Answering Hebrew Roots and Black Hebrew Israelites

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00:10

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host of Striving for Eternity, Andrew Rappaport.

00:27

All right, we are live, Apologetics Live, coming to you because of the strange virus that we have, this pandemic that is going around.

00:37

We're going to do this over the internet. You're thinking of a virus called stupidity.

00:42

That's right. That is the name of the virus that I'm convinced everybody is. I just don't get this whole virus thing.

00:50

Sorry, folks. All these schools are canceling because people are going nuts.

00:56

I don't get it. Yep. Sorry. Not that. Just looking at the percentages. This is the importance of getting facts.

01:05

But that aside, tonight we're going to be talking with the author of this book.

01:11

Oh, wait. Doesn't that look so much better? It looks great covering up my face with this. All right.

01:17

So, Torahism. Are Christians required to keep the law of Moses?

01:24

And so we're going to have R .L. Saalberg. If you listen to my Rappaport podcast, you are aware of this.

01:31

We've spent an hour going through this book, getting into details. But if you have friends, wait, let me just stop.

01:38

Stop. You do have friends that are in Hebrew Roots Movement. All of you. I know you do, because basically everyone seems to.

01:46

But you got to make sure they're watching this, listening to this. And more importantly, make sure they're going out to the website

01:57

Torahismbook .com. They're going to need to go there for a very simple reason. They need to read this book.

02:02

Robert, welcome to Apologetics Live. You never know what's going to happen with me.

02:09

At some point, I'm going to be able to explain in the future what's been going on this week, what it was like.

02:16

It's been a very busy week. But that aside,

02:22

I'm looking in the wrong group. No wonder why I can't find it. Your bookshelves are empty because of the coronavirus?

02:28

Is that what I'm understanding? That's right. My bookshelves are empty because of the stupidity virus.

02:36

It's a pandemic of stupidity everywhere. I do like,

02:41

I did like, there was a, someone had grabbed some quotes.

02:47

I forget the senator from New York now. I'm just remembering everything tonight. But he, they had his tweet from like early

02:55

May, where the guy was criticizing Trump for not doing, for closing the borders to China and how we needed to replace him because he was so radical in what he was doing.

03:07

And then like a month later, he's the same guy is saying that this president's not doing enough.

03:14

And we need to remove him. Basically, we need to remove him. Robert, let's get into, for folks who didn't listen to the podcast, let's get into discussing a little bit of your background.

03:29

And then, you know, obviously, you must be from like a Jewish background that you want to write about Jewish laws.

03:38

And right, that's, that's got to be it, right? Well, no, not technically, but I am one to 3 %

03:45

East, East European Jewish, according to Ancestry .com. But yeah, I wasn't raised

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Jewish at all. Ancestry .com thinks everybody seems to be Jewish, but they're,

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I think they're, if I'm very quickly, they're owned by Mormons, which for Mormons, they have to be one of the 10 tribes.

04:01

So like everybody in the world is, you know, is there. So Yeah, no, actually,

04:07

I mean, I first found out about tourism, which is a term that I had coined myself.

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But just by engaging with some old friends that used to be Christians, and, and one fall, they decided to start posting anti Christmas memes, which is pretty weird.

04:25

At first, I thought, well, that's strange. These guys are old friends of ours, you know, from Minnesota, where I'm from,

04:30

I live in Nashville now. So I hadn't talked to them in quite a while, was surprised to find that they were posting that.

04:37

And I thought, okay, I'll jump in. Why is Christmas a pagan holiday? And that just kind of was like Alice in the

04:42

Wonderland, I stopped, I stumbled into this whole other belief system that I, at the time, I wasn't aware that it even existed.

04:48

It's kind of this weird, halfway land between Judaism and Christianity. And so that's, that's it, this whole thing started out as just me talking with friends turned into several blog articles on my blog, which is our at rlsolberg .com.

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And then over the course of a couple of months, I started having people say, well, this might make an interesting book, because they aren't the people that I was speaking with my old friends, they aren't specifically

05:13

Hebrew roots, but a lot of overlap. It's the same concept of Christians needing, or they're saying

05:20

Christians needing to return to Torah, needing to practice all the Old Testament laws, even though they at the same time, they believe that Jesus came and that he was the

05:30

Messiah. So it's this kind of weird, weird, weird world that I stumbled into. That was really the start of this book.

05:37

And this is the thing, you know, you and I were talking before, before we went live.

05:43

And so I want to tell the audience the story that I was telling you before we went live, but of why

05:50

I need to start traveling with copies of your book. Now, first off, anybody, I said this on my podcast, on the

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Wrap Report podcast, I'll say it here. You need to go and buy several copies of this book,

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Torahism. I'll cover my face so that suddenly I look better. But you can go to Torahismbook .com

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and pick up a copy. Why? I actually say you need to pick up multiple copies, because one for you and one to give away, because you will need to.

06:19

I think after our podcast, someone said he bought six for members in his church.

06:24

That's good. Go do that. Because the reality is there is someone you're going to know who is at least, if they're not engaged in this, there's so many people that are just playing with it.

06:39

And we're going to talk about why that is a little bit dangerous maybe in a bit. But this weekend, this last weekend,

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I was out in Huntington Beach, California. And I was, you know, basically

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I was going out with a friend of mine who does open air evangelism there every week. And he's out there and he's, basically what happens is every week, he is up there and when he is preaching the gospel, there is a guy with a shofar.

07:06

Now, for folks that don't know what a shofar is, just look over my shoulder. Oh, wait, no, wait, sorry. It's packed.

07:12

I don't have it. Okay. But it looks, it's a horn, like a ram's horn. And, you know, what it, it basically, if you know how to blow it right, can get a very, very loud sound.

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And this guy tries to drown out Ray every time he's preaching every week. And so,

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I figured I'd go over and have a chat with him. And he had this whole chart up there.

07:35

Basically, what he was trying to do was to show everybody that we need to be realizing that we need to get back to our

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Jewish roots. It was interesting, you know, Robert, because he said, everyone's

07:47

Jewish. I was like, okay, that's an interesting one. But he couldn't tell me which tribe he was from.

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And then he proceeded to tell me that I can't know which tribe I'm from. But he had this thing up there, it had the prophecy of Daniel and the 70 sevens.

08:09

And as we're looking at that, I could see he's got it laid out. The first set, the seven sevens is 49 years and the beginning of the completion of the building of the wall and the temple to the, you know, for that.

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And then he's got the 62 times seven. So, he's got the dates as years. And he's going through this whole thing explaining how no

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Jewish person would expect the Messiah to be on earth for more than a year. And so, the proof that this is something supernatural is the fact that the

08:44

Holy Spirit was on earth for 490 days. And I went, wait, where did the days come from?

08:50

He's like, well, that's a riddle. I'm like, what makes this a riddle? And he basically just says, because we know it is.

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No, you have to follow rules of interpretation, which he didn't want to do. He ended up getting frustrated with me.

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So, he turned to Dr. Silvestro, who had an open Bible for a while, and he was upset.

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And I let him go for about 10, well, at least 15 minutes, maybe even 20 before I said anything. I just let him do his thing.

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And then I started to interrupt him, and he did not want that. He didn't want any interruption. But then as he's getting frustrated not being able to answer my questions, he turns to Dr.

09:30

Silvestro and he's like, well, what is it? You have something you want to say. So, Anthony starts to read from Hebrews 8 and 9 because this guy was making a big thing about the tabernacle has been discovered under a, you know, on a mountain.

09:47

The convenient thing about it being discovered, though, you'll love this, Robert, it's always good to have a system that when you come up with a theory, there's no way to prove it.

09:58

We know that this was found because this rabbi found it, and seven people tried to move it, and they all died.

10:05

And they're gone. They vanished. So, how do you know that it's actually there?

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Like you're saying, the only eyewitnesses are gone. So, you've…

10:17

When did that happen? Is he saying that was a recent thing? Yeah, yeah.

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He was saying this. Now, the irony is in this big chart that he had, he had Christ return in like 2017, and it was crossed out, and he wrote in 2023.

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Convenient, and all because we found the tabernacle. So, Anthony's reading about Hebrews, and that we don't look to the tabernacle, we look to Christ.

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And he looks at Anthony, he goes, I can't do this. I can't do it. I can't have two of you at once. Only one of you at a time. I said, well, you're talking to me.

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He goes, but he keeps interrupting. And I literally was like, dude, you just invited him into the conversation.

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He's been silent until you asked him to speak. He didn't interrupt, at which point he started blowing his shofar to avoid talking to me.

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I wanted to have a copy of your book to hand it to him. I told him the website, but here was the interesting thing.

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In God's providence, there was a couple that was, you know, wearing clothing that would be identified as Jewish people.

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We were able to see the, you know, taluses, you know, draping out.

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And so, we see this couple. The guy is really, really steeped in this

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Hebrew roots. The wife is steeped in it, but not as much. She's just kind of,

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I think, following her husband. So, this guy that we're talking to really wanted to talk to her, right, to talk to this couple.

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But instead, since I was talking to him, Anthony took the two of them aside and then started straightening her out on a whole lot of things.

11:56

So, hopefully, they, you know, they'll hear that.

12:02

We gave them also, told them to go find your book and gave them the website. So, I think I need to have a couple copies of your book when

12:08

I travel. Yeah, yeah. So, let me ask you, Shofar dude, was he a Jew or was he a

12:14

Christian? He thinks he is. Okay, all right.

12:20

Maybe he's a tourist. Well, you gotta remember, he thinks everyone's Jewish. Right. So, you know, when you become a

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Christian, you suddenly get Jewish heritage somehow, I guess. I, you know. Grafted in,

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I could maybe go with that. Okay, I could go with that, but that's not what he was saying.

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And that's what, like, he was calling the Jewish people, the nation of Israel, his descendants or, you know, his.

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Yeah, that's a little troublesome. Or his ancestors saying, you know, I'm like, dude, it doesn't work that way.

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Like, you know, but this is, I'm saying all this to say, this is not an uncommon thing.

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This is something we're seeing in a lot of places, more than just the, you know, arguments that Christmas and Easter are, you know, pagan holidays or Roman holidays and made up.

13:09

And I mean, there are some that deny the deity of Christ as well. You address this. Right, yeah. You know, one of the things.

13:17

That's freaking scary. Very scary. Yeah. Here's the thing that I loved about your book and why it was so helpful, and we're going to get into it in a bit, but as I sat there on the streets this past weekend, there is not a single argument that any of these three people gave to me that wasn't addressed in your book.

13:37

Oh, OK, that's good. Every single, I mean, I was like wishing I had the copy because I could have just gone, oh, page 75, that covers it.

13:47

Yeah. That's the thing that was amazing to me about the way your book was laid out was

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I literally had this conversation with three different people and not one argument, except for his charts and his, that craziness.

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But the arguments for us returning to the law of Moses, not one of them asked me anything that wasn't already in your book.

14:08

And so, we'll probably get into some of those. I should mention, if anyone wants to join and ask any questions, you can go to ApologeticsLive .com.

14:16

There is a link to participate there. I see Nicholas and Mr. Batman is here. I don't know who

14:23

Mr. Batman is. Maybe it's Calvinist Batman. But, you know, the thing is, if you want to join, come on in.

14:33

We're going to be opening it up in a bit. First, I want to give Robert a chance to talk about the book, to explain what you're going to find when you get a copy of this book.

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And why, and then I want you and I to discuss why we think there's such an intrigue for people about this.

14:50

So, give a layout of the book, why you wrote it the way you did, and what people can expect from it.

14:56

Robert Leonard Sure. Yeah. I mean, what you just brought up, I think, is an important reason, or an important byproduct of how the book came to be.

15:04

So, you said that when I engaged with my friends, we went deep on a lot of stuff.

15:13

They were actually very gracious, and in their minds, they're really trying to pursue

15:18

God. So, you know, I want to give them credit for that. But as we dove in, all kinds of people.

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So, this was, I think I mentioned to you on your podcast, this was one of, probably the rarest literary form ever, which was a productive

15:34

Facebook argument. They only come around once every so often.

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But this ended up being, I think maybe because I knew them, there's a lot of respect. But because it went on for so long, it went on over a month, a lot of people had jumped in.

15:48

So, I ended up having a chance. It had all these offshoots, and I ended up spending a lot of time, three or four months, just engaging with people, understanding what their arguments were.

15:57

And after a little while, you start to see a pattern. It's kind of like apologetics in the larger sense.

16:05

But there's certain pillars of argumentation that they use. And so, as I started collecting and looking at all that,

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I started to notice those patterns. And I decided to try to adopt those patterns in how I laid out the book. So, basically, the book is laid out, first of all, part one is kind of setting the table for the conversation.

16:25

Because there's confusion, even among Jews and Christians and scholars, about what does the

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Torah mean? So, it can mean different things. And I tried to adopt a more academic understanding of what actually the

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Torah is. So, I explained, first of all, what is the Torah, so we can all get our terms straight.

16:45

And then I talked about what is Torahism. Because that's a term that I coined to address a wide, varying group of sects that all believe similar things, but not exactly the same thing.

17:02

So, that was a little bit of a challenge for me, in that there was not one big standard, one doctrine that I could go to that says, this is what these people believe, you know?

17:13

So, in the book, I try to, in two different areas, I try to lay out an aggregate sort of statement of beliefs.

17:21

And with the folks that I was engaging with at the time, I ran it by them. And I said, is this right?

17:26

I don't want to misquote you. Tell me, does this represent what you're talking about? And, you know, I got agreement that, yeah, okay, yeah, you got that right.

17:33

That's exactly right. So, those are the belief statements or the creeds that I put in the book.

17:39

And against which, I then, in the second half of the book, start examining those claims from those creeds.

17:45

So, they have all kinds of claims. And I kind of broke it down into a few different sections. There's claims about the

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Torah. So, we talk about, is the Torah eternal? And was it meant for all nations?

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And, you know, the big one, was it abolished? So, that's Matthew 5, 17. It's a big one that they bring up.

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And then we talk about claims about the commandments. So, we look at specific things.

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Keeping the feasts. Keeping the Sabbath. You know, the kosher food dietary restrictions. Spend a lot of time going into the temple and what that all meant.

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The priests and the sacrifice and the worship and all that stuff. There's a lot of historical claims. I think the core of Torahism comes from a historical claim about the corruption of Christianity by, well, by several folks.

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But they often point to Constantine in 325 as the source of all this corruption that went down through history.

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And now today, this is what Torahism believes, that today when Christians sit in the pews on a

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Sunday morning, they're hearing lies from their pastor. And their pastor may not even know their lies, but they've just absorbed all this corruption.

18:53

So, we examine that in a lot of detail. And then this gets to the scary part for me.

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I'll just say that I'm a big fan of exploring the Jewish roots of the

19:04

Christian faith. I love understanding the covenants. I love understanding the journey, the storyline of Israel, going from a man to a family, to a tribe, to a nation and understanding all that.

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That's okay. But when you start crossing the line, and this is where Torahism crosses the line, we start getting into issues of their claims about God and their claims about salvation.

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So, they're talking about things like Jesus wasn't divine. So, we look at that. There's no trinity.

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If Jesus wasn't divine, if he was just a man, then the trinity is a Roman corruption, they say.

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And then they start talking about salvation comes through obeying the Torah, which is really, this whole area is very strange to me because how can you...

19:51

Well, we can get into it, but it just opens up a Pandora's box when you start getting into the idea that, like they'll say, for example,

19:58

Jesus was just a man, yet he was the Messiah, but because he was a man, you should not be worshipping him.

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So, when Christians worship Jesus, according to Torahism, they are committing idolatry and worshipping a human.

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So, this is where you get into the real weird stuff. But it's kind of like Mormonism and the Latter -day

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Saints where you have to kind of dig down a few layers below the pop level to start uncovering those kind of scary roots.

20:23

Yeah, and the thing, by the way, some of the folks are saying you're not as loud as me.

20:29

I pumped you up here, but... Oh, I can. Yeah, I know you can. No, you can do this. Yeah, there you go.

20:36

Let me put, I'll put my mic closer. You actually, for folks who don't know, you have a background that you and I obviously would share anyone who knows me.

20:44

I'm very musical. I sing back up. When I sing, everyone backs up.

20:53

Nice. You got a background in music. Yeah. I should let folks know that some folks were commenting about my new intro for my

21:04

Rap Report podcast. A lot of people really liked the Rap Report daily where I introduced it, and that was you who put that together.

21:11

Yeah, it's actually me playing the instruments. Yeah, so we'll have to apologize to Mr.

21:16

John who did the old one who's watching. But John, dude, you got to up your game.

21:21

This guy is like a professional, okay? And so what's he doing? I'm a recovering professional musician.

21:27

Yeah, he's like, wait, what? Yeah, see, it shows he doesn't even want to. A little show and tell.

21:33

It's my Martin D -1000. You're going to have to pay me for this though.

21:48

Okay, that's enough. I just wanted to show you. All right. Love it. Okay, I've always got a guitar or something, and when

21:54

I'm thinking through things and working that out, I'm usually noodling around just for fun now. And so basically,

22:02

I can't do any of that. We had a guitar in our house for 25 years.

22:08

We just sold it. I think it was played by people that would come over sometimes, and they knew what they were doing.

22:15

My wife wanted to learn how to play, but we never did. I thought you were going to say it was played by Jimmy Page or something.

22:22

No, no. Although, hey, I'll throw this out. People who are regular listeners here know that I'm pop culture illiterate.

22:31

So I'm listening to my next -door neighbors where I used to live, and they had a band playing.

22:41

And next day, I was talking to my neighbor. I was like, I heard the music you guys had.

22:47

It sounded pretty good. It's the E Street Band. I'm like, oh, okay. He's like, oh, yeah.

22:53

My brother -in -law is one of the members of the E Street Band. I'm like, okay, who's the E Street Band? Oh, my.

23:01

Well, then I should tell you that Jimmy Page was the guitar player for a rock band called Led Zeppelin, if you weren't aware of that band.

23:07

I was not. Okay, there you go. All right, so let's do this.

23:13

Nicholas has been in for a bit, so we're going to bring him in, see what questions he may have. So brought you in,

23:21

Nicholas. You can unmute yourself. All right, can you hear me? We can. Gotcha. Perfect.

23:28

I reached out to you about, I don't know, probably a month ago, just trying to find some direction as far as links regarding just why we shouldn't use

23:38

Hillsong and Bethel music in the church. Okay. I feel like I actually, by God's grace, stumbled across some links last week just through Justin Peters Facebook community page.

23:50

So I might actually just shift gears, if that's okay, and just ask a question that I have from the Old Testament. Well, yeah, and I'll just say for what you were just saying,

23:59

Justin has done some great work on that. He recently did a video with Todd Friel. But for folks who just so we don't switch topics, the

24:09

Old Testament, but just so people don't wonder why we might be against that. They use their music as a way to reach into churches, to pull people into some of their false teaching.

24:22

And so the reason I'd be concerned is the fact that they are open about using their music to get into churches, to try to pull people into their belief system.

24:35

So it's not just playing, playing their music is not just innocent. It's their, that's their evangelism that way.

24:46

So, all right. So go with your question for the Old Testament. Okay. Just as I've been making my trek through the

24:52

Old Testament again this last year, I know that God gave commands, right? To do sacrifices at the tabernacle in the wilderness and so forth.

25:01

But then as I get to like Joshua, and as they go and do contest, conquests and things,

25:07

I've noticed in a couple places that they build altars and so forth and do sacrifices there.

25:14

So I guess I'm just trying to figure out like, how is that different from the ordinances that were given at the tabernacle as far as the duties of the priest to do?

25:27

Because as I read through it, and then I actually got back to Joshua 8, verse 30. It talks about the law as far as it being uncut stones.

25:37

So there was a law that God set up, which makes sense that they had to follow. But I guess I'm just trying to figure out or differentiate between that and the actual practices that were at the tabernacle.

25:48

Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. Did you want me to take that?

25:53

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I guess the thing that I think of is that like, if you talk to the, in rabbinical teaching, they believe that the law actually was given, existed,

26:07

I should say, before it was given on Mount Sinai. So even if you look at early Genesis, you have

26:12

Noah building an altar. And that was a long time before the law was given. So there's a sort of an understanding or a belief that the sacrifices are kind of, well,

26:23

I don't want to say eternal, but that they go back much earlier than the law. And that the law sort of codified what they were and kind of put structure around it.

26:33

And it became part of the law of Moses being sort of the terms of the Mosaic covenant. And so I can't speak to whether it started at that time or whether we realized it at that time.

26:46

But when the law of Moses was given, the sacrifices, they became sort of atonement sacrifices for sin.

26:55

And I think that's what we're seeing when you go through anything that you see that's pre -law of Moses.

27:03

And I don't know, I'm not really deep in this yet, but because the writing of this book has got me really interested in digging further into the history of Israel and the history of the laws, because many of the laws are mentioned in some form before we get to Exodus and the nature of God.

27:26

And that as we, as the Bible progresses, you know, this kind of this progressive revelation concept, we start to understand later on what the sacrifices mean.

27:35

And then, of course, by the time we get to the New Testament, it becomes very clear what the sacrifices were intended to signify and the fact that Jesus was the one final sacrifice once for all.

27:48

Pete Now, if you, depending on your end times view, an interesting thing that comes up with this as well,

27:53

Nicholas, is the question people will see, it seems that for those who hold to a millennial kingdom that the sacrifices are reestablished there.

28:03

And that becomes an interesting thing. I think the common understanding of that for those that hold to a millennial kingdom is that the sacrifices then are much like what we would do is baptism or the

28:17

Lord's Supper that point back to what happened at salvation. And so, many think that they'll do these sacrifices looking back at what

28:28

Christ did on the cross, which was the fulfillment of those sacrifices. Pete Oh, that's interesting.

28:34

I hadn't heard that. So, instead of being the foreshadowing that they are in the Old Testament, they turn into a remembrance of what

28:40

Christ did? Yeah, that's the most common understanding for those that hold to a millennial kingdom.

28:48

So, Pete I was just going to say, wouldn't that, wouldn't that, in a sense, just,

28:54

I guess my thinking in that would, wouldn't that undermine the whole sacrifice that Jesus did then if you go back to doing something that was pointing to what he would ultimately fulfill?

29:08

Well, the thing is, what is the goal of it? So, we think about the

29:14

Lord's Supper, which was actually a Passover meal. Pete Yeah, the bread and the wine. Joe Yeah, and Christ changed that.

29:20

He changed it from a Passover looking back at God's providence through, for the nation of Israel getting, you know, through the slavery and into freedom and all the trials they went through to looking at it as a look at the new covenant, right?

29:40

So, he changed that. So, the thinking is he would change that as well for the, you know, and this is for those, there are many who don't believe there will be a millennial kingdom, and therefore they wouldn't see that continuing.

29:55

I guess maybe I'm tipping my hat since Ethan is asking what's my end times view?

30:03

I'm definitely pro -millennial. If there is a millennium, I am all for it.

30:11

So, that would be my position. I would be pre -millennial, pre -tribulational is where I lean.

30:19

I don't make a big deal of it because I think it's not something we're going to be able to be, in hindsight, we're in the

30:32

Old Testament before the first coming of Christ, people didn't see all of the details between the first and the second coming clearly.

30:40

I think the same thing is going to be for us. I mean, I know there's a lot of people, I'm upsetting probably a lot of people because they think, like, they got it down pat.

30:50

Pete Yeah, that's a larger reason that my eschatology is as yet unformed. I'm still open to things,

30:57

I'm still interested in some possibilities, but it's so hard to know when you look, especially looking through Revelation, what's symbolic, what's allegory, you know?

31:07

It's very difficult to know, and for me, it comes down to whatever

31:12

I believe is going to happen in the end times will have little to no impact on how I live my life today, the decisions that I'm making as a

31:20

Christian today, you know? I mean, it's enough for me to just try to follow Jesus and try not to sin and try to keep things in order in my life, you know what

31:29

I mean, as a believer today, that I just trust God at the end. Whatever happens is going to be amazing.

31:36

Now, in dealing with, you know, Robert's book, Torahism, the question you asked,

31:42

Nicholas, actually is very important because the thing that we end up seeing is when

31:48

Israel was taken into the Babylonian captivity, right, and God promised that this was going to be a judgment on them because of the fact that for 70 sabbatical years they were ignoring the sabbatical year,

32:02

God was going to put them into 70 years of captivity. But one of the things that he said with it is that he would basically cure them of their idolatry.

32:12

That during this captivity, that was going to be resolved, and it was. I mean, we never see

32:17

Israel as a nation going back into idolatry like they were before that captivity. But when they returned to the land, and what you end up seeing is the rebuilding of the temple, well, first, during that time of captivity, you had the beginnings of the synagogues and the changing of the system with the

32:42

Pharisees rising up and the Sadducees, you don't see that in the Old Testament, those groups don't exist.

32:48

One being more the political group, the Sadducees, the Pharisees being more the religious group. So you had your

32:54

Republicans and Democrats right there. See, nothing's changed. And so what you end up seeing, though, is that you had this rise.

33:03

But then after 70 AD, when the temple was destroyed, just like in the time when they were in captivity, they had to come up with some way, how do we offer sacrifices?

33:15

And it was a shifting in 70 AD, you start seeing the shift to what we would refer to as rabbinical

33:23

Judaism, where it's the rise of obeying Torah, and that's what they would say, obeying the law.

33:30

And so now, and I've written about this in my book, What Do They Believe?, that with Judaism today, salvation is seen as obeying the law.

33:41

They've replaced the sacrifices, because they can't do that anymore, with law -keeping.

33:48

And actually, the most, yeah, that's the book. Hey, you got a copy.

33:54

I got a, oh wait, no, I don't have a copy on my bookshelf anymore. It's packed in one of, like, 90 box.

34:02

Oh, you got a copy. Everyone's got a copy. You really should read it, Andrew. It's a fantastic book.

34:08

It's a good book. But the thing that you have to realize in it is that there was a shift.

34:18

That shift is what's, you know, people read the Old Testament and think that's Judaism. I think that what you see with the

34:26

Torah, I'm trying to remember, Robert, how you worded it in the book, tourists? Tourists, yeah.

34:32

Tourists. So, it's hard for me to say because it's a new word for me, but the tourists, those that are

34:37

Christians that want to put themselves back under the law, the thing that I always find interesting is they're not following the law of the

34:47

Old Testament. Many of them are following the law of the rabbis. So, Robert, maybe you could address that issue, because I think that'd be helpful for folks.

34:58

Yeah, I actually learned a lot about that. I talked with two different groups of folks that are actually based in Israel.

35:05

One of them is a Jewish organization, and I asked them, what is the

35:11

Jewish position on the end times and the rebuilding? You know, ever since the Temple was destroyed in 8070, you can't technically live a truly

35:21

Torah -observant lifestyle, so what do you do now and what's your view of the end times? And they were explaining that there's all kinds of things that they're doing now,

35:29

I didn't even know this, to, like, for example, they've still practiced the sacrificial rituals in Jerusalem to make sure that that skill or that art isn't lost.

35:41

And I think it was back in the year 2000, 2001, they had an actual Passover sacrifice made, like, within sight of the

35:50

Temple Mount, and that was kind of a big deal. So, they're holding on, and they believe that if the

35:56

Temple is not rebuilt before the Messiah comes, because again, they don't believe Jesus was the Messiah, it will be rebuilt then, and all of the laws, all 613 mitzvot will be returned back into service, including all the sacrificial laws, which is kind of interesting because, well, if you take the

36:15

Christian position, what's the point? And I think you kind of brought that up. The other group that I spoke to based out of Israel is a

36:23

Messianic Jewish organization called One for Israel. Fantastic resource, they've got some really brilliant scholars there that have spoken about this idea that, and for example,

36:37

I should mention too that One for Israel, as Messianic Jews, they still celebrate the feasts, because they see it as a great way to, in the feasts themselves, like you mentioned,

36:48

Andrew, they see the foreshadowing of Christ, and they feel that it's a great way to honor the Jewish culture, and there is not, there's no technical reason why they shouldn't honor those sorts of, a lot of those feasts celebrate what

37:01

God did, obviously, you know, Passover and the escape, but they see now Christ in Passover as the modern version.

37:09

But they obviously don't do the sacrifices, and they don't think the sacrifices should return in the end times, but they did a great job of pointing out this switch to rabbinical

37:20

Judaism, and I have the story in my book too. They go through the Talmud and they bring up a bunch of stories that are really interesting from a modern perspective.

37:32

And I'm going to paraphrase it here, but you can get the full story in my book, but there is a temple curtain or sheet that they would put out during Passover and it would magically, now, this is not in Scripture, this is in the

37:49

Talmud, which they consider, you know, it's an important part of Judaism. Christians may not believe it.

37:55

Petey What's that? Matthew Jewish people would consider that as authoritative as in Scripture. Petey So, Judaism, yeah, yeah.

38:01

So, the story goes that there was a white fabric, I think it was a sheet or a veil or something, but that they would put it out during Passover and overnight it would magically turn red as if the sheet was taking on the blood of the sacrifices.

38:17

And after the temple was destroyed in 8070, according to the Talmud, that sheet never turned red again, that piece of fabric.

38:28

It stayed white. And they couldn't understand why, but of course, the Jews that had converted at the time and that were now

38:34

Christians and now following Yeshua, they believed it was because the one final sacrifice, the once for all sacrifice, as it says in Hebrews 8, 13, was

38:44

Jesus, and this was proof of it. So, it's interesting that there's little sort of supporting ancillary evidence in that other sacred

38:52

Scriptures that talk about maybe this was a huge shift. And my personal opinion is that God knew what was going on.

39:02

Jesus predicted that the temple would be destroyed. It came to pass in 8070, and it's almost like God said, all right, there you go.

39:11

The road is now closed. I want you to take this other road. I want you to follow

39:16

Jesus. My Messiah came and now, I don't know if the

39:23

Messiah took the turn and the Jews wanted to keep going straight or other way around, but either way,

39:29

I feel like there was a kind of period at the end of the sentence when the temple was destroyed. So, and then this is one of the things

39:34

I argue with my Torahist friends about is that even if you wanted to, you couldn't live a

39:40

Torah -observant lifestyle. And that's one of the things they really are, they have a lot of pride about that, the fact that they are observing

39:46

Torah and Shabbat and all that stuff. So, and Nicholas, anything else?

39:57

Nicholas No, not really as far as regarding that question. I don't want to, I kind of don't want to go off topic with what you guys are talking about tonight.

40:04

So, maybe I can chime in next week. Paul Well, I'll keep you in the backstage and you can always put things in the private chat if you want to come back in and have another question.

40:14

How old's the baby? Nicholas Elijah is four months going on five pretty soon.

40:20

It's our first, so he's, right now he's in one of those sleep regression stages. So, we're having a really hard time.

40:28

God's really just rooting out a lot of sin of anger and just impatience and yeah, it's just that stage.

40:35

So, Paul You know, there's two very, there's two things God uses to sanctify us the most in our life.

40:42

One is marriage and two is children. Nicholas Amen. Paul Exactly.

40:47

Nicholas Congratulations. That's awesome. Paul Thank you. Yeah, God's been really good because we were actually in a position where we were told without medical intervention, it wasn't going to happen.

40:58

And then two weeks after we finished our perspective class, we found out we were pregnant.

41:04

So, it was just like, what in the world? Because we thought that we were going to start pursuing overseas missions to like unengaged, unreached people groups.

41:12

And so, it's kind of just like, well, maybe not right now. So, right now I'm kind of just focusing on apologetics and just evangelism.

41:19

So, that's, I've got a lot of questions as I read the word because, yeah, so.

41:24

To answer those questions. So, is that Australia on your wall there?

41:32

Andrew So, actually, here, maybe I can turn my camera real quick. So, what it is, it's actually, it's a world map.

41:39

You can see it there. Paul I did get Australia out of context even, Andrew. That's impressive.

41:45

Andrew Yeah, it's pretty good. There's a little itty bitty Hawaii. It looks like a bee on the wall. Paul Yeah, that's cool.

41:51

It's a lot bigger than Hong Kong. I don't see that at all. Andrew Yeah. So, we actually got that from,

41:56

I think we got it from Ukraine. My wife ordered it online. So, pretty cool. Just a good reminder to be praying for the world.

42:03

Paul Yeah, that is cool. Andrew But yeah, love your ministry, Andrew. A big benefit to me in my walk lately, especially as I talk to coworkers weekly.

42:13

There's a lot of challenges that come up. So, I will definitely chime in, Lord willing, next week.

42:18

Paul Yeah. Next week, I was going to announce this later, but next week we'll,

42:28

Dr. Sveshwar is going to be here. He requests we come on and talk about the topic, should

42:33

Christians vote for Trump? Andrew That would be a fun one. Paul It'd be a barn burner.

42:39

Andrew Yeah. Yes, that'll be fun. So, Nicholas, I'll put you in the backstage.

42:44

Just let me know if you want to come back in with another question. And Mr. Batman is back. He dropped out, but he's back.

42:51

So, bring him in. Paul Good evening. Andrew Mr. Batman. Yeah, I was trying to—what's his real name,

43:01

Batman? Paul Adam West. Andrew No. Paul Oh, no, that would be Bruce Wayne. Andrew Bruce Wayne. Paul Oh, you're still in the—okay, gotcha.

43:08

Andrew Yeah, see, this is how pop culture illiterate I am. I was going to ask you, Mr. West, what your question was.

43:15

That's all right. Well, my name—I get the name Batman very honestly.

43:21

I've been a Batman collector ever since I was about 10 years old. I've been collecting Batman paraphernalia, anything with a

43:26

Batman symbol on it. Now, I collected my wife, Robin, and she is the prize of my collection.

43:32

So, together, we are Batman and Robin. Paul Oh, nice. Andrew And if you'd like to know more about me, you can visit my website at mrbatman .com,

43:41

where I do teach science and apologetics for all ages. Paul Well, I put up the comment from Chris Honholds, who—he's

43:50

Captain America, and he says he saw the Bat -Signal. Andrew We can't combine that.

43:57

It's DC and Marvel. It's two different comic books, man. Paul Oh, see, I don't get that. Andrew I'm sorry.

44:04

Paul Yeah, Chris will correct me later. I have no fear. I will hear it on his podcast, how

44:12

I don't know the difference between DC and—I know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, okay?

44:18

Andrew There we go. That's all you need right there. Because now, with the coronavirus, we're having to do the

44:24

Vulcan salute. To keep from shaking hands, we do the live long and prosper. And that happens to be a

44:30

Hebrew blessing as well, so that works out well. Paul It's actually—you know, it is kind of funny. Everyone in California, when

44:37

I was out of California, started doing this elbow thing instead of even—beginning of the week, people were doing a fist pump, and by the end of the week, everyone's doing this elbow bump.

44:47

Andrew I'm actually a teacher at an elementary school, and I'm teaching my children, because first graders especially, they want to come up and give you hugs.

44:55

And they've got snot running down, and they touch everything. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Here we go, boys and girls.

45:01

We're going to do the virtual hug. So, I have them hold out their arms, and I just say, hug, hug, hug, and they do a little move.

45:07

And the one little boy did not want to do it, and so I said, what's the matter? And he likes dinosaurs, and I said, come on, let's do the

45:14

Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I held out my arms real close to my chest, and I said, hug, hug, hug, and he really liked that.

45:19

So, as long as they don't touch me, I'm fine. Paul Understood. So, what questions do you have for tonight?

45:27

Andrew Well, I was going to ask, why do we not keep the Sabbath? That's a really good one.

45:35

Matter of fact, that was the one commandment that I had the most difficulty understanding, and as I dove into it,

45:43

I thought, in my discussions with Toreism, I thought, well, this might be one where I have to give them,

45:48

I have to concede the point, because they celebrate Saturday Sabbath. So, the

45:55

Sabbath, obviously, is part of the Ten Commandments, it's the fourth commandment, but also, as I'm sure you know, it predates that even.

46:02

It goes back to creation and the rhythm God set up for life, the six, and then one.

46:10

But then, interestingly, we get into the New Testament, and we see Paul telling us, well, don't let anyone judge you by a

46:16

Sabbath day. Paul Actually, I think what he's saying there is don't let anybody judge you for keeping the

46:22

Sabbath and keeping the festivals, because he's talking to people who are actually in a very pagan area that are, now these people who are keeping the

46:31

Sabbaths and keeping the festivals are being judged for doing so. Pete Do you, um, Mr.

46:37

Batman? Yes. What's your real name if you want to share it or not? Jim. Jim Barber.

46:42

Okay. Yeah, just so I have a name to call you. Do you— Oh, sure. All my information's on my website for anybody who's interested.

46:49

I'm very open and honest about who I am. Do you keep, do you worship on Saturdays? I keep

46:55

Sabbath, is that what you're talking about, but I don't have a church in my area that actually performs what's called a holy convocation on the

47:03

Sabbath. So, I'll worship every day. I go to church on Sunday, because that's when the people around here go to church.

47:09

But I do, my wife and I do keep the Sabbath. We keep it holy. We don't work. We don't make anybody else work.

47:14

We don't spend any money, and we spend time with our relationship with God and with each other. That's beautiful.

47:20

And the view you just espoused would actually be similar to the Presbyterian view, by the way.

47:28

On Saturday? Not on Saturday, but they will have, they'll keep, they will say that they'll view

47:34

Sunday as a day to keep holy where they won't work, and they won't ask anyone else to work.

47:41

Sure. And I understand their reasoning behind that, but let me ask you a question. Does the

47:46

Bible say to keep the first day of the week holy or the seventh day holy? Yes. In the

47:51

Old Testament? Well, that's the Bible, isn't it? Yes, but if it mentions—yeah, so you start to see in the

48:00

New Testament, you see the apostles meeting on the first day of the week. What does difference does that have to do with what the

48:06

Sabbath—see, if you actually do something that changes the Old Testament, are you familiar with Deuteronomy 13?

48:12

And again, if you have somebody who comes and proclaims something that, again, Moses has not proclaimed, then you've got a problem, because that violates the

48:21

Deuteronomy 13 test. Well, so here's where I would kind of challenge that, is that Jesus came and did things that changed the

48:29

Old Testament. How so? Well, sacrifices aren't required anymore.

48:35

Well, that's because the temple's no longer in existence. But again, that's happening in the spiritual temple right now, but that's irrelevant.

48:43

Where did he change the Sabbath? Jim, Jim, we want to have dialogue, so— Sure, I'm happy with that.

48:49

But I want to stay focused on the Sabbath. Yeah, let him finish that out. I mean, I will say we mentioned one earlier, the

48:56

Lord's Supper would be an example where he changed Passover to something different, but go ahead. I actually didn't, but okay.

49:03

Okay, so here's what I ended up doing when I was looking into this, just to kind of let you know how

49:08

I arrived at what I arrived at. I did a comprehensive, systematic look at the

49:14

Ten Commandments in the New Testament. So, where are they mentioned? I'm looking at where they're either clearly taught, endorsed, repeated verbatim.

49:25

So, the way the Ten Commandments break down, the first three commandments, they're not repeated directly, but they're clearly taught and they're clearly endorsed.

49:34

The last six commandments of the Ten Commandments are literally repeated verbatim from the Torah. The commandment about the

49:41

Sabbath, though, is it's not repeated, it's not endorsed, it's not taught. Now, I'm not suggesting that that means that it's no longer valid, but I'm saying it gives us pause because in the

49:53

New Testament, the Sabbath, which, you know, when we talk about Jesus and all the teachings related to the Sabbath, it's referred to more often as a source of controversy with the leaders of Israel than it is actually a commandment to be kept.

50:07

So, we start looking at that. We start looking at the idea that as the New Testament unfolds, we see that the apostles are not only taught, they taught

50:16

Jews in the synagogues, right? Because that was, so there's this, let me pause for a second. There's a whole chapter in my book about this idea of the crossover box.

50:25

So, this is this time in history from Jesus' ministry until the Temple destruction in 8070 where both systems were running in parallel,

50:33

Judaism and Christianity. And I go into that in further detail in the book.

50:38

But during this time, what you start to see is they started meeting as Christians on the first day of the week.

50:44

And so, I mean, you look at like Colossians chapter 2, right, that talks about the Sabbath being passed. It shows that the old

50:51

Sabbath, or in Greek, I guess it was plural, the Sabbaths, are passed away. And then we look at that again, the apostolic practice, frequently meeting on the first day, and we begin to see a new pattern emerging, whereas the

51:06

Jews rested on the seventh day, Christians rest and started worshiping on the first day.

51:11

Now, the question is, is that heretical?

51:16

Does that break the law of God? Do we, here's kind of the two distinctions.

51:23

Do we need to obey the Sabbath strictly as it was written in the Old Testament in the

51:28

Law of Moses, or is the concept of the Sabbath bigger than the Law of Moses? And I argue that it even predates the

51:34

Law of Moses. And what it looks to is the six -in -one rhythm that was the rhythm of Israel, it was the rhythm of the

51:42

Torah. But now, because Jesus came and we are no longer under the law, the

51:48

Old Covenant has passed away, we would be wise to continue practicing that.

51:53

I think that's beautiful that you're doing that, and I think that's something we miss a lot in the Western culture, is this idea of intentionally setting aside a day to worship

52:03

God, but does that day have to be, in God's eyes, the last day of the week?

52:09

That's the question. And I came down on the side that it doesn't matter which day of the specific day of the week it is, but it is wise of us to enter into that rhythm.

52:18

In Hebrews, it says that Jesus was the rest, the final rest that we entered into.

52:24

So, that's kind of where I landed on. Very lovely. Very lovely dissertation. It's irrelevant, but it's very lovely.

52:32

Have you heard about, let's see, this is Exodus 12, verse 14, where it says,

52:37

And this day will be a memorial for you, and you are to celebrate it as a feast to the Lord, as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come.

52:46

Some translations even translate this into a perpetual ordinance. How do you deal with the fact that the

52:52

Sabbath is a perpetual ordinance? What does perpetual mean? Yeah, so who is that written to?

52:58

It's written to Israel, sir. Well, so would you agree that all the laws are written to Israel?

53:04

No. Really? So, who are the laws written to? Because when, hang on a second, the laws of Moses come from God.

53:13

Who did Moses get them from? Okay. There were laws before there was a nation of Israel.

53:22

Yes, sir. The Torah pre -exists its giving at Sinai. As a matter of fact, Cain and Abel knew what sacrifices to offer.

53:30

That's why Abel had a good sacrifice and Cain did not. Again, they knew what to do right from the very beginning.

53:36

That's called—see, the word Torah literally means instruction. God has given us his instruction, and he wants us to obey it.

53:45

Now, once again, Deuteronomy 13, if you look at that particular scripture, this actually tells us exactly what it looks like when you have a prophet in your midst.

53:56

Deuteronomy 13, verse 1, actually says—let me get there real quick. If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and that sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and then he says, let's go after other gods which ye have not known and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams, for the

54:19

Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

54:26

You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice.

54:32

You shall serve him and hold fast to him. Now, how do you get that any of these laws have changed?

54:39

See, if God has written it in stone in his finger, when he gave it to us at Sinai, it was actually given to us before that, but he codified it in stone at that point, so everybody could know it without any wonder.

54:52

So, where in the New Testament does he do the same thing by canceling these laws? Because you think he would do us a favor if he's going to write it.

55:00

Pete - Hebrews 8 .13. Pete - Yeah, that would be one to look at. I would love to get back to your original question about why does it not mean forever if it says perpetual.

55:11

Pete - Yes, sir. Pete - While you're looking that up. So, my response to you would be that in that passage, like, for example, if you look at Exodus, I think it's 31 .16,

55:24

about the Sabbath being celebrated throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. When we look in the

55:31

Old Testament, the Hebrew word for perpetual, or that's translated to English, is the word olam, which means perpetual sometimes.

55:41

But in English, you think of the word perpetual, it means kind of continuing and lasting forever and all that kind of stuff, right?

55:47

Well, the thing is, in ancient Hebrew, the word olam is not so cut and dry, right?

55:53

Ancient Hebrew had about 9 ,000 words. Current English has about 2 million words. So, they used that word olam to mean a lot of things.

56:01

It could mean a long duration. Sometimes it meant forever and always. Sometimes it just meant an unknown quantity of time or a long quantity of time.

56:10

Sometimes it meant— Pete - Yes, sir, I agree with that definition completely. But again, that's irrelevant, sir. We're actually

56:15

God -telling. Robert - Let me finish up my point. So, if we look at the word olam— Pete - Robert, hold up one second.

56:21

Jim, I muted you. We're going to try to have a discussion. So, we let you explain your view,

56:29

I want Robert to finish what he's saying, and then you can ask a question. That's how we kind of do things here.

56:37

Just so you know, I know it's your first time in, so, okay? Robert - And I'll be quick, and I'd love to hear your response,

56:43

Jim. So, here's what I'm getting at with the range of meaning about the word olam and why

56:49

I think it is actually relevant. When we look at something that, for example, that uses that word olam or perpetual or whatever we want to call it, how do we know which translation, which meaning we should assume for that translation?

57:08

So, if we look at something like here, Exodus 31, 16. So, the sons of Israel shall observe the

57:14

Sabbath to celebrate the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. Okay, so, if we're looking at it from the lens of Judaism, which rejects the

57:24

New Testament and the scope of our context for understanding that— But that's not what Judaism does. That's two different things. You see, there's two different kinds of—

57:31

Okay, Jim, I'm muting you again. I'm almost done. If we're looking at it from the context of Judaism, which says, what could this word possibly mean?

57:40

And they say, we think it means perpetual, forever, a thousand generations, whatever it might mean.

57:46

When you take that word now and add the New Testament, which Christians believe is as much part of the

57:52

Bible as anything else, you now have a wider context, and you have the Messiah, and you have

57:57

Jesus coming, and you look at that and you say, okay, if God has chosen to sovereignly reveal

58:04

His will to mankind over time, and you only look at the Old Testament, you might reasonably conclude that meant forever.

58:11

When you look at the New Testament and Hebrews 8, 13, and Jesus talking about— Well, when you look through the lens of the

58:20

New Testament, and we understand that the New Covenant has happened, that things have changed, we now look back and say, oh, you know what?

58:26

That could not have meant that the Sabbath or the old laws were meant to remain literally until the end of all time, because Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, clearly says that the

58:38

Old Covenant is now passed away. And it also says that when you have a—Jesus is our new priest, and when you have a new priesthood, which is, in the minds of the author of Hebrew, a superior priesthood, it also brings with it a new law.

58:54

So that's what I would point to. So I'd love to hear your feedback, Jim. Jim Steyer Yes, sir. Now, once again, can you show me, because we're going to use some hermeneutics, can you show me anywhere in the

59:04

Old Testament where that word perpetual is not perpetual? Because, again, I understand you're appealing—again, sir, and again, when we're talking about God's laws, where any of God's laws have—

59:15

Now, wait a minute. I thought—I was going to get to have a talk here. Hang on a second. Hang on a second, sir. Be quiet now. Hang on a second.

59:21

Now, let's— David There you go. I will mute you because it's not your show. You ask the question, I'm going to give you the answer.

59:28

Genesis 6 -4, the word olam is used referring to those who are of old.

59:36

Okay? Deuteronomy—I'll just rattle off all the ones where it's used not referring to perpetual.

59:42

Genesis 6 -4, Deuteronomy 32 -7, Joshua 24 -2, 1

59:48

Samuel 27 -8, Job 22 -15, Psalm 24 -7, 24 -9, 25 -6, 41 -13, 77 -9, 90 -2, 103 -17, 106 -48, 119 -52, 153 -3,

01:00:10

Proverbs 8 -23, Proverbs 22 -28, Proverbs 23 -10, and Ecclesiastes 1 -10.

01:00:18

Should I go on for more? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:00:25

The fact of the matter is, sir, show me any place where any ordinance of God is done away with.

01:00:30

The fact of the matter is, the Sabbath, when we were talking about—no, you told me, you showed me where different places that word is used in different ways.

01:00:38

I agree with that. Again, but we're not talking about that. You're using different references to talk about something you love.

01:00:44

Show me where this is referred to the law, where the law is ever done away with. Show me where God abrogates any law, anytime, anywhere.

01:00:51

Now, you keep appealing to the cross, and now, all of a sudden, we celebrate the

01:00:57

Sabbath on the first day of the week. Sir, can you count to three? Because I'm going to tell you that Jesus himself actually gave the prophecy of Jonah, where it says,

01:01:06

For just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so the

01:01:11

Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights. Now, sir, how do you get three days and three nights, from Friday afternoon before sundown to Sunday morning before dawn?

01:01:23

Sure. Before you answer that, this is a common tactic

01:01:30

I want folks, what we do on the show is teach people how to identify and help people with hermeneutics.

01:01:37

This is something you guys who are watching or listening can see. Notice what Jim's doing. He asked a question.

01:01:43

When his answer, when it was answered overwhelmingly, he changed the question and said it couldn't be answered.

01:01:49

Then, when that gets answered, he switches to another question. It's a logical fallacy known as a red herring.

01:01:57

So, you're shifting - Where did logic come from? Huh? I mean, you're using logic, right?

01:02:03

Doesn't logic come from the God of the Bible? And isn't he totally consistent throughout time? He does not change.

01:02:08

Malachi says, I am Yahuvah. I change not. That has nothing to do with what you do. Actually, it does, sir.

01:02:14

Because what we're talking about here is we're actually talking about how the Word of God - So, Jim, what we're trying to expose to you in me saying this is you're employing logical fallacies.

01:02:27

When you employ logical fallacies, you can't possibly, cannot possibly by your own, what you just said, be agreeing with God.

01:02:35

Because God is logical. You're not being logical in your argumentation. I want you to be logical.

01:02:41

I want you to make some good argumentation. It's not that I'm, we're not here to try to win a debate.

01:02:46

We want a good discussion. But you can't talk over, it doesn't make it for good discussion.

01:02:53

You got to stay on topic. And that's what Robert asked if we could do. All right? So, we're going to try to do that.

01:02:59

Does that sound okay? Sure. So, let's stay on topic and show me in the New Testament where Messiah himself did away with the

01:03:06

Sabbath. Because if anybody, do you know what Stephen was stoned? You know what Paul was, you know, all the things he went through?

01:03:13

Because people thought he was trying to do away with the Torah. You know, when later on in the

01:03:19

Acts, also in other areas of Scripture, you see Paul, you see Peter keeping the Torah, keeping kosher.

01:03:25

When you have the Peter's vision where the cloth comes down three times with the clean and unclean animals, the common animals in it, this is ten years after Messiah's resurrection.

01:03:36

So, once again, show me where Messiah tells us that we do not keep the

01:03:41

Sabbath on the Sabbath. Now, I go back to the three days and three nights because this is what got me down this path.

01:03:48

Because we have to understand that we have been fed a line. And again, it's very easily understood if you can count to three.

01:03:56

Because Jesus himself said there would be three days and three nights. Now, how do you get three days and three nights?

01:04:03

Could we pause there and stay on this topic of three days and three nights? Okay. Okay. So, I'll let you finish your thought.

01:04:10

I just wanted to make sure, because you mentioned a lot of stuff and it's fun and I'd love to jump in, but I just kind of want to pick one spot.

01:04:16

So, if you want to complete your idea about the three days and three nights? Pete Certainly. Again, the three days and the three nights are very important because it's the only prophecy that Messiah himself said that would be the sign that he is the

01:04:29

Messiah. And I love how he said it. You know, the Pharisees come to him and said, give us a sign that you're the Messiah.

01:04:34

And in his most loving and compassionate voice, he said, you wicked and adulterous generation, no sign will be given to you other than the sign of Jonah.

01:04:41

For just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so the son of man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

01:04:51

Now, if you look at it on a chart, I don't care how you count it. Einstein couldn't do this. You cannot get three days and three nights between Friday afternoon at sundown and Sunday morning before dawn.

01:05:02

Pete Sure. Okay. So, I guess my response to that would be what we're dealing with here is not a math problem.

01:05:09

It's a language issue. There are several Hebraic idioms, if you're familiar with them, such as three days and three nights, after three days, on the third day, that all mean essentially the same thing.

01:05:22

And I'll actually give you scriptural evidence for that. If you look at Matthew 27, 62 through 64, it says the following.

01:05:30

The next day, the one after preparation day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. Sir, they said, we remember that while he was still alive, that deceiver said, and I'm quoting, after three days

01:05:42

I will rise again. The passage continues. So, give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day.

01:05:50

Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. So, what we have here is the

01:05:57

Jewish officials using the phrase after three days and until the third day synonymously.

01:06:04

It tells us that they meant them to mean the same thing. They used those idioms to mean the same thing. And elsewhere in the book of Matthew, Yeshua even has other predictions that he would rise on the third day.

01:06:15

Look at Matthew 16, 21, where from that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

01:06:32

Matthew 17, 22, the Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him and on the third day, he will be raised to life.

01:06:40

Matthew 20, 18 and 19, on the third day, he will be raised to life. So, if you use your math skills,

01:06:46

Friday's the first day, Saturday's the second day, the third day is Sunday. The only way to reconcile what you're saying with all the other scriptures, and there's tons of them here, is this understanding of the

01:06:59

Hebraic idiom. When they said, on the third day, in three days, three days and three nights, those all referred to in that Middle Eastern culture, the same time frame.

01:07:12

Actually, I used that argument when I was doing that same argument, sir. It doesn't work.

01:07:17

Because what you have to do is you have to look at the actual calendar, the Hebrew calendar itself.

01:07:23

The Messiah was crucified on the first month of the 14th day. That would have been a Wednesday. He would have arisen on the 17th day of the month of the

01:07:31

Aviv. You can look this up yourself there. Let me finish my statement. One moment, sir. So, that would have been a

01:07:37

Sabbath. That would have been the Sabbath that Christ rose on. The reason that the women find an empty tomb before dawn on Sunday morning is because He was risen on Saturday afternoon before sundown, between the evenings.

01:07:52

Okay. Gentlemen, I hate to bow out, but it's 915 my time, and I've got to teach early in the morning. Alright. So, when

01:07:58

Jesus said, I will be, like Jonah, in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, that was one thing.

01:08:05

Three days and three nights, 72 hours, yes. When He says that He will rise again on the third day, how do you reconcile those two utterances from Jesus?

01:08:16

Well, sir, He's actually pointing to the fact of what He said as His only prophetic statement that He would be the

01:08:21

Messiah. After three days is also three days and three nights.

01:08:27

That's 72 hours. As a matter of fact, if you'd like, you can go to my website, MrBatman .com. I actually did a whole

01:08:32

Sunday school lesson at my old church on the very issue. I'm going to mute you just for, because I understand the tactic.

01:08:39

It is a roughshod tactic of being a steamroller, just plowing through things. And, well, now

01:08:46

He's gone. So, now I guess we could discuss what He, but for folks, I mean, I want you to recognize what

01:08:53

He was doing there, because we want to educate you guys so you can see the tactics people use.

01:08:58

Rapid fire, give a lot of details. It sounds overwhelming, but I want to pick apart this and look at what

01:09:07

He did. 72 hours. What scripture verse says it was 72 hours?

01:09:12

Not a single one. In fact, what you realize is that most people do not understand the way

01:09:19

Jewish people would see the beginning of a day. It's not at midnight. It's at the sundown.

01:09:27

When was Christ crucified? Well, He wasn't crucified after sundown. It was before sundown.

01:09:33

How do we know that? Because they needed to get His body prepared because the next day was a day of rest.

01:09:44

He's arguing that He made the statement of what day of the month it was and said that was a

01:09:50

Sabbath. Notice, Robert asked Him, support the argument. This is what you see people do when they're doing rapid fire.

01:09:58

They want to steamroll you with what sounds like a lot of evidence, and yet they don't want to support any of it and can't.

01:10:06

Go ahead, Robert. I was going to say, so let's let that argument play out, and I agree with you that that is what

01:10:13

He was doing. He wasn't interested in reconciling the two different types of comments.

01:10:19

But here's the bigger point for me. What was He getting at? Was He telling us that Jesus was crucified on a different day, that He was resurrected on a different day, and how was

01:10:31

He going to tie this into something to do with the Sabbath? Because from the Christian perspective, since in the

01:10:39

New Testament we are no longer under the Sabbath in terms of a day of the week that has to be celebrated, and since something happened on the first day of the week, on the

01:10:49

Sunday, which was essentially the most important event in the history of all humanity, the event that split history in two,

01:10:58

Jesus was resurrected and brought to life on the first day of the week. So this is why Christians have morphed over to celebrate the

01:11:07

Sabbath, or what we call the Lord's Day, on a Sunday. What He was trying to get at with the three days and three nights is a mystery to me, and I actually wrote about it in my book, which is why

01:11:17

I had some of those verses kind of at hand. It's a comment I heard consistently. There's even these pretty charts to go along with it that show the sundown and when the day starts and whatnot.

01:11:26

But there really is no larger point underneath that three -day math assertion, you know what

01:11:32

I mean? Or at least if there is one, I don't get what he's driving at. Pete Well, and let me address, let me see if I can find the comment, put it up here.

01:11:42

Here we go. Shia Luke, I might have mispronounced the first name, forgive me.

01:11:50

I said wrong. He was buried on the day of preparation, Friday. Okay.

01:11:55

This is a problem that a lot of people have. What was the day of preparation? Okay. What is the

01:12:03

Sabbath? The Sabbath was not only Saturday. The Sabbath was also the day of Passover.

01:12:11

That's a Sabbath. That's what it would be called. Also, the day of unleavened bread.

01:12:18

That's a Sabbath. So, these are Sabbaths. So, the fact that there's a day of preparation, is it for the

01:12:27

Saturday Sabbath or the Sabbath that was for the unleavened bread?

01:12:36

Now, what we have in scripture, God speaking, God's very word, a record that they worshiped on the first day.

01:12:45

Why? Because that was the day Christ rose. So, it couldn't be, you know, for people that are going to try to say, no, it has to be on the

01:12:56

Friday, well, then God is lying. When God is giving the, now, when we do hermeneutics, we have to make a distinction between what's prescriptive and descriptive.

01:13:08

So, the Bible's not going to be in error in its description or in its prescription.

01:13:15

The fact that the Bible mentions that David had many wives doesn't mean we should have many wives.

01:13:21

That's description. It's accurate in the fact that David had many wives. But here's a description describing the fact that they worshiped on that day because that is the day

01:13:31

Christ rose. Now we have that timeframe. We know when that is.

01:13:37

We know why they worshiped on that day. So, what

01:13:42

I think you saw is a, and for folks, I encourage you to go back, re -listen to this, and watch what he was doing.

01:13:50

Because when you start to pick up these tactics, you'll see that a lot of people do these things.

01:13:57

He wanted to - Yeah, it's difficult. Being on the other side of the coin, it's difficult, and as a younger man,

01:14:03

I couldn't even do it, to not jump in because you feel you already have the answers.

01:14:08

He said some disparaging remark about how he had dealt with that, whatever he said, anemic argument a long time ago.

01:14:15

So, in his mind, it was settled. And while he was talking, I was praying and asking

01:14:21

God to kind of show me what I should say and where I should say it. And at the same time, I wanted to listen to what he had to say in case there was something for me to learn.

01:14:29

And I feel like that's a big problem that we have on both sides, but especially when we're out there trying to share the truth.

01:14:37

And it's almost like they have these pre -built snowballs that they're ready to just throw at you instead of actually breaking it down and discussing and saying, oh, you made a point.

01:14:48

Let me respond to your point. Let me think if I agree with that point or not. You know what I mean? To make - like you had to sort of - you had to force it to be a discussion through the all -powerful mute button.

01:15:00

But that's - and I get where he's coming from, and I get frustrated on his behalf because I know he really wants to talk and talk, like you said, the steamroller thing.

01:15:10

But I just pray that something that we talked about landed somewhere that it could grow.

01:15:17

You know what I mean? Because I feel like he's probably - this is me. This maybe isn't you, so I'm not speaking for you,

01:15:24

Andrew. But I give people the benefit of the doubt that they actually are interested in trying to find out the truth about God.

01:15:30

They're at least making an attempt. That's why they'd show up and want to talk about that stuff. So, somewhere in there, other than the guy who wants to win an argument,

01:15:37

I'm hoping was the guy that wants to find the truth. Paul Yeah, and see, there's - when you have the rapid fire like that,

01:15:45

I mean, there's one thing he was making an argument, that you have to have the New Testament say something in a very specific way about the

01:15:53

Sabbath. Pete Right. And if it doesn't say it that way, then it's not true. Well, the

01:15:59

Mormons - sorry, the Muslims do the same thing to us. They say, you show me where Jesus said,

01:16:05

I am God, worship me. Andrew That doesn't exist, does it? No. But that doesn't mean he didn't claim to be

01:16:12

God when he said, I am, or the Father and I are one, right? He claims, but he didn't do it in the way they want.

01:16:19

Now, an interesting thing he also said is that the law was codified in stone.

01:16:28

Which law? There's five uses of law. That which was codified in stone was, we know, is the

01:16:35

Ten Commandments. Pete Yep. Andrew As you mentioned earlier, there's how many commandments?

01:16:41

Pete 613, yeah. Andrew Okay. Pete Five in the Old Testament, yeah. So right there, he's arguing for two different uses of law, which is a fallacy of equivocation.

01:16:51

He's equivocating on the word law, using them two different ways. Andrew Right. Pete And then claiming that it's the same.

01:16:58

Andrew And what was interesting is that you paused to point out his logical fallacy of the red herring.

01:17:04

He didn't defend it or try to argue against it. He just kind of bounced off and went in a different direction.

01:17:11

Pete He did it again. Andrew Exactly. He doubled down. I thought that was interesting. And again, you would hope someone would say, well, wait a second.

01:17:18

I don't think I'm doing that. Am I? You know, and pause. I had a lot of that. God gave me lots of humble pie to eat while I was working on this tourism stuff.

01:17:25

Because I do, just openly, I have that tendency to want to win an argument. It's that competitive nature.

01:17:32

And for me, in the dealing, and maybe it helped that these were my friends, and then the folks that I kind of eventually ended up talking to, they weren't my friends, but I sort of approached them that way to say, look,

01:17:43

I don't know everything. And I actually don't want to win an argument. Matter of fact, many of them, like the

01:17:49

Jewish group in Jerusalem, I said, I'm not going to argue at all. I just kind of want to know your position. Just you teach me.

01:17:55

I want to sit here and listen. And when we don't have that, when our hearts are hard, it's hard for us to ever learn.

01:18:02

We put a ceiling on ourselves, you know? So, I think that, and I agree with you,

01:18:09

I don't know where he was going to go with the whole 72 -hour thing other than to, I think, and this is hard because we don't have him here now, but I think what he was trying to prove was that we were fed lies and we can't trust our interpretation of the

01:18:26

Bible. Now, this is another thing maybe you guys could pick up what he did. He threw out the word hermeneutic.

01:18:34

Did he actually apply any hermeneutics? No. He mentioned the word.

01:18:39

It gives credibility. And then he went rambling on just a whole bunch of statements, a whole bunch of claims without any support.

01:18:47

Right. Matter of fact, he totally tried to sidestep my hermeneutic on the word alam, he wasn't interested in that.

01:18:54

And what did he do? He brings that up. I mean, he's the one that asked the question, show me where that word is used anywhere else.

01:19:02

Now, I was going to give him just the one verse, but since he kind of busted it,

01:19:07

I'm like, I'm just going to give you a whole bunch, and I didn't even give, I mean, there's more than that of the usage, okay?

01:19:15

Right. It's used that way 48 times in the Old Testament.

01:19:21

So, you know, that was, I think, a simple thing, and for folks, pick up what

01:19:27

Robert did with this. This is one of the things I picked up in your book that I hadn't recognized, and I thought it was an excellent point, you brought it up tonight.

01:19:37

The number of words in the Hebrew language compared to other languages, whether it be

01:19:42

Greek or English, you have a limited number of words, which means you're going to use words for multiple meanings.

01:19:52

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's an excellent argument that you made. Melissa dropped out.

01:19:59

I was just about to add her. Okay, Melissa, come back in. She had a question, I think, let's see if she put the question in here.

01:20:07

She said she was reading about Leviticus, so I don't know if that was her question.

01:20:14

We'll see if she comes back in. Let me bring Atomic Apologist in, none other than the hat -wearing

01:20:21

John Wilkinson. How you doing, sir? Hey, I'm good. I'm good, I'm good,

01:20:26

I'm good. We'll put him backstage. Oh, I'm sorry. You're mean, man.

01:20:33

You are just mean. It's okay, man. I got my leather Bible right here.

01:20:42

You know, I have my... Oh, wait, no. Hold on.

01:20:53

He's trying... Just because he got the nice Schuyler Fiction, but I got...

01:20:58

Schuyler Fiction? You read Schuyler Bible.

01:21:03

I got my nice ESV heirloom here, and I know for a fact this one costs less than yours.

01:21:13

Okay, okay. That's okay,

01:21:18

I just picked up... Yesterday, I just picked up Foundations of the Christian Faith by Boyce.

01:21:26

So I'm really happy about this. And then I also saw... I also found Van Til's Christian Apologetics.

01:21:35

So I'm really excited about this little guy right here. I just turned on that one. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. The one by Bonson?

01:21:43

No, by Van Til. Oh, okay. I have Bonson's kind of collection of the Van Til catalog.

01:21:50

Okay, all right, all right. Cool. John, I'm going to get to your question, because Melissa's back in here. So we got to make sure we have time for her.

01:21:57

Okay, you said earlier in the beginning of the show there, these guys, they recognize that Jesus was this human, and they recognize him as a

01:22:11

Messiah. But how do they get around Isaiah 53 or other major prophecies when it comes to that point exactly to Jesus?

01:22:24

I mean, is it similar to what the Jews do, or is it... I mean, both of you guys can probably answer that, but I mean...

01:22:32

Oh, yeah, Torahists are different in that aspect. So Jews skip that forbidden chapter altogether.

01:22:37

You know, one week at the synagogue, you go through Isaiah 52 and stop halfway. Next week, you're at 54.

01:22:44

Torahism doesn't reject Isaiah 55. They actually embrace it and say, look, Jesus was the suffering servant.

01:22:50

They embrace all of it, but somehow they interpret it to be mortal, a mortal Messiah. Where Israel, or sorry, the rabbis will interpret it as the nation of Israel.

01:23:02

So they will deal with it. And if you read through the text, I mean, just read

01:23:08

Isaiah 52, the end of 52 into 53, and ask yourself, is this a person or a nation?

01:23:14

And just a simple reading, I think, makes it clear it's a person. Okay. I think

01:23:19

Rabbi Singer has a teaching on that. Yeah, but Rabbi Singer is so very interesting.

01:23:27

There's a reason that Tovia will not debate Michael Brown. They did two debates.

01:23:34

One that was recorded, but Tovia did not want it released.

01:23:40

And from what I understand, I've not been able to find it. So I think, I guess Michael Brown honored that. But the second one, one of the things that happened in the debate was that Michael Brown, and I'm not a fan of Michael Brown.

01:23:57

Some folks know that. But Michael Brown said that there's rabbis who interpret

01:24:03

Isaiah 53 as referring to Messiah. He said there are no passages like that.

01:24:09

And I think Michael Brown started it by saying, well, if I find one, will you convert to Christianity?

01:24:18

And Tovia says, yes. And if you can't find one, will you convert back to Judaism? Well, after that show, he came up with four references of rabbis that refer to it.

01:24:30

And so he was very upset with that. And he ended up saying that there was editing that was done.

01:24:38

My understanding, the editing was done. They both approved the edits. It was done to fit into a radio format.

01:24:46

But I think from what I understand from Michael Brown, the issue was he produced that and Tovia didn't convert.

01:24:56

I was just going to say, when's Tovia's baptism? Yeah, well, that's because God does the converting.

01:25:03

Here we got evidential apologetics in every sub, right? So, John, anything else?

01:25:10

No, that's it. So, Melissa can go ahead and jump in. So, thanks a lot, guys. Okay, let me bring

01:25:16

Melissa in here. Melissa. Can you hear me? Yes. And Melissa does a show, a podcast called

01:25:23

Truth Be Told Radio. I was just going to say Truth Be Told and then

01:25:28

I went blank for a second. Yeah, it's on laptop radio website, Truth Be Told Radio, on Sunday 2 p .m.

01:25:36

to 4 p .m. Pacific time. Okay, my question, I think you guys kind of answered it, but I'm going to say it anyway.

01:25:44

I was reading Leviticus, like there'll be certain laws and they'll say, this will be a statute forever.

01:25:51

And so then I'm saying, like, how could that be? And then obviously we know that Jesus, like, went back on something, like he,

01:26:01

I don't know how you call it, abrogated or something? Yeah, and I was trying to address this with Jim when he brought it up.

01:26:12

And this is, I mean, he used the word hermeneutics. I want to apply some hermeneutics.

01:26:18

So in Exodus 12, verse 14, which is what he referred to, that passage, and I think you may even remember it, but in, this day shall be a memorial day that you shall keep as a fest, as a feast to the

01:26:36

Lord throughout your generations as a statute forever, you will keep it as a feast.

01:26:43

And the word actually, you know, forever, the statute as forever appears a couple times there.

01:26:49

Now, the question I asked him is, who is it being written to? In other words, this was being written to a nation of Israel.

01:27:01

Okay. If anyone has been listening to my rap report podcast, the weekly one that drops, we're in, we dropped two parts of a four -part series on what is the church.

01:27:15

And we've been addressing these things because this is a big thing you end up seeing, and this is what he was struggling with.

01:27:21

I'm going to be curious to see what Robert ends up responding with. But you have Israel, the elect, and we were talking earlier in the show about being grafted in, that's the elect, those believers, and then you have the nation of Israel, that's people that are not elect, but they're both the nation of Israel.

01:27:41

You have the same thing in the church, and we're dealing with this on the podcast, on the rap report podcast, because we're talking about the church, the visible and the invisible church, or the local and universal.

01:27:52

So, you have the elect church, and then you have people that gather and are called the church, but they're not elect.

01:27:58

Same thing with the nation of Israel. So, the question you have to first ask when interpreting is, who wrote this and who is it being written to?

01:28:08

These are commands to the nation of Israel, referring to both unbelievers and believers, elect and non -elect.

01:28:17

They're both included in that. And once you see that difference, okay, then the laws are not just for God's people, they were for a nation.

01:28:29

And so, the question then becomes, why does that apply to a different group of people that are made up of elect and non -elect, but they're not the nation of Israel?

01:28:40

Okay? That's how I would end up answering it. Robert? Robert Leonard That's an awfully good answer.

01:28:46

Yeah. I mean, I would agree with that. I'm sorry, was this Exodus 31? I can't remember the scripture that you mentioned.

01:28:53

The one I referenced and that he brought up was Exodus 12, 14. Robert Leonard Oh, okay.

01:29:00

It's actually 12, 14 to 28, it covers it. Robert Leonard Okay. I think

01:29:05

I responded to him about a different one, but I believe it's the same Hebrew word. So, I don't know if you heard any of that kind of explanation.

01:29:15

I'm talking to Melissa. If you heard that explanation to, what's his name, Jim, Batman? Melissa Yeah, I was listening. Okay, yeah.

01:29:21

So, I would kind of respond to that way as well, is that hermeneutics, you need to start with, as Andrew said, who wrote it and to whom, but we also need to understand when we look at it, we need to understand it in the context of the entire

01:29:35

Bible, the entire storyline of scripture. So, if we find something later on that seems to contradict or conflict with something we read earlier, we need to make sure that we're resolving that conflict within the context of all of scripture.

01:29:54

Because the Bible is, it does not lie, it's inerrant. So, if there's a conflict, that conflict is with us to try to harmonize.

01:30:03

And so, the point that I was making to Jim, the Batman guy, was that when we see a word like forever in the

01:30:11

Old Testament, and later on we see something that was, that makes it appear that perhaps that thing doesn't exist anymore.

01:30:18

For example, the Levitical priesthood was supposed to be forever, according to the Old Testament.

01:30:24

It's no longer. We know it went away with, even if you don't want to be a Christian, you can admit there's no more

01:30:30

Levitical priesthood after AD 70. So, the Bible didn't lie about it. What does that mean?

01:30:35

Well, now we need to go back and look at that Hebrew word, alam, and say maybe that wasn't being used until the very literal end of time.

01:30:42

Maybe what it meant is for a long time or, you know, for an era or an epic kind of thing. I think that's an important concept, too.

01:30:49

I would kind of want to point out is this idea that, and this is a big thing with the

01:30:54

Torahists, is they tend to interpret New Testament events and things like Jesus, but they limit the context of that interpretation only to the

01:31:09

Tanakh, or the Old Testament, right? So, the analogy I like to use, it's like the movie, it's like the

01:31:15

Sixth Sense, if you saw that movie, right? So, you go through the whole movie. I'm not ruining it for Benny. It's pretty old, but yeah.

01:31:23

So, near the end of the film, you know, you get that shocking revelation. Oh, my gosh, this psychiatrist guy, the Bruce Willis character, he's been dead the whole time.

01:31:31

Wow, that's crazy. So, once you get that revelation, now, if you went back and watched the movie again, which

01:31:36

I remember doing that a second time, all of a sudden you're looking for those clues, because now you know what happens at the end.

01:31:43

So, you're starting to see this stuff that the director put in there, you know, like Malcolm's wife was ignoring him.

01:31:49

You're like, wow, she's really mean. No, actually, now that we look back, she couldn't see him because he was dead. Same, the same concept holds true with the

01:31:56

New Testament. Now that we know that Jesus has come and that He's inaugurated the new covenant in His blood, and all these shifts have taken place,

01:32:05

He actually didn't abolish the law, as it says in Matthew 5 .17. He fulfilled the Old Testament. So, now we can go back from the beginning and say, okay, what must have that have meant when they said such and such would last forever?

01:32:17

So, that's kind of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about getting the wider context of the whole body of Scripture.

01:32:23

It's almost as, you know, many who would hold to covenant theology would say that we interpret the

01:32:29

Old Testament from the New. It almost seems like the Torahists want to interpret the

01:32:35

New from the Old. Right, exactly. That's exactly, yeah, that's a great way. Instead of getting a new edition of my book out, that was good.

01:32:44

I'm putting that in there, yeah. I mean, you're exactly right, because Jesus Himself is the key that unlocks the meaning of every biblical text, right?

01:32:53

Yeah. So, He makes sense of the Old Testament, and now, and even, and it's pointed to in the

01:32:58

New Testament that the feasts and all that were a shadow of the real thing that was to come, and Jesus was the real thing that they were pointing to.

01:33:07

Yeah, I'm reading a book right now. Progressive revelation. Instead of taking that which is…

01:33:13

Right. They want to go back and say, no, no, no, we got to interpret the newer revelation from the older.

01:33:20

Yeah, I'm sorry, Melissa, you were going to say something. Oh, yeah, I'm just saying, like, I'm reading a book now, like, it's saying how, like,

01:33:28

God is without passions. Like, one point it'll say God regretted, but then it says in their part that God doesn't regret, like, so it's like, it's weird.

01:33:41

It's like, it's like you can't do it from the same, from our same point of view, like, as a human,

01:33:48

God's different. Yeah, exactly. And even beyond that, I would urge you to consider, and we got in this a little bit with Jim.

01:33:57

Consider the Eastern culture in which that book was written. Oh, yeah, that too. Oh, Westerners, you know? I'm actually reading a great book right now,

01:34:03

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. Cool. It's a good book, and what it talks about is how we as Westerners, Americans, come to book thinking in a

01:34:13

Western individualistic way isn't necessarily wrong, but we get so much more meaning if we unlock how an

01:34:20

Eastern culture, an honor -shame culture, a collectivist culture, how they would have intended and meant their stories to be understood to their audience.

01:34:28

It's really interesting. What's that book called again? It's called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E.

01:34:35

Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O 'Brien. Brandon J. O 'Brien. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's very eye -opening.

01:34:41

I'd show it, but unfortunately, my books are packed, but I have this book available,

01:34:46

Torahism, which if you go to the website, you can get it on Amazon, you can even get it in Kindle, but, you know, just,

01:34:57

I mean, if you take a look at Robert, he looks kind of hungry, he needs to eat, so go directly to Torahismbook .com

01:35:05

and pick up a copy of Are Christians Required to Keep the Law of Moses?

01:35:11

My suggestion to you is to buy several copies because you're going to run into a gym of your own.

01:35:19

It's good to be able to give that to them and say, here you go, read this and get in touch with Robert.

01:35:26

And you run. Yeah, thrown my way. Yeah, give his blog site, rlsolberg .com,

01:35:36

is it? That's right, yeah. .com, and so give him that site, just let them go there, and that way you can run.

01:35:43

That's what I do. Melissa, anything else? Thanks for answering the question.

01:35:49

That's all. Thanks, Melissa. Okay, well, thank you very much. Let me bring in the last person that's been in here for a while here, the

01:35:57

Aussie, who with a great first name, Andrew. How are you, brother? Not too bad, sorry.

01:36:07

Jinx had to swallow at the beginning. Okay, I want to regress because I thought it was actually pretty funny.

01:36:15

Maybe we could end on a lighter note. At the beginning you said there was a person, what was it, the

01:36:26

Ark of the Covenant and how seven of them disappeared? Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to flesh that one out, how

01:36:35

I was going to go with it because I was thinking. Well, what the guy was trying to say was that the

01:36:42

Ark had been discovered, it was under a mountain, that they had several people that tried to move it, and when they went under the mountain to find it and to get it, they all died.

01:36:57

And so the only person alive that knows its location and has supposedly seen it is this one rabbi who gave testimony to where it is, but with the warning that if you go to get it, you're going to die.

01:37:16

So how do we prove? Oh, right. So like, okay, so the

01:37:23

Ark was being put on the oxen and somebody decided they were going to stabilize it by touching it and they died.

01:37:33

Yeah, but see, in this case, I guess something like that, but this is, since Robert's going to do movie illustrations,

01:37:41

I'm going to go even further back to a movie than Indiana Jones because I didn't see that one.

01:37:46

No, back to the Terminator, because I actually watched this movie, but Terminator, they go back in time and they can't bring anything with them.

01:37:59

One police officer says, how convenient that you have a story that you can't bring anything that collaborates your story, there's nothing you could bring.

01:38:09

You have to come through the time, you know, naked, so you can't bring anything that would be able to verify the story.

01:38:17

That's sort of what this reminds me of it. Anyone that looks at it is going to die, except for the one rabbi who writes about it.

01:38:25

I guess he doesn't die, but everyone else does. So you can't find it because it's there, but I guess it's hidden, you know, so.

01:38:37

It's convenient. Where are the bodies? Yeah, well. Where are the bodies if they die?

01:38:44

I think he said that they vanished and so they're gone, so you don't need a body.

01:38:51

See how convenient that is? So like some kind of rapture. Yeah, yeah. Very rapturous.

01:38:57

Yeah, I don't. I'm not going to take that one.

01:39:05

What was it in the 70s when the pilots decided or the airlines decided that one

01:39:10

Christian pilot was not going to be flying with another and they were going to put the atheist pilots with the

01:39:15

Christian pilots because if the rapture happened, they wanted somebody to land the plane.

01:39:22

Then what happens if the atheist gets converted? All right, so.

01:39:28

I don't know if the atheist gets converted, but anyway. John wanted to come back in.

01:39:33

That was an interesting joke. You have anything else, Andrew? Because John wanted to try to jump back in before the end.

01:39:39

Oh, that's it. All right. So jump in. It's the

01:39:44

Brady Bunch. Yeah. John, welcome back. I just want to come back to you and come back to the show real quick and just say, dude,

01:39:54

I can't believe Bruce Willis was a ghost. Why didn't you say spoilers?

01:39:59

What the heck, man? You didn't say that. Why weren't you paying attention?

01:40:05

I think 20 years is beyond the statute of limitations for spoiler alert. Now I got to see the movie.

01:40:14

You ruined it for me. I never saw the Ghostbusters movie, so don't tell me how that ends. They bust ghosts.

01:40:23

Yeah, I don't even remember. I did see that movie. The only thing

01:40:28

I remember of Ghostbusters, other than the line, who are you going to call Ghostbusters, was the big marshmallow blowing up.

01:40:35

As a kid, I don't know. That was just hysterical to me. So all right.

01:40:42

So someone's asking, John, if there's going to be an after show.

01:40:48

That's up to you. Probably not, because the other computer

01:40:53

I have is just not working that well. All right. All right. So we'll put

01:40:59

John in timeout. I mean, backstage. I was almost going to do that to Jim.

01:41:09

It was getting kind of close there, but he left beforehand. So real quick, before we end, give folks, again, plug the book, plug your blogs, let folks know how to get in touch with you.

01:41:23

If there's anyone who's listening who has a podcast, I recommend you get a hold of Robert and get him on your podcast.

01:41:30

More people need to be getting copies of the book, Tourism, because we're dealing with this.

01:41:36

It was good to have Jim come in so people can see the arguments. People who are reading the comments, you're seeing some people arguing there.

01:41:44

And this is not an unusual thing, unfortunately. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

01:41:51

So let me thank you, first of all, for promoting this. I really appreciate all your support. I'm going to throw some shout outs back to you.

01:41:58

These are awesome books. Andrew and I did a bit of a book swap, so those are great. Yeah, so the book, tourismbook .com.

01:42:05

You can get it there. You can see some information about the book there as well, or amazon .com.

01:42:11

It's available there. It was put out by Williamson College Press. I do need to give a shout out to Williamson College, which is where I am currently studying for my master's degree in theological studies.

01:42:23

So shout out to all my friends there. Fabulous school. And they've been very supportive of this for the very reason that they've been seeing very similar things happen in the

01:42:32

Nashville area, up in the Minneapolis area, where I first ran into it. Matter of fact, at the book launch party that we had at the college,

01:42:40

I had a guy come up to me from about two towns over and said, I need to talk to you. We have to go to lunch. There's so many people that keep bringing this stuff up to me.

01:42:49

So this is a book born out of a personal need to understand where these other folks were coming from and out of a need to defend the

01:42:59

Christian faith, because I'll tell you, just a little elaboration on the story of how this came about. When I started engaging with my friends, so on Facebook, they were posting and et cetera, we got into this big, long public discussion.

01:43:12

I started getting a lot of people behind the scenes saying, hey, you don't know me, but I really appreciate you sticking up for Christianity with Bob and Sue, is the pseudonyms

01:43:21

I gave them, because they would tell me things like, hey, our kids play with their kids, and now their kids are trying to tell our kids this weird stuff, and we don't know how to respond.

01:43:31

We didn't know what to tell them. Even had some of their relatives say, hey, we've been praying for our brother, but we don't know what's going on.

01:43:39

Thank you for defending the faith. And so out of that came this book, and I sent it out to all the folks that had reached out to me.

01:43:45

So I think it really is a valuable resource when you're talking to someone that believes or is tempted to follow that kind of return to Torah, Hebrew roots movement.

01:43:55

But in addition, it ended up becoming a little bit of like a biblical theology that helps to explain the storyline and the arc of the

01:44:03

Bible and what things meant in the Old Testament and what they mean in the New Testament. So I think even if you're not kind of fighting with that in your own world, there's some interesting stuff in here that I think would bless you as a

01:44:13

Christian. It blessed me to kind of learn it, and it was a huge, huge process for me. So again, torezandbook .com,

01:44:20

rlsolberg .com is my personal blog website, and that can be found on all your major media outlets or social media outlets as well.

01:44:29

So, and thanks, Andrew. I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, no, I mean, I told you this when we first talked.

01:44:35

This is the only book I know that really covers Hebrew roots, and it's ilk. Um, because I just,

01:44:44

I didn't have a resource to turn people to, and I get asked this all the time because people think, oh, well, if you're

01:44:50

Jewish, you understand everything about Hebrew roots. What? Right? So, I'm thrilled that there's now a resource

01:44:58

I could turn people to and say, here, get this book. Not only because there's a resource, but it's so thoroughly done.

01:45:05

I mean, it really does answer all the issues that come up.

01:45:12

I mean, folks, basically, here's what Robert was doing when Jim was on. He was opening his book and just reading, you know?

01:45:21

It's there. It's like, you know, just sit there and say, okay, what's your question?

01:45:26

Oh, okay, hold on. Let me turn to that chapter. Here you go. Right. It was kind of like that with Jim the

01:45:31

Batman, right? Oh, Sabbath? Okay, we got that. Three days and three nights? Okay, we got that. We got that. It's in there.

01:45:37

It's in there. That's the beauty of this book. So, go check out the book, Tourism, tourismbook .com.

01:45:44

You want to get a couple of copies. Get them today. And it really is well -written.

01:45:52

I think I told you this. And here's the irony. We didn't get to talk about this, but we talked about it on the

01:45:57

Wrap Report podcast where you And, you know, when the person that contacted me,

01:46:04

I guess your secretary or whoever contacted me and said, hey, you know, would you like to have him on?

01:46:10

My response, and I think you ended up seeing it, was, you know, I'm going to be a little bit critical. I'm from a

01:46:15

Jewish background, you know? And you were like, oh, then I definitely want your input.

01:46:21

When I started reading this, I actually thought that it was going to be an argument for law keeping, and I'm reading it going, wait, no, wait, no, no, he's actually, he's saying things that are right here.

01:46:36

No, this is an answer to it. I was like, oh, this is great. So, I really enjoyed the book.

01:46:43

The thing we didn't get into, and I would encourage people to go to Andrew Rapport's Wrap Report where Robert was on.

01:46:50

It's also titled, I think it's titled, Tourism, Answering Hebrew Roots and Others. The one thing that we did do with that was we covered the issue of how people get into this.

01:47:01

It is a little deceptive. I'm going to give a really condensed version here, but basically what you have is you have people, maybe like Jim, Batman Jim, who, you know, they're interested, they want to get back to looking at the background of Judaism to enrich their study of the

01:47:19

New Testament. Just as Robert was saying, he likes to do and to study that out, but they start to go a little further to where they defend the law keeping over what the

01:47:32

New Testament teaches. And this is what you see happening. One of the things I ended up saying on the podcast was you end up seeing these people that what they do is it starts out as just an interest.

01:47:44

I just have an interest in this, and we study it out, and then you're talking to friends and you're really defending the

01:47:51

Hebrew roots, just trying to explain it to friends to explain what it is they believe. And before you know it, you're starting to believe some of the things because you're saying, hey, there actually are answers here.

01:48:02

And you actually convince yourself of it in trying to just answer people's questions of what you're studying, and you're just trying to defend the case accurately, but you're actually convincing yourself of its accuracy.

01:48:15

And you're not listening to some of the questions and the challenges being asked. You saw that tonight with Jim.

01:48:21

He wasn't listening to the challenges. He just rolled right over them.

01:48:26

He made light of them, made little of them, just, you know, and I'll continue to go on.

01:48:33

That's what you end up seeing that people end up doing, and that's convincing themselves of that right now. I will say that not always, but a lot of times there's pride involved, and all of us have pride, and we can all suffer from it, and you do have people,

01:48:46

I don't care what group you're in, if you're charismatic, you get saved, and then you get a second blessing, you speak in tongues and have the

01:48:52

Holy Spirit. If you're Reformed, you get saved, then you get Reformed, you know the five points of Calvinism, and everything is seen in that.

01:48:59

If you're a fundamentalist, you get saved, and then you learn about King James only. And if you're going to be, you know, in this camp, you get saved, and then you learn all about the

01:49:08

Hebrew roots. The same pride can exist, you can see it in all these different groups, and when you have someone like that, then what they're doing is their pride becomes king, and they tune everything else out, and that's where it becomes a dangerous part, because that's when souls are at stake, because now they no longer listen for truth.

01:49:29

I think you kind of saw maybe a little of that with Jim, where he believes he has the truth, and I think he's sincere about it, but he tunes out anything that doesn't agree with his conclusion.

01:49:42

That's called confirmation bias. You heard it when he was given overwhelming evidence with a question, he just ignores it and rolls on, because it doesn't fit the confirmation, okay, the conclusion that he has.

01:49:59

Now, let me give a warning to those of you that may be listening. I know that there was parts in there where, and I'm guilty of this as well, of laughing at Jim, the things he was saying, the way he was behaving.

01:50:16

There is an element where we sit there and go, wow, I can't believe someone's actually saying this or acting this way.

01:50:22

But there's another component to it that I really want to stress with us. Be praying for Jim.

01:50:29

Be praying for these people. Do not be, well, they don't know what they're talking about.

01:50:34

They're a bunch of idiots. Do not do that, even if you think it's true, okay?

01:50:40

Pray for their souls. Pray that they would come to know truth, because what many of these people are doing is they know of the freedom of the gospel, and they put themselves back under the law, which the whole book of Galatians would condemn.

01:50:56

Right. They need our prayers. That's what they need.

01:51:02

They need guys like Robert who are going to spend the time to research this, to put this together so that he can have answers for them.

01:51:10

They need what he has. So, be praying for him, because the reality is there's no other books

01:51:15

I know on this subject, so he's probably dealing with this day in and day out, aren't you, Robert?

01:51:21

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Once the book came out, I was suddenly the expert, so. Exactly. And I'm still learning myself, so yeah.

01:51:28

But yeah, you're right, and it's something that I really appreciate you mentioning that, because I make a big point in the book that this isn't, our argument or our fight isn't with people, it's with ideas.

01:51:40

So, we can refute Jim up and down and laugh at the ideas, but Jim as a human being, we want to pray for him.

01:51:46

I appreciate you mentioning that. Yeah, and I'm going to let you close out with one thing.

01:51:53

One thing you really didn't get to address is Hebrews 8 .13. It was brought up,

01:51:59

Jim really didn't let you address it. Let me read it, and just if you could address the importance of this. Hebrews 8 .13

01:52:05

says, in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete, and what is becoming obsolete and growing old is already, or is ready to vanish away.

01:52:19

What's the importance of that? I had to read this about ten times when

01:52:24

I came across it to understand what it really meant, and it's talking about the covenant, the Sinai covenant.

01:52:30

And this whole book of Hebrews is about now, through Jesus, we have a superior temple, we have a superior priest, we have a superior law.

01:52:39

So, I think that is really pointing to the fact that Jesus fulfilled the

01:52:46

Old Testament law. Again, he didn't abolish it, he didn't make it useless and unworthy. It was God's law, it's perfect. But it just wasn't intended to last forever, and I think that's what

01:52:54

Hebrews 8 .13 tells us. Well, again, I thank you for coming on.

01:53:01

I love the time spending with you. You're a little bit more musically talented than me, just a tad.

01:53:09

I can fix that. No, you can't. Some things can't be fixed apart from a miracle of Christ.

01:53:19

So, but folks, check out this book, check out rlsahlberg .com,

01:53:27

tourismbook .com. Really encourage you to get these. And go back and listen to the episode that we got to do on the

01:53:36

Wrap Report so you can see that. I know there are several people here listening because I'm seeing the chats.

01:53:45

And they need to be reaching out to you right now. I'm speaking directly to you, Mr. Hanholz, award -winning podcaster.

01:53:54

You need to get a hold of him and get him on your show. You know, come on now.

01:54:02

So, but I do think that this is something that we got to get more people knowing about this book because there's so many people being trapped in this.

01:54:10

So, please get the word out about this book, Tourism, by R .L.

01:54:17

Sahlberg. You need to do this because there's souls at stake. There's people being deceived.

01:54:23

And so, you know, we're glad that Jim came in, you know, and I know, and I'm just going to end by explaining this.

01:54:35

I know that many people think, oh, it's so rude that you muted him. There is a reason that I do this, okay?

01:54:41

I know after these guys get off and they say how we silence them and we're trying to control the conversation.

01:54:47

I'll encourage you to go back and listen to how much time he spoke compared to how much time either

01:54:53

Robert and I combined spoke. And I think you're going to see that he did more speaking.

01:54:59

It is my show, so I do get to set the rules. But we want dialogue.

01:55:06

That's what we're here for. Okay? And if Robert was speaking over Jim, I would have stopped him as well, you know, because we want dialogue here.

01:55:16

We want to help you, the audience, to learn not just the content on today of, you know, tourism, but also to learn how to do apologetics, what to look for.

01:55:29

And so these are the things, you know, and it wasn't that I just am muting him for the sake of muting him because I don't like what he's saying.

01:55:40

I would have muted him a lot sooner. I would have booted him if that was the case. I muted him because of the behavior, okay?

01:55:47

And so I just want folks to recognize that as well. All right. So, Robert, again, thanks for coming on.

01:55:55

I hope everyone goes out and gets your book or several copies of your book. And we'll be back next week.

01:56:03

So, next week's topic, Dr. Anthony Silvestro will be in, and he's going to try to convince you that you,

01:56:10

Christian, should be voting for the Donald. Yeah, I want to see the argument.

01:56:18

Now, it is going to be interesting because we do have some people that are planning to come in and challenge me on, now

01:56:28

I can't even remember what the challenges were. They wanted to come in and challenge me.

01:56:33

I think there was an atheist that wanted to challenge me. I just forget the topic.

01:56:39

So, oh, well, when he comes in, we'll know. But there were also, I do know some folks that were going to come in and challenge me on the fact that they believe you can lose your salvation.

01:56:49

That's fine. That's what this show is for. So, folks, one of the things is, is if you have any apologetics questions like Nicholas had, that's what we're here for.

01:56:58

Come on in Thursday nights. We're here most Thursday nights. If we're not doing a formal debate, we will entertain any question, pretty much.

01:57:08

So, just know that we're here. Apologeticslive .com is the place to go. We always put the links up there, the topics, the links to participate, the links to watch.

01:57:18

And so, we appreciate you guys who are listening. So, remember that until next time, to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God, and we'll catch you next.