Ezekiel Part 30

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Ezekiel Part 31

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All right, let's do this. We're going to pray and then we're going to get into our study. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we ask you,

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Holy Spirit, to help us to rightly understand what is revealed there, that you would properly convict us of our sin and also assure us of the forgiveness of sins because of Christ and his merits and the things that he's done in atoning for our sins on the cross.

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We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, brothers and sisters, I am back from Japan and we are in Ezekiel chapter 22.

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When we left off a few weeks ago, I had made it to verse 22.

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And let me back up into verse 17 so that we can maintain our context. God is here speaking in Oracle against Israel and their shedding of blood.

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And in verses 17 through 22, we have a clear allusion to the doctrine of hell.

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And you'll note that God, in his word, oftentimes will refer to his wrath in terms of it being hot, of it melting things and stuff like that, because you'll note that in humanity, there are a few things less painful than being burned.

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And that's kind of the point, is that the intensity at which we feel being burned is designed by God to remind us of his wrath against sin.

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So verse 17, Ezekiel 22, the word of Yahweh, came to me, son of man, the house of Israel has become dross to me, and all of them are bronze and tin and iron and lead in the furnace.

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They are dross of silver. Have any of you guys ever seen those channels where they actually take tin or aluminum, you have to say it that way nowadays, we have to go with the

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Brit way of saying it, or gold or bronze or something like that, and they actually melt it?

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And then you get that slag, that dross on the top that they have to skim off in order to make it so that it's pure at the end of it.

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That's what God's referring to here. Therefore, thus says the Lord Yahweh, because you have all become dross, therefore behold,

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I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem as one gathers silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into a furnace to blow the fire on it in order to melt it.

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So I will gather you in my anger, and in my wrath, I will put you in and melt you.

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I will gather you and blow on you with the fire of my wrath, and you shall be melted in the midst of it.

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As silver is melted in a furnace, so shall you be melted in the midst of it, and you shall know that I am

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Yahweh. I have poured out my wrath upon you. Now, this is not talking about hell per se.

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You can see in the context here, God is going to gather them in Jerusalem, and the idea here is that there's going to be a siege in Jerusalem, Jerusalem is going to fall, and this is going to be all a result of God's wrath.

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But then the ongoing implication here is that what they're facing then is the hell.

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That's the point. And the next part of this then is going to give us a little bit more of the explanation as to why

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God is so hot under the collar, and why he's acting in threatening in such terrifying ways.

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So the word of Yahweh came to me, son of man, say to her, to Israel, you are a land that is not cleansed or rained upon in the day of indignation.

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The conspiracy of her prophets in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing the prey.

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They have devoured human lives. They have taken treasure and precious things. They have made widows in her midst.

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Her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the common.

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Neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my

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Sabbath, so I am profaned among them. Her princes in her midst are like wolves, tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain.

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And her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, thus says the

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Lord Yahweh, when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery.

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They have oppressed the poor and the needy. They have extorted from the sojourner without justice, and I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none.

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Therefore, I have poured out my indignation upon them. I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath.

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I have returned their way upon their heads, declares the Lord Yahweh. Does anyone sit there and go, that sounds like today, right?

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And you're going to note here, God is pointing out that when priest and prophet and politician go bad, they go bad in a way that destroys people's lives, and as a result of it,

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God destroys theirs. So listen again to the words. We've kind of worked our way through the big block of it.

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Let's kind of work our way through bit by bit. Son of man, say to her, you are a land that is not cleansed or rained upon in the day of indignation.

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The conspiracy of her prophets in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing the prey.

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They have devoured human lives. Note the word conspiracy here. Now, we should not be prone to conspiracy theories.

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That, however, does not mean that there are not conspiracies. And over and again, people ask me oftentimes questions like, do you think there's some kind of a grand conspiracy that has led to the weird wingnut, wackerdoodle false prophets and things like this that are running around the church?

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Oftentimes, we want to ask a question if there's some kind of a unifying movement, so to speak.

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If there's some kind of planned smoky room where people are sitting, let's do this.

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Let's get one of our prophets to tell people that they remind them of toilet paper, you know, something like that, right?

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Most recent video. But you sit there and go, how is it these people are doing this?

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Okay, and you're going to note then that on some level there is coordination, but we always have to remember what the scriptures teach, and that is that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

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And so, when you see different disparate heretical or sectarian groups all seeming to work together to be teaching the same false doctrine and heresy, it's not that they're exchanging emails and said, all right,

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I'll go first, you follow second, and we'll work this out together. It's that they're all sock puppets of the devil.

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And so, we have to understand that we are still at war. Satan is real, and as we get closer to the return of Christ, he is going to be unbound.

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And as a result of it, the demonic conspiracy to tank the church is definitely a thing.

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And when you see people who are claiming to be prophets today, or people who are pastors who are not faithful to God's word, you're going to note here, and that is that the result of what they're doing is that they end up devouring human lives.

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Now, many of you who've come to us from churches who have these types of false teachers, you can easily say, yep, that's exactly what happens, because these people are merciless.

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They'll sit there and they will tell you, you need to tithe, and that's the minimum that God expects you to give, and you need to give on top of that if you expect a miracle from God, and God wills for you to have divine perfect health and wealth and influence and affluence and stuff like this.

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And as soon as you get a protracted disease, or you have something seriously go wrong with your body, and you're no longer able to put on any kind of pretenses or airs that in this lifetime you're going to have anything close to perfect health, what they basically do is tell you it's all your fault.

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You just didn't have enough faith, and they kick you to the curb. I think of the churches where,

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I kid you not, this is a thing now, and that is that people who are members of congregations, if they're not tithing, they receive invoices from their church to let them know how much they owe.

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Don, when was the last time we sent an invoice out? Not lately, yeah. Oh, no.

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No. Okay.

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Holy guacamole. I'm glad we don't have that. That would be terrible. Oh, wow. So Don Masson revealed that in the history of Kongsvinger, how much people gave to the church was actually published in the annual report, and they called it the scandal list.

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Yeah, but it's referred to now as the scandal list, and what a horrible thing.

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Yeah, but you're going to note false doctrine and legalism, you know what it does to people? It destroys them, and in the sermon today

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I talked about the fact that the wicked, they die terribly. The scriptures make that very clear.

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They don't have any pangs of death until death is legitimately on their doorstep, and at that point there is no comfort.

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There's only anxiety, and they go into death in terror, and that terror continues on in hell, and you'll note that they do not die well.

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However, legalism does the same thing to people. I want you to kind of work this out with me.

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Legalism is a form of idolatry, and it is rebellion against God because God wills that people are saved, not by their own merits, but by the merits of Christ and what

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He has done for them on the cross. So when people are legalistic and basically saying, you know, you're not saved if you drink, if you smoke, if you chew, you know, if you date girls that do, then you're not saved, and you have this legalistic structure where everybody is determining whether or not they're saved, not according to faith, but saved according to a list of things that you're supposed to be doing.

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How is that any different than Islam, by the way? How many pillars does Islam have? Five, right? The five pillars of Islam, and you'll note that Muslims, they give alms to the poor.

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They make pilgrimages, and they pray five times a day. If only there were Christians who prayed that many times a day.

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I'll be blunt. You know, one of the things I saw when I was in the Philippines in the

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Manila airport was a prayer room for Muslims, and there were Muslims in there praying.

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I didn't see a prayer room for Christians, okay? And so I would note that, you know, you'll note that the other sects, other religions are very pious and stuff like that, but are they saved by their works?

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No. At the end of the day, when you are getting close to dying, can you somehow point to your good works and your obedience to Christ as any kind of assurance that you are saved and that you have a right standing before God?

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I want you to think that out with me. Well, I'm going to heaven. Why are you going to heaven? Well, because I've never been to prison.

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Good on you. Okay, that's great, and you paid your taxes every year. Whoop -dee -doo. Right, okay, never caught, but they made sure that their accountant, the person who did their taxes, they made sure that every single possible loophole that they jumped through in order to pay the least amount of money, right?

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Yeah, but all that being said, can you point to your good works and to your sanctification and have any assurance of your salvation at all?

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I can't, and anybody who does is delusional, and so you think about this is that false teachers,

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God's Word describes them as devouring human lives.

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False teachers are not something that we just can sit there and go, it's no big deal that we can have some kind of a laissez -faire attitude.

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Well, I understand they're misleading people, but at least they're paying their taxes. You can't talk like this because the

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Scripture says that they devour human lives, and then you'll note they've taken treasure, precious things, and they've made many widows in their midst.

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Send in your thousand dollar seed offering, and God's going to bless you, right? I think about a recent video that was put out by a fellow by the name of Mike Winger.

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He did a four hour long expose on Benny Hinn, and it was well done, and I mean really well done, and one of the things that he was able to point out is that Benny Hinn, who's famous for telling people to sow thousand dollar seed offerings and things like this, he's also famous for having healing services.

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I remember watching these things on TBN back in the 90s, and this is as real as wrestling, okay?

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It has the same kind of showmanship to it. Have you guys ever watched old school, like WWF, and sit there and go, is this real?

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You just sit there and go, really? Hulk Hogan versus whoever, right?

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You sit there and go, is this even a real fight? Because it just seems kind of staged and kind of cartoonish, right?

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Same thing with Benny Hinn and his healing lines, people coming up claiming that they were healed and stuff like this, and Mike Winger did a really good job of pointing out with several examples of people who came up and were allowed to have that face -to -face interaction with Benny Hinn on the stage claiming their healing, and it was obvious that they were not healed, and one particular woman had cancer and was in a lot of pain, and of course people who have cancer and are in a lot of pain, they need to be handled very carefully, right?

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And what does Benny Hinn do? He pushes them back and they fall backwards, and it was clear that the woman was in a huge amount of pain as a result of being pushed backwards by Benny Hinn, pretending that that was the

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Holy Spirit knocking her over, when in fact it wasn't, all right? So you'll see here that false teachers, as Christ has described them in John 10 as wolves who come to steal, to kill, and to destroy.

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You can always tell a false teacher because it's like always and again, the number one thing on their mind is money, money, money and power, right?

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Her priests have done violence, Scripture says, of the false teachers of Ezekiel's time and also the time of Jeremiah.

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They've done violence to my law. They have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean.

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They have disregarded my Sabbaths, and so I am profaned among them. And in saying they've disregarded the

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Sabbaths, that's not merely to say that they were working on Saturday, because the purpose of the

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Sabbath was that they would have a day of rest where they can then have convocations where they can meet in the synagogues to hear

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God's Word. And how many times, just in recent history, have we heard over and over again from people who call themselves pastors or who claim to be pastrixes and things like this?

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The things that they teach, they don't make the proper distinction between what is holy and what is common, between what is evil and what is good.

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You think of like the ELCA, there's a whole, they've got an entire priesthood, and what do they do?

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They celebrate sin, right? We are about one month away now from June.

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June. You know what's going to happen in all these ELCA congregations? Which flag are they going to be flying come

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June 1st? The LGBTQXYZLMNOP thing, right?

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All the alphabet people. They're going to be flying those flags. Why is that?

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Because they don't recognize what Scripture teaches regarding what is sin and what is not sin. Same in her day.

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Her princes in her midst are like wolves, tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get this honest gain.

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Isn't that like Washington DC right now? Always? Yeah. It's strange, isn't that how that works?

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I mean, I think of like that laptop that they found from that guy, you know, just that's just tip the iceberg kind of stuff, right?

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And you sit there and you go, what is wrong with our politicians? You know what's wrong with them?

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They're all sinners, and they're impenitent sinners, and they're not believers in Jesus Christ.

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And the ones who claim that they do believe in Jesus Christ, you have to sit there and question, do you even know who Jesus is?

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You know, remember Paula White right after the 2020 election calling for angels in Africa to overthrow the 2020 election?

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You know, what, I mean, and strike, and strike, and strike, and strike, and strike, and strike.

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This is nonsense, right? And who was Paula White? She was

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Trump's number one spiritual advisor. I wouldn't have her advising me on how to clean my litter box for my cat, you know, let alone trust her with any kind of advice when it comes to Christ and the scriptures or anything like that.

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And she's one of these people who's also one of these televangelist types who is telling people so seed offerings into her ministry and all this kind of nonsense.

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She's another one of these people. And so, you know, when our politicians have joined forces with people who are religiously sketchy and sus, right?

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This is not a good thing. Is it any wonder that our politicians are a mess? Her prophets have smeared whitewash for them.

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Always and again, I think about how, why hasn't the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated

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President Biden or Nancy Pelosi or any of these people, right?

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Why haven't they done so? Okay, right, right.

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You get the idea here. There's something really off, okay? If your claim to being a

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Christian leads you to be a violent, and I mean violent promoter of the murder of unborn children, don't you think that there's a disconnect?

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About your confession of Christ and that? And then when your church basically uses whitewash to basically say, no, no, they're okay.

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That's all right. That's not a problem. You know, that's not an issue at all.

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They are devoted Christian people. What's wrong?

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And you're going to note here, this was a problem all the way at the time of the Ezekiel. We read our way through the book of Jeremiah not that long ago, and we saw the graphic detail of what this looks like.

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And this is still in existence at this point when Ezekiel is writing and God threatening to finally overthrow

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Jerusalem and bring it to its, you know, its judgmental end, you know, as a proof of his wrath against all this nonsense.

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And so God is speaking these things against these evildoers. Why? Number one, he wills for them to repent.

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Number two, so that we can see this and we can say, yeah, this is wrong and this exists in our day.

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And seeing it is not merely enough. We need to be praying. You know, one of my seminary profs, he had a profound thing that he said in one of our seminary classes.

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And at the time, I made a mental note. And the mental note basically said, huh,

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I don't know if I believed him or not. Okay. And, you know, because it's kind of technically fits into the realm of speculative theology.

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And so he asked the question in seminary class. He said, so why do you think it is that God doesn't just judge the

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United States of America and overthrow this nation for all of its wickedness?

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And it's like, I'm searching through my, you know, archives of biblical understanding, looking for some kind of a cogent answer to such a question because I've never had it posed such a way.

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And his answer to the question was actually one that made me go, hmm, huh. And his answer to the question is, he says, the reason why

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God doesn't act in judgment is because there's still faithful pastors who pray for our government every single Sunday in the divine service.

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And he hears our prayers. And I wanted to say, you don't have a biblical text for that.

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But then I went, no, maybe he does. Because the scriptures command us to pray for our leaders. Does it not?

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Paul tells us to pray for the emperor. And I want you to consider what Paul says in that regard.

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Pray for the emperor. Were Roman emperors known for their Christian virtue and morals at the time of the writing of the apostle

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Paul? No. Nero was on the scene. And Nero was a complete false god wingnut wackerdoodle himself.

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Right. Okay. He made prophetic declarations as a deity on earth. Did he actually have a prophetic gift?

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No, he did not have a prophetic gift. No. Okay. But yep,

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Paul tells us to pray for the emperor. I got to admit, we pray for our government every single divine service.

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And sometimes I pray for Joseph by name. And every time

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I do, it bugs me. Right? Because I don't like the guy.

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I don't like his politics. I don't like his family. I don't like the fact that I don't think the guy should be allowed to be in office anymore.

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That's my personal opinion, because I don't think he's mentally competent. Right? Right. But all that being said, what am

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I instructed by God to do? Pray for him. Right?

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Every time I pray that God would give us godly leaders and the current crop of leaders that we have, that God would guide them to care for our country according to his law.

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I got to admit, I pray those prayers. I say those words. And deep down,

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I sit there and go, there's some politicians I'm praying more for than others. Right?

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And don't think that just goes along party lines. It doesn't. Right? So all of that being said, you're going to note then that it is a punishment from God.

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It is a consequence of sin. And it is a sign of chaos and disorder when we have ungodly princes who tear people apart rather than serve the people they are called to serve.

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I think of the Nazi regime in Germany. And one of the things that the

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Nazis were known for is tearing down governmental institutions. And Adolf Hitler himself very famously railed against the concept of people in the government being called ministers.

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Think this out with me for a second here. So in European governments, it was very common, especially coming out of the

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Middle Ages and into the modern era, that governmental people who held offices, they held offices as the minister of so -and -so, the minister of the

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Department of Defense, the minister of agriculture, the minister of this, the minister of that.

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Who hated that idea was Adolf Hitler. Okay? The reason why he hated it is because he rejected the idea that people who held governmental offices were ministers of anything.

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They were to be rulers and reiners and people who made stuff happen.

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Right? Ministers are weak and servile. Ministers are people who are slaves.

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Those who are in power should be bold and seize that power and rule with an iron fist and make stuff happen.

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Okay? Ministers sound like a bunch of people who sit there with their hands ringing, going, you know, that they're afraid of the people that they serve.

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That's the way Hitler looked at it. Was Hitler right?

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No, not at all. Right? People who are in office are there for the purpose of serving.

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And we know this because Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, and how does he rule us?

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In love, in mercy, he serves us. Christ became the servant of all, left an example for us to follow.

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I think about the fact that back in the day, there used to legitimately be uncouth for somebody to run for political office.

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You know, somebody who had the ambition to want to run for political office was held with suspicion.

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They sit there and go, well, how then were people, how did they get into office?

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Answer, they were nominated. Who do you think would be a good candidate for us to be our president, our next president?

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I suggest that we have so -and -so running for us. And so -and -so says, oh no, no, that's crazy.

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No, you're the right person for the job, and here's the reason why. And they're supposed to say, no, I'm not. But then things prevail against them because people then recognize that person is the right person for the job, not because they're seeking it, but because they've shown by their life that they are the right person to hold that office.

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General Washington understood that concept pretty well. I think it's fascinating when you read the stories of the early account of what was happening right before, well, with the outbreak of war and the revolution, they needed to pick a general.

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And Washington knew full well it would be wrong for himself to put himself forward, but he kept showing up at the

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Continental Congress wearing a military uniform. Right? I wonder who should lead our troops?

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Hmm. He couldn't put himself forward, but he kind of did by how he dressed.

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Keep this in mind. It's coming back here. Princes in our midst are wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain.

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And our prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, thus says the

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Lord, Yahweh, when Yahweh has not spoken. Kind of like when Paula White said that angels from Africa were going to come and overturn the election, right?

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And they're going to strike and strike and strike and strike and strike. Right. Right. Oh, yeah.

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Mm hmm. You know, that darn sneaky squid. I remember years ago, somebody

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I asked the question, where in the Bible does it teach about the sneaky squid spirit? And somebody said Second Tentacles, chapter six, verse 66.

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That's a pretty good answer. All right. So the people of the land, they've practiced extortion.

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They've committed robbery. They've oppressed the poor and the needy. That's kind of an important one, too.

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They've extorted from the sojourner without justice. When I think about men like Benny Hinn, he is so much about money that there have been many documented times where he has, in his preaching, told people in his audience that if they are in debt and that they don't have any money to pay their bills, they need to clear out their bank accounts and send what little money they have to Benny Hinn to prove to God that they have faith.

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I mean, this is so obviously evil that even Bono, who

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I don't really have a lot of respect for as a man who claims to be a Christian from the band

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U2, in the rattle and hum version of Bullet the

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Blue Sky, he talks about false teachers like this. He says, the God I believe in isn't short on cash, mister.

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It's a famous line of Bono from rattle and hum. I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall, stand in the breach before me, stand in the breach, which is what we do as Christians when we pray, for the land that I should not destroy, but I found none.

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Therefore, I have poured out my indignation upon them. I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath. I have returned their ways upon their heads, declares the

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Lord Yahweh. You don't want to repent. You don't want to be forgiven. This is the only other option, and it's not a good one.

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All right, we continue on. The word of Yahweh came to me. Son of man, there are two women, the daughters of one mother.

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They played the whore in Egypt. I should note here, this gets a little bawdy.

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This is a section of Ezekiel that is rated

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PG -13. I cannot apologize because God the

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Holy Spirit has inspired this. I just am warning you that God the Holy Spirit isn't holding anything back in this section of Ezekiel.

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So they played the whore in Egypt. They played the whore in their youth. Their breasts were pressed and their virgin bosoms handled.

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Ahola was the name of the elder, and Aholabah, the name of her sister.

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They became mine, and they bore sons and daughters. As for their names, Ahola is

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Samaria, and Aholabah is Jerusalem. So we can see here that God is speaking parabolically.

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This is a parable. Ahola played the whore while she was mine, and she lusted after her lovers, the

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Assyrian warriors, clothed in purple, governors and commanders, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding on horses.

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She bestowed her whoring upon them, the choicest men of Assyria, all of them, and she defiled herself with all the idols, every one after whom she lusted.

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I would note here, again, God has this thing that he does in the Old Testament, is that adultery and sexual immorality are used as the metaphor to describe idolatry, and that's what we're seeing here in spades.

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So God is describing these sexually immoral women, but in fact he's not describing sexually immoral women, he's describing spiritually unfaithful

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Israel. She did not give up her whoring that she had begun in Egypt, for in her youth men had lain with her and handled her virgin bosom and poured out their whoring lust upon her.

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Therefore I deliver her into the hands of her lovers, into the hands of the Assyrians, after whom she lusted.

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These uncovered her nakedness, they seized her sons and her daughters, and as for her they killed her with the sword, and she became a byword among women when judgment had been executed on her."

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So much for her lovers, right? She was killed by the very ones that she was lusting after.

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Her sister Aholahba saw this, and she became more corrupt than her sister.

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In her lust and in her whoring, which it was worse than that of her sister, she lusted after the

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Assyrians, governors and commanders, warriors clothed in full armor, horsemen riding on horses, all of them desirable young men.

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And I saw that she was defiled, they both took the same way, but she carried her whoring further.

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She saw men portrayed on the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, wearing belts on their waists with flowing turbans on their heads, all of them having the appearance of officers, a likeness of Babylonians whose native land was

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Chaldea. When she saw them, she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea.

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And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoring lust.

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And after she was defiled by them, she turned from them in disgust. When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness,

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I turned in disgust from her as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there whose members were like those of donkeys and whose issue was like that of horses.

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Thus you long for the lewdness of your youth when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts."

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Now, why always talk about the Egyptians? This is an important thing here. And the reason it's important is because Israel's proclivity to idolatry was something that predated the exile by a long shot, but also goes all the way back before the exodus.

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So the best way you can talk about this then is that the roots of their idolatry grew up while they were at oppression in Egypt.

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Rather than remaining separate from the Egyptians while they were there, they actually learned the idolatry of the

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Egyptians. When you think about the golden calf, that golden calf incident is not some kind of a weird anomaly.

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They made it look exactly like an apis bull because that's what they learned when they were in Egypt.

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So they learned their ways and they brought this idolatry with them. So what God is describing here is the

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Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom as these two women, Aholahbah and Aholah, and Aholahbah thinking back to when she was in her youth, having been ravished by the

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Egyptians and her loving it and wanting to go back to that. That's kind of the idea here.

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So God then says, therefore Aholahbah thus says the Lord God, Lord Yahweh, behold,

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I will stir up against you your lovers from whom you turned and discussed, and I will bring them against you from every side, the

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Babylonians and the Chaldeans, Picard and Shoah and Koah, and all the Assyrians with them, desirable young men, governors and commanders, all of them, officers and men of renown, all of them riding on horses, and they shall come against you from the north with chariots and wagons and a host of peoples, and they shall set themselves against you on every side with buckler, shield, and helmet, and I will commit the judgment to them, and they shall judge you according to their judgments, and I will direct my jealousy against you that they may deal with you in fury.

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They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword.

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So note her face is going to be marred here, her beauty gone forever, that's the point.

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They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire. They shall also strip you of your clothes and take away your beautiful jewels, thus

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I will put an end to your lewdness and your whoring begun in the land of Egypt, so that you shall not lift up your eyes to them or remember

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Egypt any more. Now, important note here, the religion of Egypt still exists to this day, and here's where we'll do a little bit of an excursus to kind of talk about this.

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It is the Egyptians that really created the concept of that we'd call Gnosticism today,

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Gnosticism, all right, and it's they who started it, then these mystery religions that start in Egypt then get found and kind of their seed spreads into the idolatry of the

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Greco -Roman pantheon, especially of Dionysus, and this major mystery religious concept then gets really kind of hammered into what becomes

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Gnosticism, which is still with us today, and let me explain how this kind of works from an idolatry point of view.

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The main narrative of Gnosticism is that the world that we live in, the universe that we live in, where there's matter and things that you can smell and taste and touch, and the order that goes with it of male and female, of husband and wife, of government and laws and things like this, all of that is the result of an evil deity who is created by an act of sexual self -satisfaction, and that god is evil, and his name is

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Yaltabaoth. All right, let me explain how this works. So, in the

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Gnostic way of thinking, there are always going to be gods and goddesses.

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They emanate from the unknown god, and they emanate then as in pairs, and one of the pairs that emanated from the unknown god, it was the goddess

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Sophia and her husband, and Sophia kind of was dissatisfied with her husband, and so she separated from him, and then in an act of sexual self -manipulation, she conceived, without her husband's knowledge, this deity known as Yaltabaoth, and Yaltabaoth is depicted in the

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Gnostic realm or in the Gnostic literature as a deity that has the face of a lion and the body of a snake, and is described in kind of grotesque terms, and so she was really grossed out by his conception, and so she aborted him, but he still lived, and she hid

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Yaltabaoth in a cloud, and Yaltabaoth then, because he grew up in this cloud away from any other sense of any other existence of any other deities, he thought that he was the only god that existed, and therefore he created matter.

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He created the world that we live in, but he is in fact an evil deity, okay?

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You're thinking logically here, and logic is the exact opposite of what you should be doing when you're a

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Gnostic, okay? So stop thinking so logically. You have to just feel this, okay? Now, let me then explain to you how this then plays out.

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According to the Gnostic myth then, Yahweh is Yaltabaoth. He is the product of Sophia's self -sexual satisfaction, and he is the evil deity that has created the world that we live in, okay?

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And according to them, you have to fight against Yahweh and his order, and the way you do that is recognize that the world that we live in is all a mistake, and the goal is to those of you who have the divine spark in you to return to God and become one with the unknown deity again, because it is.

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It's satanic propaganda, okay? No, that's the weird thing about Gnostics.

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They recognize that they live paradoxically. Every Gnostic will tell you that when they cross the street, they look both ways so that they don't get hit by a bus, but then they hate the fact that they have to do that.

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They consider that to be an annoyance as a result of the accidental world that we live in. Now, why is this important, okay?

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You sit there and go, why is this important? Because Gnosticism has been with us as the archenemy of Christianity since the apostolic era.

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In 1 John, 1 John itself was written against Gnosticism, his primary idolatry, and since God here is talking about the

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Egyptian idolatry, you have to recognize part of what that was, because when we read in the

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Old Testament the details of what was happening inside of Solomon's temple before God had it destroyed, what was happening, okay?

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They had male cult prostitutes in the temple who were offering up their religious services, which were sexual, in the temple, and that was part of their religious practice.

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Why? Okay? Here's the reason why. When you kind of understand the uniting elements here in the theology of this, then you can begin to see what

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God's getting at and why this is still very applicable to this day. So, in this belief then that the world that we live in is an accident, it shouldn't even be here, it was created by an evil deity, and therefore, what we do with our body doesn't matter.

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In fact, we all have a divine spark in us that's trapped in this fleshly body, and the goal is to escape it.

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This is how it then manifests it theologically, and this is, I'm going to use language that you should be familiar with, because I referenced it in the sermon today.

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Your authentic self is neither male nor female. Your authentic self is that divine spark that you have from the unknown deity, and it's trapped in this earthly body of yours.

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You need to be true to that authentic self of yours, right? And so, what happens then is that this idea of male and female, of right and wrong, of good and evil, of husband and wife, all of this is part of the accident that needs to be undone.

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And so, Gnostics, as part of their practice in religion, would engage in homosexual copulation for the purpose of basically, as a religious act, saying that I am neither male nor female, and by being bisexual,

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I am then embracing the reality of the divine spark in my authentic self. Okay?

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I know that sounds crazy, but that was all going on in Solomon's temple back in the day.

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This is why God's making reference all the way back to the Egyptian practices, because it's the Egyptians who created these mystery religions that became the

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Gnosticism of the ancient world and the Gnosticism that is of our day. And so,

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I want you to think this through in our day right now, because you'll note that within the visible church, we have entire denominations now that have fallen to this progressive woke nonsense.

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And you sit there and go, what is wrong with these people? How are they justifying any of this?

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The answer is Gnosticism. Okay? The answer is Gnosticism. So, when you see people putting forward in denominations the blue -haired feminist women who, you know, are openly and celebratory about the fact that they're lesbians and things like this, why are they doing that?

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Answer, because they've bought into the major narrative of Gnosticism that your authentic self has nothing to do with your flesh, and as a result of it, those blue -haired feminist lesbians that they're putting forward, they're putting them forward as they're saying, those are the people that are enlightened.

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They are the people who see the truth. They are the people who are going to guide us out of this world of flesh into the spiritual realm where we can be reunited with the unknown deity and be done with that evil

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Yahweh who created this whole mess. That's why they are saying things like down with the patriarchy and stuff like this, because the patriarchy expresses a form of order that comes from the creation that Yalta Beoth supposedly made, and that's all part of the evil of this world.

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And so, the way they look at it is that order and distinctions separate us and further separate us from not only the unknown deity, but they separate us from ourselves and from each other, and as a result of it, we've got to get rid of all of these laws, all of this order, all of these distinctions, and get back to this unity, this spiritual weird ooey -gooey primordial state of, you know, kind of nondescript chaos.

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It's weird, isn't it? What was that?

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Sinful nature trying to get what it wants. So, as I've been studying Gnosticism, I have a more jaded opinion about it than that.

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Your opinion isn't jaded enough. I think, in fact,

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I go back in my notes when I was, you know, doing this initial research to kind of figure all this out.

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My belief is that Satan's only hope is to get everything back to a state of chaos before he was created, because his eternal future is in the pit of hell otherwise.

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And so, Satan's goal is to try to undo everything back to a complete state of complete chaos and undo all of God's order, because only in doing that can he have any hope of salvation for himself.

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Yeah, but God's already won, is the best way to put it. So, the reason

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I'm saying all of this, this text keeps referencing the Egyptian mystery religions here.

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You have to recognize this, and that is that these ancient Egyptian religions, this idolatry that they brought with them, ultimately manifested in its true form at the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which shows its

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Gnostic, its real Gnostic roots. And this is still with us to this day.

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I think it's fascinating that the late Pope Benedict, not that I'm much of a fan of Roman Catholicism at all, there's a number of Lutheran scholars who think that Benedict was a closet

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Lutheran. I kid you not, that's a conversation that has been taking place for a while, because his theology was distinctly different than most

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Roman Catholics, and some have postulated that that might have something to do with why he was pressured to leave the papacy.

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But Benedict was one of these people who, he personally experienced what

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Gnosticism does when political systems embrace it, and as a result of it he suffered terribly under communist regimes and things like this.

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But he wrote very emphatically against Gnosticism, but one of the things he said very openly was that Gnosticism has been with us from the start of the church and has never left.

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And he was very clear about the fact that it had embedded itself in Roman Catholicism, and that it continued to pose a very dangerous threat to the world.

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And I think he was absolutely right. So the thing is that if you can see this for what it is, look at the woke agenda, and the down with the patriarchy crowd, and the

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LGBTQ people, and all their talk of the authentic self, and how you have to be true to that authentic self, and all that kind of stuff.

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What you're hearing then is the conclusion of Gnosticism without the explanation is how they got to that conclusion.

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But this is an indoctrination process. And this is the reason why we as Christians, and I'm going to say something that's going to make some people uncomfortable, as Christians we have to be prepared to call this thing what it is, and to not bend the knee to it.

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Because the pressure is being put upon us now to comply with people saying that you need to recognize people's self -preferred pronouns and things like this.

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We as Christians don't have that liberty because behind all of that, you have to understand when somebody says, my pronouns are these.

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That is a theological statement, not a political statement. It is a theology that is informing that, not a political thing only.

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In fact, the politics is secondary. Anybody who says my pronouns are these, they are saying

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I am a Gnostic, even if they've never spent a single moment in a secret society.

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Because they've already bought into the meta -narrative and the metaphysical concept that the true self has nothing to do with your physicality.

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That the true essence of who you are is different than your biology. But scripture is clear that God created us male and female.

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We are not souls who indwell a body. We are human beings who have both a body and a soul.

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And both are created by God. And that both the body and soul come together make us the one person that we are.

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You cannot talk about yourself apart from your physicality, nor can you talk about yourself apart from your soul.

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The distinction, the sharp cut between body and soul and saying the true self is the soul rather than the body, that's a

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Gnostic claim and a religious one. And as Christians, we don't have the freedom to go along with that idolatry, nor can we play with it.

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And so as Christians, when they work, they say you need to bend the knee and you need to acknowledge these person's pronouns.

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You need to say I can't do that on religious grounds because that's a religious claim of theirs.

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And my religion says otherwise. Which means there's people who are going to lose their jobs.

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You just need to know that's the cost. But what's going on here is not a political problem.

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What we're seeing manifesting in our days is not a political problem. What we're seeing is a theology, a

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Gnostic theology, rising in our midst. And it's taking over everywhere.

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And the reason why it's hard to identify is because Gnostics do a really good job of hiding their sources.

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Because if they just came right out and said this is a religion, we'd see it for what it is.

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But it's a religion. And it's one that the scriptures describe as the religion of the

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Antichrist. It is overtly anti -Christian. Yes, Marilyn?

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Yes, you could. I would say it probably predates the fall just by a few minutes.

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Because when Satan shows up and says, did God really say? Satan, by doing that, you can tell he's working with a narrative that makes it sound like Yahweh is some kind of a known entity that's evil and bad.

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And that there are others who know better. Okay, that's part of the narrative of Gnosticism.

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And I think the devil concocted the whole scheme prior to tempting Adam and Eve. I legitimately believe that.

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Yeah. No, it's not.

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It's not science. So when you have a science and say, well, there's a difference between gender and sex. You sit there and go, what lab work are you showing to prove this?

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Okay. Yeah, so we're dealing with a full -on Gnostic theology that you've rightly pointed out is being backed up by science.

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But that's not science. You can't back this up with science. This is pure metaphysics. This is just straight out theology.

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And we're dealing with Gnosticism in a very, very terrifying way. And the end of all of this is a bad end, by the way.

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It's not going to be a good end for us. So until Christ returns, then it becomes a great end.

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But I have to go because I'm going to be late. All right, Lord willing, we'll see you guys next time. I did too much reading in Japan.