145. The Great Apostasy

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 145,

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The Great Apostasy. Welcome back to the podcast, and just in case that you've never joined us before, the podcast exists to defeat the loser mentality that has infected the church for far too long.

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We exist to reinvigorate Jesus' bride, to take back the world that belongs to him from the squatters who have now inhabited it.

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This is not a show for bellyachers, professional squishes, nice guys, or navel gazers.

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This is a show for those who wanna grab a shovel and get to work. This is a show for everybody who wants to stop complaining about the problems that we see in our society and help us rebuild it to the glory of God.

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It's for those who wanna proclaim a triumphant, masculine, holy vision of what the

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Christian faith actually is, knowing that what we do in the present matters and directs us to the future that Christ has written for us.

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This show is meant to prod all of God's people to victory in Christ and to beat back all of the wolves that are seeking to beat us down.

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If you've been looking for a show to coddle you, well, this ain't your cup of tea. But if you're ready for a triple imperial stout of raw biblical truth and robust eschatology that'll shake you out of your fragilities and give you the kick in the pants that you need to love

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God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, well, then to you, I say, welcome.

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Now today, we're gonna be continuing along in a revelation series with the extended introduction of Matthew 24 that we've been doing, which is known as the

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Olivet Discourse. This is the section of scripture that is happening just days before Jesus is arrested and murdered where he pulls his disciples aside and he takes them up to the

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Mount of Olives and gives them a panoramic view of the city of Jerusalem and he begins telling them about all of the evidence that is going to lead to her destruction and her downfall.

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He gives them one line of evidence after another after another that Jerusalem was gonna undergo imminent disaster at the hands of Rome that would climax and crescendo in AD 70, which, as we've noted here, is exactly what

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Revelation is talking about. The book of Revelation is saying the exact same things as Matthew's Olivet Discourse because it's

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John's Olivet Discourse where he's talking about a near -term disaster that is coming upon Jerusalem.

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He begins that way in chapter one, he ends that way in chapter 22. He is talking about old covenant

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Judaism that is passing away, making way for the new and better covenant of Christ.

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And because Christ would allow no rivals to stand in his presence, no counterfeit pathways to God, Jesus predicted in Matthew 24 and in the book of Revelation that apostate

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Judaism was going to die. They were gonna die for their crimes against God and everything that they held dear was gonna be taken away from them and was gonna be given to the

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New Testament church. For that reason, Matthew 24 is the perfect introduction for a series on the book of Revelation because it's covering the exact same things, but in a much more accessible and easier to understand sort of way.

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Now, with that, I wanna say thank you to all of your support. Thank you to everyone that has given to this channel, whether you've given your time to watch these episodes or you've actually given super thanks, that it's a thing that you can do.

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You can click the thanks button and you can send a gift to the channel. Thank you for those who've done that. Thank you for anyone who's joined as a member of this channel.

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Thank you for everyone who smashes the like button and helps this show climb in the algorithm so that we can reach more people with this godly, robustly, exegetical eschatology that is coming straight out of scripture.

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So thank you for that. Thank you for liking it, sharing it, and helping us to get this content out to anyone who wants to understand what's really going on in Matthew 24 and in the book of Revelation.

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So with that, let us jump in to today's episode and examine all that the text is saying, part one, and all of that recap.

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Now, Jesus entered Jerusalem with the echoes of prophecy swirling all around him.

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He did not come on that day riding on a war horse, at least not yet, that would happen later.

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But in the waning moments of the Jewish peace, in the final sands of the

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Jews' national sovereignty, he came like Solomon, claiming his kingdom, riding into the city on a humble donkey.

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And as he came, the people waved their palms and they cried out, Hosanna in the highest,

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Hosanna to the son of David. You see, they believed that their Messiah had come and that their

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Messiah, Jesus, was gonna overthrow Rome, but their cheers, however loud they were, were masking a tragic misunderstanding of what

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Jesus was there to do. He was not coming to deliver them from Rome, but he was coming to deliver them to Rome.

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He was the king who was coming to his empire that had fallen into disrepute and disrepair, and he was condemning it.

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And as he drew near to the city, his eyes fell upon the temple, the center of the Jewish life in the first century, the sanctuary that was supposed to be the house of prayer for all the nations, a place where the

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Gentiles were supposed to be able to come and to get to know the one and only true God. But as he looked at it that day, he saw that it had become a den of thieves and liars.

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It had become a symbol of the Jewish hatred for the nations. It was a token, not to the real

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God, but to their God, which was a God of money and wealth and power and greed and corruption. Corruption had infected every square inch of the temple and it needed to be disinfected with the strongest disinfectant that could be given.

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And on that day, Jesus not only rode into the city, he marched into the courts, his steps were deliberate, his actions were unmistakable, and he overturned the tables, coins scattered all over the floor, merchants were scurrying like rats to get out of the courtyard.

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Jesus wasn't protesting, he was cleaning, he was cleansing. And he wasn't just cleansing so that the temple would be put back into operation once more, he was cleansing it like a wound that a surgeon was getting ready to amputate.

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The temple, symbolic of Jerusalem's rot, was about to be surgically cut out of the covenant.

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Jesus had come to prepare her for her surgery. Now, the next morning, still in Matthew 21, on his way back into the city,

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Jesus approached a fig tree, which is a known symbol of the Jewish people, Hosea 9 .10. And it was full of leaves, which is the promise of fruit, but yet when

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God came looking upon it, there was no fruit. And it might not have been quite the season for figs at this time, but that wasn't the point.

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The tree stood as a symbol of Jewish fruitlessness. In 24 hours,

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Jesus had visited the city, he had visited its temple, and neither of them offered him fruit onto repentance.

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He came to the city that was supposed to bear fruit for God, and they only gave him leaves. He came to the temple that was supposed to bear fruit for God, they gave him nothing.

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And here, Jesus is standing in front of this fig tree, a symbol of Israel that was giving him no fruit, and he cursed it.

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And by the time they passed by that tree again, it had withered to the roots.

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Now, this caused his disciples to be astonished, but the message was very clear. Jesus was telling them that Israel was about to undergo a withering, the mountaintop that she lived upon, and all of her pomp and all of her wealth was about to be cast into the sea in Roman vessels that would take her wealth back to the

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Italian coastline. Judgment was certainly imminent. Now, once inside the city,

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Jesus told parables to this fruitless people, and he exposed the disease that were upon her branches. One was about the son who said that he would not obey his father, but later he ended up obeying him.

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And then the other was about the son who said, yes, I will obey you, father, but never followed through. And Jesus asked them, which one of these sons did the will of the father?

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And the answer that the Jews came up with was obvious. It was the one who said he wasn't going to obey, but ended up obeying.

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Then Jesus applied this to the tax collectors and the sinners, those who were despised by the religious elite, but who were going to be entering into the kingdom of God ahead of them because they repented from their sin and they believed and followed

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Jesus. But the leaders who claimed to be faithful, who said that they were the ones who obeyed

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God were the ones who were exposed as being nothing more than hypocrites who were going to be left outside of the kingdom.

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Then he told another parable. He told a parable of wicked tenants, this landowner who sent his servants to collect fruit from his vineyard, but these tenants who were in charge of the vineyard killed them and they refused to give the landowner what he was finally own.

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And then finally the landowner says, I'm going to send my son, thinking that they would respect him. Instead they killed him too, hoping to seize his inheritance.

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And then Jesus asked the question, what do you think that the owner of the vineyard is going to do? And the

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Jews answer honestly that he will put those wretches to a wretched end. He was going to destroy them and give the vineyard over to others.

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And it was just about at this point that the Jewish leaders realized that he was talking about them, that the kingdom was going to be ripped out away from them, that it was going to be given to a people who would bear its fruit, which is an illusion back to the fig tree.

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It's an illusion back to Jerusalem. Now, Jesus wasn't done here. He didn't just tell two parables, he told three.

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He elevated it to the infinite degree. He told a third parable of a king who was preparing a wedding feast for his son.

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He invited the guests to come and they mocked the invitation. They even murdered his emissaries who were going out and inviting them to the wedding feast.

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And because of this, it enraged the king who sent his armies, who destroyed their city by fire.

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And then, because he had no one to show up to the wedding feast, because the people who it was prepared for did not come, he invited everyone, all the people in the highways and the byways to come in and enjoy his feast.

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In these three successive parables, Jesus was telling the ethnocentric and racist first century

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Jews that their glorious mosaic world was going to be trampled upon by who they considered

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Gentile swine, that God was going to destroy his own people, that he was going to send his armies and set their city on fire because they refused to come.

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And Jesus was telling them that all of this actually pleased the father. Now, when you hear that, we can kind of sort of begin to understand how this must have sounded to a first century

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Jew. Just to put it in a somewhat modern example, for instance, it would be like Jesus being born in the antebellum south and proclaiming to the slave owners how their plantations were going to be taken away from them and who were going to be given to their servants, to their slaves, and how he was going to return and he was going to hang all of those godless slave owners by the neck in the middle of the town square.

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You can imagine that that kind of message in that time period would have produced a visceral kind of fury that exposed the hellish evil that was igniting or that was living inside of their own souls.

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That is precisely what is going down in Jerusalem in this moment. As the tensions mounted and with the crowds temporarily on the side of Jesus, the

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Pharisees were now going to try to trap him with cleverly worded questions in order to sway the population back onto their side because let's face it, trying to pull off an illegal murder would have been difficult anyway because it was illegal for the

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Jews to kill Jesus at this time. It was against Roman law. But that would have been downright impossible if they didn't have the energy and the passion of the masses.

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These were people that the Jews could use as leverage against Rome if things went a little squirrely, which is why when the

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Jews are ripping or whipping everybody up into a frenzy in front of Pilate, Pilate eventually caves and crucifies

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Jesus. The Jews knew the game. You incite an insurrection and then you can kind of get what you want.

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This is how they worked in the first century. It was a common tactic that the Jews used to try to get what they wanted from the

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Romans. So they're trying to do this now. They're trying to trick Jesus and trap Jesus to get the crowds on their side so that they can weaponize the crowds against him in order to kill him.

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One of the tricks that they used is a question about a coin. They asked, is it unlawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not, tell us what you think.

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They were asking Jesus, hoping to catch him in a political snare because the people had no money, because the

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Caesar was taxing them to death. The people were starving. So what are they going to do? They're going to ask a question to turn the people from Jesus to them.

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They weren't starving. The Pharisees were lovers of money. They had all kinds of money. They were greedy. But instead of Jesus answering their question and falling for their trap, he asked him to hand him a coin.

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And he said, whose image is on this coin? And they replied to him, Caesar. And then he said brilliantly, okay, well then render to Caesar the things that are

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Caesar's, but render to God the things that are God's. This seemed straightforward enough, but underneath his words was a deeper, more penetrating meaning that maybe, just maybe the

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Pharisees caught onto. You see, the coin bore Caesar's image and the Jews were supposed to bear the image of God.

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God's image was supposed to be stamped on them. And yet they were the people who had aligned themselves with Caesar at every turn.

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From their Caesarian high priestly appointments to the woke Sadducees who were in bed with the

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Romans, they were the kind of people who were looking for Rome to give them the kind of stability that can only be found in God.

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And they were the ones who, instead of being imprinted with the image of Yahweh, were the ones who were bearing the image of Caesar.

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Remember, it was this people who uttered the maledictory line, we have no king but Caesar.

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Indeed. It was to that people that Jesus promised that they would be rendered unto

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Caesar. They would be thrown into Caesar's coffers. They'd be melted down by the fires of Titus and brought back home to the treasuries of Rome.

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Jesus was gonna render unto God the things that were God's, the church, and he was gonna render unto

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Caesar the things that were Caesar's, Jerusalem. Now, when no one else had any more questions to ask him because he was humiliating them and their plan wasn't working, the entire city was looking on at the spectacle.

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Then Jesus breaks into seven covenantal woes that he levels upon the scribes and the

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Pharisees, denouncing their hypocrisy and their greed and their blindness, saying things like, woe to you, you blind gods, you whitewashed tombs.

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He cried this woe again and again and again. He called them whitewashed tombs because they were beautiful on the outside, but they were full of death on the inside.

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They boasted of their heritage, saying if we had been alive in the days of the fathers, we would not have been the ones who killed the prophets.

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And Jesus said, really? Really? They were the very ones right in that very moment who were plotting to kill him, who was more than a prophet, but the son of God.

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Jesus, like a righteous judge, was pronouncing the verdict upon all of them, saying all of the righteous bloodshed from Abel to Zechariah will fall on this generation.

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He left no room for misinterpretation. He wasn't inviting them to say, well, you know, maybe he's talking about people 2 ,000 years into the future.

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He's saying God's wrath is gonna fall on this generation. Which one? The one he was looking at.

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And as Jesus left the proverbial courtroom, which was the courtyard of the Jewish temple, and began to walk out of the city and up to the

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Mount of Olives, the disciples, who had been shaken by these words and incapable of speaking during this entire scene, were now ready to ask some questions.

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They pointed out to him the temple, which was a marvelous feature of the ancient world. It was one of the seven great wonders of the ancient world.

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And they were marveling at its grandeur. And they were wondering, how could all of this be true? How could this house really be left desolate?

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And it was then that Jesus looked right at them and again left no room for confusion when he said not one stone will be left upon another.

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The disciples were stunned. The temple was the center of their world, their universe, their culture.

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It was everything. It was a symbol of God's presence. It was the sign that God had favored them among all the nations.

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Could it truly be that this temple was going to fall? As they walked up the

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Mount of Olives that day, the anxious disciples were ready to find out more answers because their hearts were like in a meat grinder in their chest.

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They came up to him and they asked him, when is this gonna happen? What's gonna be the sign that this is gonna happen?

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Does this really mean that we're coming now to the end of the Jewish age? That's what they were asking.

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But you can imagine how frantic their words must have been that their whole world seemed like it was falling apart.

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Then Jesus set all of his disciples down in front of them as the city of Jerusalem is hanging in the background as their canvas.

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And he faithfully began answering their questions one by one, revealing to them all of the signs that were gonna be coming, that were gonna let them know that the events that he just prophesied, the destruction of the temple, were going to happen.

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He spoke of signs, signs like false messiahs were gonna come, wars and rumors of wars were gonna come, famines and earthquakes.

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And all of these were kind of the beginning of the birth pains. These were the signs that judgment was coming.

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And he described an awful period that we talked about two weeks ago of tribulations where the earliest

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Christians were gonna be persecuted by the rabid first century Jews, just before the

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Jews were put down by a great tribulation by the covenantal shotgun of God.

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What we've seen is that all these things are not in the future, but they're in the past.

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And 40 years after Jesus gave these tremendous signs, after the disciples had witnessed all of these things happening in their lifetime,

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Jerusalem was destroyed. Jerusalem was left burning. This is a fact, one of the most well -attested facts in all of ancient history that Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70.

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The temple was torn apart brick by brick. Just as Jesus said, the city that killed its prophets and rejected its coming king that murdered the early

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Christians was left desolated in exact picture, perfect clarity and fulfillment of what

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Jesus said. But amid the judgment that was happening, salvation also occurred.

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Out of the ashes of the old covenant meltdown, the church arose like a Phoenix, a new generation that would enter the promised land that would follow its new

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Joshua, who would carry the kingdom forward bearing fruit for their king. And it is that very kingdom brothers and sisters that we find ourselves in today.

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What we've seen is judgment was coming upon the first century rebels and salvation has come for the people of God.

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The countdown ended in AD 70. And now we're living in the new covenant of Jesus Christ.

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The apostasy that Jesus predicted in Matthew 24 is not an event that's gonna happen in the last days of human history.

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It's an imminent apostasy in the first century. It's an apostasy of Jewish converts who converted to Jesus, who are gonna be turning their back on Jesus to go back to the slums of Jerusalem.

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What we're gonna see today is that Jesus predicts that a lot of Jews who converted to Jesus, who embraced the gospel with joy, who tasted the goodness of the word of God, were going to turn back to the picture instead of the person.

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They were gonna turn back to the types and the shadows instead of the fullness of who Christ is.

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The lure of their old lives, the threat of persecution and the deceptive allure of false gospels was gonna prove too much for a lot of people who were going to turn away from Jesus and back to the temple and back to the sacrificial system and back to all of it.

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This is not some footnote in history, but this is one of the central themes in the

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New Testament. This has been recorded by ancient witnesses. In today's episode, we are going to see how the great apostasy

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Jesus predicted has already come. So with that, I'd like to read our verses that we're gonna be focused upon today, and then

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I want us to jump right in. Matthew 24, 10 through 13 says this. At that time, many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another.

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Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. Because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold, but the one who endures to the end will be saved.

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Matthew 24, 10 through 13. And that leads us to part two, the biblical case for a

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Jewish apostasy. Now to begin, I wanna share an example just so that we can get our mind in the right place.

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I want you to imagine that there's a family that's driving to an amusement park and they've told their son that they're going to go there and have the entire day of all sorts of fun and laughter and everything else.

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That's what they've told him. And from the moment that that little boy wakes up and his eyes are fluttering with excitement, he's bubbling over with this like a few

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Mentos that have been tossed into a bottle of Coke. Well, as the car rolls down the interstate after their breakfast and everything else, his face is glued to the window.

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He's scanning the horizon. He's looking for signs that they're getting close to the amusement park that he loves.

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And his heart leaps as soon as he sees the billboard. He's like, we must be getting closer. And then another sign appears, 10 miles to the park.

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And then another sign, five miles on the right. And then another one, three miles. And then two miles, and then one.

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With every marker, his anticipation is growing because he realizes these signs are for him.

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He doesn't dismiss them and say that, you know, they're irrelevant to my circumstances. He sees them and then he rightly intuits that these signs are for him.

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The signs confirm the reality of what has been promised to him by his parents. The theme park is getting closer.

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It's not for someone else's children. It's for him. Now, I hope that this is not relevatory to anyone.

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I hope that we simply understand that this is how signs work and that the boy is being quite rational.

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But supposing that we do get this, this is also the way signs work in the Bible, in the

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New Testament. But instead of a fun -filled theme park as a joyful destination, the signs that Jesus was giving are pointing to an unavoidable destruction.

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When Jesus told his disciples that Jerusalem was on a collision course with calamity, he gave them signs that they were supposed to be on the lookout for, road markers along the way that were gonna help them gauge how much time that they had left before they needed to abandon the sinking ship.

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I want you to remember something here. The first century Christians did not leave

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Jerusalem immediately. They bowed the knee to Jesus, but they stayed.

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They sold their homes because they knew that there was no sense keeping them if the city was gonna be obliterated,

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Acts chapter two. But they spent the next 40 years trying to convert their comrades, trying to convert their people, the

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Jewish people. If God was going to allow them, they were gonna pull every single

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Jew out of the fire before the city careened completely over the cliff's edge.

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But as they watched these signs happening, these things would have been very helpful for them because it would have told them how much time that they have left.

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It would have told them that as they were witnessing to other Jews, as they were preaching sermons in the street, as they were trying their best to convince people about what the

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Old Testament said of the Christ, they were looking, they were waiting for the final exit ramp that they could take before they would be consumed along with the city.

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And that's exactly what happened in history. Josephus tells us that as the Roman army surrounded the city of Jerusalem, that the

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Christians escaped. No Christian actually died in the siege of Jerusalem, why? Because they stayed there on mission to convert their people, the

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Jews, to Christ. And everyone who was left in the city was left there because they rejected the message and the

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Christians left. There was no need participating in a suicide mission. They did their part.

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They spent 40 years witnessing and evangelizing and then they left. Why did they leave?

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Because Jesus told them to. They didn't leave thinking, well, this really doesn't apply to, said applies to someone 2000 years from now, but it might be a good idea to leave.

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That's not why they left. That's not why they sold their houses. They did all those things because Jesus told them beforehand that it was gonna happen.

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Now, as we're gonna see in this section, there was a rising Jewish apostasy that was happening in the early church.

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And that's one of the signs that Jesus gave to be on the lookout for that the calamity was approaching.

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Jesus explicitly predicted that the final days of the Jewish age would be marked by a great apostasy, a great defection of people who were gonna be going back to the old covenant system and leaving

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Christ. Now, this wasn't a general falling away like Gentiles falling away from Jesus.

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That's not what Jesus predicted, which would be really weird if that's what he predicted. Jesus didn't say that there's gonna be a group of Gentiles who leave

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Jesus to go back to worship Jupiter. That is not at all what Jesus is saying.

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He's not gonna punish the Jews. Remember, all of these things are gonna happen to this generation. He's not gonna punish the

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Jews for a Gentile apostasy. What Jesus is saying is that the Jews who converted to Jesus in the first century and left

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Christ were gonna be a sign of a Jewish destruction.

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They tasted the goodness and the beauty of the new covenant and they spat on it and turned their back on it and walked away.

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That is a sign that Jesus was giving, a flashing neon sign that Jerusalem's judgment was imminent.

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And maybe you would ask yourself, why would Jewish converts defect from him? Why after tasting the beauty and the sweetness of the gospel would they return to the sacrament of the old covenant order?

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Well, the answer I think is pretty straightforward. They were enduring persecutions that were merciless in nature.

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To confess Jesus as Messiah at that time was to draw the wrath and the ire of your Jewish neighbors, of your family members.

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The whole families at this point were being divided. Livelihoods were being destroyed and safety was being threatened. Returning back to Judaism and the temple and the sacrifices and the feasts and all of that offered you a way out of the hell that you were experiencing there on earth.

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It was a way to get back to what you thought was familiar and safe. And of course, this was utterly sinful.

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This was a denial of Christ. This was cowardice on the scale of damnation. But the point

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I'm actually making is that we can actually have sympathy. We can understand how and why a goat who would make a confession when times are good and then abandon their confession the moment things get difficult.

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We can understand why that would happen. I mean, literally, we just walked through this a few years ago during the pandemic.

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Those who ignored the signs barreled into the destruction that Jesus foretold.

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Now, I wanna look at a few very specific examples in the New Testament. We're gonna begin with the earliest book in the

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New Testament, which is the book of Galatians. And I wanna look and see how this Jewish apostasy actually played out.

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Section one, the Jewish defection in Galatians. Now, the book of Galatians was written early in the ministry of Paul, probably in the late 40s.

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And it is a firing letter that transports us right back into the time when the church was clashing with Judaism in raw and fierce and violent ways.

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As one of the first New Testament books that were penned, Galatians reveals how early

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Jewish persecution was happening in the church. And it gives us a front row seat to the battleground that Paul is actually dealing with.

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You remember, Paul was once a zealous persecutor of Christians. Now, as a believer, he was an apostle who was proclaiming the risen

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Christ, who was ferociously defending the faith, and he was calling Jewish defectors to not leave

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Jesus, but to come back to Jesus because there is salvation in no one but Jesus. The Roman providence of Galatia was a place that teemed with life and commerce and religious activity.

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Among its bustling cities were scattered communities of little churches and Christians, many of whom were

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Jews by birth, but who had converted to Jesus and now were followers of the way.

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These men and women had embraced Christ. They embraced him as the promised Messiah. They abandoned the traditions of their ancestors in order to follow

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Jesus. They abandoned circumcision for their children, dietary laws, temple rituals, all markers of Jewish identity.

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They set those aside in favor of the old rugged cross. For these converts, the shift to Jesus was seismic.

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It was a transformation of everything that they knew, all of their background, all of their history, and that shift did not come without consequences.

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Within their synagogues and their families, they were branded as traitors. They were branded as people who abandoned the

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Torah, which in the eyes of the Jewish neighbors was like abandoning covenant with God. And for that supposed betrayal, the opposition against them was violent.

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First, they were ostracized from their family. Then families rejected them and kicked them out of the family so that they no longer spoke to them, no longer talked to them.

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They were dead to their fathers and their mothers. Even physical persecutions became part and parcel of the daily life of these

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Jewish believers in Christ. Some were beaten, others were expelled from the synagogues, and all of them were facing the smoldering white hot anger of a community that refused to acknowledge

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Christ as Lord. But in the midst of all of that, a new kind of turmoil arose.

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A new kind of persecution ensued. You see, in addition to the merciless beatings and the floggings and the stones that were being hurled at their faces, a new kind of attack began in the late 40s coming against the

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Christian church. Because when the Jews realized that they could not stop the church with violence, they reverted to rhetoric.

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Just 10 years after Jesus ascended into heaven, a novel virus began attacking the Christian church, which you can call the

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Judaizers, who wormed their way down into the meat of the church like trichinosis, laying their heretical larva right in the muscular system of God's newly minted people.

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And this horde of false teachers claimed allegiance to Christ, which is why they were insiders. They were part of the church.

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But instead of the salvation, the justification by faith alone and Christ alone, instead of that, they required that believers would go back to the

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Mosaic law. They infiltrated the Galatian church. They sowed confusion and division among the converts.

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And many Christians began to waver in their theology under the attacks of the

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Judaizing Christians. The allure of returning to Judaism with all of its familiar trappings and smells and bells and all of that was strong.

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It was a compromise that the Judaizers were offering that would give those who were being persecuted a way to privately honor

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Jesus with their hearts, but with their bodies to behave like Jews.

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The hope was that if they would do this compromise, if they would do this action of covenant disloyalty, then they could appease both

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God and man. They could appease both God and the Jews. That the blows that were being leveled against them would stop coming.

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Into that storm, the apostle Paul stepped, armed with the gospel, burning with righteous indignation.

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And this is what he said. He begins with a sort of thundering phrase. I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel,

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Galatians 1 .6. This is not a man who's disappointed. This is a man who's shocked.

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He's shocked as a shepherd who is watching his flock return back to the wolves who are sweet talking them into leaving

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Jesus. The Galatians weren't drifting into doctrinal era. They didn't have a baptism theology issue.

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It wasn't like charismania where we say, ah, they're Christians, but they have a doctrinal issue. No, they were defecting from Christ.

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The Judaizers were teaching a damning doctrine, demanding circumcision, dietary restrictions, and other ceremonial laws, participation in the temple.

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All of that was required for your salvation. It was a denial in the sufficiency of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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It was a perversion of grace. It was a return to the covenant types and shadows that had been replaced by Jesus.

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And Paul's fiery rebuke reflects the gravity of the situation. Their actions were a betrayal of God.

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And Paul knew the stakes. You gotta remember, Paul himself was a

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Pharisee. He was zealous for the law. He was a man who breathed out threats against the early

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Christians. He hunted them down like dogs in the street. This is the man who said, I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries.

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But when God, who had set me apart from my mother's womb, called me by his grace, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood.

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Galatians 1, 14 through 16. Paul's talking about a life altering transformation where he was searching for Christians in order to kill them.

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And because of the grace of Christ, he abandoned that lifestyle. He abandoned the law.

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He abandoned the temple. He abandoned all of that to follow Jesus. And when

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Paul describes this apostasy, he describes it as a spiritual seduction.

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He's saying Christ is so good that he can't even fathom what the temple could possibly offer you.

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That Christ is so glorious and beautiful. What could the sacrificial system do for you? He talks about this as a bewitching.

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Have you paid attention to that word before? He says in Galatians 3, 1 that they were bewitched, that they were under a kind of spellbinding deception, that they're out of their mind, that a blindness had overtaken them by some demonic enchanting power.

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That's what he's talking about. The Judaizing heresy. Wasn't just introducing legalism into their group like a group of independent fundamentalist

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Baptist. I grew up down the street from independent fundamentalist Baptist. And there's a little church,

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I'm not gonna name their name, but they would have what they called boot stomping services where if parents found their children's at the time when

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I was growing up, it was Britney Spears. Now Britney Spears is not relevant. But back in those days, if parents found their children's

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CDs, then the parents could bring them to the church and the pastor on that special day would wear boots and he would stomp the

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CDs and break them in front of everyone and everyone would cheer. This is not what

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Paul's talking about. He's not talking about a group of legalistic Christians who understand the gospel, but who have a problem with grace.

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He's talking about an anathematization. He's talking about a doctrine that damns you.

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He's talking about abandoning Jesus for the law of Moses.

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Paul's argument crescendos in Galatians 3. He takes his readers back to Abraham.

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He doesn't take them back to Mount Sinai. He takes them back to Abraham, the father of the faith.

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And he reminds them that it was Abraham's belief in God, not his works according to the law that reckoned to him righteousness,

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Galatians 3 .6. He's saying that true Judaism, true Israelite faith is a faith of faith, not works.

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He's declaring that if you wanna be sons of Abraham, Galatians 3 .7, then you need to be people of faith. This was the scud missile that Paul aimed right at the heart of the

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Jewish ethnocentric pride, blowing up their view that bloodlines and genealogies and law -keeping were badges of honor that were gonna advance them in the new covenant.

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Their genealogies and their circumcisions and their sacrifices mattered nothing. It did not put them in a position of hierarchy above the

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Gentiles. They were on the same playing field so that there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.

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All are one in Christ. The true descendants of Abraham were those who trusted in Jesus, not those who clung to their circumcision or their

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Jewish trappings. And Paul's pen grew even sharper in Galatians 4 where he compares the old covenant to Hagar, the slave woman, and the new covenant to Sarah.

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Do you realize like how controversial that would have been at that time? Paul was saying, you Jews are in the old covenant.

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You're like Hagar and the new covenant church is like the sons of Sarai, Sarah, Galatians 4 .30.

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This is his way of saying that the entire old covenant and all of its apologists and all of the Jews were returning to a yoke of slavery.

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They were returning to the law, which wasn't just unwise, but they were returning to poverty and slavery. You remember the scene of Hagar in the wilderness where she's about to die of starvation.

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Paul was saying that that's you, except in God's grace, he rescued Hagar and her son, but God's grace had run out for the first century

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Jews and they would not be rescued. The Galatian apostasy was a rejection of their freedom in Christ.

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It was returned to the chains of the past and Paul warned them in Galatians 5, if you receive a circumcision, then

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Christ will be of no benefit to you, Galatians 5 .2. And in verse four, he says, you have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by the law,

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Galatians 5 .4. The language is surgical and it's clear. To embrace the cutting of circumcision was to cut yourself off from Jesus.

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Paul is saying that you can cut off a little bit of flesh of the foreskin if you want, but you're gonna throw your entire body into hell.

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This wasn't a minor error, but a total forfeiture of their faith. And just in case we're confused on the topic,

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Paul tells us exactly why it was happening. In Paul's own words, he says, those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ, Galatians 6 .12.

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Their insistence on circumcision and the temple and everything else wasn't born out of conviction, but cowardice.

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They were trying to avoid the scorn of their Jewish peers. They were trying to get out of being persecuted.

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They were trying to lead others to hell so that they wouldn't experience temporary discomfort for the sake of Jesus. And because of this, you might assume that Paul is angry.

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You might assume that Paul is frustrated, that the mood of Galatians is grumpy Paul. You might think that, especially when you and I get attacked when people come after us in a relentless way, we tend to develop feelings of hatred and bitterness and resentment.

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I get it. But that wasn't Paul's motivation for why he wrote Galatians. That wasn't

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Paul's motivation for his urgency and his passion in the book. He responds with angst, not because he hates them, but because he loves them.

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He loves the Jewish people so much that he wants them to repent before they are destroyed. He's screaming at them, not with hatred, but like a mother who sees her child reaching for the hot pan on the stove.

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Paul's anguish for the Jewish people, for the Jewish Christians who are abandoning Christ, is palpable.

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He compares himself to a mother in childbirth, groaning in spiritual agony to make sure that they are delivered from this damnable doctrine of heresy.

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That's why he says in Galatians 4, my children with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you,

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Galatians 4 and 18. He's saying that I'm gonna keep working, I'm gonna keep laboring, I'm gonna keep on until Jesus is in you again because you left him.

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This is personal to Paul. He wants them to return to the freedom and the grace of Christ instead of the slavery of the law.

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Now with this, the book of Galatians is a powerful testimony of what I'm saying and what the Bible is saying.

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Jesus predicted that persecutions were gonna happen, that they were gonna rip through the early church, and Paul is doing everything in his power to make sure that that doesn't happen, proclaiming the gospel, warning defectors to turn again to Jesus before it's too late.

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The book of Galatians makes this abundantly clear, but it's not just the book of Galatians. The rest of Paul's writings say the exact same thing as well, which leads us to section two, the

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Jewish defection in Paul's letters. More than in Galatia, the great city of Thessalonica buzzed with activity.

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Merchants were called out to sell their wares. Roman soldiers patrolled the streets with an air of dominance, and somewhere in the city, in a humble gathering place, the fledgling church was reading aloud on one

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Sunday morning for their public worship a letter from their beloved apostle Paul. His words, as always, were urgent to them, deliberate and filled with both fire and grace.

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He told the young church to let no one in any way deceive you, warning them of great apostasy, which would precede the

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Lord's coming, 2 Thessalonians 2 .3. The warning was more than abstract.

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Paul's pen bled with the knowledge that these deceivers were active in the local church, they were cunning, and they were relentless, and they were working full -time to pull the faithful away from Jesus.

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He had seen it happen, like he saw it in Galatia. These deceivers were not

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Gentiles. They were Jewish leaders, teachers, and influencers who were coming to enact the same strategy that they had employed in the city of Galatia, but now they were doing it in Thessalonica, and their mission was to drag

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Jewish Christians back into the old and obsolete covenant of Moses. To them, this burgeoning sect of Christ followers was a blight upon the true faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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Their arguments were intellectual, their appeals were emotional, and their methods were ruthless.

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That's why Paul's warnings come across with such urgency. He knew that this was wholesale abandonment of Christ by a group of radicalized former converts, and he was willing to do whatever it took to keep the cancer from spreading in the

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Thessalonican church. But they were not the only outpost of this new disease.

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Far to the south, nestled on a narrow isthmus between two harbors, laid a city called Corinth, this cosmopolitan city that brimmed with energy and trade and indulgence and wealth.

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Its streets were a cacophony of different languages, its temples were a testament to human ambition and vice, and it was in this vibrant, yet morally bankrupt environment that Paul planted a local

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Christian church, one that quickly became the battleground for Jewish apostasy.

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Here, Paul tells us that he faced what he called super apostles, who were false

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Jewish teachers who had infiltrated the church, and they were preaching a different Jesus and a different gospel to the baby

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Christians and were leading them astray. This is what Jesus prophesied, that false teachers and false prophets are gonna come in and make shipwreck of people's faith, and a great apostasy was gonna occur in the first century.

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He proves that in Matthew 24 10. Paul proves that in 2 Corinthians 11, four through five. Paul's letters to Corinth are filled with his passionate defense of the gospel and his anguish over the church's susceptibility to these deceptions.

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But it wasn't just Corinth and it wasn't just Galatia and it wasn't just Thessalonica, further to the north in the

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Roman colony of Philippi. Paul battles with Jewish false teachers there as well, but he takes on an even sharper tone.

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Philippi, if you'll remember, was a city of Roman military veterans. Its streets were lined with reminders of Roman glory of captains and soldiers and generals who had fought gloriously on the battlefield of Rome.

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And yet here, a Jewish strike against the early church broke out.

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But instead of spears and bullets, they were firing a false gospel at the early church, trying to get them to abandon their faith.

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And against that group, Paul's anger burned white hot, which is why he says of them, beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision,

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Philippians 3 .2. By calling them false circumcision, we know he's talking about the

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Jews. You would never call a Roman the party of false circumcision. He's talking about the Jews. But when he uses the word dogs here, that was not a casual insult.

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This wasn't just a common quip. This was a specific word that anti -Gentile

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Jews, Jews who hated the Gentiles, called the Gentiles as they passed them on the street.

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They were referring to the Gentiles and to the Samaritans as no better than street dogs who were not even worthy to eat the scraps that fell from their table.

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In our day, this kind of an insult would be like a white supremacist using the

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N -word to a black person and thinking that it was okay because he's better than him.

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This was an ugly and insidious insult from the heart, from a heart that had ethnic pride right down to the very center of it, and that who believed that they were better ipso facto just because of their lineage.

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And that's the way the Jews were in the first century. They hated everyone but themselves. They thought that they were the best, that they were the greatest, and they used ethnic slurs of all kinds of people.

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So Paul, by calling the Jews dogs, he's turning their insult back on them.

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He's turning the proverbial tables back on them. He's aiming their worst insult against the

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Gentiles back on them. And he's saying that you, the circumcision party, are the dogs.

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You, the ones who are trying to get people to leave Jesus and return to Mount Sinai, are the dogs. For Paul, these people weren't just misguided.

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They were enemies of Jesus, Philippians 3 .18. Their belly, or their

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God was their belly. And they certainly weren't citizens of heaven so long as they were clinging to their

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Judaism, Philippians 3 .20. Their insistence upon circumcision and their adherence to the law was nothing less than a rejection of Christ's all -sufficient sacrifice on the cross.

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And Paul was warning them. He was warning Christians as early as the 40s in Galatia.

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He was warning Christians in the early 50s like Corinth and Philippi, but he also warned

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Christians all the way to the bitter end of his career, which was marked by warning Christians against the coming

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Jewish onslaught of apostasy. For instance, in the latter part of his career, to Timothy, who was stationed in the bustling city of Ephesus, which was a hub of commerce and culture,

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Paul warned against those who desired to be teachers of the law but lacked understanding, 1

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Timothy 1 .7. Why would he warn them against people who thought that they were teachers of the law if it wasn't the

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Jews? He wasn't warning against Roman legal scholars who were infiltrating the church with Roman rhetoric.

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He was warning against Jewish men who were trying to lead people in the

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Ephesian church away from her first love and into the arms of the dying old covenant. He was telling them to leave their love to go to the deathbed of Judaism.

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He warned them against men who were captivated by myths and endless genealogies. That's a

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Jewish thing. It was the Jews who were captivated by myths and genealogies.

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He's telling them, stay away from them. He's telling them to stay away from anyone who would distract them from the truth of Christ.

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Paul had seen firsthand the damage that all of this caused and he used his entire career to tell people to avoid it.

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You think about the church in Rome, it's another example of a later letter. In Romans 1 -2, we see the

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Jewish and Christian tensions are rising right there at the very beginning of the letter. But by Romans 9 -11,

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Paul weaves together a theological masterpiece explaining how Israel and Judah's rejection of Jesus was a part of God's sovereign plan.

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Paul is not encouraging believers to have their mosaic cake and eat their

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Christian doctrine too. He's telling them that Israel and Judah were being cut out of the covenant because of their infidelity.

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And that we as Christians must not be prideful thinking that we can somehow leave

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Jesus and return back to the old covenant trappings expecting that God will not cut us out as well.

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The hope that Paul's putting forward is consistent. From his conversion all the way to his beheading, he is telling people that you must turn to Christ and Christ alone, that is the only way that you will be saved.

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And if you'll do that, you'll enter into the kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And if you don't, if you return back to the temple, then you forsake your faith and you will be sprinting towards the destruction that Jesus promised.

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Paul promises that if even those would repent that he would forgive them.

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And what am I saying? I'm saying that Paul is promising that if the Jews of that first century would repent then

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Christ would forgive them of their sins. He would graft them back in to the covenant. This is what he says in Romans 11 -23.

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And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief will be grafted back in,

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Romans 11 -23. This proves the point. Jesus prophesied that they were going to abandon their faith, that they were gonna hate

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Christ, they were gonna hate his disciples and that they were going to lead people, Jewish converts to Jesus, they were gonna lead them into apostasy.

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And that is exactly what happened. Christ was plenty gracious to forgive them. But because of the hardness of their heart, they pressed forward and onto destruction, which is a sign and is a confirmation that what

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Jesus said is true. Now, before we end our biblical section of this episode,

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I wanna talk about apostasy as it relates to the last days. So with that, section three, the

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Jewish defection in the last days. Now to begin this section, we have to acknowledge that many in the dispensational camp are not really picking up what we're throwing down.

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Aside from all of the outlandish and comic book eschatology that they foment, they argue that phrases like the last days are really referring to the final moments of human history.

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They believe that the last days are still in our future and something that we need to be on the lookout for in our day.

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We need to be looking for the signs of the time so that we can understand when the end is coming in our day.

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So when we get to something like the sign of the great apostasy, well, they can't see that happening in the first century.

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They can't see that at all. Even when we give them rock hard clear evidence that it actually did, because they've already convinced themselves that it's going to happen at some point in the future so that if you tell them that it's already happened in the past, you look like a heretic.

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Like the prophets of Baal, they've gotten themselves worked up into a good old fashioned tizzy. And unless the spirit of God does a work in their minds and changes them, they're never going to see this.

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And they're seeing what they want to see. They're seeing that these things must happen in the future because they happen in the future.

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Do you see the circular thinking there? And I was talking to my daughter actually about this today, that the biggest issue between dispensationalism and what we're talking about on the show in Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation, the biggest issue is one small thing.

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If that thing would change, then they would see it. The biggest issue is that they believe that the

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Bible was written to them about what is going on in their life and their day. I believe, and I think rightly so, the

57:53

Bible was not written to me. It was not postmarked to me. It has nothing to do with what, it wasn't meant to be about my day and my situation in the 21st century

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America. Now it has application in my life. I can read it and understand its meaning and I can see the application and it's relevant to my life.

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It's relevant to my circumstances, but the meaning, the original intended meaning of the text is not

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Kendall. It's not you. You are not on the apostle Paul's mind when he's writing his letters.

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It's just not what it is. It applies to you. It matters to you. It's true and it's for you, but it's not about you.

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That's the difference. I think the Bible was written to a particular people at a particular time about a particular situation.

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And if we understand that, we'll understand what it means. And then once we understand what it means, we'll be able to rightly apply it to our lives.

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That's the big difference. And I know that I don't possess enough rhetorical panache to actually convince anyone that that's the problem or to convince someone on how to see the

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Bible differently. But I do know that this show is helping people leave dispensationalism.

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I've had those conversations. I've had conversations with people who are open and who want to learn and this show has been helpful.

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So because of that and because of the stakes at this debate are so immense. And because misreading things like the last days will skew your understanding of mission.

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It'll skew your understanding of your context in the world. It'll skew your mission or your understanding of hope.

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Because of that, I want to correct this error. I know I'm not going to be able to convince everybody, but I do want to carefully dismantle the dispensational view as often as I can and prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the last days the

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New Testament is referring to is not the end of human history. And the great apostasy that Jesus promised in Matthew 24 10, which is what this episode is all about, happened already in the first century.

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Not things that we're still waiting on today, things that have already happened that we can look at and say Jesus was right.

01:00:01

So with that, I want to take a very quick foray into this idea of the last days.

01:00:08

We've already covered this before, but I want to do it again and I want to do it again through the lens of the great apostasy. Because I want to show you how this is true.

01:00:16

And I want to answer the dispensational objections. Because they appeal to passages like 1

01:00:22

Timothy 4, 1, 2 Thessalonians 2, 3, Matthew 24 10 through 12. And they argue that this future apostasy is going to happen in our time and in our day and that we need to be on the lookout for it.

01:00:34

And because of that, I want to answer that to show that it's already occurred.

01:00:41

In their framework, the church is going to limp along, mostly losing, beaten up, bruised, barely treading water until a great and terrible apostasy takes many people out of the church.

01:00:53

There's going to be a massive movement of Christians who leave the faith and deny their Lord. And that's probably going to happen at the hands of the

01:00:59

Antichrist. It's probably going to be before the rapture, but that depends on if you're pre, mid or post -tribulational rapture.

01:01:06

And if you believe that, you're going to look at things in the news like celebrity people who turn away from Jesus, like Joshua Harris a few years ago who walked away from the faith.

01:01:19

And you're going to grumble about that and you're going to say, see, I told you that the great apostasy is beginning.

01:01:24

Or you're going to look at Rhett and Link. Or you're going to look at these other people, these famous people.

01:01:30

Maybe you're going to look at Cademan's Call. The guy now dresses up in dresses, literally. Or you're going to look at Kanye who was talking about church and Chick -fil -A, which that means he's a

01:01:40

Christian. He was talking about Chick -fil -A. He must be a Christian. And now he's saluting the devil. Well, all of that must be signs of the end times, right?

01:01:48

And at first glance, their argument seems plausible, right? After all, doesn't

01:01:54

Paul warn Timothy that the spirit explicitly says that in the latter times, some are going to fall away from the faith?

01:02:00

First Timothy 4 .1. Doesn't he tell the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord is not going to come unless the apostasy comes first?

01:02:07

Second Thessalonians 2 .3. And didn't Jesus himself predict that many are going to fall away? And don't we see that many of these people with these great and big platforms, they're deconstructing from their faith and they're now questioning the

01:02:18

Bible, questioning Sola Scriptura, and then eventually they're now denying the faith completely. Don't we see this happening?

01:02:25

But upon closer examination of these passages and the context in which they were written, we see that these warnings were not about the distant future and they're not about us in the 21st century.

01:02:40

They're just not. They were urgent warnings. They were given with immediacy for the occasion and the situation that Paul and his contemporaries were walking through.

01:02:54

Let me give you the examples here. First Timothy 4 .1. In the latter times, many are going to fall away.

01:03:00

Paul warns that in the latter times, there's going to be apostasy. Well, when are the latter times, according to Paul?

01:03:10

Is he talking about our time or is he talking about his time? He's talking to Timothy in this letter.

01:03:15

He's challenging Timothy in all of the pain and suffering that Timothy's facing as the pastor of the

01:03:21

Ephesian church in the first century. He's addressing Timothy's pain and suffering over false teachers that have come into the

01:03:29

Ephesian church. He's describing things that are going to encourage Timothy.

01:03:34

He's not talking about apocalyptic baddies from the 21st century who were one day going to, you know, take over the world.

01:03:42

That would have made no sense to Timothy. Paul is a good shepherd and is a good pastor, is coming alongside of a man who is walking through awful situations as a pastor.

01:03:55

He's got false teachers who've come into his midst and come into the midst of the church who are teaching his congregants to be abstinent and to never eat certain foods, or they were forbidding marriage, or they were doing all kinds of other things that were hallmarks of Jewish asceticism.

01:04:12

That was alive and well in the first century. Paul is not talking about global rebellion at the end of the world.

01:04:19

He's talking to Timothy about the Judaizing influences that were permeating and infiltrating the local church in the first century.

01:04:28

In the latter days of what? The Jewish age. Similarly, 2 Thessalonians 2 .3

01:04:34

has to be read in light of its historical setting. Paul's reference to the man of lawlessness in the coming apostasy is not an allusion to events that are thousands of years in the future, but it's a warning about the

01:04:47

Jewish rejection of Christ and the rise of false teachers in his own time. This lawless man is ironic because the same people, the

01:04:57

Jews, who were touting their Mosaic supremacy and who were killing Christians for abandoning the law were the ones who become the lawless ones.

01:05:06

And while it's outside the scope of this episode for me to tell you all my thoughts upon who this man of lawlessness is,

01:05:13

I will tell you that there were men who rose up in Jerusalem in the final moments just before the city was destroyed at the hands of Rome who fit the criteria for the man of lawlessness.

01:05:24

There's men like Simon Bar -Giora. There's men like John of Giscala. There's another high priest at the time.

01:05:31

There's these men, and I think it was probably John of Giscala, but I'll have to do a fuller episode of that.

01:05:37

There's men who in the city of Jerusalem were acting in such lawless ways under the guise of being the

01:05:46

Jews who cling and hold fast to the law that I believe that's what Paul was talking about.

01:05:52

So the point is is that you have actual historical reference that makes sense of these passages.

01:05:59

You don't need to boot them out into the distant future. You don't need to say that all of these things must be future because they're future.

01:06:06

That's circular reasoning. Paul is not looking at Christians who are suffering under the painful toil of persecutions against the church and then shifting gears to talk about a white

01:06:16

Anglo -European antichrist that won't arise for a couple thousand years. That's foolish. You look at Matthew 24.

01:06:23

Doesn't that passage guarantee the dispensational exegetical tomfoolery? No, no, it doesn't.

01:06:32

Jesus's prediction of falling away, betrayal and hatred need to be understood in their proper historical context.

01:06:42

And within the larger section of Jewish doom that is happening over Matthew 21 through 24, those three chapters alone over and over and over again are talking about the condemnation of the

01:06:52

Jews, the woes being poured out on the Jews, the doom that is coming. Jesus gets specific in Matthew 24, even on the level of the granular when he's talking about wars and rumors of wars and apostasies and the gospel must be preached in all the world.

01:07:07

He's saying actual, verifiable, tangible events that are gonna happen in that generation that people are gonna be able to see, that people are gonna be able to verify, that they're gonna be able to go and look and say, oh, this really did happen.

01:07:21

All of this is historical, verifiable details that show us that these things really did occur in the first century.

01:07:30

He was predicting things that were gonna come about in a single generation, Matthew 24, 34.

01:07:36

So with that, the last days, according to Jesus, the last days according to Paul, the last days according to Peter, the last days are not the end of the world, but the end of the

01:07:48

Jewish world. A catastrophic judgment that was coming upon Jerusalem and its temple and its

01:07:54

Mosaic formalism. And that is a point that we have made often, but it bears repeating.

01:07:59

The phrase the last days appears repeatedly in the New Testament and it always appears in a specific context, which is not the end of the world, it's the end of the

01:08:08

Jewish age. It's the inauguration of the new covenant era. Let me say it again. When the phrase last days shows up in the

01:08:17

New Testament, when it's talking about apostasy or whether it's talking about anything else, when that phrase shows up, it's not talking about the end of the world, but the end of the

01:08:25

Jewish covenant. That is so critical for us to understand. For instance, when the book of Hebrews opens up with God after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us through his son,

01:08:44

Hebrews 1, one through two. The last days here began the moment that God began speaking through his son.

01:08:51

And whether you wanna place that at the incarnation when Jesus first used his vocal cords, or if you wanna attach that to the

01:08:57

Pentecost when the spirit of God began teaching the church, the law of Christ and writing that law on her heart, you can't, no matter which one of those you choose, you can't get to a dispensational timeframe.

01:09:09

In fact, you can't even get out of the first century. You can't even get out of the 30s. AD 33 is the last possible date that you can accept for when

01:09:20

God started speaking through his son. That's when scholars generally accept that Pentecost happened.

01:09:26

So just from a single verse, when you're talking about Hebrews 1, one through two, that in the former days,

01:09:32

God spoke to the prophets, but now in these last days, he's spoken to us through his son. You have to have a view that the last days began in the 30s at the latest.

01:09:44

And those last days meant that the last days were happening back then and not today. The end times were happening back then, not today.

01:09:51

The end times for what? The world? Not hardly. The end times for the

01:09:57

Jewish age. That is so important to grasp. Peter echoes this understanding in Acts 2 when he quotes

01:10:04

Joel. He quotes Joel 2 when he said, in these last days, spirit of God has poured out. And he applies that outpouring to the spirit at Pentecost.

01:10:12

Acts 2 .17. For Peter, the last days began at Pentecost when

01:10:19

God poured out his spirit upon all flesh. People started prophesying and dreaming dreams and old men were having visions.

01:10:25

And this was evidence of what Hebrews is saying, that now God is speaking to us through his son.

01:10:32

All Jerusalem saw it. They heard it. They witnessed it. And there is simply no exegetical reason for us to punt these promises into the future.

01:10:41

Did you know that atheist scholars, German higher critical scholars and others laugh at Christians because we believe that these things were promised for 2 ,000 years ago?

01:10:52

They look at what Jesus said and they say, clearly Jesus meant that this was supposed to happen in one generation.

01:10:59

And now they mock Jesus because they think they didn't happen, which is foolish. But what's so crazy to me is that out of a lack of faith, dispensationals will say, there's no way these things happen in a single generation, which is exactly what

01:11:13

Jesus said. So what do they do? They punt them out 2 ,000 years into the future, which is foolish and it's stupid and it's wrong.

01:11:20

There's no exegetical warrant for it. Let me show you one more example. Second Timothy three, one through five.

01:11:27

Paul warns Timothy about difficult times that are to come, not difficult times for us. He's not telling

01:11:33

Timothy, and you know, there's gonna be some people one day who have to stay inside for 15 days to stop the spread.

01:11:38

That is not what he's talking about. Of course, right? He's saying I'm at difficult times that are gonna come in Timothy's life.

01:11:45

He's describing behaviors and attitudes that were rampant in the first century world, especially among the

01:11:51

Jews. Paul's not looking at Timothy and saying, hey, bucko, stop bellyaching about the real problems that you're facing so that I can opine to you about things that are gonna happen 2 ,000 years from now that aren't gonna encourage you, that aren't gonna strengthen you, that aren't gonna comfort you in the slightest, but that's what

01:12:05

I wanna talk about. That would be diabolical if Paul did that. And yet, that's the way every delusional disbey has to read their

01:12:12

Bible. Jesus and Paul are talking to their contemporary audiences, and when

01:12:18

Jesus says this generation will not pass away, he meant it. When Paul was comforting Timothy about things he was going to face in his last days, he meant the last days, which is the last days of the

01:12:28

Jewish covenant. The exegetical ground beneath our feet is strong.

01:12:34

The exegetical ground underneath the dispensational's feet is shaky at best.

01:12:41

What we've seen is that the Bible overwhelmingly speaks about the last days having already occurred in the first century, and for that reason, we can be confident that the great apostasy

01:12:52

Jesus predicted has already happened. We're not waiting for a massive wave of Christians to leave the faith.

01:13:00

That already happened. When Jewish converts to Jesus abandoned their faith, turned their back on Christ, and ran back to the temple and led to their destruction, they tied a millstone around their own neck and tried to swim across the ocean, and it did not work for them.

01:13:17

Now with that, I wanna enter into our last section of time by talking about the kinds of apostasies that were happening.

01:13:25

We've argued so far that it was the Jews who were bringing destructive doctrines into the church on purpose to lead

01:13:33

Jewish converts to Jesus away. They were jealous that their brothers, that their sisters, that their mothers, that their fathers, that their neighbors, that their cousins were turning to Jesus, and they were infiltrating the church with destructive, damnable heresies.

01:13:49

And so far, we've only talked about that in general. I wanna give you three examples of destructive doctrines that the

01:13:55

Jews were bringing into the church before we close. So with that, part three, the biblical case for specific apostasies.

01:14:04

The first century church stood in a crucible of spiritual warfare. Jewish leaders who were feeling the destabilizing effects of Jesus's gospel on their religious and social order were trying to combat the spread of Christianity with calculated heresies.

01:14:20

These heresies were deliberate assaults. They were like a Trojan horse designed to lure

01:14:25

Jewish converts to Jesus away from the safety of their community and to the temple where they were gonna experience a calamitous peril.

01:14:35

For the Jewish leaders, if they could not crush the church with the sword, they were gonna try to poison it with their tongue, with their false doctrines and their heresies, hoping to inoculate its members against Jesus and his gospel.

01:14:47

And for a few moments, I wanna detail just a few. There's many that we could talk about. I wanna talk about three of them to be exact of the most common heresies that the first century

01:14:57

Jews were using to lead people away from Christ. And the first one I wanna talk about is the

01:15:03

Judaizing heresy, one that we've already talked about a little bit already. But this was a persistent challenge for the early church.

01:15:10

The Jewish converts to Christianity could not let go of the law of Moses, treating circumcision, dietary laws, temple rituals as essential for salvation.

01:15:21

Their effort to blend the old covenant with the new covenant caused confusion.

01:15:27

It directly threatened the gospel's central message of justification by faith alone. And it was vigorously fought against by Paul and Peter and James and others.

01:15:37

Now, we don't know who started the Judaizing heresy, but it was rooted in Pharisaic zeal.

01:15:43

It emerged early in the Jerusalem church, as early as Acts chapter 15, where some were arguing that Gentiles needed to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses in order to be saved.

01:15:55

Now, while leaders like James and the Jerusalem council refuted this, the Judaizers did gain influence and they even intimidated people like Peter and Antioch, as Paul recounts to us in Galatians 2, 11 through 14, where Paul had to oppose

01:16:09

Peter to his own face because he was being a hypocrite when it comes to the law and about who's included and who's not.

01:16:16

Paul had to rebuke even Peter, who was a foundational pillar of the church.

01:16:22

Now, this movement was fueled not just by theology, but it was fueled by a nationalistic sort of pride.

01:16:30

The historian Josephus highlights how Jewish identity was tightly woven into the law and for the

01:16:36

Judaizers preserving the law and the Jewish traditions was on par with the gospel.

01:16:43

They had elevated their nationalistic pride to the level of salvation and their impact didn't just affect the first century church, although it did wane significantly after the downfall of Jerusalem because it's hard to tell people that you have to be involved in a temple in order to be saved when there is no temple.

01:17:02

It's hard to tell people that you have to do sacrifices if there is no sacrificial system, but its influence did actually wane on into the second century, evolving into sects like the

01:17:13

Ebionites who rejected Paul's apostleship, they denied Christ divinity and despite the apostles tireless defense of the gospel of grace, the shadow of this heresy lingered on for a little while in the church and it caused many people to walk away from their faith in Christ.

01:17:31

Early writings like the Didache and Ignatius's letters reveal the ongoing struggles that the early church was having with these

01:17:38

Judaizing tendencies. But like I said before, by AD 70 and the destruction of the temple, this heresy was mostly finished.

01:17:48

Without the symbols, without the priesthood, without the argument or without the feast, without the sacrifices, without all of that, their argument that these things are essential for salvation essentially crumbled and the gospel sufficiency shown clear.

01:18:02

And in this sense, you can thank God that he destroyed the temple. Thank God that he put away the sacrificial system because the early church was struggling with these doctrines and when the temple was destroyed,

01:18:13

God was giving his church grace. He was allowing his church to experience grace that these combating or competing rival factional doctrines needed to die because Christ is supreme.

01:18:28

That's the first heresy is the Judaizing heresy. The second heresy that I wanna talk about is the

01:18:34

Nicolaitan heresy. Now, in stark contrast to the legalism of the Judaizers, the

01:18:40

Nicolaitan heresy promoted moral compromise and indulgence. It was almost like hedonism.

01:18:46

It was a movement that was introduced into the church by the Jews. And this just goes to show you how fractured the

01:18:52

Jewish people were at the time of Christ because you had one faction who was trying to entice the church into legalism and another

01:18:59

Jewish sect that was trying to entice the church into hedonism. Both were

01:19:05

Jewish -led apostasy movements, but they could not be more different. They were diametrically opposed.

01:19:12

The Nicolaitan movement twisted Christian liberty into a justification for sin. And it offered an appealing but destructive alternative to the gospel's call to holiness.

01:19:24

This is why Paul says, should I go on sinning so that grace may abound? Because there was a group of people who were actually saying, yes, you should go on sinning so that grace may abound.

01:19:34

Paul is not just rhetorically making this point. He's speaking against the

01:19:39

Nicolaitans. Now, this movement was traditionally linked to Nicholas from Antioch. He was one of the early deacons of the early church in Acts 6 -5, but the heresy didn't arise from him.

01:19:50

It actually arose from his followers who corrupted his teachings. The Nicolaitans, and again,

01:19:57

Nicholas had nothing to do with this, the Nicolaitans encouraged Christians, especially in pagan -dominated cities like Pergamum and Ephesus, to engage in idolatrous rituals and immoral practices under the guise of faith.

01:20:10

Their tactics mirrored those of Balaam in the Old Testament, the prophet who led

01:20:16

Israel astray through idolatry and sin. If you'll remember, Balaam was hired by Balak in order to curse

01:20:23

Israel, but he wasn't able to curse them. So what does he do? If you read later in the narrative,

01:20:28

Balaam leads Israel into sin by causing Moabite women to intermarry with Israelite men.

01:20:37

He led them astray with immorality and sexual deviancy. In the same way, the

01:20:44

Nicolaitans were licentious. They were the kind of people that, yes, we should go on sinning so that grace will abound.

01:20:50

That's why Paul was addressing that very thing. Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria condemned the

01:20:58

Nicolaitans in the second century for distorting grace, while Jesus himself denounced the deeds of the

01:21:06

Nicolaitans in the book of Revelation. He praised the Ephesian church for hating the Nicolaitans, and Jesus even says in Revelation 2 .6

01:21:14

that he hated the Nicolaitans. The Nicolaitans exploited cultural pressure, offering a way to conform to the world while maintaining a veneer of faith.

01:21:26

This is your group of compromisers that we see in the world today. This is the people who look like the world, smell like the world, act like the world, but yet still call themselves

01:21:36

Christian. That is the compromise then, and that's the compromise now. That compromise from the

01:21:42

Nicolaitans was what undermined the first century distinctiveness of Christianity, making this doctrine an existential threat to the early church, and yet, thankfully, because of Christ mentioning it in the book of Revelation, and also because of early church leaders, this heresy was exposed for what it was, and it was rejected.

01:22:04

That's the second heresy. The third heresy is the Gnostic heresy. Now, Gnosticism was a heresy that blended

01:22:12

Jewish mysticism and Greek philosophy, and it diverged sharply from the legalism of the

01:22:18

Judaizers, but it also was different than the licentiousness of the Nicolaitans. This movement combined speculative traditions, dualistic ideas in order to create this dangerous worldview where the spirit was good, but matter was evil, where salvation came through secret knowledge, but not through Christ, where Jesus himself must have been a pure spirit because he wouldn't have come into the flesh because the flesh is bad.

01:22:48

If you want an example of this, read the Gospel of Thomas. Don't read the Gospel of Thomas for any sort of benefit because it's wretched and awful, but read it because it's influenced by Gnosticism, and you'll get an idea about what it means.

01:23:02

They hate the flesh. Everything is about secret knowledge, and it's wild.

01:23:08

Anyway, Jewish mystics had long sought out hidden meanings in scriptures. This had been going on for a long time.

01:23:15

There was the Pharisees, there was the Sadducees, there was the Essenes, and there was also this subgroup called the

01:23:20

Jewish mystics. Now, this kind of seeking out the hidden meaning of the scriptures paved the way for the

01:23:26

Gnostic heresy to take root in the early church. By rejecting Christ, Jewish leaders were leveraging their traditions to destabilize the church.

01:23:35

Gnosticism was included in that as a overly intellectualized alternative to faith.

01:23:41

For some Jews, it was tempting to compromise their faith in Christ to avoid the scandal of the cross and the foolishness of all of it, while still claiming some religious enlightenment.

01:23:53

Paul confronted early proto -Gnosticism directly when he warned against fake knowledge in 1

01:23:59

Timothy 6 .20, and he rebuked its aesthetic practices in Colossians 2, eight through 23.

01:24:06

The heresies denial of Jesus's incarnation struck at the heart of the guy. It basically made this a damnable heresy.

01:24:16

You can't believe that Jesus never came in the flesh and be saved. Leaders like Simon Magnus in Acts 8, and also later leaders like Valentinus and Basilitus expanded these teachings.

01:24:29

They constructed whole systems of secret hierarchies of knowledge. And yet, again, thankfully, the early church fathers, the early church in the first century and the later church fathers like Irenaeus and Hippolytus, they fought against this and they crushed this heresy before it could make it out of the first 200 years of the church.

01:24:50

Gnosticism was fracturing the early church. It was dividing believers, threatening the simplicity of the gospel, but the church stood firm.

01:24:57

They rejected its overly academic speculation and they held fast to the power of Christ, who gives a truth that not even secret knowledge could replace.

01:25:10

Now, before we get to the conclusion, I just wanna recap for a second. What we've seen is that Jesus in Matthew 24, 10, he said that apostasies were coming.

01:25:21

And what we've seen is in the book of Galatians, in the book of Thessalonians, in the book of Philippians, in the book of Romans, in the book of Corinthians, in the book of Ephesians, and in the book of Revelation, we've seen heresy after heresy after heresy that was popping up, trying to woo people away from Christ, to get them to leave their first love, to get them to walk away from the church.

01:25:48

And what we've also seen is that these Jewish or that these heresies were

01:25:53

Jewish motivated. The Jews were trying their very best to stop the Christian movement.

01:25:58

They were either trying to stop it with the sword or they were trying to stop it with the forked tongue. But either way, they were trying to stop

01:26:04

Christianity from existing, which is exactly what Jesus said. He said that these apostasies were a sure sign of Jerusalem's destruction.

01:26:13

Why? Because Jerusalem was the one who was weaponizing these things against his church. What Jesus foretold, we've proven.

01:26:21

The Jewish age ended with a dramatic and catastrophic collapse, ushering in the triumphant and eternal reign of Christ and his church.

01:26:32

But as sobering as that truth is, I want it also to serve as our encouragement.

01:26:40

And with that, let's go to our conclusion. Conclusion. The warnings of the first century believers echo down through the corridors of time to us today.

01:26:53

The lesson that we need to learn is do not let destructive heresy shipwreck your faith.

01:27:00

The pressures that lured some believers away in the first century are not unlike the pressures that you and I are facing today.

01:27:07

The culture we live in is gonna mock us. The world is gonna tempt us. The devil's gonna seek to sift us like wheat.

01:27:13

Yet Jesus Christ, who reigns victorious and who stands ready to strengthen and preserve you and keep you and hold you is there for you.

01:27:22

Brothers and sisters, cling to him. Apostasies are gonna tempt you to walk away from your faith.

01:27:29

Don't. Now, we know as Calvinists that if you're truly in Christ, you're always gonna be in Christ.

01:27:34

But my point is hold fast to your confession of faith. Contend for the faith that was once delivered to the saints,

01:27:41

Jude 2. Hold fast to your confession, Hebrews 10, 23, knowing that he who promised these things is faithful.

01:27:49

Study his word diligently. Don't be slothful and lazy. Allow his word to transform your mind and to guard your heart and to transform the way that your fingertips actually do your job and your work.

01:28:01

Pray without ceasing, for your strength isn't found in what philosophies you understand.

01:28:09

Your strength is found in communion with him. Love the means of grace. Go to a local church.

01:28:15

If you can't find a good local church, sell your house and move. It's that important. Participate in public worship.

01:28:22

Enjoy the sacraments and the weekly feasting at the Lord's table. If you don't go to a church that does the

01:28:29

Lord's table every week, that's a big one. You should find a church that does the Lord's table every week. These are our lifelines that Jesus has given us to preserve us from shipwrecking our faith.

01:28:42

Don't be a passive observer. Don't be someone who sits on the bench of your faith.

01:28:48

Be active in your relationship with Christ. As Paul exhorted the Philippians, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is

01:28:55

God who works both to will and to work in you for his good pleasure, Philippians 2, 12 through 13.

01:29:02

Brothers and sisters, the race that is set before us is not for the faint of heart.

01:29:07

We see that all the time in the first century. We see that the pains and struggles of being a

01:29:13

Christian are real. But take courage because you don't run this race in vain and you don't run this race alone.

01:29:21

The spirit of God dwells within you. The prayers of the saints surround you. The promises of Christ ensure your victory.

01:29:29

Fix your eyes on Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of your faith,

01:29:34

Hebrews 12, 2. And run with endurance. And let the fulfillment of Christ's words in the first century strengthen you and encourage you and remind you that you are more than conquerors because of him who loved you and that you are gonna finish the race and you are gonna receive the crown of life.

01:29:54

Brothers and sisters, thank God that we don't live in the first century and thank God that the

01:30:00

Holy Spirit is keeping us and holding us and protecting us from shipwrecking our faith. And praise

01:30:06

God that Jesus Christ's prophecy was fulfilled. When you read

01:30:11

Matthew 24, 10, it's not about the future, it's about the past. And when you read it, let it warm your heart that Jesus is omniscient, that he knows all things and that he knew the end from the beginning and that he spoke what he knew was going to happen and it did.

01:30:28

Let that encourage you that you don't serve a weak God, that you serve an omniscient, all -knowing

01:30:34

God who knows the end from the beginning. So brothers and sisters, press on with great joy.

01:30:42

Tackle your day with unwavering confidence. No one in the kingdom of God should limp. And until the day we see him face -to -face, be of good cheer and give all glory to the lamb who was slain, who reigns now and who reigns forever and ever and evermore, amen.

01:31:02

And with that, thank you for watching another episode of the broadcast. Please like and share this video if it was helpful for you.

01:31:09

Join as a member of the show to help us grow. And until then, I'll see you next time on the broadcast.