February 14, 2020 Show with Conference Interviews featuring Andrew Rappaport and Jeffrey Rice

The Ministry of Striving for Eternity and Its Discipleship Model

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century Gospel Minister, George Norcross, in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the Church and the world today.

Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, Champaign County, Illinois, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

My name is Eric Nielsen, I'm sitting in once again for Chris Arnzen, and this is day five of interviews from recent conferences. Today we have two interviews from the recent G3 conference in January of 2020.

And today we are interviewing our immediate neighbors. Iron Sharpens Iron Radio had a exhibitors booth. Immediately to our left was Andrew Rappaport of Striving for Eternity Ministries, and then directly across from us with a stack of beautiful leather-bound Bibles was Jeffrey Rice of Post Tenobris Lux Bible Rebinding.

We have interviews from both Andrew and Jeffrey today. Let's begin by listening to Chris's conversation when Andrew Rappaport stopped by the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio booth.

Here I am again on site at the G3 conference 2020 at the Georgia International Convention Center, and I am with Andrew Rappaport, dear friend of mine who is the founder of Striving for Eternity Ministries, and it's always a pleasure to have you on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Andrew Rappaport.

Well, Chris, it is always a pleasure to be with you, whether on the radio or in person, which this time we get to have both.

That's right, and it's amazing. People often make jokes about how many people I know and how many people they've seen me photographed with, and they'll make the all-too-often regurgitated joke about seeing me photographed with the Pope and that kind of a thing, but you, I think, maybe surpass me.

It's amazing how many people know you and have been involved in some fashion with Striving for Eternity Ministries. How long has that ministry been in existence? Hmm.

We, I guess, incorporated, I'm trying to think now, probably, I think 2007, 2010, somewhere in that time frame.

Yeah. So. And why don't you give a brief overview for our listeners who have not yet heard you on my program or have not yet heard your podcast, tell them about Striving for Eternity.

Well, Striving for Eternity is a discipleship ministry, and so we find a lot of different ways to disciple. We have an online academy. We have videos on YouTube for free. That's how we make our money.

But no, we offer classes out there. We've actually, the neat thing with the classes being on YouTube is that we've been able to train pastors in China where they're getting training. All they need is English and internet.

And so we've been able to train them, and they've contacted us, but it's, you know, they're always having to be careful what they say, but we've been able to train people around the world with it, and that was never the plan.

We go into churches and do seminars, so that's really what we try to do is to encourage the local church. We have a very different model than most ministries. Most ministries want to be where they have the big platform, lots of people, lots of money.

We go to the churches that have less than 100 people on purpose. We target those churches because those are the churches that don't have the encouragement. They're the ones who don't have the ability to bring people in to have speak.

And it's kind of like your pastor's lunch that you do where, you know, guys get there, they get books, they get, you know, good teaching. They need that rejuvenation. Well, there's churches that need that too.

Churches need, you know, to be encouraged, to be taught, to be having, being able to have a weekend where people come in and do training, hands-on training, workshops, but then gets them excited about doing ministry and to serve the local church.

And so we have our, you know, we have monthly donors that support us, so we can go into churches that can't afford to have us come in. Okay, we can still come in. We can go to any church. We don't care.

The smallest group that I spoke to is five people, and I was perfectly fine with it. The pastor was all apologetic. He wanted to cancel. Why are you going to cancel? You have at least five people. You know, they end up, it was five to 12 people that showed up for their conference that they tried to do.

Great.

Now, what would fall under the umbrella of discipleship when you describe yourself as a discipleship ministry? Specifically, what would that entail when you are assisting brothers in Christ, especially as you were saying in these smaller groups, to conduct and live out the Christian faith?

Well, we try to do it in a lot of different ways. One is through the academy. That's more individual. They can get the training, get the syllabuses. That can be done also in a church setting. We have a bunch of churches where they take the syllabuses, they use the syllabuses in like a Sunday school, and then they'll play the videos.

Or some people will ask, hey, can I just teach this material and use the syllabuses?

Fine.

So one thing we do is provide materials. The other, through seminars. The other, you mentioned my podcast. That's been something new. We've seen how a change from YouTube to podcasting has occurred. People don't watch as much on the YouTube when they can listen to the same content in a podcast because the podcast they take with them anywhere.

So what we did was instead of just teaching through podcasts, which we do, which is another means of discipling, we actually are discipling other podcasters. So what we've done is we get, we have the Christian Podcast Community.

And what we do with that is we're trying to help podcasters to improve their content and their quality. And that helps them with the audience that they have. But what we're looking to do is to train them, to disciple them in an area, both in the audio area but also in good theology.

Not trying to, and you'll understand this, you've been in ministry long enough where you see people that start to get a platform and then everything becomes about the platform. And that's a mistake because we should be about Christ, not about the self-promotion and things like that.

And that's what we try to teach people that are starting to get into ministry and do things like that. So we have a lot of different levels that we try to do the discipling. Some is providing materials for churches.

Some is more hands-on. We do some conferences that we try to do where we'll train people how to evangelize and then we immediately take them out on the street to do it.

And I'm assuming that your training starts anywhere from your basic Christianity 101, your milk of the Word, all the way into the deeper meat of the Word, when you are really plumbing the depths of the unsearchable riches of Scripture to learn more and more about those things that perhaps are commonly avoided in your average evangelical church.

So I'm assuming that there is a wide range of training being accomplished here.

Yeah, I mean, we can start with things. We have one of our classes on how to disciple, so to disciple others, which is so needed in the churches. That's basic. That's 101 stuff. We work through a book that we have that starts off with things like, okay, what's salvation?

What's prayer? What's the Bible? I mean, very basic things. But then it gets into, what does it mean to be holy? What does it mean to deal with temptations? Now you're getting into a little bit more depth when you're working on one-on-one with someone.

But then we go up, we'll have, you know, evangelism. Well, that's, you know, evangelism is something every Christian could do. We get into the apologetics. That's something that not every Christian is going to do, but, you know, it's going to work a little harder.

One of the things I'm working on now is, I'm working on two programs that we're going to try to do as a, both as a course, but we'll also do as a seminar, one on logic and one on textual criticism or, you know, basically getting back to what the original text meant.

Super needed because, you know, anytime you go evangelizing, the first thing that comes up is, well, you can't trust the Bible. Bible's been edited. It's been copied. You know, whatever things they have, but it all fits under that classification.

And the reason is because a guy, Bart Ehrman, who has been able to dumb things down in a sense of textual criticism to make it easy to understand the way he wants everyone to understand it, but he's not a believer and he's trying to convince everyone that we can't know what the original Bible is.

Actually an apostate because he was a professing believer for quite a while. Yeah.

And so he's got all the credentials, but what people don't know is when he writes for scholarly works versus masses, he writes very differently. You know, he's, he's going to be honest when he writes scholarly works.

When he writes for the masses, you'll see he'll, he'll get, have some scholarly things in there and then he just gives his own opinion and people don't realize that that's just his opinion. This, the data doesn't back that up.

So we want to train people to understand and we think that there is a way that we can make that simple to understand and in a way that people can take that onto his streets when evangelizing and say, no, you're wrong.

The Bible is 99 .98 accurate. That's better than CNN any day of the week.

Yeah, it's interesting that because of Bart Ehrman's Christian background and I'm assuming he is still identifying himself as an agnostic and not an atheist, right?

As far as I know, yes.

Because he doesn't want to claim to have all knowledge, which somebody who is a hardcore atheist would have to claim. But because of his not only knowledge of Christianity and church history and because he believes, unlike some others who are professed atheists or agnostics who deny that Jesus ever existed, although I've come to understand that's a very rapidly shrinking number of atheists because the historical evidence is so overwhelming that he existed, even if they want to deny his deity.

But you can, a naive or a person who is not familiar with Bart Ehrman who sees him in some kind of a National Geographic special or some history channel special that might even be involving Jesus or Christianity, they might be sitting back thinking they are listening to a Christian historian because he is speaking as one who believes that Jesus existed and they don't even realize this is somebody that denies everything that the Scriptures teach.

Well, at least he denies that the Scriptures are God-breathed.

And here's the thing, Bart Ehrman, his book, the New York Times bestseller, which really got him on the map, was misquoting Jesus. And if you're going to write a New York Times bestseller, you're going to put your best arguments first.

Well, here's his best argument for the claim that we cannot know what the original Bible.

Said.

His argument was that some manuscripts refer to Jesus as a carpenter and others as the son of a carpenter. I mean, that's just like shocking, I mean, there are so many doctrines based on that, right? In fact, when he had the paperback edition to that book, they wanted him to add an epilogue so he could get some more, get people who had the hardcover to buy it again.

So in that epilogue, in the first printing, he had something that was removed by the second printing because they realized how damaging this one quote was to the entire book. And that quote is that Bart Ehrman actually said, there is not one single Christian doctrine affected by any of these textual variances.

Boom.

Okay? This is like, you know, there was another New York Times bestseller, he came out of Islam, moved to America, professed to be a Christian, Aslan, I'm drawing a blank on his last name, he wrote the book Zealot.

And what he ended up doing is he built this whole book trying to say, we can't know what the original Bible said. We wouldn't be able to, the meaning is all different. But in the introduction, he refers, he says that we know that the Gospels all had a base document called Q, it's short for Quellum, or in the Greek, sorry, in the German it means source.

So it's the source document, they claim, from Mark, Matthew, and Luke, because that's the order they think that it was written. And then you have John many years later, and they'll say, well see, John makes Jesus out to be God, because it's been many years and then it got embellished.

But they say this original document Q, Jesus was human. And so this entire book is based off of the teaching of this document Q. But in his introduction, he makes the mistake of saying, we have no evidence that Q existed.

Okay, then everything in your book is made up of fairy tale. It's all wishful thinking. Because it's not based on what we actually see as evidence. It's not based on what we have before us.

It's assumed.

And it's so easy to break this down for people, because the way they argue it, Bart Ehrman or any of these others are going to argue that you had to have one document that Mark got his information from, then Matthew took what Mark had, he embellishes, Luke took what they have and embellished, but they all had to have it from one source, so that it takes from one source, copies to another, copies to another, copies to another.

And that argument sounds really good, they say it's like the telephone game, except for one problem. You could go, right now we have the Democrat conventions going on. You take any newspaper this morning, and they're going to report on that convention.

So you go and you're going to see the New York Times is going to have a comment, and then you're going to have the Washington Times and the New York Post and all of them. They're all going to be reporting on that.

They're going to have a lot of similarities. Does that mean they had an original source document? You ask that question, people are going to go, no, they were there. That's right. So there's similarities and there's differences in all those articles because they were eyewitnesses.

That's exactly what you expect to see in an eyewitness account, which is exactly what we have in the Gospels. We have eyewitness accounts, so we have lots of similarities, but we have differences. You might have someone that says, hey, here's 10 lepers that were healed, but one person only wants to focus on the one leper that came back.

Well, that's not a contradiction. That's a difference in focus.

That's why I have heard from Christian attorneys who will say that one thing that will immediately look suspicious or false or fake in regarding those that claim to be eyewitnesses to a crime or eyewitnesses in the defense of a criminal on trial is when they all parrot the exact same story with no difference at all.

Yeah, you know, I don't know if you know of Jim Wallace. He goes by, as an author, he goes by the name of Jim Warner Wallace, J. Warner Wallace. And Jim will say when he was a 20 year homicide detective who did cold cases and he'll tell people, first thing, the very first thing he does when he gets to a crime scene is they call him up, he says, okay, separate the witnesses.

I don't want them talking because if they start talking, they all sync up their story and you end up not being able to find out what actually happened then. He said, you need to have those differences.

But if everything's the same, it's probably a manufactured story. And that's exactly what they're arguing for with the Gospels. There should all be complete similarity with all four of them. But if there was, then that would be manufactured.

The very thing they claim it is, they say it is manufactured because there's these similarities, but we also have the differences. Well, the differences are what help us understand that it is eyewitness testimony.

Because it's more than just having some differences and some similarity. It's how they're different, right? Because they're not just, you have, for example, the one I gave, an account where someone focuses on 10 people, they're healed.

Well, he's focusing on the healing aspect of it. Where you have another author who's not focusing on the healing, he's focusing on the reaction of the one that returned. Well, you're going to have that.

So I think that it is easy for people to understand these things, we just have to find ways to break it down so that it doesn't stay at the ivory towers, it doesn't stay in the seminary levels. Textual criticism is a difficult area, but it doesn't have to remain that way.

You have James White on here a lot, you're friends with him very much, and you know that if you listen to his programs, he deals with this stuff. Why I think so many people are attracted to his dividing line is because he takes these complex things, breaks it down simple to understand, so that people that don't have a background in Greek can understand some textual criticism.

That's a unique ability I think those of us who are in the area of discipleship need to work at, is to take complex things, break it down so that everybody can understand it.

Yes, and it's interesting you brought up Dr. White because during a debate with Bart Ehrman, the aforementioned agnostic textual critic, Dr. White cornered Bart Ehrman to publicly admit that there are less textual variances in the New Testament manuscript evidence than there are for any work of antiquity, and it was like a monumental difference, even admittedly by Bart Ehrman.

Yes, I think Dan Wallace says that if you were to compare it, you'd have enough evidence that would take us from earth to the moon, because there's that much in manuscript evidence. You think about how much evidence we have, and so close to the writing, and here's the reason why this becomes important.

If we have, let's take the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This has been a recent thing, people based the book Da Vinci Code was based off of this. A lot of thought, but the only copy we have...

Just bought my leather-bound copy today.

The only copy we have of that is in French, which means it wasn't back in the... We don't have an original back in the time of Mary Magdalene, but you have it, and because of the fact that we know the pages' numbers, we know that there's more missing than we actually have.

There's so little there, but you have one copy, and yet you have all this that's been built, all these doctrines and theories built off of this. Now, if you have one copy, you can't tell what the original said.

If you have two or three copies, it's still hard to work to get back to the original, but when you have 8 ,000 copies, well, you have a lot you can compare. We have enough copies of the New Testament just in Greek to be able to see where those variances occurred because of the number of copies, but because we have copies that date so close to the original writing, now that we know there was enough time for those editing mistakes to occur.

Another thing that's important in this is to know where they are. For example, if I gave you a letter, and you go off to Italy, and I give Eric a letter, he goes to Spain, and I go off to Mexico, and we have the same letter, we make a copy of it, and we're all making copies, but in your letter, I was just dyslexic, and I misspelled something.

Now, I'm going to copy it word for word exactly as it is, so everywhere that you are is going to have that same spelling mistake, but everywhere else, that doesn't have that. What's easy to determine now is to say, okay, this is probably one copy that had a mistake, typo in there, and it kept being reproduced, and it's just in this area.

That is a really good indicator to say that it's just that one family of text that has this, and the others are probably the correct one. That's how we do this stuff to try to get back to the original meaning and the original text itself.

Yeah, and for those of you that may have had your faith challenged or had you astonished and shocked and depressed, when you hear people like Bart Ehrman talk about the thousands of variances, the vast majority of these variances do involve minor things like punctuation and misspelling, and sometimes that is because of the material that the scribes were copying the scriptures on, and they're not being completely smooth paper like we would have today.

You're talking about animal skins and so forth with grain in them and ink reacting in different ways to the grain, and how radically a word or a sentence may appear differently than intended just by one of those tiny punctuation marks or jots or tittles, if you will, being misread.

Yeah.

Well, I like what Dan Wallace says. He said that because Christians were actually the first to start what we would think of as books today. So Dan Wallace goes, that was the only time in history Christians were ahead of the technology curve because, you know, they really were.

It was cheaper to produce. They were able to do it and copy because they were concerned with the gospel going out. But let's look at this. Bart Ehrman will say that there's 400 ,000 or sometimes 500 ,000 variances.

That sounds like a lot, especially when you consider there's only 168 ,000 Greek words in the New Testament. So how could you have three, four times the number of variances that you do words? And it sounds really, really impressive, but it's really not fair because what he's comparing is all of the words in all of the manuscripts compared to the number of words altogether.

And that's not an apples to oranges type of thing. Really what he needs to do is compare all the words, 168 ,000 words in the New Testament, and how many of them, of those words, actually have textural variances.

Well, when you do that, you're at about 5 ,600. So we start with that. You go there, sorry, 56 ,000. So you start with that. Now 75 of them, as you mentioned, punctuation, spelling, easy to get back to the original.

Punctuation wasn't in the original anyway. There was no punctuation in the original manuscripts. So that's something you have that shouldn't even be counted, actually. But 75 of them fit in that category.

So we can get back to the original because there's spelling errors. We fix the spelling. We fix the punctuation and we're done. So those are not a concern. You then, you end up looking at this in two categories.

Can we get back to the original, and that's going to be a topic called viability, and is the meaning changed? So the only category we really care about, because if we can get back to the original text, then it doesn't matter what the meaning, if the meaning changes in this one versus that one, because we can get back to the original, done.

If the meaning changes and we can't get back to the original, it becomes an issue. Because now we don't know what it actually said. This is where the son of a carpenter versus carpenter comes in. We can't get back to the original.

We don't know the meaning. The meaning actually changed. When you look at that, the number that most people will use is 1%. So we're now at maybe 5 ,600. Of that, though, the more conservative number may be 1%, but the more realistic number is one-fifth of 1%.

So when you start to break this down, you realize we're at 99 .98 accuracy. That's where we get that number from, of things where the meaning changes and we can't get back to the original. It's only 2 .2%.

That's very small. And so when we realize not a single doctrine is affected by that, nothing is changing in. It's not like you're seeing this where Jesus is God or he's not God. There's no text that says he's not God.

You don't have that occurring, and that would be a major issue, but you don't have that. You have it in things of whether he's a carpenter or not, or whether a woman came to him that they brought before Jesus who committed adultery or not, or whether the ending of Mark 16 is.

There.

But none of those things affect any Christian doctrine. Okay, maybe if you're a snake handler, it might, but...

So as far as your experiences as a parachurch ministry leader and a discipler, and having written and vocally declared and taught the Word of God in various venues, what are the hugest, most serious problems, in your opinion, that you experience in your average run-of-the-mill evangelical church at large?

I would say probably the biggest is that people don't know how to interpret the Bible. I think if churches taught their congregation how to interpret the Bible, no one would stand for Joel Stein, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn.

You wouldn't have that, because they would look at what these guys are saying, compare it to Scripture, and say, foul. No, you're taking that out of context. No, you're interpreting an easy passage by a difficult passage.

That would be wrong. You don't do those things. I mean, this is the problem that you end up seeing with people, is that they don't know how to interpret. So what they typically do is they come to the Bible, and you'll see this in a lot of churches.

Unfortunately, they have these small group studies, a show your ignorance study, where everyone shows up and shows how ignorant they are and what the Bible actually says, because they open the Bible. So what do you think this passage means to you?

Quite frankly, I don't care what it means to you. I don't care what it means to me. I care what it means to God who wrote it and what He intended to mean by it. That's what I want to know. That's what we need to teach.

So what you end up seeing is that people don't know how to handle the Word of God. And if they did, we wouldn't have a lot of the stuff that you see on the radios and on the TVs. So I would think that that's a major issue.

But that leads into, so why don't people teach the Word of God and how to interpret it? For a very simple reason, they don't believe the Bible is sufficient. They don't believe that you can look to Scripture and get answers.

No, we need counseling, or we need social justice, or we need something from the culture to inform us about the Bible. Like God isn't enough. Like God can't handle it. The One who created, He just spoke the entirety of creation into existence, and yet He can't communicate to us in a way that we can understand and live out our life?

We must be insane to think that He couldn't do that. That's a simple thing compared to the creation of the universe out of nothing. But so many churches think they have to go and appeal to the world.

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The Whole Counsel of God, False Teachers, and the Sufficiency of Scripture

Welcome back. My name is Eric Nielsen. We are hearing conference interviews from the G3 2020 conference today, and we're continuing to listen to an interview that Chris Arnzen had with Andrew Rapoport of Striving for Eternity Ministries.

Well, one of the things that I've heard from professing Christians, and some that I would say are genuine brothers and sisters who speak in error, is that they are, it's obvious they are reacting, overreacting, to the truth that there are those amongst us who are so arrogant and so proud of their own knowledge, and have a cultic mindset where they would condemn as either being lost, moronic, or both, anybody that disagrees with them on nearly anything.

They overreact to that reality, and they have developed an idea that God has many different servants who focus on one aspect of truth and may not necessarily pay any attention to other important elements in the Bible.

And I've heard even Joel Osteen defend himself without mocking or without intending to insult others that would, guided by the whole counsel of God, declare repentance and focus on the fact that one must repent of their sin, and that grace is not an amazing thing unless you understand what you've been delivered from, and so on.

Joel Osteen will say, well, my goal in life, my mission and my gifts, and I'm paraphrasing of course, is to teach things that build people up, that comfort them, that excite them, that remove their cowardice, their self-doubt, and so on, and have them think positively about themselves.

So this false teaching that you have these compartmentalized servants of Christ who only focus on one aspect of the Bible, and I'm not saying that anything that Joel Osteen emphasizes in his teaching are aspects of the Bible, although there are, I mean, I'm sure that...

A broken clock is right twice a day.

Right, right. But the key issue here is we must all be discipled to consider the whole counsel of God when we are evangelizing, when we are defending truth and exposing error, whether that be in a formal evangelistic setting, in a church or open-air preaching, or just common discussions and friendships with family members where you are excited about your one and only hope for eternal life, and you do not want to hide that from those whom you care about.

So isn't this one of the main issues that is a problem, is this avoidance of viewing the whole counsel of God as something vitally important?

Well, it is. Here's a real simple thing. If you take Joel Osteen and his message to Iran, to the Christians there, does it preach.

Well?

I mean, is he going to be able to preach the same message he does here in America, in comfortable Christianity America, over there in Iran?

No.

No one's going to even give him the light of day.

Why?

Because it's not going to work. Preaching a comfortable Christianity in a place where people are dying for their faith doesn't work. They need the rest of that Bible that teaches them how to persevere.

He doesn't teach about perseverance because he knows nothing of it. He's living off the hog, milking the poor. And that's the problem. Now, that's why he doesn't want to teach the whole counsel of God.