Shadows and Substance in Colossians

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All right, let's bow our heads and go to Lord in prayer.
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Father, I thank you for an opportunity again to open your Word together.
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I pray, Lord, that you would help me to be the best teacher that I can be and keep me from error, for I certainly am a fallible man and capable of teaching error, and I don't want to do that, for the sake of your name and for the sake of my own conscience and for the sake of the hearts of your people.
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I pray, Lord, that you would open our minds and hearts to the Word today, that the Holy Spirit would ultimately be the teacher of our hearts, for only he can change a heart and only he can truly instruct in the Word of God.
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And I pray, Lord, that as we go to the Word that we would see the sufficiency of Christ in all things, particularly in the fulfillment of your divine law.
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We thank you for all of this in Christ's name.
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Amen.
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Come on in, Mr.
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Mike.
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Here you go, buddy.
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By the way, everyone, if you haven't met, this is Eric.
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He's our preacher for today.
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He has been the keynote for the conference that my wife and I have been at for the last two days, and I'm really excited to have him with us today.
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So thank you for coming in.
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We are continuing last week.
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If you remember, we started in Colossians 2, verses 1 through 15, and that's where we ended off, and we were addressing the subject of the sufficiency of Christ and the subject of what the writer of Colossians, which is the Apostle Paul, is trying to get across to the people at Colossae.
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He said to them that the fullness of deity dwells in Christ's bodily, and that one sentence by itself, you'll notice it's bolded there, it's underlined, and even the Greek is later on underneath that paragraph is outlined for you, and there's a little bit from Laonida, which is a semantic lexicon, and then Thayer's lexicon there is just simply explaining what that word deity means, and how it's being used, the aditas.
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But the purpose of the passage is often overlooked, because we use that as sort of an argument for the Trinity.
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When we're talking to someone about the Trinity, oftentimes we say, well, here in Colossians it says the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ's bodily.
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The fullness of deity dwells in Christ's bodily.
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But the context of that is really richer and more broad than just an argument.
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Remember, Jesus Christ is not an argument.
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He's a person.
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And when we talk about what it means to say that the fullness of the deity of God dwells in Christ's bodily, that's not an argument.
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It is a truth that we can use to argue.
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But he's saying something else.
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What he's saying is that there is this push to try to find something to add to Christ for our salvation.
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And that has been the problem throughout all of human history, to add something to the gift of God.
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We have to add works.
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We have to add religion.
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We have to add some kind of external right.
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We have to add anything.
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But you remember what we said last week, that Jesus plus nothing is the gospel.
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And Jesus plus anything else is not the gospel.
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And so that's the point of this particular section, is that we have this Savior who in himself is completely sufficient.
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For in him the fullness of deity dwells bodily.
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I mean, what else do you need? I mean, what else is there? We have the God man.
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We have the complete, sufficient Savior in the person of Jesus Christ.
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There is no more that we could possibly need.
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If we have Jesus, we have everything.
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And if we don't have Jesus, anything that we have is not enough.
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And we don't need to add anything to him.
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Okay, now that was last week.
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That brings us to what we're going to talk about today.
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Because now we're going to start.
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Excuse me, I guess I'm 13 again.
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We're going to start in verse 16.
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It says, Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or in regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.
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These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
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Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensual mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
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If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of this world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch? Referring to the things that all perish as they are used.
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According to human precepts and teachings, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
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And that so ends the reading of God's word for the morning.
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And that will be the focus of our lesson today.
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On the board I've placed up here four different categories.
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And these categories are going to play a part in our lesson today.
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Who all was here for D&D, Dads and Dudes, on Tuesday? Okay, you guys remember we talked about this on Tuesday night.
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Well, I left it on the board because it also applies to our lesson for today.
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What we have here are four different understandings of the law of God as it is given to us in Scripture.
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You understand there's not a unilateral understanding of God's law, right? You could go to four different churches today.
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You could throw a stone and hit four different churches and you'd get four different understandings of God's law.
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That doesn't mean God's law is incomprehensible or something that we can't understand.
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It's just that men tend to interpret things in accordance to what they want.
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And some people have this desire to find their righteousness in fulfilling the law.
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So they tend to be legalistic.
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And then we have some people that have no desire at all to want to serve God in the fulfillment of his law.
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And those tend to be licentious.
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So you have this sort of extreme on both ends.
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But what we have here is covenant theology, new covenant theology, dispensational theology, which I obviously had to shorten that one, and then this new one that has kind of become more on my radar screen.
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I don't know if I told you the story about the debate.
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The Torah observant group, I had a Torah observant group reach out to me to do a debate last year.
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And I responded.
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I said, sure, I need three months to prepare because I've never heard of you.
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I don't know what you are.
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The guy said, no, I need somebody who can do it right away.
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Okay, so not me.
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I'm not going to do it if I don't have time to prepare.
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I don't know who you are.
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So because of that, I began to look into Torah observant.
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How many of you know what that is? Okay, well, I'm going to explain it.
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I'll start with them and then work my way backwards.
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Torah observant is exactly what it sounds like.
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They believe that as a Christian, and they do believe that they are Christians, and they believe, according to their teaching, that they are saved by grace through faith.
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I'm not sure if they use by faith alone because that is the big distinction because even Roman Catholics would say, we're saved by grace through faith.
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The distinction is not saved by grace through faith.
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It is by grace alone through faith alone.
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And if you ask a Roman Catholic, are you saved by faith? They will say yes.
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Say, are you saved by faith alone? They will say absolutely not.
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In fact, the Council of Trent, Second Vatican, all affirm that to say that someone is saved by grace through faith alone, they are anathema.
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They are not teaching what the Roman Catholic Church would believe.
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So Torah observant would say they're saved by grace through faith.
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I do not know if they would say by faith alone, but I don't know that they wouldn't.
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So I don't want to misrepresent history.
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Is this similar to Hebrew Roots Movement? It is, it is.
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The Hebrew Roots is another.
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In fact, they're very, very, very similar, and I don't know that there's a distinction at all.
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But usually if you look up one, you'll see the other.
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In fact, New to Torah is a website that's one of their leading websites because a lot of people that are joining this movement are new to it.
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So it's new2torah.net or .com, I forget.
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But that's their big push.
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And the idea is that the law of God is found in the books of Moses primarily.
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It's not only meant as a covenant between God and the nation of Israel, but it is to be a covenant that is kept between God and his people for all time, of which we are all a part by virtue of having been grafted into Israel.
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And so far, so good, right? I don't have a problem with saying I've been grafted into Israel.
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I'm the son and daughter of Abraham.
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As Jesus said, those who believe in me are the children of Abraham.
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Paul said that, and Romans had no problem with that.
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The issue, though, is they then say that the fullness of God's law, that is the Torah from Genesis to Deuteronomy, is applicable to the life of the believer with the exception of sacrifices.
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They do not perform sacrifices, temple sacrifices.
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But they do believe the keeping of the feasts, the seven feasts of Israel, are necessary, that you, if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you've been grafted into Israel, you are now a son of the Torah, you're a bar mitzvah, a son of the law, you are now responsible for keeping the feasts.
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In fact, when they really make their noise is right around Christmas, because you're celebrating that pagan holiday, which was put forward by Constantine, and when he mixed paganism and Christianity, and how dare you celebrate Christmas but not celebrate the feasts, the seven feasts.
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These are God's holidays.
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How dare you not celebrate God's holidays.
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So the keeping of the feasts, very, very huge.
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And they are very, like I said, they're on Facebook, and I see them come up, yeah, this week we're doing our feast of booths or whatever.
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The next one is the keeping of the dietary restrictions.
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That is the food that would be considered unclean.
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That's your pork sandwich.
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That's your shrimp scampi.
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That's all the stuff that we now thank God for the cleanliness of all foods.
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But anyway, keeping of the dietary restrictions, absolutely.
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In fact, they would say that those things aren't even food, because there's a passage in Mark where it says that Jesus declared all food clean.
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But if you ask them, well, how do you define this? And they say, well, that's not food.
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No, they say pork was not considered food.
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Shrimp, crab, those shellfish, not considered food.
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So when Jesus declared all food clean, and I believe it's Mark 7 rather.
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Is the word food or all things? No, it says all food.
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All food, okay.
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They would say, actually, some of them argue that it's a textual variant.
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I have not found that to be true, but that's an easy out for some people to say, well, that just wasn't what Jesus meant or wasn't what Jesus said.
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But the other argument was, well, it's not food, because that was never considered food by Jewish people.
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So Jesus can't declare clean.
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What is it? Food.
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So there again, I think they're stretching the context quite a bit.
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Seventh-day Adventist is a form of this, but they have a very strong prophetic point that the LNG white teachings and things about end times and stuff.
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There's a very obscure weirdness that comes with it.
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And I say weirdness.
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I'm not being ugly.
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There's a lot of weirdness that comes with SDA that isn't necessarily in the Torah observable.
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But they're really strong.
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SDA is really strong in keeping of the dietary restrictions, keeping of the seventh-day Sabbath, which is Saturday, and, of course, the feasts and things like that.
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I've got a friend who's going to be here this morning who's seventh-day Adventist.
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Oh, you really? Yeah.
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Cool.
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Okay.
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And again, in the question, and people ask sometimes about the SDA versus other churches, I believe there are gospel preachers in the SDA.
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I think they have some confusion on certain things, but, yeah, I wouldn't.
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And, again, I don't know where the Torah observant guys are as far as with the gospel because I haven't heard enough of the gospel.
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It's so much about the Torah.
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It's so much about the law, but the law is not the gospel.
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The law is what points us to the need for the gospel.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But they're so focused on the Torah, it's hard to understand what they know about the gospel.
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But, anyway, they keep the feasts, keep the dietary restrictions, and they keep the Sabbath.
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Huge.
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What is the Sabbath? Saturday.
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Saturday.
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It's the seventh day.
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Yes, sir, you were going to ask? How do they justify overlooking the sacrifice? Sacrifices.
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Is that because Jesus is here and he was the sacrifice? Yeah, and there's no place to do the sacrifice.
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The temple's been destroyed and things like that.
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Sort of like with the Jewish community.
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The Jewish community would say, well, we don't keep the sacrifice because there's no place to do it.
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There's no temple.
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So they now have replaced the temple sacrifice with almsgiving.
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They don't want to deal with Peter.
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Yeah, could you imagine? Wow.
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That's a great point.
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Yeah, because when they did the sacrifices on Passover in Israel, the Kidron Valley, the brook, blood red, because of all the blood that was coming out of those sacrifices.
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Could you imagine Peter would go absolutely crazy if that was happening today? So just to outline, because I do want to get back to the text, the Torah Observer community says, as a Christian, you should want to keep the law.
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It's not a matter of this is going to save you.
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This is what you should want to do.
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Now, I never would say I play the devil's advocate because I never advocate for the devil, but to stand on their side for a minute, I would say this.
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As a Christian pastor, I would say, as a believer, there are some things you should want to do and there are some things you shouldn't want to do.
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Because the Bible says when you are saved, the God takes out the heart of stone and replaces it with the heart of flesh, and that heart of flesh desires to serve Christ, right? So we would all say that as a Christian, there are some things we should want to do and there are some things we shouldn't want to do.
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I shouldn't want to go out and murder people.
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I shouldn't want to go out and cheat on my wife.
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I shouldn't want to beat my kids.
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And I should want to serve Christ.
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I should want to come to church.
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I should want to serve the Lord.
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And when I see somebody who says, I'm a Christian, but I like beating my wife and I don't like going to church, I would say, hey, maybe you're not a Christian.
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So on that note, if somebody comes along and says, well, you should be doing these things in salvation, but not for salvation, we can then have a conversation.
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But if they're saying it's for salvation, then the conversation is over.
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If you're telling me I got to do this to be saved, you're violating scripture.
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Because salvation is by grace, through faith, alone, and not of works, lest any man should boast.
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For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works, not by good works.
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We are saved for the good works, not by them.
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So that automatically, if you talk to somebody and they say, you got to do this to be saved, say, slow down, slow your roll, you have jumped the track.
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But if somebody says, you know what, as a Christian, I think you should want to keep the Torah, well, now we can have a conversation.
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I don't agree with what you're saying, but I don't think that what you're saying, because if you want to keep the Torah, as a believer, one, I don't think you can perfectly, but if you want to keep the Torah as a believer, I'm not going to say you can't, in that that desire is necessarily sinful, because Romans 14 tells me that if you have a certain conviction that isn't mine, as long as that conviction doesn't violate Scripture, then I can't tell you to violate your conscience.
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And if celebrating Christmas in the way that another person does violates your conscience, we have people here, this church would not have a Christmas tree in their home, because they do not want a Christmas tree in their home and they think it's a violation of their conscience.
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And you know what I don't do? I don't say, hey, where's your Christmas tree? There are some people here who don't celebrate Christmas at all.
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They just kind of let it go by.
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That's fine.
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But on the other hand, the Torah observant people would say, you are in sin for celebrating Christmas, or you are in sin for celebrating Easter, which we call Resurrection Sunday.
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I don't like the word Easter because of some of the historical connotations, but they'll say, don't even do that.
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You should be celebrating Passover.
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You should be celebrating Pentecost.
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Yes, sir? They don't keep the sacrifices.
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Do they keep the rest of the entire Torah, including the stonings and the burnings? Obviously, they would not be doing that, whether or not they believe it should be done.
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There is something, and I'm going to get over here in a minute, there's something called theonomy.
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Theonomy is the belief that God's law should govern all of life.
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In fact, government should be based on God's law, and there are some theonomists who would believe that the civil punishments in Scripture should be enacted by the government.
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I don't know what the Torah observant, I don't want to speak for them on that.
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I don't know what they would say, and I don't want to misrepresent them.
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Theonomists, though, do believe that the government should be enforcing God's law.
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That's what theonomos is law.
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Theos is God.
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Theonomos is the idea that God's law should govern all of life.
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Now, not all theonomists believe that we should be stoning people either, but they do believe that God's law should be the basis for all of our laws.
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And we're going to get to that in a minute because that is very important, and that is what's in the text.
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But just very quickly, going back over here real quick, covenant theology, classic covenant theology which is found in Presbyterianism, Reformed Baptist churches, things like that.
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Covenant theology says that the law of God can be understood as a tripartite law.
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The law is moral, the law is civil, and the law is ceremonial.
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And so we can see there are laws that are moral.
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Thou shalt not steal.
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That's a moral imperative.
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But when the text of Scripture says when you steal, you must be punished, and this is how you are to be punished, and this is where the punishment is going to be played out, that's civil.
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Because that's dealing with justice and punishment.
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So that becomes a civil issue.
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Today, thieves are dealt with differently than they were 200 years ago.
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200 years ago, a horse thief would get hung.
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Nowadays, you can commit grand theft and spend six months in jail.
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Things have changed.
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So civil law does undergo somewhat of a flux.
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So we have moral law.
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Thou shalt not steal.
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Civil law is how do we handle jurisprudence in regard to the moral law.
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Because all law is moral.
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We have to understand that.
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There is no law that's not based on some idea of right and wrong.
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So all law is moral, but how you enact punishment and justice is a civil matter.
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The third is ceremonial.
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Ceremonial is how do we, as sinful people, have a relationship with the Holy God.
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He gives us this priesthood.
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This is the Old Covenant.
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He gives a priesthood by which sinful man can have a relationship with the Holy God, and it's through the sacrifice.
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The sacrifice is made first for the priest, then for the people, and the sacrifice is taken into the temple by the priest, who then places the blood on the altar, and the sins of the people are paid for by that blood.
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He prays over the scapegoat.
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Remember that? The scapegoat goes out.
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I'm certainly covering a lot in a very short amount of time, but you understand, those were ceremonies.
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Those ceremonies all pictured something that was yet to come.
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When Jesus Christ died on the cross, he died as the ultimate fulfillment of every one of those ceremonies.
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And I believe every one of the feasts.
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We'll get to that in a moment.
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But the idea of a ceremony is that it's not really a moral component.
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It's a component of relationship.
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It's not about I stole something and there's justice that's being done to me.
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There's a ceremony that pictures what God is doing for me.
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God is saving me by this work, but not the work itself.
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What does Hebrews tell us about the blood of bulls and goats? The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, right? So we know that not one drop of goat blood, not one drop of bull blood ever paid for sin, but it was a picture of what would later come.
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It was a shadow of the reality, and that's where we're going to get to the text in a moment, of what was to come in Christ.
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So we have covenant theology says there's three fold law, moral, ceremonial, civil.
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And what do we have to deal with today? Well, according to covenant theology, the ceremonial law, completely fulfilled in Christ, absolutely unnecessary to sacrifice, unnecessary to perform the feast because all of these things have found their fulfillment in Christ.
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The civil law has given way to the nation of Israel as it was a theocracy, no longer exists as it did as a theocracy.
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So we now are bound to the civil law of the land that we live in.
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Romans 13 says submit to authority and that authority, whether we're in Rome, whether we're in America, whether we're in Iraq, we do have to submit to the authority.
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So civil law gives away to whatever, wherever we are.
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But the moral law of God doesn't change, right? The moral law of God is continuing.
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So covenant theology says the law of God is trifold and what we have to concern ourselves with as followers of Jesus Christ is the moral law of God, not the ceremonial, not the civil, but the moral.
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New covenant theology says that even the moral law is no longer in force.
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And you say, oh, that sounds a lot, that sounds terrible because that's saying that anybody can do anything that they want.
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No.
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New covenant theology says that the law of Israel has been made obsolete.
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Hebrews 8.13 says that the old covenant has come or the old covenant is made obsolete by the new covenant.
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The word obsolete is used there and it says that the law, including the civil, ceremonial, moral, has been made obsolete.
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By what? The law of Christ, also called the law of love in the New Testament.
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It talks about the law of love.
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In new covenant theology, Jesus Christ is seen as a new Moses.
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Now, we don't have a problem with calling Jesus a new Aaron.
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He's certainly the better Aaron.
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He's the better priest.
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New covenant theology would say Jesus is also the better Moses because he gives us not only the law, but he gives us the law of the heart.
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He doesn't say don't commit adultery.
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He says don't even look with lust.
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He doesn't say don't murder.
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He says don't even hate.
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So Jesus Christ has given us a deeper law, a better, more powerful law.
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This is, again, I'm giving you the different perspectives.
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So new covenant theology would say all of the old covenant has been made obsolete and the new covenant, which is found in the gospels and in the epistles, contains the law that believers are now to live under.
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You can't keep our covenant.
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You can't hold our covenant.
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And I'm going to, you're right, and I'm going to point something out in just a second because I don't think there's a bigger distinction here as most people think because there is a distinction between new covenant and covenant theology, but the big issue is what is it about the new covenant law that we're really focused on and that's the moral component.
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So really it's very, very similar.
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It's just how do you understand.
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Here's where I would say I tend to understand new covenant guys because here's, I'm going to ask you this.
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If you're a covenant person, if this is where you come from, where in scripture do you find the distinction between moral, civil, and ceremonial law? Because there's nowhere in scripture that says, okay, all these laws are moral, all these laws are ceremonial, and all these laws, they're intermingled and you do have to make decisions.
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For instance, tattoos.
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The Old Testament talks about cutting yourself in the flesh and making marks on yourself for the dead.
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Now some people would say, hey, that doesn't have anything to do with modern tattoos because that was a pagan ritual that focused on cutting yourself for the purpose of identifying with necromancy or talking to the dead and it was a pagan ritual.
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Okay.
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But let's just say you did want to say, well, it's talking about tattoos.
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Does that fall under ceremonial or moral? How do you know? That's because I've got two girls that goes under moral.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But you understand what I'm saying.
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There are laws that some could say this is moral and others say, well, no, that's ceremonial or no, that's civil.
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So New Covenant theology says, no, we don't, this whole thing has been made obsolete by this whole thing.
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And people say, oh, I don't like it.
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That makes me uncomfortable.
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I don't want to spend a lot of time arguing on this, but the point of it is when we talk about God's law, I would argue that there is a transcendent law of God that was revealed through Moses to Israel, but it was not revealed in its fullness.
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And I believe that it was revealed in more of its fullness in the person of Jesus Christ.
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And the law of God is primarily a moral law.
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And here's why I would say that.
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Because in Romans chapter 2, it says that all men have the law of God written on their heart.
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And you know what people don't have written on their heart? Don't get a tattoo.
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You know what people don't have written on their heart? Every year you need to get a priest and you need to go sacrifice an animal and you need to take his blood in and you need to put it on a golden altar.
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But you know what all men do now? Don't lie.
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Because every government, even the backwoods tribes, even they have rules against lying.
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And even they have rules against murder.
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And they have understandings of things like marriages.
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And while they may have a different understanding of polygamy, hey, in the old covenant there were guys who were polygamists, but they still understand laws like adultery.
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Right? My point is simply this.
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There is a moral component of the law that transcends the covenant God made with Moses.
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And that moral component of the law is what when we talk about the law of love or the law of Christ, that's it.
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Now you can go back and say that is found in the old covenant.
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It is there.
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There is moral law in the old covenant.
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But it's also in the new covenant.
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And when someone says, well, as a Christian we're lawless, that's foolish.
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We're not lawless.
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But we don't have to consider all of the 600 and some odd precepts to have a relationship with God.
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Because that covenant has been made obsolete by the new covenant.
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Dispensationalism, I don't know what I'm going to get into.
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I'll make it short.
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I'll make it short.
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Yeah, we don't have a lot of time.
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What time is it by the way? About 1010? Okay, I've only got a few minutes left.
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Dispensationalism basically says God has two plans.
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God has a plan for the nation of Israel, which is the law.
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God has a plan for the church, which is grace.
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Law came through Moses.
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Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
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They make a hard distinction there and they say the church has no real relationship with Israel other than the fact that they're both God's people.
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But it's two people of God, not one.
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Covenant theology says there's one people of God that Israel has been entered into by the church.
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The church becomes part of the nation of Israel.
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Dispensationalism says no.
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The church is distinct from Israel and has its own plan.
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Israel has the plan that God has given to them, which has now essentially been put down so that God would deal with the church and there's coming a time when God will rapture the church out and He will begin to deal with Israel again.
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This is classic dispensational premillennialism.
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Pre-tribulation, premillennial dispensationalism is long words.
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Something means, and most of you probably heard this, that there's coming a day when the church will go.
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And when the church goes, God's going to begin His focus again on the nation of Israel and from there, we'll build a new temple and there'll be a seven-year tribulation and at the end of that seven-year tribulation, Jesus Christ will return and there will be a culmination of a thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ from Jerusalem.
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Two returns.
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Yeah.
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The first return, if you count the rapture, which they would say He didn't step foot.
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So He didn't really come.
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And that's their argument.
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And again, I'm not saying it's not important.
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I just don't have a lot of time.
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But they do view a distinction between the law of Israel as being for Israel and the church being under grace.
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But what happens a lot of times in dispensationalism, and I'm not trying to throw them under the bus, what happens a lot of times in dispensationalism, you end up with licentiousness.
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I was told in seminary, the Sermon on the Mount doesn't apply to you.
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Sermon on the Mount doesn't apply to you at all because that was for Israel.
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Jesus was preaching to Israel and you're not Israel.
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You're the church.
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This guy had a PhD.
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As in do whatever you want? Well, I don't think the guy would be a total lawless guy like that.
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I would still think as a believer he would say that we have moral component.
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The same basic moral law.
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Yeah, but he would say that the Sermon on the Mount and what Jesus was talking about was specifically to Israel to clear up their faulty theology.
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It wasn't for the church.
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In fact, here's an argument that was made.
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He says, well, in the prayer, we prayed every Sunday.
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The model prayer.
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Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
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And it gets to the part where it says, forgive us of our trespasses.
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You can say, we don't have to pray that anymore.
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Because our trespass has been forgiven in Christ.
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So that prayer doesn't apply to us.
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I disagree, but this is the argument.
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Okay? Having said all that, I want to look now, because we don't have time, and of course I ran out of time, as I always do.
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I want to look at this passage in Colossians because it says in verse 16, Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival, or a new moon, or a Sabbath.
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What do you think is the focus of that passage? When you see the words, questions of food and drink, that would be dietary restrictions.
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With regard to a festival, that would be feasts.
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And with regard to a new moon or a Sabbath, that is regarding not only, you've got to remember in Israel, there wasn't one Sabbath.
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There wasn't just the Saturday thing.
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They had a Sabbath.
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They had a Sabbath of Sabbaths, and they had a Sabbath of years.
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Every seven years, there's a year of Jubilee.
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No.
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Is it 490 years? That's a...
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I could be...
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Jubilee is 50 years.
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49 years.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, Sabbath of Sabbaths.
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So every 49 years, boom.
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There was...
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Everybody got to...
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A year off.
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Yeah, and everybody got to go back.
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If you were a slave, you were freed, and all those things.
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The year of Jubilee was very important.
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So there wasn't just one Sabbath.
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It wasn't just the Saturday.
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But there were these Sabbaths that were kept.
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So, verse 16 is saying, let no one pass judgment on you.
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Now I'm going to give you the perspective of the Torah observant group.
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They say that the Apostle Paul is talking to new Christians who are now observing the Torah, and all of the pagans are upset that they're observing the Torah, and they're passing judgment on them because they will no longer eat their food, and that they will no longer come to their festivals, but they have their own festivals, and that they are now Sabbath keepers.
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And they say...
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The Torah observant people say, see, when you become a Christian, you're going to start keeping the feasts.
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You're going to start keeping the dietary restrictions.
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You're going to start doing this and this and this, keeping the Sabbath.
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And the world will not like that.
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Don't let them pass judgment on you.
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See how they've adjusted the context? Because what I believe the text is saying, and I think I can bear this out historically, is that it's the other way around.
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It's that you have a Jewish community that demands the keeping of the feasts, the keeping of the Sabbath, the keeping of the dietary laws, to the Gentiles.
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Because that's the whole problem.
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Go back to Acts 15.
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The first Jerusalem council, what was the argument? They're not doing what we do.
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They can't be a Christian if they're not first a Jew.
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And what was the determination of the council? No, that's not correct.
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The salvation comes to them the same way it came to us by grace through faith alone.
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So when he says, therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink or regard to a festival, new moon or Sabbath, he's talking, I believe, to Christians who are now being persecuted by the Jewish community that's saying, you must do these things.
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Sure, you can be a Christian, but you've got to be a Jew first.
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That was the issue with the Judaizers.
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That was the issue in Galatians.
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I believe it's the issue here in Colossians as well.
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Because, he goes on to say in verse 17, these, what are these? Contextually, these are questions of food and drink, festivals, new moons and Sabbaths.
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These are a shadow of things to come.
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Meaning that when they were enforced, Old Covenant, when they were enforced, they didn't actually have the substance, they had the shadow.
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They were what we call a type or picture.
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But there's coming, and at this point had already come, the fulfillment or the substance of that shadow.
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And what is it? Christ.
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Again, what's the subject of this chapter? The sufficiency of Christ.
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Somebody's telling you that you've got to keep the feast.
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Somebody's telling you that you've got to keep the Sabbath.
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Somebody's telling you that you have to keep the new moon or the dietary restrictions.
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Know this, those things had a purpose and a place, but those things were a shadow.
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The substance belongs to Christ.
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Therefore, verse 18, let no one disqualify you.
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Insisting on asceticism, which is essentially self-beating, or worship of angels going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by the central mind, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourishing it together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
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Do not let them disqualify you for looking at Christ alone.
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Do not let them disqualify you for that, because that is the nature of Christianity.
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It's that Christ is our all in all.
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Remember, we used to sing that song.
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He is our all in all.
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Does that mean that as a Christian I have no moral standard? No, I have the ultimate moral standard.
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I have the word of God.
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I have the law of God.
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But my moral standards are not based on a covenant God made with Israel 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago.
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My covenant is the covenant that God made in Jesus Christ when he says, Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you a whole new list of works.
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No.
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He said, I will give you rest.
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So there's a lot more that could be said, and I wish we had time, but I hope that was helpful in understanding a little bit more about this passage.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for the truth.
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I pray that this has been helpful for your people, and I pray that we would seek to better understand your law and how it applies in our lives.
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In Christ's name, amen.