Doctrines of Man

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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All right, let's pray, and we'll get started. Oh Lord, our

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God, how blessed we truly are. Not only have you given us your word, which offers and imparts to us all the fruits of the redemption of your dear son,

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Jesus Christ, you've also opened our eyes so that we may know your grace and in firm confidence receive it and believe it.

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Though the world, the law, and our heart, and our own conscience condemns us, what do we care? Your word declares us free of all guilt.

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Keep us in such faith until our end, and grant that all the members of our congregation may appreciate the true great treasure which they possess in Jesus Christ.

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Help them and us to triumph over all the attacks of the devil, the world, and our flesh, and finally to depart this life in peace and to be received into your eternal kingdom.

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Hear us for the sake of our risen and victorious champion, Jesus Christ, amen. All right, questions regarding the sermon.

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Kind of a controversial topic, you know, just talking about traditions and rituals and things like that, and the idea is that the

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Bible actually gives us traditions. For instance, praying the Lord's Prayer. Is that a man -made tradition or something handed to us in scripture?

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That's a biblical tradition. Receiving the Lord's Supper, man -made tradition or biblical tradition?

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Biblical. Requiring a pastor, notice how I said it, requiring a pastor to wear a uniform.

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That's a man -made tradition. In fact, if it's require him to wear a uniform, then it becomes a man -made law, and that becomes a problem.

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So the idea then is that, you know, we want to think biblically and make proper distinctions.

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Jesus makes a point. You know, so many people quote that verse out of context with the Sermon on the

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Mount. Judge not lest you be judged. And a Reformed Baptist minister by the name of Paul Washer has a great comeback for somebody when they quote that, because usually the way judge not lest you be judged is used is if you point out that somebody is actually listening to a false teacher.

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You know, you say, brother, why are you listening to so -and -so, don't you know that she teaches false doctrine? You have to kind of say that now.

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And their immediate response is, judge not lest you be judged. Paul Washer's response is, twist not

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God's word lest you be like the devil. Because Jesus actually says, make a proper judgment.

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We are to make proper judgments and distinctions. And so there's two errors then when it comes to tradition.

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The one error is that there are no traditions, that we must get rid of all vestiges of things that we've received from our forebears.

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Well, it just so happens there are biblical traditions that we receive from our forebears, and they received them from the disciples who were the apostles, who were given them by Christ.

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So to reject those traditions is to reject the one who gave them, which is Christ, all right?

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So there's certain things we can reject, and there's certain things we must reject.

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But at the same time, there's certain things that based on a proper understanding of tradition, we would be foolish to reject.

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And then on the other end of it is this whole thing that we as human beings do because of our sinful nature, this consistent breaking of the first commandment where we want to be in charge in Christ's church.

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And so we set the agenda, we set the tone, we put our own traditions in place.

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And usually that'll fall under the category of we have the freedom to do these things. And somebody can say, yeah, technically that may be the case, but then once they're in place, if you say, wait a second, why are we doing that?

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That's not biblical. Out come the claws, and out come the aspersions, out come the attacks, and now that person's true agenda is kind of on the table.

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They manipulated this whole thing so that they could be in charge, and they've deposed

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Christ in the process. And so that's what the Pharisees had done with their tradition of the elders.

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And the last time I preached on this text, which was three years ago, we talked about the actual tradition itself.

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There's a book out there by a Hebrew scholar by the name of Nehemiah Gordon. By the way, the book

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Nehemiah in the Bible, it's actually pronounced Nehemiah is the way you pronounce it, just so you know.

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So his name is Nehemiah, but it's properly pronounced Nehemiah. And Nehemiah has a wonderful book called

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The Greek Jesus. And in that book, he actually lays out what the tradition of the elders was, and the actual hand -washing ceremony that the

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Jews, that the Pharisees had set up, and the whole story behind it. Have you guys heard of Rabbi Shiva?

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If you know of any Hebrew scholars or anything about rabbinic traditions, stuff like that,

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Rabbi Shiva was a very famous rabbi. And so the way it worked then was that in the intertestamental period, between Malachi and the writing of the

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New Testament, there's roughly a 400 -year span where we hear nothing from God.

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And that's the time of the Maccabees. That's the time when Judea was originally conquered by Alexander the

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Great. And if you want some of this history, it's actually really fascinating. You can read it in Josephus' works.

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And Josephus notes the fact that when Alexander the Great showed up with his armies, the high priest of the

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Jews went out onto the battlefield and had a parley with him. And the high priest of the

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Jews said, we've been expecting you. And he opens up the prophet Daniel and reads it out to him.

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And as a result of that, Alexander the Great did not lay siege to Jerusalem and did not destroy

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Jerusalem. Kind of a fascinating thing. He says, well, we've been expecting you, and he opens up Daniel.

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And so it's a very fascinating little bit of history. But also during that period then, after Judea is kind of subjugated under Greek rule, when

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Alexander the Great dies, his kingdom is split up into four pieces. Each general kind of gets a piece of it.

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And they weren't Ptolemaic. The Ptolemies were in Egypt. I forget the general who was in charge of Judea.

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But during that time, there was a real cultural clash between the pagan Greeks and the

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Torah observant Jews. And this is where you get the Maccabean Wars.

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You've got the story of Hanukkah during this time. You can find it in the Maccabees in the Apocrypha. And then also during this time, there's the rise of the

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Pharisees. And this is a sect. This is a Jewish heresy, if you would.

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And they claimed that Moses ascends Mount Sinai back in Exodus, which we're reading about.

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And upon his ascension to Mount Sinai, God gives him not just the written Torah, but also gives him this thing called the oral

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Torah, which is called the tradition of the elders. And according to their twisting of one of the biblical texts, that God not only gave them the oral

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Torah, but God himself said that they were the only ones who could judge and determine what the oral

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Torah means and that God couldn't interfere. And there's a famous story that Nehemia Gordon tells about Rabbi Shiva, who had basically said that God can perform certain miracles under certain circumstances, and the elders who were in charge of interpreting the tradition of the elders, the oral

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Torah, wouldn't listen to Rabbi Shiva. And so as the story goes, Rabbi Shiva calls out.

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He says, if I am right, then may the trees all fall over outside. And they hear this big rushing wind and all the trees outside fall over, and it was a miracle, right?

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And they said, hmm, that's impressive, but we're not impressed. And he says, but if I'm right, let there be another miracle and let the walls of the building fall in, but we're all safe.

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And the walls fall in and they're all safe. And again, another miracle. And so he invokes these miracles. And basically, the elders in charge of interpreting say, it doesn't matter if God gives us a miracle.

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We, according to this verse that they've taken out of context, are the only ones that can interpret it.

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You do not have a say. Even God himself cannot tell us what it means. Kind of a fascinating thing. And so within this body of work then, the tradition of the elders, this is where we find the ritual that the

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Pharisees had practiced. And the way it works, and here's kind of the basic premise behind it. So there you are, you're in your house, and it's time to go get your groceries.

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Now in the ancient world, they didn't have Hugos. Bummer. Okay, so you would have to go out into a place called the

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Agora. The Agora was the square where all of the different merchants would set up. And usually you'd buy enough food for one or two days.

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And so you'd take the walk, you'd go to the Agora, you'd get your vegetables, your fruit, your meats, and all this kind of stuff.

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But here's the problem. Now that Judea is under Roman rule, so if you go to the

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Agora, not only are you hobnobbing with your fellow Jews, you're hobnobbing with uncircumcised

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Gentiles. And all of their unholy ick is floating around the

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Agora, and it gets on you. It's kind of like cooties, right?

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And so the ritual was set up so that when you come back to your house, before you put the groceries away, there's a little wash basin and a pitcher.

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And some of the pitchers actually have two handles on it, which is actually a little bit helpful because the way the ritual goes is like this.

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Left hand face down over the basin, pitcher in right hand, little bit of water, and you spritz your hand like this.

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Switch, right hand face down, little bit of water, spritz it, switch again, left hand up, water, spritz it, then right hand up.

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And you have to do it in this order. Or if you do it out of order, you gotta do it again. Right hand up, water, and then you put the pitcher down and you say these words.

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Lord God, King of all creation, we thank you that you have given us the command to wash our hands.

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That's it. That's all you gotta do. Jews practice this to this day, by the way.

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Let me see if I can pull this up. At least Orthodox Judaism does, and I have to kind of make that distinction.

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And the reason why is because Orthodox Judaism is the direct theological descendant of Phariseeism.

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So here's an example here. These guys are Orthodox Jews, and here you're gonna note that this is where they perform this ritual.

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So this is in Jerusalem. This is near the Wailing Wall. And so since you're out among the goyim, among the

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Gentiles, before you can go and pray at the Wailing Wall, you have to perform that ritual, so they have it set up. And you're gonna note this little pitcher right down here, it's got one for the right hand, one for the left hand, so that you can do the switches pretty quick.

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No, that's not what I'm saying. Okay, so explain to me again.

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Sure, okay. So you're saying that traditions should only be what is written down in the

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Bible. Those are true traditions. Okay, that's actually not what I said, and let me kind of explain.

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When we have a human tradition, and every church has them, for instance, right now, on our altar, the color for the church season is green for Pentecost.

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Is that man -made, or did that come from the Bible? Purely man -made. Purely man -made. Are we free to follow that tradition?

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Answer, yes, and you have to put an asterisk. We are free to follow that tradition unless somebody says to us, you're not truly

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Christian, or you're not really Lutheran, unless you have pyramids, and they're the proper color at the proper season.

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Now we've got a problem. We always recognize that there are certain traditions that we have that are good for instructive purposes.

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And so everything we do kind of has a meaning to it. But we have to have man -made traditions with an open hand.

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What the Pharisees had done is they had said, we received a second body of work from God, and in that second body of work was the command to wash our hands.

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And if you don't wash your hands, you're sinning against God. You see that?

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Now when we have, we have pyramids, we have your pastor wears a uniform, your pastor wears an orb, your pastor wears a stole.

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There's no command for me to do any of that stuff, nor is there a command for us to have pyramids. We can meet if we want to in a warehouse, we can meet in the catacombs, we can meet in an abandoned warehouse.

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So, we don't tradition. Correct. And they can have great meaning and...

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Yes. Okay. However, when they become a legalistic rule, and the means by which, now

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I'm judging whether or not you're truly a Christian or not, now we got a problem. That's been done before. Yeah, oh I know.

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That's why I bring it up, because I've been on the other end of that, where I've been the one judging churches like this for having things like that.

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I've been on the other end, where I've been the one saying, you Lutherans can't possibly be

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Christians. What are you guys thinking? You have man -made traditions. What's with this Lent thing? Okay, that's a good question.

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Okay. So, based on the verses that I put in my sermon, Paul explicitly says to continue with the traditions that you've been taught.

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Now, if we cannot find a tradition that's biblical, then we got kind of an issue. So, one of the reasons why

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I put a little bit of a list in there, about some of the traditions that we have, that we can actually trace back to scripture, for instance, praying the

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Lord's Prayer. That is a tradition. And it is a biblical one.

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And yet, funny enough, over and again, I regularly receive criticism, you know, from the people in my radio audience, saying, why do you guys pray the

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Lord's Prayer? That's vain repetition. It's like, how could it be vain repetition, if Christ said, when you pray, say?

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Okay, so the issue here is not with the Lord's Prayer, it's that they misunderstand what vain repetition means.

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They haven't properly understood the biblical text. So, Lord's Prayer, Lord's Supper, hymns, biblical tradition, praying the

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Psalms, biblical tradition, actually, quite explicitly taught in the New Testament. And there's other things that we can point to, you know, the preaching of the

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Word in context, preaching the whole counsel of the Word of God. So, we can say then, scripture doesn't require

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Kongsvinger or any church to follow the three -year lectionary, okay? The three -year lectionary is man -made.

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That being the case, it's important to ask, well, why do we use the three -year lectionary here?

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Answer, because in one calendar year, we hit all of the major doctrines of Christianity, of the

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Bible, and you can say, we hit, by doing that, we teach the whole counsel of the Word of God in one 12 -month cycle.

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And unless you can show me a better mechanism for doing that, I'm gonna stick with that because I think it does the job.

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But teaching the whole counsel of the Word of God is a tradition that is biblical, and I'm required as the pastor to do that.

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So, the last thing I wanna do is be like, in front of Jesus on the Day of Judgment, because remember, pastors get the stricter judgment thing, and have

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Jesus sit in there and go, why didn't you teach on that doctrine? Why is, you left this whole part of scripture out and this whole important thing, why'd you leave that out?

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That's not gonna be comfortable, so it's like, I just, I don't run the place he does, I'm just doing what

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I'm told. That's kind of how I look at it, so you get the idea. So, the idea then is that we must make proper distinctions when it comes to traditions, and we must be open about the fact that some of our traditions clearly are man -made, they have instructive value, and they become destructive if you enforce them legalistically.

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And this is one of the reasons why I like to teach, why do we do what we do here? Because the answer, the reason why we do that is because that's the way we've always done it, that's not only a really bad answer, that begins to start to set the slope into legalism.

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So, the idea is, all of the man -made traditions, you have to hold them with an open hand.

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So, you're gonna know, when we get to Lent, Lent is a penitential season, right? All right, starts with Ash Wednesday, ends with Good Friday, that's

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Lent. And I always say, it is a common practice during Lent, to fast.

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Now, do I say, it's Lent, you are required by God to fast.

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No, there is no commandment that says you have to fast in Lent. It is a tradition that has good teaching value, and we continue to use it because the churches historically found it to be very helpful, and at the same time,

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I've found it to be quite helpful in my own piety, in my own growth in Christ. But nobody is required to fast during Lent, and it's just kind of interesting, and nobody's required to eat, you can't eat meat on Fridays.

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But the meat on Fridays is an example, by the way, of a man -made tradition. And here's the thing, I want you to think about this.

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In Rome, in the Roman Catholic Church, during Lent, not eating meat on Fridays, if you have meat on Friday, what kind of sin is that?

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They have two types in Rome, mortal and venial. It's a mortal sin. So Roman force is a man -made tradition with the threat of the fires of hell.

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So if you eat meat on Friday during Lent, that's a mortal sin.

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So let's say you're on your lunch break and you're a Roman Catholic, and you decide that you're gonna stop by Burger King, and you have yourself a double

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Whopper with cheese and all that great stuff that goes with it. Anyway. I need to stop.

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And so you pull, after eating the double Whopper with cheese and you're still wiping the milkshake off of your mustache, and you drive out into traffic, and you get hit by a beat piler truck, and you die.

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You go straight to hell. Okay, now listen to what you just said, okay?

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That is brilliant, what you just pointed out. Okay, okay? Okay. Okay, almost, almost.

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Now. You people are the ones that have never read this. Okay, here's the reason why what you said is brilliant.

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You said, they don't practice it as strictly as that any more.

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If this was really a command of God, would they have freedom to loosen up on that?

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Maybe everybody, things are loosening up.

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In all, in all. Well, let me ask you, okay?

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Has Kong's Vinger loosened up regarding adultery? I'm saying, I'm saying a lot of traditions or whatever.

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Now you've hit it. Loosened up in their man -made traditions.

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Yeah, I think a lot of denominations have because of the way the world has changed. I think a lot of it is driven by the radical informality of American culture as a result of the boomers coming to their ascendancy.

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The boomers as a generation, this is a blanket statement. The boomers as a generation collectively revolted against the structures, the structure of society that they inherited from their parents.

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They were very intentional about pulling down institutions. Part of this is a reaction against the

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Vietnam War. This plays a vital part in all of this. But then you also have the whole idea of the sexual revolution and the drug culture that came about when the boomers come of age.

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And what we're seeing here is that they took the pendulum and they swung it way, way out here.

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And the younger generation, the millennials, for the most part, they're revolting against this radical informality of the boomers and their overreaction to the problems of their parents.

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And so you see the millennials trying to push things back a little bit. And so funny enough, you talk to a millennial, they will say that their arch nemesis culturally is the boomer generation.

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Kind of interesting. My son says that. Yeah, exactly. And they're quite open about this. So very interesting.

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All right, so did that answer your questions about traditions? Yes. Seems to me it's a commission from Jesus.

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Yeah. My question would be more along the lines of this.

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Okay, so you attend a church and the church never has prayed the Lord's Prayer. Which, by the way, I'm hearing a lot of. Okay, like in our

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Aletheia Outreach. You know, we get people who are new to the Aletheia Outreach and they're hearing the Lord's Prayer used in a church service every single

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Sunday. And oftentimes I'll get the responses, whoa, I've never been in a church where I've heard the

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Lord's Prayer used every single Sunday. And then they say, do your kids know the Lord's Prayer?

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No, they've never been taught it. And they go to Christian school. And so my question in a situation like that is, why are we not listening to Jesus?

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Because the disciples came to him and they said, Lord, teach us to pray. I mean, this is like an EF Hutton moment, right?

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Remember the old commercial? When EF Hutton speaks, people listen, right? So if Jesus is saying, here's how you pray, boys, pay attention.

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And so what people have done is they've, look at Jesus' words. When you pray, say, and do this, and they go, yeah, Jesus doesn't know what he's talking about.

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And so they go off and they pray by themselves. I can always tell a person who has not learned properly how to pray, because the word that holds all of their prayer together is the word just.

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This is a person who has not learned how to properly pray. And so they'll say things, Lord, I just wanna,

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I just wanna, Lord, I just wanna thank you for the word just, because without the word just, Lord, I just wouldn't know how to just pray,

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Lord. And it's like, oh, okay. You wanna take this person aside and say, let's do some prayer 101.

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And we'll start with the Lord's prayer. We'll come into the Psalms, and then we'll talk about a good way, when you're putting a prayer together on the fly, what's a good way to do that?

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There's the structure that scripture teaches us along those lines, so that we're not just caught flat -footed and kinda stammering when we're praying.

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So that would give us confidence in our prayers. And so, but this is still part of kind of the residual part of the boomer generation, because they hate structure.

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They hate formality, and there's a real sense within the boomer culture that somehow, formality and structure stifles the spirit, which is a weird way to talk, because the

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Bible doesn't teach this. But they, this is something that they communicate, but they don't know where they got it from.

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And they got this really from the culture that they grew up in, it's not biblical. And so oftentimes, cultural ideas come creeping into the church, and we just assume that that's true, because we've learned it from the culture, and so the church has to adapt.

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And so one of the things the church constantly has to do, because culture changes, the church has to constantly be aware of where the culture is pushing right now at any given moment, and biblically push back and not cave to their demands.

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So in the boomer generation, there was a push for radical informality, and the destructuring of the church, the detraditionalizing of it in order to give the spirit kind of free reign, which is not even remotely biblical or true, and it's created some problems.

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But at the same time now, the culture is saying, you Christians, you need to cave on sexual identity, on gender ideas, and sexuality and stuff like that.

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That's where the culture's pushing right now. Have any of you watched that Hulu program, The Handmaid's Tale?

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Oh boy, is that dark. Man, is that dark. We've watched a few episodes. That whole program is literally like a catechism against Christianity, and it portrays

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Christianity like Islam, and it's really frightening. But, yeah,

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I'm convinced it's like, you know, every time I watch an episode, it's like, you're not describing

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Christianity, you're describing Islam. Why have you taken Islam and Christianized it? You know, it's really weird.

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So, but yeah, that wouldn't even be Westboro. That'd be something really, something different. So, I tried to be careful in my overpainting, yes.

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Folks have arrived, but that's where a lot of the stuff came from.

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It kind of helped in certain parts of the country, influenced by certain people.

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Yeah, so here's the idea then, is that Christianity is a revealed religion, and it's the faith once delivered to the saints.

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We do what we do here because we actually have a job. The job is, are you ready?

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Make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching all that Christ has commanded. Pretty simple, but we oftentimes lose sight of that fact.

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And so we never have to apologize to the culture that the things we teach here, or the things we do here are out of step with the culture.

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That actually should be the assumed thing that we all should just be prepared for.

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So if somebody who's full -blown pagan, doesn't understand Christianity at all, comes, walks in in our service, they're gonna sit there and go, what did

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I just look at? That is the most culturally out of step thing I've ever seen in my life. Right.

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Instead, the idea here is that we're to reflect the culture of the kingdom of heaven, which centers then on the mercy and forgiveness of Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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That's the center point of everything that we do, which is why then even our traditions that are man -made, we have to hold with an open hand.

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Because we never wanna bind somebody's conscience regarding something that they have freedom on.

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And so my good friend Matt Richard talks about Lutheran DNA. And he says, part of Lutheran DNA is that we have our historic liturgy that we hold it though as a gift, as a trust, not as a hammer that you bludgeon people with.

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So like, and I'll say this, knowing that this will get out on the internet and I'll get in trouble for it, but oh well.

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I know some guys in the Missouri Synod who are extreme liturgical legalists. And these guys must be opposed.

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They cannot, you cannot even give an inch to them. And the more they push, the more I will absolutely refuse to obey their edicts.

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And I'm glad here for the most part, we're oblivious to it. But if you pay attention to internet culture and things like that, there's a whole group of them that they're not in the right.

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They're like alt -right. They're way out there. And they are liturgical legalists. And as soon as somebody becomes a liturgical legalist, you have a duty to actually resist them.

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In Scandinavia, you had a revocation.

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They didn't like the political linkage that he had that was over -literate.

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So the church rebelled over the liturgical situation that they had at the time, and they snubbed him away.

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So I mean, it's been going on for a long time. Yeah, yeah, and I think in some senses, the rebellion in Norway against the autocratic, like academic snobbery that existed within some of the clergy at that time was justified.

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But this is where we always have to be careful. The opposite error of an error is not the truth.

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The opposite error of an error is still an error. It's just an error on the opposite side. So this is why we hold law and gospel in tension.

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This is why we hold biblical and man -made traditions in tension.

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And you break that tension, you're gonna end up in a ditch. That's generally how that goes. So the idea then is that we approach this biblically.

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We approach this soberly. And oftentimes you can't touch a topic like this without it evoking emotions inside of us.

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And sometimes those emotions are really strong. And it's best to kind of let the storm of the emotions pass so that you can sit down and say, let's take a look back at the

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Bible and what it says. So that's the idea. So the answer, long and the short answer, is that we recognize there are man -made traditions here.

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They are held as gift. And as soon as somebody makes them a law, they have to go.

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They must go. Because we cannot take a man -made tradition and turn it into a commandment and bind someone's conscience and judge their

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Christianity based on that. Now there are biblical traditions that we must hang onto and maintain because we lose them.

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We lose them to the detriment of our own souls. And so that's the idea. You have to make proper distinctions along these lines.

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So the man -made traditions that we have are designed to, I would say, add beauty to the biblical ones.

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And they help in the discipling process. And that's their function.

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Could they also hold things together?

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Yeah, they do. And become a very intricate and important part of that structure?

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Because without them, would there be a structure? No, that's another brilliant point.

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Okay, another brilliant point. I'm gonna get a trillion people at some point.

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Okay. That actually is one of the major pieces of all of this, is the structure itself creates a familiarity and puts everything in its proper context.

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And so there's a sense to this, which then this structure of this tradition it goes back, and it goes way, way, way, way back.

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It connects us with the saints of the past. And should they continue in these traditions, it connects us with the saints of the future.

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And so as G .K. Chesterton said, that church is a democracy of the dead, where the dead actually have a say in what we do here.

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And that's actually not a bad thing, that's a good thing. And so the idea here is that now coming back to the thing

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I criticized, on the same time there's a little bit of a strength to it. Why do we do what we do here? Well, because we've always done it that way.

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All right. Okay. Instead of saying, it's always, we've always done it that way, maybe we say, because it has worked for this many years, or this is the way, and yeah, so maybe our wording in each structure is not proper, but the meaning is.

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Right, and that's actually, it works in doing what? One of the reasons why I love the structure that we have, not only does it hold us together as a congregation, it holds the church together,

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Catholic, big small C, but it also, it also, I haven't found a mechanism that's better when it comes to actually discipling people in Christ.

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It's, the best way I can put it is, is that I think the ancients knew what they were doing. Whoever put this whole thing together was brilliant.

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And I haven't found anything, alternatively, that does a better job than this.

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And one of the reasons why I'm a big opponent of many of the modern day innovations is because I see where it goes.

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You take, you chuck all of this stuff and you think, we gotta get rid of this, this is keeping the church from growing.

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What do you replace it with? Well, we don't know what's gonna work, so we're gonna just try anything. And at the end of the day, people's biblical literacy goes from this to this.

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It just tanks. And at the end of the day, people don't even know their Bibles, it's weird. It was short faith, it was no creed but Bible, and, and, you know, we can throw out.

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And when I was finally faced with the fact that like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, so the idea then is this, this is the glue, this is the structure that you say works, but you know what it works best at?

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Making Christian disciples. Making Christian disciples.

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I mean, let me ask you guys, is there ever a Sunday that you come to the church service where you don't hear

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God's Word preached? And I know for a fact, there are sermons that I preach that sometimes are just terrible.

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But you still hear the Word of God. You still hear the Gospel. You still hear all of this stuff.

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And funny enough, one of the things that people say about our services, if they've been out in evangelicalism, they say this, no joke, direct quote.

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At your church, I heard more Bible in one Sunday than a whole year at my other church.

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I've heard people say that about this church. And I think that's nuts.

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Because, you know, we just have a structure and it works. We got an

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Old Testament reading. We have a New Testament epistle reading. We have a Gospel reading. We have a psalm.

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Before I ever hit the pulpit, people in this church have heard more

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Bible than they have in many of their churches. They've heard more in one day than they do in a whole year.

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Before I ever preach. Yeah, you've figured it out.

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Right, I mean, yeah. All right, let's do a little Bible before we get to the end though. Yeah, yeah.

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Don has a dissertation he'd like you to read. You're right about that.

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You're right about that. Yeah, that has to do with the stream of Lutheranism that this congregation comes down through.

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And let's just say that the founders of Kongsvinger and the original families and the brand of Lutheranism they followed, they were a little tightly wound up.

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Okay, that's the best way I could put it. And so, yes, yes, yes.

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And it's still wrapped. Correct, right. Well, yeah, it was going to hell with the challenge.

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Yeah. I mean, they were serious folks and they were well -meaning and repentance and forgiveness was very much so strongly and then kind of left.

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Yeah, and I want to make something clear. Every generation of Christians makes major errors.

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I can tell you right now in this church we got some things really wrong. And here's the funny part.

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The things that were really getting wrong we may not even be aware of it. This is why C .S.

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Lewis, you know, in his great essay on the reading of old books says that Christians need to read books from outside of their generation and they go way back.

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And here's the idea. And he said this explicitly. Every generation of Christians makes errors.

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They just make different ones in different eras. And so in order to figure out the ones that you're making you better start reading the older guys because they're not influenced by your problems.

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And so the trick is, is that many of the problems that we have, we can't even see them because our culture has blinded us to them or we just assume that we're right on certain things.

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And so here's the funny thing. Generations from now, should the Lord allow Kongsvinger to continue to make disciples?

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There are people who are going to look back on this generation, this pastor, this group of people and say, oh my goodness,

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I can't believe they thought and did that. And you know what? They might even be right.

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So this is the best part. We got to do this humbly. We always must assume that we haven't got all of our stuff together.

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We have a lot to learn from scripture and each other and the generation before us and the generation that's coming up under our feet.

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So, all right, we have 20 minutes. I wanted to go ahead and hit another controversial topic.

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Crazy, all right. So when we were last in the book of Exodus, I was actually quite shocked when talking about God's prohibition against idolatry, it led to a boom explosion and a lot of discussion regarding where we find ourselves.

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Now let me read out the portion that sparked the conversation and then I want to talk about how we as Christians address this.

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So Exodus 23, 23, when my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites, the

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Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces.

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You shall serve Yahweh your God, he will bless your bread and your water and I will take sickness away from among you.

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None shall miscarry or be barren in your land, I will fulfill the number of your days and I will send my terror before you and I will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come and I will make all of your enemies turn their backs to you.

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Now, the point that I had pointed out is that God does not teach us to quote unquote coexist with people who are idolaters and that sparked a interesting conversation and Janet, again, adding brilliant little pieces to it, talking about how this all plays out.

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Now, you're gonna note that God commands the children of Israel, what are they to do with their idols?

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Smash them, break them into pieces, they are not to exist. Do we as Christians do that?

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So there's an idol, you know, there's a mosque set up or there's a religious center for a different religion and they have idols, are we to walk in and smash them and destroy them and all that kind of stuff?

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Yeah, no way, no way. How then are we as Christians to combat idolatry?

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Preach the word with the gospel. I'm gonna give you an example. Let's take a look at the book of Acts and I want you to see this account and there's something

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I need to get up on my web browser real quick and that is

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Artemis of the Ephesians. Okay, see if I can pull that up while this is doing that.

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Okay, Exodus 19, we're gonna, sorry,

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Acts 19. I'm gonna skip through a couple of verses just so we can get our context. Here's what it says in Acts 19 one and it happened that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed to the inland country and came to Ephesus and so I'm pointing this out so you can see where the apostle

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Paul is. He ends up in the city of Ephesus which is modern day Turkey. 2 ,000 years ago,

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Ephesus itself was actually a port town, it was right on the Mediterranean. It was right on the sea.

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Today, the silt from nearby rivers has filled in the land in such a way that Ephesus as a city, it's more than a mile away from the ocean now.

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Kind of an interesting thing but in Paul's day, it was a port town and I'm gonna fast forward just a little bit here and it says this in verse eight.

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Paul entered the synagogue for three months, spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God but when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus.

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Now, we think we know where the hall of Tyrannus was, the hall of Tyrannus if you've ever looked at Ephesus, there's a building there that the facade of it is called the

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Library of Ephesus and that was not standing when Paul was there but literally, if you're facing it, immediately to the left over there was a place that they believe was the hall of Tyrannus and so Paul literally spends years in Ephesus preaching the gospel, not a short amount of time.

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This continued for two years so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both

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Jews and Greeks. So you're gonna note, Paul's only weapon, if you would, against idolatry, his only weapon is the preaching of the word, the preaching of the gospel.

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He's set himself up in the hall of Tyrannus and he's there reasoning, preaching, teaching, proclaiming and there answering questions, all of this, none of it in the context of a church service although as people are coming to repentance and being brought to faith in Christ, churches are being established there in Ephesus.

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In fact, Timothy, if you know your pastoral epistles, Paul wrote to Timothy, Timothy became one of the pastors in the city of Ephesus.

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Kind of an interesting story but it's in this context then, for two years, he is literally preaching the gospel and then we get this account, verse 23.

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About that time, there arose no little disturbance concerning the way.

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By the way, Christianity, one of the earliest names for Christianity was

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The Way. No, no, capital

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T, capital W, The Way. It should be. In my Bible, it's a small T. It says

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The Way. Yeah, it should be a capital The Way, all right?

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So that was what Christianity was called and then here's what's going on. A man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen.

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Now, let me see if my web browser pulled this up. Yes, it did. Good, well, it's loading.

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I'll come back over here. So these, they gathered together with the workmen in similar trades and said, men, you know that from this business, we have our wealth.

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And you see in here that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people saying that gods made with hands are not gods.

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Now, here's the idea then. The way Christians smash idols, and you have to put that in air quotes, is with the gospel, with the word of God.

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Paul said, gods made by human hands are not gods. Is he right?

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Yes, and he has the word of God, the Old Testament, to back him up on this, clear passages of scripture.

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And so he's preaching the word. And now this is where it gets kind of fun. When you have

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God's word, scripture, in your mouth and you're proclaiming it, remember,

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God's word is living and active, sharper than a double -edged sword. The word of the

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Lord, the spirit, the Bible, is the sword of the spirit. So here's the idea.

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When you speak God's word to somebody, you are armed. The person you are speaking to, if they do not have

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God's word in their mouth and they're not countering you with God's word, they are unarmed. You see what

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I'm saying? So you always have to think of it this way. When you are speaking the truth and you are using

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God's word, you're actually speaking the words of God, those words are powerful.

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They are living, active, sharper than a double -edged sword, and they can convict people like you wouldn't believe.

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And so what did Paul do to get rid of the temple of Artemis? He preached the word.

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That's how he did it. Now, a little bit of a note here. I wanna do a little bit more.

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That's present day. Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.

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Okay. Do a little bit of this. Very good. All right. In the ancient world, this is kind of an interesting thing, this was the temple of Artemis, bigger than the

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Pantheon in Athens. This, if you talk about the seven wonders of the ancient world, this was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

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So you have the great pyramids, you have, oh, what was that statue of?

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Was it a statue of Mars? You have the lighthouse of Alexandria.

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These are some of the ancient wonders of the world. The temple of Artemis was high on the list of like wonders of the ancient world.

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Think of like today, one of the wonders of the world today. The Eiffel Tower in Paris.

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Big Ben in London. The Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia.

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These are the, you think of the Great, the Great Wall of China would be ancient, but you think of the, yeah, the

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Golden Gate Bridge, things like that. So modern wonders today, this would be like the

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Eiffel Tower of the ancient world. This was how important that temple was. People from all around the

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Mediterranean would travel to Ephesus in order to offer sacrifices to the goddess

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Artemis. Now, this is where it gets really creepy. Hang on a second here. Does anyone know what

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Artemis looked like? Well, that's one depiction of her depending on what she looked like.

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But let me show you, because like I said, this gets really creepy. That's Artemis.

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That feature in her chest, she's referred to as the mini -breasted one. So she's a fertility deity.

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So in the Temple of Artemis, in the inner sanctum, there was a ginormous depiction of Artemis like that.

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And Demetrius and the guys, they were making silver shrines of Artemis and depictions of her like this.

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We actually have examples of these silver shrines of Artemis to this day. We've archaeologically dug these things up.

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So here's what's going on then back in Ephesus. So they gathered these men.

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They said, men, you know that this business that we have and our wealth, you see in here that not only in Ephesus, but almost in all of Asia, this

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Paul is persuaded and people saying that gods made with hands are not gods. He says, there's danger, not only to this trade of ours, notice they're worried about their bottom line, this trade of ours may come into disrepute, but also that the

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Temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all

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Asia and the world worship. When they heard this, they were enraged and were crying out, and here it comes, kind of in chant form.

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Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Down with Paul, great is Artemis of the

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Ephesians. So the whole city was filled with confusion. They rushed together into the theater, dragging with them

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Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul's companions in travel.

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But when Paul wished to go in among the crowd, the disciples would not let him. And even some of the

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Asiarchs who were friends of his sent to him and were urging him not to venture into the theater.

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So let's do this real quick. We know exactly where this is, Ephesus Amphitheater.

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Pull that up. This is why

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I like to travel with other people's vacation photos. All right, here's an example. This is a photograph then, and it's still coming in.

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There's the actual place that this took place. That's the amphitheater there in Ephesus. So the whole place is filled up.

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And there they are shouting, great is Artemis of the Ephesians, great is Artemis of the Ephesians, great is

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Artemis. And they're just going on. It's practically at the point of a riot. And what sparked the riot? The fruit of the gospel.

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Paul's preaching the word. They're being brought to repentance. And they're now obeying the first commandment.

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You will have no other gods before me. They have received the forgiveness of sins for their idolatry and worship of Artemis.

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And as the gospel is spreading, belief in Artemis is going, tanking, going down.

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Love the story. That's how it is with riots, isn't it?

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The false narrative is working. The false narrative is working, yeah. So even some of the

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Aresiarchs, their friends, Paul, don't go in there. Now some of them, some of them cried out one thing, some another, the assembly was in confusion.

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Most of them didn't know, even know why they had come together. Some of the crowd prompted Alexander whom the

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Jews had put forward. Alexander, motioning with his hands, wanted to make a defense to the crowd. But when they recognized that he was a

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Jew, for about two hours, they all cried out with one voice. Great is Artemis of the

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Ephesians. Absolutely nothing.

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Yeah, it was a great emotive moment. So when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the

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Ephesians is the temple keeper of the great Artemis and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky.

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Sounds like a meteor struck by. They put it up in the temple, right? Seeing then that these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rash.

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For you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess. If therefore

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Demetrius and the craftsmen with him have a complaint against anyone, the courts are open. There are pro -councils.

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Let them bring charges against one another. But if you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the regular assembly for we are in danger of being charged with rioting today since there's no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.

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And when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly. Now, one last thing I wanted to show you.

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This photograph right here, this large one on this side over here, that's all that remains of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

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That is all that's left of the Temple of Artemis of the Ephesians. This column is the only one that's somewhat intact.

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And you'll note there's a nest on top there. There's a stork family that uses that every year for their family.

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You could say that the Temple of Artemis was smashed to pieces, but it was smashed to pieces by the gospel.

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And we in our day face a religion that is every bit as nuts as the worship of Artemis.

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Because here are these people emoting, great is Artemis of the Ephesians, you challenge our God, we're going to riot, we're going to, all this kind of stuff, right?

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Muslims do the same thing today. How do you overthrow

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Islam? Answer, preach the gospel.

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A Muslim with the Quran is defenseless and unarmed against a

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Christian who has the word of God in his mouth. Everybody says, yeah, but there's two billion of them.

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Yeah, but they're growing. Yeah, but they're scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. So what?

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Artemis was defenseless against the preaching of the gospel. One of the ancient seven wonders of the world is smashed to pieces in barely even recognizable places.

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The gospel is a thing. Allah is defenseless against Jesus because Allah doesn't exist.

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And the only thing Paul did is he set up a permanent gig for himself in the

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Hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus and just preached to everybody who would listen. God did the work.

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He smashed the temple. All Paul did was preach. And we'll leave it there.