August 29, 2016 Show with David Gornoski on “Enshrining Chaos as Justice: Should Christians Support the Use of Violence & Domination to Subdue Those Who Disagree With Us?” PLUS Josh Fryman on “The Centrality of Christ Throughout Redemptive History”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century Gospel Minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 29th day of August 2016, and we've got two guests today.

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One that I'm interviewing for the very first time during our first hour, David Gronosky, who is a

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Christian libertarian, and we're going to be discussing enshrining chaos as justice.

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Should Christians support the use of violence and domination to subdue those who disagree with us?

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In the second hour, I'm going to be joined by an old friend who's been on this broadcast a number of times,

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Joshua Fryman, who is pastor of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, and he's a featured conference speaker at the 2016

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Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana, and that second hour will be addressing the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

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But first of all, our first guest today, as I mentioned earlier, David Gronosky is a writer for World Net Daily, a fellow of the

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Moving Picture Institute, a guest contributor to AffluentInvestor .com

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and Alter and Throne, and he's a featured journalist in the New York Times, St. Pete Times, TheStreet .com,

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and the Discovery Institute. He's also a producer for a nationally syndicated radio program as well as an on -air personality and founder of A Neighbor's Choice, an educational platform for introducing

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Jesus's culture of non -violence to Christians from a neighborly perspective. And as I said earlier, we're going to be addressing the theme,

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Enshrining Chaos as Justice, Should Christians Support the Use of Violence and Domination to Subdue Those Who Disagree with Us?

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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, David Gronosky. Thank you.

03:04

Thanks for having me, and I'm glad to be here. Yeah, it's my pleasure to have you on the program.

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Well, first of all, tell us something about what you view

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Christian libertarianism to be in a summary form. We've had several folks who represent that category of political theory, and there are,

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I know, differences of opinion even within that genre of political philosophy.

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There are, obviously, just as there are differences of opinion in most other ideologies and facets of life.

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But tell us about your particular expression of Christian libertarianism in a summary form.

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Well, I understand the modern libertarian movement is, in some facets of it, quite different from what you would think

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Jesus would be for, especially if you look at people like Gary Johnson and those guys.

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But I'd just say in this way that Jesus is the founder of liberty, and Jesus is the founder of the liberty movement in history.

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And it's much bigger than simply a political liberty of freedom from the initiation of coercion from governments that are out of control.

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It's also freedom from fear of death, and that's what the resurrection is about.

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And that's what it offers, is that death has been conquered, and so people no longer have to have the tyranny of death.

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And liberty is also about freedom from envy and being totally, as Augustine would say, being totally tied up in your desires to the point where you let them become a tyrant over you.

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And I think the modern libertarian thinkers don't properly account for the full scope of liberty in that sense, not addressing the root cause of where our desires come from.

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And if you don't have virtue and excellence alongside freedom from coercion, you're not going to really have liberty.

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And so Jesus is the founder of the liberty movement in that sense. And tell us something about the

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Affluent Investor. Well, that's a group from Jerry Bowder. He's a great financial

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Christian advisor, and he started this website as a kind of alternative for Christian investors and businessmen and entrepreneurs who are interested in learning financial information from a

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Christian perspective. And they have been very supportive of my commentary as of late, and I've also had a lot of support from FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, FEE .org,

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and worldnetdaily .com is another published house that carries my work.

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And I think this week we'll have the American Conservative pick up a column of mine, so I'll share that as well. Yeah, that is quite interesting because a lot of people, perhaps your average evangelical, for instance, who has conservative leanings in most areas of his life, they would be surprised to hear that there is some commonality between libertarianism and historic conservatism.

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Because as you were saying before, when they hear folks like Gary Johnson and modern libertarians in the media, they immediately associate it with liberalism in regard to moral and social ideology.

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Obviously, they would have to admit that there would be some conservative views fiscally that are attributed to these modern libertarians.

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Hello? Hello, can you hear me, David? David, are you there?

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For some reason, David is not with us right now. He cannot hear me, and I'm not sure why.

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So what we're going to do is we're going to go to a station break, and we're going to try to find out what happened to David.

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So if you'd like to join us on the air, we have an email address here, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages.

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Call Linbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402.

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Or visit linbrookbaptist .org. That's linbrookbaptist .org. David, are you there?

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Yes. Okay, I don't know what happened there. Yeah, I just, I couldn't hear you. The phone's still going, but I couldn't hear you.

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That's, that's interesting because I heard you loud and clear, so I'm not sure, I'm not sure what happened. Hopefully it doesn't happen again.

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As I was saying, when we lost communication there, your average evangelical might be quite surprised that there is a lot in harmony between historic or paleo -libertarianism and historic conservativism.

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They immediately, very often, will have a knee -jerk reaction to libertarianism and associate it with liberalism, although they would have to admit that there is fiscal conservativism involved with the modern libertarians.

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They would immediately, very often, associate people like Gary Johnson and the modern libertarians with liberalism and, in fact, sometimes extreme liberalism when it comes to matters of social and moral ethics and so on.

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Well, I think that if you don't have Jesus, you know, what is conservatism conserving?

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It's conserving, I would believe, paganism. So if you don't have Jesus firmly in the view, and you're not surrounding everything you're talking about from the ethics of Jesus in the imitation of Christ, your conservatism is simply conserving paganism.

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What I mean by that is, it's very ubiquitous in ancient societies for pagan cultures to demand human sacrifice, scapegoats to maintain order and catharsis and peace in society.

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And what Jesus does is he's showing us that we don't need to have the continuance of human sacrifice to maintain our peace.

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We don't need to have common enemies to purge and to put all of our blame onto because he's dismantled that system from being able to be necessary for what took place in the ancient times with actual human sacrifice.

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So anytime you try to have a conservatism, which is trying to preserve a past order, if that is preserving an order that is

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Christless, then you're going to get paganism. Well, what you're saying actually reminds me of something one of our founding fathers,

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John Adams, said about the constitution when he said, our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

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It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Right. And that's the thing is that, you know,

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I'm against, for example, the drug war, but I don't think you should do drugs. And one of the things that happens whenever you imitate

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Christ when it comes to these sins is that you will be accused of doing or being complicit with the thing you're trying to say not to use laws for.

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So for example, you know, Jesus was accused of being a winebibber because he was hanging out with people who society considers winebibbers.

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So in the same sense, you know, if you say, hey, let's not put this person in a cage, you're not actually going to deal with the sin that way properly.

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Then they typically will say, what do you think? Drugs are okay. Are you okay with drugs? It's the same thing they did to Jesus. And you have to get to understand that when you stand with scapegoats, even if you're not saying that what they're doing is right, what you are saying is there's a better way to take care of this in a systematic way that won't create blowback and with black markets and violence upon violence and harder drugs.

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That's all the drug war has given us is harder drugs. Every time we ban drugs, something harder comes out on the black market.

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It's even worse. Yeah. Well, that's what the, uh, our, our, our government seems to have forgotten as well as many of our citizens seems to have forgotten what happened with prohibition in the earlier part of the 1900s.

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Uh, it, it, it really created the mafia, created organized crime. Uh, and it's interesting how people can't, uh, see the comparison between that and the drug problem.

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Um, basically what you're saying if, and of course, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there is a difference between having biblical moral and social values and believing that a human government that often consists of people that don't even share our faith ruling over us to, uh, basically protect us from ourselves and our, our, our decisions, even if they're stupid ones.

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Yeah. And you know, a lot of people don't realize that even in the old Testament, you don't see, uh, prison, uh, cells, no prison cells or dungeons, so to speak, uh, in ancient

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Israel, that's a practice of pagan nations, you know, Egypt, Rome, uh,

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Babylon, they're the ones that used prison dungeons. So, you know, even the Bible, you know, they have some, there's some laws of course, but you know, the

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Bible doesn't prescribe a prison cells. And it certainly wouldn't prescribe them for nonviolent behaviors.

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And so, um, the modern state that we live in, where there's half a million, uh, uh, regulatory laws that can result in criminal, uh, sanctions, that's like insane.

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There's almost something you can do every day that can get you in prison if they were monitoring everything you did.

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You know, that's something that has nothing to do with the idea of the law of Christ, which is based on love and, uh, on what

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I said, true liberty, which is the absence of fear. That's why the angel said, fear not when

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Jesus was born. Uh, the absence of fear of death that leads us to do such nasty things to one another and sin and viciously, uh, transgress against others.

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And then the fear of, and then liberty from, uh, envy and not needing to keep up with the

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Joneses. I think that's something libertarians need to understand more as they, they tend to deify market behavior.

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You don't want to deify market behavior because there's a lot going on there that we don't want to encourage, but you can't stop it through violence.

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That's the point. Now, if you don't believe in a prison system, how on earth can we, uh, as law abiding citizens be protected from dangerous criminals?

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Well, you know, there's a two part answer to that. The one first part is what we have currently, which is, you know, you're not going to change the system tomorrow.

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So as it stands, the only thing I think is legitimately okay for a citizen to allow, um, people to be put in a prison cell for would be violent acts like assault, uh, fraud, uh, uh, rape, murder.

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Those are actual violent things that if you were saying it happened on the yourself, you would be within your

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Christian rights to use physical force to restrain and confine the attacker until such time as you know, the victim is protected and the attacker is not able to continue attacking people on the street.

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So anything that you can do as a Christian yourself, you have the moral authority to extend it to other people to do it on your behalf.

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And that's the simple principle of what is true law. So if someone is drinking raw milk across the street in their home, that's built straight from the cow without pasteurization, it's a crime to do that.

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But, uh, you know, I'm talking about in theory, you know, here, ethically, if you were to see your neighbor drink raw milk, you wouldn't be within your moral right to break down their door, grab a gun, put your knee on the back of their neck, tase them if they refuse to cooperate, uh, and then grab them and put them in a cage in the back of your car and then take it to another cage and say, you will sit here until you have learned what you've done.

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And such time as I say fit, you would find that insane to do that yourself. But we do it every day when we hire politicians who say they're going to continue to do that on our behalf for a bunch of nonviolent stuff like drinking raw milk.

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So, you know, it's a matter of, you know, I tell people, liberty is all about best hiring practices.

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It's about the ethics of hiring. You know, if you have a business, you don't hire someone.

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Imagine you're employing somebody and you're going to get a salesperson. And in the interview, they say, you know what

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I do when customers don't pay on time? I break their legs and they always pay after that.

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You say, great, I'm going to hire you start on Monday. And then next week you hear from one of your vendors, they call you up and they say,

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Hey, this guy who is this new vendor rep we have, he broke my legs. What's going on here? And you say, it's not my fault.

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I have nothing to do with it. Of course, it's your fault, right? You hired that person. And in the process of the hiring process, they told you they were going to use violence against someone to get their way.

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And you said, okay. And then they went and did it. That means you're responsible for the violence that they do. And the same thing is as appropriate for voters all across the country.

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Doesn't matter if you have 50 million voters join you. If you hire someone and they tell you in the hiring process that these politicians do, that they're going to use violence to subjugate and dominate people who are doing nonviolent things.

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And you say, Yep, sounds good. I'll hire you as my president, and you're responsible for what they're doing on your behalf. So what do you do with those people who may not be a physical danger to us, but those people who have robbed people either even in white collar crimes of millions of dollars?

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How do you how do you punish people for disobeying the laws of the land in that way?

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Well, in the Bible, you know, they had usually a two to one payback, right? So if you stole a dollar, you had to pay $2 back.

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And, you know, in a biblical restorative justice sense, that's where we really want to go for things like theft.

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But again, because that's not going to happen tomorrow. I think there is some sense of intermediary step where you can use the system as it is.

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And if someone is stealing millions of dollars in fraud, fraudulent gain, and has, you know, victims that they can't even possibly repay back,

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I think it's appropriate to have them have a timeout from society. And that would be, you know, the prison system as it currently is.

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I think you need to do that in a way that is not vindictive, though, because the Bible talks about don't, you know, vengeance is mine, you don't have a right to get vengeance on people.

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So if someone's a thief and stole millions of dollars from a Ponzi scheme, you need to put them away from society for a time so they understand that they're not allowed to just keep on doing that.

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They're a menace to society. They're robbing from old people or whatever. And that's not something you just allow to happen in a

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Christian sense. But you don't do it in a way where you try to, you know, vindictively, you know, let's show, let's rub their nose in it.

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Because that's the spirit of the pagan world where it's all about revenge. And, you know, that's, you know, like Lamech's curse, you know, they killed.

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If you kill me, I'm going to kill 70 people in revenge against you, you know, that kind of thing. So you don't want that creeping up.

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But yeah, there's a place for prison for people who are fraudulent. But again, be careful what the government says is fraudulent, you know, because they'll say, you know, vitamin

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C, you know, that cures scurvy. If you say vitamin C cures scurvy, then they say that's a fraudulent health claim.

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And they have the right to put you in a cage for that, even though we know vitamin C gets rid of scurvy. Yeah, I've heard of someone in New York, I believe, who was arrested because he became convinced that apricot pits,

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I believe, had some kind of medicinal properties that were able to control and perhaps even cure cancer.

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And he was, he was fined and imprisoned when he stopped, when he wouldn't stop selling these products.

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But so obviously, even you as a Christian libertarian, what's the actual phrase that you like to use to describe yourself?

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Is Christian libertarian adequate? Or is there something? I usually I usually actually don't even use the term libertarian.

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But I, I'm around so many libertarian circles that it's fine with me. I just think it's

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Christian. You know, if you're in it, I take the definition of Christian literally, you know, like, Christian means little imitator of Jesus.

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So what I'm going to be doing is looking at how to imitate the pattern of Jesus's life and the way

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I treat my neighbor. And that literally will produce certain behaviors that are gonna look on paper like libertarianism in a lot of ways, but maybe come from a different spirit.

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And obviously, you believe that even if you were to get your way, if you will, if you were to have your political vision, become reality, you seem to be insinuating that there would need to be perhaps even a very lengthy period of time of transition, where things could not be transformed overnight and immediately start doing things radically different.

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And, you know, in society, we would have to basically wean ourself off of things.

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Is that what you're basically saying? Well, you know, it may be like that, but it's a tricky subject.

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Because again, I really believe in the morality of what I'm talking about when I say that, you know, you can't hire someone to do something that you're not allowed to do as a

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Christian yourself. And so I kind of take that seriously. I mean, really, I think we all should as Christians.

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Because, you know, if it's a great, grievous sin against God to, you know, assault someone for, you know, a disagreement of, you know, like the way they said something, then it's a sin no matter if 50 million people join you in assaulting that person.

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So I think that would radically change the law system in our society, if Christians actually obey

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Jesus when it comes to being voters, and say, wait a second, is this person I'm hiring, is he only going to use the violence of the state as a self -defense against actual real violence?

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Is he going to use it as a shield that protects victims from actual real violence of fraud, theft, and violent assault?

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Is he actually going to use that? Or is he going to use it as a sword, swiping at every possible thing that the crowd doesn't like in their latest trends of thought?

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I don't think it's that. I think it's actually possibly, you know, a sin to do that. I think if you're hiring someone to do something that your

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Savior tells you you can't do on yourself, then it doesn't magically make it okay. And so there would be, you know, if Christians actually obeyed

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Jesus and didn't sin in that area of their life, there would be a radical transformation of how law is in our society.

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But again, you know, in the real world, it's probably going to be a slow process. But I do believe, like, for example, if you're on a jury, and you're presented with,

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I remember I was on a jury once, or I was being considered for jury, and somehow it came up about, you know, do you have any moral objections to a scenario?

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And I said, actually, you know, that would go against my Christian belief about ethics and morality.

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And the whole courtroom was aghast. You know, you could hear the, you know, people were really terrified.

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I said that I would go against the application of the law if it violated my

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Christian conscience. And they said, wait a second. The state prosecutor came out and said, we've got to make sure we get this clear.

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So you're saying if there was a law that said, you know, state prosecutors are not allowed to have blue pins, and you find overwhelming evidence that I was using a blue pin, you could not simply enforce the law as it is and say guilty and render the full verdict as guilty?

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I said, of course not, because, you know, having a blue pen is not a violent act. And so it's against my ethic to participate, even if there's a whole group of people joining me and putting someone in a cage, a human cage for using a blue pen.

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And again, the whole room was aghast. They couldn't believe it, that someone wouldn't just blindly put someone in a cage for using a blue pen.

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I thought I was in like a TV show or something. This is like the Twilight Zone. Now, these people were everyday folks that, you know, they'd save you from maybe a calamity in the real world, but it'd be a good neighbor and save your cat from the tree if there was a problem.

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But when it comes to, if the authority says there's blue pins should be put in prison, then blue pin people go to prison.

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That's a very pagan concept. The Bible wants us to take account of the stone that's in our hand.

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And that's what the story of Jesus is with the adulterous woman. He says, who's going to catch the first stone? And immediately that personalizes the responsibility of the violence that these people are about to partake in.

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And they say, wait, if I don't have a model to imitate, who's going to be the first person to do it?

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It's a lot harder to do violent acts when you are the first person to do it and you don't get to hide in a crowd.

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That's what happens with juries. You know, those are crowds of people and they're just kind of hiding and slinking back from their moral responsibility of using violence.

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And it's not appropriate. I mean, and even if you want to be technical about, well, you know, you need to follow the law, right?

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Some people use that argument. You just need to obey the Caesar, right? Well, guess what our Caesar tells us? Thomas Jefferson is one of the

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Caesars of our country. He's one of the architects of the constitutional government we have. And Thomas Jefferson created the jury system and others with him as a way to creatively check tyrannical laws.

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So when the founder of your system is telling you it's your duty, of course, the

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Declaration of Independence, it says that it is not just what you should, it's not just good.

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It is your duty to alter or abolish government laws that become injurious to the means of liberty.

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So your own Caesar, in our case, is telling you, get rid of what we're doing if it goes against liberty.

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So you can, in some sense, Christians will tell you, you know, obey government, obey government. And to obey our government, to be honest, to be truly honest, to know the law is to be consistent with the founder's vision and strike down tyrannical laws using the jury system.

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So that's a way to obey the government. When I give our email address, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

27:57

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We already have several people waiting to have their questions asked and answered by you,

28:03

David. We're going to go to a break right now. And if you'd like to join them with a question of your own, just shoot us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

28:13

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with David Gronowski.

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our first guest for the first hour of the program is

31:08

David Gronosky, who's a writer for WorldNet Daily, and he is founder of A Neighbor's Choice, an educational platform for introducing

31:18

Jesus' culture of non -violence to Christians from a neighborly perspective. We're discussing as our theme today, enshrining chaos as justice.

31:27

Should Christians support the use of violence and domination to subdue those who disagree with us?

31:33

And our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. We do have a few people waiting to have their questions asked and answered, but before I go to the listeners,

31:42

David, I wanted you to tie into our subject an article that you wrote not long ago, in July in fact, on if black lives mattered to you.

31:53

How is this article you wrote, that theme, the Black Lives Matter groups and people who fly under that banner, who also have been unfortunately involved in riotous behavior and so on, if you could tie this subject all together with that?

32:15

Well, most of those laws that have really done a detriment to the black community are for non -violent behaviors.

32:24

You know, they end up getting stopped for this or that, and these are things that really shouldn't be criminal penalty laws anyway.

32:33

And so most of the time they're being put into a situation where they shouldn't be in the first place.

32:39

And it becomes very difficult to get out of the prison system once you've had one or two strikes against you already.

32:46

It becomes like a revolving door. And so the idea is, if black lives matter to you, you wouldn't put people in a cage for non -violent behavior, no matter who they are or what their race is.

32:58

Typically those laws against non -violent vices, they tend to strike down at the poor and disenfranchised people, people who are struggling because they didn't have a parent raising them or they're a single mother or something in that scenario that didn't give them good grounding and they don't have a great financial shot in their economy.

33:22

And they are very easily targets for things like, you know, well, you didn't fix your taillight, so you're going to have a civil penalty, you know, $200 or something.

33:32

And people can't afford that when they've never had a shot to get out of the lower income level of the economy.

33:41

And that continues to build up to the point where they have a distrustful, rebellious attitude. And then the police respond with reciprocal intensity of aggression.

33:51

And it's a vicious cycle that creates all of this problem. And, you know, we can talk all day long about, you know, well, there's a bias with police, but you can't really police that out of the police.

34:03

What we need to do is stop allowing them to use force for non -violent behaviors.

34:10

That's our responsibility as voters. We're the people who have hired these people to represent us.

34:15

And if we're making them use violence and draw guns on people for fixing it, I mean, it's like I said, what kind of a society brings a guy with a gun to get someone to fix their taillight?

34:26

It's something insane about a society. That's not Christian. You know, a Christian society doesn't bring a gun, hey, fix your taillight, or I'm going to take money.

34:34

That's not the way Christians handle that kind of stuff. That's an example of one of the people that got shot by a policeman because he had a taillight that was broken, and they stopped him for that.

34:43

So, you know, and in things like theft, like petty thievery, again, we need to adopt the biblical concept, pay that back two to one.

34:50

So, you know, I know, you know, stories of, you know, a black woman in Florida here, she got thrown in prison or jail because, you know, she ate a piece of fried chicken from Publix, you know, that's a grocery store here.

35:03

I don't think a Christian neighbor really would want their child thrown in a jail cell because they own a fried chicken.

35:10

Maybe they can pay it off three to one, two to one or something, and do some community service or help pick up trash in the public parking lot, and give them a chance to understand what they're doing without dehumanizing them and throwing them away.

35:23

So we don't want to do that if we're Christian. And obviously there has to be some kind of a penalty if they refuse to comply with the penalty that they've already been given.

35:34

Whatever more lenient penalty that is, there needs to be a more serious one if they refuse to comply, wouldn't you say?

35:42

Oh, for things like thief, like petty thief stuff? Well, yeah, if somebody just out in that refuses to obey the law, and they refuse to adhere to the consequences, no matter what they are, shouldn't there be some kind of a way of enforcing that?

36:02

David, are you there? For some reason, David is gone again.

36:07

I'm not sure what's happening with David's phone line. And hopefully, we're gonna, after we go to this final break with David, hopefully, we're gonna hear back from David.

36:18

And our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

36:25

We're gonna get a one more station break. And hopefully, this will be resolved by the time

36:32

David calls back. Well, David's calling back now. So perhaps we don't even have to, David, are you there?

36:38

Yeah, I don't know what keeps happening, David. I guess in the future, we'd have to make sure you use a landline.

36:43

Yeah, that's fine. We'll do that next time. What I was saying is, doesn't there need to be some sort of punishment that someone receives if they refuse even the lenient forms of discipline, punishment, the more lenient consequences of disobeying laws?

37:05

Doesn't there need to be some way to prevent anarchy and chaos?

37:11

Yeah, again, if it's a violent act, there needs to be some forceful enforcement of justice.

37:17

If someone steals and they refuse to do community service or pay back, you know, two to one what they stole and property damages, then yeah, if they refuse, then yeah, you have to forcibly put them in timeout.

37:31

And that's what jail would be for. But I don't think most people, if they had the choice, would choose jail over being able to work it off or pay it back.

37:40

I think people would enjoy their freedom more. For thieves and petty stuff like that, I think that'd be taken care of. But if they did it for assault, murder, those are things, yes, put them in a cage for because they need to be taken away from society.

37:54

If you saw someone being assaulted yourself, you'd refrain them, you could restrain the attacker, and you'd be within your

38:00

Christian right. But you wouldn't be within your Christian rights to do that. If it was a nonviolent thing, like, maybe you saw a pastor preaching a sermon, and you thought that would trigger hateful violence.

38:11

Would you be within your right to use violence to stop that pastor from preaching? Of course not. It's such an absurd concept.

38:17

Well, that's what the that's what those who are, at least in the limelight of the media, the ones running the

38:25

Black Lives Matter, I don't know what phrase to use for it, because I don't know if it's a specific organization or just a movement.

38:34

But the ones that are in the limelight of leadership that you see, they are advocating this kind of violence and even seem to be actually participating in not only calling upon their fellow

38:51

African -Americans to kill police and so on, or perform acts of violence, but they are in some ways participating in these acts of violence on occasion themselves, as far as riotous behavior.

39:07

And it seems, it always seems to me quite ironic that in these very urban neighborhoods, where there are people who have been trying to serve those communities with providing, you know, any kind of a business like a grocery store or any kind of a convenience store, and they do so very often at their own risk of safety, when these riots occurs, they are really used as an excuse to steal and to vandalize and to unleash the totally depraved nature of their souls, it seems.

39:53

Yeah, well, you know, those riots are not, you know, that's not the kind of liberty world that we look at.

39:59

That's actually a reflection of the state, because the state is chaos like that.

40:04

It's just more enshrined, sanctified chaos from the standpoint of the state administrators.

40:11

They're looting and stealing and taxing and inflating and debasing currencies and destroying purchasing power, and they're looting businesses with regulations that rig the game for their corporatist allies.

40:23

So really the state is acting just like those rioters, and it's both of them are wrong.

40:28

They're both a mirror of violence, and we have to reject them. Christians need to be the adults in the room.

40:33

You know, there's a lot of Black Lives Matter people that are, you know, I think, trying to have an intelligent discussion, and they get drowned out by a lot of the people that just use that hashtag on Twitter to justify why they stole something from their local

40:46

Best Buy. That's not going to work. You know, that's what's going to happen with any movement, though, to be honest.

40:52

I mean, like the Tea Party, you had some people who were saying crazy things, and they got blended in with people who were just trying to talk about constitutional principles.

41:00

You always tend to have that with these movements that spread, when everybody can just adopt the phrase and use it.

41:06

It's kind of hard to tell who's who, but you just have to speak principle in the midst of all this. Well, of course, the difference is that,

41:12

I don't know if you've seen something that I haven't seen, but I haven't seen mobs of hundreds of Tea Partiers vandalizing and robbing and beating up passersby when they don't have their way in a particular legal action or something.

41:32

All right. We do have a listener in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, Linda, who asks,

41:39

I recently belonged to a church where many members got into Christian libertarianism.

41:45

All seemed fine until they started following Ian Rand's theories, which caused them to be very anti -police, anti -borders.

41:54

These ideas actually divided the church, and many members left. Can you speak to this problem?

42:02

Well, I've never read Ian Rand's books. I've held them in my hands, though. They were too long. She was a

42:08

Russian -American philosopher in the earlier part of the 1900s, actually through perhaps the mid to later part of the 1900s, correct?

42:17

Yeah. I'm not really familiar with the inner workings of her world, but from what

42:22

I've seen, I don't really think she elevates selfishness as a virtue and rationalism, but the

42:30

Bible says we're not motivated by rationalism. We're motivated by desires, and that's the gut.

42:36

I don't think she takes a proper account of where our choices are being pulled from in a desire sense.

42:42

Augustine is closer to that. Yeah, well, she was an atheist. Yeah. I don't know much about Ian Rand in terms of what she's doing, but that really is not, again, just like, again, the

42:56

Black Lives Matter Tea Party. There's a term, libertarian, and it gets used for a ton of different stuff.

43:01

You just simply have to use discernment to say, what's liberty to you? Liberty for me is the absence of coercive violence.

43:12

She said that they were anti -police. I'm not anti -police, but I'm anti -voters who don't take responsibility for the violence that they're asking police to do on their behalf, so I think

43:25

I put the onus of responsibility on the voters that are hiring these people to do this. Now, certainly, there is a time in which

43:33

I think you as a policeman need to take account of your responsibility in pulling the trigger, for the continuance of unjust laws.

43:43

That's the same thing, for example, in Hitler's Germany, where people had to make a decision whether they were going to risk their life and limb to resist their orders that they say, hey, you're supposed to round these

43:53

Jews up and put them in the train, and you say, hmm, should I do this? I mean, I don't know. I'm not necessarily going to kill them.

43:59

I'm just doing my job. People can rationalize their way out of participating in violence, and they go along with it, and I think you have to become aware, and that's up to the policeman to have his conscience awakened by Jesus, like Paul did on the road to persecute the

44:15

Christians. Saul turned into Paul when he saw that Jesus said, why are you persecuting me?

44:21

Jesus was standing in solidarity with people who are being killed for nonviolent behaviors, in this case, their beliefs in Christianity.

44:31

One of the things, I know that you said already earlier that you don't specifically identify yourself as a libertarian, but you do have a lot of affiliations with libertarians, and there are a lot of similarities that you have with at least the paleo -libertarian group.

44:52

One of the things that I don't understand about a lot of libertarians is their, what seems to be, lax view of securing and protecting borders in the

45:06

United States. I completely understand the opposition to sending the brave young men and women in our military overseas to participate in conflicts that we have no business in involving ourselves in, and having the children of American citizens killed over on battlefields to fight other people's battles that, in many cases, will never be resolved on this earth, especially when you're talking about the

45:39

Islamic conflicts in other parts of the world that have already been going on for centuries. And on occasion, like what happened in Iraq, Christian missionaries will be the first to tell you that Iraq is a much more dangerous place for them than it was when

45:59

Saddam Hussein was the dictator over there. I mean, sometimes, unfortunately, these more secular

46:08

Muslim dictators keep the more violent extremists in line.

46:15

But having said that, I understand that part, but I don't understand why making sure our borders are very strictly guarded and protected, why that would be in any way a violation of a libertarian concept.

46:32

I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries. The New American Standard Bible is perfect for daily... Sorry about that. That was a commercial that started before it was supposed to.

46:41

Wow, runaway prophets. Yeah, well, you know, with borders, again, that's something that there's a mixed view with liberty people.

46:51

I tend to be against open borders, but it's kind of a complicated issue because in a libertarian world, or let's just put it this way, and I think in a

47:02

Christian world, we have a lot of private property systems based on contract and voluntary associations.

47:11

And so you'd have a lot of private roads and private systems, and they would have deeds, and they would have association rules, which would say, yes, we allow the free, you know, travel of people on our property and our roads or our town.

47:28

But we don't have that right now. We have a lot of public property that I think is unjustly gained by, you know, hobbling up all these resources and holding onto these lands, like public parks and things.

47:43

I think this is something you should turn back to churches and businesses to take care of. So in a

47:49

Christian liberty -perfect world, there would be private property, and those would be private borders, and it would work itself out that way.

47:59

But we don't have that, and so I think it's crazy to have a total open border policy in a country like ours with a giant welfare system and a currency that is being highly inflated and debased based on monetary shenanigans.

48:18

And so even if you think you're a humanitarian by saying, let everybody come in, you're really setting them up for failure, because they're going to participate in a monetary collapse when everybody runs in here, uses the welfare system, uses the fruits of the labor of the

48:36

American country's productive class. And even if they're productive themselves, just having that much influx in a system that's not sustainable with debt is really just asking for, you know, you're setting these immigrants up for failure.

48:51

So it's a complicated issue that I don't think, you know, we should deport everybody tomorrow.

48:58

I think it's a logistical nightmare, and there should be some kind of system that can sort those people out in a humane fashion so that, you know,

49:07

I mean, at the end of the day, if you were to legalize everybody tomorrow, give them all citizenship, I mean, what would happen, right?

49:14

You'd have, you know, they'd all be entitled to minimum wage and everything, and all the things that we that they do now would be priced significantly higher, like produce and things like that, because it'd be a lot more costly to have it harvested and taken care of.

49:33

So there'd be a lot of crazy things that would happen if you just gave them citizenship. But there would also be a lot of chaos if you try to deport, you know, 11 million people or whoever, however many there is.

49:44

Well, by the way, Linda in Hilltop, Hilltop Lakes, Texas, I forgot to mention that you, since you're a first -time questioner, first -time submitting a question to an

49:58

Iron Sharpens Iron guest, you're getting an absolutely free copy of the New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the

50:05

New American Standard Bible, and it will be shipped out to you, compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

50:14

cvbbs .com. And this is a really beautiful edition of the NASB.

50:20

It's got an embossed cross on the cover. It's just very attractive, and I'm sure you'll enjoy that.

50:26

It's also just about the right size that you as a woman could fit into your pocketbook or purse very easily.

50:35

A man could possibly fit it into a coat pocket. It's a little bit bigger than a pocket version, but it's just a beautiful edition, and I hope you enjoy it, and we need your full mailing address to get that out to you.

50:47

But thank you very much for submitting the question. So you're making it clear, just so we make sure we're on the right or on the same page here and so that nobody misunderstands you, you're certainly not a full -blown pacifist, and you believe that violence can be very right and decent and moral when you are reacting in defense of yourself, your family, your children against a violent attacker, and that of course can take many forms.

51:25

It could be a murderer. It could be somebody who is violently breaking into your home or trying to sexually assault you or your children or your wife or whoever.

51:35

There is a right role for violence in even a Christian's life, isn't there?

51:41

Yeah, I wouldn't even call that violence. I'd just call that defensive force. So to me, violence is just...

51:48

it's a semantic, so I'm not going to talk about it, but I think violence is the initiation of aggression.

51:55

It's vindictive or vengeance -oriented. So you have a right to protect someone from attacking your family if they broke into your house, but you don't have a right...

52:04

suppose they killed everybody in your family and you lost the fight. You wouldn't have a

52:11

Christian right to go to their neighborhood and kill their family. Oh, of course. Vengeance, right? So that's a difference, right?

52:17

And so it's not just carte blanche, you know, just do whatever you want, you know, torture your burglar once you...

52:24

that's not what we're allowed to do, but you're allowed to use defensive force to protect victims.

52:31

Well, you have to take the fun out of life, don't you, David? Well, obviously though...

52:37

see, I'm not even opposed to an armed homeowner. If somebody's climbing through their window,

52:44

I'm not opposed to that person shooting that intruder because you don't know what they're going to do.

52:49

You can't read their mind if they're there just to steal food or to molest your children or kidnap them and kill them.

52:57

I mean, wouldn't that be appropriate for a Christian to do that? Again, it's one of those things that you don't know the situation that plays out, and there needs to be discretion for those personal scenarios.

53:10

I think if someone's clearly just, you know, taking your car, do you need to, you know, shoot their tires out and shoot them in the head?

53:19

I don't know, maybe let that car go and deal with it in another way. Yeah, well, I would view that as a different issue from somebody climbing through your window,

53:27

I mean... Right, and in the heat of the moment, it's hard to say, you know, don't do whatever you can to stop that person, you know?

53:34

I don't think Christians are sinful to do that. I think in some sense, though, Christians have less ethical right to protect themselves than they do those around them, and that's an interesting thing that might take another time to talk about, but in the sense that I don't think you have a right to your life in the same sense that you have a right to protect the lives of those who are vulnerable around you, like your family and people who are vulnerable or victims around you, you know?

54:01

So that's the sense that, you know, maybe self -defense is not as important in the Christian framework as defense of those who can't defend themselves.

54:09

Yes, and going back to an issue that perhaps I just touched on a little bit when

54:15

I was speaking about illegal military activity that we as a nation have been involved in overseas, involving ourselves in conflicts that are none of our business.

54:29

Having said that, it would seem that those who love liberty and freedom as much as you and libertarians do, they would have to understand that a strong, a very strong military is required to maintain that.

54:45

Otherwise, others in other nations or even in our own land are going to take that from us as soon as they realize that we are weak and they have an opportunity to do so.

54:57

Isn't that true? Yeah, but I think, again, who would be more efficient at providing a really effective defense service?

55:07

And if we want to get to the true principle of it all, I think it would be private companies.

55:13

So I'm okay with what we have now because I'm not a utopian person. I'm okay with it.

55:18

But if you really think about it, imagine if you gave Walmart an exclusive monopoly on providing milk.

55:25

It would be overly expensive, it'd be low quality, it'd be a lack of options, it would be a poor quality.

55:33

That's what happens when you give someone a monopoly on the product. It's the same thing that happens with our government's military services.

55:40

They have a monopoly on using defensive force, and what do we get? We get a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse going on in the

55:49

Pentagon. We had billions that they can't even account for. We have wars of aggression that do nothing but make us more endangered.

55:57

They're really misusing what we've given them, including our people that serve there honorably. I think those people who are soldiers would have a much, much more efficient system if they were able to work with private contract defense groups, who would basically be like an insurance service where you pay a subscription fee every month, and they protect your region that you live in, or state, or what have you, with defensive shields and military at the ready in case there was an invading force.

56:28

Because of the market forces and competition, they would be able to provide a very highly efficient defense system that would be superior to statist attackers because they wouldn't have the waste that government inherently brings to the table, and they'd be able to take care of the problem with highly effective, innovative technologies.

56:49

I would like you, in the next two minutes, to basically summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

56:57

I just encourage everybody to think, as we get into this election, we wrap it up and go on forward, to think about what does it mean to be a

57:05

Christian as a voter or a jury member, or simply as a citizen of your community. And that means don't use violence against non -violent people, because Jesus never does that himself.

57:16

He doesn't initiate violence to get people to understand the kingdom of heaven, and we need to have that same approach to the way we treat our neighbors with who we elect to represent us.

57:28

So consider that as it applies to a lot of things. For example, at the end of the day, we may be hesitant to want to let the drug user out of prison or some of these other people who have partaken in vices, but think about it this way.

57:45

If we allow a state to criminalize those non -violent behaviors, they have the moral authority to criminalize non -violent behaviors that are more closer to home, like the kind of milk you drink, or the kind of herbs you take, or nutrients you take, or the kind of sermons your pastor preaches, or the kind of cakes you're forced to bake.

58:04

All those things are criminalized right now because we ceded the principle long ago that it's okay for us to use violence against people who are doing non -violent things.

58:15

We cannot cede that principle and cede it in a safe way, so we have to be consistent with the way we shape our state in a way that only allows violence for actual violent crimes like theft, assault, and rape and murder.

58:34

And the Christians may be the first to find out in the years ahead how true that is, because I'm sure the further left that our government drifts, or should

58:48

I say really speeds with great acceleration into that direction, that more and more people who are sticking up for biblical morality and truth will be imprisoned and so on, and we will have those words that you just said echoing in our minds, wishing that we had a government that did treat its citizens that way.

59:12

But if you could, if you have any contact information that you'd like to share for listeners, or a website or URL that they could find some of your writings.

59:23

My email is A, the letter A, aneighborschoice at gmail .com.

59:30

That's aneighborschoice at gmail .com, all together, all the letters. And yeah, email me if you'd like to be in touch about these issues.

59:40

I'm speaking at different groups around Florida. I went to Austin, Texas this month with the

59:48

Christians for Liberty Conference, and everywhere I go, people are really excited when they realize that Jesus is the founder of the true liberty movement, and he's relevant more than ever with all of the issues that are facing our nation.

01:00:04

So they're welcome to email me there, or you can read my articles at fee .gov.

01:00:10

I keep saying fee .gov, and they're against a lot of the government behavior. Fee .org. Yeah, I can't imagine a libertarian having his articles on anything with a .gov.

01:00:22

I guess I just associate fees with the government so much that I keep saying fee .gov. So fee .org,

01:00:30

wnd .com, affluentinvestor, altarandthrone .com.

01:00:35

The American conservative should have a piece up this week from me about how Trump is the scapegoat supreme of our time, so that should be interesting.

01:00:44

And of course, there's WorldNetDaily's website, wnd .com for WorldNetDaily, wnd .com.

01:00:53

That's right. Well, thank you so much, David, and look forward to having you back on the program. Thank you.

01:00:59

I enjoyed it. Thank you. Well, God bless. And we're going to be joined any moment now by Pastor Josh Freiman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, and we're going to be discussing the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

01:01:19

If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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01:04:15

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest for our second hour today is my dear friend,

01:04:22

Pastor Josh Fryman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Island, New York. He nearly became my pastor a few years ago, but God had mercy on him and delivered me from Long Island into the hands of those here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who now have to tolerate my existence.

01:04:43

But Pastor Josh Fryman is not only a dear friend and a man and a brother in Christ who

01:04:48

I respect very highly, but he is an excellent guest.

01:04:53

I'm looking forward to discussing a very important theme with him today. Christ Our Redeemer Conference is coming up just in a matter of days at the

01:05:05

Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana, and we're going to be discussing that theme, which is the main topic of the conference, the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

01:05:17

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, my dear friend, Pastor Josh Fryman. Hey, Chris, good to be with you.

01:05:25

Well, it's always great to have you on the program, Josh, and it's been a while. So for those of our listeners who never have heard you on this program, in fact, we have a lot of new listeners since you were last a guest, maybe providentially due to the

01:05:40

World Magazine ad, maybe for other reasons I'm unaware of, but we every day nearly have people contacting me to let me know that they are enjoying the program, and so why don't you tell our listeners about Community Baptist Church in Riverhead?

01:06:00

Sure, and I'm not surprised that your listenership is growing. You do a great job.

01:06:08

Community Baptist Church was started in the fall of 2010.

01:06:15

We began by holding just one service on a Sunday in the basement of a catering hall, and God was good to us and allowed us to see growth, and we moved into an office building.

01:06:30

We were there for almost two years, and from there we moved into a beautiful, old congregational church building.

01:06:42

Well, we actually... If you want me to share one of my pastoral mistakes with your audience, we spent a little bit of time in an

01:06:53

Episcopal building, which was looking for a place just to meet, but we were there for just a couple months, and the

01:07:01

Lord opened up a beautiful building. We've been in there for a little over three years, and by God's grace, we are in the process of buying that property now.

01:07:13

Oh, praise God. I'm glad that that is finally happening because I love that building. Yeah, it's tremendous.

01:07:19

It was built in 1904, and it's... Rebuilt in 1904, right?

01:07:24

Yeah, it was originally built in 1880, and from what the local historian told me, in 1901, the pastor that was there then, he got fired, and then got upset and came back and burned down the building.

01:07:42

Which is kind of an interesting revisiting of history because you did that at your first congregation, didn't you?

01:07:51

Yeah. Just kidding. That did not happen, ladies and gentlemen.

01:07:58

And you lost half of those new listeners. But no, so we've been in there, and it's been wonderful, and the

01:08:09

Lord has blessed the church. He's given us some wonderful people.

01:08:15

We've been able to see him save folks and change lives, and it's just...

01:08:21

It's an honor, and I'm really privileged to serve there. We organized as a church four years ago this fall, so matter of fact, next month we'll be celebrating our four -year anniversary having organized officially as a church.

01:08:37

So we are very thankful for all the Lord's done, and you can find out more about our church on the website.

01:08:46

It's communitybaptistchurch .net. communitybaptistchurch .net. And also, if you want information about an upcoming conference that Pastor Josh is speaking at,

01:08:58

God willing, September 9th, Friday, September 9th, and Saturday, September 10th in Pittsburgh, Indiana, you can go to the

01:09:10

Pittsburgh Baptist Church website, pittsburghbaptist .com, P -I -T -T -S -B -O -R -O, baptist .com.

01:09:19

And this is the Christ Our Redeemer Conference, and the theme is the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

01:09:27

As I said, Pastor Josh Fryman is one of the featured speakers, in addition to Pastor Josh, Reverend Isaac Evans of Glastonbury Baptist Church in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

01:09:39

I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. And Reverend John Peoples of Grace Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.

01:09:47

And I hope that you can make it out to this conference, especially if you live in Indiana, or if you have easy access to get there.

01:09:58

I strongly advise you to hear Pastor Josh Fryman preach. He is definitely a gifted and powerful preacher of the gospel.

01:10:06

Their keynote speaker is going to be Dr. Russell Fuller of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's faculty.

01:10:15

He's the main plenary speaker, and he is a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

01:10:25

So we also have him featured coming up in the very near future,

01:10:32

God willing, on Iron Sharpens Iron. Let's see if I can see where he is going to be speaking.

01:10:39

He is going to be on Thursday, September 1st. So that is this

01:10:45

Thursday. I was excited to hear that you're going to be able to have him on. I want to make sure everyone knows he's the keynote speaker.

01:10:55

He'll be speaking, I think, three or four times, plus there's a Q &A session. And I also want everyone to know, all the compliments you're throwing my way,

01:11:05

Chris is a very gracious man. So bear that in mind. But I'm not a liar. Oh, you changed.

01:11:16

Okay. All right. Just kidding. Just kidding. I'm sorry. That's quite all right. Yes, thanks be to God, I did change, which is one of the themes of our discussion today,

01:11:27

Christ our Redeemer, right? Yeah, amen. Well, tell us something about what you are specifically going to be addressing at the

01:11:36

Christ our Redeemer conference. Well, I've been given a topic, well,

01:11:41

I was actually given several topics to choose from, the theme obviously being Christ, specifically in the

01:11:48

Old Testament, with the theme of redemption. One of those topics I was given was Christ seen in the tabernacle.

01:11:56

And our church is going through the book of Hebrews right now. We go through books of the

01:12:02

Bible, and right now we're in the middle of Hebrews. We actually start chapter 11 on this coming

01:12:09

Sunday. But when I saw that was one of the options, Christ in the tabernacle, I prayed about it and really was very happy and pleased and feel confident that that's the subject that I should deal with.

01:12:23

And so that's what I'm going to be speaking on on Saturday. It'll be Christ seen in the tabernacle. And obviously we'll not be able to cover everything in one session.

01:12:32

I think there's 35 minutes to speak, and then there's a question and answer afterwards. But he's seen, the

01:12:39

Lord has seen not just in the tabernacle itself, but also in the offices that are used in the tabernacle.

01:12:47

A lot of the words that we use so often like mercy seat, the veil, or atonement, all these things obviously find their roots in the tabernacle.

01:13:00

And so I'm excited about it. I think it's good to have our pure minds stirred up by way of remembrance, as Peter says.

01:13:08

And this conference is going to be an opportunity to do that. I know it seems like to remind us to think about Christ seems like something that we wouldn't need, but it's something we definitely need to be reminded of.

01:13:24

And I think with all the different distractions out there, and especially the modern movement kind of changing sort of the theme of church services even themselves,

01:13:36

I think it's good to remind ourselves the importance of exalting Christ in everything and really what redemption is about.

01:13:43

And that that goes all the way back to really before Genesis, because as we know,

01:13:48

Revelation teaches us that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. So it goes even back before Genesis.

01:13:56

So I'm excited about it. And so we're going to zero in on the tabernacle. We're going to look at the

01:14:01

Lord Jesus Christ seen evidently in the tabernacle. And then my prayer is that whoever is there for the session will have a greater love for the

01:14:12

Lord than they did when they walked in. 05 .01 Praise God. And there is a misconception on a part of a number of people, perhaps some of them, many of them even professing

01:14:27

Christians, who have a wrong belief about redemption in the

01:14:34

Old Testament. They somehow think that a man was made worthy of heaven in the

01:14:40

Old Testament by virtue of his obedience to the law. And then Christ came and said, okay, guys, no sweat anymore.

01:14:49

You don't have to labor to get into heaven. I'm going to pay it all for you. But it wasn't in 2000

01:14:59

AD that Christ really changed something, that God had a totally different plan of salvation prior to that, was it?

01:15:11

That's correct. And when I say that's correct, I mean about the misconception. What did not happen 2000 years ago was

01:15:21

God changed his mind. Somehow he had a conversation and said, well, you know,

01:15:28

Israel is rebelling. My people are rebelling. So we're going to have to have a new promise or a new covenant or a new testament.

01:15:37

That's not at all what happened. I think it was John Metzger, forgive me if I'm attributing the wrong thought, but he'd written a great book about Christ in the

01:15:47

Old Testament. And he had said this, and it's very true, that in Hebrews when we read about the

01:15:55

Old Testament, we kind of get the idea old, like, well, you know, it's something that we want to keep it around.

01:16:04

I'm not going to use it as much, so I'm not going to throw it away, but I'll put it up in the attic and I'll only reference it when I have to.

01:16:10

And that's kind of how we treat the Old Testament sometimes. But it was what the writer of Hebrews is saying through obviously being moved by the

01:16:20

Holy Ghost. It's not that there's this new and improved plan, right?

01:16:26

Like you would see on some infomercial, you know, hey, that was the old stuff, but now we have a new and improved.

01:16:32

It was really the continuation of the promise that was promised all the way back in Genesis when that was prophesied about Jesus coming.

01:16:43

And this is very important for us to understand that every bit of the Old Testament was a part of the covenant promise that was coming because it was painting and giving us detail to the beautiful picture that are beautiful pictures that represented

01:17:00

Christ. It was the Lord giving us details about what

01:17:06

Jesus Christ would do, and we have the privilege to be able to look back at both now and see it.

01:17:12

And of course, the Holy Spirit guides us and teaches us, and we can see things in Scripture. But I would never improve on Scripture.

01:17:21

I could not do that, but it was not a new plan.

01:17:27

It was basically the continuation of the plan that had already started from the foundation of the world.

01:17:34

And God, in His providence, decided that instead of Jesus Christ coming and doing that 2 ,000 years prior, 4 ,000 years prior,

01:17:45

He would develop types, pictures, shadows of the

01:17:50

Messiah that would come, and there would be this beautiful thing, beautiful pictures for us to look back on and see

01:18:00

Him and realize that what was done 2 ,000 years ago on Calvary was just a beautiful, redemptive plan.

01:18:11

We are so blessed to be recipients of it, and it's a wonderful thing.

01:18:20

So, forgive me for taking a little bit too long to answer that question, but yeah. No, it's definitely not a new and improved plan.

01:18:26

It was always part of the plan. Jesus was slain. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.

01:18:33

And I believe, and I just apologize for giving you too long of an answer, and now

01:18:39

I'm going to make it longer, but I believe it's very important that we understand this, that what

01:18:45

God is teaching us, one of the main lessons through the Old Testament is how difficult access to God truly is.

01:18:55

That's one of the things seen in the tabernacle. You don't just waltz into God's presence. God's people, when they were going to be given the law, the

01:19:05

Lord told Moses, He said to put a perimeter up around the mountain, and so they see lightning and thundering from a distance, and then there's a tabernacle.

01:19:13

Now, the Lord's going to dwell among the people, so His presence, if I can say it that way, is closer, but they're not allowed to go in there.

01:19:22

Only one priest was allowed to go into the holiest, that room that is the outer court, and you have the holy place, and then there's the veil, and then you enter through the veil, and that's where the

01:19:35

Ark of the Covenant would be, and the mercy seat, and the blood would be applied, so that high priest, he was only allowed to enter into that room one day a year, and he was only allowed to go in twice.

01:19:46

He had to go in and make atonement for his sin, and then he had to go in a second time on behalf of the sins of all of Israel, but I mean, what is that teaching us, if not that sin is serious?

01:19:58

Sin is a very serious thing, and it cut off access to God, but the greatest need that we have,

01:20:06

Chris, is access to God. We need a relationship with God, and that is impossible unless the sin issue is dealt with, and so that's why it's such a big deal when you're writing to the

01:20:20

Hebrews, or to Jews, when the writer of Hebrews will say, which by the way was

01:20:26

Paul, but anyway, that's another story, that's another interview, another time. Well, actually, my friend,

01:20:31

Dr. James White, who you know, or you've met anyway, he believes it was Luke.

01:20:37

Oh, really? Either Luke, or somebody heavily influenced by Luke, but anyway, I'm sorry, I digress.

01:20:44

Well, listen, tell Dr. White... I think

01:20:49

Rich Jensen out there in Medford believes it was Paul, I think.

01:20:54

Yeah, I used to think it was Paul, it doesn't matter, I was just kidding around, but this is why, when the writer of Hebrews wrote this, it would have been such a big deal, so when he talks about coming boldly before God, or let us draw near with a heart, with true assurance, with true sincerity, full of faith, this is a very big deal.

01:21:18

Well, what's the context? The context is Christ being the high priest, and so they understood that, they got that, so for the

01:21:27

Lord to have set up all these pictures, and types, and shadows, so that what

01:21:32

Christ did for us is so much better understood, it's just another evidence of God's love for man, and God's love for us, and His desire for us to know

01:21:41

Him better, and to understand fully the scope of what Christ did on our behalf.

01:21:47

And by the way, you can never speak too long about Christ's redemptive,

01:21:54

Christ's centrality in redemptive history, because obviously I'd be a fool to cut you off when you're talking about such a rich theme as that.

01:22:04

I have nothing better to add to that information. But in fact,

01:22:10

I just embarrassed myself about 10 minutes ago when I announced that Christ's earthly ministry was in 2000

01:22:17

AD, which would have been 16 years ago. I meant to say 2000 years ago, not 2000

01:22:24

AD. Oh, I think we all knew what you meant. At least

01:22:32

I sure hope so. I will tell you this, you are partially right,

01:22:38

I mean, Jesus is obviously still working. Yes. I will tell you, that's one of my favorite parts about the book of Acts, actually.

01:22:44

If you, like, we call it the Acts, and most people will have in their Bible, the Acts of the Apostles, but if your listeners would open their

01:22:52

Bibles to Acts chapter 1 and verse 1, Luke wrote that verse, he's being moved by the

01:23:01

Holy Spirit to write it so we know it's perfect, and he says this former treatise

01:23:06

I have, I'm not going to quote it exactly because I don't have it right in front of me, Otheophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach.

01:23:15

And you don't get to chapter 1, Jesus is gone, physically. But yet, every time you see the

01:23:23

Church on the move, or the Apostles, or preaching, or people being converted, people being discipled, that's

01:23:31

Christ working. That's Jesus working. And I would tell the Church of Corinth, ye are the body of Christ.

01:23:37

In Ephesians chapter 4, we're to edify the body of Christ, or so, we are to be the body of Christ, we're to have the mind of Christ, the spirit of Christ, all so that we can do the work of Christ.

01:23:47

And so, that's one of my favorite parts about chapter 1 of Acts, is that it's not really the acts of the Apostles, it's the acts of Christ with the

01:23:55

Apostles. And that's still going today, the Lord's still building his Church, and he is still active, he's using us to do his work, which, praise the

01:24:04

Lord for that, but so you were still correct, the

01:24:10

Lord is still very much active here on Earth, so. And something, don't you agree that some very important matter is misunderstood, and neglected, and overlooked by many professing

01:24:29

Christians in regard to Christ in the Old Testament? Because they forget, either they forget, or they have been very poorly instructed to begin with, and have some kind of modalistic understanding of the trine nature of God, they forget or fail to realize that Christ was in the

01:24:52

Old Testament, he was not incarnate in the Old Testament, but he is very much a part of the narrative of the

01:25:02

Hebrew Scriptures. Absolutely. I've said this to our Church, that when you study the

01:25:09

Old Testament, you don't just find types of Christ, shadows of Christ, and pictures of Christ, you find

01:25:17

Christ. He is there in the Old Testament, and he was active, and that's absolutely the truth.

01:25:25

There was not this waiting for him to be active until 2 ,000 years ago, he was very much active.

01:25:33

Anytime, really, you find the Father and man, that interaction, you'll find the

01:25:41

Lord Jesus Christ, he's that intercessor, our mediator, and that's a wonderful truth.

01:25:49

And I've challenged our Church, maybe a month and a half ago, I began studying for the conference that I'm going to be speaking at in a couple weeks, and there,

01:26:00

I challenged the Church to do that, find the Lord in areas where you wouldn't typically think you'd find him.

01:26:09

Now, of course, not all those are going to be actual appearances of Christ, some of them are going to be types and shadows, one of them being this man,

01:26:21

Tim Keller, he's in the city here in New York, and he wrote a great article on moralism versus Christ -centered exposition, and in the article, and let me just back up and explain why that's important.

01:26:36

The reason why the conference that we really are, you know, calling to discuss is such a significant thing is because, really, that has happened today with many churches, and I use that term loosely, where they have decided to take the example of Christ, right, how he lived or how he was, and they teach that, and while there's nothing wrong with that,

01:26:59

Christ is our greatest example, we should want to live like the Lord. You know, I just said a few minutes ago, we're to have his mind and his spirit, we're to do his work, and so we need to know how he lived, but that is not the greatest thing that the

01:27:14

Lord did. The greatest thing the Lord did was not feed 5 ,000, and that doesn't, you know, so, well, you know, they fed 5 ,000, so, you know, we got to start a soup kitchen.

01:27:21

That is great, and if you can start a soup kitchen and go for it, but that's not the greatest thing the

01:27:27

Lord did. The greatest thing the Lord did was take care of our sin. That is the issue, and moralism has become a big theme because it's easier to preach about, it's easier to teach about, and of course, you know, the low -hanging fruit here is guys like Joel Osteen or, you know, of that like, and I know that most of your listeners wouldn't really be tempted to take anything a man like that says serious, but you can understand how they get where they are because it's so much easier to talk about, well, the

01:27:58

Lord did this, and this is how we want to be, and so go out and just try to do your best and try to help, and well, the

01:28:04

Lord also lived a perfect life because we could not. We're sinners. One of the ordinances that God gave is the

01:28:13

Lord's Supper, and so that unleavened bread reminds us that he was perfect because we could not be.

01:28:18

The blood, the fruit of the vine, that cup is the blood that not only washed away our sin, but it was the price that had to be paid for our redemption and his death and all that goes with that, and it definitely needs to be kept in the our sin problem was a great one, and I love what

01:28:42

John Newton said, and, you know, I'll never get tired of saying it or hearing it when he said,

01:28:47

I am a great sinner, but Jesus Christ is a great Savior, and we have to keep that in the forefront of our minds.

01:28:55

If we're going to give a clear message about who Christ is and why he matters, we have to keep that in the forefront of folks' minds.

01:29:05

Yeah, I think that Newton said that towards the end of his life, and he said, two things I remember is that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great

01:29:14

Savior, and, of course, I end my program, as you may remember, every day with the quote by Christopher Love that is very similar,

01:29:22

Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner. Yeah, praise the Lord for that. We're going to, go ahead,

01:29:28

I'm sorry. No, I can identify personally with that, amen, and we have to go to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air, there are a couple of people who have questions for you.

01:29:40

If you'd like to join them with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

01:29:51

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

01:29:56

USA. Don't go away, we're going to be right back with Pastor Josh Freiman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Island.

01:30:05

Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God, or am

01:30:11

I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

01:30:19

We are a Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

01:30:27

We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do, than how men view these things.

01:30:35

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either.

01:30:42

We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

01:30:55

If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

01:31:01

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

01:31:12

TV program entitled Resting in Grace. You can find us at providencebaptistchurchma .org,

01:31:18

that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor

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609 -494 -5689. Harvey Cedars, where Christ… And we're back, and for some reason, our ad stopped short there.

01:34:06

We have to have a technician look at why that happened. We can't have our sponsors' commercials stopping short like that.

01:34:13

But anyway, welcome back to the program, and we have on the air with us today for the second hour of this broadcast, with a half hour to go,

01:34:23

Pastor Josh Fryman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Island, New York. He is one of the featured conference speakers at the 2016

01:34:32

Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana, and for more details on that conference, you can go to pittsburghbaptist .com,

01:34:42

p -i -t -t -s -b -o -r -o baptist .com.

01:34:48

Before I return to our discussion, another one of our sponsors wants you to know about a conference this

01:34:55

January 19th through the 21st that, God willing, I will be attending. I have been given an exhibitor's booth at this event to promote

01:35:06

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, for the gracious folks that are running this conference, and also have a sponsor and dear friend on Long Island who provided all the other finances needed to participate in this, and I'm so excited about it.

01:35:24

And as I've said to Josh before the program and to other friends of mine, that I believe that God has either one of two things in mind for this.

01:35:36

Don't say this. That it's either going to incredibly bless me and my ministry, or that he has ordained for me that they depart this earth and enter into glory, because there are so many different converging things providentially that have left me with no sane option other than to go to this conference.

01:36:01

But I am looking forward to it, and if you would like to find out more about this conference, by the way, the roster at this conference is longer than I've ever seen at any conference in my life that I can recall, and not only very long, but very impressive.

01:36:25

Paul Washer, Stephen J. Lawson, D .A. Carson, Voti Baucom, Dr. James R.

01:36:30

White, Tim Challies, Conrad M. Bayway, Phil Johnson of Grace to You Ministries, and the list goes on and on, and Todd Friel of Wretched Radio will be there, who's been a guest on this program.

01:36:42

In fact, most of these speakers have been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron. Rosaria Butterfield, a former leftist lesbian professor at Syracuse University, who was transformed by the power of Jesus Christ, and she is now a pastor's wife and a

01:37:02

Bible -believing Christian who is using all of her gifts as a tool in God's hand to draw sinners out of that wickedness, out of the wickedness of homosexual activity and even leftism, into biblical

01:37:20

Christianity, and even more importantly, into the saving embrace of Christ. So if you want more details on this conference, go to G3conference .com,

01:37:31

G, the number 3, conference .com, and please, if you register for this, would you please mention that you heard about the conference on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I truly hope that my guest,

01:37:47

Josh Fryman, will be joining me at that conference, and I'm going to be praying about that. Yes.

01:37:53

Well, many people just heard Paul Washer, Stephen Lawson, Conrad M. Bayway, but yeah, yeah, yeah, but Chris Arnzen's going to be there.

01:38:03

Actually, I think they said, why is Chris Arnzen going to be there? Well, remember, I'm not one of them. I was afraid that's why your commercials were cut off.

01:38:10

They were like, he's interviewing who today? And keep in mind,

01:38:16

I'm not one of the speakers. I'm just having an exhibitor's booth at this conference, so I don't want anybody to have the horrific notion that I will be one of the speakers there.

01:38:29

Well, we have, Pastor Josh, we have a listener in Kinross, Scotland, who has a question for you.

01:38:37

Murray in Kinross, Scotland, says, would you define Hebrews 11 .13

01:38:44

as equivalent to saving faith? Would these

01:38:50

Old Testament saints understand that there would not be a Messiah but a cross, and the need for that cross on a personal level?

01:39:01

Okay, so there's two questions in there, is that correct? Yeah. With Hebrews 11 .13.

01:39:07

Okay, so this is a great question. I'm going to answer it now. If I don't answer it, then just tell me

01:39:14

I didn't say it wasn't clear, and try to re -do it, okay? I've actually changed my position on this the more

01:39:23

I've studied the Scriptures, and one of the things said, let me just read it for listeners that aren't there, these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth.

01:39:41

For they that say such things declare plain that they seek a country. So have you ever heard the expression, the

01:39:51

Old Testament saints were looking forward to the cross, and New Testament saints look back to the cross?

01:39:58

Is that okay? I used to say that myself, but the problem with that is when you read the Scriptures, you find when

01:40:04

Jesus said that he would go to the cross, no one started cheering and saying, it's finally arrived, it's finally here, right?

01:40:14

They did know through the, like Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, they did know that there would be the forsaken one, there would be one who'd be led like a lamb to the slaughter, but no one tied it in, even though many started believing that Jesus was in fact the

01:40:32

Messiah, they were ready for him to set up his kingdom. So the faith that's talked about, and this is a little fresh for me because we're getting ready to enter it in here in our church as we go through this, so what does it mean when they were saved by faith?

01:40:46

If they, like the apostles, when Jesus told them that, they were confused, they didn't want him to go to the cross, like no one said, oh it's finally here, right?

01:40:56

So what was it? It was faith, it was this, it's very simple and it's also very wonderful.

01:41:02

It was faith in God's Word. That's what exactly what it was. Nothing has changed in that regard.

01:41:09

With that faith cometh by what? Hearing. Right, and hearing by the

01:41:14

Word of God. It was the Word of God then, it is the Word of God now. Now the promise that we have is obviously complete, it's fulfilled, we know that now.

01:41:28

So I don't think that in the Old Testament that they thought of a cross or they thought of that and said that that's really where our true hope is.

01:41:39

What they believed was what God said, that when you bring these sacrifices and this blood is shed and the high priest goes into that tabernacle and he comes back out, that atonement has been made and sin has been put aside for another year.

01:42:00

That's why he had to keep doing it every year because it was not washed away, it was covered. And let me say this while I'm on the subject because this is very important.

01:42:11

This is about Christ in the office of the high priest. When the high priest did go into that tabernacle,

01:42:19

Chris, and he walked through the outer court, which is just a bloody mess. I mean, think of it, you had mucus out there and blood and guts, entrails, all that, just flesh.

01:42:30

There's the brazen altar, there's the laver where he would sanctify himself, which is obviously that, you know, as you go to God, this is all wonderful pictures.

01:42:42

You go through that, the holy place where they have the show bread to one side, the candlesticks on the other, then he would go up to where the incense is and then only the high priest would go in there.

01:42:52

He's made sanctification for himself already, so now he has to go back in again. This is significant because Hebrews tells us

01:42:58

Jesus Christ entered once into the holy holy. Jesus Christ didn't need to sanctify himself. He only had to go in one time, that was for us and not for himself.

01:43:06

So he only enters once. The high priest in the Old Testament had to go in twice. So he's already sanctified himself and now he's going back in on behalf of Israel.

01:43:14

He's literally wearing Israel over his heart and on his shoulders. He's bearing Israel with that ephod and all those the stones that represent the tribes and he's going into that.

01:43:25

Now, this is beautiful. What were they doing while the high priest went into the holiest?

01:43:31

What was their role in this whole process? Well, remember, you're the guest,

01:43:37

I'm the host. Well, okay, so here's what they did.

01:43:43

Nothing. They did nothing. They had brought their sacrifices and while the high priest did his work, all they did was literally wait.

01:43:55

They did nothing. And then when the high priest came back, they knew that God had accepted the blood and on the day of atonement and their sins were taken care of.

01:44:06

And I have to tell you, that is such a blessing for me. And by the way, what did they have to go on that?

01:44:11

They didn't have the priest's word on that. It was God's words. This goes going back to their faith. But it is the same way in salvation today.

01:44:19

Jesus Christ said it is finished. He meant just that. No work that we can add to salvation.

01:44:25

And literally, they did nothing on their atonement.

01:44:30

It was that the blood was applied to the mercy seat by the high priest. All this was done. And all they did was literally receive grace that came from that.

01:44:39

And that's exactly what happens today. Back to the question that the person from Scotland, Murray, who

01:44:48

I hope I get to visit one day because I've always wanted to visit Scotland. Do I think it's equivalent to faith in the cross itself?

01:44:59

No, I think it was faith in God's word. And what God said was required for atonement, what was required for sin.

01:45:07

And then the second half of the question, I forget what the second half of the question was. That was the second part of the question.

01:45:15

Oh, I'm sorry. What was the first question? That Hebrews 11 .13 was equivalent to saving faith.

01:45:23

The second part was, would these Old Testament saints understand that there would not just be a

01:45:29

Messiah but a cross, and the need for that cross on a personal level? Okay, so in other words,

01:45:35

I see, I see, I'm sorry. I gotcha. Yeah, I think he's talking about people that went to paradise.

01:45:42

They were in what we would call Abraham's bosom. But their sins, because they were not washed away, they could not go to heaven yet.

01:45:52

That's why they had to wait till Christ accomplished eternal salvation on the cross.

01:46:01

And that's why after the resurrection, he says to Mary, don't touch me. I've not yet ascended to my Father, but yet later on Thomas can reach his hand into Him and touch

01:46:09

Him. Because he had done that, he had led them up. They are now able to enter into God's presence. Their sins are not just put to the side for another year.

01:46:20

Their sins are now washed away through the blood of the Lamb, much like, or exactly like,

01:46:26

I should say, ours are today. I hope that answers the question. Yeah, it did to me.

01:46:33

And if Murray has any follow -up questions, feel free to email us, Murray. Thank you very much, brother.

01:46:40

We do have another listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, not far from where you are,

01:46:48

Pastor Josh. Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island says, are you familiar with Charles Leiter's book,

01:46:57

The Law of Christ, where he discusses Jesus being the fulfillment of all the laws of the

01:47:03

Old Covenant? I'm not, but I'm writing it down now. Can you spell it,

01:47:08

Charles? L -E -I -T -E -R -S, or L -E -I -T -E -R, and that is assuming that Tyler has spelt it correctly.

01:47:18

Okay. Yeah, Charles Leiter, and then what was the name of the book? Well, I don't think he gives a specific title.

01:47:26

He just says that the book, in the book, he discusses that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the laws in the

01:47:33

Old Covenant. And well, if it is a good book, I can assure you that you could get it at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

01:47:41

A shameless opportunity to plug my sponsor, cvbbs .com, cvbbs .com.

01:47:49

Very good. Yeah, and like, you know, there was confusion even in Jesus' day when, you know, he's not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill the law.

01:47:58

I will tell you that I will be looking that book up, and I appreciate Tyler recommending that to me.

01:48:05

So I just found it online, so. Oh, you did? Yeah, it's called The Law of Christ. I think this is the one he's referring to.

01:48:12

Yeah, actually, now that I look at his question, he did give that title. I'm sorry, Tyler. The Law of Christ.

01:48:18

Yeah, very good. I appreciate that. And if Tyler's not in a church right now, come

01:48:24

Sunday, we can talk about it. And of course, there's nothing wrong with Tyler visiting

01:48:30

Community Baptist Church, even if he is a member of a Bible -believing church. I'm not trying to take people from that church.

01:48:41

Oh, I know that. I would never endorse that kind of thing. But obviously, as I said, there's nothing wrong with Tyler visiting

01:48:47

Community Baptist Church of Riverhead. And remember, Tyler, that the website for more information is communitybaptistchurch .net.

01:48:57

Thank you very much, Tyler, for your question. It is interesting that as much learning as the

01:49:09

Pharisees had in regard to the Torah and all of the

01:49:16

Hebrew scriptures, and even those very common

01:49:22

Jewish families who loved the Lord, who loved Yahweh and studied his word to the best of their abilities and availability to the scriptures, that it seemed to be totally shocking to those

01:49:38

Jews in the first century when Christ insisted that he must be crucified.

01:49:46

And this seemed to be totally out of character with what they were expecting as a

01:49:51

Messiah. Correct. And one of the reasons that it is shocking is

01:49:57

Jesus reminded them that the books of Moses, the Old Testament, the prophets,

01:50:03

Jesus himself would use these books when talking to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus.

01:50:09

He said, they spoke of me. It was about me. And I think that there is application here and also a warning to us because, and especially because there's so much out there for us, there's so much access to books about subjects and there are so many

01:50:29

Bibles at our disposal. Like I have probably in my home, I probably have, I don't know, maybe nine or ten copies of the

01:50:37

Bible. And there's just so many, so much opportunity for us to just accumulate information, right?

01:50:48

And the Pharisees, and this is a very important thing for all of us to remember, the

01:50:54

Pharisees could have given you facts about the Old Testament, but they couldn't give you the truth about the

01:51:00

Old Testament. And that's a fundamental difference, right?

01:51:06

I mean, they could have recited to you different facts about different things, but the truth of what it all meant, they missed.

01:51:14

And for us today, the reason that matters for us today is it reminds us of how absolutely dependent we are upon not just the

01:51:24

Word of God, but on the Spirit of God. We need the Spirit of God to teach us and to help us understand and to, as we study and we work and we should be workers, we should be diligent.

01:51:35

I talked to someone recently, the Lord Saved, and I said, just so you know,

01:51:41

I mean, you've entered the spiritual warfare, you've entered spiritual battle, but you're going to have to learn to be a reader.

01:51:49

That's just part of it. That's part of this, because we need the Word of God, we should be consuming the

01:51:54

Word of God, but we don't want to just assimilate or accumulate facts. We want to understand them, we want to know them.

01:52:01

And so this is a problem the Pharisees had. They knew the books of Moses, they knew what

01:52:06

Jesus was talking about, but they didn't understand it. And so how important it is for us to understand our dependence upon the

01:52:13

Spirit of God and the Word of God. But that's the tragedy. Paul would say in Romans 9 that not all of Israel was

01:52:22

Israel, that he would say that his heart broke for them in the next chapter. They'd not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.

01:52:30

And it's the same old problem. People left to themselves will choose 100 % of the time their tradition and what they're comfortable with instead of the truth.

01:52:44

And so that's why we praise the Lord for His work in our lives to really, as the

01:52:50

Lord says in the Old Testament, when He gives a promise about the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31,

01:52:57

He said, I will change that, right? The old covenant, it was

01:53:02

My covenant and they break it, but the New Covenant, I'm going to do it. I will put in their hearts,

01:53:08

I will circumcise their hearts. I will cut away the rebellion from their heart. Literally, I will make their heart,

01:53:14

I will turn it from a, this is not in Jeremiah, but this particular context, but the truth is there.

01:53:20

I will turn the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. So that's why a believer can have confidence that they will continue, is because it is a work of God.

01:53:30

It's not what they did. It's not what they prayed. It's what God did. And when God said,

01:53:35

I will work in their heart, I'll cut away the rebellion and I'll give them a desire to obey, a desire to serve, which speaking of redemption, don't forget, that's not a new concept.

01:53:46

It's not a New Testament concept. All the way back in Exodus, eight or nine, maybe both, forgive me for not knowing exactly, but when the

01:53:57

Lord told Moses why He wanted them to come out, He said, it would be to serve Me. That's why, let

01:54:03

My people go to serve Me. And then when you find later on in Exodus 15,

01:54:08

I think it is, when they have come through the Red Sea and now they're singing a song of praise, Moses says, you've redeemed

01:54:14

My people. You've redeemed your people. Why? Why did the Lord redeem them? Why did

01:54:20

He save them? Why did He bring them to serve Him? That's why. And that's very important that we remember that because it still applies today.

01:54:31

You know, we still have to remember that, that we, Revelation chapter five, now we're in the end of the Bible, we're in the future now.

01:54:38

And it says, but the problem is I don't have a wireless phone and I'm trying to reach my books and I can't, so forgive me if we're not getting these.

01:54:46

I'm stuck with those early chords. But it's in Revelation chapter five where it says that Thou hast redeemed us to God.

01:54:57

It wasn't just from something, it was to something. It was to God. And this is so important for us to understand that when we were saved, when we were redeemed, when we were bought, it was for a purpose.

01:55:12

It wasn't just to rescue us from where we were. It was to put us in a state and a place so for what we could do moving forward as well.

01:55:21

I hope that makes sense. It's not just to be saved from our sin. That's wonderful. But it's this.

01:55:27

You couldn't serve God. You could not bring glory to God in your sin. So God transforms us.

01:55:33

He changes us. He forgives us of our sin. He cleanses us from our sin, but not just to cleanse us from our sin.

01:55:40

He cleanses us from our sin so that we are now made usable to bring glory to God. And it was that way back in Exodus, it's that way today.

01:55:48

And so when God says, I will cut away the rebellion, I will give you a new heart, that gives me confidence that I will be able to continue for the glory of God, not because of my effort, but because of what

01:55:59

God has done on my behalf. And I can't praise and thank him enough for that. Amen.

01:56:05

And even knowing truth, even knowing the truth perfectly in a mental and intellectual and scholarly capacity is not going to save one's soul.

01:56:18

Even the most brilliant theologian alive who, if he could, have memorized every word of the entire canon of the

01:56:29

Word of God and even believed in an intellectual sense that these things make sense and are true, that even in and of itself would not save that person.

01:56:42

That requires the work of the Holy Spirit and the blood of Christ, does it not? Absolutely.

01:56:47

Saul of Tarsus would be your example. He was not only a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He said concerning the law,

01:56:53

I was perfect. You know, he almost find an area where I didn't keep it.

01:56:59

But this, Chris, is the value of what our Lord did for us. Because looking at what

01:57:06

Jesus Christ did compared to what he did, meaning Saul of Tarsus, he said, when

01:57:13

I look at all that, Pharisee of the Pharisees, concerning zeal, I mean, that was him. Of the law, he was perfect.

01:57:20

But compared to Christ, he said, everything I did literally amounted to literally, not to be irreverent or gross, but this is what he called it.

01:57:29

He said it was just, it was dung. It was a pile of manure. That's all it was. And that's the value of what

01:57:38

Christ did for us. And that's why words like redemption and substitution are such wonderful words for the believer.

01:57:47

And propitiation. Propitiation, absolutely, absolutely. Turning away of the wrath that we deserved.

01:57:53

Yeah. And religion will teach you or tell you that there's a scale and you've done a lot of bad.

01:58:00

You've done a lot of sin. You know, you've offended God. And the devil always appears as an angel of light.

01:58:06

He'll always mix a little bit of things that are true in with his lies. And so people do understand, you know, just from the things that are clearly seen in creation, there's a

01:58:15

God. And so religion offers this sort of answer to that. Well, there is a God and, you know, you've offended him and that you've sinned.

01:58:22

And so you've, you've tipped the scale over and boy, you're in bad trouble. But the good news is if you do all these things, then

01:58:28

God is a good God and a loving God. And he'll look at that scale. And if you've done enough good and you've tipped that scale, then he'll let you into heaven.

01:58:36

And that is, of course, a simplistic view, but that's really the bottom line message of religion.

01:58:43

And the Lord's message, the story of redemption through Christ is totally turns that on its head.

01:58:51

It shoves the scale right off the table. And it says that there's nothing you can do, that you'll never be able to tip that scale.

01:58:59

But when Christ came and he lived the perfect life, and he was the perfect lamb, and he was fully acceptable in the

01:59:06

Father's sight, and he shed his blood, he died on the cross, was dead, buried, and then rose up to show us the power that he has.

01:59:15

I mean, the power of the resurrection that Paul talks about that is evident in the believer's life. It's why we're able to be saved from death.

01:59:23

We were dead in trespass and sins. I need a savior that resurrects from the dead, because that's what

01:59:29

I was in my lost condition. I was dead. So I need that kind of power. And that's redemption.

01:59:35

That's what God planned. That's what God designed. Amen. And we're out of time. And the website for Community Baptist Church of Riverhead is communitybaptistchurch .net.

01:59:44

I hope everybody for the rest of your lives always remembers that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.