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Sunday school from March 3rd, 2024
Let's pray and we'll get into our study.
Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we humbly ask that through the Holy Spirit you help us to rightly understand what
you have revealed so that we may properly believe, confess, and walk according to your holy word.
As Christ has truly said, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.
We ask you, Lord, to grant us through your Holy Spirit to keep your word.
In Jesus' name we ask.
Amen.
Okay, so we've been working our way through the book of Ezekiel and we are to a part
where God has been basically telling the exiles they can't inquire
of him because they really haven't truly repented of their idolatry.
Am I sharing the right screen?
No, I'm not.
Okay, hang on a second here.
Don't ask me to do something that makes sense.
That's just ridiculous.
Okay, there we go.
All right, so here's kind of an interesting conundrum.
I'm going to take you down a slightly weird path for a second here.
That is because there's a growing attack against Christianity and it has a very
unique argument, but one if you know your Bible is not hard to debunk.
So let's kind of think back for a second.
If you were to think back with me to the book of Jeremiah, what was Jeremiah preaching against?
Idolatry.
He's preaching against idolatry.
Why did God send the Jews into exile in Babylon?
Okay, all right, so and then do you remember what the temple complex was
like before Josiah?
It was a mess.
Okay, and by that we're not saying that the housekeeping staff wasn't keeping it tidy.
Okay, they had set up incense altars to Baal.
They had put an Asherah pole inside of the Holy of Holies because they thought that Yahweh needed a girlfriend
and things like this.
Now here I'm going to ask you what's going to seem like the most basic of questions.
Just kind of work this out.
If I were to go on to an archaeological dig in Israel and I were to dig
up a part of a small village from the time of
Jeremiah, what do you think religiously I would
find in that archaeological dig?
Idols, syncretism.
You're both right.
Okay, you would find idols and syncretism, right?
So if I were an honest biblical scholar and an honest archaeologist,
what would my conclusion be then regarding my shovel digging up
exactly what the Bible said should be there?
That the Bible's right.
Okay, this isn't rocket surgery.
However, okay, you'll note that there's a whole group of
scholars today.
They call themselves biblical scholars and what they are are critical scholars.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
Critical scholars are to biblical scholarship as abortion doctors are to
pediatric medicine.
That's your connection.
And so as a result of it, how are they interpreting the data that they're digging
up in these archaeological sites from this time period?
Okay, let me give you an example.
Okay, here's a book.
It's called When God Had a Wife.
And so what they're basically arguing is that because the
archaeological evidence shows, get this, that idolatry was
rampant, polytheism and belief in many guys was rampant in Israel during this period.
That means that idolatry and polytheism are the true
things about Judaism and that Judaism is not a monotheistic religion.
And that because nobody had a problem with Asherah, therefore that proves that Yahweh
did have a wife and her name was Asherah and it was right for them and stuff like this.
But they didn't read Ezekiel.
They didn't read Ezekiel.
They didn't read.
They didn't.
Dude, do you even Bible?
Anyway, you get the idea here.
So we've got a problem.
So when you run across people claiming to be biblical scholars, and there's a very famous one
now on TikTok and on YouTube.
His name is Dan McClellan and he is a Mormon.
You need to know this about this guy.
The guy legitimately is a Mormon and he's latched on to these theories of these critical scholars
because is Mormonism monotheistic or polytheistic?
Polytheistic, right?
Mormonism, what?
No, of course not.
Which I find fascinating because in my first rebuttal video I did against Dan McClellan, I actually referenced the fact that the Smithsonian Institute
considers the history of the Book of Mormon to be completely bunk.
And I didn't even know he was a Mormon at the time.
I've since learned that he's a Mormon.
And the guy legitimately is latching on to these critical scholar
arguments to try to basically claim that God had a wife.
Her name was Asherah.
And so this goes perfectly well with kind of the Mormon thesis that they're the
true Christianity and that Elohim, our God, that's who they say our God is, that he has many,
many, many, many spirit wives.
He lives on a planet near a mysterious star named Kolob.
Have you ever heard of the Kolob Mountain Range in Utah?
That's named after that.
And so he's latching on to this.
And what I find fascinating is whenever I find somebody on social media attacking those who
are actually teaching sound doctrine, you know there's a problem.
You know that there is legitimately a problem.
Now, I don't know if the people online will be able to hear this, but I'm going to do something here.
I'm going to, it will require me to unmute myself though.
Can I do that without it feeding back?
Maybe if I turn my microphone off.
Hold on.
Josh is going to do some technical magic.
I want to play a part of McClellan's video.
So I got to share my computer sound.
Okay, how do I do that?
That it depicts the God of the
Hebrew Bible as having a wife.
We have no textual data that depicts the God of the Hebrew Bible as having a wife.
So that's not exactly accurate.
We have no.
Textual data from the Bible that depicts that, but we have multiple textual
attestations to Asherah as the consort, the partner, the wife of
Adonai, who is the God of the Bible.
What actually happened was in Israel's pre -exilic times, some Israelites disagreed with biblical theology
and thought God had a consort named Asherah.
So this is inaccurate and anachronistic.
There was no such thing as biblical theology until there was such a thing as a Bible, which would be about a
thousand years after Israel's pre -exilic period ended.
So the widespread.
Semantics, he could have just said scripture.
He was just replacing.
All right,.
We don't need to share my sound anymore.
I think I've made my point.
So you get the point of what this guy is doing, okay?
He is legitimately coming up with all these arguments.
Now, he has a doctorate.
He has a PhD from Exeter University, which is not a slouch of a university.
And so he gets on TikTok and social media, and somebody says something that's biblical, and he goes,
no, that's not true.
You know, does John 1 say that in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God?
He says, no, it doesn't say that.
I'm sitting there going, I teach Greek.
What are you talking about?
It's like, are you kidding me?
And so what he's doing is he's attacking sound biblical theology,
using critical scholarship for the purpose then of opening up, basically trying
to defend Mormonism.
So this guy is wicked, absolutely wicked.
And I hate to say this, but it's kind of cool because for the longest time, I've been dealing with the same stupid false teachers.
I have some fresh meat right now.
Yeah, data is greater than dogma.
He just likes to ignore certain data.
Yeah, that's right.
He ignores certain data.
And so I recently did a video against this guy where he claimed that the Gospels contain no eyewitness testimony.
It's like, what?
You know, so I mean, this is like one of my standard lectures in catechism is, you know, is talking about how do we, you know,
does the Bible contain eyewitness testimony?
It's like, yeah, like nothing else even comes close.
You know, he says, well, it's written in third person.
Whoop -dee -doo.
You
know, you ask a good question, James.
You ask a good question.
All of that being said, you need to be aware of this.
So if you run into it, you basically sit there and go, there's a reason.
And he'll go on to argue that the archaeological evidence shows that at this time that
there was polytheism and worship of multiple idols and nobody cared.
It wasn't a big deal.
Nobody bucked up against it.
It's like, right.
It's called the apostasy that then God had to clear it up by sending him into exile.
Okay.
It's like, you know, so you get the idea.
So this, you just need to be aware here that what I'm covering as
mundane and like basic as this could potentially be for
the new group of like critical scholars, what I'm reading to you is anathema.
And it's like, and you're stupid if you believe this.
Because everybody knows that Yahweh had the hots for a Shira.
It's just nonsense.
So backing up.
So last week we were working our way through chapter 20.
And let me see if I can get back where we were.
I'm going to basically start here about where I left off.
Back up just a little bit.
So then I said, I will pour out my wrath upon them in the wilderness.
God said to make a full end of them.
God recounting what was taking place during the Exodus.
But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the side of the nations
in whose side I had brought them out.
Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would not bring them into the land that I had given them a land flowing with
milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands, because they rejected my rules and did not walk in my
statutes and profaned my Sabbath for their heart went after their idols.
No.
So the question for those of you online who didn't hear it, I hate to rephrase it, but I will rephrase it.
Is the question, is it wrong to think that a Shira is Satan and drag?
The answer is no.
Because the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 makes it clear what the origin of all idols is.
The demonic.
So you'll know, and this is an interesting thing.
Right now in our times, we're seeing a huge, huge resurgence of Gnosticism.
And there are a lot of people being initiated into Gnosticism who don't even know they're being initiated into it.
What is the name of that cartoon that you made me watch the preview for?
The Has -Been Hotel.
All right.
So the cartoon called The Has -Been Hotel, which I kid you not, in cartoon form
tells us the backstory of Satan from a Gnostic perspective.
And Satan's the good guy.
Yahweh's the bad guy.
Now here's the interesting bit.
He showed me the preview for The Has -Been Hotel, the first two minutes of it.
And I was in shock because what I was seeing depicted in cartoon form,
I spent the better part of two and a half years doing a deep dive on Gnosticism and
Freemasonry and all these different initiatic societies.
I had to dig deep into books that I'm not even allowed to own before I
ran into these Gnostic narratives that supposedly are teaching us the truth about
the world that we live in.
And Satan's the good guy and Yahweh's the bad guy.
I had to really dig deep before I found that in their writings.
Now you don't have to dig deep.
It's right there in a cartoon.
What's that thing streaming on?
Prime Video.
On what?
Amazon Prime.
It's on Prime.
So if you want to see the backstory, if you want to see the Gnostic backstory of Satan, which initiates had
to go through all the rigmarole in the years past that is now just out in the open on Amazon Prime, has been
Hotels Your Thing.
So here's the thing.
In Gnosticism, there's, gosh, man, there's some crazy, there's different variations,
different spins off the same thing.
But the basic idea is that there is an unnamed, unknown deity
behind every other deity.
And so that deity cannot be involved in our universe, but the deities that come from him
are like called emanations.
And from that deity, the deities that emit from him always come in binary pairs,
male and female.
And so in one of the Gnostic narratives, Yahweh
was one of the emanations, and Ashira was his binary goddess deity with
him.
And that was Yahweh who rebelled against the unknown deity
by creating matter.
There's another version of it that says that matter was created by a female deity because she had a temper tantrum.
I like that one better.
But the whole point is that there's different kind of
spins off the idea, but always and again, where you have deities, you have to have male and female.
And that's part of the duality of the universe that we live in.
We live in a universe of material dualities, the spiritual and the physical, good
and evil, light and darkness, male and female.
The dualities are important because in the Gnostic scheme, salvation is the elimination of
all dualities and us being folded back into God.
So where we cease to have a separate consciousness of our own, but we
only have the one consciousness together.
And so everything goes from dualities down to a monism.
Does that make any sense?
So the idea here is that what Israel was engaging in was buying
into kind of the proto Gnosticism of the day, which was actually developed by the
Egyptians.
This is a core part of Egyptian religion and things like this.
And they rejected God statutes, they rejected monotheism, they rejected the commandment, you
shall have no other gods, and were just running headlong into
polytheism.
And so God here speaks disparagingly, shock of shocks, against
idolatry because no other deity exists.
The whole pantheon of deities, it has its origin in the demonic.
Let me explain that.
Give me a second here.
I don't want to see him again.
I'll save him for this week.
I'm working on another video that I'm going to end up having.
I'm going to release a video of me debunking him claiming that Jesus isn't God two days, the
day before Good Friday, just because I thought the timing would be good.
Yeah, Monday, Thursday.
Yeah, well,
he's a Mormon, so you know.
All right, let me see if I can find this real quick.
1 Corinthians 10.
Okay, warning against idolatry.
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into
Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
This is 1 Corinthians 10.
All ate the same spiritual food, all drank the same spiritual drink, they all drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was
Christ.
Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased for they were overthrown in the wilderness.
These things took place as examples for us that we might not desire evil as they did.
Yeah, because here's the thing.
If you desire evil, chances are you're going to act on those desires, and then you're going to pursue it and then engage in it.
That's the idea.
So do not be idolaters.
You'll note that the Bible doesn't say don't be idolaters because it's hard to figure out which deities are true deities and which ones
are false deities, and so you got to be really selective in which ones you believe in and things like this.
No, the whole concept of idolatry, any other god except for Yahweh,
totally out of the window, right?
As some people were, as it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink, they rose up to play.
We must not engage in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and 23 ,000 fell in a single day.
We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
Nor grumble, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
I should have told this to my kids.
Sorry, guys, I let you down.
Now, these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on
whom the end of the ages has come.
Therefore, let anyone who thinks he stands take heed, lest he fall.
No temptation has overtaken you.
That is not common to man.
God is faithful.
He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability.
Note here, you sit there and go, I'm being tempted, and I just don't feel like I have the ability.
You are not being tempted beyond your ability, but I don't feel like it.
Stop it.
Your feelings are telling you the wrong thing.
Feelings are real, by the way, but they often lie to you.
Just want to make that clear.
It doesn't matter what you feel.
The scripture says you'll never be tempted beyond your ability, so work that one out.
He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation, he will also provide a way of escape, so that you may be
able to endure it.
Sometimes our temptations, it feels like it's like just enduring it.
Therefore, my beloved, here we go again.
Flee from idolatry.
This is the Monty Python solution to idolatry.
When you see idolatry, like that little white rabbit, run away, okay?
Run away.
That's what you're supposed to do, okay?
So, flee idolatry.
I speak as descensal people.
Judge for yourselves what I say.
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?
What's the answer to that question?
Yes, it is, okay?
The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Yes, it is, right?
So, you know, Calvinists beware.
Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, and we all partake of the one bread.
So, consider the people of Israel.
Are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar?
Yeah, they are.
So, what do I imply then?
That food offered to idols is anything?
Or that an idol is anything?
No, I imply that what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.
That supports your thesis, okay?
So, Shira is Satan and drag.
There.
So, what the pagan sacrifice, they offered to demons, not to
God.
I do not want you to be participants with demons.
You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.
You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.
Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy?
Are we stronger than God?
Let's kind of go with the pecking order of strength here.
You know, it's like, you know, because a lot of people, a lot of men like to size themselves up how strong they are, right?
Man at the bottom, the demons above them, Christ above them all.
Got it?
So, he's the head honcho here.
And so, you'll note in the New Testament, we are warned
against provoking God to jealousy through idolatry.
Does that sound like a merely an old covenant concept?
Well, I mean, back in the day, it was forbidden to do idolatry.
But, you know, now in the new covenant, we can do that.
No, this is not how this works.
Okay?
And you'll note there's a lot of people who argue things like this.
They'll say, well, you know, in the old, the ten commandments, that's old covenant.
They don't really apply to us as Christians today.
Then why are they reiterated in the new covenant?
All except for one of them.
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
Why?
If they don't apply to us today.
You remember what Paul said in our epistle text, let no one deceive you with empty words.
So, when the ELC comes along and says, oh, just love the one you're with.
Tell the ELCA, get behind me, Satan.
There we go.
So, I swore to them in the wilderness, I would not bring them into the land that I had given them, land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands,
because they rejected my rules, did not walk in my statutes, profaned my Sabbaths, for their heart went after their
idols.
Nevertheless, my eyes spared them.
And I did not destroy them or make a full end of them in the wilderness.
And I said to their children in the wilderness, do not walk in the statutes of your fathers,
nor keep their rules, nor defile yourselves with their idols.
I don't care that your daddy worshiped Baal or Molech or Asherah.
You don't worship those deities, right?
Don't walk in their ways.
And walk means conduct your life according to the statute.
Because you got to know that it's not just a statue.
There's a story behind the statue.
And the statue has things that the statue wants you to do and things like that.
There's texts that go along with these things.
It says, I am Yahweh, your God.
Walk in my statutes.
Be careful to obey my rules.
Keep my Sabbaths holy so that they may be a sign between me and you, and that you may know
that I, Yahweh, your God, that I am Yahweh, your God.
But the children rebelled against me.
They did not walk in my statutes.
They were not careful to obey my rules, by which if a person does them, he shall live.
They profane my Sabbaths.
So then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them.
Wait, God has wrath?
Yes, he does.
Well, that's not very popular today, is it?
No, it's not.
But that's kind of the point.
Blessed is the one who hears the word of the Lord and keeps it.
Did he now?
Really?
No, he didn't.
God has wrath.
I withheld my hand and acted for the sake of my name that it should not be profane in the sight of the nations in whose sight I had brought them
out.
Now, I mentioned last week in kind of a similar context, God acting for the sake of his name and thinking about all these
Yahoos who have these prophetic channels on YouTube and stuff like this, thinking, holy smokes, you guys, when
God is going to act regarding his name, it's going to not go well for them.
And I am legitimately praying that this election cycle, that they prophesy that the
guy I don't want to win will win so that God will make the other guy win.
Does it work like that?
I don't know.
Just saying.
Oh, man.
So I withheld my hand, acted for the sake of my name that it should not be profane in the sight of
the nations in whose sight I had brought them out.
Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the countries
because they had not obeyed my rules but had rejected my statutes and profaned my Sabbath and their eyes were set on their
father's idols.
Did God make good on that threat?
Yes.
What happened to the 10 northern tribes of Israel?
They're gone, man.
God basically just took a knife and just cut them right off and then just threw them out into the different nations, right?
Who do you know that is from the tribe of Naphtali?
Do you know?
I don't know a single person from the tribe of Naphtali.
Very few people make that claim, right?
Where's the tribe of Naphtali today?
How about Ephraim, Manasseh?
Where are they?
The only tribes that people mostly can trace their lineage back to are going to be Judah,
Levi, and Benjamin.
Those are the tribes of the southern kingdom.
The tribes of the northern kingdom, very few people can trace their lineage back to those tribes.
Very, very few because God took them and just scattered them into the wind just like he said.
Why did he do it?
Because their eyes were set on what?
Their father's idols.
Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could
not have life.
We talked about this last week and what that meant because the law of God is sent to convict us of our sin not to
give us life.
If the law had been given by which we must be saved, then righteousness would be by the law, Galatians says.
I defiled them through their very gifts and their offering up of their firstborn that I might devastate them.
I did it that they might know that I am Yahweh.
Therefore, son of man, speak in the house to the house of Israel and you say to them.
Now these are the what's left of the house of Israel in exile in Babylon.
We're talking 5 ,000 -ish people because this is still pretty early on.
They may have had babies at this point and their population is slowly growing, but there's not many of them left.
Thus says the Lord Yahweh, in this also your father's blasphemy by dealing treacherously
with me.
For when I had brought them into the land that I swore to give them, then whenever they saw any high hill or
any leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices and there they presented the
provocation of their offering.
There they set up their pleasing aromas and there they poured out their drink offerings.
I said to them, what is the high place to which you go?
So it's called Bama to this day.
Bama means high place.
It's not about Alabama.
Therefore, say to the house of Israel, thus says the Lord Yahweh, will you defile yourselves after the manner of your
fathers and go whoring after their detestable things?
Does Yahweh have to use such a strong analogy?
Yeah, it's just as bad.
When you present your gifts and offer up your children in fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols to this day and
shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel?
As I live, declares the Lord Yahweh, I will not be inquired of by you.
What is in your mind shall never happen.
The thought, let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries and worship wood
and stone.
James has a question.
You know, you've got a point.
I might have to refine that argument, but yeah, I like it.
There's a question from online.
Okay, the answer to the question is God pour out his wrath on his children.
I always, I may overuse this quote, but it's a good one.
Okay, I'm going to, yeah, but so God
disciplines us and it's described in Hebrews as a scourging and, and so it's, it's an
unpleasant experience for sure.
Let me show you what Luther says in this matter, because I think Luther has a good point.
Let's see here.
I need this.
If you have a Lutheran study Bible in the introduction section to the book of Jeremiah, okay.
This is, this is Luther on the prophet Jeremiah, and this is a great quote.
Luther says, we learn from Jeremiah, among others, that as usual, like
the way he put it, as usual, the nearer the punishment, the worse the people become.
And the more one preaches to them, the more they despise his preaching.
Thus, we understand that when it is God's will to inflict punishment, he makes the people to become
hardened so that they may be destroyed without any mercy and not appease God's
wrath with any repentance.
So the men of Sodom long ago had to not only despise the righteous lot, but even afflict him because he
taught them, even though their own affliction was at the door.
Likewise, Pharaoh, when about to be drowned in the Red Sea, had to oppress the children of Israel twice as much as before.
And Jerusalem had to crucify God's son when its final destruction was on the way.
So it goes everywhere, even now.
Now that the end of world is approaching, the people rage and rave most horribly against God.
They blaspheme and damn God's word, though they well know that it's God's word and the truth.
Besides, so many fearful signs and wonders are appearing, both in the heavens and among all creatures, which threaten them
terribly, is indeed a wicked and miserable time, even worse than that of Jeremiah.
But so it will be, it must be, the people begin to feel secure and sing peace all is well.
They simply persecute everything that accords with the will of God, and they disregard all threatening signs
until destruction suddenly surprises them and destroys them before they know it.
But Christ will be able to sustain his own, for whose sake he causes his word to shine forth in this shameful time of
ours.
Just as at Babylon he sustained Daniel, like those like him, for whose sake Jeremiah's
prophecy had to shine forth, to the same dear Lord be praise and thanks with the Holy Spirit, one
God over all in eternity.
And so you'll note here that as we get closer to the return of Christ, we should
expect the world to get worse and worse and worse.
And as Luther pointed out, it'll get so bad they'll persecute Christians out in the open, which would basically mean that
God has assigned them for judgment.
And so another way to think of it this way, as we get closer to the return of Christ, the number of Christians on
planet earth and faithful pastors on planet earth is going to dwindle.
The reason being is simple.
God does not will for them their repentance.
He wills to judge them in his wrath, because the day of the return of Christ is a day of global
wrath, God's judgment.
So that being the case, it's going to become harder and harder and harder to find the gospel and to hear it and stuff like this, because
if the world heard it, they might repent, and then God would have to relent.
God doesn't like his children being in the way when he acts in his wrath, but Luther pointed out that God was able to sustain
Daniel even through his acts of wrath, and so he'll sustain us and protect us even when God is acting in his wrath.
You need to know that's the case, right?
All right, does that answer that question, by the way?
I think so, okay.
Well, if it didn't, too bad.
I'm just in a weird mood today, again.
So, you know, let's see here.
I can just see somebody pulling that quote.
See what he does to his students?
How does he treat his congregation?
If he didn't ask the question, he just says, too bad.
What a meany poopy head.
Anyway.
All right, let's see.
Roll in here.
So, other part of this.
What is in your mind shall never happen, the thought.
Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone.
How many churches have gone off the rails with a similar attitude?
Think about this, all right?
You know, so I remember, this is maybe now 15 -ish years ago.
Back 15 years ago, a guy who was like a rock star in the seeker -driven, purpose -driven
movement was Perry Noble.
You guys remember Perry Noble?
You know, yeah.
Some of you, maybe for not good reasons, but y 'all remember Perry Noble.
And Perry Noble, he legitimately, this is about 12 -13 years ago, started his
Easter Sunday church service with ACDC's Highway to Hell.
And it's like, you're singing this unironically?
You know, what's going on here, right?
And you'll note that the whole purpose -driven movement
legitimately, intentionally, takes all the trappings and the likings of the world and brings them into the
church and displaces the things of the church in order to make the church appealing to the
world.
But all the world gets when the world shows up at these churches is the world.
But scripture says the love of the world is the hatred of God.
Well, yeah, and it's, by the way, and one of the best lines in all of
modern culture was from King of the Hill where he condemns that Christian rock star guy
basically saying, you're not making rock and roll better, you know, you're not making Christianity better, you're making rock and roll worse.
And you'll note that we don't have a praise band here.
You know why?
Because we'd suck at it, okay?
Could you imagine Don on the
stage?
Don's like, no, please God, no, right?
Yeah, you know, so it's like, why would you want to be a cheap imitation and
knockoff of the world in church rather than be the authentic thing of
Christianity in the church?
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah,
oh,
okay, so he thinks
the argument's a dangerous argument, right?
So Satan's going to
come and whisper in your ear, that's right, Blasphemer Roosevelt was right, Don
would be terrible at the drums, so you need to go to that mega church in town, you know,
because, you know, their drummer's rocking, man, you know.
right, right, you're right.
So what they do is they exchange the biblical content of the hymns.
Have you all noticed that the hymns somehow mysteriously work really
well with my sermons?
Have you guys figured that out yet?
That's by accident, I'm sure.
It's just a coincidence, you know.
In fact, just like evolution is a coincidence, you know, the fact that the hymns seem to work with the sermon,
there's a reason for that, and you'll note that the church's hymnity is
based on these texts, and there's a reason why they work well together is because
there's a principle that the ancient church understood, and it was in Latin, and the principle went like this,
Lex Arendi, Lex Credendi.
The law of prayer is the law of belief.
What did I just disconnect from?
What is Napoleon doing here?
Hang on a second here.
I did not ask Napoleon here, sorry.
Oh look, it's your sister.
Sorry.
All right, so yeah, Lex
Arendi, Lex Credendi.
What you sing, what you pray, ultimately impacts what you believe.
And so, kind of going along these lines then, a negative example of that,
if you remember, there's a heresy in the Christian church called Arianism.
Arius was a wicked foe of biblical Christianity, and he taught that
Jesus was not God in human flesh, not God of God, light of light, very God of very God.
He was a god -like being.
He was divine, if you would, but he wasn't God in human flesh, and the
way he taught that particular doctrine is that he was really skilled at
writing hymns and writing music.
And so, Arius's hymnity catechized people into a belief in the Arian
heresy, and as a result of it, it was really hard to root it out because people
loved his songs.
They legitimately loved his little ditties.
And so, even after the Council of Nicaea definitively put down the Arian
heresy as heresy, it still took more than 150 years to kind of ultimately weed it out
because it was so firmly ensconced in the hymns and the songs that people were singing in church.
And so, you got to be careful what you sing.
You'll note that we don't ever sing, I have decided to follow
Jesus.
We don't sing that.
Because you decided that, right?
So, that's the other bit.
So, another analogies.
Back about 23 years ago, I traveled to
Chicago, and I was with a couple friends, and we wanted to see some of the
urban cathedrals in Chicago.
We didn't care if it was Anglican or Catholic.
We actually thought it'd fun to see some really older cathedral architecture.
So, we went into this Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of Chicago, and when we walked in, I was shocked
because I was led to believe that there were beautiful stained glass in this building, but
when I looked it up on the internet as a place to go visit, I failed to read that they had
swapped out the old stained glass in the 1970s and replaced it in the 70s.
And so, I went in expecting to see this beautiful stained glass stuff, and instead, I was met with
color blotches, okay?
Every window, every window where there used to be a marvelous stained glass depiction of the life of Christ or
the apostles or whatever, had been replaced with something that looks like one of those tests that they give you when you're trying to test if
you're colorblind, you know?
It's like, you know, so you got the green and red and blue.
There's squares and blotches, and there's no rhythm to any of it, and I'm thinking,
huh?
There was still a crucifix up in the front on the altar, which you would expect, but the rest of the
artwork was completely meaningless, and I'm thinking, what happened here?
You know, why would you get rid of something that actually taught the faith visually
to replace it with just Rorschach tests, you know?
Oh, look, I see a cloud, and it looks like a bunny.
You know, this doesn't make any sense, and then you'll note that, similarly, in those
churches that have abandoned the historic hymnody, what if they replaced it with Bethel music,
you know, Elevation music, and even Hillsong, you know?
It's like, and all three of them are notable heretical groups, okay?
Like, notably heretical, and what is the content of the songs that they're singing?
There is no content at all.
It's all designed to evoke emotions, and it's like, you know, and then they accuse
us of somehow, you know, putting God in a box and all this kind of weird stuff.
Right, yeah, you know.
Well, we put God in a tomb, but that's a different thing altogether, but you'll note then,
what gets replaced is all of these hymns that actually, they support the
texts.
They reinforce the doctrines of scripture.
There is actual content in them, and we are then replacing it with Jesus is
my bearded girlfriend kind of ditties, okay?
Which is, again, really gross kind of stuff.
This is the air I breathe.
Oh, great.
Well, this is the coffee I drink.
Thank you.
You know, so it's nonsense.
It's absolute nonsense, and so what do people believe now?
Nothing.
They don't believe anything, or they believe whatever they want to believe, and then if
you say, well, that's not what the Bible says.
Well, you're just not reading it right.
You're a meanie poopy head.
You're, you're, right?
It's just crazy.
It's a complete free -for -all, and so when I look at
my job, so I have a job.
It has a job description.
It has qualifications, and if you're not sure what they are, please read the pastoral epistles, okay,
and ask yourself this question.
Is Roseborough doing this or not, okay?
Is he rightly handling the word of truth?
Is he preaching the word?
Is he, you know, is he reproving, repuking, and, you know, and teaching, and training, and righteousness, all these things,
right?
Is he doing all of that, right?
In order to do my job, I look for ways that work,
okay?
When I was in the corporate world, I have an MBA, and my, the focus of my MBA is leadership and organizational change,
and the one thing that everybody in the corporate world talks about, especially in on the MBA level and in the best
business schools, is they talk about best practices, okay?
Now, there's a reason why that when
productivity declines at your local factory, they don't pull out a bullwhip and
start cracking it on your back, okay?
That's not a best practice, okay?
It doesn't get the results that you would expect, okay?
Instead, it rightly creates an opportunity for a lawsuit, and so when we look at when
productivity is declining, you want to find practices that are the best practices that will get the
results without destroying your assets, you know, with your assets being your worker base and things
like this.
Similarly, when I look at church history and ask this question, what have been the
best practices for teaching the faith, right?
What have been the best practices for creating disciples who legitimately are
growing in the word of God and exemplify it in increasing fruit in their lives
in love towards each other and things like this?
What are the best practices?
Now, best practices doesn't mean you have to legalistically go after just one particular way.
That's not the idea, but I would note that the
megachurch practices, by their own testing, doesn't teach the faith.
There was a study done by Willow Creek, Bill Hybels, before he got washed out
of ministry for sexual reasons.
At Bill Hybels' church, it was called the Reveal Now Study, and when I heard what this thing was about, I actually went to Chicago and
went to the conference that discussed the results of that study.
What they had done is they took the top churches that were part of the Willow Creek Association,
and they decided that rather than do a quantitative study, a quantitative study is how many people are in your church,
how fast are you growing, how much money is coming in, and all this kind of stuff.
It all has to deal with numbers.
And they decided that they would do a qualitative study instead, and you can look this up.
It's called the Reveal Now Study.
So they did a qualitative study to see if their newfangled way of doing church was actually
producing disciples with meaningfully deep understanding of scriptures and all this other kind of stuff.
And you know what they found?
It wasn't working at all.
And they legitimately were kind of at a crisis, like what can they do differently about this?
Because the megachurch model is not a best practice.
It's like a worst practice.
If you want to create people who are just nominally Christians who believe in
moralistic, theistic deism, if that's what you want to do, then
go the megachurch route.
But historically, the church has thrived doing the historic
liturgy with a historic lectionary and historic hymnody.
It actually thrives.
And it's like, okay, well, here's the thing.
I'm lazy, and I procrastinate like I wouldn't believe.
As a result of that, because I've got too many footnotes I want to read, I'm not going to reinvent the
wheel.
I'm just going to go with established best practices and basically say, as soon as you show me that you have
a better practice, I might consider it, but I want to see the data.
I want to see the data, because that's how that works.
Boy, am I off track.
What happened to me?
You were going to blame yourself in the beginning.
You did it to yourself.
You're like, I'm going to take this train, and we're going to derail.
Exactly.
It happened at the beginning.
I'll keep that in mind.
I have to jump off here.
Lord willing, we will see you guys next time.