Lightfoot in Chicago Then A Helpful Introduction to the Gnostic Creation Myth

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line.

I guess I have a voice. It was fine until just a moment ago. We are starting off the week, and I'm not exactly sure what the schedule is going to look like this week.

It's going to change from day to day, so we'll just try to let you know when we're going to be able to be with you.

Sorry to all you truckers about yesterday. I hope you found something interesting to listen to. We appreciate all your hard work, and though I have yet to see a single disinfecting wipe at Target since February, could we somehow,

I'd like to find at least one little thing of those again. That would be a good thing, but at least we had toilet paper.

That's good. That's good. That's good. Anyway, stuff happening over the weekend.

According to what I found online, 10 people were shot and killed, 42 injured in gang violence in Chicago over the weekend.

A new record for a single Memorial Day weekend, and yet while that is going on, the mayor of New York, Lori Lightfoot, what did

I say? Oh, did I say New York? I meant Chicago. Lori Lightfoot decided that police resources should be used to shut down churches, especially seemingly

Black Baptist churches and Black Pentecostal churches, and I'm just sort of left going, where are the priorities here again?

I mean, if we were talking about the plague, then okay, because you'd be talking about churches meeting or you cause tens of thousands of deaths, but we're not talking about the plague.

The numbers are clear. The more numbers came out, even using the CDC numbers, which

I'll be honest with you, I question in many ways as to the collection methodologies.

When you pay medical institutions factors of money more to have certain patients, money corrupts numbers.

I mean, I won't even take the time to go into how many times we have documented over the years that money corrupts numbers.

Look what happened just in the, remember Climategate? Remember the hockey stick stuff and all the, you know, how many times we found people who were fudging the numbers because it meant money.

So anyway, even using the CDC numbers, if you don't live in literally a few square miles in central

New York, out onto the island, down toward New Jersey, if you don't live in that hot zone, and if you're under 50 and don't live in an old folks home, which those two normally go together, though there was that one guy, how did that one guy get into an old folks home?

The guy that beat up the veteran? I totally lost the plot on that one.

How did that guy even get in there? I don't, I don't know. I can't figure that one out.

That was just disgusting. But if you don't fall into that area and those parameters,

COVID -19 does have the exact same mortality rate as influenza.

Now, throw in what the insanity that happened, and by the way,

I know the current meme on the right is to basically say that leftist governors did this on purpose.

I don't think they did it on purpose. I think they did it on panic. And this is why I have been talking about the dangers of panic.

I think they did it on panic because a guy in England with a long track record of massively overestimating deaths was behind the paper that caused the world to shut down.

And I think these governors believed it. I remember it was only, what, a month and a half ago at most that in the president's news briefing, they were seriously telling us that the next week 200 ,000 people would die.

That the very next week that this is going to hit, we got to be prepared for it. 200 ,000 people are going to die.

And so we're rushing hospital ships in, we're putting stuff up and none of it ever happened.

But that's what they were expecting. And panic creates bad decisions that ended up costing lives.

I think that's what happened. I don't think there was some nefarious, ah, we can get rid of all the old people. No, I think that they sent the

COVID positive patients back to nursing centers, old folks homes, because they were expecting every single bed, every single hallway to be inhabited with, well, with whom?

Because what was the average age? 81. That's what it was in Italy too.

But anyway, I think that's what happened there. So all of that aside, we can't put it aside because I predict that there will be a second wave debacle coming, if not soon, at least in the fall toward winter.

I think churches, if you're, if you're reopening, don't get used to it.

Don't get used to it. The holidays are coming and I can, I'm not being a prophet to go,

I can think of a couple of states that will go, no Christmas stuff, no Christmas gatherings.

And in fact, during the height of the flu season, um, we need to go back into, uh, banning large, uh, gatherings and the response is going to be, okay, that's fine.

As long as you do it to everybody. So if you, if you shut down all the sports and all the rest of that stuff, then, you know, we'll just go along with it type of a thing.

And that's, what's coming. So you need to be thinking ahead. What's your response going to be, um, to all of that kind of stuff?

All of that is background to, if there was, if this was the plague, then

I can understand why Lori Lightfoot in Chicago would use police resources on the most violent weekend of the year so far, uh, to shut down churches instead of trying to suppress the violence that took 10 lives and hospitalized 42 others, um, in the gang, the gangland, gangbangers war that continues in the streets of Chicago.

All of that was, believe it or not, background. Wow. Seven minutes in. Good. This could take a while. Um, all that was background to a series of tweets that I put up that no one read.

No one read. You hear that? Or everybody was scared to say anything about it. But I put up a, an entire thread over the weekend.

I think it was Saturday. Might've been Friday. May have been Sunday. I don't know. Sometime on the weekend.

It's a long weekend. And I pointed something out. Lori Lightfoot is a married lesbian, married according to the definitions of marriage that have absolutely no meaning.

Um, but she's a married lesbian. Now, if there had even been serious, credible rumors that she was a lesbian in 1980, would there have been any doubt?

Would there be any doubt whatsoever that that reality would have been central in any discussion of Lori Lightfoot's positions, stances, attitudes toward the church in 1980?

Some of you are going, we don't remember in 1980. I get it. I understand. But yeah.

Um, 40 years ago, would there have been any hesitation on the part of anyone, even non -Christians to have raised the question, does

Lori Lightfoot's sexuality impact her attitude toward the church?

In 1980, there, there was no question that would have been on the table front and center.

Yet in looking at all the articles, do you see,

I mean, serious articles, I guess there, there's probably some fundamentalists someplace that, you know, that's all they can talk about.

And that's what to go after. But I mean, anyone who makes a serious attempt to connect, because theologically you have to.

Theologically, if Romans 1 is central to your anthropology, then that particular expression of the suppression of truth will be central to your analysis of an individual's actions and words and attitudes, the formation of their worldview.

I saw no reference to it whatsoever. It is like you cannot say that in our society any longer.

And that includes Christians. Christians are not allowed to point out that if there is that settled level of rebellion, settled to the point where you will take the

Christian God -ordained state of marriage.

And this is, this would be true of Pete Buttigieg too, by the way. You will take that, redefine it and rebel against the norms that God has established.

You can't talk about that. You, you, you cannot connect that to the rest of a person's worldview, not in our, not in our land any longer, and not even in the church.

As Christians, we have to, you're going to have an incomplete, incoherent biblical analysis of why somebody is doing what they're doing, but we can't, we can't talk about it.

We just are not allowed to do it. And it really struck me over this weekend as I saw the behavior going on there in Chicago in light of what was also, and it's interesting,

I hadn't looked at the shooting stuff. It just so happened that in at least one of the articles that I was looking at, because it came from Chicago, over on the side, it's, it's in the sidebar, you know, and you're like, that's current.

That's, at the same time you're sending, you've got police squad cars, um, roping parking off so that people can't get to churches and stuff like that.

While a few blocks away, the bullets are flying. And it's like, where do you get priorities like that?

Well, there may be other things behind that. And you see, we're not allowed to, you're not allowed to, no, no, no, no, no.

We, we've normalized this now. And so biblical parameters don't, no, no, you can't society won't accept that.

So you can't go there. You can't go there. That's all there is to it. And I posted a thread on that.

I don't, there might've been one or two comments, but it was like,

Ooh, I ain't touching that. No, I, I don't want to get kicked off Twitter.

Well, I didn't get kicked off Twitter. Um, might've, if I had posted on Facebook, I might've,

I might've, I think Facebook is significantly right now, more censorious than Twitter is.

It's not that Twitter doesn't, um, shadow ban and all the rest of that stuff they do.

But, um, as far as just straightforward, you're out of here. Uh, that seems to be more of a

Facebook thing right now. So it seemed like a lot folks are like,

Ooh, I'm not going to say a word about that. Maybe true, but I'm not gonna say a word about it.

Not gonna say a word about it. So, uh, also breaking news right now.

Um, stunningly another apostate from behind a microphone with a guitar.

Um, evidently there is a lead singer of Christian rock band,

Hawk Nelson says he no longer believes in God. I'll be honest with you. Never heard of him.

I mean, I don't, okay. I'm not big on, you know, but it got a guy named

John Steingard lead singer of the Christian rock band, Hawk Nelson regretfully announced on Instagram last week that he no longer believes in God.

And so it looks like he's a PK. Um, it says,

I remember being uncomfortable with certain things, praying in public, always felt like some kind of performance, weird performance art.

It can be. Um, I've, by the way, I've always had problems with some of the ways that we handle with flippancy public prayer.

I've always had problems. Why? Because it's worship. Yeah. So when you just attach it to stuff, okay.

It's just time to do it now. You know, it just, it's, it becomes this perfunctory say a few words in Jesus name.

Amen. Type thing. Um, yeah, because you're, you're supposed to perform in a certain way, you know, um, anybody in a church that I've been associated with will tell you that they get a little worried when

I'm the one asked to pray. Uh, because if it's, if it's going to be in as a part of the service,

I'm going to go longer than you're accustomed to. Um, and in fact, what

I've got to do, I haven't done this, but, um, in my previous church, there would be a, a moment of silent prayer before the pastoral which

I really like. But what's fascinating is young people struggle with that horribly silence for more than five seconds means the battery on their iPhone died.

And that's a bad thing. And so it stresses them out and you could never do it, but I wish there was some way to do a, uh, test where you just remain silent before praying for a full 60 seconds and then ask people how long they estimated it was silent.

And they would, you would, you'd get people to think in 10 minutes. You really would. When you have silence for that long, the next generation is not accustomed to that.

That's just my experience. Um, but anyways, um, emotional cries, such as Holy spirit, come fill this place.

Always felt clunky and awkward, leaving my lips. Um, our youth conference,

I tend to encourage every team to sign a pledge. They would date Jesus for a year. It felt manipulative and unsettling to me.

I didn't sign it. Well, yeah. Okay. So you got somebody PK exposed to some who knows what, um, what they would date

Jesus for date Jesus for a year. What is that?

I maybe it's some abstinence thing, but seriously, how about obey

Jesus for your life? That was date Jesus for a year.

Sorry, guy that you got exposed to that, but date Jesus for you. Um, despite those concerns in his youth, he still ended up pursuing music and generally found some peace in the band

Hawk Nelson. However, as time grew on, not overly time grew on what

Steingard increasingly had trouble with the concept of evil. If God is all loving and all powerful, why is there evil in the world?

Can you not do anything about it? Does he choose not to is the evil in the world or result of his desire to give us free will.

Okay. Then what about famine and disease and floods and all the suffering that isn't caused by humans in our free will?

If God is loving, why does he send people to hell? We're all questions that plagued him. Now, these are the most fundamental basic questions that he should have been hearing clear and consistent answers to, especially as a

PK from his youth onward. Maybe they weren't in the service when these were being offered because they were being entertained in kid's church.

I don't know. Um, it does, whenever I hear anyone saying things that my first, my first question is, and so having missed the numerous sermons on this subject, unless he was in a church where there was just no verse by verse exposition, nothing.

If so, that explains all of this. Um, the reason you didn't go to your elders was exactly what again?

Because you see, is the evil in the world or result of his desire to give us free will?

Yeah. It doesn't take the atheist too much to see through all this worship of free will on the part of so many in the church.

And it certainly leaves you with a rather impotent God who has a desire to give you free will.

Every time I hear that, I can't help but think of the doctrine covenants. You know, this is, this is

God's purpose. Mankind is the centrality of God's purpose rather than God being the centrality of man's purpose.

It's just, it's just upside down and backwards and everything else in the process. Um, but okay.

Let's say you, let's say, because he's a Christian musician, he doesn't get to go to church very often, which doesn't make much sense.

And if that's the case, that should tell you a little something about that kind of ministry. Um, then you're saying there aren't billions of hours worth of resources online, even like important, serious books that maybe were even written,

I don't know, 500 years ago that address all these things in depth.

It does make you wonder. Steingard then attacked what he felt were contradictions between the old and new testament.

Listen to this. Why does God seem so bleeped off in most of the old testament and then all of a sudden he's a loving father in the new testament?

Okay. Right there. There's two possibilities. Either this is the,

I'm a convert, so I'm going to grossly misrepresent my former faith syndrome, which you see all the time.

Or this is some poor guy that got stuck up in front of people to perform because he had a good voice and could play the guitar well, and then never got the most basic foundational

Christian education that the kids in a good solid church get, and they get it early on.

Because this is, as soon as you hear this, you know you're talking to someone who has minimal exposure to any serious theological training whatsoever.

Why does he say not to kill, but then instruct Israel to turn around and kill men and women and children to take the promised land?

Because this was judgment upon them for their sin? Remember this flood thing, you know?

Yeah. So the objections are all the standard stuff that there are 20 books that I can tell this gentleman never read and had no desire to read in the process.

So we shouldn't at all be surprised by these things. And I've been saying for a long time, tsunami of apostasy.

As the society, as the cost of being a professed disciple of Jesus increases, those who are false disciples will refuse to pay the cost.

When you're in a society where there's not a great cost, then you will have a far greater percentage of people that'll go along because, hey,

I would imagine he's been able to pay the bills singing the songs.

But once that tipping point is reached, things change.

Things change. It's interesting, most of these famous apostates, when they're given the opportunity of actually talking to someone who would have answers to their questions, they're just not interested.

They're just not interested. We're still good?

Whenever I hear that UPS going click, click down there, it's like, I didn't see the lights flicker.

No, that's not good. We're still going.

That's great. But it's only like 107 outside. So what? Oh, the

UPS is, well, the UPS is only going to go so long if APS doesn't keep going.

Yeah. They keep building houses and keep connecting electricity to them.

And so I just wonder how we can keep all this stuff going.

I'll be perfectly honest with you. Anyways, I'm sorry. Oh, I know that.

But most of that goes to California. That's the sad part of that. At least it used to. I'm not sure if that's changed or anything like that.

But anyway, well, they are moving here and then they still vote for the same wackos they vote for in California.

That's the problem. By the way, just in passing, I was interviewed by The Atlantic today.

Who knows where that's going to go or what that's going to do? I don't know. But the initial questioning was about churches reopening.

I said, well, I need to make sure you understand. I'm one of the pastors of a church that never closed.

Oh, that all of a sudden changed everything. And so one of the things that's been really interesting,

I met three couples yesterday, two from California, one from Colorado, that had flown to Arizona to go to church.

That's why they came. They knew Apologia was open and they flew here to go to church.

And then they were going back on Monday. And the week before, a guy had two reasons to go to church and to get a haircut.

California. The first thing I said to the guy from California was, strange times we live in, isn't it?

That you would actually get on a plane and fly to Phoenix, Arizona to go to church and get a haircut.

Now, he did not get a haircut during church. I just want to make sure everyone understands that this is not a service that we have started offering in the back.

A little trim, a little off the top. Rich was saying definitely not in that church.

It's not like there's a bunch of people with long hair off the top of their head.

Beards, there are a few beards, but I notice as the hot weather is coming in, a lot of those are getting a little bit of a trim as well.

Because trust me, you notice my beard is gone and my goatee is rather short.

Because once that temperature starts regularly topping 100, it's going to be 100. Are they still talking 112?

They drop it down to 111 the next couple of days. That's only 109? Oh, that's disappointing.

Back in the 90s next week for a while, so I'm happy about that. Anyway, I just found it really interesting.

What days we live in that you have folks come up to you and we're from Colorado, we're from California, and we flew down to go to church.

It's like, okay, well, I'm glad you all knew that we were here and hope that was a blessing.

We're finishing up a series on Philippians and then Jeff's got some work left to do in Matthew 24, to be honest with you.

He's not done there. I've still got some questions for him in that section, so there's going to be some work to do there.

But that will eventually finish, and so we've been talking about other things. I'm going to be doing, it's going to be a lot of work, but I'm going to be,

I did a series on the Lord's Supper, so I need to do a series on baptism as well. So that always is a controversial subject to address.

All right, get a deep seat in the saddle because I need this particular element of our study in the general response to Dr.

Ken Wilson's dissertation is valuable across a broad spectrum, what we're going to be talking about today, and that is we are going to specifically focus in upon Gnosticism.

Now, as you know, Gnosticism is a term that is bantied about constantly.

Orthodox Christians accuse these groups of Gnosticism. Non -Orthodox groups accuse the

Orthodox of Gnosticism. I have heard the

Gnostic label attached to so many things that, to be honest with you, it was very plain that the person using the phraseology knew nothing about Gnosticism.

I have, I just grabbed a few. These are just a couple of the books in my library on Gnosticism.

This is the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Gnostic Bible, a Meyer did both of those, Ancient Gnosticism by Pearson.

This is a subject that I have had to, what? I'm sure they're biased sources because they're in my office.

Anything in my office is a biased source, just by definition. Not even going to waste time on that.

Anyway, the reason that I have a pretty decent library of materials on Gnosticism is because of the broad number of topics in apologetics that Gnosticism is relevant to.

That is because Gnosticism was the first great enemy of the

Christian faith. In fact, I've become convinced, absolutely convinced, and this is not a perspective that you would,

I'm going to be in the minority in what I'm about to say. I'm just letting you know ahead of time, but I want you to hear what

I'm saying so you can evaluate it for yourself. Given how dangerous

Gnosticism was, almost immediately after the

Apostolic Age, I mean second century, so matter of decades, and Proto -Gnosticism, sort of a

Jewish conglomeration form, is seen in Colossae.

So Gnosticism as a religious system, flourishes and it threatens to destroy what we would consider

Orthodox Christianity. In other words, a Christianity that takes seriously the Christian scriptures in the context in which they were written.

Gnosticism was that dangerous. Gnosticism, especially Valentinian Gnosticism, was a purposeful, satanic imitation of the original that was highly effective in destroying many, many souls.

And in academia today, I just slit my proverbial throat.

You're not allowed to say that. You can't. In fact, in academia today, there's this one professor

I've listened to. He has an extensive class on Gnosticism. And when it comes to factual material, it's very interesting.

But he is a wild -eyed leftist, as almost anybody in that field is.

And you can just tell he loves Valentinus. Valentinus is just oh, so wonderful and insightful and brilliant.

Irenaeus, what a crabby, nasty. Tertullian, just a martyr.

Oh, they're just so... You want bias. Wow, there is a tremendous amount of bias in the academy when it comes to this particular subject.

But the subject of Gnosticism is important to Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Islam, Atheism, any type of dealing with church history, transmission of the text of scripture, canon issues, oh my goodness, the

Gnostic Gospels, all of that stuff. This is central to the apologetic task.

And yet, I guess I can add this. Well, this would sort of fall into the church history section, but I've never understood, and I'm doing as best

I can as a one -man army to change this, but I've never understood why apologists in general are not

Greek literate and church history literate. And especially in regards to Gnosticism.

I mean, broadly read, not just a narrow series of criticisms, but more broadly read.

And I understand parts of it. I mean, we've taken some of these and done some story times with Uncle Jimmy, and for most people, it just sounds like babble.

And it's because, especially with Gnosticism, less so with Valentinian Gnosticism, but with Classic or Sethian Gnosticism, there are so many peculiar names and terms and concepts that just trying to figure them all out is next to impossible.

There are so many different forms of it. Because it's not like they're not functioning in a worldview like you and I have in the

West. It's not that this is some objective revelation that what one generation believes is going to be relevant to the next generation.

It's amorphous. It changes. Once it encounters a new belief, it sort of makes room for that.

And so it changes over time. It's not like they're here is one objective revelation from God.

Valentinian Gnosticism is different. It's less complicated terminology, but that's because it was specifically designed with a knowledge of the

Christian faith in mind to imitate it while fundamentally changing it. And here's where I'm different.

Here's where I am going to tell you something that I've never mentioned on this program before.

You've never heard this, but as I have been delving into especially

Valentinian Gnosticism, it has struck me that if we believe that scripture is divine in its origin, it's interesting that we tend to adopt the mindset that while the

Tanakh, the Torah, Nevim, Ketuvim, the Old Testament scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures, while the

Tanakh can have a supernatural character to it that allows it to contain divine prophecy, of the coming of the

Messiah, when it comes to the

New Testament, well, the New Testament's different. And while the

New Testament can give us end time stuff, and for a lot of people, that's

Matthew 24, that's all of Revelation, that's some stuff that's Thessalonians, and that's all futuristic.

But it's futuristic in such a way that the early church is never envisioned in the

New Testament scriptures. In other words, part of this is because we're moderns, and we're living 2 ,000 years later, we're looking back at it, and we want these words to be all about us.

Okay? I was raised with that. The books that I read, Late Great Planet Earth, and stuff like that, instilled in your thinking the idea that what

I'm reading, especially when you read the Book of Revelation, is all yet future, and we get to look at modern events and figure out what that's going to be, and so wasps with a man's head that looks like an

Apache helicopter, and so voila. Voila, I know.

I just like messing with people. Anyway, so that becomes ingrained in our thinking, and the result is that basically, this first, second, third, fourth generations of the early church, who cares?

They just... And part of this is because I've spent so much time in that time period.

Justin Martyr, and obviously Ignatius, and things like that, but then you get into the

Apologists, you get into Justin Martyr, you get into Tertullian, Irenaeus, and they had incredible struggles.

They really had incredible struggles, and basically, we just go,

God just left them on their own. There's nothing in the text of Scripture that would be relevant to them.

There is in the Old Testament. Once you get the New Testament, there's nothing that's relevant until a future application, even from our own perspective.

Isn't that a default way of thinking? And once it becomes default, that's what gets communicated in our preaching, our teaching, stuff like that.

What am I getting to? As I read the New Testament, I see elements that are specifically important to that early period in their fight against the greatest enemy that the

Church ever faced, and that was Gnosticism. Beware of gnosis falsely so -called,

Paul writes. And you see, the way

I was trained in seminary, that would be primarily seen as evidence of a late date for the writings of Timothy, or minimally a very early presence of some form of pro -Gnosticism, but you weren't even allowed, it doesn't even enter into the commentaries to allow a supernatural element in Scripture that would give foundation to the early

Church to survive the onslaught. And doesn't it make sense that that's exactly when the enemy would attack, and would attack in the most vociferous and ferocious of ways, before you have a completed canon, before you have the foundation to be able to...

I mean, Gnosticism in its full form is not much of a threat today.

But why isn't it? It's because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

We have definitions that allow us to see the consistency of Scripture. They didn't have that in those first decades.

It's easy for us to go, okay, yeah, the one, and then emanations, and eons, and oh, this is...

But in that day, they didn't have the kind of background that you and I have.

And so, we're allowed a certain level of supernaturalism from the

Old Testament into its fulfillment in the New. But no one ever goes,

I wonder if God placed in the scriptures a body of truth that was specifically designed to guard that faith in that early period of time.

I think he did. I think we have in Colossians, I think we have in Paul's warnings to Timothy, I think we have in First John, are phrased in such a way that they become directly relevant to a threat that the church was not yet facing in its fullest form, the form that it would face in the second and third centuries.

And I just simply ask the question, why couldn't God do that? Because in essence, you're not even...

That's not even a part of the discussion. Instead, that's used by someone who approaches scripture as if it's not divine, as if it's a product of human writing, as evidence of much later origination, and therefore,

Paul didn't write that, and it came about later on. And that's why in the late 1800s, especially in the

German schools, it was just a given that John was written around 170, 180. That's well after the rise of Gnosticism.

And so, oh, okay, that's obviously a response to this type of stuff. But I think a lot of even believing evangelicals that would not have otherwise a foundational reason to not think this way, we just don't think this way.

We don't look at it in that way. So, as I've especially been looking at Valentinian Gnosticism, wow.

Like I said, I've been listening to this leftist, leftist liberal, and he's just...

You can tell he just loathes to have to say that Irenaeus identified these as doctrines of demons.

You know why? Because Irenaeus was right. Irenaeus was spot on.

In fact, the more you learn about, the more you realize these guys were not overstating things at all.

They were spot on in what they were saying, especially

Irenaeus. I mean, my estimates of Irenaeus have gone up greatly, especially in light of the fact that with the discovery of the

Nag Hammadi library, he was found to have been incredibly accurate, incredibly accurate in what he described.

And given the multifaceted nature, it's hard to describe something that is so...

has so much variation and so many different flavors of it, and yet he did a good job,

Irenaeus. But what a difficult time to be an apologist.

We've got it easy today, guys. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

You're sitting there going, you shouldn't be saying this. No, I need to, if I'm going to be honest. We got it easy. When I look at the resources that are available to us to do apologetics today.

Oh, wow. It's amazing being an apologist in 170.

Now that was tough. That was hard work. We get to stand on the shoulders of giants.

We've got all this research and writing and reasoning and argumentation that we can grab out there.

Oh, we're wimps. Can you imagine what it was like in 170? And you're doing apologetics while the

Romans want to throw you to the lions. There's a question. How many of us will be doing apologetics under persecution?

They were. Man, I don't know about you, but my respect for the early church just goes up and up and up.

The more I really realize what the context was that they were facing. So we've talked about Manichaeism and we've said

Manichaeism drew from Gnosticism. And one of the important things to recognize in Manichaeism is it's pure dualism.

Pure dualism. What do I mean? In Mani's theology, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness are co -eternal.

One does not give rise to the other. One does not come into existence after the other. One is not dependent for its existence upon the other.

They're co -equal, co -eternal. That is as dualistic as you can get.

The Gnostic myth, let's talk about classic Scythian Gnosticism first.

You can't define Valentinian Gnosticism without dealing with the Scythian stuff first.

Classic Gnosticism is likewise identified as dualistic because you have the sharp distinction between the physical realm and the spiritual realm.

The spiritual realm is good. The physical realm is evil. But the physical realm is not co -eternal with the one parent, the one source of all good, the unknowable

God. So Manichaeism is technically a purer form of dualism than the standard classical forms of Gnosticism.

So in Gnostic, and again, you're going to find variations.

One of the reasons you can pick up the Gnostic Bible here, you can pick up the Nag Hammadi scriptures, you can, I've got the

Coptic version in the other room, it's four or five volumes long, just thousands and thousands of pages. And the reason that you can pick all of them up and find variations of thought is because there were variations of thought.

Like Manichaeism, and I think Manny picked this up from Gnosticism, you edit stuff to make it attractive to the audience you're attempting to reach.

And so as your religion moves into different areas, if people are big on the

Buddha, you put the Buddha in there. If people are big on Jesus, you put Jesus in there. You mix and match.

And they didn't find that to be disingenuous, because they weren't claiming this is some kind of, you know, we're

Western thinkers, we think of revelation as an unchangeable thing. They don't, that's not, no. There are basic parameters that sort of define something that's

Gnostic, but man, you can move around a lot within this system, you really can. So what

I'm going to describe to you is sort of the basic vanilla version. And then as you read in these sources, you're going to find variation over here and variation there.

This eon is named differently over here. And that's just, there's no way to avoid it.

That's how it is. So in Gnosticism, you have not a personal, self existent deity as you have in Christianity.

That's not what you have. You have an unknowable, divine purity of thought.

The one parent, there's a, there's a, all through Gnostic thought, there is a male female interplay.

There is an androgynous concept. There is the idea. If you've, remember when we read years ago, we read the gospel of Thomas, it's probably still what we do every like two years, but read the gospel of Thomas and section 114,

Peter says, Jesus, make Mary depart from this for women are not worthy of the kingdom of God.

And Jesus says, don't worry yourself about it. I will make Mary into a man. And we're all like, wow, that's really weird.

That's because it comes from Gnosticism and all men are women too. In other words, the physical has a spiritual angelic male counterpart and salvation is the reuniting of the male and the female into one.

So there was no death until Eve was formed because Eve is taken out of Adam.

And so there's a separation of male and female, and that's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. So salvation is those coming back together again.

Who knew? But that male aspect is angelic spiritual. So you can imagine some of the things that resulted in, but anyway, so there is a background that the initiated would understand the whole thing about Gnosis, mystery religions and learning that Gnosis and, and stuff like that.

And we get into Valentinianism. You'll really see how almost all the modern cults are just much less imaginative versions of what the

Valentinians were back in the olden days. I'll just give you a hint right now. What they would do is they would attend

Christian churches and they'd attend Bible studies and sermons.

And then they'd find what looked like one promising non -Valentinian.

And then again, the conversation, that was a really interesting conversation about the resurrection of Jesus.

But you know, there's more to understand about the resurrection of Jesus. Would you like to come to a meeting where we do some in -depth

Bible study about this? And that's how they operated. That's how they spread.

That's why the bishops were like, you have to, you have to learn to identify these people and see where they're coming from because they would act like plain old

Christians. And then let us give you a little more. Let us give you the Gnosis.

How many cults do that? Pretty much all of them. That's how they operate today.

And that's how Valentinus started. That's how

Valentinianism operated. So anyway, back to classic

Sethian Gnosticism. So you have this divine being. There isn't an emphasis upon self -existence over against creation.

Because remember, this divine being creates nothing. This divine being emanates.

So there is an act of contemplation on the part of the one that results in what's called thought.

Now here's one of the problems. You have technical terms that are used of all these eons. Then depending on who you're talking to, you'll have some that have eight inner eons and then 10 and then 12, a total of 30.

And then some have just a 10 and a 12. And then they'll have different names for the same eons, even though they're talking about the same thing.

It is just so outrageous. And part of this is because we only have fragmentary sources.

I mean, with the discovery of Nag Hammadi, yeah, all of a sudden we got a whole bunch more.

But there isn't 100 % unanimous understanding of even how to interpret everything that's been discovered from Nag Hammadi.

So again, I can just only give you the bare bones because it gets too complicated once you start trying to cover all the different schools and all the different variations.

But this first emanation, this first thought, this first contemplation is sometimes called the mother thought.

And very often, this is the one key that really identifies classic

Sethian Gnosticism, the Barbalo. And so this is an emanation.

It's not we err when we try to cram this into Christian categories of a divine being choosing to act and creating.

No, this is a thought, an emanation, a disturbance in the force, if you want to use

Eastern thinking, that results in not a personal being, but an aeon.

It's almost a ripple in the space -time fabric, if you want to get

Einsteinian, go there. The Barbalo, the

Barbalo, the mother, key element. But if there's going to be a mother, then some

Gnostics felt it was absolutely necessary that even in the one, there had to be a male and female.

So in some, the emanation of the Barbalo requires the emanation of the noose, the mind, the thinking, the father.

So you have to have the male -female counterparts. Most of them do have this.

Some felt that once you go back to that first one parent, that there didn't need to be the male -female, but then others felt that it was just because it's absolutely necessary in all the other eons.

All the other eons have a male -female counterpart. There has to be balance.

And it is an imbalance in one of those pairs that results in the physical universe.

Now, let me emphasize something here because this is so important to our analysis of Gnosticism in regards to the claims of Ken Wilson.

And that is, there is no divine decree in Gnosticism.

The deity of Gnosticism does not have omniscience temporally, does not have knowledge of all future events.

In fact, once we see what happens in how the physical universe comes into existence through Sophia, in most of these,

Sophia is actually able to hide what she did from the rest of the

Pleroma, the upper eons, because there is no omniscience in the sense that we would understand this.

So there is no divine decree. There is no decision on the part of the one pure God, who again, hopefully you've seen is not, we're not talking about one

God as in Yahweh. Um, there is no decision on the part of that God to create, to make, to self -glorify, to have a purpose in all that happens.

It's not there. Just as there isn't a Manichaeism, because you have full dualism there, and the actions of the kingdom of light are determined by the invasion of the kingdom of dark.

This is temporal. This is non -eternal, no decree, absolutely no personal divine decree in this.

There is no foundation in this system for such a thought in Gnosticism or in Manichaeism or in Stoicism.

That's more of a, much more of a mechanical reason for that in inviolable laws and things that flow from that.

So there's, there's no divine decree. So the attempt to lump together these disparate beliefs into the foundation of the key element of the claim of Wilson's dissertation, dupied, no foundation at all, none.

It is indefensible. Okay? So just so you understand.

Now, what becomes really confusing is that once the documents of Gnosticism become available to us, there is a mention of the

Christ. And this is what for us is so hard because the

Christ for us is an identifiable, historical, individual. We know of course that he is the incarnate one.

And so he's, he's eternal in the sense of that divine person, but temporal in the sense of the incarnation.

And that's not how Gnosticism views the Christ. But one, but, but the sun or the thought thinking itself is another eon, another emanation that takes place.

Once you start having multiple eons, then there's interaction between the eons that results in other eons.

Okay? And so the Christ is an emanation, one of the highest of the eons.

So you've got the Barbalo, you've got the noose, the thinking, the mind, then you have the son, the

Christ, which is the thought thinking itself. So you can see how the mother is called thought, the father is called thinking.

And so the result of the father and the mother is the son, which is the thought thinking about itself. And this is so far outside of the, the rather concrete categories that we utilize that it's not easy to grab hold of it.

Some hallucinogenics would help. Sure, it would make a whole lot more sense after something like that.

In fact, I imagine Gnosticism probably makes more sense in Colorado, like especially in Boulder.

If we were walking down some of the streets

I've been on in Boulder, after a few blocks, this would start making a little bit more sense.

Yes, you don't have to go into any of the shops, just walk on by and it'll start making a little more sense.

Okay. So there is also in this inner circle of eons, the heavenly spiritual

Anthropos, the first Adam, but this doesn't have anything to do with the historical Adam.

This is why it is so difficult for us because we automatically transfer thinking.

You having problems with your chair out there, big guy? Yeah. Is that one of them that you worked on? No. No.

Okay. All right. Are you sinking? Are you, cause I'm, I'm worried.

I'm just gonna see you go, just, just, just, yeah. Okay. All right. Don't touch it.

You break it. Okay. All right. Just watching him, you know, going up and down and he runs out that way with the chair and it comes back and it's like,

I'm supposed to be teaching here and this is tough stuff. And I've got, you know, again, the stuff that goes on through the window, you don't understand.

You cannot possibly understand. Okay. So we continue on with further emanations, but what you need to understand is, is you could draw circles and each one of the emanations is going to start moving a little bit farther away from the one true source.

And so there, there is a thinking that the farther you get away from the one true source, there is a degradation, um, a, a diminishment of how closely related you are to that one.

So the Barbalo very, very close, but then these thoughts get, so you have four lights and then there's 12 eons.

Let me just give you some of them. Uh, the, the

VFI love understanding idea, Aureal memory, afterthought perception, LF peace, perfection,

Armazel truth, grace form. Um, obviously these are

Greek terms that had philosophical meanings that are being applied to what we would want to refer to as maybe, um, aspects of God's character, attributes of God, things like that become eons, actual emanations, like understanding memory, perception, truth, grace form.

But what's important is that the final sometimes called the lowest, sometimes called the youngest of the eons in they're called the upper eons in the play

Roma play Roma, the fullness remember in Paul, that's the term he uses all the fullness play

Roma of deity dwells in Jesus Christ in bodily form. That was a utter refutation of this before this had been expressed.

That's why, that's what I was saying earlier is I'm seeing how the new

Testament contains prophetic supernatural revelation to equip the second and third century churches to survive.

That's a minority view because why? Because you're not supposed to look at scripture in a supernaturalistic fashion.

So the, the, the final low lowest, um, emanation, who's an

Eon in the play Roma in the fullness is Sophia. Now you've heard of that word, you know what it means.

Philosophy. Sophia is wisdom. Isn't that weird that the lowest would be wisdom itself.

Sophia, Sophia is a feminine form. Sophia is, has a male partner that Sophia is to act in accordance with.

And the other, other eons, likewise, male, female, they act in accordance so much so that the eons do not think or contemplate separately from each other.

Now, why is this important? Because this is where creation comes from. That's where it is.

We got it here. Okay. The youngest lowest

Eon Sophia chooses to contemplate the one parent, the great one that had always existed and then began these emanations to approach and to contemplate this one apart from her male consort.

Now you're all sitting there going, you're saying that like, it's really important. It is because this is where creation comes from, not from the choice of the eternal

God, the unknowable God, the source of the emanations, the source of the

Eons. No, that deity never chose to create. It was not his plan to emanate these

Eons. And then Sophia goes wonky. And that was his plan.

No, there is no decree. There is no decree. There is always a sexual overtone.

The male, female stuff has sexual overtones. And in some of the writings, there is a sexual overtone as to what

Sophia did. Again, the stories will differ greatly.

They really will. But the result of Sophia contemplating apart from her male consort is a sort of a form of self -impregnation that shouldn't happen if she had thought in concert with her male consort.

But since she didn't, Sophia is still a divine

Eon with divine power within her. And thinking is what's resulted in all these other

Eons emanating from the thought and the thinking, the mind and the mother and the father thinking mind.

And so when she thinks but thinks improperly outside of the realm of balance, as a result, that divine power within her brings forth a misshapen deity, a deity that has divine power but is misbegotten, is hideous, called

Yaltabaoth. Yaltabaoth. Yaltabaoth is a ignorant yet powerful emanation being that is given birth by Sophia.

Now, various forms in some of the schools, one of the other

Eons comes alongside Sophia, and Sophia is accepted back.

Once it's found out what happened, Sophia is accepted back into the Pleroma, and Sophia works with some of the other

Eons to try to undo what has happened. But the point is that Yaltabaoth is the result of a mistake, an error, an imperfection on the part of the lowest of the emanations, the

Eons, from the one true God. Yaltabaoth thinks he's the only

God. Yaltabaoth becomes Yahweh. So the

God of the Old Testament is a hideous, misformed result of an error in the lowest of the

Eons, and he thinks he's the one true

God. He thinks he has all power. He thinks people should only worship him, and he is the one that originates the physical creation because he has the power to do so because he is the offspring of Sophia.

So he can do it, and he can try to recreate.

So you'll see a lot of diagrams where you've got the Pleroma up here, and then

Sophia here, and then the connection to something similar down here where Yaltabaoth tries to imperfectly recreate what he can't really understand, but still has knowledge of through Sophia.

And so all of the planetary archons, powers, beasts,

I mean, I could just give you the planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, these are all created.

And of course, they're all connected with powers because, like I said, I think in the last program on Friday, astrology and issues like that, central to all of this, all of this.

But there's connection to biblical characters. So the moon is connected to Abel. Mercury is connected to Cain.

You start bringing in mosaic categories, but the mosaic

God, Moses was deceived by Yaltabaoth. Moses was worshiping the misshapen deity.

So all the powers, demons, everything in the physical universe comes about through Yaltabaoth, who is the misbegotten result of Sophia contemplating the one true

God, deity, thing, whatever. So it is then through these powers that Adam and Eve are made.

So when you think about it, and in Adam and Eve, part of the mythology in some of the forms is that there is a, and this becomes the light in Manichaeism.

It's not quite as defined in that way, but the divine spark, the divine spark that comes from Sophia into Yaltabaoth, then goes into Adam.

And then in some of the stories, it's actually Sophia and some of the eons that bring Eve along.

And then Yaltabaoth sees that there is this energy in Eve, and so he attempts to rape her, but the energy leaves before he does so, but he does rape her.

That's how evil Yaltabaoth is. There was a absolute detestation of the

God of the Old Testament by the Gnostics, which Valentinus mutes because he wants to get

Christians in. Okay, so he takes that part of it out. Yaltabaoth becomes

Yahweh, but Yahweh is not evil, doesn't try to rape anybody. He is the master architect, but he's still ignorant.

But you don't have this. There is a deeply anti -Mosaic polemic within the

Gnostic mythology. There really is. There's a detestation, as there is amongst some

Christians today, too, sadly. So anyway, so this ends up resulting in mythologies about Seth and Cain and who has the divine sparks within them, and you end up with a

Sethian race, and it gets really, really complex. But for our purposes right now, it's important to recognize that the physical universe in the classical

Gnostic Sethian concept, the physical universe was not brought into existence by the will of the eternal one.

So there is no purpose. There is no predestining decree. There is no foundation for election.

You will end up with different kinds of mankind, spiritual, soulish, animalish.

And the Gnostics and the Valentinians, they will all argue about whether the spiritual, whether the soulish can become spiritual, because the spiritual will eventually go, be absorbed back into the

Pleroma, into that final place. But it's an absorption. It's not the continued existence of a specific created soul, but an absorption back into the one.

There's a monistic concept to it. But there's an argument about whether a soulish one can become a spiritual one, or whether there are some people who actually had the idea in the eschatology of Gnosticism.

I can't believe I'm talking about the eschatology of Gnosticism, where the soulish ones would have the opportunity of living with Yalta by oath.

Well, in Valentinianism, they would be living not with Yalta, but they'd be living with Yahweh, because he sort of gets to continue living, because I guess he thinks he's still the one true

God, but never in the Pleroma, in the fullness, but in the lower sphere.

But the earthly can never be saved in almost all the schools. So that is what

Christians were arguing against in Gnosticism in regards to an idea of predestination or election.

It has nothing to do with what is biblically taught. This has to do with a mechanistic concept down here in the lower regions that have no connection whatsoever with the one

God above at all. So you have to keep that in mind, have to keep that in mind.

Now, the Gnostics would have various rituals, but so many of them varied depending upon what part of the empire or farther to the east these things were found in.

Very frequently, there would be something similar to Christian baptism, but there's always been stuff similar.

Ritual washing is found in pretty much every religion there is. That shouldn't bother you.

I've noticed that some Christians are really put off and bothered when they discover that there are parallels between what we do and what others have done all along.

That shouldn't surprise you. I mean, when you join a religious faith, there is very often a symbolic laying aside of the old and putting on of the new.

What is unique in the Christian faith is how that represents the gospel and the gospel is absolutely unique.

That's why all this zeitgeist stuff and all this stupidity about trying to draw parallels to Manichaeans or Gnostics or whatever else completely misses the reality that what is fundamentally foundationally definitional of the

Christian faith is one true God, personal and self -sustaining, who creates all things and all things are dependent upon him.

Not that came out of creation. Not that was influenced by creation to do something.

No. We're talking about absolute monotheism, that personal

God glorifying himself by entering into his own creation.

This is where the Trinity becomes central to these things and providing the full price of redemption by union with himself.

No one, no. Any little part of that you can try to draw a parallel to something out here.

It's the whole that is unique, not the little parts that go into it. Because we're human beings, we live in this world.

There's only so many unique things we can do. You know, you got to keep breathing.

You can't have a ritual that involves spending 10 hours underwater. Doesn't work. Okay. That's just not where we live.

So there are going to be areas where you can make inappropriate, non -helpful, deceptive connections between systems, which is what

Duped is, by the way. But that's also, see, Duped is just a Christian bad version of the

Zeitgeist stuff, where you draw connections between various different kinds of religions and Jesus.

That's what Ken Wilson did with Calvin and Augustine, is he tries to make completely invalid connections to stuff that should never be connected together.

So you don't connect Osiris and Isis and Horus to Jesus' resurrection because there are too many fundamental category errors in process of doing so.

You don't connect Manny's cosmology with the concept of divine decree in Christianity because there are too many fundamental category errors to get over.

It's the exact same thing. It's the exact same error, just being made for another purpose.

So as a Christian, you should, when you see what looks like similarities, you don't just jump to the idea of same source.

You ask the question, what is the purpose and what is the context? What is the purpose and what is the context? A ritual cleansing, a baptism.

Oh, well, that's found in almost any religion there is. That's true. But did that, what did that represent in the other religion?

Well, there can be similarities there too. If it's an initiatory rite, it's this is where I was and this is where I am now.

Okay, so what makes Christian baptism unique? It has to picture the gospel.

It has to picture union with Christ, the God -man in his death, burial, and resurrection, which actually took place in history.

It wasn't just a mythological thing. That's why Christian baptism has to have that unique aspect to it.

There are some important aspects to that I'm not going to get into right now, but think through them and you'll figure it out.

So when we study church history, we see these things and what that does for me and what

I'm trying to help you to see is that increases my appreciation for what makes the

Christian experience utterly unique. But to see where that comes from, you have to have an understanding of the wholeness, the whole fabric of the

Christian faith to see how the incarnation is related to atonement, how it's related to the eternal purposes of God and creation itself and to the final state.

It's seeing the big picture. It's growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that then increases your appreciation and your confidence in these things.

So there is a danger in exposing people to Gnosticism and Manichaeism.

I've said many times debates will result in people leaving

Christian churches and joining false religions. And as a result,

I remember very clearly back when we first started this ministry, there was a lot of people would say, I just don't think you should, you know, just need to leave well enough alone, leave them alone.

And, you know, just there's enough to do to reach just a pagan lost. If they've got their religion, just leave them alone because, you know, some of our folks might end up joining those churches.

The reality is, yeah, they might. And in fact, they should. Why? Because if they're not true believers, they need to go out from us.

And they go out from us for many, many reasons. Normally it's just the world, constant exposure to the world, but it can be exposure to false religion.

It can be, that will happen. It will not happen to the elect. The sheep will not do that, not stay there.

We can have that confidence. Christ is not going to fail in his work. But the elect will be strengthened in their faith by seeing the beauty and the harmony of their faith in light of these falsehoods and these counterfeits.

So in other words, I'm saying you can actually trust the Holy Spirit of God to continue to sanctify Christ's sheep because we can.

But what I'm saying is when we look back in history, when we see these things, these things can actually help us to grow in our faith.

When we see the terrific struggle that the early church had against these things, and when we understand why, then we can appreciate the bulwarks that we have against these falsehoods.

We have a, a, we can defend the

Old Testament's testimony to monotheism in a way that they struggled to do.

We know more about the backgrounds than they knew at that point in time. And as popular as it is in liberalism to go, ah, yeah, the

Old Testament's henotheistic and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, actually it's monotheistic and you can defend that.

We can see the advantages we have today over where they were then.

That should cause us to appreciate them all the more, given that they had so much less than we have, should make us much less judgmental about them and should make us much more thankful for what we ourselves have.

And it should then drive us to see, to want to see even more. And this is the illustration

I've used forever, but it, the beautiful interwoven fabric of divine truth throughout all of scripture, and then being elucidated as Christ builds his church.

And he will continue doing so. He will continue to do that. And isn't it amazing that Irenaeus was taking the time to study the same stuff you and I were just studying, living in a place where in all probability, he didn't die of natural causes.

In all probability, he was martyred. We don't know that for certain. We can't tell, but we know there was severe persecution in that area, in that time period.

For most of us, we would be solely focused completely upon survival in this world.

Irenaeus was concerned about the survival of those in his flock, their souls, in light of the deception that was being preached by people in that day,

Valentinian Gnosticism. Are we concerned about our, our churches?

Are the people in our, in our congregations? Congregations? Or are we primarily concerned about the events and affairs of this particular life that's around us right now?

Some of the questions. So there is a rundown of Gnosticism.

I hope you see why it's important. I hope you see why it's relevant in, in apologetics.

This is not just about the Ken Wilson stuff. It is important to that. We'll make application to that in our summary statement, but I hope you can see this is important to so much else when it comes to the subject of apologetics and how apologetic, apologists need to know church history and what was happening at that time.

You really do, really do. Well, thank you for joining us today. I don't know when we're starting tomorrow.

It's going to be two or three, our time. I've got a really busy morning. I'm doing another solar show tomorrow for homeschooled kids from Apologia.

That's fun, man. I'm going to tell you that's, and it's so much easier than stargazing because you don't have to, it's normally clear, pretty easy to find the sun in Phoenix.

If you can't find the sun in Phoenix, Arizona, you really need to find another thing to be doing with the kids.

You really do. But I'll be out there in the East Valley early in the morning. You gotta let the sun come up some so you can, so you can see it, but I'll be doing a solar show for some kids tomorrow.

So we'll probably still be shooting for two. Is that, is that good? Let's just say we're gonna go for two and we'll go from there.