1 - Introduction to Religions and Cults

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy. We are starting a new school and a new class.

New school is going to be a school of world religions. The school of world religions.

We are going to start with an introductory class. We're going to start with a class on an introduction to the major western religions.

We're glad to have you with us. We have, at Striving for Eternity, been trying to have many different classes, many different schools,

I should say, that are going to focus in different areas so that you have a different subject matter that you can look into.

We currently have the school of hermeneutics. We have the school of systematic theology.

We have a school of discipleship. We're starting this school of world religions.

We're working on the school of apologetics. And we're going to be adding more, and then within each of these schools, we're going to start adding more classes in more detail over time.

But if you are watching us live, or if this is the first time you've ever watched one of our academy classes, welcome.

We're glad to have you with us. And we are going to be doing things, if you're watching online, you're going to see me do things different than if you've watched in other classes.

I'm going to be relying a little bit heavier on my notes than I usually do because in this class,

I'm going to be relying on documents that I have studied in the past and are not as familiar with, don't have memorized, and so I won't be as likely to quote and reference things that are not in my notes.

And I do want to say that this class is based off of 14 years of study that I did in studying these different religions in their context.

In other words, I went and read their authoritative documents and tried to be as honest as I could with systematizing different religions, different major religions of the

Western world. And so what I've tried to do when

I did this study is I actually wrote up my notes and put it into the form that you're going to have if you have a syllabus.

I'll get to that in a minute. And what I did was I put that or gave that to people that are authorities in these different religions and asked them, am

I accurate in what I'm saying you believe? And if there were things that needed to be changed,

I would change them. I found that there wasn't much that was needed to be changed. There was some with when we get to the

Latter -day Saints where one of the elders just did not like the way things were worded, but he could not argue that that was what was taught.

So he didn't want me teaching what they believe, but he couldn't deny that is what they teach.

So I kept it in. So essentially, this is not a study that we often think of when we look at studying the

Bible and in a Christian's context. And what I'm going to say up front is I'm going to try to give you the context of what these other religions believe, not necessarily always give you a refutation for them.

And I'm doing that because I don't want to be guilty of what many are guilty of. Even Christians are guilty of this as well as others, where they will attempt to explain or define what someone believes, and they'll do it in a way that is a strawman argument or is not what someone actually believes.

And I want to be fair and honest with the Scriptures that we're going to deal with. And when

I say Scriptures, I'm saying that in a broad sense, the authorities that the different religions believe is

Scripture. I'll put it that way. So let me start with this question. Why study world religions?

What would be some reasons that we would want to study different world religions and cults?

And I'm going to define what a cult is in a moment. But let me give you five different reasons why this study becomes important for the

Christian believer. One is to know... Oh, that's right. Thank you. I didn't mention the syllabus.

You can pick up a syllabus for this class, a study of the Western religions on our website, strivingforeternity .org.

You can go to the store there and pick up the syllabus. The syllabuses are $25 each.

This one is a little bit thicker than some of the other ones, so you get a lot more. But you want to have the syllabus if you want to fill in the blanks and take notes, which really becomes important.

You're going to see, especially in this first lesson, how much we try to give you in the syllabus, just from where I say that we fill in the blanks.

You're going to be seeing that I'm going to be reading more from the syllabus. Now, this syllabus, more than others, are going to be kind of important because this syllabus, unlike others, has all the quotations that I'm going to give you.

Where some of the other syllabuses, I may give you references. I'm giving you references from Scripture, and you can pull a

Bible off your desk or shelf and follow along. But I don't know how many of you have a

Koran, or a Talmud, or a Book of Mormon, or these different reference works that I'm going to refer to.

If you don't have those things, well then, in this case, the syllabus is going to be really helpful to have. So, with that,

I encourage you to get a syllabus at strivingforeternity .org. Now, why study?

Thank you for that. I will say this, for the engineer's sake.

This class, unlike others, is going to be a little bit more difficult for the engineer to kind of get the references and put the slides up that they put up, or that are put up.

It's going to be because we're not referencing some things that are super familiar.

And so, sometimes I may say something and it may, they may pop up the wrong slide.

We're going to be gracious with that. So, if you're following along online, just know that. But I will try to read them anyway, and we'll try to make sure that the slide ends up matching what

I read. Okay, so why study the different world religions? One is to know what is believed in order to defend against false doctrines.

A lot of times what you see is every, every theological system is well thought out.

It's a misnomer when people think that some religious system is not well thought out because it doesn't match the same definitions that we as Christians use.

That would be a bad argument. It's well thought out, typically. And they have answers for things.

And even if we don't like those answers, we don't agree with those answers. So, we need to understand what they believe in their context.

Now, with that I'm saying, I remember debating, or I never did the debate, I had a professing atheist that wanted to debate me on television.

And it was back when I worked at Lucent Technologies, because I worked at Bell Laboratories, which became Lucent Technologies.

And he worked there, and he wanted to do a debate with me on his atheistic television show.

And I said, I'd be happy to under one condition. I want you to argue for the merits of Christianity, and I will argue for the merits of atheism.

He's like, what would that prove? I said, what it would prove is that you do not understand what you are attacking, and I understand very well the point that your position holds.

And that's the thing. If you're going to argue a point, we need to be able to argue it where we understand the position.

I remember when a rabbi gave me six hours of cassette tapes, if you guys remember what those things are.

But I had six hours of cassette tapes of this rabbi who supposedly knew the New Testament as well as he did the

Old Testament. What I discovered is the rabbi sounded really good when he was speaking before other rabbis who knew nothing about the

New Testament, but he didn't understand Christianity. He had a mix of Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.

I mean, it was just a complete mix of many different aspects of different groups of Christianity.

And he made it sound really out there and wacky, but he didn't actually define any consistent, in a general sense,

Christian view. In other words, general meaning Roman Catholicism generally, we're calling it Christianity.

Everyone with Jehovah Witness and Mormonism and these others, in a general sense, they would claim that they're

Christian. As Christians, we would say that they're not, and we'll get into that. So the first thing we want to do is we want to understand what these religious systems actually believe so that we can defend against error.

How are we going to know what error looks like? Well, we study the truth, which is the Word of God, and then we do a comparison.

You're going to see us go through and do that in this class. Second is to recognize the deception that many are under to seek to set them free with the gospel.

When you are on the streets evangelizing or you're at work or you're in school or you're maybe at a family function, you're going to see that many people are blinded by religious belief, and we're going to want to try to help you to understand what these belief systems are so that you may be able to speak with someone about the gospel.

Now, one of the advantages of doing the study the way we have is this study is used in the

Middle East by a missionary, and he said that he loves this study because he starts on the lesson on Islam.

And what he has found is because when he goes over the lesson on Islam, the Muslims believe what he's saying because it's what they believe.

So, they're seeing the accuracy in their religious system, and they're saying this is the belief.

This is accurate to what we believe. And what do they do? They then trust it when he goes over the other religious systems, and then he's allowed, because he's built the trust to be able to explain the differences with Christianity and Islam.

And he's been able to effectively use this study to lead many Muslims to Christ from what he's telling me, and I'm greatly appreciative of that because that's one of the goals of studying these religions.

A third is to protect against becoming deceived ourselves. And I understand that many would say, well,

I can't be deceived. Well, if you're a believer in Christ, I would think you can't really. But, you know, there are people that make good arguments.

One of the things is that many don't understand why they believe what they believe when they raised in a church.

And therefore, what they end up doing is they hear this argument that sounds like it's really well thought out, and they say, that makes more sense than what

I believe, when really what it is is no one's ever sat down with them and explained to them what it is they believe.

We're going to do that as well. Number four is to protect our families and friends against false religions and cults.

You know, when you get that knock on your door, some of you don't like that when that knock comes on your door and they have different literature that they want to tell you about.

I encourage it. I like it. I invite them. Why? Because I know what they believe, and they get a little bit nervous.

I'm on the do not visit list for both Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons. They avoid my house.

I call them up every time I move and say, hey, I need a Book of Mormon. Can you send a missionary? I would like to get a watchtower.

Can you send someone over? And it usually only takes once, and they mark my new address. So actually, when

I moved to the town I'm in now, one of my neighbors thanked me after a couple of months of being here because what

I found was that one of the neighbors, his sister's a Jehovah Witness. So the Jehovah Witnesses used to come by the neighborhood every single

Saturday, and it drove the neighbors nuts. And what I started doing was when they came to my door and then they started to avoid my door, what

I started to do was I would follow them around the neighborhood with my Bible. I'd see them in the neighborhood. I'd grab my

Bible and I'd chase out after them. And they'd look at me like, what are you doing? And I'd say, well, I'm just going to correct all the error you tell my neighbors.

And so ring the doorbell. My neighbors see the Jehovah Witnesses. They'd see me standing behind them, and I'd say hi and mention the name.

You with them? I said, oh, no, no, no. I'm just going to correct all the errors that they tell you if you choose to have a conversation with them.

It should be fun. And so after a while, they avoided my entire street and my neighbors thanked me.

So you want to protect your family and friends from religious beliefs and cults. And then another thing is, lastly, is to know the truth.

All right? To know the truth. So now I've been mentioning a cult. And that brings up the question of what is a cult?

Let's look at a definition of a cult. And I'm hoping that we'll get into at least starting some of Judaism this week.

But I do want to take the time to explain what a cult is and what a religion is and what the differences are. And hopefully we're going to get into all of this and be able to get into Judaism.

I expect that we'll probably take two classes per lesson. And I'm going to go over how these lessons are organized in a few minutes.

So what is it that defines a cult versus a religion?

Well, a religion comes from a Latin word which means to bind together. It is a reference for those human ways of integrating existence of expressing meaningful of expressing meaning in the integrated universe.

That's the definition that I had gotten from someone. Religion is basically a set of systematic teachings.

That's really what it comes down to. It's a teachings or doctrines that reflect the ultimate order, meaning, and possible transformation of existence for a people.

OK? So commonly, the way that this is used today is to refer to a cult. To refer to those beliefs, behaviors, social institutions that have something to do with the speculation on any or all of the following.

The origin, end, and significance of the universe, what happens after death, the existence and wishes of powerful non -human beings such as spirits, ancestors, angels, demons, and gods, and the manner in which all of these shape human behavior.

So that's a definition that's used for religion.

Now, the thing I find so interesting about that definition is this definition I had written up long before the

Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that atheism is a religion. And they do have a focus on the origin, end, and significance of the universe.

So I would say that it properly fits the definition. I understand those professing atheists hate when you call their belief system a religion, but it is.

Even the Supreme Court ruled so. All right, so most religions have groups or cults that have splintered off from within the main religion.

Commonly, a cult will have four traits, I'm going to give you five, that will differentiate it from the other main religions.

And this study is going to speculate that basically the religions, the cults have splintered off from Christianity is where we're going to focus.

So let's look at number one. Now, this is definitions of a cult. There's five things I'm going to give you. By the way, this is also in my book.

Do you have that slide? I have a book called What Do They Believe? And basically, most of the material we're going to go over in this class is going to be in that book.

What Do They Believe is going to be part one of that book. We'll get there in a few minutes.

But it does explain in the introduction the first of these points of what a cult is. The first is scripture twisting.

And that's your blank if you have a syllabus. Scripture twisting. What is scripture twisting?

Scripture twisting is the de facto assertion of extra biblical revelation.

It is when you use some of the scriptures with a disregard to the context to justify an unbiblical or extra biblical doctrine.

You'll see this when people will argue in a religious system that some leader is claiming that he's getting direct revelation from God.

That is twisting. That's changing it. Or they take the meaning of scripture and give it a brand new meaning that it never had before.

Now, if God does that, he can do that. He can have a dual meaning and use scripture differently than the way we thought it was meant.

And it has a dual meaning. But you'll see some that take a meaning and give it something totally different because they don't handle it rightly.

They take one word or a phrase and rip it out of its context. So you'll see that they twist the scriptures.

That becomes important because everything else in a cult is based on a mishandling of scripture. So they have a mishandling of scripture.

What's the second thing? Number two in your syllabus is authoritarianism. That is your blank there if you have a syllabus.

Authoritarianism is when an individual interpretation on a subject is not allowed.

In other words, you and I cannot have private interpretation. Only the cult leader or leaders can interpret the scriptures.

And they're cannibals only usually to one another or to no one. All right. And so you'll see that most organizations that fall into the category of a cult will have some either one individual or some group of individuals that say they're the only ones that can properly give the scripture meet scriptural meaning.

And so when you have that, you have them saying you can't privately interpret the scripture. Now think about that.

Why do they need to do that? For a very simple reason. If you're going to twist the scriptures, then you can't let others do the interpretation of scripture, right?

If you're going to be twisting them, you can't let others see what you're doing. So you got to be the only authority, the only one that can properly handle the scriptures.

So you have authoritarianism. Number three in your syllabus is exclusivism.

Exclusivism. Exclusivism is when an organization, only the organization has the truth and all others are excluded from it.

So if you're outside of the organization, you're excluded from the truth, okay?

That is very, very important to understand because what it is is saying that because you have this group that they're twisting the scriptures to give themselves an authority position and because of that, they're saying if you leave, you can't know what the

Word of God says. You can't understand the Word of God outside of this group because they're the only ones that can properly interpret it.

So you need them and if you're outside the group, you can't have the truth. That becomes very important to the cults because what that does is it keeps people in the group.

It keeps people from leaving because there's no truth. If you leave the group, you've left the truth and you're damned to hell often or you're condemned to error.

Number four is isolationism. If you have a syllabus there, this is your next blank, isolationism.

Isolationism is when members of the organization are not allowed to speak to outsiders about doctrine unless they convert first, okay?

Unless they're converted. The organization often states that it is to protect the truth and they want to protect their members because these unbelievers just wouldn't understand.

Isolationism is also seen when you'll see people that will stay together.

They keep to their own, all right? They don't talk to folks outside of the group.

And when you have groups like that, what you end up seeing is that they're very much going to be tied to living together, working together, doing everything together.

That creates what some call love bombing. You know, when people come to these groups, they're so loved.

They feel so welcomed that for an emotional reason, they want to be part of the group. But you can't leave the group then because if you leave the group, you're leaving all your friends and your family.

It makes it very, very hard to leave. You see how the cults work then? So they twist the scriptures.

They get someone that's an authority that says they're the only ones that can properly interpret the scriptures. Because they're the only ones with the truth, you feel you can't leave the group without leaving the truth.

And then they isolate you from the outside world. I know of one cult that what they do is they immediately try to get you to either convert or cut off all your family.

If your family doesn't convert and move to their town where they have their church, then they tell you, you know, it's a sin to be with your family because your family is unbelievers and therefore you have to cut them off.

And they use a passage in Matthew where Jesus said, you know, I've come to cause division with the family.

And they misuse that and twist that meaning to give it a new meaning that only their elders, their three elders can give it.

And it means that if your families aren't believers, you have to cut them off. What that does is it cuts people off from those that care about them and would be the ones that would try to pull them out of this controlling group.

And that's what you're going to see in every cult control. All right. And that control often has this fifth thing.

And that is endangerment. Endangerment. Now, this is the fifth trait.

I put it as a separate trait in my book. What do they believe? But in this study, I'm saying that it's possible these first four, if you have all four, the first four,

I would say that group is cultic. And if it has this fifth one,

I would say it's a full -blown cult. And that's endangerment. It is true that most cults teachings do lead to either physical or emotional danger.

Okay. And to its members. And this may, it's not always true, but it's more often than not.

And the emotional is what it is because most people feel they can't leave and they feel they must do what the cult is telling them to do because if they leave and some try to leave and return to cults.

Why? Because they leave and they feel that there's a huge void because the cults doing so much interaction together, they feel like they're missing something when they leave the group.

They feel like, well, I, there's something missing in my life.

Well, really what's missing is Christ, but they don't understand that. All right.

So let us begin by looking at what we're going to study in this study.

All right. I'm going to give you now an overview of the next several weeks, actually months of classes.

I'm figuring, I'm figuring we're going to be as we usually are about 20 lessons per class.

This one may be a little bit more. But we're going to, we're going to see how we, how it goes.

So what's in this study? This study is going to be a careful study of some of the major Western religions and cults.

The study will quote original source material mostly as some areas where I haven't, but I'll try to mention that.

But I'm trying to give original source material from the sources that are accepted as authoritative for each of the religions generally accept, that they generally accept.

There's going to be differences. I understand that. And I'm trying to be fair. And if I'm incorrect, I want to correct it.

Many people study different religions. However, they don't spend the time to understand what these religions believe in their own context.

In other words, you'll see that there's a genre of introduction to world religions, which study like dozens and dozens and dozens of world religions.

And they go an inch deep. They go over the foundations and some of the major, major doctrines, but they don't explain in detail and they don't give lots of quotations.

You're going to see we're going to give lots of quotations and go into detail. The other extreme is that you'll have books that focus on one area and get into a lot of detail.

And really what they're doing is telling you how to refute those religions. We're not going to tell you how to refute it so much.

We're going to tell you what the religions believe. Okay. So many study, as I said, in a view to refute.

This study will attempt to explain what these systems of religions believe in the context of the religion, not the

Christian context. In other words, I'm not telling you what, how Christians, how it's wrong compared to Christianity.

All right. Now we're going to look at several areas. All right. And with each one of these religions, the religions we're going to look at is

Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Jehovah Witness, not in that order.

And then Christianity. That's going to be part one. Part two, I'm going to give basically a Christian response to these six doctrinal areas.

And each one of these religions, we're going to look at six doctrinal areas. We're going to look at their view of authority.

What's their scriptures? What do they hold to as an authority? The view of the authority will address those documents or people that the religion believes are authoritative.

Some of these authorities are considered to be the word of God and some are not.

But there still can be an authority, just not equal in authority to God's word. It must also be studied as how these religions acquired these authorities.

In other words, we're going to look at one that believes that God gave someone golden plates and translated them from an ancient

Egyptian hieroglyph that we don't know ever existed. It must be studied how they acquired these authorities, which may include inspiration or some other means.

And the view of the authority is the starting point because that's what we're going to build on when we say this is what someone believes.

So we're going to look at their view of authority. Next, we're going to look at their view of God. I'm going to focus specifically in the

Trinity. What's their view of the triune God? How do they answer for the

Trinity? But we're going to look at other things. The view of God will address the nature and attributes of God in general, where they disagree with biblical

Christianity. More specifically, it'll address the issues of the Godhead and view of Trinity.

The Trinity has become unique to Christianity in general. However, there are those that call themselves

Christian that disbelieve in the Trinity, and we're going to look at some of those.

Then we're going to look at their view of Jesus Christ, specifically His deity. Most of these religions are going to have a view of Christ, and we're going to look at the view of Jesus Christ since that is the heartbeat of Christianity.

The question we're going to ask is over His deity. The view that Jesus Christ is

God, which we find is unique to Christianity. However, since the early years of Christianity, there was debate over His deity and His humanity.

Many so -called Christians argue over these things today, and we're going to see that.

Number four is their view of sins. We have their view of authority, their view of God, their view of Jesus Christ, and then their view of sin.

This is specifically going to be man's spiritual condition we want to focus on. The sin nature. What's their view of sin?

What's their view of man? The view of sin is essentially to an understanding of what they believe is man's spiritual condition, because that's going to have an impact on the next one, which is the view of salvation.

How does one go to heaven is the question we want to answer there. We want to make sure we have an understanding of man's spiritual condition, so we have a right understanding of how someone becomes a believer, becomes saved, shall we say, regenerate or in a right standing with God.

Then the last and sixth one that we're going to look at is their view of the eternal state, heaven, hell, if they believe hell exists.

It's always interesting, they all believe heaven exists, it's only hell that's questioned sometimes. But their view of the eternal state is the goal of salvation.

Their view of heaven, hell, or other judgments that sometimes differ. So what are we going to look at?

Unless in part one, what we're going to look at is what do they believe?

It sounds like a title of an excellent book. What do they believe? We're going to start with Judaism.

I'm going to start with Judaism, which is the older of these

Western religions. This happens to be my background. For any who may not be familiar with me and don't know much of my history or background,

I grew up Jewish. I was Bar Mitzvahed. I am from the line of Levi, specifically

Korah, which were the family that was responsible for taking care of the elements within the temple.

That is my family lineage. I've spent many years, a dozen plus years, in Hebrew school growing up, where I would go many evenings during the week after school.

My parents would drop me off at Hebrew school on Sundays. On Saturday, I'd go to synagogue.

On Sunday, I'd have Hebrew school. Much of my upbringing was revolved around Judaism and the

Jewish tradition and thinking. I say that not to say that I'm an expert in this.

The Talmud, the studies, I'm getting ahead of myself, but the authorities in Judaism are vast.

You have to understand that you could study these things. As one rabbi that I'm friendly with that doesn't live all that far from me said, you could spend your lifetime studying the

Talmud and never come to an end of it because it's so vast. To claim to be an expert would be a problem.

I think I understand some of this well, and I've checked my sources with some who believe and have been studying these things for many years, and I'm trusting that it's accurate.

Let us begin in the study of lesson one on Judaism. If you have your syllabus, we are going to start with the authority.

What do Jewish people accept as the authority in their religion? Well, Judaism has four sources, major sources of authority that are accepted today.

We're going to actually look at a fifth that's kind of accepted, but not really. It's not considered

God's Word, but we have four different things. The Tanakh, the

Mishnah, the Midrash, and the Talmud. Now, I am going to say this.

I'm going to give you references, I'll probably do this throughout this class, to different books that you've never heard of before.

And I am going to, especially when we look at Judaism, I'm just going to be completely transparent and honest with you.

I'm not going to try to pronounce the different names of the different Talmudic books and some of the references because, well, quite frankly,

I don't want to butcher it. My Hebrew is not so good. Maybe you can understand when

I was 13, I got bar mitzvahed. I no longer, you know, at 14 or 15, I didn't have to go to Hebrew school anymore. I couldn't wait to drop

Hebrew. I wish that I didn't, but I never really used it after my bar mitzvah.

I, when I didn't have to go to synagogue, once I got to college, I ditched it. By then,

I was actually a Christian. So, you know, it was something that I really didn't keep up with.

And so, I'm not going to give you the, I'll give you the abbreviations that are there, but it's just sometimes

I just, I'm going to butcher it. So, I'm going to save myself that embarrassment.

Yeah, so, yeah, right. So, some are saying I butcher the English language, so Hebrew must be worse.

You haven't heard me with Chinese. I do that one even worse. So, let's start with the first one.

And this may be all that we get through in this lesson, but the first is the Tanakh. The Tanakh is, yes, and you got to sound like you're spitting when you say it,

Tanakh, you know. But the Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible that contains 24 books.

It's basically what we in Christianity would say our Old Testament, all right. The Tanakh contains 24 books.

It's basically the Old Testament, but not organized the same way. And you say, well, wait a minute, we have more than 24 books in the

Old Testament. That's right. Because in the Jewish scriptures, they merge, they don't have a first and second

Samuel. It's one book called Samuel. You don't have first and second kings or chronicles.

That's just kings, chronicles, okay. So, you have differences like that. They're also organized differently, all right.

But the Tanakh refers, it is referred to as the written law.

That's your blank there, the written law. And you're going to see there's going to be a difference. There's a written law and oral law.

So, that which is written, that which is spoken. Then there's going to be commentaries on both. And those are the four sources that we're going to look at.

Written law, a commentary, and oral law, a commentary, okay. So, it'll be easy for you to remember it in that way.

Tanakh, written law. Mishnah, commentary on that written law. Midrash, oral law.

Tamad, commentary on the oral law, okay. So, this is the written law. And the belief is that God dictated the

Bible to the writers word for word. So, they believe in a dictation method, which would be different than Christianity.

Now, the Tanakh has a three -fold division. Torah, prophets, and writings.

And sometimes you'll see Jesus in the Gospels refer to the law and the prophets. That is summarizing all of the

Old Testament. That's what that means when you see that. Because if they say just the Torah, that is just the first five books.

The Torah means the first five books. It means the law, okay.

Torah means law. Okay, that's your blank there, by the way, law. In general, the

Torah can refer to both the oral and the written law or the whole of the written law.

Sometimes you can, they'll refer to the Torah meaning the entire Old Testament. But in its specific sense, it's going to mean the first five books, those books of Moses.

Sometimes called the Pentateuch, all right. And the Torah is the most important of Jewish authorities.

That is going to be most important. Judaism teaches that every letter in the

Torah is identical to that which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. And it is complete.

Let's give a quotation here. And this will be the first case where I'm not, you know, where I'm going to just give you that reference there.

But I'm going to read this for you. It follows from the perfection of the

Torah that it can never be improved upon and therefore

God will never supersede it by another revelation. This dogma of Judaism is denounced from the text.

It is not in heaven. They take that from Deuteronomy 30, verse 12, which expounds, expounded thus, that you shall not say another

Moses will rise and bring us another Torah from heaven.

I have already made it known to you that, quote, it is not in heaven, unquote, i .e.

there is nothing left of it in heaven. What that is saying, basically, is that when

God gave the Torah to Moses, it's not in heaven anymore. It now is with Moses and was copied and it stayed as is.

Okay. Now, let's also talk about the creation of the Torah because it is believed that the

Torah proceeds, the actual Torah proceeds creation.

Let's read this. Seven things were created before the world was created.

The Torah, repentance, the garden of Eden or paradise,

Gehenna, which we'll talk about later as hell, the throne of glory, the temple, and the name of Messiah.

Real interesting there. Those things, those seven things are believed to have been created before the creation of the universe.

All right. And so, you know, this becomes an issue that we end up seeing that they believe that the

Torah was before, you know, before creation. Not so with the prophets and the writings.

The prophets just refers to the major and minor prophets, what we call the major minor prophets.

And then the other writings are the writings of the rest of the Old Testament, all the historical and wisdom literature, the

Psalms and Proverbs and Samuel and Kings, Chronicles, all that. All right. Now, so that's the

Tanakh. The second is the Midrash, the Midrash. And the

Midrash, as I said, the Midrash is a commentary on the Tanakh. It is the commentary.

Some rabbis state that it is a system of interpretation employed throughout rabbinical literature.

Hence, the allegorical method of interpretation of the Midrash leads to Jewish mysticism.

There are several different Midrash writings by different rabbis, and they are not assumed to be the word of God, but they're still considered to be an authoritative source in Judaism.

Okay. So this is a bunch of commentaries on the written law that people write down what they think is the meaning.

And you'll end up finding, when you see this, a lot of mysticism. If you study Kabbalah, you'll see a lot of Kabbalah gets its understanding from these type of writings, the

Midrash and the Mishnah. Let's deal with that next. The Mishnah. So we have the

Midrash. The next is the Mishnah. The Mishnah is an abstract or summary of the religious and civil laws of the

Jews. It is referred to as the Oral Law. That's your blank there, Oral Law.

It is believed that the Oral Law was given at the same time as the written law on Mount Sinai and was given to Moses and not written down until about 220

BCE. Now BCE, what do you mean BCE? Judaism does not refer to before Christ.

They refer to before the common error. Okay. So when you see BCE, it is a

Jewish rendering of time. We would say it before Christ. They would say before common error, just so you understand.

Judaism teaches that the Midrash was memorized concept by concept as opposed to word for word throughout the centuries.

The concepts given to Moses were preserved in what are now about 1100 pages.

So concept by concept for thousands of years, this was supposedly given from father to child and that they would have it memorized concept by concept until it was eventually written down and it's 1100 pages that they would memorize.

Now you say that's crazy. Most Jewish, Orthodox Jewish boys have to have the entirety of the

Torah memorized before their Bar Mitzvah at 13. They have to have it memorized word for word.

It can be done. We're just not very good with some of that. So I do have a quote from a rabbi.

You also notice this that most of what you see in Judaism is they do quotations from other rabbis.

That is a very Jewish way of thinking and speaking. But this is from a rabbi, Jacob Ninser, I'm mispronouncing his name, but he says this,

The Mishnah itself is generally supposed to have come to closure at the end of the second century and its date for conventional purposes is

C .A. A .D. 200. In other words, this is the thinking that it was being written over time.

So they gave it orally and it started 220 B .C. but it was closed at 200

A .D. A fundamental issue with the rabbis was the acceptance of traditional

Torah transmitted from one generation to another by word of mouth, side by side with written text.

It was claimed that the oral Torah equal with the written

Torah goes back to the Revelation of Sinai, if not in detail, at least in principle.

So what he's saying there, what this rabbi is saying is that this document, the

Midrash, is considered to be God's word, equal in authority to what we call

Old Testament, the Tanakh, the written law. So written or oral, both considered to be that authoritative.

Now, let's look at the next one. The fourth one is the Talmud. And this is really where most of the focus comes.

The Talmud is where most rabbis and most of the things I'm going to reference are from the

Talmud. The Talmud, as I said earlier, the Talmud is a commentary on the

Midrash, I always mix these two up, on the

Mishnah. OK, so it's that oral law. So this is the commentary on the oral law.

Talmud, and so that's a blank, by the way, Mishnah. The Talmud is a work wherein is deposited in bulk of the literary labors of numerous, numerous

Jewish scholars over a period of some 700 years.

So roughly about 200 BCE to 500

CE is the writing of the Talmud. There's two primary

Talmuds, in other words, there's differences, but there's two primary ones, the Palestinian and the Babylonian. The Palestinian Talmud composed shortly after 400

CE and the Babylonian Talmud, referred to as the

Talmud, was completed about 500 CE. All right, so one was completed a little bit earlier than the other.

Do I have that quote on the Talmud? It should be right after the, it'll be from Rabbi Cohen.

OK, there we go. So here we go. This is from Rabbi Cohen. He states there that the

Talmud for the Jew is not merely a great literary product, which it is.

It is not merely a great repository of law and ritual, which it is.

The Talmud is a great fund of Jewish religious experience and wisdom accumulated throughout the course of the ages.

The Talmud ranks next to the sacred scriptures in significance as a source for religious insight, inspiration, and practice, and will instruct the last generation of mankind.

I added that emphasis, by the way, that the Talmud ranks next to the sacred scriptures. I actually find it interesting because when you do talk to rabbis, they speak, and when you push, it really seems as if the

Talmud is the ultimate authority because they all seem to rely on the Talmud's interpretation more than maybe the

Old Testament. The religious leaders of the last generation empowered through the

Mishnah to legislate for their own time a light of commentary and circumstances.

Therefore, the Torah, both written and oral, were static and changing. However, the

Talmud and the Midrash were a running commentary on the

Torah, both written and oral. The idea here is that what you see with these commentaries is that the belief was that these commentaries were giving further, basically the tradition, giving further explanation to the law.

And the reason that becomes important is because note when both of these commentaries were completed, 200

BC and 400 to 500 BC, both after Christ. Why has that become important? Because when you read the

Talmud, you will see a lot of it is reactionary to Christianity, to first century

Christianity. A lot of it is trying to address things of Christianity. The other thing

I want to explain with the Talmud is you have to understand that it's a redacted work.

We are going to go long on this first class, just saying, because I do want to finish up on this fifth one. But it's a redacted work.

What do I mean by that? A redacted work would mean that say I write a commentary on a passage of the oral law and I write five pages of commentary.

You may come along and take what I wrote and summarize it. In other words, you're going to take what I put and you're going to skinny it down.

The Talmud is just many, many volumes. It's a huge number of volumes.

It would take up many shelves. So what you have is they take the previous people and you take my five pages and you redact that down to three pages and then you give your commentary on that.

Maybe you write six pages. Someone else comes along, takes my three pages that are left and redacts those down to two pages, takes your six pages, redacts that down to five pages and they write maybe three more pages.

And this would continue to happen. So you're not adding completely upon everyone, but the reality is that you lose what those earlier writers said when you're summarizing their beliefs.

Especially if you're reacting to Christianity, you may revise some of those earlier writings and summarize them by cutting out things that Christians would believe that they don't want taught and then explaining that after.

OK? So you have to understand that when it comes to the Talmud. Let's get to the last one.

I don't know, do I have a slide for it? Rabbinic, the Rabbinic Law. Rabbinic Law. OK. And this is what you often see.

Rabbinic Law are the rules of the rabbis found in the Talmud and the

Midrash. That's what that refers to. It is important to note that ritual, that's your blank there, ritual keeping is essential to Judaism.

It's important to note that ritual keeping is important to Judaism. Jewish rabbis believe that the rituals, the ritual keeping, the ritual itself keeps the message over time.

The message of the Torah could be lost over time, but if it's tied to the rituals, eventually somewhere down the line, people will ask the questions, what's the meaning?

And will regain the meaning from the ritual. This is why if you ever do a Passover Seder, there are questions that are always asked.

The purpose of those questions are so that if we forget the meaning of the Seder, those questions are to remind us what the

Seder is. And if you don't know what a Passover Seder is, that's OK, but the idea is still there.

They would erect monuments to remind them of why they walked across the

Red Sea and these different things. So what you have is you have a case that the rabbinic law, and that's why so much of when you hear what we'll call sermons in a synagogue, it's a quotation of other rabbis.

You could not, it would be wrong to just say this is what God's word says. You have to refer to other rabbis.

And so that is the Jewish authority. We're going to pick up here and try to finish Judaism maybe next week, and we'll look at their view of God, their view of Christ, their view of sin, salvation, and end times.

So I encourage you to get my book if you want to read more on this, What Do They Believe? You can pick that up from our website at strivingforeternity .org.

Also encourage you if you want us to come out to your church and teach people how to interpret the Bible. Bible Interpretation Made Easy is a weekend seminar,

Friday night, Saturday, eight hours, six sessions. We come in and give you a crash course on how to interpret the

Bible. I should have actually given the email for questions. Thank you. If you have any questions, you want to email us academy at strivingforeternity .org,

academy at strivingforeternity .org. If you want to pick up a syllabus, you can just go to store .strivingforeternity

.org and pick up the syllabus. Also, a way you could support us if you so choose, if you happen to shop at Amazon, you could go to Amazonsmile .amazon

.com and put in that you'd like your support to go to Striving for Eternity. We've already been starting to get some of those checks.

And so you spend what you'd normally spend, buy what you'd normally buy, and they send a percentage,

Amazon sends a percentage of that to us. And we appreciate that. And lastly, looking forward,

September is coming. September 2015, we got J. Warner Wallace and Justin Peters coming to NorCal Fire.

The topic is discipleship. J. Warner Wallace, if you're not familiar with him, he's an apologist, that he was a cold case homicide detective, never lost a case.

And he applied his skills when he was a professing atheist to the New Testament to try to prove that Christianity is false and ended up realizing that it wasn't and became a

Christian. And he has got a real unique way of dealing with basically training up a new generation of people to handle

God's, for the defensive handling of God's word. Justin Peters, if you don't know, Justin is mostly known for his work with the the

Prosperity Gospel, but he is a great, great guy.

I've gotten to know him and really, really looking forward to spend more time with him. He is just so knowledgeable.

We're going to pull him out of his wheelhouse a little bit. He's not going to focus so much on some of these false belief systems within Christianity, but discipleship, and he handles

God's word so well. You're going to see that if you come out. That's September 11th and 12th in San Jose, California.

You can go to NorCalFire .info to register. And so I'd encourage you to do that.

Lastly, as we always try to do at the end of each program, we want to encourage you to encourage other people.

And with that said, what we want to do is we want to encourage someone who has always been an encouragement to us, and that is

Jennifer Pepling. She works with Christian Collegian Network, ChangeYourCampus .com,

and she has got an evangelism camp that she's organizing that ministry runs called

Repent and Witness that's in New York City for four days. I will be part of it again, doing some of the teaching.

It's a great time, a fun, fun event, and a lot of evangelism in New York City.

Great place to evangelize. So she could use your encouragement. I know what it's like to organize a big event.

The last few weeks before are crazy. She's probably going crazy, so she could probably use some encouragement.

She could use encouragement because she may have broken her finger at Jersey Fire. I will let you ask her how she did it and what is happening with it.

It looked freaky. But she's a great, great sister. You'll know her from her laugh, but she's got that bubbly personality.

It's hard not to laugh around her. She laughs at the silliest of things that may make no sense, and she'll laugh, and then you find yourself laughing at her laugh.

But if you get to know her, it will be a great joy for you. I know that.

She's a great encouragement to many people, and so look to encourage her this week. I know we went a little bit long.

We'll try not to let that be a regular habit, but until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.