The Gnostic Heresy

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still woe. Today's Stone Choir is part three of our four part series on the subject of the state of the church today and terms of foreign beliefs being imported into the church and being passed off as Christian. The first episode that we did specifically dealt with defining Christianity or defining religion in general in terms specifically of the source of right and wrong of morality. Because there are a lot of different sources of morality that we use today that we believe are giving us moral answers to things, but they're not from the Bible. But then we think they're Christian after the fact because we think they're moral. And so we talked for a couple hours about the fact that

1:24 that's really dangerous because if you're getting your morality from the world and the world is evil, you're getting your morality from Satan, and we should care. Last week's episode we specifically dealt with Judaizing. This was the very first heresy that attacked the early church, and we talked specifically about two big areas, and gave a couple other examples of ways in which the early church faced an attack from Satan that did not directly attack the gospel, not overly. It did subtly, and it did ultimately, but the attack was to say, okay, you're Christian, that's fine, but you still need to do the Jewish stuff. And the case we made in the Judaizing episode, and although I didn't say this explicitly during the episode.

2:08 I realized when I was re-listening to it. I think that we made the case the point repeatedly throughout that we didn't want to just give a list of here are the top five ways that the church today is Judaizing. Because if you leave something off of the list, then someone will say, okay, it was on the list, so it must not be Judaizing. What we did was we established the principle by which you can determine whether or not anything is in fact a Judaizing heresy. And so we highlighted a couple examples to show here's something that was stamped out in the church. It ceased to be Christian practice. And then it came roaring back in the last couple centuries. And now more and more we're told here's another new thing that

2:47 you need to do. Sure, you're Christian, that's fun that's fine. But if you want a more authentic version of your Christianity, you gotta go back and you gotta have more of this Jewish stuff that sure yeah, Christians never did, but we should be doing it so we can be more authentic. The reason we gave that premise is that you don't need a list of the things if you understand the principle. So by trying to teach the principle, I can almost guarantee this some point in current year, some new form of Judaizing is going to come along where someone will discover some new word or some new tradition or some new idea that is blessed by ancient Judaism, not the version of God, but the version of the people who

3:28 killed Christ. And we'll be told, if you want your Christianity to be more authentic, you need to do this thing too. And for those of folks who listened and who got the point, you'll be able to say to something that couldn't possibly be on anyone's list, hey, that's Judaizing. I recognize what's going on. Because Satan will use the old tricks, but he'll use new forms of it. He'll use the old sales pitch, but he's not going to try to sell exactly the same thing. And so the danger that we have today is if we just want a checklist to say, well, if it's this, this, and this, then I understand what's going on. Otherwise, it's fine, because there's nothing bad going on. This is a very vulnerable place where all Christians really have been

4:12 left today because there's no one left who can think about new threats. Today we're specifically talking about Gnosticism as it's been roaring back in the last century, not only in the church, but in our world at large. And when explicitly state at the outset, if you are autistic or if you're very knowledgeable about the history of Gnosticism as it's been recently researched and uncovered from the past, you're going to be really annoyed at our approach today because we don't care about the specific veins of Gnosticism in the first and second century. What we're gonna do today is we're gonna distill a few key elements that were present in all of the Gnostic cults, and we're going to present a case that those key elements are represented in

4:59 new lies that are told today. And so when we're doing an episode on Gnosticism, I want to at least make the plea that we are not being some of the sort of idiotic people you see online that they learn a word and want to just say, well, any I know that Gnosticism's bad, so anything I don't like is Gnosticism. There are people who do that. And so I'm going to acknowledge we're not being sloppy with the definition because we don't care about the specific implementation details. We're being specific about the underlying premises shared among all the Gnostic cults. Because this was the second key heresy that was frontally attacking the church is denounced uh obliquely in scripture. It's denounced very frequently in the early church fathers because it was

5:45 one of the very first attacks that Satan waged sort of from outside the church and sort of within. So we'll get up very briefly into the history of what we used to be believed, but we fundamentally don't care because once you understand a few of the key points that we're going to make about what beliefs were underlying their specific doctrinal claims, the specific doctrinal claims, some of which are coming back today and some of which are not. If someone's going to be completely autistic and will say, well, it doesn't meet any of these specific criteria that I found on this page, therefore it's not Gnosticism. Don't care, not the point. The point is that when you understand that there's a form of

6:26 a thing that can creep back in in a new form. The underlying principles are the same, but then the substance is the same, but the form can change subtly. That's what we have today. And so we're going to make the case that once you understand that there are a few key principles in the early Gnostic religion, you will find them playing out over and over today. And this is one of the cases, even more so than Judaizing, although there's a lot of parallels. I think the Gnosticism in some ways is even more dangerous of a heresy to the church because we're adopting it wholesale and we'll we'll make the case for some of that. The so we have kind of four basic areas that we're going to cover from the type of type of Gnosticism that it used

7:10 to exist that we're starting to see again. The first two examples I'm gonna get out of the way because they're they're important and they're interesting and they'll sort of pop up a few times throughout this episode, but they're not really the main point, which is why we're front loading them. The main point is going to be the last two elements that are going to be the bulk of this episode. The first element of Gnosticism that is sort of definitional to all the views that used to be held, regardless of kind of which permutation nearly 2,000 years ago, is that gnosis is the mystical or esoteric knowledge coming from directly partaking of the divine. What I found interesting when I found this description was that this

7:52 almost perfectly describes what Bonhoeffer was doing. I recently re-listened to the Bonhoeffer episode 'cause it was kind of part two of the MLK episode, and since MLK Day was recent, I was I was going back through the back catalog, and Bonhoeffer almost says this verbatim when Bonhoeffer talks about what he was trying to do to and in Christianity, he was specifically pursuing a post-Christian religion, one where the doctrines and the dogmas fall away, but the But the spirit and the essence of the thing can live on. Even when people stop being Christian, per se, they can still have God because they've they've partaken of the divine essence that they're getting from wherever. And the thing that Bonhoeffer and MLK had in common was that

8:39 they believed religion was man-made. They didn't believe that Christianity came from God and was revealed to man. They believed that men created religion in specific ways and specific times. And the way that that played out in the early Gnostic cults is that it was very much of the same vein. It was men because one of the elements of the Gnostic heresies was that we're just going to discover new secrets. We want esoteric knowledge. We want this mysticism. And that is how we're going to know that we're getting closer to the truth. And the truth is in their mind God. Now we called God truth as well because that's what God calls Himself. But the question is when you contrast what they're doing with

9:21 scripture, it falls apart. They're clearly not looking for the true God. What they're looking for is deep dark mysteries of things that are hidden that are occult because there's always an appeal in in every man in every age there's a certain appeal to hidden knowledge. We've done episodes in the past where we've sort of briefly touched on those things and specifically said we're not gonna go into them because we don't want to inflame those passions in the men who are vulnerable to them. Neither Cory and I are interested in delving into that crap because we know just enough to know how wicked it is. There's no enticement. There's some men when they hear about secrets, hidden knowledge, it piques

10:04 their interest. Like, okay, I want to learn more. That's that sounds juicy. I think it's part of the midwit trap that they're guys who are used to maybe knowing a little bit more than others. And so if you can learn some esoteric bit of knowledge, something you've leveled up, if you know a secret bit that nobody else knows, it makes you smarter, right? you are clearly the smartest man in the room when it comes to that one thing. And so someone who's sort of striving to climb the ladder of what's perceived as intelligence, will see hidden knowledge as a way of getting there. And the Gnostic esoteric impulse, there really is fundamental to man, and we find it everywhere. You find it in Freemasonry, you find it in all the cults,

10:47 you find in Mormonism, Scientology, there's a progressive revelation of new bits and pieces of knowledge, so you level up and you go deeper into the thing, which is in stark contrast from Christianity. Christianity does not have levels. There's complexity to Christian doctrine. And so as a newcomer, you're gonna receive spiritual milk because that's all you can digest. And then as you get more into your faith, you can you can handle solid food. But that's not progressive revelation. It's not levels of secrecy. It's simply that when you're early on, you have very simple questions, very basic questions. And as you start making more mistakes, subtle mistakes, by asking the obvious human questions, like, how does this work?

11:29 Well what about this? What about this edge case? That is when the heretics of old invented all sorts of false doctrines to fill in the blanks when God had not revealed something. And And so although Christianity can be as complicated as you want it to be, the simplest version of Christianity is just as true. In some ways it's more true. We said in the IQ episode, if you are literally retarded and you have good parents and faithful teachers, you will be a blessed Christian and you will have everything of Christianity you need. You don't need a bunch of facts and figures and details and arguments to be a better Christian. You need faith in receiving what is given correctly and just believing it. So if you have an IQ of sixty and you can't

12:15 function and your parents tell you about Jesus and that you did something bad and that Jesus forgives you because you are sorry for it, ta da, you're Christian. That's it. It's law, it's gospel, it's sanctification, it's justification, it's everything. And even though someone of that limited ability doesn't understand any of those words, he understands he did something bad and he understands he's forgiven and he's reconciled and he knows that Jesus is the reason for it. That's the entirety of the Christian faith. So right at the outset, just want to make the case that there's no there's no comparison between the fact that teaching more and more things about God is certainly a lifelong pursuit.

12:54 You can spend your entire life reading the Bible and only begin to scratch the surface. That's not the same as a sort of Gnostic, esoteric, hidden knowledge that is so appealing, and it's one of the ways it gets people distracted from what God actually wants for us. So this impulse is always present and it's really a dangerous one. To give a concrete example here of where this crops up in the modern church with the greatest frequency, I would highlight Pentecostalism. And I use that as an umbrella term. Because we see in Scripture very clearly that God works through means, not least of all being Scripture itself. God is given us His Word, and He has given us the sacraments. God works through means to create faith.

13:44 And largely even those Christians who are listening now and disagree with us on the sacraments, I would recommend you go listen to those episodes again. But even if you would disagree with us on the sacraments, you will at a bare minimum, as a Christian, agree that the word of God is a means God uses to create faith, and he uses that when it is read or when it is heard. Scripture is very clear that is how this works. Pentecostalism, as an umbrella term, would be all of those strains that are Christianity adjacent that claim direct revelation, inspiration, some direct connection to God where absent the means of grace which God has instituted, man can come to a saving faith of God, a saving faith in God.

14:37 That is fundamentally Gnostic, and Well will get to that with the second point here in a minute, but that is what you should think of when you hear or see Pentecostalism. It is a fundamentally Gnostic perversion of the Christian faith but Because again, God works through means. You do not go out and sit under a tree and just contemplate God or wait for God to come to you. He's given us his word. If you want to learn about God, if you want to learn about the things of God, use what he has provided. He has revealed himself to us in his word. And so anyone who tells you that you don't need the word of God, you just need to have a relationship with God, or you just need to contemplate God or anything like that, you're dealing

15:30 with a religion, but that religion is not Christianity. That is a strain, that is a thread, that is a form of Gnosticism. One other thing that stands out when you look at that definition is In terms of partaking directly of the divine, that's pretty much Eastern Orthodoxy as well. All of the meditating on God and the navel gazing and pursuit outside of Scripture, trying to find God where God does not say he reveals himself is it's the same sort of thing. It's the same sort of pursuit that's it's funnel fundamentally a Gnostic pursuit. And if you're EO, we're gonna beat up on everybody, but we're gonna spend most of the time, I'm gonna go spend most of this time going after Lutherans. So please don't tune out if like, oh man, they call me

16:16 Gnostic, what a jerk. Lutherans have some serious problems now, so we we'll we're gonna deal with Roman Catholics too. Like everybody has this problem because we're all vulnerable to it. So it's if we ever finger point in some other denomination, rest assured, we are at least as unhappy as things that are going on in our denominations. So So this is going to be a a pan-denominational bloodbath in this episode because we all have these problems. And sometimes they're subtle, sometimes they're profound. Like the Pentecostal thing is just wide open. They're just sitting there waiting for Jesus to tune in and drop new revelation on them. If anyone comes to you with a new revelation that is not from God, that isn't from Scripture, you need to put them out

16:59 the window, whether it's somebody in your church or it's some new teacher or it's a podcaster, that is deadly. Scripture condemns that. You need to deal with those people as a threat to your soul because it's not what happens. And so one of the other aspects of Gnosticism that it's not a huge issue in the church today, but it's always a danger. And this is the one of the other key elements from from the origins of Gnosticism is that this sort of secret knowledge or gnosis? Incidentally, they have the same proto-Indo-European root, G N O and KNOW pronounced the same. That's originally the word for no. So six thousand years ago you could have said no to someone and you would have been saying the same thing.

17:48 that that's just very interesting. But like it it it's that ancient a word to say you know something, same root as gnosis as gnosticism. And so it's I think important to highlight that the pursuit of knowledge is not itself bad. In fact, some of the the early context of the use of Gnostic was in some ways talking about learned men. He was kind of talking about some of the men that we find that were opponents of the early church, but they weren't dumb. You know, it was the Pharisees and some of the teachers, and even those who were outside of the Judaic cult, which was trying to destroy Christianity. There were other learned men that you know Paul went to in the Areopagus and elsewhere where they're philosophers.

18:29 They were always pursuing knowledge as just part of their daily life. It's not It's not inherently bad to pursue knowledge. The problem is where are you getting it from and then where are you doing with it? And so as Christians, our concern is if these n if this knowledge of religion and specifically of God is not coming from where God told us we would find it, we're in danger. And uh one of the one of the other aspects of of Gnosticism is that there was a belief then that knowing these specific things were the means of salvation. So it wasn't knowing that Jesus died for your sins and believing that and having faith in that the saved. It was specifically the knowledge. It was the one small portion of okay, now I have the

19:14 fact. And the problem with this sort of approach is that it turns the faith into magic. It turns it into a sort of witchcraft where if you have the secret word, then you've captured the power behind it. We talked about last week in Judaism. We talked about Yahweh. That's an example of that. Not necessarily of imparting salvation, but of the secret knowledge that we think is being progressively revealed. And so some we've discovered, you know, Jehovah in the fifteen hundreds or whenever, and then Yahweh less than two centuries ago. And now that's the new secret name of God that you have to use if you want to refer to God. And it becomes it becomes a case for some people that they won't refer to God as God.

19:58 They won't say I am. They'll say Jehovah. They won't call Jesus Jesus. They'll have to call him Yeshua. Why? Because it's somehow more authentic, even though it's absurd, even though it's not scriptural, but it's it's fundamentally Gnostic in a very small way. And so I want to make explicit in in this first section that when we say that these things are Gnostic in nature, that's not saying that anyone who says Yahweh or Yeshua is a Gnostic. That would be stupid. That would be what people who I don't like that. That's just Gnostic. No, we're not saying that. We're saying that the the impulse underneath the desire to do that to say, well, I need a better name for God than God. God's not good enough.

20:37 I need I need the secret name. Congratulations, that's a Gnostic impulse. Full stop. In any century. I think it's interesting to note that one of the things that you see a lot, particularly on social media with a lot of guys, particularly younger guys who are what's called cage stage, where you just discover your faith, you or you're just reinvigorated. Especially if they're if they're a little bit intelligent, you want to dig into the stuff. You want to read more, you want to learn more, you want to learn as much as you can because you're you're excited about God, you're excited about Christianity and about your faith. And the very subtle error that I would caution is potentially Gnostic in that space is that when the desire to accumulate knowledge and

21:24 facts ends up being the intermediate point that you focus on, instead of focusing on you like you at some point you accumulate so much knowledge and you get such a big library and you have so many arguments and talking points for all these different fiddly sixth century councils almost no one's ever heard of, but you have really strongly held opinions on them. When that becomes your predominant focus, it's entirely possible to begin to lose sight of God. Because although those arguments in those days were pointing to God, they were about God, your focus can potentially be on having the knowledge itself. And you think, okay, I've accumulated this stuff, I have these facts, I have all these details, now I'm a better Christian.

22:08 And you're just not. You could be totally ignorant of all that stuff and potentially be a better Christian than you are with it. Not because the knowledge itself is bad, but because the emphasis it was placed on pouring out all that energy, like to what end? If you can eloquently argue with somebody on Twitter about a sixth century church council, so what? What has that done for anyone? Now maybe there's some interesting point, like you know, we're talking about a historical point here, but I want to highlight that when Corey and I tackle historical subjects, it's superficially, and that's deliberately. It's not that we're not capable of digging deeply into these things, is that I am very pragmatic about what I want to talk

22:49 about. When we approach a subject, it needs to be immediate, it needs to actually be hurting people today. Sixth century councils aren't hurting anybody. First century Gnosticism isn't hurting anybody. If you go down the checklist of the specific cults that existed, you're not going to find them by and large. What you will find is the underlying spirit of those cults re-emerging in all these little pace places by varying degrees. And so that's what can certainly. It's not that there was some weird thing in the first century that's re-emerged and so let's spend all this time talking about history. It's that when we know that the evil thing in the first and second century bore evil fruit, it had nothing but evil surrounding

23:33 it. In all of the church history it was always condemned it. And I if I can say, yeah, this new thing has the same roots as that, I don't need to worry anymore about how good or bad it is. I know it's evil because I know that there's a Gnostic root underneath it. Now I'm not saying that cage stage guys are Gnostic at all. It's I'm not being stupid about it. I'm just saying that there's a there's a desire that we all have to want to know more, to want to level up. And Christianity doesn't have levels. Christianity has depth and substance, but it's not the same thing. It's like there are ranks, there aren't secret tiers, there's no, there's no paywall, there's no Patreon level for Jesus. You're in or you're out, and that's all.

24:15 And the more you know, the better off you are. But all the things that God gives us are free and they're in scripture. It's interesting when you look at the transition from Hebrew to Greek in the Old Testament, that was the end of the oral tradition, because the oral tradition was only needed when you had vowel pointing, when everything had been written down in the Tanakh, and then it was translated by those faithful scribes into Greek, it was fully fleshed out. There was no longer a need for an oral tradition to explain anything from scratch. Now it was certainly still valuable because insofar as they were teaching faithfully, it was consistent with the text. But at that point you could hand a Greek Old Testament, a

24:58 Greek Tanakh, the Septuagint, to anyone and if he understood Greek well he could come to faith by it all by himself he didn't need any secret knowledge to be able to access it and I think that was it was a very interesting moment in history where in a way God really put oral tricks tradition to death. And what we've seen since then is wherever oral tradition is preserved, it causes problems because it's invariably departing from the text. And so just knowing a bunch of stuff isn't going to save you, but it can potentially create a problem for your faith if you think, well, I gotta know more. I'm not a good enough Christian. You don't. You don't have to listen to a podcast to be a good Christian. You have to know what we know or care about what

25:40 we care about to be a good Christian. Being a good Christian is very simply believing in God and obeying Him. And if your conscience says, you know what, I think I'm missing out on something, I should spend more time in your Bible, do that. And you'll have more of what God wants for you. But there's no progressive revelation. It's all right there for uh for the taking. For those who spend a lot of time on some of these ancient conflicts and various minutia, and by that I don't necessarily mean that they are unimportant, because they may very well be important. But there's a difference again, as Wo has just said, between importance and relevance. But I think a good standard, a good question for you to

26:22 ask yourself if you think you may possibly be in that camp. Would you be just as happy arguing with someone on the internet about your favorite fantasy army or military or faction. And if that's the case, then maybe you just like arguing and you've found a niche in which you can argue about something that really doesn't actually have any import or any importance in the current context. And if you are trying to invest that time in a Christian way, I'm not saying that investing your time in a hobby isn't Christian, because of course Christians can have hobbies, but if you're trying to invest that time in a way that you believe is explicitly a Christian use of that time, which is to say a pursuit of the Christian faith itself, then maybe just read scripture instead

27:13 of the old counsels, because by and large, those battles aren't live. These are not things over which we are having actual fights today. These are not things that are endangering souls today. So just read scripture, rather than reading whatever counsel it happens to be. Go and read several books of scripture. You can probably do it in about the same time. It's going to be of greater utility to you to read through scripture again, however many times you've read the book. It's always profitable to read it again. There is another issue that I want to bring up here because it's an important way to frame the issue of knowledge and the division here between the sort of Gnostic conception of knowledge and what it does, and the Christian conception.

28:07 This has come up in a number of other episodes, but I will go over it again here because repetition is how we remember things. There's the There's the tripartite division within Christianity with regard to knowledge and how we react to that knowledge. And that would be notitia, as sensus, and fiducia. So to take notice of the thing, to assent to the thing, and to trust in the thing. These are terms that have basically direct equivalents in English, so you can readily understand even the Latin. What distinguishes Christianity is the third. It is fiducia, it is trust. It does not save you that you recognize the Bible exists. It does not even save you if you recognize the things in the Bible are true.

29:00 What saves you, what saving faith is, is the trust in those things that those things were undertaken by God for you. No, they were undertaken, of course, for the entirety of creation, because Christ redeemed creation in his death and resurrection. However, It is that personal faith that applies that salvation to you. This is the subjective justification. This is what saves you. And that is fiducia. The distinction here is that these Gnostic cults inevitably rely heavily on a sensus. Now they do play around with notitia as well because a big part of the cult, the initiation into the cult, is just to recognize the existence of this secret knowledge, to be given access to it, and then to accept it at a sensus level, that's what

29:57 makes you a part of the Gnostic cult. That is what they really are at their core, at their foundation. And you see this in basically the division between any religion that is not Christian and Christianity. Because Christianity relies on faith, relies on that trust, relies on that third level, the belief. That is what saves you. Whereas in every other religion, it's generally works, but they also have this aspect of secret knowledge, particularly the mystery cults in ancient Greece and Rome and other places, but we're not getting into the specifics of the history in this episode, as Woe already said. But it's helpful to have this framework in mind not only during this episode, but when you are listening to things out in your

30:52 Out in your everyday life, when you are assessing things in our culture, is this Gnosticism that is being sold to me as Christianity? Because that is often the case, you'll have a Gnostic cult that'll wear a Christian mask. The Mormons are one of the best examples of this, even though very few people in this audience are going to fall for the Mormon claim to being Christian. There are plenty of people in the United States and elsewhere who believe the Mormons are Christian. Maybe a little weird, off in their little corner doing their own thing, although there are now millions of them, but still Christian, because they Because that's what they pretend to be. They will wear that mask until you're a temple Mormon, then they

31:35 drop the mask and tell you that Satan is Jesus Christ's brother and all these other things, and you're going to rule a planet when you die. But you need to be careful as a Christian, to make sure that you aren't falling for a demon that just happens to be wearing a mask. Because Satan appears as an angel of light. He's not going to come to you as Satan, because if he comes to you as Satan, the odds you're going to fall for that are pretty low. But if he comes to you and says, I'm Christian just like you, brother, and I've discovered something, and you need to hear about it. Your hackles should go up, the hair on the back of your neck should stand up. You are in danger with regard to your eternal soul.

32:17 And so bear this framework in mind, because Christianity is fundamentally different. It is different in kind from these false religions. Because what distinguishes Christianity is faith. It's not secret knowledge. Now I'm not saying that knowledge isn't important, because again, all three of these levels also apply in Christianity. It is important to take notice of the fact that Christ did become incarnate, that he did die, that he was resurrected. It is also important to assent to those facts as facts. But a Christian believes in them, trusts in them, has faith in them. That is what distinguishes Christianity. And that is one of the ways that you can tell false religion from true religion and Gnosticism from Christianity in this case.

33:07 The fact that Mormons today masquerade as Christian is just historically absurd. Until like the last thirty or forty years, it was never the case. They saw us as separ they saw Christianity as a separate competing religion. Just as it's it's a say it's just as absurd as the claim today that Jews are white. Forty years ago it wasn't the case. It was never the case historically. The identity of the thing was one way. And then suddenly when it becomes advantageous for the group to identify differently, they just morph. And this is this is one of the fundamental problems that we're facing continuously. If something has no actual roots, if it can just transform on the fly like a hallucination, you you can never get your hands

33:54 around it. It's always a hallmark of deception. Something that's true today will still be true in a hundred years. Even if things change, maybe it's no longer true because the thing is wiped out, but it was true today. You can't undo the truth retroactively, which incidentally is really the next point. One of the other key fundamental elements of Gnosticism, the early religions, that is where we spend a lot of time today, is the demiurge. We've talked about this before. One of the key doctrinal claims in the Gnostic cults was that there were two opposing gods. And the cults varied depending on whether or not the demiurge of before Jesus was equal to the the newer god or if they were subservient did one create the other.

34:48 There were they argued over that, which is why the fiddly autistic arguments over well that's not Gnosticism because blah don't care. The demiurge is the important part because the demiurge is the old testament god. That's a phrase that you've heard. Oh that's the old testament god. Well if the old testament god is not the same as the new testament god then they're both satan because god is eternal he doesn't wink in and out of existence. There's no one God here and then he changes and he's something else later. That is not our God. And we've talked about particularly in the perfect hatred episode, talking about how it's become common in Lutheranism in particular, but certainly everywhere, that

35:28 men will say sure, the Old Testament, which is a terrible name, by setting old and new in opposition, suddenly it becomes you can just discard it like well that's it doesn't really count because Jesus came so now we have this new stuff. Well, Jesus came pointing to the old stuff. The scripture that Jesus preached from, that the apostles preached from, that Paul reasoned from, was the Old Testament. It was the Tanakh. It was all the stuff that we call old. For them it wasn't old. It was it was the faith. It's still the faith. What we have the benefit of today is everything that they said and wrote down is also recorded for us. But it's all an explication of what was said before. So there's not two religions.

36:09 There's not a Judeo portion and then a Christian portion. It's all Christian because it's all pointed towards God. It's a fundamental element. Like if you if you never learn anything else from Stone Choir that you can hang your head on, please let that be it. Christianity is eternal. Adam was a Christian. You're a Christian. It's all pointed to God. What we see with this Gnostic heresy actually manifesting today is that guys will actually say, well, the old testament God did this and then things changed. And it's very notable that in in the in the Gibbs essay that I referenced in that perfect hatred episode, in what we see today in many of the new Lutheran commentaries, they go out of their way to reference the God, the God in the Old Testament

36:58 as Yahweh. They don't call him God any more. Well he don't say I am, where it's relevant. They say Yahweh. We talked at length last week about how that is a Judaizing, and B it's a satanic invocation. To say Yahweh is invoking the Antichrist. There's no other explanation for what happened in the last two centuries to produce those sounds. And one of the reasons that they won't call God God is because demons can't call on his name. If they call him Yahweh or Yahweh God, they're changing the variable. They're talking about something different, and they will explicitly say that. Anytime someone talks about Yahweh in the Old Testament and doesn't also talk about Yahweh in the New Testament as the immediate God in

37:44 that age and in our age, they're talking about the demiurge. They're talking about a bifurcation of multiple deities, competing deities. And one of the key elements of the demiurge was he was evil. The evil of the Old Testament, the God who killed people, the God who was was judgy, the God who didn't just had these rules, that is seen as evil. And that's that's a perception that some people have today of their God, or who they claim to be their God. Can God be your God if you call him evil? I don't think so. I don't think you can call God evil and have a promise of salvation. And in our own denomination, this happened last year. In direct condemnation of this podcast, the LCMS put out a press

38:30 release where in the name of every pastor in the synod they explicitly denounced numerous teachings of the Bible. They specifically highlighted one that's incredible. They said that genocide is always evil. When you look at the Old Testament, we made the case in the episode against the Antichrist, went into detail on how to say something like that is inherently to say that God is evil Is evil. When the president of the LCMS and all the pastors and all the district presidents who participated willingly in publishing that in the name of all Christians, and indeed, this was said in the name of Christ we condemn it. That was how Harrison ended that paragraph. Specifically said that to commit genocide is evil.

39:13 He was talking about the demiurge because the old testament God was evil. And then there's a new God when Jesus showed up. We have a new set of deities and everything's hunky dory now. That's that is straight up Gnosticism. No holds barred, no equivocation, no need to play any games with definitions. This is a Gnostic heresy full stop. It's on full display today, not only in Lutheranism, but in all Protestantism and really in pretty much everywhere, because it's a necessary part of the global religion. Because when you look at the Old Testament, you find slavery, you find racism, you find women being treated as women and not as equals, you find the slaughter of wicked people on moss. Everybody gets killed.

39:59 They even like there were places where God said not only kill every living human, he said kill all the animals and all the livestock. So kill everything. That's our God. If that's not your God, then you don't have the God of the Bible. Like there's not an Old Testament one and then a New Testament one. There's one God. That is the Christian confession. So this is one of those places where Christianity today has come to a crossroads where guys who will just they'll they'll subtly adopt the Judaizing practice of saying, Well, yeah, I was Yahweh God in the old testament, and then Jesus came. And so, you know, they play games and say it's the same God, but when the confession is called into question, they'll say racism

40:42 is bad. There's lots of racism in the Old Testament. There's lots of slaves in the Old Testament. And the Old Testament never says it's bad. Like we did in a whole episode on slavery as a Bible study. There's nothing. Even the New Testament doesn't say it as well. But so we try to make sure that we call out when people play these games to try to set the so-called old against the so-called new. Scripture is scripture, it's all breathed out by God. It's all useful for reproof and rebuke and correction of error. Every word of it, every jot and tittle, that's what it says. So we have to believe that or we have to say God's a liar and why are we wasting our time? There are much easier things to do with your life if there

41:21 is no God than this. It's not fun. You like the rewards are few and fleeting, the punishments are frequent and sometimes more than some people can bear. This is not what you would invent as a religion. It's what God has given us because it's true. And so when people come along and say, Oh, I have the secret revelation, let me improve it. Let me find a new sin. As the the racism episode And the feminism episode, these things that were not sins for thousands of years became sins by virtue of Gnostic Revelation. Now, the game that they have played is that they didn't say what the Mormons say. They didn't say this is a new revelation of Jesus Christ, because that would be a bridge too far. Even idiotic Christians, even Christians who are almost asleep, would detect, hey,

42:09 new revelation from Jesus Christ, that doesn't sound like Christianity. So what they do? They said, Oh, it was always a sin. It's always been a sin to do these things. This has always been wrong. And when someone like us comes along and says, well, doesn't that mean that everybody in the Bible is in hell? Like, oh no, don't worry, but they didn't, they didn't get it. We get it now. That's progressive revelation. That is a type of Gnosticism. And so we're not again, we're not making the fiddly case that we just want to shout Gnostic and call everything Gnostic. When you look at the moving parts and you see that this these specific details are the machinery of the Gnostic cult, you'll find it emerging in new forms.

42:49 You know, if if I say the Yahweh is not only Judaizing, but it's also fundamentally Gnostic, if you want to be autistic about the definition of Judaizing in in the Bible, well, there were things that we said last week that are not condemned in scripture, not in the t in terms of they this were this was Judaizing heresy. Yahweh in particular, the word hadn't been invented yet. So if we say that that's Judaizing and you use what was Judaizing in the first century, obviously we're wrong because there was no Yahweh, so it can't be the same. That's why the conveyance of these principles is why we're doing these episodes. If we can explain to you, when you see these moving parts acting as a machine and they're producing certain results, you can

43:33 identify the underlying cause. And the underlying cause, when you have guys running around saying Yahweh and saying that God sinned in the Old Testament, and your ancestors who were Christians sinned and they didn't repent, and so according to Christian doctrine, they must necessarily be in hell. They would usually won't get go that far, but there's no way to reconcile that with what the Christian faith teaches. If you have unrepentant sin, you're damned for it. Only the sins that we take to the cross are those that are forgiven, which is why it's a Christian duty to throw everything on the cross. Say, Lord have mercy on me, a poor, miserable sinner. That's every one of us. Doesn't the more you learn about Christianity, the more miserable a sinner

44:16 you will realize you are. Because the more bad things you get rid of, the more you'll realize how many little subtle things are lurking. But it doesn't beat you down. It's supposed to give you an appreciation for the gospel that God loves you so much that He paid for the price for all this crap these these evil things you tried to do and the stupid things you didn't even know about. He paid for all of 'em because he loved you even when you were his enemy. That's the gospel. This is one of the things about Gnosticism that should be somewhat easy for most Christians to detect, at least when it is blatant, because this sort of dualism is rampant in the world. It is a standard feature of most of the false religions of

45:02 the world to various degrees. Sometimes good is stronger than evil, sometimes evil is stronger than good. It depends on which mythology. But you have this sort of balancing between good and evil that you see across the world in these false religions. And that is not the case in Christianity. Satan is not God's equal. Satan is not God's opponent in the sense of being equally matched as you would be in a tennis match or something. Satan exists because God permits him to continue to exist for a time before damning him to hell for eternity. He'll still exist, which is not good news for him. It's not good news for anyone in hell. But there's no dualism in Christianity. There's good and evil, but good wins and it's not even close.

45:54 Evil is permitted for a time. Evil does not have control. Evil did not create. Evil cannot create. It can only pervert. And so the sort of dualism that we see in these Gnostic groups, which often takes the form of the demiurge being responsible for the creation of the physical world. Now of course we're not talking about Plato and his conception were talking about the later form of Gnosticism for those who are familiar with, say, Timaeus. But this later form of Gnosticism that is the kind that is a problem for the church that is creeping back into things things places the creation of the material world within the demiurge. The demiurge is what created your physical body. It may be that God created your soul and created the parts

46:54 of you that are actually good, and we'll get more into that issue of the distinction between the spirit and the flesh and how Gnosticism conceives of that distinction. But that simply is not Christian, because God created you, and you are spirit and flesh. Again, we're not going to get into whether you are spirit and flesh or spirit mind and flesh in this episode. That's not the point here. And having that debate, although it may be interesting, is not actually that relevant to this topic. The distinction is between the spirit and the flesh, and both are good. We'll get into this more at the end of the episode. But they're both good because God created both. As Christians, we do not get to deny that God is the

47:45 author both of our body and of our soul. If you deny that He created one or the other, then you are attributing the powers of God to something that is not God. Because if God didn't create your body, something created your body, because your body certainly exists. And so this is an error that sometimes comes up and has come up in the Christian church in the past, this is one that is actually relevant because people today still get this one wrong. And they may not even understand they are getting it wrong. In our fallen state, as we currently find ourselves. We are corrupted by original sin. Our nature is not original sin. Our flesh is not original sin. These things are in their essence good, because they are still creations

48:39 of God, even in your fallen state. God created your body, God created your soul, God gave you life. These things, in so far as they are the creations of God, are good. They are tainted, they are corrupted by original sin in this life until you are restored fully in the next life. That corruption is the work of Satan, but it is not an original creation. It's not a creation at all. It is a corruption of God's good creation. And it is vitally important for Christians to distinguish these things, because if you say, for instance, that your nature in your fallen state is original sin, then what you are saying ultimately is that Satan created human nature. Because Because the corruption that is sin can be attributed to Satan

49:33 bringing it into the world through our first parents. And so as a Christian, you must be careful here. God created human nature. Satan has corrupted it. There is a distinction there. Satan has not created any part of you. You can attribute again the corruption to him. He can be blamed for that. And he should be blamed for that. That's not to say we don't also bear blame, of course, because we bear blame for our sins, we have inherited original sins from our parents, etc But our nature again not at risk of ad nauseum because this is important and Christians need to understand it and take it to heart. Your nature, even in your fallen state is a creature of God created by God, and so any system that attempts to prop

50:24 up this sort of dualism, where this part of creation is attributable to the demi urge and this part And this part of creation is attributable to God, and this part is good because it's from God, and that part is evil because it's from Satan. That is from Satan. That idea, that thinking is from Satan. Because that is Satan attempting to elevate himself to the level of a God. He'd like to elevate himself to the level of God. He can't do that. But if you believe that he has created something, that he has created your nature, whatever it happens to be, you are attributing to him the powers of deity and you are making him your god. Now you may also have other gods, but you now have a false god. And so this dualism

51:12 is alive and well in the world today. We see this not just in other religions, but we see it being imported into Christianity. And we see it primarily in this distinction, this false distinction that is drawn between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as Woe was highlighting. Because if you can say, Well, that was then and this is now. You're saying that God changed. And if you're saying that God changed, well God doesn't change. So that's a different God you have in the Old Testament if you say that He is different from the one in the New Testament? Because Jesus Christ is the God who walked in the garden. Jesus Christ is the God who met and ate with Abraham. And then And then went on with the angels to oversee the

52:05 destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Jesus Christ is the one who took on flesh and walked around ancient Israel with the apostles. Jesus Christ is the one who was nailed to the cross. These are things that He did bodily. And He is God then, He is God now, He will always be God. You cannot say that the Old Testament God is a different God. It is the triune God in the Old Testament and it is the triune God in the New Testament. And so if you find something that God did in the Old Testament and you disagree with that, you think it's wrong, oh God couldn't do that. You have a different God. You don't get to pick and choose what God may do or may not do. What God has done is right and true and good.

52:52 If you think it is not, you are an error. God is not an error. This is something that the modern world seems to think it can just declare, this is good and right, and so anything else that doesn't agree with what I have said is good and right, must be evil and wrong, and they will go to any length in order to justify that. You'll have men like Bonhoeffer who will go through the Old Testament, and disagree with this piece and that piece, and oh well that was a different God, or that was a different time, or you have to interpret this, or you have to deal with it differently. You'll have some in the East who will say the conquest of Canaan was actually metaphorical and they didn't actually kill anyone.

53:33 These are people who are trying to make excuses for God or for their own religion, often both. And that is not Christian. Because a Christian reads what God has done, and says Amen. What God has done is right and good. If you disagree, you are in error, and so when God commands the Israelites to take slaves, if you think that slavery is a sin, you are in error. When God commands the Israelites to genocide the cities and the peoples in the promised land, if you think that genocide is a sin, you are an error. Anything that God has ever commanded a man to do was not sin, because God does not command sin. Anything that God has ever done was not sin, because God does not sin. There isn't even a way to say that in our language.

54:28 We don't have a word for it. Because merely to imply that the possibility of God sinning is a thing is incoherent. So it's not actually fully correct to say God does not sin or God did not sin, because it is above and beyond that, even to put God in sin, other than saying God hates sin in the same sentence, is basically incoherent. But our language doesn't really encompass the necessary concept there. But this distinction that we draw, not we in this episode and not we personally, but the general we, this distinction that is drawn by many, particularly many pastors and teachers today, who will say that was then, and this is now, that is Gnostic dualism being brought back into the church in order to deal with the fact that

55:19 these men are one uncomfortable with what God did in the Old Testament, because it's God, it's the same God, and to hide the fact that they don't actually worship that God. They have a totally different God. They have created in their image. And if you look carefully, this is a problem that we have with many Christians that perhaps reveals they don't really read the Bible. If you look at the things that they say about their supposed New Testament God, right, this is a different God. He just loves everyone and he never hates and he doesn't use mean words, it never says anything that's coarse or never's blunt or anything like that. Anyone who would agree with that has clearly not read scripture, as

56:06 well was mentioned in other episodes, just go read the words in red letters. If you think that Christ never said anything that was harsh or blunt, or brusque. I don't know which scripture you're reading, but it's clearly not the one written by God, using men as his scribes inspired men. Even if you just read the words of Christ, the God being prophet being propped up by these prophets of the modern world, that's not the God of Scripture. And there is a consistency through all of Scripture. God is not inconsistent between the Old Testament and the New Testament. God didn't have a manic episode in the Old Testament and he's settled down in the New Testament, now things are good again. God is consistent because God does not change, and if your God

57:02 changes, if your God has changed, then you have a God, but it is not the Lord God. The last of the main points that we want to make today, which is going to take up the rest of the episode, is another of the key tenets of all of the early Gnostic heresies, and that is that the human body is a prison for the true self rather than a part of it. In other words, your spirit, your soul, your mind is trapped in a meat suit. You are you are not your body, fundamentally, because as Corey was saying, the body was created by the demiurge. The demiurge was evil. All of material creation was evil. And one of the first false prophets of this teaching was Marcion. We've talked about him before. I've publicly accused Jeff Gibbs, the retired professor from LCMS's Saint Louis

57:59 Seminary, who wrote the wicked essay on hatred a Marcionite, particularly because he set the so-called Old Testament God against the New Testament God. And it's it's everywhere. Let me read this passage about Marcian to you and we're going to talk about a couple different things that emerge because it's fascinating how relevant these bits are today. Again, that's why we're talking about this. It's not that Marcionism has been resurrected wholesale, but when you look at the bits and pieces and you see them being recycled in Christian churches. That's notable today. And it doesn't matter if you say, well, it's Marcionite or not, I don't care. It's evil. This is one of the earliest, most prevalent heresies that was directly

58:43 condemned by the entire church, caused a firestorm. It was a huge problem for the church. Here's what this says. According to Marcion, the god of the Old Testament, whom he called the Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal deity of the Jews, whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death. In contrast, the God that Jesus professed is an altogether different being, a universal God of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy. Marcian also produced a book called Antithes, which is no longer extant, contrasting the demiurge of the Old Testament with the Heavenly Father of

59:28 the New Testament. Marcian held Jesus to be the Son of the Heavenly Father, but understood the incarnation in a docetic manner, that is, that Jesus' body was only an imitation of material body, and consequently denied Jesus' physical and bodily birth, death, and resurrection. So So there are a couple things here. One, you know, Marcion confessed the demiurge. He said there were two different gods, just as we find in our pulpits today. But he also, how did he describe the demiurge, the tribal deity of the Jews whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice. You may remember something almost exactly like that described in the very eastern less orthodox episode where we talked about the orthodox so-called hatred

1:00:18 of penal substitutionary atonement. Because that's precisely what it is. Legalistic reciprocal justice is just Marcian's way of saying penal substitutionary atonement, saying that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins. Because the Orthodox will say that there's no penalty for our sins that Jesus paid. They say Jesus died on the cross to make the story better. But the idea that a God would punish Jesus for our sins is hateful. They go right to the limit of calling God the Father the Demiurge, but they get around it by saying, well, that didn't really happen because it's not Christianity. PSA is hated in Marcionism. It's hated in Eastern Orthodoxy. And again, if you're listening, I'm not picking on you guys.

1:01:04 Look, we're picking on Lutherans too. We're all under the same bus here. This is a disaster for the church because whenever these false beliefs got picked up, the fact that things of Marcion, the damned heretic, who's universally condemned by the church, are being recycled in our pulpits, or whatever the EO have. That's a bad thing. It shouldn't happen to any of us. And the second part of that, towards the end, specifically talked again about what Corey was saying. If the demiurge produced the material world and Jesus was God, then Jesus couldn't have a physical body, could he? Because he could not participate in evil by taking on human flesh. So see, this is where the rubber meets the road with this

1:01:47 denial of the flesh. Jesus, because he's perfect, can't have a body, but then you've denied his his birth, his death, his resurrection. Christians, according to the creeds, according to scripture, believe if you deny those things, you deny God. You are not Christian and you are going to hell. Jesus had to be born bodily as a man, because it was prophesied, because it's what God said he was going to do, and it's what God said he did, and he showed us that he did it. And Jesus died the same way, and he was resurrected the same way. The only way for Christianity to be true is for this Gnostic heresy to be false. And so the reason that this matters today is not necessarily they're not recycling this part of Marcionism.

1:02:33 They're not saying that Jesus wasn't necessarily resurrected bodily. What they will say is the other stuff about the body, that the the b your body is not your true self. And this is a case where, as we spend the rest of this episode talking about this, we find that the church today of the new global religion is in perfect accord with the global religion appreciators in every other walk of life. Men who have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever will agree with all the things we're going to say for the rest of this. Because the notion that your body is not yourself, well, that is necessary to deny the race is real. If the only way for race to be real is if God did something bad because the other side of the equation that

1:03:22 these guys will say is that race is a product of sin. There would never have been any human races if not for sin. We went over in the DNA episode and in the soteriology episode on race about how that's a lie. But it's something that I still hear regularly online. People think, well, yeah, like we have race, but that's only because Adam fell. If not for the Tower of Babel, there'd be no race, which is just complete nonsense. But fundamentally and much more importantly, it's a denial of the flesh. Because it goes to the point the Cory made about the demiurge producing the physical. If you believe that your the fact that you are white or black or Asian or whatever is a product of sin, you are saying that your body per se is a product of sin.

1:04:07 And where that becomes a problem is in the resurrection. Because forget this life, you assume for the sake of argument that that is true, that you only have a race today because there's sin, and therefore your race is sinful. Even if you ignore Revelation seven, where it makes very clear that all the races of men stand before the throne of God in perfection, where nothing evil can exist, only that which is perfect can be there. So that proves that wrong all by itself. Even if you ignore that, you were still left with the question of if my body is sinful per se because I am white and I was never meant to be white, whatever I am, it's not a white man. It's not a man at all, incidentally. It's just a spirit being trapped in this meat.

1:04:53 What's going to be resurrected on the last day? The Christian faith, scripture says that you, I, my actual physical body, the one sitting here and speaking to you right now, waving my arms in the air as I'm talking, you can't see 'cause thank God this isn't a video podcast. This body will be raised on the last day. That's what Job said. He said, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I will see him with my own eyes. He believed that he was going to be resurrected, his body, his eyes, my body, and my eyes will be resurrected, and so will yours, and so will the unbelievers. As Cory said, that's really bad news for them, because the bodily resurrection applies to everyone. Incidentally, this is something that divides some of the other cults from

1:05:37 Christianity. There are those who subscribe to annihilationism. They say that only the the those who are saved, only the elect will actually be resurrected from the dead. And everyone else just vanishes. Why? Because you can separate the body from the soul permanently and there's no more you. Now death itself is clearly a separation of the body from the soul. That's absolutely a fact. And that's why it's traumatic and it's evil and we see it as a corruption. We see it as the worst thing that it can be imagined. You can suffer any indignity as long as you're still alive. But to die, it's finished. When annihilationists say, No, only the saved are raised from the dead, or when someone says, Well, sure, you're going to be raised from

1:06:21 the dead, but it's not going to be this body with these sinful things like being white, then what is raised from the grave? Because it's no longer your body, it's no longer you. And this is why this is such an incredibly deadly and very active heresy today. That we've Cory and I have triggered this heresy on the spot, on contact with LCMS pastors, by discussing racism. When we talk about the races, we specifically pointed to them personally. Brian Wolfmueller, pastor in Austin, Texas. He's very well liked and on YouTube. I used to like him. I used to think he was a good faithful pastor. Until he started attacking the resurrection of the dead in order to defend against racists, because Galatians 3.28 says there's no neither Jew nor

1:07:09 Greek. And so Corey made the point to him on Twitter, well, what's going to be resurrected for the dead Jew and the dead Greek and the dead me and the dead Corey and the dead Brian? What's going to come out of the grave? And Scripture says, Job says it's my eyes, this flesh, my body, is what's going to be raised. Brian had to deny the resurrection of the dead in order to defeat racism, because he's on the other side of the Gnostic heresy. He ceased to be Christian when it comes to these subjects, because Gnosticism that hates the body, that says it's the product of the demiurge, must necessarily have something different resurrected from the dead. Now, there's absolutely open questions in Christianity about what is resurrected.

1:07:55 It's my body, but I don't know which version. What age will I be? Will I have gray hair? You know, when I was born, I had a heart defect. I didn't know until I was about forty years old when the valve started failing. I would have been dead six years ago if they hadn't replaced the valve. The valve that I have in my heart now is a cow valve. When I'm resurrected from the dead, am I gonna be 0.2% cow? Probably not. I don't think there'd be any purpose in that. But you know, all these things go wrong with all of us. If someone has an arm amputated, if you lose your eyesight, if you're born without body parts, what comes out of the grave? We don't know. We know that it will be perfect. And we know what the perfect form of humanity is, because we

1:08:38 we can clearly discern that from creation. We can discern what Adam's body would have been like by looking at all the variations of human bodies with their different flaws, and we can see the good in individuals and say, well, if you mash on the good together and you extract all the evil, Adam's gonna be a lot like that. God doesn't give us specifics and we don't need to worry about it. I don't worry about it. But I want to distinguish between that and what we have with heretics like Wolfmuller, who will openly deny the resurrection of the dead, saying well it's it's some sort of spirit body that comes out of the grave. That's Gnosticism. That's saying that your body that you have today is fundamentally evil

1:09:19 and God has to give you something different for it to be perfect. This is dangerous stuff. This is the death of Christianity. Because when you lose the resurrection of the dead, whether you deny that the damned are also resurrected bodily, they are. They're going to be cast bodily into fire. What is a spirit carriage if it's cast into fire? The damned are cast bodily into fire. We're all going to get up on the last day. We're all going to be put back together. And the sheep go in one direction, the goats go in the other, and then it's either paradise or it's eternal suffering, bodily suffering. That's horrible. I don't want that for anyone. Even the men who hate me, I don't want them to suffer

1:09:57 that, particularly for my case, 'cause it would be stupid. Why hating some podcaster would put someone in hell is beyond me. Please just I wish they would repent, and I forgive them for my sake, but ultimately, when they hate me, it's not me, they don't care about me, they hate God. These men hate God because God is the God of the old and the New Testament. God is the God that did a racism and did a genocide and did a misogyny, and scripture is unapologetic about that, and they hate it. They hate everything about it. And so they will go to the very heart of the Christian faith by denying the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, according to the creeds and according to scripture, because it's necessary to

1:10:41 own the racists. Think about how serious that is. The fundamental parts of the Christian faith just go out the window in order to deal with these new made-up sins. So we're talking about Gnosticism today. These aspects of it are not a dead issue. They're alive and they're destructive and they're sending men to hell. This is serious stuff and it's happening right now. That's why it's worth us discussing because we got to get in front of this. And one of the problems that the church has today that Satan is exploiting is that these are new variations on the old theme. Satan didn't use these attacks in prior centuries. So what does that mean? It means that there are no prior church fathers to which we

1:11:25 can reference and say, well, here's where he said this and we can trust his judgment, and here's a good sound argument. Okay, this is a settle issue. That's bad, this is good, we have an argument. We have to actually recognize first, here's the pattern, it's replaying, it's not completely novel, it's a form of Gnosticism, it's a form of Judaizing, but it's the same heresy, but it's wearing a new skin suit. And so things that weren't even done in the first and second centuries are being done in the church today. They're being done in Christian pulpits today. The sheep and the pews don't know any better. And I said earlier, if you're retarded and you have a good teacher, you're fine. That'd be fine.

1:12:04 There'd be no problem with that The problem is that we don't have good teachers. We have men who will, for the sake of owning the racists on Twitter, they will deny the resurrection of the body. And at that point, all of Christianity is canceled. That man cannot come back from that without specifically repenting of that blasphemy. Wolfmüller's a blasphemer. Harrison's a blasphemer. These men who participate in these lies thinking, oh, it's a small thing. Like it's it's better to say this than to let someone be racist in our church. So we did that their episode earlier. Like this stuff, these seemingly minor peripheral issues, they will always ultimately cut to the heart of the Christian faith.

1:12:47 Because Satan knows what he's doing. Satan's not dumb. And the fact that he's recycling this stuff century after century, it's not just that he's lazy, as he doesn't need to be creative. We're stupid. We're fundamentally evil in our fallen nature. The things that we are attracted to are always going to be bad. God has to replace that with a sanctified nature by perfecting what was originally supposed to be us. It was the us that God desired when He foreknew us before eternity. But then sin came along and it corrupted us. And so we're naturally turned towards all these tricks that Satan can play over and over again and we gobble it up. So again, we're not being fiddly with historical points and we're not

1:13:35 playing fast and loose with a definition to try to play a game here, but to say that if you believe that the first century heresy was was demonic, as it demonstrably is, you must necessarily conclude that these new teachings from these men who call themselves Christian pastors are also demonic. And the fruit is right there. When the discussion came up about, well, you know, what about the resurrection of the dead if there's neither Jew nor Greek? The first response from these guys is, well, God's not going to resurrect us. He's going to resurrect something else. We don't even know what it'll be, but it won't be us. Well, if you're not your race, what about your sex? That's the next part of this, transsexualism.

1:14:14 It we open the door to every modern thing. And that's where the stuff outside the church comes in. Because then it's not just about church doctrine. It's about what we see playing out all around the world today. Make sure that we are abundantly clear with regard to Woe's rhetoric about the resurrection. We do have some information about the resurrection and the state of things in the resurrection in Scripture, because of course Christ during his ministry on earth was a foretaste of that kingdom, and he restored sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and the ability to walk to the lame. And yes, those are the terms that we should use. It's a tangential issue here, but an important one nonetheless.

1:15:00 He restored these things because he was restoring the way these men were supposed to be. He was removing the defects. He was removing these things that are not supposed to be part of creation, because they are the result of sin. They are the result of corruption. They are not part of God's good design. And so, yes, if you are blind, you will see in eternity. If you are deaf, I don't know how you're listening to the podcast, but you will hear. I guess we do have transcripts. These things will be cured in the resurrection. So woe is not going to be some certain percentage cow. He will have a heart that no longer has that defect. But to turn to the issue, the fundamental, the core issue here. There are two reasons that Woe and I talk about things such

1:15:54 as racism, such as the races, and by racism I mean the fact that it essentially does not exist. Exist. Yes, of course, if you hate someone purely because he's a different race, that is actual racism, and that is impermissible for a Christian. Preferencing your own is not racism, but we're not really discussing racism in this episode. We've gone over that previously, you can go and re-listen to that. But the point that I want to make here is the twofold reason that we constantly return to these issues. One is because they are relevant to society and we do talk about things that are relevant to society. We talk about them in a Christian light, but we talk about them because they are relevant, they are important, they have very real

1:16:40 consequences for the society in which we live, and the societies the societies in which all of you live, because we have listeners from around the world. We have listeners from quite a few countries at this point. The second reason, and to deal specifically with the issue of race, that we talk about the issue of race or any of these other controversial issues, is that they matter to the Christian, and the reason for this is very simple logic and yes, basic very, very basic logic course that it's important to understand. This is called modus ponens if you want the Latin name. The Latin doesn't matter. It's just if P, then Q. So hold that in your mind. The reason this matters. If A, then B. If P then Q.

1:17:32 And so if you have one thing, another thing necessarily follows. Okay? So if you say that you have P, then you will necessarily have Q. But to summarize this, without getting deep into the weeds, the reason that this matters is that issues like race and sex and all these core aspects, these fundamental parts of our physical bodies, if you deny them, you are denying the physical created reality, which means you are denying the creator. So these issues that we'll bring up that may seem like they're tangential or not particularly important or why on earth are Christians focusing on these things? Well the reason that we're focusing on these things is that if you deny the reality of race, you're denying the reality of the

1:18:31 flesh, you're denying the reality of a creation, you are effectively asserting a form of Gnosticism. And as Woe said, and as we've highlighted elsewhere, how does the resurrection work in this sort of scheme that is being built up by these men who claim to be Christian and yet deny fundamental aspects of the creation? If you say that race isn't real, then as what are you resurrected? I am ethnically German and a little Scottish. That is what I will be in eternity, because if I were anything else, I would not be me. It is incoherent to say to say, Well, if I were Chinese, if I were Chinese it wouldn't be me, it would be a Chinese man. And I am not Chinese. The same thing works in reverse. If a man who is Chinese were German, well he wouldn't be

1:19:30 the same man. These things are fundamental. The same is true of sex, and hopefully Christians are still in a position, and I know that those who are listening are, but hopefully still in a position to recognize that there's a fundamental difference between between the sexes, and so it is utterly incoherent to say, Well, if I had been born a woman, I would not be me. I am male. All of these things are part of my nature as God created me they cannot be otherwise, because if they were otherwise, I would not be me. And so God must resurrect these things in order to resurrect me. Because if these things are not resurrected, then God has resurrected something else. God has created something else, and that would be to make

1:20:18 God a liar And ultimately, that is the accusation that these men are leveling against God. Because ultimately, they're not disagreeing with me, they're not disagreeing with Woe, they're not disagreeing with any of you who have interacted with them on Twitter or elsewhere. They are disagreeing with God because they are denying what he created. If a man stands up and speaks the word of God and someone shouts at him that he's a liar, he's not shouting at the man who stood up and spoke, he's shouting it at God. And that is why, for instance, in scripture, when we see those who rise up against a prophet and say the prophet is a liar or say the prophet shouldn't have that position or someone else

1:21:02 should be able to unseat him from his position. God will take offense because it is God who was insulted. Yes, the prophet is also insulted, but the ultimate insult, the ultimate accusation is directed at God. And so that is true any time you speak the things of God. And so these men who attack these things aren't ultimately attacking us. They're attacking God, and they will have to answer for that one day. But as Christians, we have to affirm these things because if you hold a belief that necessarily entails a denial of Christianity, you are necessarily denying Christianity. You cannot hold beliefs that are contrary to Christianity, to state it more simply. If you have mutually exclusive beliefs, so there's a set of things

1:21:56 that Christianity says are true, and there's a set of things you believe, if these do not agree, you have an idol, at least one. You need to purge that idol from your life. And so it may be that it's one of these idols that is very common, that are very common in our culture. It may be race, it may be sex, it may be ability, it may be disability, maybe any of these various things that have been turned into idols either in and of themselves or by proxy in our culture. If you have them as part of your religion, whether you call it a religion or not, then you have a religion that is a different religion from Christianity. It is incompatible with Christianity. And that is why we keep talking about these issues, why we

1:22:44 raise them, why we word things the way we do, in particular I will word things in order to elicit these responses from people, because I am highlighting where they have an idol, where they are worshipping a false god, where they are using language that is incompatible with Christianity. It is that pinch of incense to Caesar. There were Christians who were willing to go to the lions because they wouldn't give a pinch of incense to Caesar. I don't know how we could possibly think that the things that we see supposed Christian leaders and teachers doing every single day could possibly be conceived of as less than a pinch of incense. These are men who are devoting their time, their name, their honor,

1:23:29 their lives in some cases, to defending these tenets of a false religion. They're defending a form of Gnosticism. This is a new secret knowledge. This isn't something they got from Scripture. This is something they got from the world, and then attempted to shoehorn into Scripture because they want to deceive you as well. So when someone tells you that, for instance, because it's one of the best examples, we will keep using it, when someone tells you that racism is a sin, tell them to give you a verse. There is no verse that says that racism is a sin because it simply is not in Scripture. There are things that God says in Scripture that to day, if you took them out of context, or you changed a couple of

1:24:15 words but kept the meaning the same, all of these priests of the new modern religion would tell you that's racist and you can't say that. If you said that all Cretans are liars, well they're going to understand that one because that's a quote from scripture, they might catch that one. But if you change it and pick another stereotype from somewhere else, make fun of any other group, which is fine, you're allowed to engage in that sort of humor, but pick one and use that. They'll tell you all that's racist, you can't do that. It's the same sort of statement that God makes in scripture. If you think that God sinned, then the religion you have is not Christianity. It is another religion. It is a competing religion.

1:24:56 It is, in fact, this modern Gnostic religion that says, we are more enlightened. We have progressed. We have these new beliefs that are distinct from those backwards, less progressive, less advanced people we find in the pages of scripture. And so what we believe is right and so we'll rewrite scripture to fit the things we believe, which is what they're actually doing. When you change the meaning of a word, you are not actually interpreting the underlying text. You are changing the meaning of the text. You are rewriting the text in effect. And that is what we see happening with these false teachers, with these false pastors, these wolves, these false shepherds Shepherds. In particular, with the case of racism, they'll try to say that

1:25:48 well, partiality and racism are the same thing. And so when it says that you can't be partial, well there's a ban on racism. They'll try to use that one, because that's the comeback for the ones who are a little better trained. They'll immediately use that one against you when you tell them to point to racism. That's not what partiality means. Partiality is the use of false scales. It's the use of a false measure. And scripture is clear about that. God hates false measures. He hates a false scale. That's in multiple places in Scripture. But as Christians, we need to be very careful about these things, and you do need to think of them. It's not necessarily in a philosophical sense, but it is in a

1:26:30 logical sense. You need to think, if I believe A, or if I agree with this person who says I must believe A, what are the consequences of this belief? Because it may not be so simple that it's A and then B is rank heresy. Satan is often more subtle than that, because most people can figure out if there's that immediate connection there. But it may be that if I believe A, I must necessarily believe B, which necessarily entails C, and it happens to be that C is the heresy. Well you can't believe A, because necessarily entails means that it must follow. And that's the goal. The goal of Satan is to extrapolate this out just enough that it gets past your defenses. Well that sounds Jesus. That sounds kind of Christian, and it's said by someone who has

1:27:28 M Div behind his name and pastors a large church and all of these things that are supposed to be signals to tell me that this is a Christian. The signal that tells you whether or not it's Christian is whether or not it is in God's word. So if that person is just telling you, Well, to be a good person, to be nice, you can't do X, Y, and Z, and you must do A, B, and C, no tell me where it is in God's Word. Because God has given me His Word. He has given me His revelation. He has told me what I am to believe and not to believe. Now, yes, we will abide, of course, continue to hold there is both special revelation, which is to say scripture, and there is natural revelation, which is to say the natural world.

1:28:17 There are things that you can discern from the natural world. However, nothing you discern from the natural world will ever contradict what God has revealed of Himself in Scripture. And so if you find that these men are telling you things that disagree with God's word, that you cannot reconcile with Christianity, that necessarily entail some false belief, they are trying to drag you into a false religion. They are trying to get you to give that pinch of incense, they are trying to get you to bow down before an idol, and ultimately they are trying to drag you with them to hell. As we've mentioned, two of the most obvious examples of created reality being accessible even to the unbeliever is sex and race.

1:29:06 Any man can look at a man and a woman and tell the difference the difference. Any child can. Animals can. Dogs will have preferences for one sex versus the other. Incidentally, dogs also have preferences for race among humans. They know which humans are more likely to mistreat them. The sexes are plainly discernible. It's a created reality at every level, at the level of DNA, at the level of the body, particularly even before puberty, but especially after puberty, when the secondary characteristics become predominant. And then even in death, when when a fully grown male and female die thousand years later you can dig up those skeletons, and tell which one was a man and which one was a woman.

1:29:52 Not only by the size, not only by the bone density, not only by the shape of certain types of bones, particularly by the pelvis. Because a woman's pelvis needs to be able to transit a human skull when she gives birth to a baby. It's got to go from one side to the other. Man's pelvis doesn't need that. There's no possibility of getting a baby's head through a man's pelvis. It's literally physically different. You could have an entire lifetime with without a shred of knowledge of God or of scripture, and still come to the correct scriptural conclusion about the fact that the two sexes are different, that the two sexes are unequal, and that they were made for different purposes. I've said before, I am a physically completely average man, and yet

1:30:40 I am stronger, meaner, and more capable of violence than almost any girl. And a man whose one standard deviation bigger than me is going to be basically superior to every girl who exists unless there's a complete freak. Because that's just how it works. I'm totally average, totally normal, totally nothing, and yet I'm bigger, stronger, and meaner than almost every girl. Because I'm a man and that's it. It's just free and it's automatic. This is not a distinction of better or worse in terms of the way we usually use those words. It's just different. If I'm bigger, stronger, and meaner than a girl, and I'm not using that to be big, strong, and mean against her, then if for whatever reason she's with me and there's a benefit to those

1:31:31 qualities, I can protect her better than she can protect herself. Now of course, in a world with sin where there is always the possibility that the bigger, stronger, and meaner could hurt the smaller and weaker, girls instinctively understand that they that they shouldn't ever be alone with certain guys. Arguably, girls should never be alone with anyone who isn't, you know, a relative or a husband. Now that sounds incredibly extreme, but it's worked for many cultures. One of the reasons that it has worked is that the guy who's bigger, stronger, and meaner, if he sees a pretty girl who's weaker and he's like, well, I want her, and I don't care what she thinks, and I don't care about the law, he can

1:32:11 do something harmful and she has no choice. And we're gonna talk here for a minute about some things that some people may want to fast forward for five minutes or so, because it's necessary in refuting the Gnostic heresy of your body not being yourself, unfortunately to talk about some some things that are harmful. So we're gonna talk for a minute about things that some kids might not want to hear if you've been the victim of a a physical crime, especially one of that type of nature, you might want to skip ahead because this might be unpleasant. You know, it's funny when we we hear things like trigger warnings, the thing, Well that's just stupid, that's just weak. Frankly, if someone has had something terrible happen to them, and you

1:32:57 can do them a favor by not reminding them, that's a good thing. It's obviously taken to absurd extremes by leftists, but the principle is not a bad one. You know what? There's some content in this thing that it's not for everyone. It doesn't mean it's sinful or that it's bad per se, but if someone wants to opt out of that, let them. So just saying now, skip ahead for five minutes if you don't want to hear that sort of thing. For everyone else, one of the key proofs that the Gnostics are lying about the fact that the body is not self is that when there's physical violence done to yourself, to your body, it's personal. It's completely personal. And it's why some people become permanently traumatized by that sort of

1:33:46 injury. If someone is is violently attacked, if someone if a girl is raped or otherwise assaulted in such a manner, it's personal in a way that nothing else is. It's violative in a way that nothing else is. Because it involves your body. It's not hypothetical. It's not external. It's not conceptual. It's physical. And the physical damage and harm that is done to an individual bypasses all the intellectual and all the other protections that we may have. There's not necessarily an amount of mental toughness that can insulate you from being physically injured by by deliberate cause. You know, if someone wants to hurt you, if they're malicious and they do something harmful, it affects a in some cases a lifelong

1:34:37 permanent change in that person. That's one example we gave last week with circumcision. Circumcision of an infant where they're strapped cruciform in thirty-six thousand nerve endings are sliced off without anesthesia. They go from being comfortable in the n womb for nine months, completely protected, to the most unimaginable excruciating pain possible, and it causes permanent changes. The baby doesn't remember, but the brainwaves remember, the body remembers, the self remembers, because the the platonic separation of mind and soul and body is they're distinctions that are valuable to a point, but they're not distinctions of they're details of self. We're every man is effectively a type of trinity.

1:35:31 You know, God has the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Man has body, mind, and soul. I'm not suggesting that they correlate directly, but there's there's a sense of typology there, even if it's not actually typological. What we are as our bodies, as ourselves, is it's indistinguishable. You cannot separate the man or the woman from her body and take it somewhere else. And these sorts of of violative attacks on the person prove it because in some cases they'll fracture people. One of the horrible examples that we've alluded to before, and I'll say just briefly here, torture as it relates to MKUltra, a program that was developed in the nineteen sixties by the United States government specifically exploited this fact.

1:36:23 Exploited the fact that you could cause psychological and physical torture of a person to split the mind from the body to cause disassociation. And they tried all these experiments and they created a methodology of doing this specific thing. And they mastered it. And you know, we think about that as sort of being ancient history, and that's just it doesn't happen anymore, and that's really extreme. And you know, the Manchurian candidates are who cares about you know disassociation, that's not a big deal. One of the ways that this has played out since then is in the form of things like nuclear drills, and today we have active shooter drills, where little children, who probably don't understand mortality yet,

1:37:08 are told there's an existential threat outside the door that's about to kill you. I don't know what kill means, but I'm terrified. I my teacher is telling me this is serious. You know, they they make these things so elaborate that they're actually terrifying for little kids now. That is the end stage of MK Ultra because what does it do? It takes a child in an innocent state where they don't know about death and they don't know about terror, and it imposes that sort of terror in a way that rips them away from what they thought was a safe, comfortable place. In this sort of mass conditioning that's done now, it's not the full version of MK Ultra, it's it's a distinct diluted version for a slightly different purpose, but the conditioning effects are similar.

1:37:54 When kids are continuously told, you may suffer grievous bodily harm or death at any moment. That's horrifying. We talked, I think, last week or the week before about the fact that there's certain types of evil knowledge that children should be spared from. People shouldn't know these things. And yet unfortunately we all learn them at some point. And so the sole purpose of talking about it is to illustrate that when when you do something to the mind, when you do something to the body, you can actually permanently damage a person internally so that they can never completely but be put back together. That's not to suggest that that's hopeless or that there's no forgiveness or whatever is applicable in the situation.

1:38:35 It's to say that just like cutting off your arm or gouging out your eyes, these internal damages, this sort of psychic damage to the mind and to the soul, can be just as permanent and just as scarring. And so when someone has suffered that, we need to be empathetic. Don't laugh when they need a little more cushioning to stay away from these things. That's a that's something that's Christian. If you can spare them suffering something that hurts, do it. And thank God that you're in a position that you can, because not everybody will care. Because the division of the body, body, mind, and soul is an artificial one ultimately. You are all of those things at once. You are either a man or a woman.

1:39:17 And that informs everything, informs your body, informs your psyche, import informs your personality, it informs your intelligence even. Because although men and women on average are about the same intelligence, men go much further to the extreme. There are not nearly as many female geniuses or female retards as there are men. Men go much further to either side. So if you imagine the bell curve, the female bell curve for any particular race is much narrower. The male bell curve is wider because we have greater variety. That's intrinsic. So that's in part about the mind, but it's also about sex because it's at the body. And it's ultimately about the self. You know, and something like retardation is a it's a regression from

1:40:01 the norm, and it's something that is a defect. It just as being blind is a defect, being lame is a defect, being paralyzed. When Jesus performed miracles, as Corey said earlier, he removed those things. Men who were either suffered injury or sickness or were blind or lame from birth, God healed their bodies. And he did it for three reasons. One, it fulfilled prophecy. Two, it proved that he was master of creation, that he was the creator. And so when he said I can forgive your sins, and he will fix the lame, and he will in fact cause people to be raised from the dead by speaking, you can believe that it's that he can actually deliver on that promise. And three, as Corey said, it's undoing the effects of the fall.

1:40:48 If someone is certainly dead, or if they're lame or deaf or mute or blind or paralyzed, if they have leprosy or some other sickness, this is the fall. This is damage to the self. It is not intrinsic to the self. No one's intrinsically a leper. No one is naturally blind. Even if they're born blind, even if you've never been able to see for a day in your life, that is not how God intended to create you. And this is a key point because this is something that's happening very often in our churches. It didn't used to be the case until the last twenty or thirty years. But now we have churches where people are afraid to say, this is a disability, this is a defect. If you're listening and you're blind, as Corey said, you weren't supposed

1:41:30 to be blind at birth. Now it's I'm not making fun of you. I'm not saying you're worse than, but the fact that you can't see is something that God will fix. When you're raised on the last day, you will be able to see. And God proved that by healing the blind, as he was prophesied to do. God fixes the products of sin because there won't be any in creation. What didn't he remove? He didn't turn men into women. He didn't turn people from one race into another, erase their race entirely. They were still the same body that they had before. And it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't they forgot something. It wasn't that he hadn't proven that point yet. It was that those things are intrinsic. Those are how God made you.

1:42:12 When God wrote my name in the book of life from before eternity, it was the name of a man. Same with Cory, same with you. If you're a woman, it's the same thing. You are You are what you are because God made you that way. And yet today we see first we had the equality of the sexes saying, Well, sure, they're the same and they're interchangeable, which needs leads necessarily into transgenderism, because that is one of the most pure expressions of Gnosticism to say this this body, this flesh, it's not really me. I feel like I'm a woman. I'm feeling girly today. I think I'm gonna do all the things I need to do to butcher this body and turn into a woman. Doesn't work. All I've done is wrecked a man's body and turned into something

1:42:56 that's neither. I'm still a man inside, and therefore tormented. And that's what we find. the suicide rates for those people are horrific because they're being tormented. They're being demonically oppressed. And then when people don't say, Stop, this is evil, don't do any of this, when there's no one to intervene and condemn the deception and the damage is done to the body, it's permanent. And there are many accounts from people who have repented from having gone through one of those evil procedures. And they come out the other side and they realize that they were always the sex that they were born. You know, oh I was born that way. As though that's some accident. No. That is the substance of who you are.

1:43:38 And this is crucial because it own doesn't only apply to us. To go back to what Marcian said about denying the birth, death, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus was born a man. He was not born human. He was born a man. Because Adam was created a man. Woman was taken out of man. Jesus on the cross was fully anatomically correct just like any other man. He wasn't some hermaphrodite, he wasn't splitting the difference, he wasn't a spirit being, he was a man, and he died bodily as a man, he was resurrected the same way. When we go down this path where we say that your body is not yourself, you will ultimately get to the point where you have to deny the resurrection, which is where Marcians started out.

1:44:25 And this is something else we're seeing today. Wells recently changed their hymnals, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which is generally considered more m conservative than the LCMS is not really, but they have a different set of problems. We're all fighting these battles together. They recently changed the Apostles' Creed to say to say that Jesus was born human, not born a man, because of egalitarianism, because of anti-misogyny. Because well, Jesus died for everyone, and so we want to be inclusive. You have to include everyone by denying that Jesus is a man. And it's a small thing, but that's what Satan loves. He'll take generations to do this damage. He doesn't care if you're not tricked by switching from Jesus as

1:45:11 a man to Jesus as human, he'll wait for the next round. And he'll come back and say, Well, human, what does that even mean? This sort of incrementalism is made possible in part by our appetite for Gnosticism. And when you deny the body as everyone is today, I mean, identifying with pronouns and all that crap, all these things that we all know about and tend to laugh about when it is not fought facially and condemned not only as false but as evil, but particularly because as Corey's saying it is a denial of how God made you. If you refer to a man as a woman, you are denying how God made them. You are denying God. You cannot deny their creator or your creator without denying that that creator saved you.

1:46:00 It's part and parcel. And see, we're not trying to make race an issue of salvation. We're making confession of God an issue of salvation. Because we don't need to do that. God did that. You can't confess false gods and have the one true god's forgiveness. If you call God a liar and say, Well you didn't make this, I'm I'm actually a girl or, you know, I'm I'm Hindu, I'm I'm Chinese, I I'm all these different things. I don't care what you say. You're not the boss of me, Dad. That's a spirit behind all of it. It's just it's it's facially absurd. It's stupid. And yet we're told to tolerate it. Because self identification is the purest form of Gnosticism. It's saying this body, this evil garbage, this this meat sack, none

1:46:42 of this is me. don't pay an attention to this. I'm just a spirit. I'm s a spirit trapped and listen to my ideas and blah blah blah. It's it destroys what God has made. Because you're not just an idea, you're not just a soul. You're everything at once. And whenever any one of them is damaged, it damages all of you. This becomes an issue of salvation because it's a denial of how God created you. Not only transgenderism, but also transhumanism, which isn't a problem in the church yet, but it's certainly a problem in the pagan world where there are guys who think that they will be able to live forever. Some are trying to enhance their human bodies. Others are looking at ways of extracting their consciousness, of jumping into

1:47:28 a robot, or jumping into another human body, or uploading into the cloud so they can just live on AWS and pay the fees and then they'll always be present, even if they don't have a body. And we laugh at those things and we think they're absurd, but by measuring in degrees, they're gonna get someplace place. they're gonna do portions of it. They won't do it perfectly, because as soon as you remove a body from the from the mind, you have you've broken the person, just as death breaks us. When the when the mind dies with the body and the soul departs, there's a rending that is terrible. It's something that we can visually see as bad. If you've ever been to the funeral with open casket of a loved one or a relative, you look at that and you're like,

1:48:18 that's it's them, but it's not. And it it's a very viscerally unsettling, uncanny valley thing because it still looks like them but and you know they do stuff with makeup and things so like it seems realistic but you know that if you touch them they're cold and no mammal is cold. This you know that it's naturally awful. it's completely terrible. And that's why it's so traumatic because it's not natural, it's a separation. And so these lies that are being told today about trannyism and about your race not being who you are, and about transhumanism being able to separate these things cleanly, ultimately they're all destructive. And that's what Satan wants. He wants to destroy. He wants to remake and destroy creation because he hates God and

1:49:03 he hates us. He hates us more than you can possibly imagine. Because we were created in God's image and we were given a gift. And he doesn't have those gifts. And he despises us and he's devoting everything Every moment that he has, I'm gonna say I was saying waking moment, but he never sleeps. He's always prowling like a roaring lion. He hates us because we're different than because as an angel, he is spirit. To whatever degree he can manifest, it's not truly who he is. The supernatural is a totally separate category. And that's fundamentally what we get into here when we deal with these Gnostic things where men say we can separate body and mind and soul, we're gonna create new things, we're gonna

1:49:47 have subsets of things, and it's still gonna be you. You're playing with a fabric of creation, and it's not that it's impossible to do any of it. It's that it's impossible to do what they're claiming to do. They can destroy and they can create horrors, but they're not going to deliver on their promises because all the promises are satanic promises intended to deceive and to destroy. They're not intended for immortality, which incidentally is another defiance of God. The entire reason that the flaming sword in the hand of the angel was placed outside the garden was to keep Adam and Eve out of the garden because if they could still eat from the the tree of life, they wouldn't die. What happens if you don't die?

1:50:32 You can't be resurrected. Our death is necessary for us to be reunited with God in perfection. So all of this stuff, all this denial of the body, the least of the dun denial of the resurrection of the dead, it's not coincidental. It is a it's an arrow pointed directly at the heart of the Christian faith. And all these bits and pieces that we pulled together today, they all work towards that same end. When you start looking at this pattern, you find that there is hatred of this doctrine in this form that God has presented in this way that He's given us things. It's just all hatred for what God does. And it's substituting something that the world embraces. The global religion loves all this stuff.

1:51:15 It says no, you that's maybe you're burdened with it and we'll pray for you, but you don't have to change. You know, it's it's very common now among deaf ministry for those people to be told they're not going to be healed from being deaf. That you're going to be deaf in the resurrection. You're fine just the way you are. You're not fine. There's something wrong with you. Your body is defective. Just as my body was defective when I had a flap, that it was just it was flapping around. It was it never worked. My cardio was always terrible. I had no idea why. Turned out I had a valve that eventually failed. So they had to fix it. And now I things work again. I was born defective in lots of ways.

1:51:52 That was one particular one. I can hear, I can see, but my heart didn't work quite right. Some people can't see, they can't hear, they're missing arms or legs. They you know all these things are less than what God wanted us to be. All these things are what God will restore in the resurrection of the dead. As soon as you start pretending that your body is not you, you're saying, I don't care what you do. It's whatever, just let my soul go, you know, play a harp in heaven. Like that absurdity. No. This body will be resurrected on the last day. I know that my Redeemer lives, and I will live to see him with my own eyes. That's a that's a promise from God, and it's one that we have to remember, because Satan's trying to take it from us.

1:52:33 And if he can take that away, then all these other lies are up for grabs. And the more you adopt and the more you're not terrified of, the more you think, well, maybe I can baptize that doesn't doesn't seem like it's a threat on Christianity. You know, annihilationalism, like I don't want people to go to hell. So, you know, maybe they just vanish. No. They're resurrected bodily just like you. And then they're thrown into fire. If that seems bad to you, maybe tell 'em about Jesus. If damnation is inconsequential, then who cares? Like it's this sort of separation of act and consequence is something else Satan wants. It's all about separation from God's word, from his will, and from his promises to us.

1:53:12 Everything that God has told us about and has given us is for our benefit. Everything that Satan has given us and told us about is terrible. It's the worst possible thing. And more and more our churches are adopting what Satan is giving us and despising what God has in the same breath. The church is not going to make it. The church will not make it if we continue down that path. So these narrow episodes about this seemingly weird stuff, we have to nip it in the bud because it will corrode the church from the inside just as it's corroding the world around us. And we are the ones who have to stop it because we have no guarantee that if we screw this up and let all this stuff slide that there's gonna be anything left for the next

1:53:55 generation to even know what Christianity was about in the first place. You are like most of the other things in your environment surrounding you, what is called a gestalt. And that is simply a German word that means a thing that is greater than the sum of its parts. And it is also an English word because we just straight imported that one into English. So capitalize the G or don't capitalize it as you prefer. But this is true of so many of the things that surround us, the pen that I'm holding is a gestalt. Because certainly it is made of I believe this one is macrolon, it has some metal, few other components. If those were all separated out and set on my desk, no one would call that a pen.

1:54:42 It would just be a handful of miscellaneous materials. Useful, certainly, they have utility still, but it wouldn't be a pen. It wouldn't be the same thing. And we see this, as Wo mentioned, when someone or a pet something dies. is the separation Of the spirit and the mind as well from the body. The gestalt is gone. Which means the person is not there because you are the gestalt. You are not just your finger, you are not just your spirit, you are not just your mind. You are all of those things. You can't take one part and rip it away and have the whole remain. And that is why death is a traumatic thing, not just for the one who dies, but also for those who witness it, who are around after it.

1:55:43 Because it is unnatural, it is not meant to be a part of nature. Death was brought into the world by sin. Death will be removed from the world, defeated by Christ. It already has been, but that ultimately resolves itself in the second coming and the new heavens and the new earth. And so when we think about this Gnostic tendency to deny the reality of the flesh. The reason that it is such a danger to Christians and to Christianity to the Church is that again it is ultimately a denial of the creation and therefore a denial of the creator. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that Satan just wants to destroy hates God, he hates the things of God, he hates the people of God, he hates all that is good and true and beautiful.

1:56:44 And so he just wants to destroy. But there's a nuance to it here. God took on human flesh. That sets man apart in a way that the angels and the demons are not. The demons hate that. The angels want to look into the mystery of the incarnation and what these things mean. The demons hate it. But at the same time, they envy us, and we see that envy in a number of places, in the reliable recountings of exorcisms, we see this, we see it in Christ's interaction with the demoniac and the herd of pigs. On the one hand they hate the flesh, but on the other hand they envy the flesh, but they want to destroy it. And so if you participate in this denial of the flesh, and this denial of the reality of what it

1:57:46 means to be a person, because again, you are not just your spirit, you are spirit, mind, and body. I'll go ahead and just state that you are tripartite, we're not getting into the finer details of that, we're just going to assert it. But you are that Gestalt, so if you deny some component part of that, you are ultimately really denying the whole. You are denying what you are. And this works out as a denial of the resurrection. Because here in time you'll have those who will say that, well, you're not really German, you're just German because you had a piece of paper that says it, or you're American because you have a piece of paper that says it. It's not because you were born American. You're a man because that's just what you feel like today.

1:58:32 You're not a man or a woman because you happen to have the chromosomes that tell you you are that. Because that's what it is. It is according to the biological nature of your body that you are male or female. Now, of course, there are those who will scream about, well, what happens for those who have a genetic defect of any of a various number of kinds? It's a defect. If a man is missing a leg, that does not mean that it is in the nature of man to be missing a leg. It means that that man is missing a leg. And so if someone has a genetic defect that causes a problem with the reproductive system. That does not mean that it is in the nature of man or woman to have that defect. It means it is a deviation from the norm.

1:59:23 It is a defect that will be fixed by God in the resurrection, which is great news if you're a Christian, terrible news and sad news if you are not. And so you cannot deny any of these fundamental aspects of the flesh of the body. These are, if we want to use the distinction, essential. They are not accidental. The color of the coat you're wearing, if you're wearing a coat right now, or socks, or whatever it happens to be, is accidental. It's not intrinsic to your nature. Whether you are German or Scottish or French or Japanese or Ugandan or any of the other races of men that I could list, that is essential to your nature. You are that now in time because you were born that, because God created you as that.

2:00:21 You will be that in eternity because he will raise you on the last day. Because again, if he were to raise some other thing from what you are, so if you are, say, a French woman, and he raises a Chinese man, that isn't you. That would not be you. It's not to say that oh well now you're saying God can't do no, I'm saying it is incoherent to assert that. It's the same as the stupid arguments where you see an atheist say, well can God make a rock so heavy that God couldn't lift it. In brief the reason that's incoherent and stupid, and we should be clear it is stupid, is because God, what you are premising in the beginning of your question is defined as omnipotent, so as soon as you get to the word cannot, your sentence is incoherent, and

2:01:17 anything after it is just a string of sounds. You could say purple moose banana, and it would make as much sense as the rest of that supposed question. Just because you can intone so that it sounds like a question in English at the end of your rambling sound doesn't mean it's a question. It's incoherent. The same thing is true if someone tries to say that God is going to raise you as these things that you are not change your essence. That cannot happen because it is incoherent to say it. And so when we see the promise of the redemption and the resurrection, when we see these things in Scripture that are the core of the faith, if we give up what it means to be resurrected, what it means for you to be resurrected, not something to

2:02:03 be resurrected, because if God just said he's going to burn the current universe to ash and then make a new one, that's not good news for anyone living in this one. It's good news if you're resurrected in the new one, which is what God promises, incidentally, because he is going to burn this one to ash. But believers will be resurrected into the new life, into the eternal life, in the new heavens in the new earth. And notably, we spend our eternity in the new earth. We're not saying what the exact contours of that are because Scripture doesn't give us all the details. We don't need them. We know it's perfect, because that is what God promises, it is paradise. But what God says is new earth, because you are going

2:02:49 to be flesh and blood, you will still be spirit, mind, and body, but that But that body part is important. We cannot import this Gnostic understanding, this Gnostic contention, that well, all of the things of the flesh don't matter because it's ultimately the spirit that matters. Quite frankly, you are male or female according to your spirit, because you are male or female in your essence. And so if you are a German man, you are going to be resurrected as a German man. If you are a Scottish woman, you are going to be resurrected as a Scottish woman, because that is who you are. God is going to resurrect you. And that is why these verses that we will get into in another episode in more detail, these verses that say there is neither

2:03:44 Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male and female. They're not a denial of those categories. They are an affirmation of those categories as real things, because what matters is what follows all are one in Christ. It is saying that these categories do not preclude you from saving faith, do not preclude you from being included in the resurrection and the new life, and the new heaven and the new earth. That is what is being said there, and so when you see pastors and teachers and others who stand up and use these verses to deny the reality of the creation as God has made it. Those are false shepherds, those are wolves, those are liars, and those are demons. Because what scripture, as we have highlighted, previously calls teachings of demons.

2:04:38 Those things are trivial compared to the things being put forward today as supposed tenets of the Christian religion. And so the fundamental question that you need to ask yourself when it comes to these matters is the question that I raised earlier, and really we've been illustrating it in this episode. Does this thing that I am being told I must believe or I must not believe conflict with what the Christian faith actually is? And do the consequences of say the thing I am being told to believe conflict with the Christian faith? Because if you are being told that you must believe A, and as it turns out, what is entailed by believing A is something that is incompatible with the Christian religion, then what you are being

2:05:36 told with A is that you must bow down to a false God. You must render unto Caesar something that does not belong to Caesar. You must bow before this idol. You must give the pinch of incense, whatever it happens to be. And we see this rampant in our culture. We see this with things that are extremely obvious. We see those who say, Well, it's not nice and it's not kind if you oppose abortion, because that's health care for women. No, it's murder, and it is incompatible with the Christian religion, and if you support it and promote it, you will go to hell. Because that is high handed, impenitent violation of the fifth commandment, that is incompatible with what it means to be a Christian. But there are also more subtle things.

2:06:24 And that is why we keep returning to the issue of race and sex and related matters, because those are more subtle. If you just look at it at a surface level, it may seem like, well, if I just say that we're all equal and these things don't matter, how can that possibly conflict with the gospel? Because that's the tact they will often take. How does that conflict with the gospel? Well, it does conflict with the gospel. But fundamentally, foremost and first, it conflicts with what we confess in the first article of the Creed Because we believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. And if we deny the reality of the creation, we are denying the reality of the Creator. You cannot have the Son if you deny the Father, the same

2:07:16 as you cannot have the Father if you deny the Son. But it does also conflict with the gospel, because the good news is that you're forgiven, and to be forgiven means that you are adopted as a son of God and you will see eternal life in eternity. And if you deny the creation, you are denying that resurrection. And so again, as Christians, what we are urging you to do is to take all of these things and assess them in light of Scripture, in light of what it means to actually be a Christian, because you are going to be constantly bombarded from all sides in this life, particularly as things currently stand in our culture, with demands that you give your pinch of incense, that you bow down before whatever idol it happens to be, that you affirm whatever the

2:08:13 lie happens to be, and it changes seemingly every day. But as soon as you give that inch, Satan is going to take not a mile, but whatever you'll give him, right up to it, including your soul. Because as we've said before, Satan is a rat, he's a snake. If he can get his head in, the rest of Satan is coming in as well. And so we do these episodes that may seem like something that is perhaps a minor issue, or if you're thinking about classical Gnosticism, not a live issue. But we do them because they are live issues. Some of them may be a problem that we see that is going to be a live issue in the church, or currently a minor issue that is going to become a major issue for the church. This is not one of those.

2:09:04 This is today a major issue for the church. Because when you start looking at what is being pushed in the world, you see a Gnostic religion. Because you see this dualism. Because really the third and the fourth points of the episode were the the meat of it, as it were. Yes, there's the secret knowledge aspect, and there's the impartation of salvation, the belief that just the knowledge alone will save you. But the meat of the episode really is the dualism that good versus evil in which they're equivalent, equal, in which the God of the Old Testament, lowercase G isn't a real God, and it's only the God of the New Testament who settled down, that's the real God. And then there is the denial of the flesh, the belief,

2:09:48 the physical world is evil that it is wicked. And those two are really part and parcel. Because if you have good versus evil and they're equivalent, then you have this follow-on from it, that it is the evil God that created the natural world, the physical world, and it's the good God who created your spiritual nature, and you'll be freed from your physical nature by whatever secret knowledge it is that this cult imparts. And this is nothing new to mankind. We see this in old religions, we see this in Greek religion, we see this in Eastern religion, but we see it today as well in the church, and we see it being pushed by men who are supposedly leaders and teachers, who are pastors, so called in

2:10:33 these cases, of the church. We see it rampant in some denominations more than others. This is a particular problem in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, as we went over in that episode, so I will not go over it here. But it is a problem in every single denomination. And so like we said at the beginning, we're not beating up on any one denomination or any three denominations. This is a problem for all of us that we all need to address together. This is something that needs to be ejected from the church, searched out, found in whatever dark corner it is hiding and removed, because it is incompatible with the worship of the one true God, because it demands that we believe things that are false and incompatible, things

2:11:22 that are mutually exclusive with the Christian religion. And so we've alluded to it a number of times, but I just want to close this episode out with the actual reading from Job nineteen, because this is one of the greatest gospel passages in all of Scripture, and it's right here in the Old Testament, in arguably the oldest book of the Old Testament. For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold and not another, my heart faints within me.