Is Christ just a Pagan Copy?

Welcome to The Rapid Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, I had the privilege of being on the We Are Saved podcast. It's a Christian testimony podcast.

On there, my challenge was to answer some supposed difficult questions.

Well, I answered a couple of questions for them on whether the religion of Christianity, the quote -unquote myth of Jesus, is just another pagan rewrite, and then why is it that Jesus is the only way?

So those are the two questions I will be answering on his podcast.

Hope that you enjoy this. It was a good discussion. I thought it was informative, and I wanted to be able to bring this to you guys to hear some of the answers that I gave to the questions that were challenged to me.

So this is something that will just be informative, and I'm going to let you hear that right after some announcements.

Hey, I'm Daryl, and I'm here with my wife, Karen. What's up? And we're the hosts of the What Are We Even Doing Here podcast, the podcast that seeks to answer the question that we all ask, what are we even doing here?

We cover topics such as marriage, family, life, and living a Christian life in this crazy world. We don't have all the answers, but we know where to look.

Subscribe to us on iTunes and follow us on SoundCloud as we seek the kingdom of God and find out what we are even doing here.

Grace and peace. Okay, now after this interview that I had,

I want you to make sure you stay tuned afterwards because we have something special for you afterwards.

I will have for you a promo of a new podcast on the Christian Podcast Community, so be sure to stay tuned and check that out.

You will not want to miss that one. And welcome to our Q &A segment today.

I have Andrew Rappaport with me to answer some burning Bible questions. Andrew, how are you doing?

I'm doing very well, thank you. Perfect. So, tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a little bit of your credentials.

Sure. My name is Andrew Rappaport. I am with the founder and president of Striving for Eternity Ministries.

I also do a lot of Bible teaching there. I have my seminary degree from Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

And I have several podcasts that I do. I'm the executive director of the

Christian Podcast Community. And so I have my Rappaport podcast as my regular one.

And I do an Apologetics Live with a friend of mine, Matt Slick, from karma .org. So we do that every Thursday.

So we get lots of questions that people ask and we have to answer.

Not always do we know the answer, but we at least try. That's a good way of doing it because not everyone's going to know everything.

I know somebody who does know everything. And everything that I need to know, he wrote it in a book called the

Bible. And so, I just go by that. Yes, it's all in there. All right.

So, the first question that we have for you is, Was Jesus just a myth taken from other pagan gods, other mythology, kind of like Attis, Horus, Mithra?

What is the answer? Now, this is an interesting question. Actually, I just had to answer this question for a project that I was doing with Living Waters.

And this is very common. But what a lot of people don't know about this, in today's day and age, is that most of this thinking came about from a 2007 movie called

Zeitgeist. And that was based on a 1999 book called

The Christ Conspiracy, The Greatest Story Ever Sold. And when you read that book or you view the movie, and I had, on one of my podcasts years ago, did a two -hour episode on that movie.

Here's an interesting thing you end up seeing. They talk about similarities. Some of the similarities they'll talk about with these different pagan deities are things like the term

Son of God, the being born on December 25th, having 12 disciples.

And they're looking at these different Egyptian deities. Now, it's really, really simple to do this.

It actually doesn't take much critical thinking. There's really only two things that you see that are consistent with all of these that they try to make consistent.

That Jesus was born on December 25th, and the term Son of God. And what they do is they try to say that all these other deities were born

December 25th. Okay, here's the first issue. Nobody believes that Jesus was born on December 25th.

That was exactly my thought. Yeah, I mean, the thing is that everybody knows that the

Catholic Church took a pagan holiday, Christianized it, and just declared that they were going to celebrate

Jesus' birth, but no one believed that that was when he was born. So, if all these other pagan deities were born on December 25th, then they have nothing in common with Jesus because he wasn't born on December 25th.

In fact, we would think he was born probably more in the spring or fall, just because of the setting of the events of his birth.

There were shepherds that were outside, things like that. So, there's ways we could determine it wouldn't have been winter.

So, that one that they see is consistent with all of them isn't even true for Jesus.

So, there's not the similarity there. They'll talk about 12 disciples, and when you actually look at some of these, they don't have 12 disciples.

Some of them will talk about virgin birth. I forget, I think it was Horace that was supposedly born of a virgin, but it was a rock that he came out of.

That's not really a virgin the way we'd think of a virgin Mary. So, it's like scratching it.

Some they completely make up, but the thing that I think is most interesting is the reference to Son of God.

Because what they do is they refer to Jesus being the Son of God, S -O -N, and they'll talk about these

Egyptian deities S -U -N. Now, in English, that sounds similar.

Son and Son. One refers to the star in the sky, and the other to a title for Jesus as the

Son of God. So, when you look at these two, they sound similar in English.

And it works well in English. But if this was an Egyptian deity, the

Egyptian word for sun in the sky and sun like an offspring are two totally different words that don't sound anything alike.

Same with Greek. So, this argument only works in English, which is a language that didn't occur for like 1 ,300 -1 ,400 years after Christ.

So, their two biggest arguments that they make are based on things that are not true.

I mean, based on the English language, which didn't exist. So, it doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to realize that there's not all that similarity that they try to make it sound like it is.

The other thing is that there are some similarities, but there's similarities in lots of things.

There's an account written in about 1910 about a ship that was sailing from England over to the

United States. It was struck by an iceberg, and it sank.

They didn't have enough lifeboats on there, and many people died. Most of the people actually died.

Do you know what ship I'm referring to? It's got to be the Titanic. No, because the

Titanic was 2012, I think, or 2014. This is the Titant. Oh, yes.

I've heard this. There's actually a book, a fictional book, written years before the

Titanic, that has so much similarity. So, does that mean the Titanic never existed, and it never actually sailed, and never actually sank, because it was based off a fictional book?

No, it actually happened. It actually happened. This is the way we can reason with people to help them to see that some of these things, you apply a little critical thinking, and we realize it's not true.

But when they say, but look at these similarities, much of the similarities, they're trying to force. We could find lots of similarities.

I forget all the details, but there was accounts where people put a lot of similarities that make it sound like you're talking about the shooting of Abraham Lincoln.

And it was actually a different president. So, you can find similarities in things.

That doesn't mean that it was copied. And so, the question that you have to ask when we look at these things is, were there things that are different?

The differences are more important. Another thing is to look at the historical accounts. We don't have a lot of ancient history on some of these

Egyptian deities. And we do have a lot of historical accounts of Jesus. In fact, we have so many manuscripts, ancient manuscripts, on the

Bible and other early church writings that we have more doctrinal information, more historical information on Jesus than anyone else in ancient times.

We have more accuracy because we have so many manuscripts from then. There's more evidence that Jesus Christ walked the earth, was referred to as the

Son of God in all the accounts that we have in the Testament than we have for Caesar. And no one questioned Caesar.

So, many people want to try to say that Jesus was just a copycat. But the reality is that we have to look at history.

And history shows that this isn't a fictional character. But in fact, someone who did walk the earth, who did do these many miracles, and in fact, even

Jewish historians who are not Christians and don't want to work for promoting

Christianity, state that Jesus Christ not only lived, but he also died and rose again.

It was common knowledge back then. And some of the pagan deities that try to say that they were going to rise again,

I looked into many of them and there was no evidence that any of them actually said that they were going to rise again the same way

Jesus did. Okay, so that does answer a lot of the question as if Jesus was a myth because we do have other – there are little similarities everywhere.

I mean, I'm looking at a chart that basically says five other deities were all born of a virgin, but yeah, like you said, what does a virgin exactly mean?

Keep in mind when you have that chart because I've seen those charts. When you do the fact checking on those charts as I did, you find out that much of that isn't even true.

It was based off this one book in 1999. And so first off, we got to remember that this is relatively new thinking that started with the internet really exploded.

But it was based off something that wasn't fact checked and yet everyone just accepts it and they build all those charts.

And if you actually go back to the ancient myths, you realize, oh, yeah, that's not accurate.

But it's called gaslighting where you tell a lie long enough that people believe it's true and that's what we have.

Well, that just gets me to think like what is really so bad about Jesus? Like honestly, like the second something comes out that even puts a little bit of light on Jesus was just a regular man.

Everyone wants to jump on it so fast. What exactly is the problem with just accepting the fact that Jesus was who he was?

I don't get that anymore. I just don't realize why it's so hard for people to just be like, okay, well, this guy was actually a real person.

So I'm going to accept it versus the second I hear that, no, there's one little riff that somebody didn't fact check.

So now, oh, yeah, he's not who he says he was. Well, there's been many attempts to try to argue that Jesus, the historical

Jesus, never existed or to recreate Jesus to say he was just a man. But later they embellished the disciples, embellished and made him into a god.

And really, it is because of what you said. Why do so many people have a problem with who Jesus is?

Because of who Jesus is. Almighty God who died on a cross, rose from the dead and says that we are going to be accountable to him.

That the difference literally between heaven and hell is what we do with Jesus Christ. That's why they want to be.

They really want to fulfill Genesis chapter three. They want to be

God. Yeah, even when I was in my atheist days, that was just something that I never really understood.

I had zero problem if people wanted to believe this or that or whoever. I didn't care.

The whole thing about atheism is there is nothing. So believe whatever you want. I don't care.

But now I see there's like this huge debate, really, of atheists wanting to debate

Christians over things like this. And then they come up with all of these similarity things. And I'm just like, uh, aren't we like supposed to not care, really?

Like, what's the big deal? For the most part, and this isn't true for all people who profess to be atheists.

But for those that want to debate, the hardcore atheists that want to debate, most often they grew up in a church and that's what they're responding to.

They're responding to something of their childhood. Because like you said, if you really believe there is no

God, realistically, why would you waste the 70 years you have on life to try to argue with people because you think they believe in a fantasy?

If they believe in a fairy tale, why would you bother to try to convince them? Life is too precious, it's too short, and you would live it.

The fact that they spend all the time trying to convince people Christianity is wrong, they're writing blogs and reading books and watching documentaries, all trying to promote that only

Christianity, you never see them argue against Islam or any of the others, but it's always against Christianity.

And they do all that because they know God exists. Romans chapter 1. They know he exists, they suppress that truth in unrighteousness, and they're fighting against their own knowledge that they want to suppress.

And that's why. Yeah, that's... Now, as a new believer, I do see a lot of those things.

So it's just, it's very confusing in a way, but mind -blowing all at the same time, where it's like, okay, yeah, there's nothing, so why do

I believe in anything? And now I look at the same exact thing, as in, I believe now, why did I question everything?

Like, it's all right in front of my face, I don't understand. I just, I'm trying to get more people to actually realize that, that that's, once you flip to the other side, you start seeing, oh yeah, that was really dumb of me, why would

I even bother? See, there is a reason for you and I, if we're believers in Jesus Christ, to go to someone that professes to be an atheist and want to share with them about Christianity.

Why? Because we know a judgment is coming, everyone sins and falls short of the glory of God, they're going to be accountable to Him, they're going to deserve an eternity in a lake of fire, because they sinned and committed crimes against an infinitely holy

God. And we don't want that for them. We want them to know the truth, because God Himself made a way of escape, has died on the cross as a payment of sin, that they could be set free.

We want them to know that good news that we received. For an atheist, there's no reason they should be doing it.

Let me ask you this. Have you ever seen anybody standing outside of the malls during December, arguing that Santa Claus is not real?

I have to say I have not seen that. Why not? Because everybody knows he's not real.

Right? That's true, yes. And that's why they don't bother to try to convince anybody that he's not real, because they know everybody knows he's not real.

So why do they bother trying to convince everyone that God's not real? Yeah, but I mean that's really what you have, is you have them trying to suppress what they know is true.

I heard Frank Turek say that everyone, like nobody wants to be told what to do, they want to be their own personal

God, so that's why so many people have a hard time believing that there really is a God, because they want to be their own personal

God. And that right there is Genesis chapter 3. The professing atheist actually fulfills scripture in showing that they want to be like God.

And one of the ways they're going to do it is just to remove him altogether, and say that they are the most superior creature on earth.

I mean one thing that I have as an argument to a lot of that stuff is, let's look at the

Bible. If you look at your life, you can see your life in the Bible, like 100%.

Anything that you will ever do, any question that you will ever have, it's going to be inside the Bible. Sure the

Bible can be just a story or something like that, like any other story, like let's take

Oedipus or anything like that, some huge wonderful novel that's so wonderfully scripted,

I can't put myself in Oedipus, but I can definitely do it in the Bible. It doesn't matter what stage of life

I'm in, I'm going to be able to do it in the Bible versus doing it in any other work of historical books.

But see that actually becomes an argument that is subjective. But there is an objective way to know any religion that's man -made versus a divine religion.

Any man -made religion will add human efforts to getting right with God. So you look at Islam where they'll say one good deed outweighs ten bad.

You look at modern Judaism called Second Temple Judaism where they'll say you have to live by the

Torah, it's not by sacrifices. That's works, that's doing the law. Every single man -made religion will argue that you do works.

Catholicism will say you have faith plus works. So there's only one religion in the entire world that says

God did it all, and that's biblical Christianity. It's what it says in the Bible.

And it's the only one where God does the work, not man. So it's the only divine one. And you can look at that objectively.

You can do as I did. I wrote my book, What Do They Believe?, which looks at the different world religions.

Every world religion I examined has a belief that you add something to your getting right with God, to your salvation.

You add something. You add works, or you work with God in some way, or it's all your works, but you're doing something.

It's not all God. Every religion teaches that, except for one. And that's the divine one.

And that's the one that I would hold to. Wow. That's a good way of putting it.

So that basically answers the question of if Jesus was a myth. Just do the fact checks and you will find your answer.

And just a little critical thinking. Just a little. It doesn't take much. Just a bit, yeah. S -O -N?

S -U -N? Totally different in the Greek and Egyptian languages.

That only works in English. Right. And that's how you know they're stretching it. Alright, so let's move on to the next question.

Next question is, If God created everything, wouldn't he have created evil as well?

Well, okay, the first question that has to be asked in this is to first make sure we have our terms proper and understood.

So what is evil? Evil is the absence of good. Good is defined by the nature of God.

So, did God create evil? Some people would say he decreed it.

Others would say he allowed it. But the issue is, God cannot create evil.

In James it says God cannot tempt anyone with evil. Nor can he do evil. But the reason he can't do evil is because it's opposite to his nature.

Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. And we get goodness defined by the nature of God.

That's the absolute universal standard. So when we talk about evil, we first have to recognize that evil requires

God. And this is radical to think about for many professing atheists because they think the issue of evil is the proof that God doesn't exist.

And yet they don't think through it to realize you'd have no way to account for evil if there was no

God. You're going to try to argue that it's from something you think is evil? Then once you make it subjective and not a universal absolute objective standard, you make it a subjective one, even a cultural one, then evil is whatever you make it.

So therefore it's nothing. Because what one person calls evil, the other doesn't. So you end up with nothing.

You have to have the standard. So evil is the absence of good. So God can't create evil.

But the first act of evil that we have recorded and known of is

Satan and the angels falling when they rebelled against God. The second that we know of is with mankind.

And so did God cause that? Well this gets into a little bit of a difficulty.

God is both eternal and omniscient. What that means is he's outside of time and he knows everything.

Now you and I, we learn things, right? Everything we know has been through observation or we've been taught it, right?

Think of, is there anything you could think of that you just knew, you weren't taught, you didn't observe it?

I knew to breathe. Well that's instinctive, right? It wasn't something that you'd know in that sense.

But you've observed that breathing is necessary, right? Well as a baby

I don't think you'd observe anything. You're just there, so something takes over. But that would be from instinct, right?

That would be the way that we're designed. I'm talking about the things you know knowledge things. Well I would know if I was a baby when

I cry I get fed. Well that would be observed. You might cry but you don't know that you'll get fed.

Right, exactly. So we observe things. Here's the thing about God never observed anything, he just knows it.

And because he's eternal, everything's the same eternal now to God. In other words, you and I are having this conversation right now.

But to God, we're having this conversation. Jesus is on the cross, Abraham is offering

Isaac, Adam and Eve are in the garden. It's the same eternal now to him. There is no time the way we think of things.

So did God know that Satan would rebel? Did he know Adam and Eve would be disobedient?

Yes, he knew that absolutely. And he knew that even being outside of time.

And so it's hard for us to wrap our minds around when we say did God create evil?

He didn't create evil, he can't. It's impossible for him to create evil because it's opposite to his nature.

But did he know about it? Did he allow it? Did he decree it? It's hard to really wrap our finite minds around that because those things are...

We're going to explain it in language that you and I can understand as finite beings. We cannot fully comprehend what it means to be omniscient and eternal.

So to answer the question, no, God cannot create evil because it's opposite to his nature. But yet he used evil.

He allowed it to occur. He allowed Adam and Eve to be disobedient.

He allowed the angels to be disobedient and he used that. Now, could he have stopped it? If he wanted to, he could have.

And for whatever purposes, he chose not to. Now, a lot of people think that's wrong somehow.

That somehow that's wrong for God to do. And the thing for folks like that, they're the same people that would say that if you said, well, it's okay for God to just determine everything and not give you a will at all.

You have no choices. They would say that's wrong. So in other words, you want God to give you choices but not let you actually have free choices that you could do good or bad.

They don't want to be a puppet and yet they also don't want to have evil.

Yet you can't have both. God created Adam and Eve with a free will. So they had an ability to choose right and wrong.

I think after they fell, we have a sin nature and we don't have that anymore. We're born in sin. We have a sin nature.

And we're enslaved to sin. But Adam and Eve were not like that. The angels were not like that.

And so they had a true free will where it wasn't influenced by sin. With that, they weren't puppets.

But that means that they can choose to rebel. So the people who want to say that it's wrong for God to allow evil also would say it's wrong for God to make us puppets.

So which is the better way? Would you rather be the puppet and you have no choice? Or to realize that there is a plan that God has?

We see this plan in Romans chapter 9. In Romans chapter 9, God said that he allowed sin for the purpose of displaying his attributes and glorifying himself.

If you think about this, if Adam and Eve never sinned, if there was never acts of disobedience, would you really understand

God's love? Probably not. Would you understand his long suffering? No.

How about his mercy or grace? No, because I wouldn't need any of those things. That's right.

And so the fact that there's evil in the world is what puts these attributes of God on display so that we can see who he is.

We can know him better. And that's basically what he's going to end up saying in Romans chapter 9.

He ends up asking, does a piece of clay get to decide how the potter is going to make him, whether it's a piece of pottery for honorable use or dishonorable use?

He ends up saying this in verse 22. What if God desiring to show his wrath and make known his power has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he prepared beforehand?

So you see, he ends up saying that he allowed evil so that these attributes can be seen.

We would never know God's wrath. We'd never know his love. We'd never know his justice. We'd never know his grace, his mercy, his long -suffering.

Many of the attributes of God would not be known if he did not allow evil. And he wanted those attributes to be seen.

So he allows evil so that we might know him better. Do you think he does award these people, no?

Like when they get to the other side, let's say somebody was brutally murdered for some strange reason, would he make them, wouldn't he reward them in hell?

I mean in hell. Wouldn't he reward them in heaven for that? It depends if they have been forgiven.

Okay. The reality is all of us, and this is hard for some people to think about.

Why would I be punished to eternity for doing one wrong thing?

I told a little lie. But the question is who do we sin against when we sin? We sin against an infinitely holy, infinitely just God.

And because he's infinite, the consequence is also infinite. And so there needs to be a payment.

I mentioned one of the three things that makes Christianity unique earlier, and that is that only in Christianity do you have

God doing 100 % of the work and man not adding anything. There's two other things that I teach that makes

Christianity unique from every world religion. The other two are the fact that you have a God -man,

Jesus Christ being fully God, fully man, truly God, truly man. And the reason is because as a man that never violated

God's law, he becomes a sacrifice. He becomes a perfect sacrifice. He's able.

In other words, if you say you did something and you end up in court, you can actually have someone else pay your fine as long as they have the means to do it.

They're innocent of the crime. There's things like that. He's innocent of the crime. As a perfect human being, he can pay the fine for other humans.

Being fully God, being truly God, he can pay an infinite fine for more than one person because of his nature being infinite.

That's why Jesus Christ becomes the only possible sacrifice because being truly

God, he can pay for more than one person and pay that eternal fine because he's an eternal being.

And that's what makes the third thing possible. That's justice and mercy. Every religion talks about God being both just and merciful.

But if you think about it, those are mutually exclusive. You can't show justice and mercy for the same exact act.

It's one or the other. So what you end up with is with Christianity, there was a justice.

God himself, Jesus Christ, paid that fine. Now he can offer the mercy to us.

But if you have a person who hasn't received that mercy, even they might have been a really nice human being compared to other human beings, but they still violated

God's law, would still be under that condemnation unless they turned and trusted what

Jesus did on that cross as the payment of sin because that's the only payment. If you're going to trust in your good works, they don't last.

And in fact, if someone's trusting in their good works that they're a good person, that's pretty offensive to God who came to earth and died an infinite death.

How could we do any good works that compared to that? We can't. That's why we need them. That's right. You see.

So the answer to the question you asked is if someone was murdered, the question becomes they could be brutally murdered and yet still spend eternity in a lake of fire because they still sinned against God.

Yeah, that's hard to get around. Like the person.

I don't know. Let me make it harder. All right. Go ahead. Make it hard. Let's make it hard for the listeners, please. And people hate me when

I say this, but it's true. Okay. So I was raised Jewish. Okay. My mother died when

I was 10. Now, I loved my mother. I don't want people to think that I had something.

She was wonderful. I was a terror and she had to put up with a lot, but she died at a very young age.

When my mother died, they actually had to get police for the funeral because there was like a three to four mile line of cars to the funeral.

So she was very well loved. But I have no reason to believe that she's going to be in heaven.

And people say it's so horrible. How can you say that? Because she was a liar like every one of us.

She broke God's law. I'm sure she stole things or looked with lust, which would be committing adultery of the heart or got angry with someone.

Probably got angry with me a lot as a child. But as wonderful as a person that she was compared to you and I, she might be far more moral than you and I, but we don't go to heaven because of our morality.

If you're going to think that your morality gets you heaven, you have to be absolutely perfect. And she wasn't.

And it sounds horrible to say that my mother, as far as I can assume, is probably right now in hell.

Sounds horrible. And it is. I don't want that for her. But I have no reason to believe that she repented and trusted in Jesus Christ.

That's just one of those things that people do need to realize that is the truth.

That is exactly how it is. That's why it's so important that we put our trust in Jesus Christ, because there is no other way.

There is none. And this is where we rest in the verse that says in Revelation that in that day after the final judgment, he's going to wipe away every tear.

I sit there and think I would hate to see my family who would probably those that have already passed away, those who will that could spend eternity at Lake of Fire.

I don't want that. Yet I'll understand God's justice then, and I'll accept it a lot better than I do now.

But I also sit there and say, you know, for all I know, I believe every single person has enough information that they know

God exists and that they break his law. They could turn to him and repent.

My mother might have done that on her deathbed. I don't know. But I have no reason to believe that. So I don't want to create a false hope.

And this is the thing. A lot of people, they want to create a false hope or say that, well, if I just think that God doesn't exist, then

I'll be okay. And I don't have to think about these bad things that I don't want to. I don't want to think about. Well, that's just intellectual dishonesty.

I'd rather be intellectually honest with myself and just say, hey, I may not like it. I may not agree with things, but that's the way it is.

Yeah, that's exactly it right there. All right. So, Andrew, I think you gave us a lot to think about.

Thank you so much for that. Well, thanks for having me on. And I really appreciate talking.

These are issues that have to be discussed. And there's people that have honest questions.

And we, as believers, need to be ready to give an answer to those who have honest questions.

Many of these, some of these questions people try to use because they think that it demolishes

Christianity. No, it doesn't. It supports it, in fact. But I appreciate coming on and being here with you and, you know, being able to spend some time with you.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Give us some of your stuff again so people can find you. Yeah.

A great way to find my podcast is Andrew Rapaport's Rap Report. That's rap with two

Ps. It's not about rap music. If you get my last name, you get the play on the name,

Rapaport Rap Report. We deal with basically Biblical interpretations, applications to everything we see, whether in Scripture or within culture, within Christian living.

There's two podcasts that I have. One is a weekly one -hour one. And then

I have a two -minute daily, Monday through Friday. So if you prefer a two -minute one, shorter ones, subscribe to the daily one.

If you like the longer ones, you can subscribe to the regular rap report. I have the

Apologetics Live on Thursday nights. We do that, and that's a podcast that we do. I have, if people are interested in being a podcaster, we have a podcast called

So You Want to Be a Podcaster. You can check out all the podcasts that we have at the Christian Podcast Community at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

You can check out Striving for Eternity. I have free courses that we offer on our

YouTube channel. They're all on our website at strivingforeternity .org. You can get classes on how to interpret the

Bible, Christian theology, introduction to world religions, introduction to discipling. We're working on some more courses.

And we offer those free online. That's how we make our money. Wait, that didn't work right.

It's okay. Yeah, so we offer those free. And we have seminars we do.

We come into churches. We do seminars. Bible interpretation made easy. I'm known for my evangelism.

I do a lot of evangelism and apologetics. So we have seminars on evangelism and apologetics. We have some seminars on church history.

We have a seminar. We have three speakers, Pastor Frank Mullis from Georgia, Dr.

Anthony Silvestro in Ohio and myself. And Pastor Mullis happens to be one of Georgia's leading experts on sexual abuse.

He's a counselor and counsels Georgia's sexual offenders.

And so he goes into churches and teaches them that basically how to identify sexual predators because most of the people, this shocks people.

They think, well, we do background checks. Most of the background checks don't catch the sexual predators because they haven't been caught.

Once they're caught, the repeat offense is very low. But they've committed dozens and dozens of crimes before they ever get caught.

So you have to be able to find it before the background check. And so he does seminars on things like that.

So all that can be found at strivingforeturning .org. All right, so I guess that's going to do it for this segment.

All right, I want to give you a quick promo of a new podcast that is on the

Christian Podcast Community. This is just a little bit of a snapshot of what you'll get if you listen to the 5

Solas podcast. You want to make sure that you are listening to this.

So on your podcast app, go search for 5 Solas. Hit the subscribe button so that you will get every episode downloaded to your podcast app.

Check this out. Welcome to the 5 Solas Podcast.

I am your host, James Watkins. Let's be incredibly real and transparent.

That's what the church needs now more than ever is men who are just willing to be real, real. Men who are not afraid to stand up within the church and rebuke the wolves that seek to slaughter the sheep.

Men who hold firmly to Sola Scriptura. Men who are not afraid to go before the brethren in brokenness and tearfully confess their sin.

Men who are not ashamed to throw themselves down before the throne of God in prayer. And most importantly, men who can stand and say, along with the

Apostle Paul, that I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.

The Christian walk was never promised to be easy. The cross we are commanded to carry every single day is incredibly heavy.

And that weight comes in many different forms. Are you hurting financially? Pick up your cross.

Is your marriage damaged? Pick up your cross. Did you lose a loved one? Pick up your cross.

Are you depressed? Are you thinking about killing yourself? Pick up your cross.

There's a reason why Paul, when writing to the churches in Corinth, referred to it as light momentary affliction.

And that's saying something coming from the Apostle Paul. He was imprisoned, beaten, shipwrecked.

He calls it light momentary affliction. Light momentary affliction. There's a reason our beloved

Apostle Paul said, We do not fix our eyes on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For the thing seen or temporal, but the unseen is eternal.

If we place our eyes on the temporal, the right now, the light momentary affliction, this fallen world will absolutely crush us, brothers and sisters.

But we have an eternal hope. Those in the world, the unbelievers, they are the ones who are broken by the temporal, but not us.

At least we shouldn't be. 1 Thessalonians 4 verse 13. He wrote that they may not grieve as others who do not have hope.

In other words, we should not suffer in the way that the world suffers because we have an eternal hope in Christ Jesus.

We have an eternal treasure that is in Christ Jesus in all of our suffering. All of this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 17. And there's going to come a time when the promises will fill that he will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

Death will be no more. Neither shall there be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away.

No matter what you suffer with, no matter what the thorn in your flesh is, there will be a day where you will see that absolutely every single tear was worth it all, and great is your reward in heaven.

It's easy to sit behind a microphone and say this. It's easy to tell believers to not suffer like others.

That's why I always want to be transparent. I listen to podcasts that only touch on the good. All these sappy heretical preachers only tell you of the great plans

God has for your life. If you look at our Facebook posts, our Facebook posts contain our greatest hits.

But the life of a Christian is marked by suffering. It's marked by self -denial. All you have to do is look to the apostles.

Crucified upside down. Stoned to death. Beheaded. Exiled. In the book of Acts, though, what do we see?

That the apostles rejoiced. That they had been counted worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ.

And are we rejoicing in our suffering? Most of the time, no. But I get it. I suffer in my own ways like everyone else.

I confess. I seek the approval of man way more than I seek the will of God. I seek compliment more than I care to hear criticism.

I suffer with depression. I don't look to the unseen. I focus on the temporal. I battle with thoughts of suicide.

I battled with this even before I was saved. Almost killed myself. Sitting in an apartment years back because I, in the world, was being crushed by the world with no eternal hope as an atheist.

I suffered then and depression has been a thorn in my flesh for years now. But I rejoice in knowing that I am a new creation.

I rejoice in knowing that greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world. I rejoice knowing that I have an eternal hope and treasure in Jesus Christ.

And I pray that God would use this thorn in my flesh for His glory. That through this thorn in my flesh,

I would preach to those who suffer and the elect would come to faith as God has decreed through the preaching of His gospel.

I do not suffer in the same way that the world suffers and you shouldn't either. There's a beautiful truth that if you were in Christ, you were a child of God bought with the blood of a king.

There is no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ. The debt has been completely paid in full.

I'm overcome with grief with my flesh, but I am not near as broken over my sin as I should be.

I don't confess my sin like I should. I am nowhere near the husband that I'm commanded to be. I do not understand my own actions.

I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. The Apostle Paul wrote that in Romans chapter 7 verse 15, speaking of himself, but almost prophetically as this should represent the battle within of every single believer.

But this is also the same apostle who said, are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?

God forbid. I am so broken hearted for many of my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Even for myself, we cling to Rome more than we care to admit. Why is

Christ not enough? Even in the reform circles, we base our salvation on our own morality.

That's where we look to for assurance. And if you were looking for that within yourself, you were going to be vastly disappointed and always questioning the work that Christ accomplished on the cross.

We judge our salvation by our response to the law. We judge our salvation by the good works we do or condemn ourselves for the lack of works that we do and our lack of holiness.

Were you Christian not clothed with the righteousness of Christ? Do you not wear his robe of righteousness?

Does the Father not see you as he sees his son? Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here.

I'm not speaking of antinomianism. I'm not saying that we can sin all that we want. But if I am in Christ and I sin, do

I then become outside of Christ? No, because God holds his elect in his hands and his hands are strong enough to hold you despite your lack of perfection.

Our assurance of salvation comes from our realization of sola gratia, grace alone, sola fide, faith alone, solus

Christus, Christ alone. And you are only going to understand this if you are holding to sola scriptura, scripture alone.

Our blessed assurance comes from faith alone and the one who accomplished what we cannot. We should have a change of mind about sin.

If we are new creatures, that's a result of that miracle work within us. But it won't be perfected in this lifetime.

That's what the cross is all about. The point of the cross is that on that bloodstained Roman cross, Christ bore the sins of the elect.

The sins of past, present, and future and secured for the elect the hope of eternal life.

And we know that God is faithful to draw his elect, to regenerate his elect, to grant faith to the elect, to seal his elect, and to hold his elect for all of eternity.

And this is not of our own doing. It is solely the work of God by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, according to the scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.

Solely. Deo. Gloria. Alright, so make sure you check out

Five Solas podcast. Excellent, excellent stuff. I cannot say enough good things about that.

They are doing some quality, quality podcasting over at Five Solas.

Don't let James know that I said that. He might think I actually listen and enjoy it. But for the rest of you, check it out.

Alright, so folks, let me encourage you, if you could help us out. I am headed soon to the

Philippines with my friend Justin Peters. And if you don't know, there is a lot of false teaching happening over in the

Philippines. We're going to be doing some discernment seminars. I will be doing basically a conference for pastors on church discipline.

Something that's lacking in so many churches. I will also be doing a seminar for a bunch of folks on open air evangelism.

And we're going to take some teams out and do that. And then Justin and I will be doing some discernment conferences both in Manila and in Cebu.

We'll be gone for two weeks. How can you help? Well, it's very simple. The fact is that the church over there cannot fly us out there.

They can't afford it. That's where you come in. You can help us get there. Because we want to make sure that the truth of God's word is communicated around the world.

And that's why Justin and I have committed that even if the church can't afford it, we will go anyway.

And so, it basically costs us about $2 ,400 each to get out there. And after we get there, they'll take care of everything.

But we have to fly out there. If you could help, you can go to strivingforeternity .org and you could donate there.

Or you could go to justinpeters .org and donate for Justin. I suggest actually doing both.

Just a suggestion. And you could help us out. By the way, if you donate at strivingforeternity .org,

you can go to Patreon or PayPal. Either way, if you give $2 a month, we will give you a free copy of What Do We Believe?

If you give $5 a month, you'll get that plus What Do They Believe? If you give $10 a month, you'll get those two mentioned already and On the

Origin of Kinds. If you give $20 a month, you'll get those three books plus Sharing the

Good News with Mormons. So, all four of those for $20 a month. That's actually more than just the price of the

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. So, if you could help us out, that would be a great blessing. It takes us a little bit to get those gifts out to you.

But please consider helping us so that we can spread the truth of the Word of God around the world.

Next episode, we will have a friend, Danny Purvis, will be joining me.

And we're going to be discussing, well, there's someone who basically had a different view of church discipline in Matthew 18.

And we're going to be looking to see whether the Scriptures actually supports his view or not.

Yeah, we're just going to have to read the Scriptures and let that speak for itself. Until next week, go and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.