Fairy Tales

Have You Not Read

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Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

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Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

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Thank you. Welcome back to Have You Not Read. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Kassin, and Andrew Hudson.

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We are thankful that you are all joining us again and we're gonna start off with a question that was sent in to our website.

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The question reads, I'd love to hear your justification for slavery, misogyny, talking snakes, talking donkeys, talking burning bushes, and the hundreds of other fairy tales your book depicts in the year 2022.

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Michael, you want to take a crack at it? Yeah, first of all, I would like to clarify that slavery and misogyny are not fairy tales, but I think we know where it was going.

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Talking snakes and talking donkeys, misogyny and slavery, talking burning bushes, and hundreds of other fairy tales your book depicts in the year 2022.

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So I think the key word here is justification. By what standard are we saying that the things in the

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Bible, the stories of the Bible, the events of Scripture are indeed not only true, but they are authoritative, they have meaning, and they operate as a standard in the year 2022?

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How can we justify that the themes and stories and laws and instructions and claims of Scripture, of the

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Bible, are to be used today in the year 2022? So if we look at the question, we see what the standard is for the one who is asking.

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We notice this, I'd love to hear your justification for and then there's a list of things that the questioner finds objectionable in the

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Bible, and then they say in the year 2022 as they finish out. So obviously the standard to which the questioner is holding the

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Bible is the year 2022. The questioner sees that there's a real problem, and to them they see a real problem for the claims of Scripture in light of 2022.

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So the year 2022 is the standard by which the Bible is being judged by this questioner.

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Now concerning judgment, something that's very human and we all do, so in Matthew chapter 7 we hear something from Jesus in the

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Sermon on the Mount, and he says, Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged.

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And with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?

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Or how can you say to your brother, let me remove the speck from your eye, and look, a plank is in your own eye.

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Hypocrite, first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove this speck from your brother's eye.

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And so Jesus simply says, look, when you judge, you have to reckon with the fact that by what standard you judge, that is what will be applied back to you.

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Okay, so Jesus does say it's okay to make a judgment call, it is okay to discern, it is it is okay to try to get the speck, the splinter, the sliver of wood that is in your brother's eye, but you know before you do, you need to remove the plank that is in your own eye.

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What Jesus is saying is, the standard of judgment with which you're going to judge should be applied yourself first.

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Okay, before you start applying it to others. You see, and that's what Jesus, that's what his counsel is, that's what his advice is.

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So here's the question, here's two guys working on a job site, right, and they're building a house, and one guy has this big splinter in his eye, and the other dude has his face mashed up into a, you know, a four by four.

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Now the guy with the splinter is saying, ow, can you get this splinter out of my eye?

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I can't see straight. And the guy with a plank in his eye, I can't see anything. Now the guy with the plank in his eye has got to get it out of his face before he can help the guy with the splinter.

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Now what gets the plank out of the guy's eye? What removes the blindness?

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That's the question. What is the standard that brings light into the darkness of one's life so that you can see clearly enough in your own situation to get the plank out of your eye so you can help somebody else?

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The clarifying standard. Okay, so this has to be applied to yourself first before you apply it to others.

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So I hear the standard being employed is 2022.

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Okay, so let's take a look at this. Slavery, misogyny, talking snakes, talking donkeys, talking burning bushes, and hundreds of other fairy tales.

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How can you justify such things in the year 2022? So let's apply the standard 2022 first to these things and see where we end up.

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How are we doing with slavery in the year 2022? Rampant. Slavery is rampant in the year 2022.

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Now private ownership of slaves is not allowed in our fair republic, but the federal government can own as many slaves as they want in the federal prison system.

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We've got lots of slavery in the United States of America and there's slavery all around the world in the year 2022.

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What about misogyny? Oh, guess what? By the way, today was Celebrate Women's Day in the

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Air Force and they put forth a man as their premier woman.

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So, I mean, if that ain't misogyny, I don't know what is. When it's time to celebrate

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Woman of the Year and a man makes the front page. If that ain't misogyny, I don't know what is.

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A man just bested all of the women's swim records in the NCAA. If that ain't misogyny,

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I don't know what is. What about talking snakes and talking donkeys? Well, in this case, I have to admit there is a difference.

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In the Bible, there was a snake that talked. There was a donkey that talked. Special events that occurred for good reasons.

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But today, we don't have talking snakes and talking donkeys, but we do have people identifying as animals. They don't actually talk.

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They make animal noises and fail to communicate very well. So, I guess the Bible is a little bit ahead of the times compared to 2022.

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When it comes to the burning bush, talking burning bush, well, you've got to read the story again.

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To be fair, the bush wasn't actually talking. The bush was a flame that didn't consume, but it was actually the fire that was talking.

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So, it was the presence of God manifested as a flame. And there are hundreds of other, as you say, fairy tales in our book.

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Well, a fairy tale meaning, you know, hard to believe stories or things that nobody ought to be believing. But we live in the year 2022, and it is a year full of fairy tales.

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What do you think, guys? What kind of fairy tales we got going on today? Is this Have You Not Read or This Week in Witchcraft?

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Well, I don't know, you know. But we've got a lot of fairy tales being told today over and over and over again, and they're fairly mainstream.

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Entire books have been written on this, you know, live not by lies. Where, you know, you're telling a lie, and they know it's a lie, but everybody's believing the lie and stop living under the lie.

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I suppose a great one is that, and you brought it up, a man pretending to be a woman, and then we all have to participate in that person's self identity until they change it and they identify as something else.

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Then you must participate in that. And they said, this is the tale that I'm telling today.

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You all need to believe it. And if you're not, then you're going to go to jail.

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I remember there is a single tweet, Bible verse. This is a legislature in, was it

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Finland, I believe? Yes, a Finnish member of Parliament made one tweet, and they are, and they just got acquitted.

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But the fact is that they, you know, that was a hate speech, because they did a tweet.

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And what it was is that they were attacking someone's identity. She was not going to participate in someone else's identity, whether it was a fairy tale or not.

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Yeah, and we've got like, you know, fairy tale Trudeau saying, we are standing up for democracy.

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We are against tyranny and oppression. And then we see how he treats people that disagree with him in his own country.

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You know, there's... What about the value of the dollar? Yeah, don't get me started. Yeah, we can print all the money that we want, or just, you know, create massive amounts of dollars, and everybody should be just fine with that.

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And it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that we're now having problems with inflation, and so on and so forth. I thought that was transitory.

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Yeah, yeah. Or is it good now? I don't know. So I think that probably the most, the biggest fairy tale that we see in our world today is the emperor has no clothes on.

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And it's just being asserted that he's wearing the finest set of clothes that anybody ever has. And nobody's listening to the little boy.

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In fact, they're locking up the little boy who's saying, yeah, but he's naked. And that's the fairy tale that just continually is being lived out in the year 2022.

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So I would say that when it comes to judging others, Jesus' counsel, I think, is pretty good.

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Judge not that you not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged. And with the measure you use, it would measure back to you.

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Here's the thing. There are some surprising claims being made in the Bible, and they don't really fit well with the common assumptions of the

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Academy today. And I grant you, there's a lot of things that sound weird in the Bible. But here's the thing.

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I want the Bible to be my standard. I believe it's the standard for everybody. I want my life to be continually judged and assessed and evaluated according to the

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Holy Scriptures. And do I fall short in my faith? Do I fall short in my holiness and my righteousness and my love for others?

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Yes, I do. Am I impatient? Am I often selfish and prideful? Do I fail to follow my

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Lord and King Jesus Christ completely like I should? Yes, this is so. And the Bible tells me so.

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That's the standard I want to be judged by. It's also the book that tells me about God's mercy and forgiveness, and that Christ is my standard, who died for me perfectly, righteous, satisfying

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God's standard in my place and for my sake, so that by my faith in Him, not by my works for Him, but by my faith in Him, I am held near and dear to God, fully accepted and justified in His sight.

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So, you know, I think that reading the Scripture, you're gonna find slavery in the Bible. You're gonna find instructions that look like woman hatred.

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You'll find actually men hating women in the Bible and them being condemned and judged for it.

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You're also gonna find a talking snake and a talking donkey, a burning bush, and hundreds of other things that many will feel compelled to call fairy tales.

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However, Scripture, the Bible, our book, as you say, the Bible is the

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Word of God. It is breathed out by God. It was given to us by the

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Holy Spirit, who bore up holy men to write down exactly everything that God wanted us to have.

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So all of Scripture is God -breathed, and it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, meaning it tells us what's true, where we're wrong, how to get right, how to live

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God's way. Sixty -six different books written over a 1500 year time period on three different continents and three different languages by over 40 different authors, all about Jesus Christ, His glory before He arrived,

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His glory in His arrival, and His glory now as He sits at the right hand of the Father. He's the light of the world and He is the

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Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. And so I hope you'll read the

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Bible again with fresh eyes and see the good in it. Amen. Would you say that this question displays a presupposition that the person named

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Jesus is an entirely fictitious character? Because even modern scholars agree there was a

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Jesus of Nazareth. The debate is really, is what recorded of what

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He did, said, taught accurately given to us in the accounts of the gospel?

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Well certainly the Scripture shows us accurately who He was and what

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He did, but I think the presupposition is that the Scriptures are not to be trusted, because it includes things that are hard to believe.

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It includes things that don't accord with the many other presuppositions of the Neo -Darwinian hypothesis.

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So because it doesn't match up with a certain grid, then the whole thing is to be distrusted. But I would say that the

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Neo -Darwinian hypothesis actually doesn't match up with the grid that is set forth in the

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Neo -Darwinian hypothesis. So this standard that our questioner is using is modern, you know, modernism.

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This is 2022. Because we're in 2022, we should use, you know, look around.

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We're living in today. We're not living in ancient Israel. We should use this as a standard. And you presented that the year 2022 is full of the very same things that this questioner is claiming invalidate the

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Scriptures. So their standard falls apart when applied to themselves. Well that's what

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Jesus tells us. By what standard you, with what judgment you use, you will be judged. The measure you use will be measured back to you.

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So we just have to be aware of that. Right. I think the year 2022 is a pretty flimsy year.

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I think it doesn't hold a lot of weight. I don't think it has what it takes to be a standard for anybody's life.

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And the really tyrannical thing about living according to the spirit of the age is that it's always changing.

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It's always changing. Sometimes you're left behind, or when you're just having the rug pulled out from underneath you every little crisis that flares up on social media, you have this compulsion in order to be righteous and holy to jump out and claim the righteous side to virtue signal at everything.

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And then sometimes you're left high and dry, like, you know, oh am I really on the right side of history or not.

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The perception of that changes daily and it's tyrannical, it's legalistic, and it's hopeless kind of life.

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You outlined why the Bible, as the word of God, is an unchanging standard.

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Our questioner used something that he would consider very abhorrent.

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I think most of us at this table would say chattel slavery was an awful institution. But pre -1800, every single culture on earth had some measure of slavery.

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You can look back at the slavery revolts of Spartacus or Haiti and say pretty much universally, nobody liked being a slave.

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So we all hated it, but every culture practiced it. And then all of a sudden, well, we can look at William Wilberforce and the influence of the

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Christian worldview started to dismantle slavery. So now we are here in 2022 and most of us don't like slavery.

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Let's say that spreads throughout the world. Okay, 2023, everybody hates slavery. Give it another 100 years.

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Does it go back? Maybe slavery will be okay again. If you have an ever -changing standard, you never know what it is from year to year exactly like you just said in slavery.

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Give it another 100 years, maybe it'll change again. Yeah. I mean, if you're against slavery, so am

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I. Man -stealing is a death penalty in the scriptures. And I mean, if you're against slavery, that's great.

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Don't buy anything online in general. A lot of stuff is being produced by people living in slave conditions and you should be concerned about that.

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But William Wilberforce and John Newton, they read the same book too.

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And their lives were transformed by it. There was the talking snake and there was the talking donkey and there was the talking burning bush.

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And there were hundreds of what many people considered to be fairy tales. But what it led them to do in the transformation of their life was to help people and take stances and do actions at great cost to themselves to see the end of slavery in Great Britain.

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Pretty good. When we get a question like this, we can't really speculate on the motives of this specific questioner, but questions like this coming in sort of with a backhandedness to them, and we expect this from the world.

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When we see questions like this coming from the church or church bodies, does that change our response in any way?

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Or are maybe going from polemical to ironic type of defense?

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We're still going to use the same standard. We're still going to scriptures. But how are we to come at this when it comes from somebody within the church body, either our church body, or we know that they go to a different body nearby?

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I think it still depends on the attitude with which it's asked. I mean, you look at the way that Jesus handles questioners and that gives us the model.

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There were people who asked questions not because they wanted the answer, but because they wanted to use the question as a shield or even as a bludgeon, as a club to try to discredit the one that they were asking the question of.

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They didn't want the answer. Then there were those who've asked questions who were actually curious. I don't understand this. This is really weird.

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What's going on? And of course, as you say, it's the same standard. We don't know the hearts of people and so on.

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But I say you just start off with the answers that are most apparent and available in the scriptures and then usually in the follow -up questions, you can kind of see the intent or usually the intent is often stated by the questioner.

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If somebody is truly honestly curious and has some trouble with some of these things, they will say so because they're really trying to seek understanding and so they're dealing with you in an honest and upfront way.

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Somebody who is trying to discredit the Bible to blaspheme the name of Christ and so on, they may take a more deceptive approach, which would be unfortunate, but not unexpected.

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Yeah. With this question, I think we can figure out by the sentence structure, mostly what the motive is, but we're not going to have any solid grounds to say one way or another, but it can be quite obvious the way it's asked.

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Not that we don't appreciate those troll questions. No, yeah. Sometimes it produces some of the best conversations, right?

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And that's what we're kind of looking to do is take in all the questions that we can and strategically pick which ones we want to tackle from one week to the next.

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And just because it's difficult doesn't mean we're not going to, or just because it's piercing, or in this case, hostile, doesn't mean that we're not willing to address it.

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Yeah. And how many times have you seen a question like this in the public square that you encounter that's not necessarily addressed to yourself, but it's still there out in the open?

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Oh, yeah. All the time. Yeah. You get on social media consistently. Great. Appreciate Joel's input on that.

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Yep. Well, that wraps up that section. We're going to go to our parenthetical section where David has his dissection of Scofield's work that we get to pick through, and he's going to lay out what we're going to go through, and we'll go through it with him.

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So, we have been discussing C. I. Scofield's Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, and in this installment, wanted to try to see the scriptures from Scofield's perspective.

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We've talked a little bit about the environment in which he was writing, why he wrote the way he did, the people against whom he was writing, who he intended, who he was fighting, and wanted to talk about some of the ...

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We'll finish up the definitions of terms, go through some of his operating assumptions, and then I'd like to kind of compare them with our own, and then actually dive into some of the formatting of Rightly Dividing the

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Word of Truth. We're going to be focusing more on Chapter 1, because I think the entire book hinges on Chapter 1, and then builds on that one foundation, if you can accept his chief premise, that there are two people of God.

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Not necessarily two plans of salvation. He didn't really go that far. Some of the other dispensationalists did. One plan, but two people, and two methods of enacting that salvation plan.

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He actually said, are Jews going to be in heaven? Yes. He didn't separate them that much, but he did say, if you can accept that, then the rest of the book can make sense.

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But if he fails at that point, then I think the rest of the book falls apart. The whole point was to help us develop tools to read authors that we don't necessarily agree with, but you got to read them honestly.

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You have to look at their arguments, look at their starting points, their presuppositions, their assumptions, look at the flow of their argument, see it from their perspective, try to place yourself in their shoes, and then step back and say, do these operating assumptions make sense?

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Then I think that you could take a really important book like this book, and maybe it'll challenge you.

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Let's look at the impact. If you've never read it, but you say that you believe the principles in here, then

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I think that you, especially those of us who are recovering dispensationalists, if you've never read it, then

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I think you're doing yourself a disservice. Even though I came to a different conclusion than him, truly enjoy the journey.

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I hope that you guys will as well. In Schofield's day, so late 1800s, early 1900s, he was fighting liberalism.

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We talked a little bit about it last time. What is liberalism, at least in Schofield's day? Well, it's the application of all kinds of critical scholasticism in which a hermeneutic of suspicion is taken to all literature, including the

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Bible, and the Bible is treated like just any other kind of book, any other kind of ancient work. Any kind of presupposition about the

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Bible's origin, inspiration, truthfulness, verity, all of it is completely discounted in the name of academic rigor, and the

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Bible is treated precisely as another ancient document might be treated.

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The Bible is not allowed to make claims for itself. Everything that the Bible claims is to be seen as only true if it can be verified by other sources that are considered to be resilient.

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The Bible is full of, as we were talking about earlier, things that people call fairy tales. The whole thing is to be suspect.

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What about prophecies? What about promises? What about Jesus dying on the cross and raising from the dead?

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What about being born from a virgin? What about his miracles? What about his sitting at the right hand of the

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Father? What about him coming back? Let alone all the stories in the Old Testament about Adam and Eve and the serpent and the flood and the exodus and the

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Passover and all of that. All of these things completely demythologized by the liberal academy, and what they do in their demythologization is they say, okay, there are things here of value that we can take from this.

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We're not going to believe the myth. We're not going to believe the claims that are being made, but there may be virtues and values here that we can extract from these stories, and then we can take those values and we can still apply them to people's lives, and we will still have what is good of Christendom in these values and these virtues that we've extracted from these myths.

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So, Schofield is rightly rejecting this liberal approach to the scriptures, wanting to affirm the verity of scripture in a full -throated way.

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So, would you say the liberalism of his day was just a tidal wave of irreverence towards the word?

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It seems like you're bringing it down. They wouldn't have described themselves that way, although I think what you're saying is accurate.

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They would have described themselves as ethical. There's myth, teaches stories about how to live, and then there are good values.

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How do you know what is good from the scriptures? Well, we have these... Everybody knows what's good. From the liberal point of view, they are in the heyday of Darwinistic naturalism, materialism, and modernism,

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Industrial Revolution. You're getting ready to have the World's Fair in Chicago in a decade or two, and it's this pinnacle of human achievement.

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We know what's going on now. They know what is good, what is right. Everybody knows.

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People are basically good. That's where the liberals were coming from. Everybody knows that these were myths in the

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Bible, but there's some good things. They were coming at it from that point of view.

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They would never have called themselves irreverent, although they were. So, they're basically banking on Christian capital that's backed by nothing anymore.

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That's exactly what they were doing. Yeah. So, you have them holding to the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the eternal value of the human soul, but they don't have anything to back it up on other than just these assertions that they can find.

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They find it in the scriptures neatly drawn out from what they consider to be myths, but they only hold to those ideals and virtues that they take out of the scripture because they already have them from other things that they feel are also or probably more solid.

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They're running away with this idealism from Hegel where salvation is found in the purification of the idea.

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So, what you have is the thesis and the antithesis and the synthesis, and Hegel's dialectic basically breaks down in truth is not found in the thesis or in the antithesis, but in the emerging synthesis between the two.

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So, the thesis is scripture as you have it, the claims of the fundamentalists, and then you have the antithesis, which is this bleak meaninglessness of a material worldview.

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Nihilism. Nihilism, right, where you're just trying to be honest with everything, being the skeptic, but truth isn't found in the thesis and not in the antithesis, but in the emerging synthesis between the two, and this is where the liberals are at.

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It's like, look, this is good. We're being saved from nihilism, and we're also being saved from superstition.

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This is pure Christianity, which is, again, Hegel's idea of salvation through ideas.

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That was the environment of the academy, the intellectual. That's where Princeton was going very, very fast.

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Union Theological Seminary, the big seminaries were all going this direction, and then you have men like D .L.

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Moody, C .I. Schofield, James Hooks, these people who were saying, no, the

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Bible is actually true. There's no synthesis here. We're sticking with the thesis. We're sticking with this.

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Yeah. Thunder and fire bring the word. All of it's true. Don't be led astray by these false teachers.

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Boy, howdy. I'll give them an amen. Yeah, which you can't. Schofield was a valiant warrior in a battle.

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He had what he claimed to be a literal hermeneutic, and we defined hermeneutic last time as the science of interpreting scripture.

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When you say literal hermeneutic, what really comes to your mind? What do you think of when you hear literal hermeneutic?

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Exactly as it was written. Now, see, Schofield would agree with that, but what do you mean?

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No, I'm trying to get into his worldview, literally exactly how it was written. If someone is as tall as a tree, they're as tall as a tree.

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If it says from this sea to the rivers in the east, it's from this sea to the rivers in the east.

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That's what it says. A literal hermeneutic should include figures of speech.

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It should include, well, this is poetry. It's written in poetic meter. When you read in scriptures that horses fast as leopards, well, how fast does a leopard go?

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No, the point is they're fast and they're fierce, teeth like iron. Well, no, they didn't have braces.

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They were fierce and they were mean. Those are normal figures of speech that a literal hermeneutic should take into account.

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Literal in the sense of according to the literature, according to the nature of what this is, it should be read accordingly.

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This is something that would acknowledge the authorial intent, what was intended by the original author to his original audience.

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How would have they heard it, received it, contemplated it? How would they have responded to it?

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That's what a literal hermeneutic would incorporate. If it's poetry, it's poetry.

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If it's apocalyptic vision, then that's what it is. If it's history, it's history. According to whatever the literature is, that's how it should be received.

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We should not be imposing some sort of foreign standard upon the text, but it should be according to its own literature.

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There's a corollary term called literalistic. That's more of a pejorative description.

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Someone who is the reader who focuses on the exact definition of the word without regard to normal human speech metaphor and such.

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The dispensationalists are at the time really lumped together, non -dispensationalists and reformed into the liberal camp because they didn't take the

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Bible the way they saw it as literal, not literalistic. The same way the many orthodox reformed theologians actually lumped the dispensationalists into the literalistic camp.

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That really wasn't fair, but we started having that kind of war at the

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Thanksgiving dinner table among Christian family. You're not going to get a whole lot accomplished. That was the environment in which

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Schofield was writing. Anybody that said, well, I think the New Testament actually does use poetry.

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It does use figures of speech. It actually tells us that, well, this is what the

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Old Testament meant. This was a type and shadow. Then it literally says, if I can use that word, overuse that word, that this

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New Testament passage interprets the Old. This is what it meant, and this is how we should read it today.

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Depending on who you're speaking to at the time, you could be accused of liberalism because you were using the

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New Testament to interpret the Old, like Jesus and Paul did. Yeah, exactly.

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But the concern, of course, is that somehow somebody is twisting the scriptures. The fear is that scriptures are being twisted in a way to say that God isn't keeping his promises the way that he said he was going to keep his promises.

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That's the liberalism against what they're fighting. Of course, Jesus rose from the dead in the sense that he lives in us when we follow his teachings.

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And that's what the fundamentalists obviously would say. You're spiritualizing.

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He really raised from the dead. He rose on the third day. The tomb is empty. So they're looking at those actual physical realities of God keeping his promises, and they're saying you're just spiritualizing it.

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The difficulty comes, of course, when you're trying to fight against a threat, that the temptation is always to throw that pendulum too far to the other side to where you unfortunately begin to not allow the

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Bible to speak for itself, which, of course, is what they always were saying they wanted to do.

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And of course, we're in complete agreement that when the Bible speaks for itself, there are all sorts of things in which

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God makes promises to Israel and then fulfills them in bigger, more splendid ways in Christ.

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And dispensationalists may be saying, no, but that's not exactly what he said back here in Genesis.

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But yeah, but Jesus is telling us in the New Testament how it gets fulfilled. So we have to be careful that we're not importing a foreign standard of reading the text.

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Like the liberals. Exactly. This is actually cautionary, I think, for all of us when there's a threat.

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For instance, let's take the whole social justice gospel, liberation theology surge in the

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North American Evangelical Church. So the pendulum swing, the other direction, which

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I've been watching, is that anything that has to do with addressing injustice in our world today, that's part of that social false gospel, and we're going to shut that down immediately.

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Well, I don't think that pleases the Lord. I think that pleases the devil if the church is going to not talk about things in a biblical way.

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The Bible is full of helps. We can talk about these things in a robust, scriptural,

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Christian way and not have to apply the Frankfurt School's hermeneutic and a

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Hegelian dialectic to try to understand what's going on. We don't have to use intersectionality and critical race theory. Scriptures are sufficient to answer all these issues.

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But we can't just say, well, because these liberals of today are talking about these things, then when those things come up, we have to completely just shut that down.

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That would be swinging the pendulum too far. You see what I mean? Yeah. What about loving good works, right?

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Right. We were created for good works. We should walk in them and we should...

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There's plenty of systemic injustices to fight biblically on a sound biblical basis.

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Yeah, absolutely. And we should be involved in that. The fact that perhaps the church has been silent on the issue is what allows for a lot of false teaching to arise.

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So in the example with rightly dividing the word, the concern is a good one.

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The execution of fighting the enemy in this case was not precise and there's friendly fire going on.

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There's collateral damage going on here where there's too much as being a hit. Yeah, agreed.

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And I think you're right, David, when you say that basically in the first chapter is the critical piece.

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And sometimes that's the way it is. Sometimes in the very first chapter of somebody's work, at the very first presuppositional work of their work, at the very beginning, they're laying things out that have to be dealt with in depth right there.

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And to move on to chapter two puts you in a place where you can't have the conversation that needs to be had.

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So I think that's wise to observe that. I think that's a good jumping off point right there.

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When Schofield wrote chapter one, he talked about the promises of God. He was trying to establish two different people, but he spoke about those promises.

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And that's something that you had just mentioned, that dispensationalism in general. And again, if you are interested in learning more about dispensationalism or you ever want to argue against it, make sure you go with the best the other side has to offer.

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Don't go with the weird 2 a .m. preachers that are talking about,

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I actually saw this where you can actually call in, give them $50 and you can get a blessed handkerchief so that you can carry that with you when the beast arises.

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I mean, it's ridiculous stuff. Hey, that's where I come from. Sorry, man. Too soon.

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Too soon. Too soon. Does it wipe the mark off? No, it should. It probably should. I mean, for 50 bucks.

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It seems like a good deal. But I would go with dispensationalists like Charles Ryrie or Dwight Pentecost.

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You can even go to Lewis Perry Schaeffer, who actually was taught by Schofield to get a better understanding because they flesh this stuff out.

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They're the more theologically precise, but we're actually looking at Schofield's kind of first folly in this work.

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So please understand where we're coming from, that this is a book that I chose because I disagreed with it, but I wanted to understand it and wanted to see it from his perspective.

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So the Old Testament promises that Schofield really dealt with most when he had Abraham. The promises to Abraham, as he saw it, was many descendants, honor, land, blessing.

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This blessing will extend to all the families of the earth. Very physical. Physical terms. Same thing with Moses.

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Blessings for obedience. You'll have big families. You'll have big harvests. You'll have rest from your enemies.

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And cursings for disobedience. Same thing. Wombs will shrivel up. Your fields will die.

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Your cattle will turn to dust and your enemies will overrun you and you'll be vomited out of the land. Just as I'm going to drive out the

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Canaanites before you, I will drive you out of this land. All focused on the land and physical.

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The promises to David. He'll never lack a person sitting on his throne. So when

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Schofield read these promises, he's like, Bible's true. This is what it says. I believe it.

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And these liberals, you know, they start to spiritualize these texts. And anybody who tries to take it beyond this literal or literalistic interpretation is therefore guilty of a spiritualizing liberalism who does not believe the

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Bible is ultimately heretical. That is kind of his operating assumptions. And so you're suggesting is to actually read for yourself.

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Like read it for yourself. Read the text. Read the scripture for yourself to see if that particular approach is, does that actually bear out in the word itself?

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If you stopped, let's say just with the book of Genesis. Let's read the Pentateuch.

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You stop there. He's got a point. He says, well, these are kind of written in physical terms, but the

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Bible doesn't stop there. As we know, it reinterprets these passages.

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It's true. But then even if you just read the Pentateuch, there are like massive unresolved themes that have been built up that are just waiting for fulfillment and you're left hanging in a very serious way.

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Just reading the first five books. Yeah. Where's this prophet that would be raised up from among your people where you will be required?

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Yeah. And when is Shiloh coming? Right. And what about the seed that's been promised?

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Do you feel that David fills those or the Psalmist fill those same type of themes? Like when you're reading the

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Psalms, you feel like they know that there's something that is still left. Yes. In those themes that has yet to be reconciled.

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Yeah. I would encourage anybody when you're trying to solve a particularly difficult Bible question, you know, hermeneutics, you know, how you interpret the

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Bible itself. I would just encourage you something practical is just read the Bible out loud. I mean, read it out loud, read it out loud to yourself, and then maybe do more than one time when you're reading your

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Bible. For instance, considering the claims of Schofield, when you read Galatians 3 verse 15, brethren,

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I speak in the manner of men, though it is only a man's covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it.

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And listen to this now, Abraham, not to Abraham and his seed. And you'll see that it's capitalized

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S in verse 16 of Galatians 3. It's easy to remember Galatians 3, 16, a good 3, 16 in the

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Bible, but not to Abraham and to his seed where the promise is made. He does not say into seeds as of many, but as of one and to your seed, who is

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Christ. The upshot of this, of course, is seen in verse 28. There is neither

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Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female for you're all one in Christ Jesus.

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Meaning that obviously there were Jews and Gentiles in the same church.

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Obviously there were slaves and freemen in the same church. Obviously there were men and women in the same church, but their distinctives are not what keep them in and out of the covenant, in and out of the promises of God.

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But their primary distinctive, their one identifier that they all share, which is the most important, is that they are one in Christ Jesus.

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Verse 29 says, and if you are Christ's, if you belong to him, then you are Abraham's seed.

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Then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Even if you are a

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Gentile female slave, if you belong to Christ, then you are of Abraham's seed and you are an heir according to the promise.

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So when you read that and you read how the Apostle Paul interpreting the

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Old Testament through Christ makes this claim, this is one of the passages for me where I just can't agree with the division being wrought in the text by dispensation.

42:50

Yeah, it blows the doors off. I mean, there's no separation. No. Scofield does address some of those questions, but as I read it, he's hanging his hat on the promises in the

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Old Testament are written in, and he says that when you just read the text, you see one distinct body and you see another distinct body with very different promises.

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And he says that the passages that you just read, well, obviously that's very, very spiritual. Jews and Gentiles are together in this one body.

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It's so different than the exclusivity that you see in the nation of Israel, which is just about ethnically homogeneous.

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So because of those differences, his conclusion is there must be two people.

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He's trying to resolve the differences, but he's not using the lens that we would agree with.

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I do have a question. The premise behind that God's dealing with specific people in specific ways over specific periods of time, i .e.

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dispensations, would you maybe say that he hasn't left a specific dispensation in his mind and he wants to maintain that one simultaneously with the next dispensation?

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Does he want Schofield? Yes. So he holds onto the people of Israel dealt with in a specific way, and he wants to make it simultaneous to another dispensation.

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He would say because the promise to Abraham was called an everlasting promise, and God always keeps his promises, he had to press pause.

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Not that they're happening simultaneously, but it's paused so that all those passages about, well, this is going to be the time of the

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Gentiles, we're going to raise up the Gentiles, we're going to make the house of Israel jealous, so that he can raise up those

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Gentiles, and then that has to be removed so that he can press the pause button again and fulfill those promises that he made through Abraham to Israel.

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And of course, we would say using another lens, he didn't really make the promises to the physical nation of Israel.

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Galatians says he made it to Jesus. I would say that if you're reading it literally. I mean, because it literally says it was the promises

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God made to Abraham were brought about in Christ. So to me, if it's the plain reading of the text, which

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I think is the most biblical reading of the text, where the text is not fighting against itself, but it's the most natural reading of it, that's what you got to really roll with.

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The charge from Schofield to people like us who would see it differently is that scripture is intended to be taken literally, unless you absolutely must take it symbolically.

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Do this first. You must take it in this literal way when he defines it really more literalistically, and then you have to take it as symbolic only if the text absolutely demands it.

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All right, that's a really subjective standard, dude. It sounds like he overlaid that on top of the scriptures.

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That is the grid that he put down, and he feels safe there because of the environment in which he was fighting.

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I mean, I don't blame him, because look at the people that he was fighting against. Yep, sounds like a good and necessary consequence of the times in which he lived.

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Well, that was helpful. I think that honing in on some of the distinctives and the definitions and so on.

46:40

Yeah, so we'll wrap it up with what we are thankful for. Start with you, Michael. Well, I'm thankful for cancellations.

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Usually, I'm kind of stickler about schedules and stuff, but thankful for a lot of cancellations on my schedule lately so that I was able to breathe a little bit more, spend more time with my family, kind of be refreshed, stop and enjoy the day a little bit more than I had before.

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So I don't know. I'm just thankful for all the cancellations I've been having lately, so I like it. Strangely enough,

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I had a cancellation this week. Today is Thursday. I'm actually on day four of a four -day trip that got canceled and handed off to someone else, which gave me time to, when

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I was in Dallas, to see high school friends that have not all been in the same room for a long time, and these are guys that shared the gospel with me when

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I was in high school. Wow. That's the quality of men they are now.

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It was a real blessing to sit down with them and be able to talk and communicate with them.

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Even though we shared stories about high school, we're talking and communicating in a way that was far more valuable. So I'm also thankful for cancellations.

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I'm going to keep going. I'm thankful to God for the cancellation of the record of charges that were against me and taken out of the way, fully paid for by our master.

48:11

Amen to that. I'm thankful for answered prayer and healing. You'll see the gap in the episodes, but our family went through quite a bit of hacking, coughing, sickness, and then

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I ended up with an ear infection myself and a perforated eardrum, so that knocked me out a little longer than everybody else, but I am very thankful that we had a lot of people praying for us, helping us out in many different ways, and the

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Lord answered prayer and healed and continues to heal because I'm not hearing everything just yet, but he continues to heal and continues to answer prayer, and we are very thankful for that in our family.

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And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?