This Age is Passing Away: the Emptiness of Secularism, then Hebrews 10 for Resurrection Weekend

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March 28, 2024

Two primary topics on the program today, first, the emptiness of secularism and our need to be continually aware of its influence upon our thinking, acting, and speaking. Then, Hebrews 10 and its testimony to the purpose of God in the sacrifice of Christ, a particularly relevant topic on this Resurrection weekend.

00:35: Greetings! Welcome to The Dividing Line. Here we are again in the same studio that we were in last time.
00:41: I didn't have to move all the cameras around. I tell you, there's just so much stuff going on.
00:47: I cannot believe how quickly the next trip is coming up. Don't forget, those of you in the, well, south -central part of the country,
00:58: Livingston, Louisiana, is the focus of where I'm going to be going on this next trip. Two debates with Jimmy Akin, then a few days after, well,
01:09: I think that's, is that Wednesday? Thursday? And then Friday, Saturday, Sunday will be the conference on reaching
01:17: Roman Catholics. So about five days there, as far as actual speaking is concerned.
01:24: There in Livingston, at Brian Gunter's church, he works very closely with End Abortion Now, a good friend with Jeff and Luke and Zach.
01:35: In fact, Jeff's supposed to be heading down there, but Jeff said he was hesitant to be making
01:41: Brian do all this stuff since I'm heading down there, putting up with Jeff and all the rest of that stuff.
01:46: So it'll probably be May before he gets down there. But anyway, so if you're in that area, go to aomin .org.
01:53: Right on the front page, there's a link you can click. It'll take you to the stuff about the debates.
01:58: I assume there's more information about the conference there, stuff like that. And so I'm there through a
02:04: Sunday, I believe, that I head north. So I'm doing my, the
02:11: Texas loop. I've got, there's two ways I can get out of Arizona and go east, pretty much.
02:18: And that is the 40 up through Flagstaff, and then over into New Mexico there,
02:27: Grants and Albuquerque and Tucumcari and all those places. And then into sort of northern
02:34: Texas, Panhandle up there. Or go south along the 10 and end up having to, you know, last time through El Paso wasn't the worst thing
02:47: I've ever experienced. I was actually thought, okay, I'm done.
02:52: We've gotten through, we're good. And then it went down to one lane and slowed down. But there's a lot of construction in El Paso.
02:59: But I made it through last time fairly well. So I should be kind to the folks who do work on the roads there.
03:09: But anyways, those are the two directions. So this loop's going to be this direction this time. So I'll start off going out in the south down to, you know, just outside of New Orleans, really.
03:21: And then back up north to prior Oklahoma. And of course,
03:28: Grace Life Church there with Derek Melton and all the fine folks there. Try to get there as often as possible.
03:35: And we're going to be talking about the atonement of Christ, which we'll be talking about a little bit today on the program too.
03:42: There at Grace Life Church, May 1st and 2nd. And then headed home from there.
03:49: It'll be a good shakedown run on the new RV. And I figure by the time we get back, we'll have everything figured out as to how things work.
04:00: Hopefully not having caused any problems in the process. But lots of stuff to do between now and then.
04:06: Sometime probably, it's looking like next week. It has to be really next week. Hopefully early next week,
04:11: Rich and I will be working our, we will be getting our steps and we will be getting our climbing steps too, because we've got to move everything out of the old
04:24: RV into the new one and hopefully put it, put the stuff where we logically found again.
04:33: And in fact, I'm sure I'm going to find some stuff as we're emptying Yulwin Alga. Oh, that's where that went.
04:39: I wondered about that. That's always what happens when something like that happens. But anyways, we'll be working on that next week and getting the real workout in the process.
04:50: And there's one more step I noticed on the new unit, because it's, it's just so much taller.
04:55: Yeah, it's, it's just, she's a beastie. Gonna need a rope?
05:01: No, I'm not gonna, never gonna need, I've never seen one that you needed a rope to get into actually at all. But yeah, we, in fact, tomorrow
05:10: I have a, a tire ladder coming. And I think
05:17: I did see someone use one of these, but it's this type of, it's a, it's a ladder that it's, it's a step stool type thing, but you, you put it on your tire and it hooks onto the tire.
05:27: Then you put the thing down and you can stand right up over the tire. And I just need that.
05:35: The little step stool that I've been using has always been highly questionable as to its actual functional capacity.
05:46: It's just not high enough to get me far enough in there to reach down and work with the new hitch, which has a slider on it.
05:54: And so I've got to be able to get the slider and I've got to get this pin in and get, you've got to be able to get up far enough to get into it.
06:02: And so yeah, lots of, lots of, it's a learning curve and I will get everything learned right in time to retire.
06:11: And I'll have no one to teach it to. So yeah, there, there you go. Anyway, excited about going.
06:19: I, uh, have been watching, um, things today on Twitter and I, I have to admit,
06:28: I, I saw this guy going after one of the sisters on Twitter.
06:33: And so I sort of made a, made a comment and I was struck once again.
06:41: I, I can't imagine that Van Till well,
06:48: I'll take that back. Schaefer sort of did. I just wonder how much did visionaries like Van Till and Schaefer, if you have to close your ears, but you just have to admit it,
07:01: Rush Dooney, did they see how the level of absurdity that would develop when secularism finally just opened its all out assault on the
07:19: West and on the, the obvious elements of Christianity that held
07:29: Western society together? Could they possibly see the, you know,
07:37: Chesterton made comments that might indicate that he did, but I mean, just the, the complete abdication of rationality, utter abandonment of reason, logic, anything.
07:55: You can see this every single day on X, Twitter, Facebook, and I don't use any of the rest of them.
08:04: I don't use TikTok or Instagram or any of that stuff. When people send me links, I'm always like, uh, this may or may not work.
08:12: I don't know. But the, the level, the, the dumbing down, the, the making everyone in our society infants, could they have possibly really seen what was coming along those lines?
08:30: I don't, I, I certainly never dreamed it was, it was a possibility, but I wasn't a visionary.
08:36: I wouldn't claim that I was. So when you, when you recognize secularum in Latin, when you have the phrase forever and ever, uh, from, to the age of the ages in Greek, um, normally comes across using secularum.
09:02: So it's the, it's this age. So secularism is, you know, the spirit of this age.
09:10: And that's what it's about. That's, that's its essence. That's what it's, it's promoting is the, the goodness of this world without any reference to what has come before.
09:25: So it really disconnects us from history and certainly without a concept of future.
09:31: It is very much focused upon self -realization, self -fulfillment.
09:38: That's why, you know, as recently as my own generation, you, you felt some kind of responsibility to marry, have children, be some type of productive member of society and continue the culture and the nation and at least somewhat look to the future.
10:04: Not everybody looked as far to the future as should have. I certainly really wasn't taught that, but it was still sort of there someplace.
10:12: It was communicated without necessarily saying it out loud. But you, you look at the selfish, what's, what is, there's an acronym for, um, married, single, two income, no children.
10:28: You know, you know what I'm talking about? Dinks, dual income, no kids.
10:34: That's okay. All right. Um, and you, you look at these and their kids, they're,
10:43: I don't care if they're 40, as far as their maturity, uh, their, their insight, their concern about others and the future, their, their children.
10:56: And they're just so proud that not only does their family name come to end with them.
11:04: Uh, but when they die, that's it. Because from a secular perspective, why not?
11:10: There's, there's nothing, there's no judgment. There's nothing in the future. You can't invest in your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, your great, great grandchildren.
11:20: You can't invest in them. You can't build anything for them because there's, there's nothing to do. There's, there's nothing. Once you die, you just turn to dust and that's, that's it.
11:30: And so this is what secular, secularism is anti -human. It is opposed to everything that is good.
11:41: Everything that makes us, the amazing thing is it makes people miserable.
11:48: Uh, study after study, you know, you hear all this stuff all the time about that. I heard somebody talking about the happiness index and how
11:56: America is falling down the happiness index. And it's funny when you see some of the countries, some of the people with the highest level of happiness are the people who have the least of the world's goods because they don't have to, they're not spending half their time trying to figure out how to hold onto it or how to get it for that matter.
12:15: Secularism is the antithesis of Christianity. It is destructive of humanity.
12:22: It is destructive of human flourishing and all the secular concepts that we bring into the faith because of our constant exposure to secular sources and secular thinking and secular movies and secular print and secular this, that, and the other thing, we bring it into the church and it creates a mishmash.
12:48: It can't, it can't fit with what is in scripture at all. It reminds me of the rather cutting words of scripture in first John chapter two, first John being the simplest
13:02: Greek in the new testament. It's child level and yet child level words can be used to communicate fundamentally earth -shaking concepts.
13:13: So in first John chapter two, verse 15, do not love the world, neither the things in the world.
13:20: The term is kosmos. You have ion, age, kosmos.
13:26: Unfortunately, the King James was nowhere near consistent in its translation of these terms.
13:33: And so as a result, you get traditional beliefs have developed over time based on the
13:41: King James rendering that no one bothered to see what the underlying text was. But ion, ionios, kosmos have overlapping semantic domains, as we say, but they can mean very different things.
13:59: And as I said in a debate a few weeks ago, kosmos is used at least 10 different ways by John and about 14 different ways in the new testament.
14:12: If you have the, if you have the old fundamentalist hermeneutic mindset that says first use determines meaning, where the first time you encounter a word in the
14:29: Bible, normally in the King James, that determines its meaning in the rest of the Bible. There is no such rule as that, and it's absurd on its face, and yet so many people accept it as a given.
14:45: I heard it in my youth. And the result with kosmos and world would be a total mess.
14:56: But the same writer who recorded Jesus saying, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, said, do not love the world nor the things in the world.
15:07: If you can't tell, that means, yeah, it's probably a different use of the word world. You get really confused reading the rest of the
15:15: Bible. And by the way, can I just mention that John 3, 16 is not
15:24: God so loved the elect. I've never said it was the elect. I mean, who's going to get eternal life?
15:32: Well, the elect will, because they're going to believe. They are all the believing ones. But the world is just simply the entire world of Jews and Gentiles, and the elect are drawn out of that world of Jews and Gentiles.
15:46: But John's not referring to that there. It is a demonstration of his love to the world, which has all sorts of different results.
15:56: I mean, I got to spend a few minutes last weekend passing out tracts and talking to a few folks in Mesa at the
16:05: Easter pageant. I'm going to try to get out there in the next two nights, Lord willing, if I can. You know, it was a whole lot easier when we were in our 20s.
16:15: And we were exhausted by the end of it back then. But standing for that many hours now,
16:22: I find myself looking for the planters real quick to sit it down for a few minutes and take some weight off.
16:30: There ain't no two ways about that. But anyway, uh, oh yes.
16:39: Someone just, uh, dual income, no kids equals dinks.
16:48: Single income, two children, oppressive mortgage equals sitcoms. S -I -T -C -O -M -S.
16:57: All right. There's lots of, uh, lots of interesting things like that there. Anyway, as I was saying, the term world, do not love the world nor the things in the world.
17:11: So John's making a distinction. There is love of world and there is a love of the things in the world.
17:21: Um, if anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. Now that is, that is convicting stuff.
17:29: That is, um, because I think all of us at some level or another have a love of our stuff.
17:41: And hence that's described as a love of the world. And if anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him.
17:49: Now, if you could take that super literally, then you're gonna have to take it, you know, is continually loving the world.
17:56: But still the, the, the point I think is clear to any, to any of us, there is something antithetical about having, uh, hey, agape tu patras, the, the love of the father.
18:10: Now is that the love which comes from the father? Is that the love, is this the subjective objective genitive, uh, the love for the father, love that comes from the father, a fatherly type of love?
18:23: Genitive is an amazing thing. Um, however you decide that there is an antithesis between loving the world and loving the father for all that is in the world.
18:40: The lust of flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life. Now see right there, those are three clearly negative concepts describing for us that this, this world that's being described here isn't the same world of John 3 .16.
18:58: This is secularism. This is the spirit of the age.
19:04: This is to live in God's world while in rebellion against him so that you have the lust of flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life.
19:18: Um, things that absolutely enslave those that do not have the ability to look above this world, this age and see how this fits together with what's come in the past and what is yet to come in the future.
19:39: People who do not even have the concept of living in light of eternity.
19:50: Um, none of this is from the father. It's from the world. So it has its origination in the cosmos, not in the father.
20:03: It does not come forth from the father, but comes forth from the world. These concepts of lust of flesh, lust of the eyes, you know, we understand lust of flesh, lust of the eyes, greed, greed, and man, is that a, um, a
20:25: Western sin par excellence. I mean, poor people can be greedy as well, but what the
20:35: West has taken greed to a advertising maximum, shall we say. And the world is passing away and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.
20:55: And so as I look at, as I listen to people trying to reason from a secular perspective, uh, there was this, like I said, that I chimed in with this thread on Twitter and this guy was mocking a sister and, and I just made the comment, you're, you are morally and ethically malformed.
21:24: Um, your, your morals and your ethics, because you're a secularist, are incoherent.
21:33: They, they, they have no source in your worldview. You cannot consistently apply these things to anyone else.
21:44: Um, you just, you really don't have anything to say. And of course he became rather abusive in his response.
21:51: But when you, the, the, the temptation is for us
21:58: Christians to become frustrated. Um, you, you see someone made in the image of God utterly throwing what that means out and yet acting as if they're
22:16: God themselves, really, that's what you end up seeing with so many of these people. And it can be very, very frustrating.
22:22: And one of the exhortations we need to be making to each other over and over again in our, we, we, we need to recognize we're all in this battle.
22:38: And so we need to be exhorting one another and encouraging one another. That's something we should be doing. We gather for, for fellowship and, and for, you know, whatever meetings we have during the week and things like that, encouraging one another, because it's discouraging to try to be salt and light in this society, in a society that is clearly under the judgment of God.
23:01: And so we have to encourage one another. And one of the things we need to be encouraging one another with are the words such as, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.
23:14: And this is over against the world passing away. It's lust, the lust of the eyes, lust of the pride of life, lust of the flesh.
23:23: But the one who does the will of God, not the will of the world, not, not as defined by the world, but does the will of God abides forever.
23:37: And that's something that we should be very much focused upon. Now, it is, uh, now somebody asked me why, uh, and I guess,
23:54: I guess Passover and Easter this time around are completely disconnected.
24:04: Um, I didn't look at it, so I'm, I'm sorry, I can't really comment on it. Um, obviously the quarter decimant controversy in church history was when do you, uh, celebrate the resurrection of Christ?
24:20: How do you determine that? And the East did it in one way, the
24:25: West did it another way that led to argument and eventually schism.
24:31: Um, and people who utilize the Jewish Passover as the mechanism for determining that I'm, I'm, I have seen comments that having
24:45: Easter coming up, resurrection Sunday coming up this weekend is so long before Passover that you're, you're, you know, you're gonna have the resurrection well before, before, um,
24:59: Passover, which doesn't make much sense. And I, I hadn't looked at, I only saw that and I was like, oh, that's interesting.
25:06: I, I suppose I could, you know, look some stuff up about that a little bit too late now, um, to do that.
25:14: But since for most people anyway, there is probably going to be some kind of a, um, resurrection theme, crucifixion theme, uh, thing going on, um, this weekend.
25:34: I forget what it was this morning, but I saw someone's comments.
25:41: Someone said something and my mind was drawn to Hebrews chapter 10.
25:47: And I, I wrote a little something up this morning. Well, not a little something. I'm not sure how many characters it was, but it had little substance to it on Hebrews chapter 10 verses 10 through 14.
25:59: And I commented as I have so many times before that I would think this time of year would be a great time to focus on the book of Hebrews.
26:12: Um, and I've expressed the fact that Hebrews became one of my favorite books in the
26:19: New Testament when I preached through it over the course of a number of years. I forget how many years it was.
26:27: I do remember it was 85 sermons. So that's a while.
26:33: It was probably five, six years, um, as far as the timeframe goes anyway.
26:38: Um, and I, I commented then that it seems to me that if Hebrews was a more widely read and understood book, and the only way to do that is if you understand it's
26:56: Old Testament backgrounds and you have a really strong grasp of the Levitical law,
27:02: Leviticus, things like that, priesthoods, you know, there's all sorts of that the book assumes, you know, from the
27:12: Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures. And since most people don't know those scriptures, then
27:18: Hebrews has always been somewhat of a closed book. I know it, I know it pretty much was to me as a young person in the
27:26: Baptist circles that I lived in. And yet there is no book that has longer, directly relevant specifically on this topic passages, specifically on the topic of the crucifixion of Christ and the purposes and intentions of that, uh, than the book of Hebrews does.
27:46: And I've lamented the fact that I think that the reason that most evangelicals have a, an emotional doctrine of the cross rather than a consistently biblical doctrine of the cross is because we've gotten most of our understanding from hymns, um, musicals, um, all sorts of stuff other than the text of scripture itself.
28:19: And so I looked at Hebrews 10 and as I was, as I was writing it,
28:29: I was even struck by something that obviously I've, I've seen the texts, but I don't remember really being pressed to think through the significance.
28:45: So let's, let's look at Hebrews chapter 10. We'll do the rest of our time here pretty much.
28:53: And, um, I do. Oh, I that's, that's rich and rich is, um, that's, that's the rich cam, um, over there.
29:03: Green. Oh, you're, you're blaming, you're blaming the color of the buttons. Oh, it's anyway.
29:14: Uh, you're trying to find the feed from the, um, from the laptop, right?
29:22: There you go. Okay. For the law, Hebrews 10 one, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things can never buy the same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near.
29:47: Otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered because the worshipers having once been cleansed and no longer have consciousness of sins.
29:55: But in these sack and those sacrifices, those repetitive sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year by year.
30:05: Now I, I know you're all going, yeah, we've heard this one before, but we have new listeners all the time.
30:11: I don't want to leave them out of, um, something rather beautiful here.
30:22: The argument is if, if those old sacrifices were truly meant to remove sin, then wouldn't that have then cleansed the conscious, consciences of those who drew near to worship so they wouldn't have to keep going back year after year after year after year.
30:46: Now some people might say, well, wait a minute, we confess our sins. We have confession of sins as every part of our service.
30:53: How does that fit with this? And I would just simply point out the, the difference here is that what's being spoken of in Hebrews is repetitive sacrifices.
31:10: The sacrifice on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, as I keep saying, it's
31:16: Yom Kippurim, there was more than one sacrifice made, but the day of atonement, Leviticus chapter 16, that sacrifice, while it was being made, if you stood in the congregation that gathered the temple and you saw the sacrifice being made and the high priest taking the blood into the holy place, if you were thinking, you would recognize that this was going to happen again next year.
31:55: And you probably were there the year before. It's the same sacrifice.
32:01: It's the same thing happening over and over again. It's speaking of my sins, but it's not taking my sins away because I wouldn't have to be here now since I was here last year.
32:18: And I'm going to have to be here again next year. And so it's not really burying my sins, is it?
32:27: No. In those sacrifices right here, there is an anamnesis.
32:36: The anamnesis of sins, kat and yaton is a way of saying year by year, yearly.
32:50: Anamnesis means reminder, a remembrance. Personally, I think one of the most beautiful things in the
32:59: New Testament is you have this term, it's not an overly common term, and it's saying that in repetitive sacrifices, because you have to do it over and over and over again, you have a remembrance of what?
33:19: Of sins year by year. But this term is used elsewhere.
33:25: Like I said, it's not on every other page in the New Testament. It's fairly rare, but it is used elsewhere. This is the exact same term that Jesus uses when he says of the supper, do this as an anamnesis, a remembrance of me.
33:46: So repetitive sacrifices remind us of sin. A singular one sacrifice reminds us of the sin bearer who has taken away sin.
34:00: The same term, the many sacrifices were pointing forward to the one that would then actually take away sin.
34:11: That's beautiful. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
34:17: Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, sacrifice an offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.
34:22: There's a textual variant there that's fascinating, we don't have time to get into it. You can hear my discussion of it in my sermon on that subject from that Hebrew series back in, who knows where.
34:31: Anyway, in burnt offerings and sacrifices of sin, you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold, I have come in the scroll of the book, it is written of me to do your will,
34:41: O God. And so he focuses upon the
34:48: Greek Septuagint use of the lemesu, your will. And he says, after saying sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sacrifice of sin you have not desired, nor have you taken pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.
35:03: Then he said, behold, I have come to do your will. He takes away the first, the sacrifices that were still going on in the temple.
35:16: I don't even know how you make hedge tails out of Hebrews if you don't see it was written before the destruction of the temple in AD 70.
35:23: But he takes away the first, which is the
35:29: Mosaic sacrificial commandment, in order to establish the second, behold,
35:36: I have come to do your will. By this will, the will that Christ has come to fulfill, by this will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
35:53: So there is one of the most important sacrifice atonement texts in all of the
36:06: New Testament. By this will, the will of Christ being obedient to the
36:12: Father, I've come to do your will, we have been sanctified.
36:20: I think in Hebrews it would probably be better to understand that as made holy.
36:34: In fact, I think you could really make an argument that in Hebrews, this is as close as you're going to get to Paul's use of the term justification.
36:51: The reason for the difference is, again, I think this is Luke, not Paul, writing this.
36:57: I think Paul's preaching it, so Luke's providing the Greek vocabulary. But this is different.
37:07: It's in a different realm, a conceptual realm, than the will of God for you is your sanctification, that you would not engage in sexual lust and things like that.
37:18: That's a different context in the Paulian corpus. And by this will, you have been made holy through the prosphoros, the offering, again, standard terminology of what took place on the
37:41: Day of Atonement, things like that. But it's the offering to somatos, of the body of a goat, a bull, a calf, no, of Jesus the
37:54: Messiah, Jesus Christ, ephapox, one time.
38:01: It is a temporal adverb, and so it's referring to once for all.
38:12: I realize in English you can try to do this, but you can't with the
38:19: Greek. It does not mean once for all people. It's a temporal adverb.
38:28: Once, it's referring to frequency, and this frequency is one. One time.
38:36: So, we are standing in God, in God's sight, has been accomplished through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, one time.
38:54: So, there's the contrast. Contrast is, they offer the same sacrifices year by year by year by year, reminder of sin.
39:02: We have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ one time.
39:12: If it is repeated, the entire argument of Hebrews is refuted. If you have an unbloody sacrifice that in any way, shape, or form is involved in your perfection before God, in your holiness before God, which is what
39:30: Rome teaches, you've undone the argument of Hebrews. You have.
39:38: There is no ephapox. There is no once for all because Rome teaches the mass is a representation of the one sacrifice of Christ in an unbloody manner.
39:56: Now, you could go for either one of those. It's not bloody. It's not a sacrifice. If it's a representation, then it should be propitiatory, which they say it is, but it's not perfecting.
40:08: You don't go to mass once and, ah, I'm ready to go. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you go over and over and over and over again.
40:23: And every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.
40:46: They can picture it. They can point away from themselves, but they never take away sins. But this one, he having offered one, it's this one, this one, but this one, one in behalf of sins, having offered sacrifice.
41:17: So this one in opposition to, again, in contrast to the priests, and this has all been developed.
41:25: This is why the author was talking about Melchizedek and blessings and Leviticus, the
41:34: Levites and all this stuff to establish the supremacy of the
41:39: Melchizedek priesthood over the Aaronic priesthood. And to say there's only one Melchizedek priest.
41:44: I took some of the tests for an Aaronic priest tract with me. I've got some in the truck. I need to grab some more before I go out.
41:52: And we were using those for all the missionaries going by. Do you hold the Aaronic priesthood? We need to reprint that or something eventually.
42:02: But all that stuff that the author has done is laying the foundation for this so that he can say, but this one, in opposition to the old priests, by one sacrifice in behalf of sins for all time, he's offered one sacrifice.
42:38: Those sins are taken away, either they are or they're not. The idea of general atonement, universal atonement, utterly misunderstands the concept of substitution and the concept of the completeness of the work of Christ.
43:01: He offered one sacrifice for sins for all time.
43:07: And then he sat down at the right hand of God.
43:16: He sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies are put as a footstool for his feet.
43:26: Now, I'm not sure why, and maybe it's just a setting in my program, but in my
43:38: Greek New Testament on my main, this is the one we use in the studio, and it's our backup one.
43:46: But I know this morning in looking at this at home, the
43:52: Greek used italics to indicate the Septuagint citation.
43:58: I'm not sure why it's not doing that now. I'm going to have to look to see if I was overzealous and clicking certain things or whatever.
44:08: But you can see in the English translation, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies are put as a footstool for his feet.
44:23: So, the use of the all caps, indicative of the citation from the
44:28: Greek Septuagint. And of course, we know the text. It's obviously God's favorite
44:34: Bible verse because he quotes it more often than any other. Psalm 110 .1. So, here in the middle of a discussion of what
44:47: Christ accomplishes in his death, you have the 110th
44:53: Psalm, which Paul makes reference to in 1 Corinthians 15. There are a number of highly charged theological areas that the text appears in.
45:10: The idea is, he sits down at the right hand of God, which means his work has been accepted.
45:17: And there is no place to sit in the holy place.
45:26: There's no place to sit down. You come in, you do what you're supposed to do, and then you turn around and you leave for another year.
45:38: And so, sat down at the right hand of God, that's the position of authority, of acceptance, of being beloved.
45:51: Waiting from that time until his enemies are put as a footstool for his feet. Again, a concept not generally a part of our language in the
46:05: West any longer. It pictures the conquering king with his foot on the neck of his enemies.
46:17: They are humbled, and he can put his feet upon them, and that's the idea of until his enemies are put as a footstool for his feet.
46:32: And so, there is a presentation of the finishedness of Christ's sacrifice, but also the victory that comes from Christ's sacrifice.
46:48: The victory. Because his enemies will be put under his feet for, verse 14, for by one offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
47:14: So, the reason for the ultimate cosmic victory of all of his enemies being put under his feet as a footstool is that he has offered one offering, and that one offering has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.
47:43: And I think that disappears behind the thing there, so let me see if I can, it's fairly close.
47:56: Christ's sacrifice results in the subjugation of his enemies and being placed under his feet.
48:04: Because by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
48:11: So, the one offering accomplishes exactly what Father, Son, and Spirit intended to offer, which is the perfection, the completedness for all time of those who are being sanctified.
48:31: And then, where does the author go? He's now made an amazing statement.
48:39: And where does he go? This is a covenant that I'll make with them after those days, says the
48:44: Lord. I'll put my laws before their heart and on their mind, I will write them. Where have we heard that before?
48:51: Well, you know where it's from. It's from Jeremiah 31. But, it was also just quoted pretty much in full in chapter 8.
49:05: So, the covenant that comes forth from the shed blood of Christ is the new covenant.
49:15: And it's the covenant that I'll make with them after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws upon their heart and on their mind,
49:22: I will write them. So, he's pulling in from Jeremiah 31, which he had just cited beforehand, which again gives us, you know, there's been a few people who have speculated that the new covenant language is just for Jews, or it's just for,
49:45: I have heard this, it's just before, well, since it's just for the
49:56: Jews, it doesn't really have universal application, things like that. No. The death of Christ brings about the new covenant and guarantees.
50:09: This is why he can put my, I will put my laws upon their heart and on their mind,
50:15: I will write them. Because it accomplishes what is intended to be accomplished.
50:23: He then says, it's interesting that he then says, he breaks up the quotation.
50:29: He didn't in chapter 8, but he does here. He then says, and their sins and their lawless deeds,
50:38: I'll remember no more. Now, we went through Hebrews 7 and 8 fairly in depth in the mobile studio.
50:54: Blessings be upon the mobile studio. Sort of sad to see, I'm gonna be sad to see that one go.
51:01: I mean, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have a studio in there. It's just gonna be a different one.
51:08: And it's, it's gonna be really, I might be able to work something out, but it's gonna be really hard to have my background in the new location.
51:18: It really is. And so all the hours I spent putting up that stone background and, oh, but, but don't worry.
51:30: I'm working on the lights. Don't worry. We're gonna be good there. We're gonna be good there. I have,
51:35: I have backup and contingency plans. We're gonna make it work. It's gonna happen. And I honestly think with that, that thing,
51:46: I think we can get something very, very similar to what I had and just hang it from the, where the, where the shade comes down.
51:55: I think we will be able to have a background that will be something other than just a, a blackout shade, even though that one's white, which is nicer than, you know, something else.
52:07: I think it will, but it's probably not gonna be this next trip. So anyway, sorry, got bumped off my topic there because I was thinking,
52:15: I was thinking back to talk to when we responded to Jared Longshore and we walked through Hebrews 7 and 8 and into 9,
52:22: I think, it's just very interesting to me to note that he inserts this, this idea.
52:34: He says, and their sins and their lawless deeds I'll remember no more.
52:41: His point is this death of Christ inaugurates the new covenant and the new covenant takes away sin.
52:50: The old covenant could never do that. Therefore, there's nothing to go back to.
52:55: Therefore, when you're being called to go back and offer sacrifice and curse Christ, there's nothing to go back to.
53:03: And the old covenant scriptures told us that. They, it was right there because he then says in verse 18,
53:14: Now, where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin.
53:27: So may I ask for your soul's sake to all of our
53:42: Roman Catholic friends, how do you understand this?
53:51: Now, where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin. If Christ's once for all sacrifice perfects those for whom it is made, then why do you have a perpetuatory sacrifice that you call the mass?
54:12: Why are you offering it for the dead? Why are you attending it yourself?
54:23: If the sacrifice of Christ accomplishes that which scripture says it accomplishes, there is no longer any offering for sin.
54:32: So the immediate application in Hebrews is obvious. Look at the beautiful temple.
54:41: Look at the high priest and all the priests and procession and the beautiful robes and the pageantry and all.
54:51: Come back. You've joined this little cult. Come back. Until you understand all of that was meant to point away from itself.
55:07: And that dark day when the sun stopped shining and the veil, the temple was, was rent from top to bottom.
55:19: When that took place, all the rest of this stuff became empty and meaningless.
55:29: Now, you're not even allowed to say that anymore. Boy, we found that out a few days ago, right? You know,
55:36: I'll just make a quick comment. I'm really,
55:44: I've sat on the program before and I think a lot of people just sort of let it go past them and they don't think much about it.
55:52: But since World War II, there has been, especially in Europe, especially in Germany, a tremendous embarrassment at what the
56:10: New Testament says about the role of the Jewish people in the crucifixion of Christ.
56:17: And I've illustrated, remember my illustration? My illustration was the Passion movie. In the
56:24: Passion movie, if you remember, in the trial scene, the
56:32: Jews are standing there and they're yelling in Aramaic.
56:38: They actually spoke Aramaic in the film. And then it was subtitled so you can understand what was being said.
56:46: But right before it came out, they had to pull the copies and redo the subtitling so that when it got to the point where the
56:55: Jews said, His blood be upon us and upon our children, which in the
57:02: Bible is connected to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
57:08: It's a prophecy. I'm sorry, but when you start doing weird stuff with eschatology, you end up missing the fact that Jesus prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem.
57:22: And the early church referred to that over and over again as evidence that He was a prophet. He died before the destruction of Jerusalem.
57:29: He said it was coming. If you take Matthew 24 and throw it off, everything off in the future, what did
57:35: Jesus prophesy? Or, as Doug Wilson, when he did the movie
57:43: Collision with the atheist, his brother's name is
57:51: Peter. Hitchens, yeah. When Hitchens goes, See, Jesus expected all this stuff to happen in his lifetime, blah, blah, blah, blah.
58:00: What does Doug do? He comes back and says, No, actually, that was a true prophecy, and here's the fulfillment.
58:07: And Hitchens is like, You've never even heard of that before. That's because you've been talking to folks that were reading
58:14: Left Behind. But anyway, so all of this demonstrates that what has happened in Christ finishes the sacrificial system.
58:34: And when we become so embarrassed that they took the subtitling off where they said,
58:41: His blood be upon us and upon our children. It was still in the Aramaic, and if you understand Aramaic enough, you heard them saying it, but they took the subtitling off.
58:51: Now, the Jews rejected their Messiah, but the lima, the remnant, who's,
59:00: I believe, preaching this sermon in Hebrew, probably, Paul, one of the remnant,
59:07: God was faithful in saving the remnant. But you can't, it's like saying you can't say
59:16: Christ is King. It's all through the New Testament. It's the Christian message. Well, you can't say the
59:23: Jews had anything to do with the crucifixion of Jews. It's right there. You're going to have to start tearing pages out now.
59:29: You're going to do the Thomas Jefferson thing. But people have misused this. Yeah.
59:36: You know, like I said last time, Dr. Saban said, Well, Trinitarians have burned Unitarians, as if that makes the
59:42: Trinity wrong. No, it doesn't make the Trinity wrong. You just have to think clearly.
59:48: And unfortunately, people today don't think clearly. They don't think clearly anymore at all. So, here's the point.
59:55: Now, where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin.
01:00:03: That's the message of Resurrection Sunday. There's no more offerings.
01:00:12: There is one offering, which we remember the one who offered himself.
01:00:18: Jesus says, Do this in remembrance of me. But there is no more offering for sin.
01:00:25: So, if you are planning on going on Sunday to a place that is going to talk about making an offering for sin, find a place that actually believes the
01:00:38: Bible. Find a place that actually believes the apostolic teaching found in the
01:00:44: Bible, not the aberrant traditions of later generations. Where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin.
01:00:56: By one sacrifice, he has perfected for all time.
01:01:03: Believe it. Rejoice in it. Don't let yourself be taken into slavery to man's systems.
01:01:17: This is the Word of the Lord. This is the message of Scripture. We could keep on going.
01:01:25: Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
01:01:52: Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promises faith will—oh my, there is just so much more that could be said.
01:02:02: If you're going to be doing some Good Friday, Resurrection Sunday reading, make it
01:02:09: Hebrews 10. It will bless your soul. As we're wrapping up, might have a little more information next week, like I said.
01:02:23: Are you going to say anything about this cross? I'm not sure.
01:02:37: There's some things that I need to set up here because the way
01:02:46: I auctioned before was through Facebook. I really think that Facebook is going the way of MySpace in a great big hurry.
01:02:59: I've had some people correct me on that matter when I kind of brought it up there. It's like this is really becoming an irrelevant place.
01:03:06: Twitter is where everybody's going that's relevant. You just made a bunch of people angry.
01:03:14: Yeah, I know. I know. That's okay. They also own stock in Facebook. I almost shut the whole page down.
01:03:21: It's like it's irrelevant. What's the point of my doing this? It's like just nothing going on. Anyway, I need to come up with a way to auction stuff.
01:03:28: But yeah, if you have seen me brag about the stuff that's in the new studio over there, the layered cross, again,
01:03:38: I did not invent the layered cross. While I built it, I used the design from Dennehy Designs.
01:03:47: It's their creation and it's absolutely beautiful. One thing that a lot of people think that the wood is stained.
01:03:58: None of the wood on that is stained. It's just different kinds of wood. It's different kinds of wood.
01:04:03: Some of them I've never even heard of before. I was able to track it down the whole nine yards.
01:04:09: But there's all kinds of different species you can put together to do these in different sizes.
01:04:15: I think if I recall, I think their biggest one that they've done is 12 feet tall. A little big.
01:04:21: Weighs about 250 pounds. So I'm not going to do that one. No, no. But I might offer up that one that's on the wall.
01:04:29: And there is a 24 inch one. The one that's on the podium is a nine inch one.
01:04:37: And so I might do another 24 inch one that someone could hang on the wall.
01:04:44: On the other hand, 12 might be easy for anybody to hang just about anywhere. And certainly would make it easy to ship somewhere.
01:04:53: Yeah, you don't want that getting broken in transport. Yeah, I'm thinking seriously about offering that up for one of the auctions as well.
01:04:59: So right now we've got two brothers, aside from Rich, that have offered to use their skills.
01:05:09: Again, we're not doing what we did last year with a big old hunking fundraising type thing.
01:05:15: We don't want to quote unquote go to the well all the time. You know we don't like to do these type of things. What we are doing and the reason we're mentioning all this is this is really the costs involved with making the choice of continuing my travel, doing the debates with Jimmy Akin, travel coming up after that, speaking at various churches, rather than shutting that down and going to court.
01:05:47: Because we would have to sue a certain manufacturer. We'd have to get lawyers involved, you know, all the rest of this stuff.
01:05:55: And we'd be stuck. We'd either have to rent something. And because of all the technicalities that are involved, we'd probably lose.
01:06:05: Well, yeah, who knows? Who knows? But the point is, it's not like...
01:06:13: In fact, you can testify. When the last trip started, and I started feeling horrible, and I started off not feeling well and all this stuff.
01:06:22: But one of the things I did say a bunch of time is, well, at least the unit's working well. Because the refrigerator was working and, you know,
01:06:31: I was happy. As opposed to your first stop when the circuit breaker popped again. It did.
01:06:37: And then it stopped doing that. And then it stopped doing that. So whatever was vibrating up front as the thing was shaking apart probably fell back in place.
01:06:45: I know. And it's all great. I know. The point is, I was going, hey, you know, we've got a new roof.
01:06:53: The circuit breaker's not popping. I was happy. It's like, yay, we're gonna do this.
01:06:59: And then, you know, we've got various theories here. I think
01:07:06: I did mention on one of the dividing lines that I got into the unit when I got to one of the RV parks, and there was glass all over the floor.
01:07:13: Yeah. Because the round glass...
01:07:19: The tray. ...tray in the microwave had been thrown out the microwave and shattered all over everything.
01:07:28: Now, I've had stuff break, but I've never, never had anything like that.
01:07:35: And Rich will tell you, from the start with this unit that we had,
01:07:40: I was like, man, that thing seems to bounce around a lot. Something's weird.
01:07:45: Because the first stop I made with it, so I had driven for four or five hours, get to this place.
01:07:53: I had hung some clothes up in the very back in a, it's not a full closet, but you could hang like shirts and pants and stuff in it.
01:08:02: I opened that thing up and everything was off the rail. And the hangers that had, that were plastic, the heads were snapped off.
01:08:16: Now you've got to, you've really got to, boom, to snap the heads off these things.
01:08:23: And so I was a little concerned, and I had looked at the suspension and I, you know, in the back of my mind, this stuff's running around.
01:08:32: I think we put a few things together and we're realizing why it was falling apart.
01:08:38: There was defective issues and it may not have just been the thing up front. It may have been a combination of things that put it all together.
01:08:46: Make a long story short, I mean, the thing would have to, is going to be sent back to the manufacturing place in Indiana to be rebuilt.
01:08:55: That's all they can do. And so we would have been off the road. We would have been doing, having to do completely different things.
01:09:03: And we just decided, no, we're not going to go to court. We're not going to fight with all that kind of stuff.
01:09:09: We'll, we'll take a loss. And that loss is what we're talking about covering.
01:09:16: And so Rich can, Rich has talked about doing one of those beautiful crosses that you saw. I wish, wish we had a picture of it, but everyone's been watching it the last week when we were in there.
01:09:28: And then Derek Melton from Melton Forge, Pastor Melton, where I will be speaking May 1st and 2nd.
01:09:34: If you've never seen his gorgeous knives that he makes, he donated one last time and we had bidding on that.
01:09:45: And then of course, Jeffrey Rice is going to do one of his famous Bibles. And so hopefully we won't have to say too much more about it.
01:09:53: Just letting folks know the, you know, this, this trip will, will reveal a lot.
01:10:03: And we have serious plans for major debates and new topics in the rest of the year.
01:10:13: And so you can be a part of that by hitting the travel fund at AOMN .org
01:10:19: and helping us do that kind of thing and, and keep us going. So hopefully those thoughts from Hebrews 10 were helpful to you.
01:10:26: Have a wonderful weekend with your family, with your family of faith. Thinking about the amazing condescension of our
01:10:34: God in providing for us our salvation in Jesus Christ. And we will see you next week.