True Religion

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. On today's Stone Choir, we are going to be discussing the subject of religion. What is a religion? This will be the beginning of a three-part arc where we discuss religion in specific terms we'll get into in a minute. In the second episode of this arc we're going to be discussing specifically Judaizing and Gnosticism within Christianity, because those are two key examples of false religions that have been inserted into the practices and beliefs of many of us today. And the final third episode in this arc is going to deal specifically with apostasy. We're going to deal with the fact that much of the New Testament speaks directly to Christians in the church in terms of falling

1:27 away. There are a lot of things that we today read as pronouncements that we think, well, that must apply to pagans because it's talking about people going to hell. when you look at in proper context, it's clearly talking to Christians in the church who have or are falling away and will be damned because they have lost the faith that was given to them. So this is going to be an arc that's going to be a lot of law. There's not going to be a lot of good news in this for us. And the reason that we're tackling it is that this is fundamentally about the state of the church today. As we look at all of our churches, you know, multiple denominations, they're all in varying states of this decay. And the distinction that we're going to highlight today with the definition

2:11 of religion is specifically going to exclude what God you're talking about or what practices you perform. It's going to focus entirely on what is your moral compass? What is the origin of the right and wrong that you hold to in your heart and in your life? Because there's a degree of passion that we bring to our morality, that we bring to what violates our conscience that is absent from when we discuss doctrine. So we'll differentiate between the two of those in this episode. As I said, this is going to be a weighty series to begin the year. If you're a regular listener, we're coming back after a three week hiatus. Thank you to everyone who was you know checking the back catalog along the way.

2:52 I had an interesting exchange with somebody on X uh couple days ago talking about listening to old episodes and he said something that I that I hadn't really thought about, but I wanted to highlight just to say to everybody. He mentioned that when he first found Stone Choir, he jumped around topically and sort of picked the episodes that seemed like they were the most interesting to him. And he said that when he did that, it was depressing. It really hit him over the head. And so he went back to the beginning and listened in order and he had the opposite experience. And I realized that that's something that we wouldn't have really thought about because we very consciously manage kind of the the psychic ebb and flow, like the energy

3:33 of the episodes. You know, these are woo-woo terms, but you know what I mean. Like it's kind of like making an album or a mixtape. We don't want to hammer every every week because that's brutal. Nobody wants that. At the same time, if it's all just light and and less not interesting, but maybe less serious, less urgent, you need to mix those up because we we all need a break. We personally need a break from some of the heavy stuff, and you as as listeners certainly do. So I will say once again, if you've discovered us recently, whenever you're jumping in, we highly, highly encourage you to go back to the very beginning and just listen to them in order. Yeah, if you get 20 minutes into an episode and like this

4:11 is dumb, I don't care about this crap, that's fine. we're not telling anyone to hang on our every word. There's nothing like that about this. It's just that there's a lot of interesting information and points that are vital in one episode that carry over in a future episode. So when we speak, we expect that you've heard the rest. And while we try to make sure each episode stands alone, the continuum also tells a story. And additionally, you know, some of the episodes are gnarly. There's some heavy things in there. If those are the only ones you listen to, this is going to be a fundamentally different sort of podcast than if you listen to them the way that we're presenting 'em, but because we're conscious

4:48 of that and we want the time that you spend with us to not to to be edifying and you know, to challenge you, but not just to completely be you up and leave you bruised and broken, because that's that's not the point. The point is for us to come out of these discussions strengthened and better off than we were before. Uh before we get into the the main subject, I just want to give a brief thanks to everyone who has donated to us in the past year. We've had everyone who donates anything is generous, you know, great or small. Uh we had a couple of particularly large donations at the end of this year that I wanted to acknowledge, but for anyone to give anything of value to a stranger is an act of

5:25 of kindness and generosity, and it means a great deal to both Corey and myself and it makes a big difference. So thank you to everyone who's done that. Additionally, and at least as much, thank you to everyone who shares the stone choir with friends and family, whoever's gonna benefit from it. And thank you to you know for leaving five star ratings and letting people know that this is content worth sharing. Honestly, I think the most valuable thing to us is the fact that people would spend time listening to a couple guys talk about this stuff. Because like you said, some of these episodes and subjects are challenging. they're hard to hear. And they're they're intentionally hard to hear because nobody's talking about 'em.

6:05 Uh that's why we started and begin with to tackle issues that are being neglected. So for you to spend two hours out of 168 in your week listening to us, it means a great deal. And anyone who doesn't donate, God bless you too. Like it's none of this has ever had anything to do with what we receive. It's a podcast. It's free. Please take it, enjoy it, benefit from it. If there's a good episode, listen to it more than once. You're going to learn some things, even the second or third time through. Nothing that you know we ever do here is gonna be for our own benefit. Um clearly, like I got doxxed and punishment for this. Corey has been attacked and you know, whatever. The fact that anyone would think anything kindly of us and and

6:45 share with us means a great deal. So thank you. The reason that we're going to be tackling this arc the in the coming weeks as we come back from our break, which by the way was great. I thank you for coming back after three weeks off. That helped me a lot. It's it it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to to produce these and I didn't realize going in how much work it was going to be. So I actually have a lot of respect now for the guys who churn this stuff out all the time. it's really difficult. Not that I'm whining. Like this is not work great. It's just it was nice to have a few weeks off and uh Corey and I actually kickstarted a couple other things as as we add that downtime that will be paying dividends in the coming

7:26 year. So that's I'm looking forward to when some of those other things come to fruition. This particular arc where we're talking about religion as a subject itself and how we define it in terms of we can see inside our own Christian churches and even inside our own hearts where one religion ends and another one begins is a really tricky subject. The reason that it's challenging is that particularly as Christians, we go to church, believe the Bible, confess God. We do all the normal Christian stuff. And we think in terms of okay, I'm a Christian, and that means exclusively I'm a Christian. That's the way it's supposed to be. But the reality is that as not the case for any of us because we're not perfect.

8:15 The only time we will be perfect Christians is when we die, and God perfects us in eternity. Until then we are imperfect Christians. And that doesn't simply mean that we are free from sin. It means that we are incapable of having the perfect relationship to God and the perfect confession of God that He demands. And those are also sins that Christ paid the price for. So when we talk about these things, we don't want people to be sitting around and fretting like, oh no, am I am I doing something terrible and God is going to hate me and send me to hell. That's not the point. The point is for us to keep in mind what it is that we're thinking and believing and confessing, if it's contrary to scripture.

9:00 So the specific focus of today, when we're talking about religion in terms of source of morality, deliberately excludes who is your God. Because scripture is clear, we're gonna talk about that in the third episode on apostasy. There are many within the church for all times and in all places, who will say I am a Christian, I am a God fear, I am a believer in God, who in fact are not, whatever false beliefs, whatever false religion they hold is in fact their true religion. And so the fact that someone says I'm a Christian, especially today, is fundamentally meaningless. It's truly meaningless to say you're Christian. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't say it. But what does it mean to be Christian?

9:43 And that's the question. And the reason that's important is that there are people who say that they're Christian and they'll have some of the religious beliefs of Christianity, but they will additionally have other religious beliefs, other beliefs of right and wrong of morality that will not have come from scripture. And when you're not getting your morality from scripture, you're still getting it from somewhere. And so the definition of religion that we're going to talk about today, as I said, it excludes practices, it excludes names, it excludes deities, it excludes anything, all the trappings, it only focuses on what is What is your moral compass? Where are you getting your right and wrong?

10:25 Because if you're getting them from God, you're getting them from scripture, and you're going to be a good Christian. You're going to have only Christian beliefs. However, the second that anyone begins to get his moral compass, his right and wrong definitions from anywhere other than scripture, he is importing a false religion. And he now has two religions. And we all have at least two religions. it's inherent because we're sinners, because we are incapable of perfectly worshiping God. One of the crucial things that Luther really gets right in the small catechism when he talks about the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. As we've talked about this in the past, before doesn't mean in

11:07 terms of rank. It means in the presence of, as in I see before me tons of soil. What you're beholding is before you. That is not what it means when God says we are to have no other gods before him. It means in the presence of. And when God is omnipresent, there is nothing that is not present for God. So when he says you can't have any gods in my presence, he's saying period. He's saying anywhere in a superset of the finite universe, there's no place where you can have any gods other than me. So it's not ranking, it's not that God's one and football's two, and you just try to keep football becoming number one. There's one and one God only. Every time we sin, we violate that. Every single time we sin, we Whether knowingly or unknowingly, we are

11:54 disobeying God's will and we are saying, I reject God, I'm my own God for the next thirty seconds or five minutes or the next day, I'm gonna do this other thing, and then make me I'll get back to God later. For right now, this thing that I'm doing, I am my own God. Because God has told me one thing, I'm gonna do another. And whether it's conscious or unconscious, that is enacting a separate religion. And you don't need to think of yourself in terms of being a god. You're just like, well, I'm just gonna do what I want. I don't think it's so bad. And that's the root of this. If your morality is not coming from God, if it's not coming from scripture, you're going to go down a path where all manner

12:35 of errors can occur. We've seen this from the very beginning. In the Garden of Eden, God said to Adam and Eve, where he this was what Eve was taught by Adam, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Now it's interesting that this is the origin of morality. This is God not only giving Adam a command of what is good and evil, but the tree itself, the fruit embodied knowledge of good and evil. And so this was imperfection, this was in perfect creation, there was still the ability to have knowledge of evil. And while we don't know what that means because we're fallen and

13:16 we're on the other side of knowing all sorts of evil, we at least know that God's will is that which is good, and anything contrary to it is evil. And so that fruit embodied the moral compass that they were to have, and every religion ever since then, by whatever form always does the same thing, it always teaches good and evil. And the distinction is what does Satan say to her? But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So he turned it on its head, and he said This knowledge is beneficial. This thing that God said is evil, I'm telling you it's it's gonna be fine.

13:59 And she saw that it looked delicious and so she ate some, gave it to her husband, and he was like, Okay, great. He listened to her, he sinned, he ate the apple, we all die because of it. That mor moral compass right there in the garden is reflected throughout every other sin and every other religion true or false that has ever existed. There's always what is good, what is evil, and then what choices are we going to make when confronted with it? And Eve didn't listen to God's voice. She didn't listen to Adam's voice when he told her what God had said. She said something and Satan tricked her. She's like, okay, well, that sounds good. She stopped having God as her God. She let Satan be her God.

14:44 Just for a few seconds. He told her something different than what God said. And he's like, I like your morality. I like your good and evil better than God's good and evil. I'm gonna go that way. And everything that's happened ever since is a result of that moral decision. I think it is helpful to go through a few terms as we start out this episode. Just in general some of the terms that are related to the matter of religion. For instance, where do we get the word religion? What does it mean in its core sense? What does it mean today? What does it mean for us when we say religion? And so religion has the word itself has a relatively complicated etymology because it is related to a number of terms, a number of verbs in Latin and

15:33 if you understand those terms it gives you a general idea of what religion in its core sense means. And so the two big ones are religio and religo, the difference of an E versus an I in the verb there. Religo is obviously from Lego. Re in Latin is just again or an intensifier, much like in English, but religo means to gather, collect again, or this is the most salient one in the case of the etymology of religion, to go over or through again, for instance, in reading or thought. And so of course we can see where we get this sense of part of religion is going over the religious texts themselves, and this is true. True both of true religion, in this case scripture, and of false religion, because false religions also have their scriptures, they have their beliefs

16:33 that you go over again and again and again. The other verb, religo, an I, is to bind fast. And so religion binds you to a certain set of beliefs and actions. It binds you to these tenets, to these beliefs, these claims of the system itself. So between these two Latin verbs, you get the sense of what we have in English as religion. Additionally, there is the issue of obligatio, which is tangentially related, which is just you can probably guess from the word itself, it's an obligation or a binding related to Religo. But related to this, there is the term cult. This is a vitally important term to understand, generally speaking, because this is more of what we see in our culture today with regard

17:32 to false religion. But cult itself is actually a neutral term. In English it has started to take on almost an exclusively negative term except in specialized usage but that's false. Cult is a neutral term. Cult simply means a system of religious veneration and so for instance, we all belong to the cult of Christ, we belong to the cult of God, we belong to the Christian cult, in the neutral sense which is the proper sense of the word cult. Now, there is of course the negative sense that is largely come to predominate in common usage in English, so Mormonism is a cult in that sense, cult meaning people who are strange in some way, who are out there, who have a weird religion. And so a cult would be a smaller group with strange practices.

18:30 But bear in mind that cult, again, is a neutral term. it simply means a system of religious veneration. There's a system of religious practice. That comes from cultus, which just means the same thing in Latin. We dropped the US, we brought it into English. It comes from a verb that means to cultivate land, or to till or to take care of a field or a garden, also means to inhabit, to frequent, or, in the figurative sense, it came to mean to worship, honor, or revere. There is a connection here, we won't get into it in this episode, we'll get into it in a future episode on a different topic, but there is a connection here between this land and worship, honor, and reverence. But that is what we mean when we say cult and it

19:20 is notable that one of the words we get from cult, from cultus is culture. And so at a very base level, at a foundational level, our culture is an outgrowth of our religion. Because culture is an outgrowth of cult. And so what you have in your culture is going to be based on a religion or multiple religions. And so some of these things that we just assume are so-called secular, they are actually religious. Because the culture itself is religious by nature. And so you may think that something is neutral in the sense of secular, or secular in the sense of neutral, and that it's something about which Christians can disagree or we can ignore it, it's not that important. But there's a reason the second episode we did We did was

20:16 on the genealogy of ideas. Because the source of these things matters. It matters. The foundation upon which you build your life. We should think of a very obvious example here, a very obvious parable from Christ. Upon what sort of foundation are you building? The same thing applies not just to your life, but also to your culture, to your civilization. What is the source from which you have derived these ideas or these beliefs? If your culture tells you that you have to believe A, why is it saying that you have to believe A? What is the source of that? Because if you go back, you will eventually find religion. And if the religion you find is not Christianity, then the culture is telling you you have to believe something false from a false

21:09 religion. That's worship. That's worship of a false god. That is something that we are not permitted to do. And woe mentioned Luther's commentary on the first commandment. I actually want to read just one paragraph. This is from the large catechism instead of the small catechism, which the large catechism is obviously larger. It expands on what is said in the small catechism. I'll actually read two paragraphs so I can give you the context. The first paragraph is just going over the actual text of the first commandment, but I'll read the second half of it. What is the force of this and how is it to be understood? What does it mean to have a god or what is God? Answer A God means that from which we are to expect

22:00 all good, and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe in Him from the whole heart. As I have often said, that the confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. That is an important point for us to bear in mind. When it comes to belief in something. If we rely on something that is not God, if we place our trust in a thing that is not God, we are giving worship to that thing that is part of a false religion, that is cult. That is the worship of a deity. And if it is not Christ, if it is not God, then it is a false worship of a false deity. It is idolatry. And we find that all over our culture, practically in every nook

22:56 and cranny. Now I want to be very clear: we do not mean that you cannot, as a child, look to your parents for good. Your parents were provided to you by God, the good that they render to you ultimately comes from God. And so it is fine, in fact it is required by the fourth commandment and elsewhere in scripture, to be thankful to your parents, to honor your parents, but you are doing that in recognition that the good they have provided you ultimately comes from God. The problem is when you are looking to something as ultimate in itself, or when it is something that has an ultimate object that is not, or an ultimate source, that is not God. And we find that in our culture. Every time you are looking for

23:46 comfort or meaning somewhere that is not ultimately grounded in the things of God, you are worshiping an idol. And Woe mentioned that the sense of having no other gods before God simply means to have no other gods. Thou shalt have no other gods is a permanent perfectly good paraphrase of the first commandment. You don't need the before me if that confuses you. But we can look to Deuteronomy to get God's answer on this question. See now that I, even I am He, and there is no God beside me. I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. There is no other God. The issue of the first commandment is not whether you are going to worship God as supreme or have God as one of a

24:47 pantheon. The issue of the first commandment is that there is one God, and that if you have anything else to which you are looking for this ultimate source of meaning or comfort or whatever it happens to be, then you have an idol, you have a false God, you have a false religion. And as Christians, and the point of this episode, we need to be looking at the things we believe, and figuring out the ultimate source of those beliefs, because if we cannot trace them back to the things of God, then they are not of God, and if they are not of God, they are part of another cult, they are part of some other system of worship because they are the worship of some other god, which is to say, an idol, a false god.

25:37 And this sort of genealogical examination of these ideas is something we've talked about since the very beginning. I want to clarify something. When we talk about the genealogy of ideas on Stone Choir, we are not talking about encouraging some sort of exhaustive historical examination of every nook and cranny of a subject. We're saying you hold a belief. Where did you get it from? Where did they get it from? Where did he get it from? Where did he get it from? It it's just like your own genealogy. It doesn't need to be complicated. Just you know, give me the names and the dates and the locations. That that's the origin of the thing. If you go back far enough, you're going to find the ultimate

26:23 origin in in whatever sense. An example of this, I was having a conversation a couple weeks ago with someone who used to not be Christian and had explored Kabbalah and some other things and I don't remember what we were talking about briefly, but he referenced something else. And I said, yeah, if you dig down that path far enough, you're inevitably going to find the Sephirot, which is the Kabbalistic tree of life. And that's about all I know about it. And he got really excited because he knew a whole lot about it. And I didn't know at the time that he had studied Kabbalah. I just knew from my own experience that whenever I looked at the genealogy thing, just superficially, like this guy said this thing

27:06 and then he learned it from this other guy, I could go back just a few steps and I'm going to find this sort of Kabbalistic hermeticism and I'm going to find you like if you look on Wikipedia, you're going to find the Sephirot over on the right. Because there's an entire series of articles that deal with that stuff. And so for my purposes, that's all I want to know. I don't delve into that crap. it's demonic. I don't want to know anything. But so I think when I talked to him, he probably thought like I had been interested too. I'm not. I don't I don't want to know. For me, the genealogy, the examination of whatever idea I'm running down, when I go back far enough and I find Jewish black magic,

27:45 that's the end of the search. I know the origin of that thing. I don't need to go back further. I don't need to understand any more about it than the fact that it has a wicked origin, the end. So when we talk about the genealogy of ideas on Stone Choir, sometimes it's very superficial. Yeah, I think one of the best examples that we gave in another early episode, we did one on the neglected matters in scripture. One of the five examples we gave was of head coverings in the church. And we mentioned that for 1960 years it was the almost universal practice in the Christian church for girls to cover their heads in church. Heads were to be covered because that's what God says in the New Testament.

28:30 And in the late 1960s, the perfidious Jewess Betty Frieden Goldstein declared in the same year when she established the National Organization for Women and she made the push to get abortion, the sacrifice of infants legalized, simultaneously at the very same time, the other project that Betty Fried and Goldstein had was to get head coverings out of churches. There is a concerted campaign by now to reach out to Christian women. This Jewess told Christian women, take off your head coverings, they're a symbol of the patriarchy, they're a symbol of your subjugation, remove them, send them in to now headquarters, we're going to ceremonially burn them. So today in our churches, when the subject of head coverings

29:25 come up, pastors don't want to engage with a genealogy of ideas of how head coverings were destroyed sixty years ago. No. They want to deal with the genealogy of the idea of where did it begin? Because if they can lock it into the cultural context of Corinth, then they can say, well, that doesn't apply to us. That's one of those things that's like shellfish. Whatever, doesn't matter. That'd be fine, except that no Christian believed that for 1960 years. Every Christian did the opposite. There are Christians alive today who remember the opposite. There may be some older ladies listening to this very podcast who remember when it was still common in your churches for every woman to cover her head.

30:07 Why? Because it was cultural? Well, as Corey was just saying, yeah, it was cultural because it was Christian. It was the Christian belief, it was the Christian religion of what is right and wrong that was the norm. It was culture because it was part of the religion of Christendom. And it was only when this wicked Jewess came along and told Christians, You're free from that. You don't have to do that. In fact, it's bad. You shouldn't be doing that because patriarchy is evil. She was making a moral claim against head coverings. See, the demon-worshiping wicked woman who told girls to take their head coverings off wasn't making a positive case from scripture. She wasn't making the arguments the pastors are making today falsely.

30:55 She was making an overt attack on heaven itself to say there's no God, you have no masters, be your own girl boss. And she didn't use those term, that term, but that's exactly what we have today. We see girls left and right running around headless, not realizing that they're headless. And so what do they do? They follow their base or instincts. They do what they do because no one will stop them. If all all the moral complaints that we have girls these days and the misbehavior, the things that they shouldn't be doing that they are, would they do those things if their heads were covered? It's a it's a ridiculous question, because the answer is obviously no. there's no possible world where a girl who was actually devoutly covering

31:42 her head would engage in the sort of behaviors that are the very opposite moral end of the spectrum. Because it's a real thing. And I think that head covering is a perfect example of the sort of morality that we're talking about today because it's such a minor point. It's a small thing. It was never something that was a crucial part of the church in history. It was simply always done. Why? Because scripture said to. And everyone's like, okay, well, God says to do it, this is what we do. And it was cultural. It was normative for all Christians in all places and all times, almost without exception, until it was really fifty years ago, because it was the end of the nineteen sixties, when Goldstein came along and

32:24 changed everything, in our churches, a wicked woman outside the faith, a child of Satan, said she gave us permission, just as Satan gave Eve permission in the garden, you will not surely die. You don't have to wear a head covering. That's what you what are you doing? That that's not how it works. You'll be fine. In fact you'll be better off after you take it off than you were before. Eat the fruit, you'll be like God. It's the same proposition. It's always the same proposition. And so it's a small thing. It's not, it's not something that lights my hair on fire. Like when we discussed that in that early episode, it wasn't it wasn't in vehemence. It wasn't in vigorous moral condemnation of the fact that probably virtually

33:05 every girl listening right now doesn't cover her head. We're not worked up about that. We're simply pointing to the fact that scripture says that should be the case. And it's not for us as podcasters to tell you. Your husbands, your fathers, your pastors should be telling you. What do we find instead in the church today, in current year, in some of the congregations where girls have begun head covering, something has just taken off in the last couple years, it causes pastors to become very uncomfortable. And in some cases, they will arouse moral indignation against the practice of head covering that they don't find for any doctrinal issues. Which is fascinating, because the church always did it until 50 years

33:54 ago, almost without exception. And you know, for a lot of ladies, it took until the seventies or eighties, usually some of the older ones didn't break with tradition. They kept doing it because they didn't feel comfortable not doing it. But as new generations rose and everyone said it's honky dory do it, today in our own seminaries and our own churches, pastors are deeply uncomfortable. They're angry about this particular issue. Why is that? Scripture said to do one thing, and yet they have a moral response against that thing. And the nature of their moral response is egalitarianism. They are defending feminism against Christianity. And so the purpose of today's episode is to illustrate that this

34:38 is what happens. You know, these pastors who will teach through very patiently all manner of of doctrinal error, confusion in in a man or a woman when something comes up. But if you do something like re-establish, even for yourself, you know, if a woman privately wears it, doesn't say a word to anyone, she just shows up on Sunday with her head covered, everybody's gonna notice. A lot of people are gonna get uncomfortable. Some of the men in particular, who are feminists, whether they admit it or not, they get really uncomfortable. And some of them get angry. Their pastors in the LCMS in particular, at the highest levels who are angry that there are girls in our congregations who are doing this because

35:23 it reasserts the fact of male headship. It's not that wearing a head covering is dominating a girl. It's an acknowledgement of the pre-existing ontological nature of the relationship of the sexes. We did a couple episodes specifically on the nature of woman and on the history of feminism, and we cover this in more depth there. And so when today you have a moral indignation against that which is scriptural, that's a separate religion. Even when it's a pastor, even with someone who is he does all the stuff, you know, he doesn't curse, he doesn't cheat on his taxes, he doesn't do any of the morals things that you would think, well, clearly that guy's you know he's a good Christian. And he's a pastor.

36:07 He's devoted his life. he's doing everything right. But when this thing comes up, he flips. He gets so angry that they will go around in secret and they will try to root out anyone who would deign to permit, let alone encourage this sort of behavior in our churches. That is a separate religion because that's there are all sorts of errors in the church today that are tolerated, what won't they tolerate? Because what you will not tolerate, what is way over your line, whatever your personal line is, that is your true religion. And in today's world, our true religion isn't from God anymore. The things that get us fired up are not the things that God established. The things that get us fired up are the things that culture

36:52 have established as moral and the problem is that the culture is still religious. It is simply no longer predicated on Christian beliefs. And so left and right you will find, you know, in the back catalog of Stone Choir, we dealt with head coverings, slavery, racism, feminism, all substitute moralities. And those are the hot button issues of this day. And one of the reasons we did those episodes is that they were Bible studies. They weren't simply political streeds because this is not political in nature. This is moral in nature because it's coming from scripture. It's all coming from God. And when we try to separate the two, when we try to say, well, no, you can we're gonna carve all this stuff out

37:34 and call political. We're gonna call woke. As soon as you do that, it ceases to be a moral matter, but it's still moral because you still defend it with a vehemence that you don't even bring to things like you know, the creeds in the Lord's Prayer and these things that are basic tenets of the Christian faith. Your religion is that which you defend the most vigorously. And even in the smallest, least significant example that we could think of, something like head coverings will elicit the greatest degree of vehemence. That itself is the issue. That is illustrating that there's a separate religion occurring, even in the same pulpit, that also espouses Christianity. And that's why this is so dire.

38:16 Because it's not Satan coming into our pulpits manifest and saying, forget the justification stuff, forget Jesus on the cross. We're going to do all this other evil stuff. No, he says you can have all your Jesus stuff, just just do this one thing. You know, you will not surely die. don't worry about it. That's the distinction. See, Satan doesn't care how he gets you as long as he gets you, whatever trick works, and if you start disobeying God, you're off to the races. There's a particular set of questions that I have used a few times in order to highlight one of the points that Woe just made. I am going to modify them slightly for the sake of the podcast, but I have two statements I am going to make.

39:01 See which one, initially, just viscerally, offends you more. Jesus Christ is not God that's the first statement. Martin Luther King was not a Christian. That's the second statement. Now there is another word that I could use instead of Christian that usually elicits a stronger response, and it proves the point just as well, but again for the sake of the podcast I will refrain from using that word here. Most people in our culture will respond more negatively, significantly, more negatively, to criticism of Michael King, or any of a number of other secular saints, as it were, than they will to the other statement, which is blasphemy. Jesus Christ is not God is blasphemous. It is a violation of the first commandment.

40:02 It is the violation of the second commandment as well. But even pastors And I have tested this personally, even pastors will respond more negatively to their critique of one of these secular saints, so-called, than a statement that is directly against the core of the Christian religion. What that tells you is that the individual who responds more negatively to the first statement or the second, depending on the order you read them in. If you're going to perform the test, reading the statement about the secular saint second is more effective. But the person who responds more negatively to that has a different God. And holds that God in higher esteem than he holds the Lord God. That's not just having another God, that's having another God as

41:00 your supreme deity. Now granted you're not supposed to even have lesser gods in addition to the Lord God as your supreme deity, but making the Lord God a lesser deity is even worse. And that is what we see in our culture. Because people are more offended when you speak against these idols than when you speak against the Lord God. We have comedians all the time making jokes about Christ. Christians don't bat an eye. Many Christians listen to that filth and laugh at it, find it funny. But these very same comedians wouldn't go anywhere near these secular saints. Because that is the actual religion of our culture, that is the actual cult that forms the basis of our culture today. That is our system of religious veneration, because these are the actual

41:54 gods in our system, or in this case, if you name the individuals, they are the priests of the gods of our system. And one of those gods, of course, is egalitarianism. is the belief, the contention, false on its face, that all men are equal. They'll even attempt to appeal, of course, to scripture and say that, well, God made all men equal. That's not what Scripture says. We've been over that in other episodes and will undoubtedly go over it in the future in other episode contexts as well. But you have a rampant worship of false gods in our culture and Christians just go along with it, because they do not examine their priors, they do not examine their presuppositions, they do not look at the things that they believe and the things that they are

42:43 doing. If you have a visceral reaction to someone critiquing some particular person, you need to look at why that is the case. If that is because the person was a Christian and he is being attacked for his Christian faith, then that is a good Christian response. And you should be proud to have that, quite frankly, that is a good thing to have. That is a mark of a true Christian. But if the person being attacked as it were, being critiqued, was not a Christian, which is the case with Michael King, of course, as we went over in our series on that. But if the person being critiqued is not a Christian, you have that same response Response you are participating in a false religion because you have a learned

43:32 and indoctrinated most likely visceral response to an implicit attack on one of your idols, and whether or not you recognize that you have that idol, if you have the response, you have the idol. And that is a point that I want to make very clear here. This is something that many don't recognize. Our culture is suffused with propaganda. much of it propaganda for false gods, for false worship, for false religions. Now, of course, everyone listening is going to go, Well, of course I know there's propaganda. That's not what I mean. There is propaganda in places you do not expect it. There is propaganda in forms you do not see. Because there are very intelligent and also very evil, but very intelligent,

44:26 very well compensated men, very well educated men who dedicate their entire lives to drafting, to tweaking, to optimizing the sort of propaganda that just gets right past your filters. Because not everything that you see or hear or encounter is run through all of those conscious filters that you have in place. And you may have very good ones. You may spot the more obvious propaganda immediately, but the problem is you watched it. You still saw it. And part of the way that the human mind works is it integrates those things. It's basically Bayesian updating without getting into the specifics, but you see these things, you encounter these things, they seep in over time. And so even if you are watching say television or Netflix, whatever

45:19 it happens to be, you're watching these obvious propaganda programs, and you say, Well, I know the propaganda and I could see it's propaganda and so it's not dangerous to me because I recognize it. No, it's still dangerous to you. It is seeping into your mind over time. And if you find that you have some of these visceral reactions to certain critiques or certain attacks, there's your source. You have been indoctrinated, and we have this stuff all over our culture. There is a reason that we are instructed to avoid even the appearance of evil, that we are instructed to avoid spending time with the wicked. We are to guard ourselves against these things because they can infect us even when our guard is up.

46:04 And so Christians should not be essentially watching television, really. Most of it is wicked. Are there some exceptions? Sure. Should you be paying for it? I'm going to go ahead and just say no, because if you're paying for it, you are propping up the wicked system. You are literally tithing to Satan. As a Christian, you shouldn't doing that. We said this is going to be a law heavy episode and it's going to be, because there are some realities of which you as a Christian need to be aware. Satan is prowling about as a roaring lion seeking to devour whom he can. He doesn't care if your guard is up or your guard is down. If he can get past it, it's irrelevant. And he is very good at this game.

46:51 Now I'm not telling you to despair, I'm not telling you that there's no hope because Satan is so good at his job. What I am saying is that as a Christian, you are to guard your eyes, your heart, your mind from these wicked things. If you expose yourself to them, they will have an effect, even if you recognize them as the wickedness that they are. That is why when we go over certain topics, we don't tell you, go and read this stuff for yourself. There are very real harms, at least potential harms, involved in exposing yourself to certain things. As a Christian, you should want to deal with holy things, with things that are good, with things that are of God. Now, obviously, living in a fallen world, we cannot exclusively deal with

47:40 those things. We are going to have to deal with the wicked world and its products to some degree. But you can control to how much of that you're exposed and the way in which you're exposed, and certainly whether or not your children are exposed. And too many Christians just let the television babysit their children. Do you think that the people in Hollywood who are producing those programs have your best interests in heart? Do you think that they have your children's best interests in heart? Do you think that they worship the Lord God? They are training your children to be religious. They are training them, they are indoctrinating them, they are initiating them into the cult, at least one of the cults, on which our

48:22 culture is currently based. If something is not oriented toward God, it is necessarily oriented against or away from God. Christ is very clear about this. If you are not for him, you are against him. And so as Christians, we have to be careful about these things. And we have to look at the things that we believe and the way that we react to certain things, or attacks or critiques of certain people and certain ideas, and we need to pay attention to how other Christians react as well. Because just because someone says that he is a Christian does not mean that he is He is. This is a problem that we see in church history and still today in the church generally. Many will look at just Adjust the external appearance of the thing.

49:16 And they will say, Well, that looks Christian. Now there is something to be said for appearances. They do matter. Anyone who tells you appearance doesn't matter is lying to you. That's wrong. Appearances matter. We're never going to say they don't. We're not going to say that the liturgy isn't important. We're not going to say that decorating the church to be beautiful isn't important. All of these things matter. Of course beauty flows from God, it is one of the transcendentals, so beauty does matter. But we would caution you not to make that the totality of your assessment. There are other things that matter in addition to beauty, in addition to that external appearance. And sometimes if you dig more than skin deep, as it were,

50:00 you may find that it's not so beautiful on the inside. But there's the issue of the word concept fallacy. I've gone over this previously, and we see a version of this when someone will claim to be a Christian. He'll say he's a Christian. He'll may even go to church. He may even religiously go to church. He may go Sunday and Wednesday. But then you start asking questions, or you start discussing certain topics, and it turns out he has a totally different set of gods. He has a collection of idols in his heart that are contrary to the Lord God, that have taken up residence in place of the Lord God. That is far easier to do in a culture such as ours that is not Christian. In a Christian culture, that would be that would be very difficult

50:54 to do. Because in a Christian culture, you would go to church and then you would go back out into the world for your daily life and you would still be surrounded by Christians, Christian beliefs, Christian culture, Christian society. That is easier for someone to remain Christian in that setting. And that is one of the reasons that we want nations, we want governments, we want states to be Christian. Because if you live in a Christian context, the odds of you staying Christian are much higher. When we had Christendom in the West, by and large the majority of people were Christian. Even those who were relatively marginal Christians stayed Christian because they lived in a Christian context. It matters.

51:40 Scripture speaks to this. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. You are raising that child in a Christian context. That is part of what it means to train him up in the way he should go. And by doing that, you are keeping him in the faith. These things matter. And so when it comes to religion, when it comes to this cult, when it comes to our culture, you need to look at the things to which you are exposing yourself, and you need to look at the things you believe, perhaps as a consequence of the things to which you to which you were exposed or you allowed yourself to be exposed, or you just outright exposed yourself deliberately. You cannot assume that just because, well, I go to church and

52:27 I believe this, so it must be Christian, that doesn't follow. What is the source of the thing you believe? If it came from someone, for instance, a Jewish feminist, then it isn't Christian. That idea, feminism, did not originate with God. It originated with Satan. It has been shoehorned into the church, and now we have men in the church, some sometimes even men in robes, defending feminism. That is incredibly wicked. And as Christians it is our duty to push back against that. But first and foremost, before you can push back against it, you have to remove it from your own life, you have to remove it from your own heart. You have to root out those idols and destroy them. And this is why the definition narrowly of religion as focusing on

53:22 morality is the test. Because you can confess the triune God with your lips, you can go to church, you can do the superficial trappings of that religion that has a name and a deity and a logo, has all the stuff that says, yeah, that that looks like a religion. And then the other things in your life that that don't necessarily have a logo that the gods don't necessarily have names, at least not ones you know. But if those are the sources of your active morality in your life, those are your gods. Even while you're simultaneously confessing to be Christian. And while that's probably not as common with most of the Stone Choir audience, I guarantee you it is much more common with your pastors and with the leaders of your churches, because they have all

54:14 been taught by their own institutions, we are the experts, we are the more godly ones, we're gonna run this stuff well. And if they were testing their inputs, as Corey was talking about, if they were carefully discerning that all of their doctrines and all of their beliefs and all their morality was only to be derived from scripture, that would be true. But what we see today and what we've seen for the certainly last two centuries, especially in America, is that morality, right and wrong, is being originated in new fashions in secular, increasingly secularized unchristian culture, and then it's being imported into the church, and then they find a proof text somewhere in scripture to say, look, this new thing that I just scraped off the sidewalk and

55:05 I dragged in here, this is actually from the Bible. Well, it's nothing of the sort. It's a dog turd. You brought in filth and then you baptize it and then you give it to people and tell them that's Christian teaching. That is the second commandment, as it's ordered by Roman Catholics and Lutherans. Do not bear falsely God's name. Lying about what God says is a violation of that commandment. When you say that God says something and he didn't say that, that is much worse than what we typically think of. We think of cursing using God's name profanely as you know, using G D it, that's bad. It's evil. It's not as evil as saying, I'm from God and let me tell you what God really said. God didn't really say that.

55:49 He actually said the opposite. And let me explain how. That's typical in our churches today, across the board. One of the verses that Cory and I will most frequently refer to is from the beginning of first Timothy four. Now the Spirit expressly says that afterwards some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence for foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. There's a lot just in this one passage that teaches many different aspects of this lesson. One, some will depart from the faith.

56:36 It's not talking about unbelievers. We're not talking about pagans here. We're talking about people who were in the church who had the faith. And then what did they do? They devoted themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. Where are the sources of these teachings? Either their scripture or their wickedness? Because everything that is true, everything that is from God is either naturally revealed in nature or it's in scripture. Not every single thing that is true is found in scripture. That's not how God arranged things. But when you start talking about morality, when you start talking about right and wrong, that is distinct. Now right and wrong is written on the hearts of men.

57:21 That is part of the image of God, which is damaged in the fall. For some, it is so damaged that some of those things are gone entirely. I'm going to give another example of something from past episodes that again illustrates the point we're trying to make here today. There are some races that are inherently more wicked than others. Some of you listening right now will get very angry at that. That's blasphemy. Is it blasphemy against Scripture? No. actually Scripture says the same thing in multiple places, and we see it in reality, and we can explain it theologically. We devoted an entire episode in the race series of Stone Choir to the biological nature of race and then to criminality. And how criminality directly correlates with certain races.

58:11 Now criminality is the government word, it's the the secular world word for sin. If something is sinful, we typically make a law around it. We used to have a lot more of those laws because we said a lot more things were sinful. As we found fewer and fewer sins in scripture, we got rid of those laws. But we didn't end up with fewer laws, incidentally. We have more laws than ever because there are all these new sins. Things that weren't sins sixty or a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today they're sins. Today they're crimes. But they're not Christian sins. They're not crimes against God. And so this is the crucial distinction here. If you look at these matters as something being less Christian or

58:56 more Christian, and your only concern is to have the more Christian version, you're missing out on the fact that either it is of Christ or it is of the devil. There are only two sources for morality. Either it's God or it's hell. And if you're getting your morality from hell, well the end conclusion there is obvious. When 1 Timothy sets the floor so low for teachings of demons and what deceitful spirits are bringing into our midst again when this this devotion to teachings of demons is in the church. That's what scripture says. So when Cory and I say the same thing, we say that they're wicked men in the church, in pulpits teaching the teachings of demons and we look at the examples, what are they?

59:41 Is it worshiping false gods overtly? Is it sacrificing infants to Moloch? No, it's it's abstinence from marriage and it's abstaining from foods and making those commandments, saying you must do this. Incidentally, that's going to be part of next week's episode. We talk about Gnosticism. That's part of what was being addressed there in this passage was the already extant Gnostic cult that existed within Christianity against it. The Gnostic tendencies are one of the ways that from the very beginning Satan was attacking the church from within. And what we see right now as these seemingly closing days of the church, we see the same Gnosticism roaring back. We see Galatians three twenty eight quoted against creation, where God says

1:00:33 there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. That is an argument that is used by those who have devoted themselves to deceitful spirits as an attack on creation. They say there's neither male nor female. There's no male and female. It's like the the ands and then the or separate. We'll talk about that. After the sarcastic we're gonna be doing an episode entirely on Galatius three twenty eight, 'cause we've said before, it is the key that unlocks all these attacks on creation and on the church. The fact that there are pastors today who are using that as a proof text to attack God's order, to attack headship of man

1:01:15 over woman, to say that man was not created for woman, but woman was created for man. That's That's quoting scripture. And yet if you say it on social media, you're gonna get dogpiled. Why? Because it's against the culture. it's it's wrong. It is absolutely wrong. Is it wrong in Christian terms? No. It's quoting God. It can't be wrong in Christian terms. It is wrong in terms of the morality of this age. And yet many of the people who will attack the sort of man who will say that in public are are themselves Christians. They think that they're defending God when they attack Scripture. And the point in this episode is that when someone attacks Scripture and says they're defending God, they're telling the truth.

1:01:59 They're telling the truth. They're not telling you the truth about who their God is. Their God is Satan. Their God is not the triune God. But they are defending their God. And see, the distinction we're trying to make here is when you take these things as doctrinal matters, as measuring them only against scripture, and saying, well, this is more Christian or this is less Christian, you completely lose sight of the fact that these teachings are either from God or they're from demons. If Satan put this in someone's head and in his heart and on his lips, that is an immediate threat to the souls of everyone who hears it. And from the garden to this day, we have all manner of false prophets, including at the head of our denominations, saying things like,

1:02:44 slavery is the original sin of the United States. When we did the episodes devoted to slavery and racism and feminism, they were largely Bible studies, because again, those are religious matters in both directions. Christianity says one thing about slavery and racism and religion, and the modern religion says the opposite thing. And so today, when we have these conversations in public, Corey said, you can say these things and be canceled, doxxed, fired, unemployed, forever. Why? Because you're bad? Because you're a neo-Nazi podcaster? No. Because you said the same thing that God said. And that's all it takes. That is a moral calculus. That is absolutely a religious decision. What it is not is Christian.

1:03:33 Christianity doesn't do that. Satan's religion does that. And the reason that it's crucial to identify that it's Satan's religion is that it doesn't call itself Satanism. There's no pentagram on this stuff. There's no usually, although hilariously in a lot of places, when you see anti-racism marches, you will frequently find pentagrams and stars of Rem fan in the crowd. Happens quite a bit. But it's not always there. And you also find it in Christian churches, where pastors will say the very same things. The men's like Magnus Hirschfeld said a century ago in his book on racism, they are preaching from Satan's gospel. And it's a true religion. It is absolutely a complete religion that calls itself Christianity.

1:04:21 So the genealogy of your morality, whatever it is, whatever specific moral tenet, if it's from Scripture, it's Christian. If it's not from Scripture, and yet it's still your morality, that is a false, competing anti-Christian religion, and we all hold them simultaneously. Part of the sanctified Christian life is figuring this stuff out to realize I in good conscience believe this for twenty, thirty, forty years. And then I realized, because someone told me or because I studied that I was in error, that I had sinned. Is that a surprise? No. He who says he is without sin decees himself and the truth is not in him. So if you find out that you got something wrong and you've been sinning for most of your life, it should make you feel

1:05:06 bad. But it shouldn't. It shouldn't possible. It should certainly be a shock and it should be alarming, but to realize that you got something wrong, particularly when you've been taught falsely, and that's the most crucial thing about this, is that it's the pastors who bind people's consciences with these demonic lies from these deceitful spirits, that men who don't know any better are going to parrot them. And in good conscience, they will say that's a violation of my morality to be racist or to be anti-fan. You know, Cory, when he was falsely excommunicated, one of the charges was literally misogyny. Think about that. A Christian denomination excommunicates for misogyny. It's a new sin. They cited falsely the Ten Commandments.

1:05:55 It was a complete fabrication. On one hand, that is not Christian doctrine. So it's an error. It's not binding. It's complete falsehood and it's a condemnation to hell of every man involved. On the other hand, it is their true confession. And that's a crucial part of this. And that's why we're gonna do uh the third episode on apostasy. These things that get people fired up are their true confession. Stone Choir is Corey and Mike true confession. This is the stuff that we think is the most important because it's destroying the church. Now, we don't talk a lot specifically about the gospel, not because it's not important. And we refer to the gospel all the time. There are numerous people who have begun going to the church for

1:06:38 the first time in their lives because of what they've heard on Stone Choir. And it wasn't that we scared them about hell. It wasn't that we were so law oriented. It was that they realized that God had died for them because we talk about that all the time. So the emphasis that we have is the same emphasis that you find in the New Testament. I've said before, if you read only the words in red, only only Jesus' own recorded words, it's almost all law. There's very little gospel in there. There's a whole lot of believe, obey, do. Is that because Jesus didn't preach well? Did he forget to say what was important? No. He told the people what they needed to hear. And what they needed to hear was repent.

1:07:18 They didn't need to hear your hunky dory. They didn't need to hear you got everything figured out. You go girl. They needed to hear what was going to send them the health. They didn't stop. That's a crucial part of Christian preaching to warn the specific listeners in whatever congregation, whatever context, here are your sins. That is not hateful. That is the opposite of hatred. If Cory and I hated any particular group, we would just let them go, ignore whatever errors they were gonna make, and know that that was going to lead them closer to hell. Instead, we shout and point and warn and say, This over here, this is endangering your soul. You need to stop. And you have to put that in stark terms because in a

1:07:59 lot of cases, there's no time to negotiate. There's no time to explain this stuff. It's your people are careening towards a cliff. And if they don't make a 90-degree turn right away, they're gonna go over the edge, and there's nothing that any man can do to save them. So these questions of morality are crucial inside the church because they're masquerading as Christian when they're simply not. The genealogy of where you got your morals will tell you what your God is. As Corey gave that example, there are plenty of other examples we could give, like the one I gave about some races are inherently more wicked than others. This is demonstrable. There are entire races, entire parts of certain continents that have no

1:08:42 concept of some crimes, no concept whatsoever. And we can't even believe it in the West. Because in our race, in our entire history as a culture, as a people, it's always been evil to do certain things that I'm not even going to name here because you know, we talked about I mentioned earlier on, you know, the knowledge of good and evil. A lot of parents listen to Stone Choir with their kids, which is awesome. And so we try to not make too many episodes things that parents can't listen to their kids. If you're a kid and you're listening now with your parents, when they say, you know what, this portion or this episode is not for you, they're not depriving you of something great. They're not holding out the good stuff.

1:09:22 They're trying to protect you from something that is evil. There's knowledge that is terrible knowledge. And what happened when Adam and Eve sinned is what we see so much in the world today where people are robbed of their innocence. They were in a state of innocence in the garden. As a young child, to a degree, you have a state of innocence in terms of knowledge of evil. Once you learn about certain things, you can never unknow them. There's no going back. And you for the rest of your life will be burdened with things that you wish you could unlearn. So every time your parents try to protect you from something, or even as adults, you know, this happens a lot, you know, especially on the internet where you're interacting more with strangers.

1:10:04 If someone has an innocent ignorance of something, there's a part of some of us that gets really excited and wants to rob them of it. That's evil. If someone is blissfully ignorant, if they're innocent of some evil, thank God that they've been spared. Because you know something terrible and awful that they don't know. Give thanks that they've been spared that and don't take it from them. Don't rob them. So when kids are listening, your parents say, you know what, not this, not this stuff. You can you can listen to the next episode. They're doing you one of the greatest favors anyone will ever do for you in your entire life. Because certain knowledge that we have as adults is can't be unlearned.

1:10:43 There are things I know and things I've seen and things I've heard that I would dearly like to get out of my head. And I can't. When I die, God will take that stuff away. But until then, I'm stuck with it. Once you learn things when you get older, you're stuck with them. You can't get rid of them. The knowledge of evil is a burden. It's a bad, terrible, harmful thing. Robbing of innocence is something that it's almost normal now. There used to be laws against it, but when the culture ceased to be a Christian culture, the laws ceased to be Christian laws. And suddenly that which was immoral and wicked was not only removed from the law, but became promoted everywhere you look. You know, Corey's talking about media, you know, you should cancel Netflix

1:11:30 right now. You should pause the podcast and cancel Netflix because you're paying for absolutely wicked things. Cartoons, it doesn't matter. Everything that they produce is suffused with satanic agendas and they're not remotely subtle about it. And if you can't see it, you're in dire spiritual state because it is wildly overt. There's nothing about it that's hidden. This stuff is so out in the open now because the culture has shifted so far that it's Satan's culture right out in the open. And Christians like, well, yeah, that's normal. That's fine. You know, why wouldn't I tell someone something, some horrible innocence robbing thing that they can never get back. Why wouldn't I? Like it's it's knowledge.

1:12:11 Isn't all knowledge neutral? No. Some things are terrible and shouldn't exist. Some knowledge should be destroyed. That's a Christian position. When the sorcerers brought together all their sorcery material and acts and burned it and it was worth fifty thousand whatever's of silver. That was a tremendous amount of wealth that was incinerated because it was evil knowledge, and they acknowledge that it's part of their repentance, as part of turning away from their wickedness, they had to destroy the evil that they had done in the past. That should be the case with us. When we discover that some part of our morality turns out not to be Christian morality, you gotta torture it. that's a good thing to do.

1:12:55 And the big struggle is getting from I thought I was fine to actually, this is crap. I need to torch it. That process is it hurts. it's painful. It's why some of these episodes are downers, because we're not free from sin. We do some bad stuff and it piles up. But getting to the other side is the whole point of the Christian life. The old testament reading for yesterday was from Ezekiel three, and it brought to mind a section of the same book, Ezekiel, that we have had on the Stone Choir website from day one, and that is from Ezekiel 33. I won't read the whole thing, you can go read it if you're so inclined. That's Ezekiel thirty-three verses one through nine. And the point of the section is that

1:13:49 I'm going to extrapolate out the point, not the immediate point God is making to Ezekiel to whom he is speaking in the passage, but the point of the passage for Christians when you read this is that if you have been given the ability to warn someone about some evil that he is doing, and you do not warn him, you have made that evil your own, you have committed sin in not warning that man, because God having given you the ability to warn him and you having failed to exercise that duty using the abilities given you by God, you have sinned through an action in action. When we started the podcast, we knew that is exactly what we were doing. Now we put it off for a while for various reasons, but we knew that the reason we had to do this for us

1:14:42 that it was not an option for us. This was not something that we could pick up or set down or do or not do. We were required to do it. That is our state of mind, that is our opinion, our firm belief with regard to the podcast. God has given us the ability to understand this material and to teach this material. And that is what we are doing on this podcast. This is teaching. And as we said in an early episode, we recognize that does subject us to the stricter judgment. We've elected that in full knowledge. But what we are doing is warning anyone who will listen about the evils that we see, about the evils in our culture, about all of these wicked things that, to us, are obvious, are incredibly

1:15:32 obvious, are out in the open, that some do not see. We're warning men of traps, of which they may not be aware. We know the trap is there. We are telling you do not step on it. That is why we're doing this, and it is a duty for Christian men, again, who have been given the ability to do so from God. This is clear in many parts of Scripture, particularly clear in the passage we chose from Ezekiel, Ezekiel thirty three again. But I actually want to speak for a moment specifically to teachers and pastors. Now this is applicable To all Christians, of course, because it is dealing with one of the commandments, and the commandments, of course, are applicable to all Christians, to all persons, actually, because whether or not

1:16:24 you're Christian, God's will and God's law still holds, and you will be judged by it. But Woe spoke of the second commandment Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. And this brought to mind a particular paragraph from the large catechism. Luther says of this commandment, the greatest abuse occurs in spiritual matters, which pertain to the conscience, when false preachers rise up and offer their lying vanities as God's word. And of course this applies to teachers as well, not just pastors. The worst thing you can do when it comes to violations, transgressions of the second commandment, is to stand up and offer that which is false as God's word. To lie in God's name and say that God said you must

1:17:28 do this is the most wicked thing you can do with regard to this commandment. And in fact, doing so inevitably entails violating the first commandment as well, because you have shown that you have this other God, and you are actually speaking on his behalf, you are simply attempting to deceive using the name of the Lord God to dress up your lies. Some will think that this is uncommon, that this is unusual, that this is something that would be obvious. For instance, the wicked Bible, if a pastor were to stand up and quote that and say thou shalt commit adultery. That would most certainly be wicked, that would be a violation of the second commandment, that would be lying and deceiving in God's name,

1:18:16 and it would be obvious, we would all catch that, I would hope. But this happens constantly, particularly with teachers and even more particularly with pastors. Because if you are a pastor and you stand up and say that this thing, racism, sexism, whatever it happens to be, this modern sin, if you say that is contrary to God's word, you are lying in God's name about the things of God. And worse, as a pastor, you are doing it while standing in God's place. Because that is the authority, that is the position that has been given you by God. You are standing up there in his stead and lying in his name to his sheep. Now we'll get into apostasy in the third episode in this series. But I can certainly say now that I would not want to

1:19:16 be in your shoes on judgment day if that is what you have spent your life doing. And so if you're listening to this podcast and you find that that applies to you, then You need to repent and reconsider some things. Now that may be somewhat unlikely for the audience of this podcast, although perhaps this is where you started listening, and perhaps it does apply to you. But again, that is the worst violation of the second commandment possible is to lie in God's name while standing in his place about his things to his sheep Such men are anti Christ. They are false prophets, including many men in our own church, some of whom are listening right now. We know their names, we know what they're up to.

1:20:07 They'll answer to God. But this sort of wickedness is it's common today and it's been common since the very beginning. Between now and a couple weeks from now, I would encourage all of you to read Revelation 2 and three. These are chapters that include the seven epistles that Jesus transcribed to John from heaven to the seven churches. And they're very interesting because they make clear many of the principles that we outline in terms of different churches having different problems. Different individual Christians have different problems, different pastors have different problems, different congregations have different problems, and groups of congregations, which today we call denominations, all have their own unique sets of issues.

1:20:56 When you read the seven Letters from Christ to the churches, what you find is that they're addressed in very different terms. When you read the letter to Smyrna, they're in good shape. God doesn't really have much criticism of them Pergamum has a few faults, but for the most part they're pretty good. When Christ writes to the church at Sardis, it's dire. Listen to what Christ writes to Sardis. I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember then what you received and heard, keep it and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief,

1:21:38 and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. Ye you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. Now he says what remains and is about to die, he's talking about damnation, and he's addressing it to a church. So seven churches, some of them are okay, some are kind of shaky. Church at Sardis, he's saying most of you are going to hell unless you repent right now. That's in the church. That's people who all called themselves Christians. They were doing the stuff. They were showing up. You know they're all the practices. They confessed God, he said, I look at your works and I do not see Christians, because the works are an outpouring of the

1:22:24 heart of the believer or the unbeliever. You will always confess with your actions and with your energy, what your true God is. If your true God is the true God, then your actions and your words are going to be in accord with scripture. You're going to do the stuff that God says to do, and you're not going to do the stuff that He says not to do. We are judged by our works in terms of them being an example of our belief. Now, no one can possibly keep God's word perfectly. Scripture's clear about that. We cannot possibly save ourselves. Our works are filthy rags before God, and they are only washed white by Christ's sacrifice. Nevertheless, there are things that are endemic to the Christian life

1:23:09 that will be absent necessarily from the life of an unbeliever. And that's what God is talking about. He's looking at him saying, basically, you're going through the motions, but you're not saved. You're going to be damned if you do not repent. And this happens in in the rest of the New Testament too. It's what the third episode is going to be about. God is calling Christians to repent, to turn away from their wickedness inside the church. How can you be wicked inside the church? By having a God other than God, by having a morality other than that which is from God. See, their errors weren't simply doctrinal. When you go back to first Timothy four and he's talking about absurd Abstaining from marriage and certain foods are those doctrines?

1:23:50 I mean, in some cases they become doctrines, but sometimes it's like, well, you know, don't do that. You know, we're just gonna do this other thing instead. It's not sold necessarily as a big ticket, here's a top line belief of this religion. It's just no don't do that. God says that's a teaching of demons. God says that the liars with seared consciences who bring those things from false spirits are damned. Inside the church. Because pagans from outside the church usually aren't coming into our churches and lying. Although you have men like Ben Shapiro and James Lindsay, who are now speaking alongside pastors, talking to us about the body of Christ in the public square. I it's inconceivable to me that these things would happen.

1:24:33 And yet men like Corey and myself are seen as worse than we're certainly not free from sin, but do we sin by telling people to believe God and go to church? No. we sin against the world religion by condemning the Ben Shapiros and the James Lindsey's because they're wicked evil men who have only evil in their hearts. And the fact that some of what they say is able to sneak into the church is precisely the threat. And the fact that they're pastors that can't discern that is a tremendous threat. That's intolerable. It's utterly intolerable for there would be men in positions of authority in our churches who do not have the spiritual discernment to see that they are inviting wolves inside the sheepfold because the sheep don't

1:25:17 know any better. Most people are not equipped to discern these things reliably. The best you can do is stick to what you've been taught and hope that your teacher was good. When you're given a false morality, when you're given a Ben Shapiro morality or a James Lindsay morality, when you're told that the Constitution and John Locke are better sources of morality than some of the old teachings, we've improved on that stuff in the last couple hundred years. Let's use the new stuff because it's even better. that is the morality as a religion. It's an absolutely a religion. With a god with a pantheon of beliefs, it's just not Christian. And so when an antichrist speaks in the stead of God from the pulpit or wherever he's teaching, you know, podcasters can do the

1:26:06 same sort of damage, frankly, more in some cases. Our audience is is hundreds of times bigger than almost all congregations. That bears weight. We take that seriously. On the other hand, if we were saying nothing, we would also stand condemned for saying nothing. So the only way we can avoid condemnation is to speak and to speak faithfully. And we do our very best to do that every week. The morality of the world is coming into the church by the back door. It's not coming in through the front. It's not saying we're gonna just burn up this Bible and replace it. Because it not it's not gonna work in some denominations. In others, it has worked. It has happened. It has worked. Most of Methodism, Elka, a lot of denominations are just absolutely openly

1:26:57 apostate. And they freely act that way. And yet they still call themselves Christians. And so we smugly from the conservative denominations look at them and say, Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. The problem is that we're in even worse jeopardy than they are in terms of falling for things, because we still think that we're holding to what Christianity teaches and what the Bible says when in reality our morality is every bit as wicked as theirs, because we're getting it from the same source, maybe different parts of it. But I'll tell you this, there are many pastors whose morality is indistinguishable from the terms of service of Facebook or X formally Twitter. If your morality is entirely compatible with the TOS for a social

1:27:44 media site, you are going to hell. Because that is the world religion encapsulated. It's very positive, it's very friendly, it's very respectful, all sorts of bad things are off the menu that you can't do or say. What they protect is evil. They prevent you from naming wicked things, from saying things that are true. In fact, on X, you will be instabanned if you quote Revelation 2:9 and Revelation 3.9, because it calls the Jews the synagogue of Satan. Using that term, using synagogue of Satan will get your account instalocked. They won't even let that be posted. Quoting God will get you banned. Because calling Jews a synagogue of Satan is a moral statement. It is a Christian statement. It is at odds with the morality of the world that says

1:28:35 that's racist, that's anti-Semitic. You can't do that and be a good person. According to the world religion, that's absolutely true. That is a confession of their religion. What it is not a confession of is the true God, because the true God literally said that. Those are red letter words too. That is Jesus from heaven proclaiming the Jews are the synagogue of Satan, as he said before that they are the children of their father the devil. That is what God said about those people, about that race of people. We did four-part episode dealing with all the details of that. If you say that, you get banned. Most pastors will have exactly the same response as Elon Musk. They will ban you for saying what God says.

1:29:18 There's a whole lot of the Bible that is off limits in our churches. And what what are the parts? They're things about when the Jews do something bad, they're thing about when there are differences between men and women, there are things about sexual sins that differentiate from one and another, to say that Sodom and Gomorrah was worse than the neighboring sent towns that were not incinerated. These are all moral propositions that are scriptural propositions that are at odds with the morality of the world religion. And so all of this is about distinguishing where is my morality from? If you get upset when someone says that the Jews are the synagogue of Satan, you are angry at God Almighty. Your visceral moral repugnance at those words is hatred of God.

1:30:04 You're violating the first and second commandments. You are serving Satan when you have that response. Elon Musk serves Satan when he bans people for saying that. Doesn't matter if he knows or not, he is. It's baked right into the system. The machinery literally enforces it. And the machinery in our churches enforces it too. There has been a massive manhunt across numerous denominations in the past year specifically trying to root out racists and anti Semites, because you can deny the Trinity, you can deny the the sacraments, you can deny pretty much anything in the Christian faith. You cannot deny the tenets of the world religion. The episodes we've named in the past and some of the others specifically

1:30:49 go after the world religion, but we want to make clear in this episode that moral compass is pointed to hell. And many of us, by bits and pieces, have our own moral compass that when it comes to those issues, we lose our point towards God and it swings. It swings to hell and says, Nope, I'm gonna believe this other religion just for this one thing and I'll swing right back. You know, it comes to going to church, when it comes to saying the creeds or what whatever your profession is, sure, you got that down. When it comes to racism, uh no no no, that's I this is my religion too. If it were Christianity, that would be good. That's why the episode that we did on that was largely a Bible study.

1:31:30 Because the truth is the opposite. It is a worldly modern invention that is an attack on Christianity. And that is why it's so important on Twitter and Facebook and in our pulpits. Christianity itself is under attack from without and within. As we've said many times before, you are in your life, in your actions, in your beliefs, trending Godward or hellward. Those are the only two options. And Satan, for his part, does not particularly care when it comes to the things about which you are wrong. Yes, he would prefer that you were a truly awful person and that you led many others to hell with you, but he's fine with it if when presented with two options, you pick the one that leads you toward him.

1:32:24 Small thing, big thing, medium sized thing, doesn't matter. As long as you are doing the thing that God does not want you to do, Satan is happy. And so many of these things may seem small in the grand scheme of things, they actually are not, because these are many of the things that have destroyed our culture, that have destroyed Christendom, that are dragging all of us, hellward, along with our people and our culture, the whole world in fact, but they may seem small in and of themselves. When you decide to profess one of the tenets of the world religion, instead of pushing back against it and saying what Scripture says, well that seems small. Particularly if it seems like it's a peripheral or a tangential issue,

1:33:14 a minor issue. But it's not. Because again, the only goal of Satan is to get you to do the thing that God does not want you to do, and not to do the thing that God wants you to do. Doesn't ultimately matter what it is He just wants you to rebel. That's the point. That's the whole point. It is whether you are obedient to God or rebelling against God. Now, I'm not saying that every single choice is binary hellword or heaven word. That's not the point. There are things that are legitimately audiophora. There are things in a grand In a grand sense of the term. There are things that it doesn't matter which you pick. If you pick chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, that's not moving you closer or further away from God.

1:34:09 That's not how that works. When it comes to matters of morality, when it comes to matters of religion, when it comes to matters of cult, when it comes to whether you affirm the words of scripture or deny the words of scripture, these are the things where it matters. And as a Christian, and this may be a hard teaching, but it is the teaching of Scripture as a Christian, you are required to affirm the words of Scripture every time, and that is regardless of consequences. In our modern world, that seems like an impossible task. That seems like something that is insane to ask. Because as Wo mentioned, we live in a world where you can be fired from your job. You can essentially be unpersoned if you simply quote Scripture, if you

1:35:04 repeat the words of God after him. There are those out there who will attempt to destroy you. But that should tell you something. They're not attempting to destroy you because you said something false. If you just said something false, they wouldn't care. If you believe in a different false God from their false god, chances are they will leave you alone. If you worship Molok, they don't care. If you worship Baal, they don't care. If you worship money, they don't care. Mammon. If you worship capitalism, they don't care. Pick your false god. Now, of course, there are some who are going to attack you for capitalism, but that's just because they don't realize that they're worshiping the other side of the same coin, as we went over in

1:35:52 our episode on on capitalism. But they care a great deal when you say the things of God, and that's because those are true. And that is why you see those who are the acolytes, who are the priests or the high priests of the world religion. It's why you see them respond so violently, so vehemently, when you say things that are just quotes from Scripture, because they go against the world religion, and demons cannot bear to hear the word of God. That is one of the things we see throughout the book of Concord, but particularly in some of the sections from Luther himself, where he says that one of the reasons we should have the Word of God in our hearts, on our lips, in our mouths why we should speak, read, discuss the Word of God as scripture

1:36:44 of course instructs us to do, is because Satan cannot bear to hear it. It drives him away. One of the ways that you can drive Satan out of your life is to spend time in the things of God, to spend time in God's Word. That's one of the ways that you are sanctified. And so doing this is one of the ways you protect yourself as a Christian, and it is why those who are not of the church, those who are not of Christ, those who are not of God cannot stand to hear these things, because it enrages their master, and so it enrages them. But again, as a Christian Christian, if you have the option to speak the word of God or to deny it, as a Christian you do not have a choice, you are required to speak the

1:37:35 Word of God. Again I will give the same caveat that I have given elsewhere when this issue has arisen. This does not mean be a fool. Now, in a certain sense, perhaps it does but you are still instructed to be wise. The word there is actually shades into crafty even because it's the same description used of the serpent. Wise is a serpent. But that does not permit you to lie. We are not Muslims, we are not permitted to lie about our faith in order to protect ourselves. There may be very real costs associated with speaking the things of God, being bold and truthful. But that is what we are called to do. Because again Satan just wants you to rebel, he wants you to deny whatever it happens to be, small or large.

1:38:25 His goal is to get you to deny Christ, to deny God's word. It's the camel's nose under the tent flap. Before you know it, you'll have the entire camel in the tent and there'll be no more tent. It's just you and the camel. That is Satan's goal. And so, yes, obviously, we've had a lot of law in this episode. But Christians still need to hear God's law. The world most certainly needs to hear God's law. This is one of the things that we have not we specifically, but Christians in general have gotten wrong in the last couple decades or really more than that, the last half century perhaps, the law has fallen by the wayside. But the gospel isn't good news if the law doesn't exist. Because if there's no law, then I don't need a savior.

1:39:20 Because if there's no law, I haven't transgressed. There must be a law that you have transgressed for the gospel to be good news. The gospel is good news. Because you're a sinner, if you were not a sinner, the gospel would just be news. It wouldn't be good news because it wouldn't apply to you. It applies to you, it applies to the world because we are sinners. Because you are a sinner the gospel is good news. And so we need to hear the law. As Christians we need to be reminded the law. And not only does the law remind us of what we should do, what we should have done, what we have failed to do, but it guides us, we forget that there are three uses of the law, and one of the uses of the law is to

1:40:05 guide us in the Christian life. And it should not just be individually, it should also help to guide our societies. God's law should be the basis of our positive law. For those who are unfamiliar with the terms, moral law would be God's law. The Ten Commandments are moral law. That is the law that flows from God's nature Positive laws simply means laws that are enacted by men. That's what positive means in this sense. And so by that I mean our criminal laws primarily. Civil laws are less of a matter for the moral law. They should be compliant with the moral law, but the amount that you set for a parking fine is only tangentially an issue of the moral law. No Making homicide illegal is a moral law matter.

1:40:54 Making adultery illegal, which it still should be, it is in the military code of justice, just not in the civil courts anymore. Adultery should be illegal in our societies. As Christians, we should want that to be part of our laws. Again, we want to have a Christian society because those are the guardrails. Those help you to remain a Christian, not to stray. Sheep folds, sheep pens, have fences, because without them the sheep wander. A good shepherd will have fences, and a prince, a proper ruler, a godly king, is supposed to be a good shepherd. He will place fences, he will maintain the fences that have been placed, in order to preserve the flock that is entrusted to his care, and that is the duty of a godly prince no less,

1:41:45 although in a different way, from a pastor or teacher. Both are under shepherds, both will one day answer to the good shepherd for what they did or did not do with regard to those sheep entrusted to their care by the Good Shepherd. The one thing that I want to leave everyone with in this episode beyond what Corey just said, which is very important, is the idea of using what we've discussed here today as a tool for evaluating whatever you hear others talking about. When you hear someone making a moral claim, someone saying this is right and this is wrong, your first instinct should be, okay, where did you get that? And the trick is that Christians are always going to say, Well, I got it from God.

1:42:34 The response is okay, show me. And they're usually going to have garbage proof texts because what they won't be able to do with many of these new moral issues that are invented in the last couple of centuries, they won't be able to point to the historic Christian belief because these things are a departure from it. And so it's not simply a question of the Christian saying, well, show me that where you're morality came from and then they show you a Bible version, okay, well, it's in the Bible. I guess that's fine. That is a superficial and useless application of what we're trying to teach here. The point is that if Christianity is true, then is eternal, because God is true and God is eternal.

1:43:20 God's will is eternal, his will does not change, Christianity doesn't change. Right and wrong doesn't change. So when someone says that used to be right, but now it's wrong, that person is from Satan, period. That's all you need to know. That's the genealogy of that idea. If they come to you and say, Well, sure, 200 years ago, no one knew that it was bad, but today we know it's bad, that person is from hell. Even if it's a pastor, even if they're a big expert in theology, if they tell you about a new sin, they're lying. And you can you should apply this first to us, to everything Corey and I say on this podcast. Are we coming up with new sins or are we saying what Scripture says and what the church has dealt with in the past?

1:44:09 As we've said, one of the tricks that Satan is playing today is he's taking new attacks, he's taking new approaches. So when the new sin of racism was invented invented, there's not much discussion in the historical Christian context about racism. Is that because it used to be okay and now it's bad? Or is it because it didn't exist at all? The notion didn't exist. What they call racism has always existed because it's not evil. The overwhelming majority of what is called racism or misogyny or any of these other things is actually obedience to God. It's actually telling the truth about things. The small subset that they want to hold up that's actual hatred, that's actual wickedness that scripture condemns, there's no need for a separate

1:44:57 word for it because God calls that murder. It's murder in the heart to hate someone. It is not murder in the heart to say this person is not like this person. That's not murder. That's not hatred. There's nothing of the sort present to say you are not like you. God does it repeatedly in Scripture. We have permission from God to do it. In fact, we may command from God to do it, because we're commanded to tell the truth. So when you're evaluating people's claims about morality, just check their work. If it's wrong, has it always been wrong? If you just discovered it's wrong, where did it come from? And as soon as you go back far enough in their genealogy that you that you find, well, yeah, it came from some girl's

1:45:38 vision in eighteen twenty three. You're done. You don't need to examine, you know, whether the vision was checked out by any experts. You know that's a teaching of demons. You know that it's evil because because evil is going to continuously attack the church from within. There's evil in the world that has nothing to do with the church because Satan is the prince of this world, but there's also e evil within the church that behaves in different ways because Satan needs to. He needs to trick us into worshiping him while we're calling on the name of God. In the episode on apostasy, we'll talk about more God says people will come and say, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy and cast out demons in your name?

1:46:19 And he will say, truly, I tell you I never knew you. That's dire. That's something that leaves us feeling like that's scary. So we'll treat that entirely in that episode. But just remember, when someone comes to you speaking in God's name, he's not necessarily from God. And frankly, today, in the current state of the world, and in the current state of our churches, when someone comes to you and says they're from God, starting with a podcaster, you should test the spirits. You shouldn't automatically believe them. Don't believe what they say because they're clever or they flashy or gimmicky. Whatever appeals to you intrinsically cannot be relied upon. What you can rely upon is that God's word is true, that

1:47:05 scripture is eternal, that is existed outside of time and was transmitted to us for our benefit. When God has revealed something that's true that says right and wrong, that's it, that's a whole shooting match. Anyone else who comes along later and says, Hey, I found a new sin, you test that spirit and then you judge according to what's going on. And when you look at these things in this simple heuristic, you're gonna find all the new stuff is lies, all the new stuff is wickedness, and all the new stuff is what's popular. The old Christian teachings about these things are gone. Obeying God, that's gone. Then no one wants to hear about that. Nevermind, it's what Jesus exhorts continuously. We don't want to hear that because it condemns us.

1:47:51 And that's okay. we should be aware the scripture condemns us, even as Christians, because that is the law that explains why the gospel is our good news. We are forgiven, we are washed white in the blood of the lamb by virtue of God paying for those sins, paying for our unbelief, faying for our failures. But having received that payment and having received the knowledge of that payment, that's the beginning of the Christian life. It's not the end of it. So as we navigate these days that are hard and getting harder, as we seemingly have fewer and fewer pastors and teachers who will speak as God has always spoken, it's there's unfortunately it's going to fall more and more to men who have not necessarily been trained

1:48:41 in these things to evaluate the claims of those who are saying I'm here from God. Let me tell you what he really meant. To some degree that is part of the reason for this podcast. Our hope with this podcast, with these episodes, is to equip you in order to assess the claims of others. equip you in order to find these things in Scripture, again, we will reiterate, we have said many times before, but we will continue to say, do not simply trust the things we say. We're not saying you cannot trust us, I would say you can trust us. I believe that we have amply demonstrated that at this point. However, when it comes to the things of God, we have Scripture. Scripture is the test. Scripture is the one standard.

1:49:35 Scripture is that against which the words of any teacher, any pastor, anyone claiming to speak the words of God or to speak on behalf of God must be tested. And so take anything we say and test it against Scripture. If what we say conflicts with Scripture, then we are liars and wrong. It may not be intentional on our part, or it may be intentional. You to some degree will have to make that call for yourself. We're not saying you cannot trust anyone. Part of human life is trust, and we have to trust others to some degree. What we are saying is the things of God must be subjected to the Word of God. That applies to us as teachers, and that applies to any other teacher or pastor. It applies to all men in all places at all times.

1:50:28 When we read the church fathers, we subject them to scripture. When we read sermons by famous pastors or famous theologians, the works of the great men of church history, we subject them to scripture. We should do the same thing with modern teachers. Because again, it is scripture that is the only standard, because it is the standard given us by God. Scripture is absolutely true and absolutely reliable. It is the rule against which all other things must be measured. I want to add a quick comment here before we close out this episode. Woe mentioned the burning of the magic books that occurs in the Book of Acts that is mentioned there, and the large value, the sum, the value for which those books could have been sold.

1:51:29 It was a great deal of money. It was a great deal of money then, it would be a great deal of money today. But there is another example that is slightly different because of the way it was executed, but is still an example for Christians, a godly example of how Christians are to behave, and that is the Disputation of Paris. This was, of course, the trial of the Talmud as one of the other names of it, carried out under King Louis the Ninth. We won't go into the details here because that's not the relevant matter. The issue is that a godly Christian monarch, a godly sovereign, investigated a matter, discovered that it was wicked, and destroyed the evil materials. The Talmud is evil and should be destroyed.

1:52:22 It is an absolutely wicked book. Collection of books, really. But the value of the copies of the Talmud that were destroyed in front of Notre Dame by Louis IX. I will admit it is difficult to estimate in current dollars for various reasons. These were handmade, they were made of various different materials. Some of the editions were better than others, as to be expected. But it is somewhere between ten and twelve thousand copies of the Talmud were burned. This was not a small number, that is an immense number of books for that day and age. Again, remember, handwritten, and the Talmud is not short. In modern printing it is thousands of pages long. If you were to roughly estimate the value of those books burned,

1:53:18 in modern dollars it would be between two hundred million and eight hundred and twenty billion dollars. That is the Christian response. The Christian response is to destroy evil, regardless of the supposed value of it And that is what a godly prince does. And so it is right that we have statues in various places for Louis the Ninth. He was a Christian prince and should be remembered. But now to close out this episode. I know that many will, again, notice that we focused on the law in this episode, and that's true. We did. The law is important. I went over that previously. But there is a statement that is common in particularly Lutheranism, but others have adopted it as well, that the gospel should be permitted

1:54:11 to predominate. Now, of course, that applies primarily to sermons, and we are not pastors. We will never be pastors. We have no intention to be pastors. Unless God sends a giant fish to swallow me, I am not becoming a pastor. I suppose here in Tennessee perhaps it would have to be something other than a fish since we're rather landlocked. However, many misunderstand what it means for the gospel to predominate. The gospel does not predominate in terms of volume. The gospel predominates in terms of weight. And the reason for this is that no matter how many or how terrible my sins may be, or your sins, or anyone else's sins, they are finite. Yes the transgression itself is infinite in its nature because it is

1:55:08 against an infinite God, and the party against whom a transgression is committed does factor into the weight of the transgression. And so yes, the weight of our sin is infinite, but the number of our sins, again regardless of the heinousness of them, is finite. Because your life is finite. You can commit only so many sins. Even if you spent every waking second sinning, you could commit only so many in your life. The gospel predominates because Christ's sacrifice is of infinite value, is of infinite weight. And also your sins, if you are a Christian, are finite in that they will be erased by God when you are renewed at the second coming. God doesn't just promise that your sins no longer count against you.

1:56:04 God promises to forget your sins. That which God forgets is gone in a way that gone does not even begin to approach describing. It will be as if they never existed, as if those sins had never been committed. What God forgets doesn't exist Doesn't exist, it's gone. It I don't even have the words to describe. It is no longer a thing. That is what God promises. The weight of that is infinite. Nothing can predominate against that. That is the way in which the gospel predominates. And so, yes, even if most of the episode was law, the fact that we even mention the gospel permits it to predominate, because it predominates in weight. It does not predominate in the number of words dedicated to it, because Christ's sacrifice again is of infinite value, and the glory that

1:57:09 awaits us in the next life is of infinite value and of infinite duration, because of course it is eternity. And so the good news, the gospel, predominates, because it is infinite, and all else compared to it is finite. And so I just want to close with the second paragraph from the Nicene Creed, because it is a good summary of the gospel. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, who, for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was

1:58:06 made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and he shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end. Amen