who are second article only. They're Jesus on the cross and their gospel only.

2:19:53 But it's not the real gospel. It's not the gospel of Scripture. It's a fabricated gospel that plays well on the internet with people who hate God. And that should be a warning to any Christian. It's not a warning to these men and I think that on judgment day we'll we'll see how that plays out. But I am I'm not optimistic, but at the same time I'm not despairing either because all we can do is obey God and it is it is tremendously comforting to know that my name is written in the book of life from before eternity, and the gifts that I have are all from God, and whatever good I do in this life is from God. It is not of me, it is not to my credit, of my own volition, it is solely of and for and by God.

2:20:42 And that's enough. I my relationship is with my creator, my my church is where I attend and I'm thankful to have a good one. But these men will not ruin Christianity, even if they burn our churches to the ground. And we will continue to fight to make sure that we don't have to deal with either one of those. Because It should not be the case. And as long as there are faithful men who draw breath and who are willing to speak publicly, that will not be the case. It's only when the last man goes silent that that happens. And we are on the tail end of generations who did go completely silent. They abandoned all of these things. The inheritance we have been given today is an evil inheritance in our own churches.

2:21:25 The only good things that we are inheriting in our churches are centuries old. All of the new things that we're inheriting need to be set on fire and destroyed. And if the men responsible will not relent, then they can be put on the pyre too I mean in the in the Lutheran case there's really no better example than we have the Book of Concord, 1580, centuries old, and then we have in contrast the CTCR documents that should all be put in a pile and burned. Said it's word. And those of course are largely from the sixties. Yeah. No, they had everything on. I it's Truly Oh yes, but the sixties were a truly apostate decade. They were. Everything that came from the from the fifties and sixties needs to

2:22:12 be erased from history. Nothing can be left standing. Yes. Well it is the election episode, so I think we'll close out here, go through just briefly, basically eight sentences describing the eight points on election, what election is, from the solid declaration of the formula of Concord. So point one: the human race is truly redeemed and reconciled with God through Christ. Point two. Such merit and benefits of Christ are presented, offered and distributed to us through His Word and Sacraments. three. Christ will be effective and active in us, will convert hearts to true repentance, and preserve them in the true faith. four. The Spirit will justify all those who in true repentance receive Christ by a true faith five.

2:23:07 He will also sanctify and love those who are justified six. He also will protect them in their great weakness against the devil, the world and the flesh seven. He will also strengthen, increase, and support to the end the good work that he has begun in them. Last point eight Finally, He will eternally save, and glorify in life eternal, those whom He is elected, called, and justified.