Have You Not Read - S1:E12

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Durham,.

David Kassin,.

And Andrew Hudson.

Thank you for tuning in with us today, and we are gonna go back to our list of questions that we've had sent in from listeners. Today we're doing a most recent question because of how much is packed in.

And we were discussing this before the podcast of where this might go, but we were all kind of piqued and interested to where we might land on all this. So we'll go ahead and ask it now. Question is, can you have tattoos now that we are in the new covenant?

And same thing for interracial couples, which I'm guessing they're asking, can we also marry interracially now that we're in the new covenant?

Michael?

Tattoos, Interracial Marriage, and the New Covenant

Yeah, so this is a good question. If you're able to read through the Bible in your lifetime, of course, we encourage you to do that. Some folks read through the Bible every year, maybe every two years.

As they do, as all of us who have done so, we get to some odd case laws in the Old Testament, some very specific instructions that we look at and think, my, how strange. Does that still apply today? For instance, in Leviticus chapter 19, we read in verse 28, amidst a list of many, you shall not, you shall not, you shall not.

We come to verse 28, and it says, you shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you. I am the Lord. So we see that verse, and it's obviously in the Old Testament.

It refers to concerns in the Old Covenant. The question is, now that we're in the new covenant, should we obey Leviticus 19, verse 28? As we look around that same verse in the context, we also read some other things.

For instance, in verse 27, you shall not shave around the sides of your head, nor shall you disfigure the edges of your beard. What about the verse after verse 28? And again, what I'm trying to model here and encourage you to do is when you read a verse, read what's around it.

Try to expand your reading to the full context. And here we're just reading a verse before and after, just as a starter. Verse 29, do not prostitute your daughter to cause her to be a harlot, lest the land fall into harlotry and the land become full of wickedness.

So when we ask the question, now that we're in the new covenant, can we have tattoos? Because we have this odd instruction in Leviticus 19, 28. Well, that's Old Covenant, that's Old Testament there and it says no tattoos.

But now we're in the new covenant, maybe I can get tattoos. If that's the logic we're going to use, then we have to apply it to the very next verse. Prostituting your daughter is a bad thing in the Old Covenant, but maybe we can in the new covenant.

Now that's pretty ludicrous, but you can see that that's not the right approach here. But this question is very good, a very important question because we have to understand how is it that the Bible instructs us to adhere to the word of God, to follow the word of God and to be in obedience to God.

We're going to get to that. The second question was about interracial marriage. Now that we're in the new covenant, can we finally have interracial marriage? The good news on that is there was lots of interracial marriage in the Old Covenant and God blessed all manner of it.

What we find is that the Israelites were told not to intermarry with the Canaanites due to the Achilles heel of idolatry, due to the influence of the false gods. What we see happened to Solomon, that Solomon married all these different wives and they turned his heart away from the Lord to their false gods.

And that's what the Lord forbade. But we see people like Rahab or Ruth, and of course there were others, who came to faith in God and believed upon the shadows of Christ and became a part of the believing community.

And it didn't matter their cultural ethnic origin, let alone the shade of their skin. There was all manner of interracial marriage going on, as long as it was of the same faith, that they were all fearing the Lord together.

That was what God mandated. And in fact, when we get to the New Covenant, we certainly don't see anything different from that. Andrew's got a great verse to read for us that really drives home the point that's being made, whether we're in the Old or the New Testament.

So in 2 Corinthians 6, I will start at verse 14. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? What communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial?

For what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God.

Yeah, so this is in full agreement with the instructions and the intentions with which God instructed his people in the Old Testament, that they were to be separate unto him. They were to fear God, and they were to be separate unto him and be holy and not to be in these unholy alliances with those who did not fear God.

And we look back there in the Old Testament, we read the case laws in Leviticus, and there's some pretty strange and very specific instructions. And we say to ourselves, well, the weird ones are not for us today, but the ones that make sense to us, we'll keep on following those.

But you see, our comfortableness with any given instruction in the Bible is not the hermeneutic we should use. It should not be the basis for us deciding whether we're going to follow parts of Scripture or not.

It's not my own personal cultural sensitivities that decides what should be followed in the Bible or not. I'm not that important. So what is it? Well, when we read the Old Testament and we see that the law of God is the expression of his good and holy character and that he provided for his people, not a burden in these laws, but a blessing, showing them how to live in godly ways and he gave them a wonderful society in which to live.

Now, of course, they griped and complained and told God that his blessing was their burden and they rebelled and, well, let's see, what was it said that Jeshurun kicked? It was the quip in the Old Testament that Israel was like an ungrateful beast who kicked against what God had given to them.

But in the end, what do we find? We find that Christ is the end of the law, the talos of the law, the goal, the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. Paul says this in Romans chapter 10 and verse 4, and in this we are reminded as he has a burden for his fellow Israelites who were still holding fast to the old covenant though the new had come.

And he said that they were seeking to establish their own righteousness. Here's the thing. If we take the law and we do not use it lawfully, as Paul says elsewhere in Galatians 4, if we use it unlawfully, then we're gonna be in trouble.

If we try to take up the law and say, well, I don't have any tattoos, therefore I'm righteous. Okay, or perhaps we might get a tattoo and say, look how holy I am that I can have a tattoo and still be a Christian.

Well, either way, what are we doing? We're just, we're showing off our own righteousness. Or perhaps it's, you know, I haven't sinned because I didn't get involved in an interracial marriage. So look at me, I'm following God's law.

Look at my righteousness. Well, that's not how we're supposed to use the law. In fact, that's not even in there. Or perhaps somebody says, look at me, look at my righteousness. I have an interracial relationship or interracial marriage.

Look how much more righteous I am than others who aren't. But either way, this kind of zeal to establish one's own righteousness is not the point. The point as is so wonderfully put in Revelation 14 is that the saints sing the song of the redeemed and follow the lamb wherever he goes.

Folks, when we follow the lamb wherever he goes, and all that he does is godly, and all that he does is righteous, and all that he does is pleasing to the father, well, we are going to be keeping the law in so far as we follow Christ because he's the end of the law.

He's our righteousness. So he shows us what it means to live godly. He shows us what it means to do things in the way that pleases God, that is in accord with God's character. So everything in the law was an expression of God's holy character.

But now that Christ has come, he is the perfect expression of who God is. Does this mean the law is no good? Oh, it's very good. It's very helpful. It teaches us a whole manner of things, but these things can only be understood in the light of Christ.

So question, somebody may be asking, is it okay for me to get a tattoo? You know, it's possible, it's possible this question is coming from a young person and there's some doubt as to whether or not I can get a tattoo and what will mom and dad think about that and so on and so forth.

Well, God still wants us to honor father and mother.

Has Ben been looking up loads of Harleys?

No, no, no, this isn't for my son. This isn't for my son. But it's about following Christ. So the questions about whether we should trim our beards or get tattoos and so on need to be brought into submission to the king.

Those need to be brought into submission to the king. Is this what it looks like to follow Christ? That's perhaps a tougher question, but a very important one.

You have individual laws, those case laws that are put next to each other and one seems like a good idea for today, the other one is like, well, maybe that's not a good idea for today, and then the next one doesn't seem to make any sense because it's more culturally relevant.

So it doesn't seem like we should be picking and choosing those individual laws. So what would you say to the person that says, look, it's in Deuteronomy, and this was the society that God set up. So we're gonna follow it.

We are going to follow these laws wherever they end up taking us because this was written by God. And if the law itself is just a commentary on the 10 Commandments, do the 10 Commandments no longer apply?

I mean, granted, maybe we shouldn't be eating oysters. They have a lot of disease and stuff in it. And this was the diet that was given to Israel and it's obviously far more healthy and all these various, various reasons.

You know, they're saying this is the law of God. How can you say that all I need to do is follow Christ and I'm keeping the law? He wrote down the law and Christ kept the law. So did Christ violate these laws?

Well, of course not. He kept the law perfectly. So if we're gonna be following him, why are we not keeping Deuteronomy perfectly?

That's a great question. I think it gets to the heart of the matter, especially this question is such an important one because we want, as believers, we want to please the Lord. We want to do the right thing.

We want to obey God's word and keep it. As James says, be more than just hearers of the word, but doers of it also. And so exactly how do we keep, after all what we talked about last time about the definition of sin, that sin is lawlessness, living as if there was no law of God to follow.

So that's what makes this question vitally important. I would say that as we pay attention to Christ and how he handles the law and gives indicators to his apostles how they are to, in light of who he is and what he has done, how they are to understand the Old Testament, the law and the writings and the prophets, that we are given direction in this regard.

So two particular examples. One that often comes up is about the Sabbath. So, you know, somebody probably has done this, but it's an interesting exercise to read through the four gospels and to see how many times Jesus got accused of breaking the Sabbath.

So that's what makes this a great example, okay? There wasn't a lot of accusation of him murdering or stealing or something, but well, that fourth commandment, he got accused of breaking that fourth commandment a lot.

And so Jesus said a lot about that. And one particular example is that at the end of Matthew chapter 11, he says, come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Of course, rest is that key word of the Sabbath.

And so the very next chapter we find Jesus and his disciples walking through the grain field and it was on the Sabbath and the disciples started grabbing heads of grain off the stalks as they were allowed to do being as poor as they were.

And they began to grind up those grains, the heads of that wheat in their hands and then separating the kernels out so they could munch on some barley as they walked along, a little bit of snack. Well, the Pharisees saw this and accused them of breaking the Sabbath.

Why?

Because they were reaping by grabbing those heads of grain. They were cooking by, well, they were threshing by separating the husks off of the kernels. And then they were cooking because they were pressing in the salt of their hands into those kernels before they ate them.

And well, reaping and threshing and cooking were not allowed on the Sabbath, that would be breaking the Sabbath. And Jesus begins to explain to them very carefully that it was impossible for his disciples to be breaking the Sabbath for one particular reason, they were with him.

And his example is with David and his, I always think of Robin Hood when I think of David and his merry men, but they go and they eat the bread of the presence, which was not lawful for them to eat, but why was it okay for them to eat?

Because, well, David is God's anointed one and here are his men and they're eating the bread of the presence and it's okay because they're with him. And what about those priests in the temple on the Sabbath day, slaughtering animals?

Anyone has ever slaughtered and butchered an animal? Let me tell you, that's hard work. And then Jesus says, why is it okay for them to do that? Well, they're in the temple, so it's okay. And this principle applies to his disciples again, because they are with Christ who is the temple.

And then Jesus says, the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. And so what he does there is, remember that Christ is the law giver. And as our righteousness, he is the law keeper. He's the law fulfiller.

And so he gets to interpret the law. He is the one who tells us what it means to follow it. And guess what? The disciples keep the Sabbath by abiding with Christ who is their rest. That's just one example.

Now, another side of it is this. When we read, Jesus will quote the law and the prophets, and he will direct our attention very carefully to it. And for instance, Paul will quote the law and use it as a precedent to make a decision.

One near and dear to my heart is the fact that I'm able to work as a full-time minister of the gospel, because you don't muzzle big dumb oxes when they thresh the grain, right? So Paul says, look, the reason why you would support anybody in gospel ministry is because you don't muzzle an ox when he's treading out the grain.

But notice what Paul does there. He takes a case law out of the Old Testament about oxes, and he applies it to preachers, to pastors. Now, Paul, that's not a very good literalistic hermeneutic there, right?

If you're going to apply it correctly, it's about oxen, not about people. Come on, Paul, you're taking out of context. No, he's not. He's inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he's doing what his Lord told him to do in reading the Old Testament, is to take it up, read it through the lens of Christ as the one who has fulfilled it all, and then make proper application of those principles having been sanctified in the light of Christ.

So yeah, there is some work that needs to be done, isn't there? The harvest, think of the harvest. Jesus sends out laborers in the harvest, and the people are gathered in, but there's still work to be done.

The grain that's gathered in needs to be threshed, and what kind of work is that? It's the work of the Word, and someone's treading on that and just doing, as I was talking to my intern the other day, sometimes rather boring work where you day in and day out, week in and week out, you just do the very next thing, kind of like an ox walking around in a circle, but that work is important in the kingdom of Christ.

What does Paul do?

He takes up the Old Testament case law and thinks of it in terms of the kingdom of Christ and then makes proper application of it. It's like Jesus talking to his disciples in Matthew 13 where he asks them, after all, telling all these parables about the kingdom, he says, did you understand all these things?

And they said, yes. Like, yeah, right, you understood it all. But they assured him, oh, we understand all these things, and he said, listen, every scribe in my kingdom, every scribe in this new thing that I'm bringing about needs to be bringing out of his storehouse things that are old and new, you see.

It's not simply going to the Old Testament and saying, oh, look, don't trim your beard. I will not trim my beard. I am righteous. No, that's not how we treat the Old Testament. We take that which is old and we bring it together with what is new, with the new covenant that Christ brings about, and we read it in light of Christ and then we can make proper application.

And the New Testament is just chock full of examples like that.

So bringing that to bear on something like the tattoo issue in the context that Israel was in and tattoos and cutting marks being something that signified most of the local pagan religions around them, is that bringing that forward, is that supposed to let us know an application that we are to look differently as a culture, as a Christian culture than around us as well?

Whether that includes tattoos or not is one of those applications from a text like the not cutting ourselves and being marked as the pagans are marked.

Well, that's a good question. I mean, the principle behind it, why was God telling them, don't do these weird things? The nations around them were doing these weird things and they had that inclination to copy them.

They were wanting to mimic, okay? They wanted to mimic the culture around them and God was busy separating them out to be their own thing. So, and again, Israel being the shadow mediator of the old covenant, they were to be bringing people to God, showing the nations the light of who God is.

And they looked exactly like the nations around them. They wouldn't be doing their job. Well, Christ is a light of the world. He's the fulfillment of Israel. He is the light of the world. And in him, we're the light of the world.

The driving question therefore is this, can I get a tattoo? Well, I mean, that question kind of bypasses a different question. In following Christ and wanting to be like Christ, why would I get a tattoo?

How does that help me be like Christ by getting a tattoo? There might be a good answer there. I don't know. But it's certainly not a question of what is permissible now. What can I get away with now? Can you please show me the line of where I can nestle up to and get as close as I can without going over it?

And then I'll know if I'm righteous or not. It's exactly what Paul was warning against in the first three verses of Romans 10 before he talks about Christ being the end of the law, unto righteousness for all who believe.

So it's about wanting to be like Christ and being renewed into him. Colossians 3 contrasts holiness and unholiness and talks about a renewal where we're being renewed into the image of God through Christ.

And it's about following him and growing up in Christ. There is at the end of Colossians 2, this is a thing I call the box of do nots. Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. Follow these rules and observe these days.

And Paul says, these have the appearance of wisdom. They have appearance of godliness, but they're not. Because godliness is being like God. And to be like God, to be fashioned after his character, well, we get that by following Jesus.

So folks are wanting those specific questions. Can I drink alcohol or not? Or okay, now that I can, how much? These are the wrong kinds of questions. We're supposed to be following the lamb wherever he goes.

Would you say that some of those questions, trying to come up to the line without crossing it kind of questions are indicative of a little less mature thinking when we come to the text? Because I mean, that's what I'm thinking is going from Old Testament of having the rules to guide and then coming into the New Testament, which is maturity and the wisdom that we have in Christ for all of these.

Paul says it's going from a slave to a son. And when a slave is always thinking about the rules and up to what stage can I do this? And what's the bare minimum I can get away with? And so on and so forth.

That's the way the slave thinks. But when you become a son, now that the law, that the law has been our schoolmaster. And people often use that in terms of like, the moral law shows us our need for a savior.

Boy, does it ever.

But what Paul's dealing with is all of the law. The entirety of the law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, because Christ fulfills the entirety of the law. And now that we're sons in Christ, we should not be thinking as though we are slaves, which is Paul's point in Galatians 4.

If you track with his thinking, he's like, why are you thinking like slaves again? Why are you going back to seasons and days and years? Why are you trying to be enslaved again?

Well, I'll tell you,.

Sometimes it seems easier to stay a slave. Being a son, being a full-fledged responsible steward, where I've got decisions to make and things aren't clear anymore. Well, you know, welcome to adulthood.

And it seems like we're having loads of those problems culturally right now, where a majority want to be slaves. They want to be cuddled by either their government or somebody to take care of them when times get tough.

Tell me what to wear, tell me what to ingest, tell me what to say, I'll repeat after you. Tell me where to go, how long to stay there.

Well, there's a group of people that are safe in boxes and have their meals provided for them and their day is regimented out and it's all paid for by the state and they're called prisoners.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say government schools.

Yeah, yeah, I thought you were describing school children.

Might call both of those slavery as well,.

Zing.

Dispensationalism, Israel, and the Church

Now that we have wrapped up that question, we are gonna go ahead on to the parenthetical part of our Have You Not Read? And we're going back to C .I. Schofield's work that David's been jumping into. Last time we defined the terms, we had a short history.

But now we are going to try to do our best to lay out some modern distinctives, where if you hear them, you would know, hey, that's dispensationalism or that comes from the school of dispensationalism.

And we're gonna let David pick apart some of the book as well. And maybe later on in this episode or the episode after this, we will also be trying to decipher or see some of the manifestations in history that we've seen since its inception till now.

So I think what we could do, Andrew, you and I, maybe Adil when you jump in, think of maybe name one thing that's a manifestation popularly today that comes from dispensationalism and then David, you tell us the background of why that is dispensationalism.

Sure. Sound fair?

Absolutely.

You wanna start, Michael?

Okay, let's start with one. I'll have an example. When I was a pastor in Tennessee, it was part of our custom to eat together as is our custom here. But every once in a while, we would, all as a church, all 30 of us, we would caravan down south to Mississippi and go to Walnut, Mississippi to the subway at the crossroads there on State Highway 72.

And we would flood this little subway and go in there and eat. And we're standing in line and just talking as church folks do. And the mother of one of our church members was visiting and she was there.

And she was talking to me about all the different authors she liked to read and listen to on the radio and all that kind of thing. And I was just listening to her. And we talked about how blessed we were and so on.

And then she told me something.

She said, I am just so blessed. God has blessed me in so many ways. There's only one thing that I would be more blessed if I had been born a Jew. And she considered that being born a Jew was on a higher plane of blessedness than any other race being born.

Now, I, in my mind, identified that as dispensationalism. Why do you think that is dispensationalism?

There is, of course, verses where Paul talks about of what benefit is there being a Jew? Well, great in every respect. And the dispensationalists, especially the history of it, read the Old Testament and see this group of people.

And Schofield himself says, you open up the Bible, two-thirds or more of the Bible is focused on this people group, Israel, the Jews, this is God's chosen people.

Boy, that sounds like a group I wanna be a part of.

Who wouldn't? They were set apart not just for blessing but for earthly blessing, for preeminence in government, be the center of the world. God always keeps his promises. And if you, I mean, you really wanna be doubly blessed, well, what if you were a Jew and then you became a believer, you're a Messianic Jew?

You got kind of the double whammy there.

Is that a technical term?

It's a theological term. So this idea in dispensationalism in particular puts that emphasis on the nation of Israel and says that God will not allow the nation of Israel, not allow the Jewish people to die out because there must be, at the end of time, at the end of the church age, he has promises that he must keep because he's God and God does not lie.

So, well, if you're a Jew, you know that your family's not gonna die out. And she could see the blessings that God had, the special love that this group had. And if you translate that to the US government, especially in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond, when the nation of Israel became a state again in 1947, all the dispensationalists were ecstatic.

And if you were a friend of Israel, you're going to have blessing yourself because that is exactly what happened in the Old Testament. Those nations that traded with Israel, those nations that supported them, those nations that were friendly to them were blessed.

And those who attacked them, those who came against them were continually struck down. So God protects the Jews, protects Israel. And they will cite everything from 1940s. They will go up through the Arabization of the Ruhr in the 1960s.

And they will say, look at all these people. Every time a nation like Egypt goes against Israel, God smacks them down. Don't mess with the Jews. Don't mess with them because they're God's special people.

They're not the church.

Yeah, okay, got it. That's helpful. All right, Andrew or Dylan?

I would have gone into asking, there seems to be a conception that the crossed flags of the United States of America and the current nation of Israel being the priority to maintain, Zionism is defined in many different ways, but it seems as if Israel proper, the nation state currently existing now in 2022, is whatever they do is good and right and justifiable.

And so even Christians would say that their treatment of people groups in their lands against international law is up to them if they want to, because it's their land.

Dispensational Christians would, at least the ones that I've spoken to and the environment in which I was initially a Christian myself would say emphatically, all of that land belongs to the Jews and anybody else that says otherwise is not being biblical.

And I can open up the book of Genesis and I can open up the Old Testament and I can actually map it out. And it says anyone, any other people groups that are in there, from Euphrates to the Nile to right here at the River Jordan and beyond a little bit and down to the Mediterranean, this is Israel's land and anybody who goes against them is going to be cast out and anybody who supports Israel is gonna receive that kind of blessing because they're fighting for God's people in God's place in that area because the Jews are special to God.

And then it can quote those verses where it says, they're the apple of my eye.

Yeah, that's one of the questions I was gonna ask that was starting out like that is how do you get a lot of conservative Christians to support and fund the beginning of a socialist state? You make it through the Zionist movement and that's exactly what it was.

It was actually a largely godless and socialist movement to begin with and Christians supported and funded it, which is a little bit mind boggling to me.

I think it would be very important to separate Christian Zionism and some of these are from the dispensationalists, there's so many of these isms. And in the modern state of Israel in the Middle East, speaking as an international relations major, the modern state of Israel is a liberal democracy that is a free market in the Knesset.

They have Arabs and Palestinians. They have, it's really a very Western jewel in an area of groups that are kind of hostile to the West, mostly because the people that came there came from Europe. So they established a European style democracy in the Middle East and they are an ally in that respect because they think along the same lines.

There are very passionate ultra-Orthodox Jews that do not think that the modern state of Israel is legitimate because God hasn't established it. It was established by treaty. So this is an incredibly complex, convoluted issue and there could be some people listening to this that says, that smacks of anti-Semitism.

Other people that are listening to this and says, wait, are you pro-Jew or are you not pro-Jew? So it's not really the issue. The issue is why do some dispensationalists when they read the Old Testament see these blessings to Israel?

Is that a motivation for them supporting the modern state of Israel? For some it is. For the question that Michael, that you had asked, it says, oh, I wish I was a Jew. For some of them it is. It's how they parse out the scriptures themselves and depending on the flavor of it, Scofield is one of them who said, the error that many people make is that Adam was in the church.

No, Adam is not because the church wasn't there yet. Not the patriarchs, they're not in the church. In fact, the church didn't exist during the time of Christ. So the followers of Christ were not in the church.

His disciples there, the church started in Acts 2 and it ends in 1 Thessalonians 4. There's your parenthesis and then the focus goes back on Israel into the end times. So that is the mindset of Scofield in his work and it has permeated and offshowed into many different areas, especially in American Baptist life and in the independent church movement in the early 20th century.

That is why you really should read this book and find out for yourself what he actually taught. And there are many dispensational friends of mine where if they had read Scofield says, what do you mean the followers of Jesus aren't in the church?

Because it didn't start until Acts 2. Well, then I guess the rest of the Bible doesn't apply to us.