A Borderless God

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Okay, we are going to pray and we are going to get started in our study today.

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Who knows what direction we're going to go, we'll see. I gotta see, is

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Bruce Burns lurking in here somewhere? But let's pray, we'll get started. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word to study your word, we pray through your

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Holy Spirit that you would help us to understand, rightly believe, confess, and do all according to what you have revealed.

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There we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, so I'll throw this out. When I first came to Kongsvinger, I had to introduce them, reintroduce

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Kongsvinger to the Athanasian creed. Today we confess the Athanasian creed. Initial thoughts, reactions, what did you think of that thing?

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Aside from Long. Yes, David Fagerlund. Yeah? Right, there should be no, there should be no, it is a...

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Right, right. So we didn't confuse the persons or divide the substance today, right?

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Kind of an important thing. Yes. Yes, my daughter

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Faith noted the fact that last year we had a, we chopped it up into pieces where sometimes the pastor would say part of it, then the men, then the women, then everybody together, and then the pastor, the men, and we kind of rotate it, and she's lamenting the fact that I made her confess the whole thing today.

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You're young, honey, you're young. That's right, yeah.

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So all of the stuff, yeah. The people in the center of the church, the people on the south side of the church, yeah, you could break that thing up that way.

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Yeah, but you'll notice that the Athanasian creed uses that word that makes everybody go, and what's the word?

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Catholic, right. Yeah. Universal.

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Yes, yes, yes.

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And then you'd say the, then you'd say Hail Mary after Roman Catholic, right? Yeah, right, so we talked about this yesterday in the women's study, and that is that Christianity is

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Catholic, small c, not Catholic, capital C. Catholic, in fact, when you understand the word

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Catholic itself means universal, and the idea behind the universal faith is that we have one

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Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. There is no progress in theology.

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In fact, scripture describes what we are to believe, teach, and confess as the faith once delivered to the saints.

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Innovation is highly frowned on, okay? That's kind of the idea. And so, and then if you go back into the ancient world, and you think about how did people in the ancient world think about deities, and deities in the ancient world were generally considered to be tied to geographies.

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So if you were to cross a river or a boundary or climb a mountain peak and then come down the other side, you would be leaving the domain of one deity and entering the domain of another.

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You guys remember the account of when the Philistines defeated the children of Israel in the beginning of 1

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Samuel, and they captured the Ark of the Covenant. You guys remember this? In fact, let's take a look at that because this is a great example of how the ancient world thought.

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And let me pull up to 1 Samuel, and I'm going to do this from memory.

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Yes, so here we have the account of the battle itself.

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In 1 Samuel 4, the word of Samuel came to all of Israel. Now, Israel went to battle against the

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Philistines. They encamped at Ebenezer. This is where Scrooge lived, by the way. And the Philistines, they camped at Aphek.

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Sorry, pastor jokes, they're worse than dad jokes. Is this in England? All right.

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And the Philistines drew up in line against Israel when the battle spread. Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about 4 ,000 men on the field of battle.

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And when the people came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, why has Yahweh defeated us today before the

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Philistines? Let us bring the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh here from Shiloh that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.

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So the people sent to Shiloh, and they brought from there the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh, Sabaoth. Okay, whenever you see hosts here, just by way of a little bit of a note, host is the

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Hebrew word savah, which means armies, okay? So when you invoke

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Yahweh, Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts, we're not talking about people with, you know, silver trays and tea kettles and things like this.

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We're talking about military men. The hosts are an army. So they brought the

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Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the

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Ark of the Covenant of God. Now, if you know in the immediate context before this portion here, that God had determined that he was going to judge the sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, who were absolutely wicked.

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They were Levites, and they were serving in the tabernacle at Shiloh. But let's just say

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Hophni and Phinehas used their position. They liked to bed the women who were volunteering there at the tabernacle.

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And they also were abusing the sacrifices and taking portions of the sacrifices at the wrong time in portions that were not meant for them.

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And they were very, very abusive in the way they did it. So Eli did nothing to restrain them.

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And as a result of them, God promised, prophesied through Samuel, who was a boy at the time, that they were going to be judged.

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So as soon as the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh came into the camp, all of Israel gave a mighty shout so that the earth resounded.

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And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, what does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?

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And when they learned that the Ark of the Lord had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid. They said, a

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God has come into the camp. So you can kind of get a feel for how the ancient world thought.

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A deity is coming to the camp. So they said, woe to us. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Woe to us.

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Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? Plural, right? These are the gods who struck the

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Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage, be men, oh Philistines, lest you become slaves to the

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Hebrews as they have been to you. Be men and fight. So it's a desperate situation.

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And they totally anticipate that they're gonna lose because, I mean, Yahweh really did a number on the

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Egyptians, did he not? Well, here's the thing. God has determined judgment against Israel because of their wickedness, because of the sons of Eli.

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So the Philistines fought. Israel was defeated. They fled every man to his home. And there was a great slaughter for 30 ,000 foot soldiers of Israel fell.

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And the Ark of God was captured. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died. And so you get the idea.

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This didn't go well. And now the Philistines have the Ark of the Covenant. And so I'll fast forward then into the next chapter, which is really kind of funny.

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So when the Philistines captured the Ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. And there the

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Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it to the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon.

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Now, a little bit of a note here. Yahweh doesn't play nice with false gods, okay?

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And if you don't know who Dagon is, the best way I can describe this particular false deity, this idol, is that he's depicted as kind of like, remember

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King Triton, the aerial from the Little Mermaid's father, half man, half fish, very

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Poseidon -esque. That's Dagon. It's very Poseidon -esque. So when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, so they put the

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Ark in the house of Dagon. And the reason why is because they viewed what happened as Dagon defeating

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Yahweh. That's the idea. And so, you know, and Yahweh isn't supposed to have power in Dagon's territory.

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That's not how this works in their mind. So when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold,

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Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of Yahweh. Dagon it.

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Well, you'll note that Yahweh doesn't coexist. He doesn't coexist with false deities.

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The story gets even more interesting, though. So they took Dagon and they put him back in his place.

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But when they rose early on the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the

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Ark of Yahweh. And the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold.

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Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him. This is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon and Ashdod to this day.

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And then the hand of Yahweh was heavy against the people of Ashdod. He terrified and afflicted them with tumors.

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Now, little bit of a note, and that is that if you ever read the

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King James Version here, in fact, let me see if I can pull the King James Version up because otherwise you may not believe me.

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It's kind of that wild of a translation. So let's pull this up.

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But the hand of the Lord was heavy upon them in Ashdod and he destroyed them and smote them with hemorrhoids.

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The ESV politely says tumors, but doesn't identify which portion of their body was tumored up. Oh, Josh, serious, okay.

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Yeah, my son just declared that they were going to take the sitting down. Anyway, so, and so the idea here is, is that God really, well, made himself a pain in the butt.

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Is, yeah, so you're not going to believe me, and here's the thing, is that legitimately you could, and it's debated, it's a debated thing, and I don't personally think that it was really hemorrhoids, but that's within the translational possibilities of Tehor.

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I mean, which makes it really weird because at the end they realized that they had sinned against Yahweh and they sent an offering back.

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When they finally sent the ark back, they not only were suffering from these tumors, but also from like infestations from rodents, and so what they did is they ended up creating golden cast images of these tumors and the mice and the rats, which kind of begs the question, if it really was hemorrhoids, that would be a weird looking golden thing.

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But you get the idea. So you'll know God doesn't play well, and the reason why...

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Making the mold would have been really awkward. So we are way off, and it's my fault.

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I need to control my classroom. I'm having a hot flash. Hang on a second. Anyway, so the idea then here is, this kind of gives you a picture of how the ancient world viewed things.

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Okay, but with Christianity then comes a very different understanding of how the church is to operate and how, because you remember,

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Judaism was very much limited to people who were genetically related to Abraham, and they were the people that God chose, the tribe from among the children of men that God chose that the

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Messiah would come up through, and Jews kept pretty much to themselves. They did not get along too well with Gentiles in general, and I've been...

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So sometimes at night when I have insomnia, you get on Netflix and you watch things or you get on YouTube, and I've been watching videos on YouTube about Hasidic Jews, which is a very fascinating thing altogether, and Hasidic Jews make a point.

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They do not ever engage in evangelism, and when you ask them why not, they say, well, we're all a family, so our evangelism is having babies, okay, which sounds a lot like how

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Lutherans think sometimes, but it's, you know, yeah, which is not what we're called to do, but the idea then is that Jews in the ancient world as well as many of them today, they kind of stay to themselves.

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They're not actively out there proselytizing for the purpose of bringing people into their religion.

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For them, it's kind of a family thing, but Christ says this in Matthew 28, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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This is after his crucifixion and resurrection, and he's commanding the disciples, and here's the important bit.

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We oftentimes think that the word go is the commandment. It's not. That's actually, if you were to translate the

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Greek, it's as you are going. It's participial here. As you are going, the commandment is make disciples.

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Make disciples of all nations, and here the word is ethnos, all right? Ethnos, and this will help us out, because when we think of nations, we think of like the

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People's Republic of China or Congo or South Africa or the United Kingdom.

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We think in terms of geopolitical nations, but Christ here is actually telling us to make disciples of all ethnicities, of every tribe, every race, regardless of what nation that may exist that they're under presently.

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That's kind of the point, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and here's the other bit.

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You notice there's no connector. There's no conjunction. There's no and or but.

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It's just a run -on sentence. Baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

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So in Christ's church, we have a command that we are to teach and disciple all the things that Christ has commanded.

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That's the curriculum. We don't get to add to it or take away from it, and you'll note then that this becomes the body of doctrines that we believe, and the only place where you can find what

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Christ has commanded, it's in the Bible. I know of no other place to find the commands of Christ.

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No other place. How many books did Jesus personally write? None, right?

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And so you'll note then the hierarchy of things. Jesus, and we read this in some of our pericopes over the past few weeks, is that just as the

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Father sent Jesus, Jesus is now sending his apostles. They're sent by Christ, and he says of them, the one who listens to you hears me.

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All right? The one who hears you hears me. So the only place I can go to hear the voice of Jesus, to hear what he taught, what he did, to know what he's commanded, the only place

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I can go is in the Bible, and that's gonna be the Bible in its entirety due to the fact that Jesus is the

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God of the Old Testament in human flesh. And so when somebody, like a progressive, rises up and says, you know, never in Jesus's ministry did he ever condemn somebody who was homosexual or something like this, right?

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Well, he didn't condemn bestiality either. I mean, what is that? This is not an argument. While he, during his earthly ministry.

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But those things are condemned in the Old Testament, and God, Christ himself, is the God of the

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Old Testament in human flesh. So we have to take the Bible in its entirety. We don't get to leave any of it out.

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And then the Bible itself instructs us what we are to, how we as Christians in the new covenant are to consider, you know, the types and shadows of the old, the feast days of the old, which have given, you know, given way to the reality which is in Christ.

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This Bible instructs us along these lines. And so as disciples, we are to be learning, well, what's in the book?

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He's given us a book. 66 books in the library that is the Bible.

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And I just, have you noticed I haven't run out of any material here? You know, so. Maybe the jokes run out of material.

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Yeah, thanks, Josh. I may have run out of jokes, but yeah. Anyway, all right.

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That's been apparent for a while. Right. Don't make me just regurgitate the same ones week after week.

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I become like Joel Osteen, you know. So the idea then is that the

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Catholic faith is the universal faith once delivered to the saints that all ethnicities are to be discipled in.

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And so the church in the ancient world used the word Catholic to distinguish itself from all of the regional deities and all the regional religions that were throughout the ancient world.

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That was the idea. And then, of course, you know, you see the rise of really some abuses that took place within the

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Catholic church, namely one of them, and that is that the Bishop of Rome, and that's what he was for centuries.

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The Bishop of Rome took a preeminent spot and they made him the head of the church.

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Christ is the head of the church, not the Bishop of Rome. And then Roman Catholicism is an oxymoron.

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Rome is a province. It's a geography. Catholicism is universal so that those two should not be put together.

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And what the Christian church, especially the Lutherans in the Reformation, the whole point of the

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Lutheran Reformation was to peel back the extra doctrines that were added on that Christians didn't believe, teach, and confess in the earlier centuries when

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Christianity was newly minted. And so this would include prayers to saints, the veneration of Mary, the invention of purgatory, the primacy of the

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Pope. These are examples. And then, of course, what ended up getting lost in much of visible

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Catholicism, especially in the medieval period, because the Bible was locked up in Latin.

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You'll note that God transforms our mind through the scriptures. And what ended up happening is that Rome, if you attended a

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Catholic church in Europe any time before the Reformation, you would hear the

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Bible read out in Latin. And if you didn't know Latin and there's a good chance you wouldn't because you had to go to school for that.

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And in order to go to school to learn Latin, you had to have money. And if your family didn't have money, then you weren't schooled.

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You weren't lettered. You didn't know Latin. And as a result of it, the people were not hearing the scriptures.

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They were not hearing it. And with the decline of the word of God being meaningfully taught, what ended up happening is a lot of mythologies ended up arising, including the mythologies regarding the veneration of relics, salvation by works, the purchase of indulgences for the purpose of receiving forgiveness of sins.

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You can purchase them. Springing dead relatives out of purgatory by buying indulgences. All of this is mythology.

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And that arose when you see a decline in the word of God being meaningfully listened to and understood.

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You see the rise of mythology. Same thing happens in our day. We're awash in Bibles now, all right?

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Everybody can get a Bible. They're free online. You have a particular favorite translation.

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You can get it for free on an app. People don't even have to pay for them. But you're gonna note that within our time, people meaningfully studying

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God's word and really understanding it, right? And so what are we seeing in our time?

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The rise of crazy, wackerdoodle mythological doctrines, which is kind of, that's my other day job, putting the videos together.

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I mean, this past week, we put out a video by a woman who has a very notably well -followed television program on God TV named

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Katie Sousa. And she claims that she was at an event recently and God told one of the people there that she was to be sworn in as one of the judges of heaven.

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And they had an actual swearing -in ceremony. And she was wearing judges robes and everything.

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And you're thinking, and by the way, this woman's an ex -con. I mean, she used to cook up crystal meth and she'd been to jail a few times.

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She's not even qualified to be a traffic court judge here on earth. And she claims that she's been made a judge of the courts of heaven.

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It's just nonsense. I don't trust her to be the major judge. So what you're saying is she hasn't repented from it yet.

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Right, yeah, okay. But here's the thing. Nowhere in scripture are we taught by either the prophets of the

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Old Testament or the apostles of the new that people can become sworn in as judges in the courts of heaven.

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That's a completely new doctrine. And it's as innovative, and I'll say this, it is anti -Catholic, okay?

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It is as innovative and anti -Catholic as many of the doctrines that have been tacked on to Roman Catholicism.

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It's just pure mythology. And so the idea behind the Lutheran Reformation is that we wanted to peel back the man -made bits.

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If you were to take an old wooden ship out of the ocean, you'd have to scrape the barnacles off that thing.

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So all the false doctrines are like the barnacles. And yeah, the ship is still there and it's still sound, but you gotta get all that off.

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And that's the idea. We wanted to shave it back. The reform, the Calvinists say we didn't go far enough.

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And then, of course, there are some people who say we went too far. But the reality is that our goal then as Christians, and I'm gonna say this in this sense, our goal as Christians is to not have unique doctrines.

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And so for those of you who were in the Women's Bible Study yesterday, this is a little bit of repeat, but it's a good topic. And then I wanna talk about something in the

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Athanasian Creed itself. So I wanna open up my keynote program real quick. And I'm gonna kind of give you a mental picture that I think is quite helpful.

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So all the things that Christ has taught. View, warning, or click to open a presentation.

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I don't want that one. I want a new one. There we go.

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What was that? I don't know what that said. Oh, Faith's PowerPoint.

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Oh, Mom's PowerPoint. Okay, yeah, from her presentation. Okay, my wife thinks that bees are birds and that birds are bees.

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It's the weirdest thing. Anyway, it's a big joke in our family. Okay, all right.

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So here, let me, we're gonna do this. And so I made a circle here. And now it's an egg, hang on.

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All right, circle, there we go. All right, and then we're gonna make another circle.

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Copy V, and we're gonna make this one red and we're gonna make this one a little bit opaque so that it kind of blends with the other one.

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All right, so if the red circle represents actual biblical doctrine, the truth of scripture, as rightly understood and revealed by God, what he intended.

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Our goal as Christians, and I'm not saying this as Lutherans, we get the name Lutheran because we're obsessed with this and that's kind of the idea, is that our goal is to have, and the blue circle represents how we're reading the scriptures, how we're understanding them collectively as a church.

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And the goal is to make the two overlap so that there is nothing unique that we teach.

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We do not want unique doctrines. And when that happens, then you'll note that what ends up happening is that you can see the blue covered there and the part here that comes out, this blue part that is not overlapping the circle, those are unique doctrines.

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So we like as Lutherans to say, we do not have any doctrines that are uniquely

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Lutheran. And that seems kind of a crazy charge, but that's really the goal. And when you read the confessions of the

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Lutheran church in the Book of Concord, you can see the great pains that they went through so that each of the articles in the

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Augsburg Confession and then in the subsequent portions of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, and I would even note in the

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Formula of Concord, all of the great pains they did to show and demonstrate that what we believe teaching confess is exactly what the ancient church confessed as well.

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And so the idea of salvation by grace through faith apart from works, and that works follow saving faith, but they are not the thing that saves us, they can quote not only the scriptures, they can quote it from Augustine, they can quote it from Irenaeus, they can quote it from Polycarp, they can quote it from Clement of Rome, they can quote it from all of the church fathers very early on and say, this is exactly what the church has historically understood this to be.

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So the goal is you don't want anything unique, so you don't wanna say to them, that's the unique Lutheran doctrine.

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But we would, as Lutherans point out that other traditions within the visible church, there are very unique doctrines.

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And when you have those unique doctrines, some of them are quite noticeable and others are a little more subtle.

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But every time you're engaging in this, then you know that you're leaving out or denying a portion of scripture.

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The two kind of conversely work in that direction. And so in order to believe these things over here on the right hand side, we have to deny these things over on the left.

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That's generally how that works. And so you kind of get the idea, but we don't want anything unique, all right?

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We don't want any doctrine that says, that's a very particular Lutheran thing.

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And I remember this past week, the Remnant Radio guys, they were trying to critique me and they absolutely believe in fallible prophecy.

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It's this weird thing, right? And so in my argument against the concept of fallible prophecy,

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I noted that what we number the second commandment, the evangelical and reformed number as the third commandment, that that commandment says, you will not take the name of the

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Lord your God in vain. To prophesy falsely is to take God's name in vain, by definition.

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And what they ended up doing was playing the portion of my video where I pointed that out and then said, well, that's what

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Lutherans do. They always go back to the commandments. And it's like, what? That's what

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Christians do, okay? The commandments define what is true and what is moral and good and also define for us what is evil and wicked, right?

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To take God's name in vain is to deceive using God's name and that is idolatry and ultimately breaking of the first commandment.

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So the idea here, we don't want anything unique. There's no progress, no progress in Christianity.

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So I've also heard the Catholic faith being described as, you know, we've all seen the

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Olympics when they have those relay races with the baton, right? So, you know,

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I couldn't run 100 yards to save my life. In fact, I'd actually die if I did. I'm pretty sure of it. But the idea then is that the generation that is right now, they have been given the baton of the faith that was passed on to them from the generation before.

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And their job is to take that baton and pass it in its entirety to the next generation.

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You don't get to shave off bits of it or bling it out and make it different than it is.

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You've received it, you pass it on without change. That's the idea. And a lot of folks are just not so keen on passing it along the way it is.

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Now let me check questions real quick here. Boy, our chat window's going nuts. Okay, all right.

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Okay, Victor, our church confesses the first half during Trinity Sunday and the second bit during Christ the

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King Sunday. Works well for us. Lazy, just lazy. Yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right.

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Just tell them to stretch ahead of time and they won't pull any muscles while doing it.

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Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, Christianity needs no uniqueness.

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That's right, it does. Little c, Catholic, just means universal. So can you explain the passage, one, however, not by conversion of the divinity in flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God?

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Absolutely, Luis. What we're talking about there is what's called the hypostatic union or the doctrines of the incarnation.

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And so we'll talk about that in just a minute. But let me kind of look ahead here to see if there's something a little less intense as far as an answer is required.

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And then I'll come back to the more intense ones because there are some things I want to show you. Okay, so the Athanasian Creed is very thorough to prevent any possibility of heresy, it seems.

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Question, though, about the relationship between the Church and the Trinity and when Jesus says, the Father who is greater than I.

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Ah, see, Eric, good question. Oddly enough, it has everything to do with Luis's, too. So we're gonna bundle those two together in one answer, but hang on a second here.

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And then they asked to take a seat. I thought that was bad. Tell us something about what plagued the

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English at that time. Oh my, God bless from McDonald's, we gotta sign off.

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Brady was at the McDonald's, okay. Okay, Pastor Chris, that was such a great fighting for the faith episode on Katie Sousa.

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I thought it looked demonic with them being ordained as heavenly judges and with Alveda King wearing priestly robe, wow.

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Yeah, exactly. And this is an example of adding to Scripture and adding to doctrines.

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I mean, the belief that you can somehow become a judge in the courts of heaven. Christ is the judge. He's our mediator.

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If Katie Sousa is one of the judges of heaven, then the whole universe is about to fly apart and we might as well get a helmet and a seatbelt and just brace for impact.

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So, right, okay. Elizabeth says, watch the

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Remnant Radio, horrible. They called Chris a cult leader. They need to get in line. That's an old charge.

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I get charged with that like all the time. So yeah, all right. So all right, there we go.

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Okay, so that means I can answer the two questions together. So let's take a look. Let me see if I can open up the

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Athanasian Creed real quick. Hang on a second here. I need to open up my Kindle and move some things around.

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And there's two things I actually wanted to talk about in this creed, in this relationship. Now, by the way, we're gonna be sending out the links, hopefully this week, for the videos for the two catechism classes.

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I have a backlog that I want to get through. And in the backlog, you will be able to find extensive teaching on the doctrine of the

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Trinity. Usually when I teach the doctrine of the Trinity in the catechism class, it takes several weeks to do that because we do it very exhaustively, or at least we try to go with a lot of depth.

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And there's the mentions of resources that are available to help you on that. So we're not gonna focus on that today.

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But let me open this up. And we are going to go to the

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Athanasian Creed. And the second part of it is the portion that deals with the incarnation.

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So let me get there. All right.

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Okay. So you'll note there, okay. It is also necessary, paragraph 27, it's also necessary for everlasting salvation that one faithfully believe the incarnation of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. So this is the overarching topic. So you know, the Athanasian Creed is gonna deal with the doctrine of the

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Trinity. There's one God, three persons. You don't divide the substance, nor do you confuse the persons.

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The Father isn't God, the Son isn't God. I mean, the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is God, the Son is God. But there's not three gods, there's one

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God. You get the idea. But when we get to the incarnation, we're gonna note something. That only the

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Son of God, second person of the Trinity, is incarnate in Christ. He is not the incarnation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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He is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God. And this is where there's a lot of mischief within the visible church today because of their lack of rigor in studying the scriptures.

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And that is, is that, have you ever heard somebody like Todd White say that Jesus emptied himself of his deity?

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Okay, my response is belogna. He did not, okay. And that runs contrary to scripture and runs contrary to a right understanding of the hypostatic union.

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And so the idea then here, it's also necessary that one faithfully believe in the incarnation of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is the right faith that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the

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Son of God, is at the same time both God and man.

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And from the moment of his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary, from that point on,

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Christ has always been both God and man, both. He is

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God begotten from the substance of the Father before all ages. He is man born from the substance of his mother in this age, perfect God, perfect man, composed of a rational soul and a human flesh.

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And you're gonna note here that they're now making an appeal to how human beings work. I've used this before and it always helps make the point.

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And that is that you cannot do anything in this life with just your body and not your soul, all right?

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And the reason being is that when body and soul separate from each other, we have a term for that.

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It's called death, okay? So everything you do, you do body and soul.

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You brush your teeth, body and soul. You comb your hair, body and soul.

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If you shave, body and soul. If you eat, if you sneeze, if you watch television, you're doing everything, body and soul.

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And here's the thing, there's not two of you, there's only one of you. So the idea then is that the way human beings work is we have a human body combined with a rational soul.

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The two come together and it creates a personal union between the two.

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To rip them apart is to, that's what death is. In the same way then, Jesus, he has a human nature, a full human nature, which is gonna include a human body and a human soul.

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And he's also the son of God at the same time. The union between the two, the union between the two is known as the hypostatic union.

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And therefore everything Jesus does, he does as the God man.

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His human nature and his divine nature are involved in everything he does, which would include when he was an infant, when he pooped his diapers, when he was a young kid playing outside, waiting for his mother to finish dinner and for him to call him for dinner.

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He did that with his human nature and his divine nature. He never emptied himself of any of that.

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And you can see vestiges of the hypostatic union. But then you're gonna note here, equal with respect to his divinity, less than the father with respect to his humanity.

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So when Christ says as part of his state of humiliation, because it says in Philippians that he emptied himself by becoming a man and being found in the form of a servant, he became obedient even to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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So with Christ's incarnation, the initial part of the incarnation was spent in humility as a servant.

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So Christ in his earthly ministry, while he, before he died, rose again and ascended, he says the father is greater than I.

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He's talking positionally here as the suffering servant. As far as his nature is concerned, his divinity, he's always equal with the father.

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But in the state of his humiliation, he says that. And so you'll note that Christ has ascended and sits at the right hand of the father.

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Is he less than the father? Not regarding his deity, but his human nature always is gonna be less in that respect.

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Although he has got a man, he's not two, he's one Christ. So don't ever play the game where somebody says, well,

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Jesus was able to read minds because he was using his divine nature. Jesus does everything with both natures.

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That's gonna include walking on water, healing people. And the idea is there's a communication then between the two natures.

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It's called the communication of the attributes. So Jesus is able to do things you and I cannot do by virtue of the connection of his body with the divinity in the one person who is

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Christ. So there's not two of them. And then you'll note, not one, however, by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but the assumption of humanity into God.

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So this is talking then, and this is where, so we've already answered Eric's question, but now we're answering

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Louise's. The idea here is that one of the attributes of God is that he's immutable, he doesn't change.

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And so the idea then is that God can't change into flesh or won't change into flesh.

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That's contrary to his nature. But instead, the idea is in the hypostatic union, the assumption of humanity into God, that's talking about the interconnectedness between the two natures.

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So God's able to maintain his immutability while at the same time, Christ can be both

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God and man at the same time. That's the idea behind the two. So it would be an error that somehow

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God, that he converted into flesh. That doesn't make any sense.

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Instead, it's the assumption of humanity into God itself by virtue of the hypostatic union.

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So, and then I wanted to show these other words because there's something here that from time to time, people make the charge that the

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Athanasian Creed teaches works righteousness. You're saved by works, okay? So I think

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Jen Bennett, she's filling out an Athanasian Creed bingo card. This is cool. I had a question about that too.

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So yeah, so here's how it ends, okay? That, wait, let's see if I gotta, if she ended up putting something in here.

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I agree with you, Rachel. Okay, we'll come back with that. Hang on a second here. Same here, screen, there you go.

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All right, all right, we'll come back to it.

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Okay, so here's the part I wanna focus on for a moment. All right, so as a rational soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one

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Christ, who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead, ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the

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Father, God Almighty. From thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. At his coming, all people will rise with their bodies and give an account concerning their own deeds.

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Those who have done good will enter eternal life and those who have done evil into the eternal fire.

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This is the Catholic faith. Whoever does not believe it faithfully and firmly cannot be saved. So what do we mean here?

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What does it mean here? Those who have done good enter eternal life, then those who've done evil into the eternal fire.

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Is this teaching salvation by your works? No, because you have to reference something here and that is that you'll note that the creeds, the reason why creeds are true when they are true is because they say the same thing as scripture.

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And so I would ask immediately the question, are any of you familiar with a portion of scripture where it talks about doing good and entering eternal life?

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Does that ring a bell for anybody? Book of James?

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Okay, I would say that probably more commentary. It's in the gospels. Sheep and the goats.

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Oh, that might work. That might work. What was that? Lazarus.

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Okay, this language is actually kind of unique. And let me find it.

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I'm gonna look for the word good and the word eternal.

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And I am going to look, let's see here. And that one's not gonna work.

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Let's see here. I know it's in the gospel of John. Let me hunt it down. I know the general area.

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All right, let's see if we can hunt this down because it's almost verbatim what is said by Jesus in the gospel of John.

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Ah, John 5, John 5 29. All right, let me put it in context and you'll see this.

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Okay, so the language that's used in the Athanasian Creed is lifted almost word for word out of the gospel of John, chapter five, verse 29.

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Those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

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Those are the words, okay? So you sit there and go, wait, those are red words. Jesus said them, right?

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So what are our three rules for sound biblical exegesis? Context, context, and context.

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So you'll note here, verse 29 is an incomplete sentence and it's given in a context.

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So let's go up to John 5 19. So Jesus said to them, truly, truly,

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I say to you, the son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the father doing.

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Whatever the father does, the son does likewise. For the father loves the son and shows him all that he himself is doing, and greater works than these will he show him so that you may marvel.

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For as the father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the son gives life to whom he will.

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For the father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the son. Uh -oh, better let Katie Sousa know that.

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The father has given all judgment to the son. So that all may honor the son just as they honor the father. Whoever does not honor the son does not honor the father who sent him.

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Verse 24, truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

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He does not come into judgment, but he is passed from death to life. So you'll note, whatever

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Jesus says after this, after verse 24, cannot be spoken of in the context of salvation by works because Jesus has already made it clear that whoever hears his words and believes in him, um, he does not, that person does not come into judgment, but has already passed from death to life.

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So then we move on. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the son of God and those who hear will live.

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For as the father has life in himself, so he has granted the son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the son of man.

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So do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice to come out, and those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who've done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

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And you sit there and you go, but I've done evil. Yeah, but verse 24 is still in play. Do you believe in Christ?

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If so, you already have eternal life. And then if you want, and this is where scripture interprets.

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Scripture is always very helpful. How is it then that it can be said of us sinners that we have done good rather than evil?

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And this is where Colossians 2 is so helpful. And Colossians 2,

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I remember years ago, I preached a sermon against Excel spreadsheet people using this passage.

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It was a sermon illustration, but you are from North Dakota.

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All right, so here's what it says in Colossians 2. You who were dead in your trespasses in the uncircumcision of your flesh,

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God has made you alive together with Christ, having forgiven us all of our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

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This he set aside, nailing to the cross. So by canceling the record of debt, again, the idea here, the image is that on the day of judgment, what's opened up on the day of judgment?

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Books, books. And that always makes us nervous because you sit there and go, well, I know what's in my book.

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And what's in my book is just as bad as what's in your book. And if there's bad stuff in your book, that's a bad thing, right?

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So you have to think of it in the terms of an ancient accounting book. This is the days before Excel, but the ancient accounting books were the analog versions of Excel spreadsheets.

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Okay, when you're on the one page of Excel, side of the ledger, you have your debits, and on the other side, you have your credits.

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And the idea then is that this is a reference to those books, the ledger, the portion where the bad stuff is recorded is called the record of debt.

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So you'll note that Christ teaches us in one of the versions of the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

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Sins is described by Christ in that version of the Lord's Prayer as every time you sin against God, you have incurred a debt.

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And so every one of your trespasses is recorded in the record of debt.

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But what happens because of Christ and what he's done for us, in your book, the entire record of debt section has been torn out, the whole bit.

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And Christ has ripped it out of the book, and it says he's nailed it to the cross. And that's his way of saying the debt has been paid in full.

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So this is why then, when we look at John 5, verse 29, that we don't need to get nervous.

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And let me see here. Did I have it still open? No, I don't. But coming back to John 5, verse 29, which says, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

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There is nothing in your book, there is no record of anything that you've done evil in your book.

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Nothing. When you stand before Christ, who is your judge, who's also your savior, and he opens the book, it's going to go straight to the credit section, not the debt section.

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And his finger is only going to see all the good that you've done. And you'll note that perfectly accords that truly

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I say to you, whoever hears my words and believes in him who sent me already has eternal life. He does not come into judgment.

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So for us, the day of judgment isn't a day of judgment. What is it?

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It's a day for Jesus to go, look what's in this book. Oh, this is amazing.

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And he's going to pay you back. He's going to reward your good works. There's nothing to fear.

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And so that's the idea. So when we read then in the Athanasian Creed, at his coming, people will rise again with their bodies and give an account considering their own deeds.

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Those who've done good will enter into eternal life. Those who've done evil into the eternal fire. Number 39 is almost verbatim.

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John chapter five, verse 29. And the context there already makes it clear how it is that that we will be reckoned as those who've only done good.

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Rather than any evil. So I see what you're doing here. All right, let's see here. All right.

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I can't see what you're sharing. May have stopped sharing. No, I'm still sharing. Hang on, let me try it again and refresh share screen there.

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Can you see it now? Okay. All right. You'll have to just, hopefully you guys got grabbed an analog

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Bible. When the screen doesn't act properly, just grab a Bible and say, follow along, you know.

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So you get the idea. Okay, let me check more. If there's any more questions. And if not, then we're going to wrap up here for the day.

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And again, when you get the links, those of you on the email list, when you get the links to the past catechism classes, you know, you can go, you can go back into the archives and listen to the full teaching on the doctrine of the

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Trinity, which takes several weeks. So, all right, John. Okay, quoting Daniel 12.

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Okay, let's see here. All right. I think this is a couple weeks ago, but can you re -explain how the son of man does not know the day or the hour of his return?

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Okay, so Eric, that again, falls under Christ's, during a state of humiliation, he didn't know these things.

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During the time that he humbled himself, he did not avail himself of everything. So the idea then is, is that he knows that now, but he didn't know that then.

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So Carla says, I know someone refers to themselves as having a triune nature because they believe the spirit and the soul to be distinct and not the same.

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They believe humans have soul, spirit and body. Spirit and soul, however, use interchangeably, correct?

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They're the same thing. I would, yes. In fact, Carlos, they are used interchangeably throughout the

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Bible. And usually what happens is that they'll take a passage from 1

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Thessalonians out of, you know, they'll use that to the exclusion of the other passages where soul and body, soul and spirit are used interchangeably.

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And it's the word of faith heresy that heavily depends on the distinction between spirit and soul for the purpose of how the word of faith heresy works.

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And in fact, I think that Kozar and I did a video on that, you know, maybe a few months ago.

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We ruffled a few feathers when we did that, but that's OK. So yeah, but that, they are used interchangeably.

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And if there is any slight distinction, the distinction really can only be made regarding Christians and talking about the regenerate self versus the sinful self.

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And it's so nuanced, it's almost impossible to tease out anyway. So OK, this is where we're going to leave off.