The Prophet Jeremiah Part 1

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The Prophet Jeremiah Part 2

The Prophet Jeremiah Part 2

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And we are going to pray and get started. If you have a Bible, I'm going to have you open up to, we're going to do some pre -work first.
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We have to explain a few things. And we're going to have, I mean, in order to kind of lay the groundwork for the context of Jeremiah, we have to look at 2
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Chronicles chapter 33, and we'll throw into the mix the compendium story found in 2
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Kings 21. And today we'll lay groundwork as it relates to the prophet
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Jeremiah. And when you look at the groundwork, you sit there and go, yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of hooks into today.
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There's a reason for that, because in the types and shadows, Jeremiah is the final prophet before God acts in judgment.
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And so, what we see happening in the history of Israel is the prefiguring of the great apostasy that takes place within the visible church before the return of Christ.
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That's the right way to put it. All right, I feel like I'm herding cats here. Hang on a second here.
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Did I miss a meeting? Picture taking, got it, okay. Hang on one second, those of you online.
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I'll pray shortly. There's a family reunion of sorts taking place here at Kongsvinger with the
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Cleven clan. So, all right. You want me to keep going, all right.
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Don't draw attention to you, got it. All right, let's pray, and then we will get started. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we pray that through your
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Holy Spirit, we may rightly believe, confess, and do all according to what you have revealed in your
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Holy Word. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, so here's our groundwork.
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I've already made it clear in my opening comments that Jeremiah the prophet, so remember,
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Old Testament is type and shadow. Old Testament is type and shadow, and type and shadow finds fulfillment in Christ, and what we see in the history of Israel, them going into rank apostasy.
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We're gonna talk about what that apostasy's about in a minute here. Them going into rank apostasy,
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God incessantly sending them prophet after prophet after prophet, calling them to repent, and we're talking now about the southern kingdom of Judah, and the kings, they're all descendants of David, so we're following the bloodline of Christ to some degree with a lot of these fellows, and you're gonna note that it's
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Manasseh who takes the hard left turn into rank idolatry and apostasy, and what he ends up doing is so over the top that in the annals of Jewish history, it's out there.
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This is so far out there, and this is also gonna require me to explain a little bit of the mentality that goes into the ancient world's forms of pagan beliefs, so we'll start in 2
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Chronicles 33, so this is setting our historical context, and Jeremiah does not prophesy during the reign of Manasseh.
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He begins prophesying during the reign of Josiah, the grandson of Manasseh, but Manasseh's the guy who sends things off in the wrong direction.
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Manasseh was 12 years old when he began to reign. He reigned for 55 years in Jerusalem.
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He did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh according to the abominations of the nations whom
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Yahweh drove out before the people of Israel. He rebuilt the high places that his father
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Hezekiah had broken down, and we'll talk about why high places are important in a minute here.
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He erected altars to Baal, made Asheroth, and this is
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Asheroth or Asherah poles, and I'll talk about that more in a minute here, and he worshiped all the hosts of heaven and he served them.
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He built altars in the house of Yahweh of which Yahweh had said in Jerusalem shall my name be forever.
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He built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of Yahweh. He burned his sons as an offering in the valley of the son of Hinnom.
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He used fortune tellers and omens. In other words, they basically set up Bethel, Bethel Jerusalem, rather than Bethel Redding.
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That's what's going on here, and he dealt with mediums and with necromancers.
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He did much evil in the sight of Yahweh provoking him to anger, and the carved image of the idol that he had made, he set in the house of God of which
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God said to David and to Solomon his son, in this house and in Jerusalem which
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I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever, and I will no more remove the foot of Israel from the land that I appointed for your fathers, if only they will be careful to do all that I have commanded them, and all the law at the statutes, the rules given through Moses.
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And Manasseh led Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem astray to do more evil than the nations whom
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Yahweh destroyed before the people of Israel. Now what is not mentioned here will be mentioned in 2
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Kings is they also, somewhere between Manasseh and Josiah, set up a male cult prostitute brothel in Solomon's temple.
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And if you're thinking what on earth are they thinking, here's the issue, you have to learn to think like a pagan to understand what's going on here.
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So let me back up, and I want to give you, if you would, at least a summary catechesis in paganism so you understand what's really going on.
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Because if you don't understand this background and how pagan religions think, you will not understand some of the nuances of Jeremiah when
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God flagrantly goes after these beliefs. So we're gonna start with the idea he rebuilt the high places.
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This is an important bit. If you were to think of all of the ancient world's pagan religions, they seem to be connected to, and some argue, connected to the religions that were first originally practiced in Egypt.
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And the Egyptian religion was heavily based on concepts regarding fertility and the belief in both gods and goddesses.
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And if you were to think of it this way, is that fertility is like such a big thing.
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So sex and the fertility of the land, everybody depends upon the good crops and the harvest and things like this.
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And the reason being, they don't have the combines that we have today. The technology that they have today, the yield that they're getting on their crops is not even remotely close to what we're getting today.
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And so everything seems to be centered around the concept of fertility.
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And also, there's this other thing, the Egyptian concept of bringing heaven to earth.
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Have you ever heard of the concept of bringing heaven to earth? So let's start with the fertility issue. So high places are important because high places, there you are closer to the gods, plural.
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Worship is to be done on the high places. There you are closer to the gods. But Carlos says, will this be recorded?
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Yes, it is presently being recorded. So this will be available on the Kongs of Inger website sometime in the next day or so.
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All right, so all of that being said, high places are big. But let's talk now about, okay, that Manasseh erected baals, altars to baal, and he made asheroth.
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These are asherah poles. And the best way I can put it, an asherah pole is a carved rendition of a voluptuous female goddess.
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And the implication here is that what Manasseh did, he made an image to asherah, and not only set it up in the temple, but it's strongly hinted at in these texts that he set up those asherah poles inside the holy of holies with the idea of giving
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Yahweh a wife, okay? So, and it may have been more than one, okay?
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So giving Yahweh multiple wives. So Yahweh now receives a harem. And the implication is, is that behind the curtain of the holy of holies,
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Yahweh is getting jiggy with asherah. That's the idea. And why is all of this important?
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Well, if you were to think of the pagan religions of the ancient world as forms of Gnosticism, that's going to be super helpful.
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Gnosticism. Gnosticism teaches, and so do the ancient Egyptian religions and stuff like this, that the physical matter that you and I can touch, so the wood, the steel of my laptop, yeah, anything that you can smell, taste, touch, that's the physical world, and that that was, and well, in some myths, it was an accident, all right?
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That the physical matter that we experience, that we live in, that that was an accident, and it created what is called dualism, dualism.
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This idea where you have God and the creation, these two separate things.
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And the ultimate goal in all of these religions, much like Hinduism and Buddhism, is to get free of the cycle or the wheel of reincarnation and to become one again with deity, to go from dualism to monism, all right?
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And so in this mix then, in the pagan way of thinking, there are gods and goddesses.
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It is unthinkable to think that there is only one God and this one
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God constantly, and let's just say irritatingly to the pagan, constantly refers to himself using masculine pronouns.
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It annoys them. It annoys them greatly. Exclusively. Yeah, exclusively, yeah.
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And point that out today, by the way, because Gnosticism is running amok in our societies right now.
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You point out that the God of the Bible, all of his pronouns are masculine, and you're gonna hear.
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Wee! Right? Yeah, they get very upset. So in this way of thinking then, there are important dates.
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In the pagan world, there are important dates. The most, almost singular most important day is the winter solstice.
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And here's kind of the idea. You have to think of Osiris as the sun god, right? You have to think in terms of the sun.
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Well, what happens during the summer months? The sun is high up, and then it's descending, and descending, and descending, and descending, and descending.
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Well, on the winter solstice, that's the last day of its descent. It's farthest. It travels south, and then from that day, it begins to ascend again in the sky.
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And so the idea then is that in the pagan way of thinking, the winter solstice is the big day.
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Why is it the big day? Because that's the day when the earth is impregnated by the male deity, the earth being female, and that impregnation results nine months later in the harvest.
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And what's really interesting is that in these pagan religions, you have these myths regarding death and resurrection.
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And so as the story goes, and I apologize for some of the details here. I'm trying to indoctrinate you, kind of give you some of the ways of thinking.
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How do pagans think? So if you know the story of Osiris and Isis, Isis is his goddess deity.
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As the story goes, Osiris was cut into a bunch of pieces by his enemy.
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And Isis went to search for her husband to find the pieces and reassemble them together.
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But the only thing she was able to find was his phallus, and she re -impregnated herself, and the cycle began all over again.
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So what does this have to do with it? You have to think in terms of the way the ancient mystery religions worked.
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All right, again, they're all fertility religions. And so the basic idea is, think of it this way.
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If you are a corn farmer, right? And let's say the important day is the winter solstice, you have your celebration.
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The earth has been impregnated by the sun, and this is an important thing. And this is why in the ancient world you have archeological sites where there's tunnels that are dug where one day a year, the winter solstice, the sun comes inside of that tunnel in the chamber and the light reaches all the way to the back.
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And that is, if you would, basically with the idea that the sunbeams are the sperm, the chamber set up is a womb, you've celebrated all of this, and so what do you do?
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You plant corn in the spring, and those are all the different pieces of the harvest from last year.
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And the idea then is that you plant the corn, the corn comes up, but then what do you do with the corn? You beat it into a bazillion pieces, and it's scattered across all the different places, and it can never be reconnected.
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But don't worry, all you need is that one sperm, and that sperm starts the whole cycle again.
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So they've taken kind of agriculture and human fertility, melded them into a religious mythos and an overarching narrative.
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And in that way of thinking, it is vital that you have both gods and goddesses.
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It makes no sense. But what does Scripture teach us? Is humanity descended, are all of us descended from a woman or are all of us descended from a man?
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Man, okay? And so biblical,
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I'll call it Christianity, and we're gonna use a very flexible term here. The religion that trusts in the
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God Yahweh, either Old or New Testament, it runs completely against the fiber of these
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Gnostic pagan ways of thinking. And so when Israel goes into idolatry, always creeping there, lurking in the background is the intent of overthrowing monotheism and engaging in religious syncretism.
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Now, Gnostics have no problem if you worship Yahweh. They have a problem if you worship
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Yahweh and say that he is exclusively the only true God. You wanna worship Yahweh, go right ahead, but they prefer that you have an esoteric pagan fertility narrative regarding Yahweh, regarding Jesus.
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And this is what's working all behind the scenes here. And Manasseh falls for this hook, line, and sinker.
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He hijacks the worship in the temple, in Solomon's temple, and we'll read in 2
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Kings that murder was a big part of what he does. Anybody who's speaking the truth, they find their throats are slit, and so he's persecuting those who are believing in biblical
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Judaism, and then along the way, someone said, hey, this would be a great idea.
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Why don't we have a male cult prostitute brothel in the temple? Now, the question would be why?
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Why that, all right? Is it because homosexuality was running amok? Answer, no, it was a religious homosexual act.
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And the idea then behind it is that if the ultimate goal in these pagan fertility reincarnation religions is to be released from the world of dualism, and for you coming together into one, monism, then the homosexual physical sex act is seen religiously as basically prophetically prefiguring the release from the body and the reuniting of the human, with the human soul with deity, okay?
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So the idea here is that homosexuality, the reason why it became a vital part of the religious practice is because it's in hope and expectation of the release from the flesh and being one again with God.
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So it's a physical act that has spiritual significance regarding the hope of escaping dualism and then being monistically reunited with God.
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Does that make sense? No. Okay, now,
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James, I'm not going to disagree with you. It makes no sense if you're thinking biblically, okay?
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But this is what's going, by the way, what have our youth said? That doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah, no, it's crazy.
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It's absolutely nuts when you think about it. Yeah, it's absolutely bonkers. But here's the issue, okay?
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Is that this Gnosticism is on the rise in our time today.
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It's here now, and Gnosticism never left us, okay?
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So let me give you just a couple of tiny little examples of a kind of Gnostic way of thinking, all right?
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So you hear somebody say, nowadays, maybe a movie star or a politician, and they say to us
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Christians, you are people who just, well, you're cisgendered.
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You accept the gender that has been assigned to you. And then they say something to this effect.
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There are people who they have rejected the body assigned to them.
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Now, you're sitting there, how is that Gnostic? Because listen to the assumption. Listen to the assumption.
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The assumption is who you are has nothing to do with the physical body that you have.
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That the real you is absolutely different than the body that you have. But God created us male and female.
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You are body and soul, and you are a living spirit.
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Full stop. And Jesus Christ, the God -man, when he rose from the dead, he still has his circumcised bits with him, okay?
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Consider the implications. But in the Gnostic way of thinking, the real you is only spirit, and has nothing to do with your physicality.
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Therefore, you can, by virtue of your free will, reject the body assigned to you, and rework your gender, or you don't even have to be male or female.
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You can be non -binary if you want. You know? Yeah, yeah, you're the binary non -binary, which is a binary way of thinking.
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Okay, okay. And here's the thing. This is still with us. It's still with us.
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And all this talk today, down with the patriarchy, right? In the pagan,
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Gnostic, fertility way of thinking, the whole idea of there being patriarchy, no way.
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In fact, when you read the pagan literature on this, they think that Judaism and Christianity were hijacked by evil misogynists and the original members of the
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He -Man -Woman -Haters Club. Okay, those of you who know, the little rascals know what
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I'm talking about, right? Okay. And so they think that biblical
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Christianity is an aberration. And here's the other thing. When you read the pagans and the current
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Gnostics on this, they point to this time in the history of Judah, the time of Manasseh and Josiah, and they point to this and say that when there was an
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Asherah Pole in the temple, when they had a starry host there, when they had incense altars to Baal, when they had a male cult prostitute thing going on there, they say that's true
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Judaism. And the later Judaism that rejects all of this is the heresy.
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That's their claim. Yeah. I've been reading way too many Gnostic authors lately and it's bent my brain into a pretzel, but at least
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I understand how it thinks. Now, important to note here, Manasseh is going to be the first king of Judah who is taken into exile in Babylon.
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He's gonna be the first. And Manasseh is actually, ironically, going to end well.
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But his conversion doesn't take place until he's already left Jerusalem.
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And his sons, who reign in his place, and then his grandson, who reigns in his place, they're practically oblivious to his conversion.
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So let's take a look at what happens with Manasseh because it's really important. So Yahweh spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they paid no attention.
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That's today, man. Therefore Yahweh brought upon them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria, who captured
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Manasseh with hooks, bound him with chains of bronze, brought him to Babylon. And when he was in distress, he entreated the favor of Yahweh, his
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God, and he humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. He prayed to him and was moved by his entreaty, and he heard his plea and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom.
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Then Manasseh knew that Yahweh was God. But afterward, he built an outer wall for the city of David, west of Gihon in the valley, and for the entrance to the fish gate, and carried it around Ophel and raised it to a very great height.
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He also put commanders of the army in the fortified cities in Judah, and he took away the foreign gods and the idol of the house of Yahweh and the altars that he had built.
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My apologies, Manasseh does eventually come back, and that's part of his story.
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So his sons aren't aware of this, but his sons persist in what they were catechized into into the hedonism that they were raised in.
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So he took away the foreign gods and the idol from the house of Yahweh and the altars that he had built on the mountain of the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem.
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He threw them outside of the city. He also restored the altar of Yahweh and offered on it the sacrifices of peace offerings and thanksgiving, and he commanded
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Judah to serve Yahweh, the God of Israel. Nevertheless, the people still sacrificed at the high places but only to Yahweh, their
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God. Now the rest of the Acts of Manasseh and his prayer to his God in the words of the seers who spoke to him in the name of Yahweh, the
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God of Israel. Behold, they are in the chronicles of the kings of Israel, and his prayer and how God was moved by his entreaty and all of his sin and his faithlessness and the sites in which he built high places, set up the
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Assyrium and the images before he humbled himself. Behold, they are written in the chronicles of the seers.
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So Manasseh slept with his fathers, buried him in the house of Ammon, his son reigned in his place.
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Now I'm gonna switch back now to 2 Kings then, so you can see then in 2 Kings, we have that same litany where he built altars in the house of Yahweh to the host of heaven, and here's where the other bit is, is the host of heaven, this is again pointing to the religion of the
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Egyptians, this idea of bringing heaven to earth. Are you familiar with the pyramids of Giza?
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That they align with the stars of the belt of Orion? There's a reason for that in that the idea of bringing the heavens to earth was a big part of the
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Egyptian religion, and so the idea of setting up monuments or religious centers that somehow mimic or mirror the heavens, the stars above, that's a big part of the religion of the
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Egyptians. So he built altars for all the host of heaven, the courts of the house, he burned his sons as an offering, used fortune tellers and omens, dealt with the mediums, the necromancers, he did much evil in the sight of Yahweh, provoking him to anger, the carved image of Asherah that he had made he set in the house of which
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Yahweh said to David and to Solomon and his son, in this house in Jerusalem which I have chosen out of all the tribes,
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I will put my name forever. All right, so you'll note then 2 Kings and Chronicles then are in agreement here,
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Yahweh said by his servants the prophets because Manasseh the king of Judah has committed these abominations and has done this more evil than all the
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Amorites did who were before him and has made Judah also to sin with his idols, therefore thus says
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Yahweh, the God of Israel, behold I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.
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So you can see here that God is going to punish him in such a way that everyone's ears are gonna tingle,
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I'll stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and the plumb line of the house of Ahab and I will wipe
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Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. And you're gonna note here that what
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God is saying here is that Manasseh wasn't singularly doing this all on his own but that the people of Jerusalem were willingly participating in this idolatry.
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And so the sins that he, the abominations that he set up and the evil that he did,
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God's punishing Jerusalem for it specifically because they're willing participants, right?
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I will forsake the remnant of my heritage, give them into the hand of their enemies, they shall become a prey and a spoil, all their enemies because they've done was evil in my sight and provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came out of Egypt to this day.
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Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood. And so here's the implication and the idea behind the shedding of the innocent blood.
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This is the persecuting of those who would speak out and say you can't worship a Shearer, you can't offer your sacrifices to Molech and stuff like that.
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So murder abounded for the purpose of silencing dissent and he had filled
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Jerusalem from one end to another besides the sin that he made Judah to sin that they did what was evil on the side of Yahweh.
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So the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all he did and the sin that he committed and they're not written in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Judah.
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And Manasseh slept with his fathers and was buried in the garden of his house, in the garden of Uzzah and Ammon his son reigned in his place.
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Now important to note here, second Kings does not give us the account of his repentance and nor does it tell us about how he was taken captive, how he repented and then was brought back and admonished people to worship only
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Yahweh, that's at the end of his life. So his son Ammon takes his place, Ammon was 22 years old when he began to reign, he reigned for two years in Jerusalem, his mother's name was
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Meshulameth, the daughter of Haroz of Jotbah and he did what was evil on the side of the
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Lord as Manasseh his father had done. So this is a fellow who was raised in this stuff, right?
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He was fully catechized as a pagan and even though dad turns and says
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I was wrong, serve only Yahweh, Ammon just says nope, heads on back, right?
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He walked in all the way in which his father walked and served the idols that his father served, worshiped them he abandoned
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Yahweh, the God of his father's did not walk in the way of Yahweh and the servants of Ammon conspired against him and put the king to death in his house but the people of the land struck down all those who had conspired against King Ammon and the people of the land made
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Josiah his son king in his place. So Josiah the grandson of Manasseh is now the reigning king of Judah.
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And important to note, Josiah he is raised a pagan and the other bit is is that he begins to reign when he's eight years old.
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So his grandfather repents when Josiah is only a small kid and his father
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Ammon doesn't repent and persists in worshiping false gods.
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And here's the thing, in the temple then how long, how long has the worship of these false gods been going on?
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Decades, decades. By the time Josiah discovers the
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Bible, he didn't even know there was a Bible, this false worship in Solomon's temple has been going on minimally 50 years, more likely closer to 70.
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There isn't a time in his childhood where he ever can truly remember and understand what the right worship of the true
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God looks like. He grows up thinking that the syncretism that's taking place and the paganism that's taking place in the temple, that that's normal, that's normal.
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You had a question? Uh -huh, what will change
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Josiah is only the Bible, not the natural law. Okay, you'll see that in a second.
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In fact, let's get that into the mix here. So the rest of the acts of Ammon that he did are not written in the books of the
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Chronicles of the King of Judah, he was buried in his tomb in his garden in Uzzah, Josiah his son reigned in his place, Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign.
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I barely remember, I have a few memories of when I was eight, but not many, right? He reigned for 31 years in Jerusalem, his mother's name was
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Jedidah, the daughter of Adahiah of Bozkath, and he did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh and walked in all the ways of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.
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However, it takes place sometime later, in the 18th year of King Josiah. So, Josiah begins reigning at age eight, now he's 18, he's reigned for 18 years.
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18 years he's reigned before he accidentally discovers the
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Bible. So, he's how old now, what, 26? Eight plus 18?
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26, yeah, okay. 26, he's 26, all right? Back to school for you, it's been a long summer,
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I can tell, James, okay. I'm not even good at math and I knew it was 26, okay. All right.
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All right, so in the 18th year of King Josiah, the king sent to Shaphan, the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshulam, the secretary, to the house of Yahweh, saying, go up to Hilkiah, the high priest, so that he may count the money that has been brought into the house of Yahweh, which the keepers of the threshold have collected from the people.
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Now, important to note here, it's still the house of Yahweh. They still think they're worshiping
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Yahweh. You've gotta get this in your head, they still think that they're worshiping
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Yahweh. Let me give you, I'm gonna pull up an ELCA website, hang on, in San Francisco, hang on, yeah, yeah.
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ELCA, goddess, San Fran, Cisco.
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San Fran. Her church. Yeah, San Fran, her church, that's what it's called, isn't it? It's called her church.
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Her church, okay, here we go. Okay, check this out, man. Okay, so this is supposedly a
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Lutheran church, okay. Welcome, as a faith community, we are called to confess the sin of racism, condemn the ideology of white supremacy, strive for racial justice and peace, and beyond statements of prayers, we are committed to act and respond to injustices we support, and word and deed, black lives matter.
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And here's Stacey, Reverend Stacey Boom, pastor -priestess, a ritual visionary leader of her church,
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San Francisco. Okay, let's take a look at their spirituality. Hang on a second here.
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Yeah, watch our divine mother sung by a vocal divine. Hang on a second, let's see what this is all about here.
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♪ Our mother who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name ♪
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That's about as much blasphemy as I can handle. Our mother who is within us, right?
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We celebrate your many names. This is utter blasphemy, right? But this is in a
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ELCA church. Church. They brought in goddess worship into a
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Christian church. Is this any different than what we're seeing happening in our
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Bible texts today? Oh, it's flat -out idolatry.
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There is no goddess. There is no goddess at all. This is a making of their own religion.
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So yeah, this stuff is just alive and well. So here's Josiah, all right?
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So 18th year of King Josiah, the king sent to Shaphat, the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshulam, the secretary, to the house of Yahweh, saying, go up to Hilkiah, the high priest, that he may count the money that has been brought into the house of Yahweh.
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So it's still the house of Yahweh, which the keepers from the threshold have collected from the people. Let it be given into the hand of the workmen who have oversight of the house of Yahweh.
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Let them give it to the workmen who are at the house of Yahweh repairing the house, that is, the carpenters, the builders, and the masons, and let them use it for buying timber, quarried stone to repair the house.
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No accounting shall be asked from them for the money that is delivered into their hand, for they deal honestly.
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Hilkiah, the high priest, said to Shaphat, the secretary, I found the book of the Torah, the law in the house of Yahweh.
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And here's the thing. This is a surprise, this is a shock. Wait, what, there's a book? Did you guys know there was a book?
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I didn't know there was a book. Who got rid of the book? Manasseh. The people who actually read the book, quoted the book, contradicted
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Manasseh from the book, they were murdered by Manasseh. So whipping out your
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Bible and quoting Moses, or the prophets, would have got you killed in the time of Manasseh.
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So they didn't even know that there was a book. How is worship in the house of Yahweh supposed to be carrying on if they're not even reading their
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Bible, right? Well, what did Jesus say? They worship me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
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In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men, right? So Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphat, he read it.
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Shaphat, the secretary, came to the king and reported to the king, your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of Yahweh.
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Then Shaphat, the secretary, told the king, Hilkiah, the priest, has given me a book, and Shaphat read it before the king.
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So you can just see they're sitting there and spending the afternoon, maybe started in the late morning.
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I don't know what time kings get up in the morning, but they spent the day reading the Bible, right? And when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes, and the king commanded
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Hilkiah, the priest, and Ahicham, the son of Shaphat, and Achbar, the son of Micaiah, and Shaphat, the secretary, and Asaiah, the king's servant, saying, go inquire of Yahweh for me, for the people and for all of Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found, for great is the wrath of Yahweh that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us.
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Now this is an important bit, the overlap. Jeremiah begins prophesying in the early years of King Josiah.
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Does Josiah listen to Jeremiah? No, no, he doesn't listen to him.
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It is only after he finds the book, has the book read to him, that he realizes he's in great trouble, and so he wants to talk to somebody who knows
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Yahweh, so Hilkiah the priest, and Ahacham, and Achbar, and Shaphat, and Asaiah went to hold of the prophetess.
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My big question is, why didn't you go and talk to Jeremiah? All right?
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Jeremiah is prophesying at this time. And here's the thing, you'll see part of the reason why they don't go to Jeremiah is because Jeremiah is so blunt, and the purpose of his preaching is to harden people's hearts.
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That's really the purpose because God intends to act in judgment. And God said, basically, listen,
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I'm sending you, but ain't nobody gonna listen to you. So they don't go to Jeremiah, they don't like that guy, all right?
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So they went to Huldah and said, the wife of Shalom, the son of Tikva, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe, she lived in Jerusalem in the second quarter.
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Fascinating that Jerusalem was cut into quarters all the way back then, still is to this day. So they talked with her, and she said to them, thus says
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Yahweh, the God of Israel, tell the man who sent you to me, thus says Yahweh, behold, I will bring disaster upon this place and upon its inhabitants, all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read, because they have forsaken me.
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Notice they, they, they, they. This is everybody in Jerusalem, all right? Everybody in Judah, they've forsaken me, they've made offerings to other gods so that they might provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched.
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Wait, are you saying that God doesn't coexist? Right, okay, okay.
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You mean to tell me that God doesn't consider you, if you worship Asherah, that to be proxy worship of him?
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No, he does not. Well, what about Brian McLaren's generous orthodoxy?
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It's a fable, it's a myth. It's a man -made doctrine. It's not what the scriptures teach, and God doesn't do that, okay?
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There's salvation only in Christ. So, because your heart was penitent, you humbled yourself before Yahweh, when you heard how
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I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, you've torn your clothes and wept before me,
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I also have heard you, declares Yahweh, therefore behold, I will gather you to your fathers, you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all this disaster that I will bring upon this place, so they brought back word to the king.
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Then the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him, and the king went up to the house of Yahweh with him and all the men and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great, he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of Yahweh, and the king stood by the pillar, made a covenant before Yahweh to walk after Yahweh to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all of his heart and all of his soul to perform the words of this covenant that were written in the book, and all the people joined in the covenant, and the king commanded
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Hilkiah, the high priest and the priests of the second order and the keepers of the threshold to bring out of the temple of the
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Lord, watch this. Okay, you priests, no, they've been priests serving in God's temple with all this other stuff.
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You go in and bring out all the vessels made for Baal and Asherah and for all the hosts of heaven, and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel, good place to take them, and he deposed the priests whom the king of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah around Jerusalem.
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So note that the king of Judah even ordained his own priesthood, okay?
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We don't want any of those Levites that are following Torah, we're gonna ordain priests that'll tell us what we wanna hear, who'll do what we want them to do.
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Hmm, this sounds a lot like the prophecies of the apostasy of the end times before the return of Christ. Yeah, those who burned, okay, so also those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, the constellations, and all the hosts of heavens, he brought out the
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Asherah from the house of Yahweh, oh, poor Yahweh, he's now divorced. No, bring her back, no, no, no,
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God didn't want her back, he didn't want her in the first place, right? Okay, so Asherah is now, poor
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Asherah, she's homeless, yeah, poor thing, you know. God just cast her out, you know.
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All right, let's see, so he brought out the Asherah from the house of Yahweh outside of Jerusalem to the brook Kidron, burned it at the brook
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Kidron, beat it to dust, cast the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. He wanted to defile that thing as much as it could be defiled, right?
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He beat people. You know, he didn't do that, so I will say this, there is an account of one of the kings of Israel who, in order to desecrate a pagan site, did turn its altar into a latrine.
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And what's really interesting is that not that long ago, they found that particular site, and the archeologists can confirm, yes, it was a latrine, okay?
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Okay, so I will say that. And then now comes the weirdest one, and Josiah broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of Yahweh where the women wove hangings for the
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Asherah. What is this religion? What is this thing?
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And here's the thing, Josiah is raised in this thinking that this is normal and that this is true
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Judaism. Has anything changed?
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Nothing has changed. So he brought all the priests out of the city of Judah.
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He defiled the high places. You worship on the high places? We're gonna defile those. Where the priests have made offerings from Geba to Beersheba.
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He broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city, which were on one's left at the gate of the city.
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However, the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers.
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He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom. That's the place where people offered their children to Molech, so that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.
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And by the way, Molech, that's not how the worshipers of that deity would have invoked him.
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Melech is the Hebrew word for king. Melech. And what the
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Masoretes did in their transcribing of the
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Old Testament Bible is every time the name of that deity showed up, uses the same three consonants that you would find in the
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Hebrew word melech, and they just changed the vowels to molech. Melech means king, molech means shame.
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So there's somebody running around the landscape going, I worship Melech, and some
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Jew goes, no, Molech, stop saying that. And it sticks, it gets recorded in scripture.
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So you'll note that those who worshiped Yahweh never really played nice with the idolaters, right?
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Yeah, a bunch of hate -filled bigots, all right, yeah. That's what the claim would be, right?
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Yep, this is a religious hate crime, you know. Yeah, you're so intolerant.
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God is intolerant, all right? So he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun at the entrance of the house of Yahweh by the chamber of Nathan Melech, the chamberlain which was in the precincts, and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire, and the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of Yahweh, he pulled down and he broke them in pieces, cast the dust of them into the brooks
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Kidron. So whatever Manasseh undid with his repentance,
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Ammon reestablished, and then while Josiah is a child, it's fully reestablished during his reign.
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So the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon, the king of Israel, had built for Ashteroth, the abomination of the
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Sidonians, and for Shemosh, the abominations of Moab, and for Milcom, the abomination of the
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Ammonites, and he broke in pieces the pillars and cut down the Asherim, filled their places with the bones of men.
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So you can tell the way he defiled these places, these so -called holy places, is with bones, human bones.
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He corrupted them with decaying human bones, all right?
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So you get the idea. That's your big context here. So Israel, in less than a century, and the greater part of a century, has full -on gone into complete apostasy and rebellion against God.
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And it has taken over the official worship complex that Yahweh had set up, and the worship of Yahweh never stopped, at least technically.
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The Bible disappeared, nobody heard the word of God, and the offerings that were made to Yahweh were also in conjunction with offerings made to Baal, to Asherah, to the starry host of heaven, and you get the idea.
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And all of this then prefigures, in the types and shadows, what it is that Paul prophesies in 2
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Thessalonians. Listen to these words. Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us to the effect that the day of Yahweh or the
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Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. That day will not come unless the rebellion, apostasy, unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so -called
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God, object of worship, so that he takes his place in the seat of the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be
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God. So in the time of Jeremiah, the devil took over the church, right?
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In the days immediately before the return of Christ, the devil takes over the church.
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You'll note that I don't believe for a second that everything's just gonna get better and better and better and better, and then it's gonna be rainbows, unicorns, and carebears, and Jesus is gonna show back up again, okay?
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This is the full -on apostasy that's taking place, and this apostasy begins all the way at the beginning of the church and just continues to grow in magnitude and intensity as we get closer to the return of Christ.
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When is Jesus coming? I have no clue. I don't know. This might stretch out for another thousand years.
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It might only last a couple of decades. I have no clue, right? That's above my pay grade.
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But when we study the prophet Jeremiah, when you see the state of the
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Old Testament church, and I'm using church in a very loose way there, you see the state of the church, the official religion of Judah was apostate, apostate, pagan, idolatrous, and sexually immoral, you know, kind of like the church today, right?
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Is there anything different? There's nothing new under the sun. And so when you, as we then, next week we'll actually go proper into Jeremiah.
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Today we needed to lay the groundwork. Next week as we get into Jeremiah proper, you're gonna sit there and go, this could have been written yesterday.
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This could have been written this morning. And you'll see the connection. The connections are very clear, very clear.
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And the same kind of Yahoo false prophets that we have today making time predictions and nonsense like this, they were a plenty in the time of Jeremiah.
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It's actually quite frightening. And that's the other bit of this.
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When you put all the data together, not only are they worshiping Asherah and Baal and Molech and the starry host of heaven and engaging in male cult prostitution in the temple, on top of it, you have a bunch of people out there prophesying gobbledygook in the name of the
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Lord. And they absolutely, these false prophets, oppose the real prophet of God and persecute him.
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All the while, they're speaking obvious nonsense and who's listening to them?
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Everybody. Who's listening to Jeremiah? Pretty much nobody, right? It's really fascinating.
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So if you ever hear somebody say, well, you know, Jesus makes it clear that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, so that means that there's gotta be one true church body throughout all of history.
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So it's either Rome or it's the Orthodox Church or something like this. It's like, are you serious?
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The church is an article of faith. We believe it exists by faith.
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There is no one church organization that has prophesied to win the day and never be harassed by the devil or ever fall into apostasy.
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Every generation is susceptible to these things. So the church exists where the gospel is preached, the word is rightly handled, and sacraments are administered according to the gospel.
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That's where the church is. And we know that by faith. All right, let me check questions because I saw that there was, the chat window was kind of zinging by here.
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Hang on a second here. All right. Okay, yeah, so, okay, that was so confusing.
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Them folks are nuts, yep. In Spanish, binary individuals have a problem since they is ellos and ellas.
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Yeah, Carmen, see, you know, you can't explain this to them using Spanish. It's no comprendo, you know, they won't get it.
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Okay, sadly, after watching some of the NAR Entertainment worship, we're not far off, exactly, right?
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So I have a cousin. What was that? Okay, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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It's been a while since I've done Spanish, you're right. The double L is a ya, yeah, ellas, yeah.
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Thank you for correcting my Spanish. You're welcome. Mucho, yeah, muy bueno. Okay, all right, let's see.
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I have a cousin who lives in India. She practices a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the whole thing is so confusing and really out there.
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Yeah, it is. Babylon mystery religion, it's all over the world in different forms.
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Literally, that's a good way of putting it. It is, it's, and here's the thing. The Babylonian mystery religion, the word mystery, that invokes all of the ancient
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Gnostic mystery religions. The mysteries of Demeter, of, you know, and you think of, you know, the
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Greek gods and goddesses all the way back to Egypt. All of these things are mystery religions. It's Gnosticism.
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Gnosticism, the church's great enemy, never went away. It was always lurking back in the shadows and has been tracking with us and planning to overthrow
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Biblical Christianity for millennia, all right? And it's now come out in almost its full form, and it's taking shape in our day.
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Jen says, communion is prohibited online, but this her church is allowed. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I, no, no, no,
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Jen, you're wrong. Her church is not permitted, it's celebrated, okay?
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It's celebrated. They are considered to be true worshipers of God, right?
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Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, they're gonna be shocked when they show up and Jesus isn't wearing a bra, so anyway.
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Sorry, did I say that out loud? Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
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I think I might wanna tweet that, Jesus doesn't wear a bra. Okay, okay, all right, so Carlos says, intolerant, impatient, long, yeah, intolerant, patient and long -suffering at the same time, yep.
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He is, he's all of that, and that's the thing. One of the big things you'll see in Jeremiah is that God patiently and consistently sends prophets to call them to repent.
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What's God's will for them? That they repent and that he forgives them. And if God can forgive
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Manasseh, he can sure forgive me. He can sure forgive you, all right? He's jealous.
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Thank God for his patience, indeed, indeed. All right, great comments, great questions. One more here in Oslo, yes?
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No. He grew up in that. Yeah, so the answer's no.
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So for those of you online, the question is, can God not fault you for not knowing any better?
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The answer's no, and the reason why is this. Scripture says that the law of God is written on our hearts, okay?
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As a result of it, none of us can say, I didn't know any better, all right?
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None of us is able to do that. And here's the thing, have you ever noticed that when people blaspheme the name of God, it's always
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Jesus Christ, okay? Jesus Christ is a cuss word. The God that atheists hate isn't
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Buddha. It isn't Allah. The God that atheists hate is Jesus.
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Not only is God's law written on our heart, we actually know which God the first commandment is referring to when it says you shall have no other gods.
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And the other thing is that the law written on our hearts gives us so many things that we just assume to be true.
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All right, when you watch the news, all right, there's people watching the evening news across the country, live from New York.
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We got this report that somebody was murdered in Colorado, right, and they give the details.
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Nobody from Maine all the way across the country on to the Aleutian Islands and into Alaska, nobody when they see a news report about somebody being murdered scratches their head and go, well, why is murder a bad thing?
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I don't see a problem with murder. You don't like that guy? Just go ahead and kill him. Nobody does that, okay?
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And then when you're walking, when you're getting in the checkout line at Walmart and you got all those magazines, you know, so and so,
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Brad Pitt, who's he sleeping with this week, right, and who's Angelina Jolie, you know, betting this time, and just go on and just, and everybody, what do they do?
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They pay attention to those magazines. They buy them. They're sitting in the line at Walmart and they're flipping through those magazines reading all the juicy gossip, and the reason it's so juicy is because everybody knows that adultery is wrong.
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No, but I don't have to explain any of that to anybody. Never. The reason why things are scandalous is because we have the law written on our hearts.
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So the answer to your question is no. We all already know the law of God, and because the law is written on our hearts, we know we are transgressing it, but the gospel's not written on our hearts.
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The gospel comes to us from outside, and the gospel tells us the good news that Christ has died for all of this, absolutely all of it, and that there's free forgiveness and true pardon and peace with God in him, and so the answer is no.
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Nobody gets to say I didn't know any better. Everybody already knows better. Everybody, yep.
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All right, Lily says, knowing this made sharing the gospel a bit easier. Oh, I know. Can you imagine how hard it would be to preach the gospel if people didn't have the law written on their hearts?
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Why do I need a savior? I don't understand why I need a savior. Yeah. Right, yeah.
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So deep down, everyone knows the scriptures are the truth as revealed by God. Yeah, they do, absolutely. Absolutely the truth, and that's the bit.
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We know that it is wrong to worship any other God, and we know who the true God is.
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We actually know that. We all do, and anybody who says, well, I didn't know, they're not telling you the truth.
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They actually deep down know exactly who they're sinning against, so. All right,
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Jen Bennett, looks like she's having a conversation. I can't hear, hang on a second, Jen, I can't hear you. Let's see.
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I'm not sure why I can't hear you. Huh. No, it's something on my computer.
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I don't understand. Jen, I can't hear you. Sorry, my apologies.
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My computer's been acting up, so. And I have to go anyway, so. Type it out, but I'm leaving, so.
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Yeah, yeah. All right, so, all right, I've gotta go. Peace to you, brothers and sisters. Lord willing, we'll see you next time.