The Judaizing Heresy

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be continuing the series we're doing on the current state of religion. Last week we talked about defining religion in terms of a source of right and wrong of morality, and why it's important to use that view when you're looking at religions because many of us simultaneously hold multiple religions in our heads. So we made a case last week that there's a whole lot of that going on that's causing problems in the church. And we said that this week we were going to specifically be discussing Judaizing and Gnosticism, which are two of the earliest false religions that attacked Christianity in its very earliest days.

1:25 As Corey and I were doing the prep for this episode, we realized that there's more than enough just on Judaizing for an entire episode, so this will be in two parts. next week will be about Gnosticism exclusively, and then the following week we'll be talking about apostasy. Before we get into this, a warning to parents who listen with kids, one of the subjects we're gonna talk about is is circumcision. We're gonna go into some of the obvious details because it's necessary to discuss what's going on there and you know you can decide if you want to listen to that before your kids do. This episode is as always a continuation of previous episodes. And I want to make this point again, particularly as we're getting

2:06 into this second full year of Stone Choir this season insofar as such a thing exists for us, there's going to be a lot more episodes that are syntheses of parts of previous episodes. So I be what I mean by that is that we're going to treat every previous episode that we've done essentially as axiomatic for the purposes of arguments we make in future episodes. So this episode on Judaizing obviously is going to assume for the sake of argument that you've already heard and at least understand, even if you don't agree with what we said in the four parts we did on the Jews. So if this is the first episode of Stonequarter you're listening to, stop. I'd say start from the beginning. If you refuse to start from the beginning before listening to this

2:51 one, if it's interesting, at least go back to Hebrews Israelites and Jews and listen to that four part series because this will not be the complete arguments from that episode they're made there in totality. We consider that a done deal. So I give that warning because we're gonna say some things that just assume all the things, all the facts previously entered into evidence were incorporating those by reference. And if you're not coming along with the previous thoughts, if you don't know what's there, we're gonna be taking a lot of shortcuts in the future because we don't waste your time just repeating the same things over and over again. So we're gonna just assume that you at least know what we're

3:30 talking about when we say some of those things. One of the key things that we've said frequently throughout Stone Choir, and it's gonna be a key part of this, particularly in framing this episode on Judaizing, is that it's crucial for our understanding of Scripture and for understanding our place as Christians in history to verbally acknowledge out loud that Adam was not a Jew. Noah was not a Jew. Abraham was not a Jew. We made the case in those episodes for why that's true. The reason that we're mentioning it here is that one of the fundamental elements of the Judaizing tendency that occurred from the very earliest days of the church and it's roaring back in the last two centuries, in particular in America

4:21 is there's this notion that we have inherited from kind of ambient morality in the world around us that well I'm a Christian but I'm the Christian and the Judeo Christian and the Judeo came first, and that was really the older, more authentic version. And so I've got Christianity, but I'm kind of the I'm the lesser cousin here. And there's there's a senior member from way back, the Jew who has more real stuff. They fundamentally have more Jesusy stuff than I have. Even though Jesus came after their period, I can't really be a Christian unless I Jew up the stuff that I have today. And that's really what happens with Judaizing in all its forms and everything we talk about today. It's fundamentally Sure, we're Christians, but can we make this more Jewish?

5:10 Wouldn't that make it more authentic? And the reason I mention Adam and Noah and Abraham is that the assumption that the Old Testament is Jewish and that the New Testament is Christian, it's blasphemous for one. Let's just get that right out of the way. That's utterly false. The entire history of Christianity before the birth of Christ pointed to the birth of Christ. That was its purpose. In Genesis three fifteen, when Adam was given the proto gospel, he was told that Jesus would come to fix his sin. He wasn't told explicitly, not in a prophetic manner that could be as easily understood as the later prophecies. And most of those prophecies that are recorded for us began with Moses. However, we know

6:01 there were many believers in God, including Noah, most notably historically, who didn't have the written versions of those things either, because none of it been written down yet. And so the tendency the Christians have today to think, well, I need more Jewish stuff in order to be a better Christian, what it really is doing is espousing a belief that comes from the Talmud. I'm gonna give you a few paraphrases of things in the Talmud. Just to give you an idea of what Jews have been taught, including in Jesus' day, in this four-part series now we're doing about the ending with apostasy, the next episode is going to be about Galatians 3.28. And one of the excellent points that Corey's made in the past

6:43 elsewhere is that once you know about the Jewish prayers that come from the Talmud, you understand that Galatians 3.28 is Jesus right. Rebuking the Talmud before it had been written down, because the Talmud was a recording of oral tradition. It was writing down things that they had been passing from generation to generation. So there are things in the Talmud that were written down generations after Jesus that were already practiced in his day. So these things have existed for thousands of years among these people, not all of them, because Mary was also a Christian. She was obviously a Judahite, she was of that people, but when the angel came to her and said you're going to bear the Son of God, it wasn't Adelaide Field.

7:31 She was amazed it was her, but she wasn't amazed at what's this Messiah stuff? I don't know what that's about. She knew exactly what it was about because she was a Christian. She was a Christian expecting the Messiah. What she didn't expect was that God would come to her personally to be the vessel for God to be born. The Talmud, as it existed in that day, and then was written down and is the basis for the modern Jewish religion. Says things like, Jews may use subterfuge to circumvent a Goy, as a non-Jew. All children of the Goyim are animals. The Goyim are not humans, they're beasts. If you eat with a goi, it's the same as eating with a dog. Even the best of the goiem should all be killed.

8:18 The common theme that these all have is that Jews are human and the Goim, that's us, that's everyone who's a non Jew, is less than human. Now think about that in the context of saying that Adam is a Jew. If Adam is a Jew, then isn't it consistent that we are less than Jews, if we don't have the Jew stuff along with our religion. But Adam was not a Jew. Adam was all men. Every single Homo sapien on the planet has Adam as his father. No matter what we've said about any other race, any people on the planet, they're all children of Adam. Which is why we all die, because we inherit Adam's sin, because he is our father. We inherit the sin of that father, that first father. The first biological father, he's our first father's obviously God the Father

9:07 in heaven. So the first Judaizing tendency that's permeating all of Christian testimony today is that well, you know, Adam was a Jew, Noah was a Jew, Abraham is a Jew. Abraham can be a Jew because if that's the case, then Muslims are Jews. Because Muslims trace back to Abraham just like the Jewish tribes. it it becomes incoherent when you actually look at what's trying to be claimed. But it's consistent with the Talmudic belief that the Guayim are not humans, they're beasts. They're less than us, us being the Jews. So everything that we're talking about here today in terms of Judaizing tendencies is something that we see from the very earliest days of the early church where their Christians and the attack that Satan took

9:51 against Christ Church as it was being born, was sure, okay, you have this gospel stuff now. You know, Jesus rose from the dead and he forgives your sins and blah, blah, blah. But did you know you still have to have this stuff from the Jews? And that was the fight in the very earliest church, we have to keep the Jew stuff. The Christian stuff isn't complete by itself. And it's very common today. And so all the examples that we give in this episode will reinforce that there's an inherent notion in many people's minds that Christianity is incomplete unless it's more Jewish than it is today. Which if you understand that Judeo-Christian is an oxymoron, obviously it falls apart. Judeo-Christian is like saying Satan o Christian.

10:33 They're opposing religions. It's not a continuum. And it's not one and then the other. Noah and Adam and Abraham were Christians because they believed in the promise of the Messiah. You and I believe in the promise of the Messiah. The key difference between us and them is that they had an expectant hope in the promise. We have a hope in a promise already fulfilled. We hope in the resurrection, we hope in the return of Christ, but we already know for a fact that He came once. So that's the only difference between our belief and theirs. As they were hoping in a prophecy that had yet to be fulfilled, we have a hope that the prophecy which has been fulfilled in Christ's birth, death, and resurrection does what God says it was

11:17 going to do. The reason that those miracles occurred was so that we would all have confidence, yes, if I can do these things in space and time, you can trust my promises that the things that I'm doing are for the forgiveness of your sins. That's the Christian faith. And they held it and we hold it in common. So when Judaizing occurs in the church, it's a subtle attack against that. And we see right from the very beginning, the the one time in the New Testament where the word Judaizing is literally used is in Galatians 2. Paul writes, But when Cephas, that is Peter, came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the

11:57 Gentiles, but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? And this is the S V, but the the word that's used there, the underlying word that we transliterate, is he saying how can you force the Jews or how can you force the Gentiles to Judaize? Interestingly, that word does appear in the Old Testament in the Septuagint, which we'll get to towards the end, in Esther chapter eight,

12:39 verse seventeen. It said that the people there were in fear of the Jews and they Judaized. Same thing. It was adopting the previous Jewish practices of the Mosaic Law in order to what? In order to earn salvation because when Jesus showed up and the Jews were holding the Mosaic Law, they were you know they were they were following the rules, they'd forgotten what the rules were for. And so a lot of us preaching were like the these rules weren't to save you. These rules are God's will, they're my will for you, the will of the Father for you, but they don't save you. And they didn't understand that. All they knew was the rope performance of the thing. They didn't understand that it wasn't for their salvation.

13:20 It was simply what God said to do. And if they believed in God, they would do those things. But it was the belief that always mattered. It was Abraham's faith that was credited to him as righteousness, not his doing. It was his belief, belief in the promise. And so from the very beginning, the very first instance of Judaizing being explicitly highlighted has to do with circumcision party, has to do with Peter himself, you know, one of the most beloved apostles of Christ was sinning against the church as a Judaizer. So that's why we said in the past episode, this was the ground floor heresy in the church. And we're going to get into this today that whether or not that's a gospel issue depends on how you understand true teaching and false

14:05 teaching. But Paul was deeply concerned when he saw what Peter was doing because it was a false confession, and that was the issue. When Peter Judaized, when he refused to eat with non Jews, his confession was false. He was confessing a false religion. Even though he was doing what the Jews had been told to do before, when God said it is finished on the cross, that was it. He was talking about those rules, and much of the ink spilled in the New Testament is specifically saying no, you didn't understand it all. The separation of those people for a time with these rules was not for their salvation, it was to preserve the promise of the Messiah. When that had been fulfilled, when Christ had lived that perfect life,

14:44 then none of them ever could, then it was finished. And from then on, everything that every believer has is is Christian practice. So from Peter to today, whenever we see people Judaizing, they're fundamentally exposing a false confession. And so to start off this section of the episode about circumcision specifically, but obviously more generally about Judaizing, we will read through Acts fifteen, verses one through twenty nine, which relates the text that Wo just mentioned in his intro. But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with

15:33 them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the nations, and brought great joy to all the brothers. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church, and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up and said, It is necessary to circumcise them, and to order them to keep the law of Moses. The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter,

16:12 and after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the nations should hear the word of the Lord. the gospel and believe, And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as He did to us, and He made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples, that neither your fathers, nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and

16:56 Paul, as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the nations. After they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers, listen to me. Simon has related how God first visited the nations, to take from them a people for his name, and with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written, after this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen, I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old. Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the nations who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain

17:39 from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled and from blood. For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he has read every Sabbath in the synagogues. Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them, and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas and Silas, leading men among the brothers, with the following letter The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the nations in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings, since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although

18:23 we gave them no instructions. It has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you, with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth, for it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and it, and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood, and from what has been strangled and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell. Now you may note that when I read from the ESV or other translations that use the word Gentiles, I draw I drop

19:12 that word. I change that word to a more accurate translation to be clear. And the reason that I do that is because Gentiles itself has become a form of Judaizing in the modern church. We'll get into that more later in the episode, but I just wanted to point out that that is something that I do, at least I attempt always to do that when I am reading from these translations. Because the understanding word is in fact nations or heathens. We have these words in English. There's no reason we need to use a Latin derived word such as Gentiles. I'm not saying the word is necessarily wrong, because if you understand what it means, the word is fine. But in the modern context, it tends to be misleading and can

20:00 be used for Judaizing, and that is why I personally do not tend to use it. I think it's conspicuous when you look at this passage that again it was the Pharisees who came and said, look what these people are doing. They the Pharisees didn't attack the gospel. They didn't say no Jesus didn't rise from the dead. They didn't attack anything that we think of as Christianity today. The Pharisees came to the church and said, What are these people doing? If they're going to convert, if they're going to be believers in the one true God, they need to be circumcised because they didn't understand what circumcision was. They didn't understand the purpose. They didn't understand what Jesus had said and done.

20:42 And so they were burdening consciences with something that was false. And the reason that we're beginning with this is that circumcision is really the Judaizing heresy that is the most prevalent in the New Testament. You see it in numerous epistles. It comes up all the time. Like that that first quote was from Galatians, this is from Acts. I have quotes from Philippians, from Titus, and that's just a small portion of where these fights were occurring, where the so-called circumcision party would show up and burden consciences and say, You must obey the Mosaic Law. The reason that the Holy Spirit worked through the apostles to put an end to that, that false teaching, was that again, they didn't

21:28 understand what circumcision was in the first place. They did understand that sealing a baby boy into the covenant of God with the act of circumcision or for adult converts, which happened as well, it wasn't an act unto itself. It was a public confession. And with Christ's death and resurrection, Christians had a new confession. The confession was in the risen Lord. The confession no longer needed to be in terms of circumcision, which was pointing forward. And that's why it was happening everywhere. Because as I said, Satan didn't care about the gospel. His first attack on the church, once it was established, he didn't go after what we call the gospel. What did the teachings of demons that Satan brought to bear do?

22:21 They said no, no, no, you have to do this stuff. You have to do what Moses said to do. What could be more of a believing thing than to say obey God? That's how Satan attacked by saying, hey, obey God, do this stuff. Because it took what God said to do entirely out of context, with complete disregard for what God actually made clear about the practice. And it tried to burden consciousness to say, well, yeah, you have a Christian confession, but you haven't done the thing yet. And this is something that in various shades you will find in all the other Judaizing practices that we see to this day. And there's a constant myriad churn. There's always some new form of this sort of thing. But it invariably says, hey, sure, you got the Jesus stuff all

23:09 right, but did you know the Jew stuff from the olden days will make it even more authentic? I think this is an interesting thing for us to talk about on Stone Choir because it sounds kind of like what we talk about a lot on the show. Like, hey, you know, we have this stuff in the church, but what about the old practices? There are two crucial differences. One, we are not claiming that doing one thing versus another saves you. As never the claim of any Christian, the doing saves. The doing is the fruit of salvation. If we have saving faith, then we obey God. That's why there are some who believe before they're baptized. A believer's baptism is entirely a real thing. They're examples in Scripture.

23:53 That does not mean that baptism does not also give the Holy Spirit to those who do not yet have faith. Did a whole episode on baptism about that. So it can be both one thing and the other at the same time. When we talk about things that used to be church belief and practice, like for example, head coverings. It's not to burden consciences. It's certainly not to say if you don't cover your head, you haven't earned salvation. Like that that that's not a phrase that can even come from our lips except ironically. It it's an impossibility for a Christian to believe that entire vein of thought. It's also important to know that sometimes the argument is simply true. Sometimes we do lose things that we used to have, like head

24:35 coverings, like God said to do it. He didn't say if a girl covers her head, she will be saved. Just said do it because it's proper order. It was never a matter of salvation, but it was a command from God. And so when we point back, it's not trying to make people do something that will prove that they're faithful or to earn their salvation. It's just to say this is what believers actually do. It's what the Christian life actually looks like. Which is a very clear distinction from circumcision, because there were many who were not circumcised who became believers and again one of the earliest controversies in the church. And it was a question to be settled. Like, you know, they sat down and discussed this for a while.

25:19 It was an important question two thousand years ago. It's not an important question today because God settled it. So when the Pharisees asked it, regardless of what their intentions were or their ignorance, God answered. He said, That was for them, that is over, someone can believe in God and not be circumcised. And so it went away entirely. It ceased to be a practice among Christians. We should point out that not only is circumcision not a Christian practice, but the modern practice that we call circumcision and the and the ancient practice in the context of the Near East, which would be the practice of which the Jews, the more accurately named Israelites or Hebrews, partook, these practices are not the same.

26:09 Now there are a number of different circumcision practices across the world. There are some that are particularly barbaric amongst certain island peoples and some parts of South America, but we're talking about the Near East here, and in the Near East, the circumcision practice of that area and of those peoples, and this is the part where if you are concerned about your children listening to materials that are technically explicit, you may wish to skip or listen to it, screen it before allowing them to. That practice is fundamentally different from what we see today. The practice today is the total removal of the foreskin, which is actually a relatively significant chunk of tissue. The practice back then was simply either a cut in the foreskin

27:01 or the removal of the tip of the foreskin. This is one of the reasons that we see in scripture when adult converts even are circumcised, they recover fairly quickly. If someone removes a significant portion of your penis you are not going to recover from that quickly. If it is the ancient practice, you can recover in a number of days and be back at work or even go fight in a battle. That's possible. That is why in the narrative related to Dina, we see that they attacked them immediately afterward, because it was a relatively short window in which they would have had this advantage due to the recovery period. These are very different practices. And the reason that this matters is because the modern practice has

27:49 arguably been designed maliciously. It is designed to do something to the child. It is designed to do something to that boy who is circumcised. It's mutilation, to be frank. It is gentle mutilation. We're used to hearing that particular phrase, that term with regard to female so-called circumcision, but it is the same when it comes to males for the modern version of circumcision. It is more comparable to what we see in some of the most demonically oppressed part of the world, and these parts of the world practice truly heinous things that are somehow even worse than circumcision, but it is comparable to them with regard to its goal, with regard to what it does to the circumcised. There are a number of effects of this, and we have very

28:37 good studies on this we know these things to be true. This has been researched Quite significantly. You will typically not hear of these things in the US context because the overwhelming majority of those in the United States are circumcised. That is not the case in the rest of the Western world. You basically do not get circumcised in Europe or Australia or New Zealand or the UK, any of these places. The rest of the European world does not practice circumcision. It is something that was imported into the US culture because it's Judaizing. It's part and parcel of a number of other things, and we'll get into some of those later in the episode as well. As well but to speak of some of the consequences of circumcision.

29:28 When performed on an infant and we will distinguish between infant circumcision and adolescent or adult because there are different consequences for those. It is more significant with regard to infants and adolescents for a number of reasons. But infant circumcision often you will hear the argument that, well, the child will not remember the pain. One that is a morally abhorrent argument, if you actually think about it, because that would justify doing almost anything to an infant because the infant won't remember And the Talmud has some things to say about that, certainly. But the problem with this argument, beyond being morally abhorrent, is that it is false. Studies performed on infants, those who were circumcised in infancy, and those

30:14 who were not show circumcision actually causes a fundamental change in the brain. It causes sight specific changes to the brain, usually with regard to pain or centers related to trauma in the brain, but it also causes a brain wave change that sometimes does not return to a baseline and certainly does not do so quickly. It causes a spike in all of the various body chemistry that relates to anxiety, because it is seen by the body, rightfully, as an attack on the body. Of course, an infant can't do anything in response to an attack. So the infant just has this stress response, this trauma response, but crying is all the infant can do, of course, which the infant does. It is also notable that this procedure is often done with

31:06 minimal, if any, anesthetic. And yes, infants can feel pain. If you start your argument or you start trying to make an argument that an infant doesn't feel pain, can Congratulations, you're on the exact same road as the people who try to argue for abortion. You're making roughly the same sort of argument they make with regard to well if an infant can't feel pain, then whatever we do is obviously moral. That is abominable, and Christians should never argue that. But beyond the alteration of brainwaves and also certain parts of the brain, even, not so much structurally necessarily, but in regards to later on psychological responses in the adolescent and adult. And this leads into my next point.

31:52 We do see increases in pain sensitivity, anxiety, and a number of other problems, including attention problems in infants, in the adolescents who were circumcised as infants, there are longitudinal consequences to the modern practice of circumcision. Again, this is a fundamentally different procedure from what is described in the Old Testament. It is not the same thing that is being done to boys today that was done to them in that part of the world historically. Now to distinguish between infants and adolescents. It's difficult to say if it's worse to circumcise an infant or an adolescent. However, one of the salient differences that we see, and part of the reason it's difficult to distinguish, obviously, is that adolescents can actually

32:42 remember what happened consciously, not unconsciously, because there's a difference there. You can remember things in your unconscious or subconscious mind that you may not be able to remember in your conscious mind. And, notably, your body also remembers things that your mind does not necessarily store. One good example of that would be when we went over the issue of promiscuity, a woman's body remembers after a fashion her sexual partners, even if she may have forgotten them. But that aside, the issue of a child who is circumcised in adolescence is that the studies done on those who were circumcised in adolescents has shown that the majority of them fulfill all of the diagnostic criteria in order to diagnose them with post-traumatic stress disorder.

33:39 Circumcision, the modern practice, inflicts very real harm on children. It is something that should not be practiced, it is a barbaric practice that is inexcusable, and it is Judaizing, it is attempting to participate in a Jewish rite, and many of those doing it are supposedly Christian. This is inexcusable. This is not something that is permissible for Christians to do. Now we know that some of those who are listening will be fathers. We know for certain that some of you were fathers, and that most likely, because much of our audience is American, most likely you had your son circumcised. We are saying you should not have done that. However, do not beat yourself up over it, do not worry about

34:27 it, really. You do need to repent, because it was sinful, it was not something you should have done. But repent, lay it at the foot of the cross, and be done with it. This is difficult for many people to do, particularly in the US context, this is a major problem Major problem. We have this issue of looking at sins that have physical consequences, consequences in time, and many people want to defend those. So for instance, we spoke of promiscuity in previous episodes. There are those who want to try and defend those actions in the past because if you recognize them as sin, etc. they were sin, repent. That repentance does not cure the physical consequences. The same thing is true here. If you repent of the fact that you had your son circumcised,

35:23 his foreskin is not growing back. That's not how this works. There are very real consequences to our sins in time that will not be restored, that will not be undone until the second coming, until we are in paradise. We have to live with those things in this life. But we do not carry them around as conscious baggage. Now, there are again real consequences that stick with us, and those are baggage in the sense that our sin does burden us. But we are not supposed to carry our sin around as a burden, because Christ took that on the cross and we are forgiven. So again, you repent, but you don't beat yourself up over this. That's not the point of the episode, that's not what we're trying to do by talking about circumcision.

36:13 The goal here, as is the goal with many of the things we discuss in our episodes, is to get people to stop participating in something that is sinful. Just because you did something that was sinful or you were burdened by something that was sinful or you were harmed by it, does not mean that you allow it to perpetuate through additional generations. You can have it stop with you, or in this case you can have it stop with your sons. Don't carry forward the wickedness of past generations. That's the goal. We can actually create a better future, a more Christian future, by getting rid of these pagan or Jewish practices. The goal is to end the wickedness. The goal is not to beat up on those who either willingly,

37:02 wittingly, unwittingly, however it was, participated in something that was wrong, that was sinful. The goal is to get the practice to stop, to get Christians to recognize that there is a Christian response to this, and there is an anti-Christian or Jewish response to this. And as we pointed out in some of the readings from scripture so far, and there are many others, the New Testament is very clear. Circumcision is a Jewish practice. It is Judaizing. It is not something that Christians should be doing. It's not because, as Woe already said, it's not because it's a gospel issue. Although, ironically, as soon as you say that this isn't a gospel issue, you've made it a gospel issue by making it into a

37:48 works issue, and so you've suddenly imported works righteousness into the discussion by saying it's not a gospel issue. What we are saying is that it is a practice in which Christians should not participate because it is Judaizing. Does participation in it damn you to hell? No. If you are circumcised, are you going to hell? No No, not what we're saying. If you try to make it part of the Christian religion and say this is something that you must do to be saved, now you have made it works righteousness, now you have rejected Christ, now you are severed from Christ in the words of the New Testament. Then you are in danger of hellfire. But the ultimate point, the foundational point that we are trying to

38:36 make by discussing circumcision, is that it is one, a harmful practice and that it is two impermissible Judaizing in which Christians should not be engaged. I want to add just one additional specific scientific point to why and how it causes harm. As Corey said, this is male genital mutilation. This is the amputation of not only a body part without the anesthetic. As Corey said that you know the foreskin is a sizable portion what is amputated today. Has nothing, nothing to do with the scriptural practice. It has nothing to do with what Moses was commanded. The foreskin itself, when it is removed, that is functionally like a clitorectomy, which is a barbaric, disgusting practice that we often find in

39:29 the Muslim world. A foreskin has about 30,000 nerve endings. The foreskin has significantly more nerve endings than the rest of the penis. And so when it is removed without anesthesia, i obviously the the pain is is indescribable. And thankfully for those of us who have been victims of it, we can't remember. But as Corey said, not only do our bodies bear the witness of that barbaric amputation, but there are permanent in many cases psychological and what do you call the brain? Like it's not it's not mental. It's just we are permanently changed by what is fundamentally a practice of torture. the s the actual process of circumcising a an American boy today, they're often put on a cruciform slab where their arms and legs are bound, just like Christ.

40:28 They're not given anesthesia, and a part of their penis is amputated that has as many endings as many other parts of the body combined. Of course this is going to do tremendous harm. it's a fundamentally wicked and evil practice. As Corey said, once the damage is done, it's done. Like it it was done to me. I don't remember. I don't know what life would be w like without it. And we'll make explicit that this is not sour grapes about my foreskin. I don't care. The point is we should not be permitting these things to happen in the world. If you participated in something evil, if you've been the victim of something evil, you don't look at it and then try to baptize and say, oh, I guess it was okay.

41:08 It's actually fine. Let's just keep going with more of that. Because you don't want to confront whatever evil happened in the past. If something is evil, this is plainly evil. Forget scripture entirely. What I just described and what Cory described is per se evil's far too shallow word for what it is. It is it's fundamentally a primitive version of what's done in MKUltra. The MKUltra torture program was designed to achieve many of the same effects that are achieved on every single American boy who's circumcised. And as Corey said, the number of European males who are circumcised, over 90% of them live in the United States. It's almost exclusively an American practice among whites. About 90% in it of Jews are circumcised, about 80% of Muslims

41:56 worldwide are circumcised. So the only people who have participated in this barbaric practice are Americans, Jews, and Muslims. That by itself should be an indication that there's something religious going on here. Because what is that? That triad? That's the Abrahamic religions. That's what we're told today. Oh, it all came from Abraham. You know, Isaac had Ishmael, and then we get the Muslims down the road, and Jacob gave birth to the Jews, and then the Jews gave birth to Christians, and so circumcision unites us all. No. What's interesting when you look at the specific history of it in the United States, it did not exist when this country was founded, because it never existed among Christians.

42:40 It was expressly banned. It was, frankly, it's something that should be a death penalty matter today, in my opinion. I think if you're going to harm infants like that, you need to talk to the hangman. The practice, when it was introduced in this country, part of it became it became very widespread once Jews began coming into this country at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. But it was already being pushed a few decades prior by post-Christian Judaizing Americans. You know, this country, when you look at things like the history of the burntover district and other places, There has been a sort of Judaizing, apostatizing development of entirely new pagan religions that was unique

43:32 to the United States. And then some of it got exported back to England and it's made it to a few other places. But many of these things, the reason it almost exclusively happens in the US is that it was exclusively a US thing. And once we started it, and originally one of the theories was it's going to improve hygiene, it's going to improve mental health. They said it was going to prevent masturbation. And then when Jews starting showing up, well, it was a way to normalize their population intermingling with ours because they were all going to be circumcised. And so if you have these people who are trying to insinuate themselves into American life, but they all have this one fundamental difference,

44:14 well, that's going to mark them as being apart, which was part of the original point. You know, all of the Levitical laws were specifically to separate the Hebrews from their pagan neighbors. So the the promise of the Messiah would be pre would be preserved and fulfilled in time. They were kept apart from their pagan neighbors so they wouldn't apostatize. That was no longer necessary once Jesus came. And so not that the circumcision is not specifically a Levitical law, but it fell into the same bucket for the purposes of it was ended. It's clearly ended in scripture. And so when it re-emerged in the US almost exclusively in the eighteen hundreds, and then it took off in the twentieth century, when

44:59 Judaizing just became the norm, that's or sorry, nineteenth century and then twentieth century, it began in the late eighteen mid to late eighteen hundreds, and then it really took off in the twentieth century to to point that at its peak in the twentieth century it was something like ninety percent of males in some places were circumcised. And it's thankfully it's begun falling in recent years, but mostly it's been falling because of illegal aliens coming here who don't practice it. So as we have non whites who have not been subjected to the Judaizing tendencies, they just don't do it because it's religious practice is not part of their religion. So So while mathematically it's a good thing and it shouldn't happen

45:37 to anyone, regardless of religion, that should be a law for everyone. It's also the case that it's declining in large part, mostly simply because we're being overrun by aliens. It's also starting to taper off. Thankfully, fewer and fewer zoomers in the latter generation have been subjected to it. And it's a good thing. It should be illegal. It should be impermissible. In a Christian government would prevent this because it's it's torture. It's antithetical to everything that any decent person would hold. And the obvious implication is that that would ban Jews, wouldn't it? Because if the Jews today still say they have to be circumcised to be Jews, which they do, they have their bris, that's part

46:19 of them still practicing the religion that Jesus fulfilled and then set aside. And they never gave up because they never understood God. They never knew God in the first place. So it's absolutely the case that to ban circumcision would be to make Jews illegal. That's necessary. A Christian country should do that. It's a shocking thing for some people to hear, but if it's evil, why do you permit it? Do you permit it because it's their religious practice? This is the fight that then happened with Peyote and these other things where oh Indians have always been doing it, so we have to let it go. Or you know, now Satanists are saying, Well abortion is part of my religion. It's a sacrament. They're absolutely right.

47:02 Abortion is a satanic sacrament. It's part of their religion, that's true. What is not true is that it should be tolerated. It should be persecuted to the full extent of the law, in addition to being prosecuted. I mean both of those. It should be stamped out because it's wicked. And so this is the most extreme example of Judaizing tendencies that's particular to the United States, but it's also, as we said, it has the most text spilled in the New Testament condemning it. I want to finish with the passage from Titus I, the very beginning of what's a pastoral epistle. This passage here is being shared to an overseer to say, look, this is what you're going to be facing, and here's what is written. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers,

47:50 especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and the unbelieving nothing is pure. But both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

48:32 This is the sort of thing that Cory and I say about some of the evil men that we see online, and everybody loses their mind. Is it unchristian to express these sorts of sentiments? No. And it wasn't that Paul gets a special get out of jail free card, and it wasn't that we have a capricious God, and so whenever the Holy Spirit transmits these things, well I guess it's not sin when God does it. This is a necessary part of the Christian faith to rebuke and condemn evil actions and those who are spreading them and those who are perpetuating them. Because this circumcision party, which sounds like the worst party in the world, was pervasive. You found it everywhere in the early church. These Judaizers showed up everywhere.

49:13 And they never reviled the cross, not directly, but they reviled the cross by despising the sacrifice that Christ had made. Because when he said that it was finished, it included circumcision. Like, no, no, no. We gotta keep doing that. We gotta hang on to these things. We have to have this Jewish stuff in the church. The defining battle of the very first century of the Christian church was against Judaizing. And what we see today is it's roaring back. And next week we're gonna talk about Gnosticism, which was the second false religion that came roaring into the church, attacking it from every direction. And that's exactly what we have today. We're gonna tie together many at past episodes that deal with elements

49:54 of the Gnostic faith, the Gnostic religion of those days that are now again pervasive. Because why would that happen? Satan knows that the old tricks work, the lies that men believe before, we keep gobbling em up, and it's only when men will speak, as Paul speaks here in Titus, as the Holy Spirit speaks, and says they profess to know God, but they deny him by their works, their detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. This is the sort of revulsion and hatred of evil the Christians are commanded to have. It's necessary to hate evil. Now, in the Acts fifteen passage, when the Pharisees came and said, You guys need to be circumcising, the immediate response in that day, because the subject had not been yet been broached, was not hatred,

50:42 but by the time we get to Titus being written, it's clear. They this question had been settled by God once and for all time. And when people keep coming back and reinvigorating the old question, knowing that it's going to do harm, you're permitted and in fact you're commanded to have a hateful response to it. Now that doesn't mean you necessarily actually speak hatefully. We're not advocating that. But if our response to this sort of wickedness is not animated by vehemence. There's something wrong with us. There is one more passage that I want to briefly add to this section on circumcision because this is something about which I want you, the audience, to think. And I'm going to read briefly from Romans four.

51:29 Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the Father of all who believe, without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised, who are not merely circumcised, but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith, that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

52:18 I want you to think about what that passage assumes about two distinct groups, and whether or not they are circumcised, and then compare that to what we are doing in the modern US. I would actually recommend you read the entire book of Romans, but at the very least perhaps meditate on that part of the book. The next example of Judaizing that we're going to tackle is actually a very modern one, which is, I think, a great example because no one today knows it's modern. I didn't know until someone asked me the question. And the question was, is the use of the word Yahweh something that is good or bad? Somebody asked me and my first response was, obviously that's garbage. That was my instinctual response.

53:07 Yeah, it sounds like bunk. That sounds like Judaizing. As I just instinctively knew this sort of pattern replays over and over throughout history, so when someone is using this Jewish sounding word to speak of God when in many other contexts that's not how we talk about God. My instinct was that's crap. But I didn't know anything about the history. So I started digging into it a little bit and what I found was astonishing. So some uh months ago, I think about last June, I did a thread on Twitter. We will link in the show notes that thread so yeah the screenshots that I dug up and we'll flesh it out a little more fully than we're gonna do here, but because a lot of you guys are not on Twitter X.

53:48 I want to just give this example because it's another great way of illustrating that these tendencies they're pervasive. We all want to Jew up our Christianity. We want to have the more authentic version of our faith. And that means making it seem less Christian and making it seem more like the old Hebrew stuff. We need those Hebrew roots. We need the Jew Judeo back in our Christianity. That's the impetus in the American Church. And we've talked at some length in other places that that's just by itself it's evil. The specific example of Yahweh is particularly astonishingly bad. So the first thing I did when before we get into it, I want to make one thing very clear. Yahweh, I'm talking about the six letters, Y A H W E

54:38 H. It's pronounced in English Yahweh. It's not synonymous with the tetragrammaton, that is Y-H-W-H. So the first thing that we have to understand when we're talking about this subject is a reminder of something we talked about in a couple of the earlier episodes about Jews, which is that Hebrew is a very primitive language. It is fundamentally deficient in numerous ways. One of the most glaring is a Hebrew literally has no vowels. There are no vowels in the Hebrew language. They're spoken because you can't speak. There we don't know how to speak without vowels. Basically the vowels are the the meat of a word and the consonants are like the the bread on either side of the sandwich. But you have to have a vowel in order to have a

55:27 word. Hebrew doesn't have any vowels, has 22 letters, they're all consonants. This is fundamentally defective for a written language because there's so much ambiguity. Imagine that I who had written down this sentence. You should turn off the and then I write L D. And so you know when you're reading it that LD is a word, but I've left out the vowels, I've left out the vowel sounds. Now what can LD mean? I could mean LED, I could mean lid, lewd, load, laud. All those have very different meanings. Those are all fundamentally different words. And maybe in context, you might be able to guess which one I was talking about. But the problem with the Hebrew language being so deficient and lacking

56:28 vowels entirely is that without the direct oral transmission faithfully, it's entirely possible for someone to alter what a word means. Because if you just have the consonants L and D, any of those words are possible. And sometimes context doesn't tell you which one it is. It could It could in some cases be two or three of them. And so it's only with faithful oral transmission of the knowledge of which words it is you're reading, which existed for a long time. I'm not trying to call into question whether the Hebrews were faithfully transmitting scripture because the rabbis would teach their pupils: here's the words, here's how you read it, here's how to pronounce it, here's what the word actually is.

57:11 Because language is fundamentally spoken and then secondarily written. So the question of Yahweh versus YHWH, the tetragrammaton, is that because in Hebrew, the word in that this is a word that was given to Moses from the burning bush. God said, I am. That's how he revealed his name. He said his name is I am. YHWH means I am. We know this to be a fact. What we don't know, what no one knows, is what the vowel sounds were in YHWH. And so One of the earliest episodes we did on A Name No Man Knows, where we talked a little bit about secret names. They're secret names of God, where he specifically says there's a name that no man knows for Jesus Christ. That's fine, that's God's business. It's not supposed to be some sort of esoteric knowledge that we

58:11 should chase after and desire greedily, I want to know the secret name. I want to know how to pronounce it. What that's fundamentally doing is turning what God said into a black magic incantation. And the reason that I can say this is that when we look elsewhere in Scripture in the other places where God said I am, he said I am, not in English, but he said in Hebrew. He and he said also incidentally in Greek. In the New Testament, I am is also said. In fact, one of the times when the Jews tried to murder Christ was when he said before Abraham was I am, and he said it in Greek. He said Ego If the tetragrammaton, if the YHWH were some special sound that had a power all its own, Jesus would have used the special magic

59:07 word, but he didn't. What did he say? He said in Greek, I am. And they knew what he was talking about because they tried to murder him on the spot. Why? Because even the sentence before Abraham was I am, which was a confession that he was got, he was saying I am God, which is why they tried to murder him, because if he was lying, it would be utter blasphemy. That's something I would never say because it would be blasphemous. I'm even joke about saying it, because it's facially untrue. When he said it was true because he's God. The interesting thing about the sentence structure before Abraham was I am is it doesn't work. It doesn't work logically to human minds. It would make sense to say before Abraham was, I was.

59:49 That would still have been blasphemy, but it would not have hearkened to what the theophany of the burning bush said. It would not have pointed back to that. And so when Jesus said I am, he said exactly what God said. So that illustrates that it's not a secret noise, it's not a special hidden name, it's just what how I am was spelled. And Christians left it alone, because one of the things we'll get into in this this thread a little bit is that the Septuagint was the Bible of Jesus day. The Old Testament was one hundred percent Greek. Almost no one could read Hebrew, and no one spoke Hebrew. It was a dead language. It was not being spoken. So in the New Testament, when Jesus' words are recorded in Greek,

1:00:36 it's not a translation of what he was actually saying. They're the words that he said, which is why there are the few places where you have Aramaic saying. So it's like, you know, why does he say Eloi Eloy Lama Sabakfani? Well he said that because that's what he actually said, because he also spoke Aramaic, and so when the words of Jesus uttered out loud were in Aramaic, that is what is recorded in scripture. When it records his Greek words, it's not that he was speaking Greek or he wasn't speaking Hebrew and they translated into Greek. He was speaking in Greek. That was his natural language. He spoke both. When he was preaching to the crowds, he spoke in Greek. Later on in the year, we're going to be doing an entire

1:01:14 episode specifically in the Septuagint, so we're not going to belabor that point today. But But it's very important that his Bible, Jesus Bible, which incidentally is a pretty big deal, the but the if the Bible that God is using to preach from is written in Greek, it should be good enough for us to say, yes, we can trust this. It has the imprimatur of God to say this is my word, I'm using it to teach. And what we find in the Septuagint is that it's simply translate, I am, and other places where it translates it as God. So this all highlights that there's no magic secret word, there's no secret noise that we need to utter or invoke in order to have some more Christian experience. But that's the Judaizing tendency to say I need something that sounds

1:02:04 more Jewish than what I'm doing. If I just say God or if I say I am well I mean I understand what that means. If I say Yeshua, or if I say Jehovah, or if I say Yahweh, now we're talking. That's that really authentic Jewy stuff that's I need more of that. That's the problem. And so when I dug into the history of Yahweh, Yahweh, not YHWH Don't care about that. Don't care about vowel pointing. Where did Yahweh come from? Well, the first place I looked was on Google Engrams, search for frequency, because yeah, if Yahweh is the name of God, if it's what everybody knows today, yeah, it's common probably in a lot of your churches for pastors and others to say Yahweh, because it seems sincere. It seems authentic.

1:02:49 Authenticious. It seems like something that's really, really legit. And so people do it in good conscience. I don't think that they're acting maliciously when they do it. But my question was, what's the genealogy of this thing? Is this godly or is it a turd? And what I found was that the word literally did not exist until the mid eighteen hundreds and it was kind of on the it was kind of hanging around in the background in terms of frequency on Google engrams, and grams on it was kind of on a slow upward trajectory until after about twenty oh five or so, right around twenty ten, you know, fifteen, fourteen years ago, it goes vertical. Everybody suddenly is saying Yahweh out of the blue. Well, that's a really big red flag to me.

1:03:35 Because that's not a natural pattern. That means that something changed in the Zeitgeist, people were behaving in one way and then they started behaving another. Now, in some cases, that's just an interesting thing to notice, but when you're talking about God's name and suddenly God's name explodes 14 years ago, yeah, that's going to concern me a great deal. So I dug into it and I started looking about at the very earliest instances in the Google Ngrams repository of where Yahweh was first used. And the thread is is going over what I discovered. I'm not gonna go into it too much here, but the gist of it is that as I said, there was never done in church history until around the middle ages. And then one of the first things that happened was that

1:04:23 the vowel pointing, so you know, we mentioned that Hebrew has no vowels. Some of you probably are familiar with vowel pointing. If you see what's called Hebrew today, it's not, but it's what it's called. You'll often see that there are dots and lines. So it's look like broken Morse code is scattered around. That's the vowel pointing. That's adding the vowel sounds to the written text so that someone who isn't receiving the orally transmitted teaching knows how to pronounce it, knows which words they are, because again, this primitive backward language has no often has not enough context to even know what word you're talking about. So the vowel pointing has only existed for about eleven, maybe twelve

1:05:03 hundred years at the outside. It's a brand new thing. You can say brand new because you know in America most of you nobody's living in a twelve hundred-year-old house, but twelve hundred years is new for Christianity. And so what happened was the Masoretes, the Jewish scholars in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East, they wanted to solve this problem. They finally started adding vowels to the old language because there had been an effort, even though it was dead, they were beginning to try to repersonate it, they were bringing it back, trying to preserve it, trying to preserve that part of their tradition. And sadly, they also wrote the uh the Talmud in Aramaic and so it has vowel pointing as well.

1:05:48 The very first sentence that we have of vowels on so-called Hebrew is the Aleppo Codex, which is about eleven hundred years old. And maybe is it could happen they say maybe about as early as about 750 was the first time that the vowels were added. And something that happened in the 12th century because they still wouldn't add the vows to Yahweh. They left it alone. And so around the 12th century, the Masoretes transliterated the vowels from Adonai, which is another name for God, onto the continents consonants of the tetragrammaton. The YHWH had the vowels from Adonai superimposed on it. And that's where the word Jehovah comes from. So they they invented Jehovah about 800 years ago. And after a couple hundred years it got picked up medieval Europe

1:06:40 because contact with the Jews who were passing around their Hebrew texts and saying this is scripture, this is more authentic than what you have, some of them fell for it uncritically. Like, well, okay, that was kind of the the beginning of Judaizing resurging in the Christian church was already happening before the Reformation. And it's it's a tragedy that that happened because they were uncritical. No one ever considered the fact that the genealogy of even the vowel pointing, never mind the so-called Hebrew text of scripture that was a thousand years newer than the Septuagint, every single vowel pointer had been invented or had been transcribed, had been not transcribed because there's no transmission, had been given to the Christians by men who were

1:07:31 in hell. Every single man who was involved in the creation of vowel pointing for the Hebrew language is in hell because 100% of them were Jews. They were evil, wicked, god-hating men. And even in the Middle Ages, they were called Christ-killers. And yet when they started, when the church started looking at, hmm, I want to learn more about God's word. Okay, great. Let's turn to the Jews. What? They went to the people that they call Christ killers and said, Tell us more about our God. And so what did the rabbis do? They started passing off their Hebrew text and saying, here you go, here's the vowel pointers, and the Adonai tetragrammaton mashup of Jehovah was passed on. And so it began to s plant the seed in people's minds

1:08:16 that I am is not sufficient. The using the words that God used isn't enough. You need the sound. And I realize this is kind of a fiddly point for some people, but the word and the sound isn't the same thing. You can have synonyms where different words mean the same thing, totally different words, different sounds. The sound of whatever the tetragrammaton is, it's the name that God gave. I don't I don't mean to diminish its importance. What it is not, is a magic spell. It's not something that because I don't know how God pronounced it, I'm missing out. I do not have less of the Christian faith because I don't know how to pronounce YHWH. And so what happened in the eighteen hundreds, there was a man

1:09:01 named Wilhelm Gesenius, who was a linguist, he was a scholar, who was digging into some of these questions. And he came up with Yahweh, Y A H W E H, the six letters, that sound. He said, I think this is a sound that it probably was. Fine. People have been arguing about for a while, just as it is a peripheral academic exercise. It's an interesting question. I wonder, personally, like I like to know. I don't care. Again, I'm not missing out on anything, but it's a reasonable question. And it's one thing for a man to speculate, but what Gicinius did was for one, he was already practicing critical scholarship, so he didn't believe that Moses was the scribe of the Torah. He didn't believe the Genesis was literal.

1:09:52 And so he came up with Yahweh in part by thinking the the Hebrews were influenced by their neighbors. And so he got to the pronunciation Yahweh with Jove and with Jupiter, because those were also preeminent gods in those places where the Hebrews lived with their neighbors and he thought, well, there seemed to be some similarities between YHWH and Jove and Jupiter. I bet they were all influenced the same way. And so he sort of mangled some of the phonetics of those words, stuck him into the tetragrammaton, and ta-da, we have Yahweh. If he had been a proper Christian, he could have still made the connection between the Tetragrammaton and Jove and Jupiter. Because as a Christian, it's entirely believable that those would be related.

1:10:45 Not because there's some god and we don't know his name, but because the worshippers of Jupiter and Jove still remembered something of God, but they didn't know God. So they they knew part they knew something about how to call upon him, but they didn't know who they were calling upon. So like the mythologies, all the all the things that they believed about Jove and Jupiter were evil, but they at least were pointing to the king of gods. They got that one detail right. That's entirely permissible for a Christian to believe. But he didn't believe that, so he said, Yeah, I think it's Yahweh. He wrote it in a book, he published it a few years later, he actually retracted. It was a footnote effectively.

1:11:25 About thirty years later, twenty years later, a man named Alexander McCorter III discovered this book and when he saw Yahweh, he didn't see a pious or unpious, depending on how you want to interpret it, speculation about how to pronounce this word that doesn't really matter. When he saw Yahweh, he discovered a key to reinterpret all of scripture. So he went nuts. He wrote a whole book, wrote 179-page books. I read the read the whole thing, either screenshots in the thread where you can read some of the clips I found. Basically what he believed when he discovered this word Yahweh, one, he was a unitarian, he was not a Christian. He had some insane heretical beliefs about the Trinity. He denied the Trinity.

1:12:14 He uh it was just a disaster. He believed that the Septuagint was a shoddy translation by men who didn't know Hebrew at all. He said they're really bad at Hebrew. So he had fallen completely under the spell that the Masoretic text that dates back, in his case, about eight hundred years, that was the real Bible. And the 2000-year-old version that we have in Greek, that was somehow botched. Because he believed that, he believed that the translators of the Septuagint were influenced by Greek pagan philosophy. And so one of the things that the Septuagint does is it will just translate God is God. And he rejected the word God. It's Theos in Greek. He rejected that. He said that that was Greek philosophy impinging upon the true religion.

1:13:03 So he found it impermissible that the Septuagint said God. That's kind of weird because Christians have always invoked the name of God. He says that's a pagan practice. No one's permitted to do that. So when he found Yahweh, what he decided was that it didn't it didn't mean I am. He effectively said the Hebrew had a tense that it doesn't have, it doesn't have a future tense. He believed the Yahweh was he who is to come, which is a really weird thing because what he wanted to do by taking this Yahweh sound, like in I realize it's kind of getting off into the weeds, but that's that's the point of this. When we say Yahweh today, this is what we're inheriting. One guy makes up a word, says, I think it might have

1:13:48 sounded like this. Another guy discovers it, he invents a new way of interpreting that word, and then he sticks it back in the rest of the Bible. And so according to McCorder, if Yahweh or Yahweh means he who is to come, he wanted to treat that as a prophecy of the Messiah. And so the book that he wrote was entitled Yahweh Christ or the Memorial Name. And basically he used Yahweh, Yahweh, as a decodering for the entire Bible. And he reinterpreted all the passages, contrary to how they'd ever been interpreted by Christians in the history of the church, in a way that was forward looking. Now, this becomes really creepy when it gets adopted by others. The when he published this book, it was roundly panned.

1:14:35 It was the I clipped some of the reviews of it. It was despised rightfully, even by some places that weren't particularly very Christian, they still found this utterly outside the faith. So it didn't really go anywhere too much until a cult discovered it. After he wrote this, he published it, it didn't really take off because it was it was pop theology. It was garbage and it was blasphemy. Unfortunately, it was discovered by a man named John Thomas and the Christadelphians. They were a unitarian cult in When they found it, they became ecstatic because this was this key of Yahweh of decoding the old testament and the new testament and then pointing to a future incarnation. They believed that this was consistent with their beliefs, which was

1:15:26 really bad news because these guys were a full-blown cult. They called them themselves the antipos, which means basically the like the adversary working against. It's you can see in the in the thread how creepy some of the stuff is. they're disturbing people. They had they denied that the devil existed. They denied that there's immortality of the flesh. Like they they weren't remotely Christian, but they loved Yahweh. And so they popularized it because Unitarianism unfortunately was taking off. And so they got enough attention that it sort of entered not the mainstream, but it it became widely known enough they was just sort of sitting there, and then I didn't figure out where later on Yahweh became adopted more broadly.

1:16:12 But it sort of became normal where people suddenly stop thinking that I am has significance, which it does, that confession of Jesus saying before Abraham was I am, that's a profound confession of who he is as God, that God is eternal. When McQuerter made Yahweh a future promise, he effectively turned it into a prophetic word, which is a problem because he wasn't talking about the second coming of Christ, he was talking about a new incarnation. And my personal belief, after digging through this, I think that when you read through it, it should creep you out and I believe that Yahweh is an invocation of the Antichrist. I think that the way these men who expounded upon Yahweh and they used it as a decodering for the Old and New Testament,

1:17:05 the ecstatic terms in which they describe Yahweh is he who is coming, it screams antichrist to me. I think when you look at it side by side with some of the passages in Revelation, I think that's what they're talking about. And you can take a look for for yourself. I don't it's my personal opinion, but it's really creepy. Even if you don't agree that it's an invocation of antichrist, it's still really creepy who was attracted to it and none of them were Christian. Like maybe Gicinius was. He was he was in rough shape. McQuer was absolutely not. The Christadelphians were absolutely not. And then yet later on in the 20th century, somebody else digs it up and says, Oh yeah, Yahweh, that's that's the original name

1:17:49 of God. That's the Jewish name of God. Now we have it. Now we have that sound that we're going to use, and now we have a more authentic version of Christianity than we have when we just said God or I am, depending on context. So by itself, it seems meaningless, but when you know the genealogy of who was attracted to it in the last two centuries, again, it didn't exist before two centuries ago. It did not exist. It was 190 years ago that Yahweh was invented. And yet today in our churches and our synods, we see men using this again with ecstasy because it's it's authentic. And what's really weird is that even in the LCMS there are guys who claim to be theologians who will talk about God in the New Testament, and then we'll refer to God as Yahweh in

1:18:38 the Old Testament. That's coming incredibly dangerously close to confessing a heresy all by itself. To divide God into two parts like that, where you have Yahweh in the Old Testament and then God in the New Testament. That's not a Christian confession. And yet that's a completely normal way for guys to be talking today. And since Cory and I began delving into some of these subjects, even just a little bit, we have directly seen pushback in the Missouri Senate at the highest levels to double and triple down on this stuff. They're pushing Hebrew even harder. They're overtly at attacking the Septuagint, which again was the Bible of the early church, that's unequivocally true. There's no Hebrew Bible used there.

1:19:20 It didn't exist. The Hebrew Bible that they're using, that they're saying is saying is authentic, is just over a thousand years old. And the continuity, such as it is, between what they're using from their Masoretic text and what goes back to Jesus' day, was exclusively in the hands of the Christ killers who deny God. Incidentally, there's specific changes that were made in the Masoretic text to remove a few of the key prophecies about God. In the Hebrew text, the Masoretic text has prophecies removed to not refer to Jesus Christ. That's what they did with a Bible, so-called, that these men want to hold over against the Septuagint. Now, Cory and I both think that there's some value in comparing

1:20:07 them, but for someone to a deliberately attack the Greek to support the much newer Hebrew, again it's Judaizing. Well why are you doing that? Because it's Hebrew and therefore it's older? Well, that's simply not true. It's not older. Yahweh's not older. Yahweh's less than 200 years old. That's what we find with some of these things. Some of the newer forms of Judaizing are they're just fabrications. They're taking things that seem Jewy, sticking them in Christianity when they have no basis in the Christian church. And that's why it's something that Stone Choir was concerned about, because what are you doing? Why are you importing stuff that has no basis in church history and then what's going to be the fruit of it when you

1:20:48 have Christadelphians, Unitarians, people who deny that there's a Satan, saying, Yeah, Yahweh, Yahweh's coming, Yahweh is he who c is to come. That creeps me out. I that makes me viscerally uncomfortable. These guys want to preach about it. there's a conflict of religions going on here. That's why the first episode we talked about where are you're getting your morality from, where you're getting your theology from. If you're getting it from from people who call themselves the adversary and who are unitarians who deny God, you're you're rowing across the river to hell. For anyone in our audience who happens to be inclined toward languages, or perhaps we even have a philologist in our audience, you may have

1:21:36 noticed something about the word Yahweh or Yahweh if you want to say it as the Germans would. The vowel sequence that is added to to the consonants is simply what one would expect if you were adding vowels to a German word in the one case or an English word in the other. Which is a little curious that it just happens to have obtained the vowels that fit the languages, the target languages. It's a minor point, but it is a curious thing to have happen, because if you were going to say this more clearly for haps for those who are not linguistically inclined, if you were given those four consonants and told to pronounce them as an English speaker or a German speaker, what we now have is exactly what you

1:22:31 would do. Just think about it. Think of the four consonants, pretend you don't know what vowels are added to them today, and then add vowels in your head. You're going to add A and E, because that's just the natural way English and German work when it comes to this sequence of consonants. But I want to point out something about the names of God that are given in Scripture, a fundamental fact. God gives us a number of different names in Scripture. Obviously, one of the biggest instances of this is in Exodus, Exodus three fourteen, in which God speaks to Moses and says, in English, I am who I am. For those who are intending to clip that, no, I don't mean that God spoke to Moses in English, I mean to say that

1:23:21 I am who I am is how we render it in English. God gives his name as I am, Ego E me, Ego Sum. These are all things that are eminently translatable. You can readily translate I am who I am into basically any language. But two of the other names God gives us that we have in Scripture are God and Lord. God, Lord, and I am are all eminently translatable. I think you would find it very challenging to find any language into which you could not translate these. God gave us names for Himself that we can use in our own language. He didn't give us a special name, a special combination of sounds that we have to use. He gave us a word that can be translated, and he did cause it to be translated, because he gave it here to Moses,

1:24:25 in whatever language it happened to be that he was speaking to Moses here, because obviously we don't know. Moses knew more than one language. We don't know which one God used. It was recorded in Hebrew at one point. It has been translated into Aramaic. It has been translated into Greek, God caused it to be translated into Greek with the Septuagint. And so we know that this was a word God gave us to be translated, because if as Woe said, if it was not meant to be translated, if God had intended for this to be this specific set of sounds is my name and you will use this as my name, Christ would have given it to us as his name when he spoke of it in the New Testament, and it would have been translated as that sequence of sounds.

1:25:11 It would not have been translated as a concept. It would have been transliterated in order that you could pronounce it the same in your tongue as it was pronounced by those who used it in another. But that's not the case, because you have God, which you can translate into German easily. Got. You can translate into Latin Deus, you can translate it into Greek Theos. The same thing is true of Lord and I am. God did not intend us to use some magical sequence of sounds as his name. And we should be very hesitant, we should be very concerned when someone tries to say that we have to use this sequence of sounds because as Will mentioned, that's magic. That's name magic. That is something that we see in the Talmud.

1:26:02 That is something we see in paganism. That is something we see in mysticism, in the occult, we see this all over in the anti-Christian world. It is not something that exists in Christianity. And so I want to bring up a version of this that we see with regard to the New Testament. Because in addition to those who say we have to use the word Yahweh for God, at least in the Old Testament or where it appears in the New Testament, we have those today who, in another form of Judaizing, will tell us that we have to call Christ Yeshua. Because yes, that is his name if you speak Hebrew or Aramaic. His name is Yeshua. That's not the name we use in English. That's not the name that's used in the New Testament, because the

1:26:51 New Testament is recorded in Greek, and that's Yesus. It is not Yeshua. In English, we say Jesus. Jesus, depending on which language you use, you use a different name, but they are all Jesus. And so no, if you are an English speaker, you do not have to say Yeshua. That is Judaizing. We are not Hebrew speakers. We are not Aramaic speakers. We are English speakers. In English, his name is Jesus. In In whatever your mother tongue happens to be, use the name Jesus, whatever it happens to be translated as, it's Jesus if you speak Spanish. Use the name for Christ in your language. Because again, it is not a magic spell. It is not, if you say these sounds in this order, something

1:27:51 necessarily happens. It's not ex opre operato. Again, we'll come back to that because we will always return to this point. Things that are of the devil, things that are evil, things that are black magic or the occult often are ex operato. You do the thing, you get the result. You ask for demons to join you, you're probably going to get demons. That's how evil works. That is not how God works. The things of God depend on faith. And so it is not that you utter this particular series of sounds, and then God does something because you said the magic word. No. You pray to God, using the names God has given us in your language, because again we have shown amply that God intended for his name to be translated, gave it in a way that

1:28:51 can be translated, and even caused it to be translated in the case of the Septuagint. You use that name, and you use it in faith. Because the things of God depend on faith. They do not occur simply because you did the sequence of things or made the sequence of sounds. That is black magic. Christians need to avoid it. Just to reiterate the point one more time, the Septuagint, the Bible that Jesus used, translates YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, as either I am or God. It shows up a bunch of times, and the Greek Bible never once plays any games with sounds. It either translates the word or just calls them God because they're synonymous. I am is God. That's a permissible thing to say. And when God inspired the translation of the Septuagint, that's what he

1:29:48 did. And it's what Jesus preached from and it's what Paul cited. It was almost universal. Over ninety percent of the quotations in the New Testament of the Old Testament are either directly or consistent with the Septuagint. And a significant portion of the quotations are not consistent with the Masoretic text. Again we'll we'll do a future episode where we specifically talk about those details because it's fascinating. And it's another example the the the widespread abandoning of the Greek Septuagint as the Old Testament basis for scripture, the early church held that universally. Everyone did. It was It was the only one. For centuries, before Jesus and after Jesus, it was preserved. And then as, you know, eventually not everyone spoke Greek, so they

1:30:38 needed another vernacular. And in the West, they shifted into Latin. And unfortunately Jerome had some very deep seated problems. In fact he had significant contact with Talmudic scholars who did some very real damage to some of his theology. He ended up using some of the Hebrew text for the Vulgate. And then on down the road, everyone sort of fell into the same view that is widely held today that the Hebrew is more authentic because it's older. Simply not true. And also it's not consistent when you look at the mechanisms of translation. It's not consistent with what was done in scripture itself. So the fundamental point there is is not, you know, just that word and again, I've probably used it at some point, although I'm

1:31:27 kind of viscerally even before I knew what was going on, I really didn't like the word. I probably said it unironically. I won't again, now that I know. That's pr that's part of a lot of what this is about. We often act in good conscience not knowing that we've done something that's in error. And the Christian response when you find out you're in error, as Corey was saying at the beginning, is not to double down. It's not once you find out that you've made a mistake, that was an innocent mistake, but it was nevertheless a wicked thing that you did, you didn't know it. You didn't know where it came from. You trusted someone who taught you. You repeated what they said. It turned out was bad. The Christian response is repentance.

1:32:08 Matanoia. Turn away from it. Condemn it. Point to it and say what I did was sin. I reject my sin. I reject this sin as not mine anymore. I'm not going to do it again. You shouldn't do it again. If you are living a life where that never happens, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're not a Christian because we all sin knowingly and unknowingly. And when you find out, the Christian response is like, that's awful. Lord forgive me. We should that should be a part of the regular Christian daily life. Lord forgive me what I didn't even know I was doing wrong. But you, Lord, know everything. So of course you knew about that too. When we double down on our air, that's when, as Corey said,

1:32:54 we get into real trouble. Because then it's not just, you know, this translation issue versus a sound and you know, the circumcision, you know, as Corey said, circumcision doesn't damn. It shouldn't be happening. I think it's the criminality of the torture involved is certainly damnable, but that's not what's in the minds of those who are typically permitting it. Nevertheless, once you realize what's going on, you have to respond as a Christian, and that means to flee from evil. In order to head off some potential questions in the future, particularly for myself, I want to point out that the phrase I am who I am has been translated slightly differently in different languages. And again, this is a case where we have this between the

1:33:45 Hebrew and the Greek, again the Greek Septuagint being an inspired translation, we have this in other languages as well. And so those who know German may decide to ask me questions because Woe mentioned the future tense, and arguably Luther's translation is future tense in the German, although I will comment more on that in a second here. In English, it's I am who I am, which I don't have to translate for you because you are an English speaking audience. The Greek is ego emhaon, I am the one. The Latin is ego sum quisum. I am who I am. So exactly the same, incidentally, as the English. Luther translates it isn sein, der Is Seinwerde I shall be who I shall be. You really shouldn't take that necessarily as a simple future.

1:34:44 Bear in mind this is five hundred years ago for this translation, you're making You're making the transition from Middle High German to modern German, which Luther incidentally spurred with his translation of scripture, and I translated it. I shall be who I shall be, because it is more emphatic. It is God making an emphatic statement of I am, which is how we would translate it in English. And you'll see this incidentally later in the exact same verse, because later in the same verse, God gives a shortened version of his name, and he does this in any of the various languages and translations we have, because he doesn't repeat I am who I am when telling Moses to say, Well, who sent you? Who sent you?

1:35:29 When they are asked, when Moses is asked, Who sent you to us? Why should we believe you? Well, what does he say? He says, I am has sent me to you. in the German Ichwerde sein hat mich zu euch gesandt. And incidentally in the Latin it doesn't even use the exact same terms, because it says Qui est mised me advos, so quiest. This difference across the translations is not something about which we have to worry. There are minor differences in emphasis in the way that you relay concepts in different languages. These translators were faithful to the original in translating in a way that worked in the target language. And so Ishva Design is not the same thing as what Woe was saying about the future tense, because it's not saying I am

1:36:23 the one who will come. It says I shall be. It's an emphatic statement of I am the one. It's really, if you want to extrapolate out of this, what you can take away from this name is God is saying that He is the root of all being. Because as we would say philosophically, He is being. He is being itself. That is, again, going back to the transcendentals, that is one of the five transcendentals. Being and unity are fourth and fifth, whatever order you want to place them. God is being. God is the fundamental ground of all things. That is what he is saying here. That is his name, because that is his essence, because again, God is his essence. Because God is simple. You cannot have a division in God.

1:37:11 And so that is how you should think about this, regardless of the language that you are using. So I just wanted to head off those potential future questions and answer them here and now. So next we'll deal with a relatively modern issue actually. This came into specifically the Lutheran Church in America in relatively recent years, and by relatively recent, admittedly I mean a century ago, but we're talking about things that span millennia, not things that happened yesterday. So put yourself in the right mindset for recent. I was just talking about Luther's translation, which is from the fifteen hundreds. And we're talking about the Septuagint, which is considerably older. But we're going to talk about the rite of baptism as it

1:38:06 was practiced historically in the LCMS, in the Lutheran Church in America. And until And until the early nineteen hundreds, essentially right around the time of the First World War, which you should bear in mind some of the things we've talked about previously historically with some of the currents that were happening around that time, a curious thing was dropped from the rite of baptism. The rite today, as it now stands, is essentially just do you renounce the devil? Yes. And all his works. Yes. And all his ways. Yes. It depends on the specific setting you have and the rubrics as to what exactly The language is, but basically you're denouncing the devil, his works, and his ways. In the older version, and we'll go right ahead and say this

1:39:02 is more appropriate, there was an additional renunciation. And that additional renunciation applied to specific groups. Now it could be used conditionally depending on the relevant group. If you came from heathen, pagan parents, you could be asked to specifically renounce the old heathen ways. And this is a carryover, incidentally, from very early on. This was part of the baptism rite in Germany, in the German lands, when they were first converting to Christianity, they were asked to renounce the ways, the false ways of their pagan ancestors, the worship in groves and the worship of false deities of the pagan gods. In the American context you also have the Unitarians, there's the separatist

1:39:55 group which is really a specific sort of Lutheran historical matter that isn't relevant today but obviously Unitarians are still relevant, and so if you came from a Unitarian background, you would be asked to specifically denounce the blasphemy, the heresy of Unitarianism. But for the sake of this episode, the most salient one is that they were asked to renounce the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy. This was part of our baptismal rite. Up until the nineteen hundreds. Up until right around World War One. But you can see why this would have been dropped. But the fact that it was dropped is Judaizing. Because what you're doing is you're trying to minimize the fact that the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy is something from which a convert to

1:40:51 Christianity needs to sever himself. He needs to say that my past in Judaism was a wicked and evil thing, because they deny Christ, they do not believe in Christ, they blaspheme Christ. I am renouncing the devil and all his works and all his ways, which include the Jewish faith. This is something that should be included today. We should have this in our baptismal rite. It isn't necessarily the case that every single candidate should have to say this, because, for instance, if you happen to have a pagan background, you probably don't need to renounce Judaism. You probably don't have a Jewish background as well, although you may. You should renounce what is relevant to you because you are converting

1:41:42 to Christianity, you are renouncing your old unbelief and blasphemous ways. But this isn't what modern Christians want to hear, and modern pastors are made uncomfortable by this. Because you have people who want to say, Well, the Jews are just our our older brothers, they're the old version of Christianity, as it were. And as we have gone over repeatedly, that is not the case. Christianity does not derive from Judaism. Judaism is younger than Christianity. Judaism is a wicked offshoot that denies the divinity of Christ, that denies the sacrifice of Christ, that denies the resurrection. Judaism, quite frankly, is a pagan religion, but it is a pagan religion that is a perversion of the Christian faith.

1:42:39 The faith of Abraham, the faith of Adam, the faith of Noah, all of these Judaism is not related to them because they were not Jews, they were Christians. And so we see, even today, relatively recently, in the recent past in our own country, this sort of Judaism has crept into the church. We had the right belief previously, we had the right praxis as well. When you get rid of these safeguards, that's when the Judaism, the Judaizing, when all of these problems start to creep back into the church, because you've removed the guardrails. And all Satan looks for is that little opening. He's a rat. He just has to find that little opening and he'll squeeze himself right through. And that's what we gave him by dropping this from our Baptismal

1:43:33 Rite. have the link in the show notes to this uh recent discovery, but again this Was the LCMS baptismal rite in German in 1922, just over one century ago? Any Jew who wanted to become a Christian, as a condition of baptism, baptism was denied to every Jew who would refuse to renounce Jews. Because it's important to read how this you will you can see the link in the show notes with the translation how it's actually phrased. The public confession is not simply a confession of personal guilt for having been a Jew in the past. It says do you renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways, especially the Jewish unbelief and blasphemy. For a Jew to become a Christian and to make this public

1:44:26 confession is to denounce every other Jew, is to publicly damn all Jews, to say they are of the devil because they are unbelievers and they are blasphemers. To make that a necessary precondition for someone to become a Christian is the true Christian faith. It is a precondition. No Jew can actually be a Christian unless this is their confession. Whether or not a church makes them say it. The reason this was necessary, because that there are many who will pretend they will try to slide in. But I can name pastors in the LCMS today who would refuse to make this confession, that was the public confession of the LCMS, one hundred years ago, because they don't believe it. Do they not believe it because politics changed or because of the

1:45:15 Holocaust? Well, yeah. It's not about it's not about Christianity anymore for any of them. Christianity is no longer in view when these subjects come up. And that's I think the crux of the entire Judaizing heresy is that it sets aside Christianity by bits and pieces and by degrees and says, Well, yeah, you have your gospel stuff and your Jesus stuff, but not this. We got to have this older thing, this more Jewy thing. We have this thing that's more Jewish than what we have because that's going to be more authentic. I reject and denounce the unbelief and blasphemy of all Jews. I despise the wickedness of these people who murdered Christ and dance in his blood to this day? That's my confession because a Christian confession.

1:46:07 And so in the church I'm despised. It's a despicable thing to say. According to Christianity, no, it's a necessary precondition of Christianity. It's a necessary precondition to enter the kingdom of heaven. That's what denying baptism to someone who refuses to say that means. That's literally what it means. So this is not a small point. This fact that this is buried in an agenda for a baptism rite and like that's a one-off thing, you know, whatever. This is a choke point that excludes this is this is the narrow path versus the wide way to hell. That's precisely why it used to be done. Why it was the Christian confession. And it still is the Christian confession. It's just one that's by and large rejected.

1:46:51 As Corey said, this these sorts of things function as guardrails, because if for example, the LCMS to this day required every Jew who would enter into fellowship with us and say I am a Christian just like you, if they had to denounce all Jews as children of the devil for their unbelief and their blasphemy, which is active, Jewish blasphemy is active. They don't simply blaspheme by existing the way they live their lives and the things that they say blaspheme God Almighty. Christians must condemn that. And for a Jew to become a Christian must condemn it as a first party. But even then the way this is phrased isn't I r I repent of my being a Jew. They have to say, I condemn all Jews. That's a radical difference.

1:47:39 It's not a small little personal I'm here for Jesus thing. It's every Jew is going to hell unless they also repent as I am, and as less unless they also denounce all Jewry. That's a big deal. And it would have prevented many of the problems that we see in our church today, because most of the people who are hanging around today would have long since left. They would hate this. Because it's not Christian. Well, was it Christian a hundred years ago? 'Cause that's really the question. it's the stone choir question. If it was Christian a hundred years ago, when did it stop being Christian. If we were Christian 100 years ago, when did we stop? Well, we stopped and we started rejecting basic Christian beliefs.

1:48:20 So keep all this in mind in view of what we said in the first episode about where are you getting your morality? This is another part of it. Where are you getting your beliefs? If you're getting them from people who murdered Christ, who hate God, who blaspheme him with everything that they do in their lives, if this is the source of some of your theology, how much room is left for God? And can you have competing religions at the same time? That's what we're dealing with here. The situation that we face today is that we are trying to hold multiple competing religions simultaneously. We are trying to take these things that came from evil men, whether it was thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago,

1:49:02 or decades ago, we're taking things that come from evil and we're trying to baptize them. I was reminded earlier as I was thinking about this, how much a lot of these Judaizing problems are captured by what Tolkien did with the one ring. Remember, Sauron poured his malice and his hatred and his evil into this talisman that was the ring. Part of his soul, his essence essence as an evil being was put into the ring. And it was fine because it was a weapon for him. But then he lost the ring. And so when he lost access to that part of his wicked power, he was diminished. But what happened with the ring? The ring was captured by Isildur. He found it, he wore it, he used it, he was he died because of it.

1:49:55 There was the covetousness of men for that power because they misunderstood what the power of the one ring was. That was basically what Lord of the Rings was about. The covetousness of that power, believing, oh, this power of the great enemy, if only I took it into my hands I could use it for good. That's what they all wanted to believe, that they could take this evil thing and use it for good purposes. What they did not appreciate in the essence of the story of the ring was that it was itself evil. It did not cease to be evil because it was no longer in the possession of Sauron. He had put his malice into it, and whoever be wielded it possessed his malice, and the malice acted on its own. When we look at these evil things, now is saying Yahweh is

1:50:45 evil as the one ring. I mean, from it's more evil because it's real and the ring's made up, but it's not simply a question of degrees, it's a question of genealogy. Where did this thing come from? If you found the one ring and you knew that it had all of the devil's malice poured into it. Would you pick it up knowing how powerful it was and say, I'm gonna use this for good? Or would you know this thing is pure evil and I can only possibly use it for evil because it has not only evil intent, but it has a life of its own. Evil ideas have a life of their own. We cannot co opt hell. We can't take Satan's things and use them for our purposes. We can only use things from God for godly purposes. When we use evil things, things from hell, things that are teachings

1:51:35 of demons, which we'll talk about a lot next week. We can only possibly use those things for evil. The genealogy of the practice of modern amputation circumcision is pure evil. There's no godly outcome for it. And it is a false confession to do it. To say Yahweh is itself an evil thing. It didn't exist for nearly two thousand years, and then a couple pagan unbelievers made it up and turned it into something that they used for evil purposes. And then what has happened in the last few decades really? Christians discovered the Yahweh ring and picked it up and said, I'm going to use this for good. Why? Because it's more authentic. It's more like that old time religion. It's Judeo. I need more Judeo and less Christian.

1:52:24 Well, that's exactly what they're getting. When you start talking about Yahweh and you stop talking about God, which is incidentally what all these people do, that's what you get. You lose You lose God and you're gonna get Yahweh, you're gonna get a faceful of Yahweh, but it's not gonna be what you thought it was, because you can't use an evil thing for good purposes. All these things follow the same pattern. We can get into Seder meals today, but it's the same thing. It's a completely new made-up way for Christians to adopt evil pagan practices because it seems more authentic. Why? Because Jews do it. The purpose of those things is always to deny Christ, small degrees, but is to say what we received in the church, what we

1:53:08 received in Christian history, is not as good as the other thing, as the secrets, as the mysteries that were lost. And we're going to pick them up and we're going to adopt them all. And we're going to make Christianity this brand new, more powerful thing by making it even older. When we on Stonequar are talking about adopting old beliefs, it's consistent with scripture. You know, if God says yes, keep circumcising, who are we to disagree? But the very first thing that happened in the early church was it got shut down. It was said you never understood in the first place. You never knew what you were doing with this. And today you're using it for evil, and you can only possibly do evil with it.

1:53:48 These tendencies that we have to just adopt random crap and think it's gonna be hunky dory are a threat to souls. Because nobody takes it seriously. Nobody cares where they get their ideas. Like, oh Yahweh, that sounds fine. Like, that's I remember that that tetragrammaton thing in some translations where it won't translate it. It would just say Y H up W H, which is also dumb. That's the the point of scriptures you're supposed to be able to read it. the Septuagint did. It said God or it said I am because that's what it is. You don't need special incantations. And it's fine to acknowledge. Like in the ESV, when the tetragrammaton is used, they will translate Lord in all caps. That's fine too.

1:54:28 God and Lord are synonymous. You know Lord, as we said before, is a synonym for master. That's how you should think of God as your master. And you will answer to your master for what we do with these things, me included, not preaching to you here, like we're all guilty of something. When we take seriously where we're getting these ideas, we're going to be armored against the very sort of errors that Satan exploits. As Cory just said, Satan just needs a little crack. You know, as we said at the beginning, the Judaizing attack that Satan leveled instantaneously in the church was about circumcision, which was from God. God said to circumcise. Jesus ascends into heaven, and then Satan says to circumcise, circumcise, circumcise.

1:55:11 The Pharisees show up and say circumcise. There's a circumcision party running around and telling everybody to circumcise. Well, isn't that what God said? They shut it down. God said no, you didn't understand, you weren't obeying, you weren't believing. It was pro forma garbage. That is ended because it served its purpose. It is no longer mine. When they hang on to things that are no longer from God, they're necessarily from the devil. That's why this stuff matters. Like it's not just matters of opinion. Well, I think I can do this or that or the other thing. If something has evil origins, we must excise it. We can't permit it to be among us. Because even the things that seem small, like Yahweh, well suddenly you

1:55:51 have to start saying Yahweh when you're talking about the old testament God. And then the old testament god is the really mean one, and then new testament god is the loving one. And so you know what? That Yahweh God, he was he was pretty tough and he had a lot of rules. This new Jesusy New Testament God, he's a lot more loving. That sort of division suddenly pops into people's heads, and it's very difficult for them to get away from because most people don't have the mental sophistication to keep all the stuff in their heads at once. You just learn Yahweh, you think, yeah, that's the old thing. Okay, great. And then someone separately sets Yahweh against Jesus. You're like, well, yeah, like Jesus better than Yahweh.

1:56:27 And suddenly there's no God in the Old Testament. You know what? That's what Martin Luther King Jr. believed. That's what Bonhoeffer believed. They believed in the demiurge. They thought they thought there was evil before, and then something new came in the New Testament, that he who was coming would arrive. It's bad news for Christians, but it's what these men will preach. So these tiny errors that seem like it's just fiddly academic garbage. It's always a building block for Satan. We have building blocks too. They're on the God gave us. And so when he says do this, we should do it. And when he says stop, we should stop. And when he says to believe him, when he says I am and I am God, that should be the end of it.

1:57:05 If it's good enough for God, it's good enough for me. I hope it'll be good enough for you two, because that's what all this is about. I am glad you mentioned the Seder meal because I had three points with which I wanted to end, and that was one of them. But on the topic of Seder, because of course I can't leave it untouched, I would just recommend that all of you go and read Hebrews 7. And then bear in mind two things, both while reading it and after reading it. One, Christ is the perfect Passover Lamb, he completed the shadow of the things that were to come. And we have a Passover meal, a better one. We have the Lord's Supper. But do go and read Hebrews seven. I recognize I'm giving reading homework in this episode, but I think

1:57:54 that's fine. And then second of the three points. I mentioned that I would comment on the word gentiles and why I do not use it. And just very quickly, we get Gentile from Latin. Gens is the Latin word. the G is pronounced that way in Latin. That means clan or tribe. And then ille is the adjectival suffix, so it just means of or belonging to the same people, nation, clan, gentilis, which we get Gentiles in English. And so if you understand the Latin, it makes perfect sense because it is translating ethnos or ethne if it's in the plural, nations or people, in the ethnic sense, in the racial sense. And so if you understand the Latin underlying the word, it makes perfect sense. But very few modern readers know any Latin, and so it is

1:58:55 a misleading term to the modern ear, because it sets up this false distinction between the Jew on the one hand and the Gentile on the other. And that is alien to scripture. We will get into that more in another episode when we deal with deal with Galatians, but there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. And that is the point, and that is my third point here. The term Jew has become extremely misleading for a number of reasons. It's used in a number of senses in scripture, it's used in a number of senses in our everyday lives. But it is important, setting all of that aside, it is important to keep in mind what exactly is meant by Scripture, and the best way to keep that in view is to keep the gospel in view and Yes,

1:59:51 we speak of the law quite a lot on this podcast because part of this is the and then what of Christian life. You believe, and now what? Now what do you do? How do you live your Christian life? What should you do or not do? But all of it is in light of the gospel. And what is the gospel? You are saved by faith, which is a free gift, due to Christ's perfect life, his work, death, resurrection That's the gospel. You aren't saved by your blood, and that's true whether you're Jewish or German or French or Japanese or any of whatever other ethnicity I could list. No one will be saved by his own blood. Everyone who will be saved will be saved by Christ's blood. And so when you see the word Jew in Scripture, which probably

2:00:44 shouldn't be translated Jew because the underlying word in the New Testament is Judahite, which is useful for a number of reasons, partly because it reminds us that the ten northern tribes are gone at this point in history, but that is a topic for another time. When you see the word Jew in scripture, don't think that this is some special group that is set aside, that gets special treatment, and God has some special relationship and they have another way to paradise, because that's Christian Zionism, which is another Judaizing heresy, but we did an episode on that, so you can go and listen to that. But think of the words of Romans three. Because you'll hear these words many times from Christian so called Zionists.

2:01:28 Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. And of course they'll end there, they won't mention the rest of it because it gives the value. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. That is a magnificent blessing from God to be entrusted with his word, and the ancient Israelites, the Hebrews, were greatly blessed with that. Granted for them because they were unfaithful it wasn't much of a blessing. But if they had been faithful, it would have been a great blessing. They at least had the ability to read God's word because they physically had it. Which again, without faith, is of no blessing to you, is of no good to you. It is in fact worse to have the oracles of God and

2:02:15 reject them than not to have them. But you'll notice that the Christian Zionist never goes on and reads verse 9. What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin. Which is to say that all are under sin. This is one of the ways in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in a number of these Shemitic languages in this region, they speak of the totality of a thing. They speak of the totality by listing two opposite ends of a spectrum. And so when it says that God created the heavens and the earth, that's saying that He created all things, He created the universe. And so here when it says both Jews and Greeks, what that means is all men, all men are under sin, for all

2:03:09 have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, in Adam all men fell. And so Christ as the second and better Adam, is the redemption of all mankind? Yes, of course there is the objective justification, but there is the subjective which is faith. If you have faith, then you are numbered amongst the elect, then you are saved. Again it all comes back to faith. It is not your bloodline, whether it be Jew or Greek. And that is the point. Any time you see anyone arguing that there is some special character of the Jews, or that they have some special route to God, or special relationship, whatever it happens to be. Look at the actual words of Scripture. What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all.

2:04:04 Anytime you see someone rejecting those words, you are dealing with someone who is Judaizing, and if you listen to that person, if you believe what he is saying, your soul is in danger. Because these are things that Satan attempts to bring into the church, to steal away the gospel, to bring back in works righteousness, to get you to attempt to work your way to God or find some alternative route to God instead of the only way God is given. What does Christ say? I am the way, the truth, and the life. He doesn't say that he's one way of many, which is what we hear from so many today when they speak about all paths lead to God. No they don't. Most paths lead to hell. For broad is the way that leads to hell, for narrow is

2:04:50 the way that leads to paradise. And so be on your guard. As a Christian, that is your duty, particularly as a Christian man, that is your duty because you have a duty to instruct and to lead your wife if you have one and your children if you have them, but also others entrusted to your care, because if you're an uncle, you have duties to your nephews and nieces. You have duties with regard to your parents and your siblings and all those entrusted to your care in whatever capacity in your life. And so you need to be on your guard against these heresies that have been with us from the beginning, as we covered at the beginning of the episode, this was a problem starting with the apostles. This has always been one of Satan's tactics.

2:05:38 Judaizing is one of his favorite tactics, and it will undoubtedly be so until the So until the end, because it's effective. Because in a sense, all of this is a form of Gnosticism. It is that desire that is inherent in some men, at least, many men most likely, to have a secret knowledge, a secret way, to have something, some connection, some ability or path, or whatever it happens to be, that elevates them above everyone else. And that is not what Scripture says. Scripture says all have sinned. Scripture says the only way is Christ. That is what Christians believe. That is what Christians have Christians have always held, and that is what we as Christians have to defend. And part of defending that is pushing back against the rampant Judaizing

2:06:31 that we see in the church today. Because it is destroying the church, and too few men are fighting back against it.