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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer
George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend
Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,
Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet
Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 18th day of July 2024.
Before I introduce my guest and our topic today, I just have a very important reminder.
All men in ministry leadership, whether you're a pastor, an elder, and by the way, I believe that's the same office, a deacon, a parachurch leader, whatever position of leadership you have in the church, if you're a man, you are invited to the next free biannual
Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon, which will be held Thursday, October 10th, 11 a .m.
to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is
Perry County, Pennsylvania. For the very first time, we are featuring our guest speaker, coming all the way from London, England, Dr.
Joe Boot, the founder and president of the Ezra Institute. If you would like to attend this free event, send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com,
chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. You will be automatically registered for free, and not only is the admission free and the lunch free and your time of edification by hearing
Dr. Joseph Boot's message free and your time of rest, relaxation, fun, feasting, and fellowship all free, everybody is going to receive a heavy sack of free brand new books personally selected by me and donated by Christian publishers all over the
United States and United Kingdom. It's all absolutely free. So if you would like to take advantage of this extraordinary free event, please send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com
and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. Well, today, backed by popular demand, is a returning guest who
I love interviewing, and I'm hoping that he is loving being interviewed just as much as I love doing the interviewing.
His name is David Reese. By now, he is certainly no stranger to the
Iron Sharpens Iron listening audience. He is pastor of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and the
CEO of ArmoredRepublic .com. Today, we are continuing our series of the history of the world from creation until now.
This is part two in our series, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese.
Brother, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about the history of the world that is laid out in the scriptures and continue to help people to see our story and the story that God has revealed.
Amen. Well, as we always do, please remind our listeners or inform listeners for the first time, depending upon if they've heard you before, about Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona.
Thank you, Chris. Basically, Puritan Reformed Church is a church that is dedicated to the authority of Scripture.
Our desire is to see doctrine taught according to Scripture alone, to see the worship of the church be governed by Scripture alone, and to see the government of the church to be according to Scripture alone.
So we desire to be very careful to maintain the Puritan principle that the church ought to be reformed after what's revealed in Scripture.
And so we believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith is a faithful summary of the doctrines contained in Scripture.
We love to sing the Psalms, and we are a congregation that is in the middle of a period of growth, praise the
Lord, but also that we're going through a process of having some men trained for office.
And so we're in a period where we want to start to increase our ability to minister into the community and to be able to increase our evangelism.
And so we're hopeful that others will join us in that work of seeing the truth taught, seeing right worship performed and given to the
Lord, and also to begin to see a more aggressive and assertive effort to evangelize and to see discipleship accelerated.
Well, if anybody is visiting Phoenix, Arizona, or if they are actually living in the
Phoenix area, or if you have family, friends, and loved ones in or near Phoenix, Arizona, please visit the website to find out more about this valuable congregation,
PuritanPHX, definition of phoenix .com, PuritanPHX .com.
And God willing, we will remind you of that website later on. Also, let our listeners know about this wonderful business where you are the
CEO that, along with Puritan Reformed Church, sponsors Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Armored Republic.
Yeah, thank you, brother. So Armored Republic is a business that we sell principally body armor.
But the idea is that we believe body armor is a tool of liberty.
And so we believe that it's a part of the kit that persons should have, that men should have for the purpose of resisting tyranny.
So people should own a good rifle and a good set of body armor, and it allows you to be able to defend yourself, to defend your family, and to be able to rally around lawful magistrates to see the defense of Christian liberty.
And furthermore, we also sell things like inserts for backpacks, where you can easily have essentially pistol armor in a bag where nobody would even know you've got it.
And the reality is that 95 % of ordinary gun crimes are committed with things that would be stopped by that pistol armor.
So I would encourage people in kind of an everyday use to look at the possibility of having something like a pistol armor plate in a bag that they carry ordinarily, and then you've just got armor with you.
And so those are the main things there. But I wanted to point out that I've got a major thing going on with what's called the
Reese Fund. And so ReeseFund .com, that takes people to it, that's an opportunity for people to invest with me in helping to buy additional companies and have them have a
Christian culture, Christian mission statement, Christian way that they project themselves into the world, to try to have capital be provided to make it so that we can do things as Christians in terms of the business world as a part of trying to have the word of God applied in every area of life.
And so I'm looking for accredited investors to help with that, have some opportunities that are ongoing, including some acquisitions of businesses that we're in the middle of.
And so just that's for anybody who's interested in potentially helping to add on to the number of Christian businesses that we can have in the country and to have opportunities for investment there for accredited investors.
Now, I know the website for Armored Republic is ArmoredRepublic .com, ArmoredRepublic .com,
but what is the contact information involving this investment opportunity? Yeah, so that is
Reecefund .com, and Reece is R -E -E -C -E. And people could also just email me at David at Reecefund .com,
which is David at Reecefund .com. Great. Well, as I already announced, we are continuing our series on the history of the world from creation until now.
This is a series that will continue until 2056. And we are actually in part two of this series, and I was wondering if you could give us a recap of what we've addressed, and then we could pick up where you left off.
Fantastic. So what we started with last time is the realization that God is eternal, and so he's outside of time, and time itself is a creation.
And so we saw that the scriptures teach us that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And so we have this, there's a start to time. And a pastor named
James Usher did a magnificent job of kind of calculating out the dates in the scriptures, and has provided a very useful outline there.
There's some other scholars that have done a great job of looking at some of the details, and so there's some very excellent scholarship by Christian men who are conservative
Bible believers who have kind of mapped out the timeline, and they're very close to each other.
The calculations on points of difference for the major dates are generally very minor based on some claim of a technicality or another.
And so we get back to the creation of the world at 4004 BC, and we're about 6 ,000 years into world history now.
And that's where we are as we listen to the show or as you and I talk about it.
And so that we talked about the fact that God made the world from nothing. We talked about the fact that we have the days of creation laid out where God is creating space, and then he's forming it, and he's filling it.
And he gave the dominion mandate to man to basically take the earth and to form it, to subdue it, and to fill it as a continuation of work that the man has been given authority by God, and that the knowledge of God will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea as the believers are increased and as the knowledge of God in them increases.
And so there's this mandate to do that work. Now, we saw the days and the big things to remember regarding those days having to do with the first day
God created light and separated it from darkness, and he created the heavens and the earth, and evening and morning were used to differentiate.
We had the second day with the ordering the heavens and the water cycle, and preparing the heavens and the sea to supply the land.
On the third day, God ordered the land and the sea to prepare the land and the habitat for man.
On the fourth day, he created the things that habitate the heavens in terms of for signs and seasons, days and years, the greater light and the lesser light in terms of the sun and the moon.
On the fifth day, he filled the first heaven with birds and the sea with the beasts of the sea.
And on the sixth day, he filled the land and gave beasts to the land, but he also created man, created in the image of God, which is rationality, gave him authority over all that was made.
And then we got to the seventh day, which was the Sabbath, where there is this
God commands rest. And he gave his example of rest. And so we had the week as a part of what
God gave there. When we realized that the history there with the creation of man, there was this giving of the covenant of works where we had a tree of life, and there was a tree, you might call it the tree of death, which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And so having these two trees to emblemize the reward for obedience and the punishment for disobedience, we have the covenant of works there, which is a covenant of justice that can be summarized as do this and live.
And what we found is that when Eve was created and marriage was given, we had the individual with Adam, then we have the household created.
And those two covenant institutions, the individual has responsibility before God. And then the family, as a covenant institution, there's a responsibility as family where the actions of the leaders of the family, the husband and the wife, can potentially have effects across generations.
So the man has a leadership responsibility. The wife is under the authority of the husband, but has a responsibility over the estate and the children and servants.
And so we find that this household is there. So we have these two major institutions, the individual and the household.
And shortly thereafter, after the making of those, and by the way, notice only two genders, only two sexes, male and female, that God made.
And so what we find is we have that shortly thereafter, Satan comes, he tempts us, the fall, and we have the curse given to man of strife, toil, and death, physical death.
And there's this issue of spiritual death. And so we have a promise that's given there after the fall, where God establishes the covenant of grace with Adam, where he has a promise essentially of, as opposed to do this and live and the covenant of works, we have the covenant of grace, that the just by faith shall live.
And there's this promise of the seed of the woman crushing the head of the serpent. And so Adam and Eve believe this promise.
Adam says that his wife, he will call her Eve because she's the mother of all the living. So there's this idea that the death is not immediate and that there's spiritual life with the giving of faith.
And God gives two major symbols there, clothing to cover nakedness and shame, to point to the righteousness of Christ that covers us.
And also animal sacrifice was given to point to the need of another to pay for our sins, the death of another to pay for sins.
And we went into Cain and Abel and the idea that Cain offered a sacrifice that God did not accept.
Abel offered a sacrifice that God did accept. And so we saw this idea of the worship that God commands is important to give.
And when Cain killed Abel, we ran into this differentiation of the city of God and city of man.
But there was no magistrate. So there was nobody to kill Cain. God didn't give authority to execute
Cain. Instead, violence fills the earth. So murder is used to largely destroy the church.
And then the seduction of men chasing after unbelieving women out of a desire for their beauty, a lusting after their beauty, as opposed to caring to have godly women that they marry to raise a godly seed.
And that led to the flood. And so at the flood, there's a destruction of this violent world. God saves four families, eight men and women.
And he reaffirms covenant with Noah and expands the covenant to now make it so that not only is there animal sacrifice, but there's the eating of the animals.
So you have, as opposed to just a sin offering or burnt offering, now you have this peace offering idea of being able to take in and enjoy the nourishment, the nurture, the peace, the fat of the land is a part of it.
But to not eat the blood, because the blood is a symbol for life. And the blood of the animal and its sacrifice, the idea that the life is given as a substitute must be maintained.
And so the sword of the magistrate is also given to restrain evil. The sword of the magistrate is to punish the wicked and to protect the innocent.
And by the time we've gotten to Noah, we're already about 1 ,656 years into the history of the world.
We are one fourth of the way through world history so far. And so that right there, that little summary, that's a quarter of the world history.
And then you get into this idea of we have after the flood and after Noah is given this extension of the covenant, the add -on to the covenant of grace, including the rainbow as a symbol for the preservation of the world so the church can live and grow in it.
We then have fall into sin and apostasy quick again.
And the world has this huge period where there's empire building and enslaving that occurs with Nimrod, leading to the building of the
Tower of Babel. And then we have God causing the nations to be scattered with the table of nations for 70 nations with all these different languages so that man is spread out across the face of the earth.
And so there's this way in which the empire building of the city of man is restrained so that human empires, beast empires, don't destroy the city of God.
And so the languages help to separate people on a practical level that prevents a total consolidation into centralized power and encourages sort of a decentralization de facto and prevents this world empire from being consolidated for a period of time.
And at the end of a period dealing with another 300 years or so, we get to this period of time where Abraham is called out.
And so now here we are at actually, forgive me, about 400 years later with Abraham after Noah, and we're now at about 2092 years after the creation of the world.
So we're now one third of the way through world history. We ended last time with Abraham, and I want to make sure that we can spend some time looking at some of the overlap of Abraham and Isaac's life.
But the last time we managed to get through about one third of world history. So that's a lot to get through in a couple hours, but we did it.
And so we come to Abraham with additional information to be looked at and adding in as we see the history of the world and of the church as a history of our people.
Amen. Well, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we return, we're going to enter into uncovered territory in our series.
And if you have any questions for our guest today, David Reese, submit them to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,
ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.
Don't go away. We'll be right back. Armored Republic exists to equip free men with tools of liberty to defend
God -given rights against the twin threats of tyranny and chaos. If you own a rifle to resist tyrants and criminals, then you should own body armor and a med kit for the same reasons.
A rifle stops evil. Body armor and a med kit keep you in the fight and preserve your life.
Armored Republic is a body of free craftsmen united to create tools of liberty. We are honored to be your armorsmith of choice.
Civilian ownership of body armor is about increasing decentralized power and, by comparison, reducing the advantages of centralized power.
The danger of centralized power is often represented by the word king. As Americans, we hate the word king applied to any mere man.
We are Armored Republic. And in a republic, there is no king but Christ.
Arm yourself with tools of liberty at armoredrepublic .com. Hello, I'm Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You with John McArthur.
I've been a frequent guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I highly recommend this show. But today
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I'm Pastor Bill Shishko of The Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac, Long Island.
I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio program hosted by my longtime friend and brother,
Chris Arnzen, in the highest esteem, and I'm thrilled that you're listening today. I'm also delighted that Iron Sharpens Iron is partnering with one of my favorite resources for Reformed Christian literature for decades now.
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Oh, and make sure that you tell them you heard about them on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Greetings.
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We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com.
But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.
Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.
In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt
God's pleasure when he ran. He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God.
I sense that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.
That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.
I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the
Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.
That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.
That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.
I'm Dr. Joseph Piper, president emeritus and professor of systematic and applied theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Every Christian who's serious about the deformed faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the
Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity by Dr. Joseph Morecraft.
It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism. It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.
Dr. Morecraft is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, and I urge everyone looking for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.
For details on the eight -volume commentary, go to westminstercommentary .com, westminstercommentary .com.
For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,
heritagepresbyterianchurch .com. Please tell Dr. Morecraft and the saints at Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia that Dr.
Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sent you. We here at Iron Sharpens Iron Radio praise
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Go to royaldiadem .com and mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with David Reese, and we are in part two of a series we are calling
A History of the World from Creation Until Now. And if you do have a question, our email address is
ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. So, Pastor Reese, if you could pick up where you left off then.
So we're getting back to Abraham. And so I want everybody to remember the four big covenant institutions, which are the individual, the household, the church, and the state.
And we have the church with the covenant of grace back in Genesis 3. We went through Noah.
We had the state established with Noah in Genesis 9. And we're at Abraham. And what we find with Abraham is he's given a symbol that distinguishes his household and those that covenant with him, those that are bought into his house and those that are born into his house.
It distinguishes that people from other people. And that symbol that was given was circumcision.
And so in Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham. And we have there this famous line that Abraham believed
God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. And then we also have, in Genesis 17, this giving of the symbol of the covenant.
And there's this weird language where it says that this is the covenant, is what it says, that circumcision itself is the covenant.
And that gives to us what's called sacramental language. And sacramental language is this language where a thing that's a symbol is used to be talked about as the thing that it symbolizes.
And so the covenant is actually the promises that were given back in Genesis 15. But the sign of the covenant, circumcision, is given there in Genesis 17.
And it's supposed to represent that covenant. It represents the promises of God that are given to Abraham.
Now, Abraham and his wife are, one of the promises they understand that they receive from God is that there's going to be a child that's given.
And Abraham's old and his wife, Sarah, is old. And so the idea that they're going to have a child seems unrealistic to them.
So they contrive this plan, this sin, to have
Abraham take a concubine, take a slave wife, and to have a child through her.
And that is, of course, a violation of the seventh commandment. It's a type of adultery. But also, it is not what
God had commanded. God was saying that he is going to provide a child through the lawful marriage that Abraham has through Sarah.
And so this sinful plan is something that results in the birth of Ishmael.
And then later on, God causes Isaac, the child who was promised to be born.
And Isaac is famous in the line of scripture. We have
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as listed out as the great patriarchs. Isaac is provided a wife.
Abraham sends out a servant to find a wife. He comes back, and Isaac has a wife.
We are told that Sarah dies and that Abraham marries a woman named Keturah.
And so then, right after that, we have
Abraham's death and his burial. And we end up with, sort of, in Genesis 25, this line where we look at Isaac and Ishmael.
And Isaac has a number of kings that come from his line. Sorry, Ishmael has a number of kings that come from his line.
And Isaac leads into having, we have
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He leads into Israel, or Jacob, and he has 12 sons.
And those 12 sons become the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel.
So we have Isaac, and Isaac has a number of issues that come up, including the famous birth of Jacob and Esau.
And we have that great differentiation between Jacob and Esau, where Esau is supposed to represent the nation of Edom that will come later.
But Esau also, even though he's born in a covenant family, even though he's circumcised and separated from the world, he sells his birthright.
He does not believe. We're told that he, still, we have this issue of unbelievers born into the houses of believers, and this danger of evil that comes even inside of Christian households.
So there's this danger of unbelief coming out of our own households.
There's danger of people being raised in the faith and apostatizing. And so we have this contrast of Jacob and Esau.
We're told that Jacob, God loved, and Esau, he hated. And, of course, that's used by Paul in the book of Romans to help to show that there is an eternal purpose of God.
And we need to remember that God's purpose in history is to glorify himself, and in glorifying himself, he shows his justice, and he shows his mercy.
And so Jacob is used to display the mercy of God. Now, when we continue with Isaac's life, he has run -ins with kings, and he has this run -in with a king named
Abimelech, where there's a dispute about property, and there's this constant pushing that occurs where the unjust, the wicked in the world, will seek to take the possessions of the righteous.
And Isaac manages to, essentially, he gives and gives until he reaches a point where he has to hold on to some property and to prevent his family from being oppressed.
And so he ends up forming an agreement with Abimelech where there's a recognition of the distinct lines of authority that they have.
And so we see this theme that comes up over and over again, where the wicked of the world would oppress the righteous, and the righteous, even in seeking to be peaceable, even in turning the other cheek, if they will not defend themselves, will not resist tyranny, will not flee oppression when they don't have the power to fight, we have this continual message that there's a danger that the world would seek to stomp out the church.
So God providentially preserves his church. God also strengthens his church to use the ordinances of God to convert people and bring them in, and also causes people who are
Christians to defend themselves, to use institutions like the civil magistracy to see that justice is administered and that evil is restrained.
Now, one of the things that happens as we come closer to the end of Isaac's life is there's this story where Esau is the favored son of Isaac, and Jacob is the favored son of his mother.
And so the two of them are a bit at odds here. And when we find that what happened, the conspiracy between Jacob and his mother, sorry, between Isaac and his mother to go deceive
Jacob and to convince Jacob to give a blessing, forgive me,
I just messed up the wording there, that Jacob and his mother were going to deceive Isaac and cause
Isaac to bless Jacob so that he could receive the blessing that Isaac intended to give to Esau.
And so there's this process of coming and smelling like Esau and feeling like Esau, because Isaac is blind at this point, incapable really of seeing, and so there's this deception that occurs, which is followed shortly thereafter by Jacob running away.
And when he runs away, he's trying to flee Esau's wrath. And in running away, he ends up meeting a woman that he wants to marry named
Rachel, and he ends up promising seven years of labor to Laban, Rachel's father, to be able to marry
Rachel. And what happens is Jacob is then deceived by Laban in a similar way to how
Jacob deceived Isaac. And so what happens is the inability to see is used to make it so that Jacob ends up marrying
Leah. And then Laban extracts another seven years of labor out of Jacob to make him earn
Rachel. So he ends up working 14 years, and then there's another seven years where he works for Laban, and there's this constant changing of his wages that occurs, so that Jacob and his house end up fleeing away.
And we're introduced to this theme that one of the great problems that continues to happen with Christians is the failure to keep what
God commands, the failure to do what God commands, that we need salvation by grace.
That's emphasized with Abraham. It's emphasized with Isaac and Isaac unjustly favoring
Esau. It's emphasized with Jacob and the fact that Jacob has cheated his father, cheated his brother, and he has also had this situation where he got cheated in a similar way to how he had previously cheated his own father.
And so we end up with Jacob being an emblem for us of the reality of salvation by grace, that we are not capable of earning our own salvation, and that even his house has failures in it, mixtures in it, where he runs away and his family takes his wife, his favored wife
Rachel, takes idols out of the house of Laban and runs away with them. So eventually
Jacob ends up leading his family to put away their idols and this need for repentance and to remove the unclean things.
But this occurs relatively late in the life of Jacob. And so the weakness of the church and its need for God to not only save it out of its guilt, but also to see
God's mercy extended in such a way where we grow in terms of our ability to do what is right, and God reduces the power of sin.
It's such a powerful thing. It's displayed in the life of Jacob. We need God to, in his mercy, cause the power of sin to be diminished in us.
And so as Jacob realizes more and more his need to devote himself with God, we have the famous wrestling with God that occurs where he is about to meet
Esau. He's running away from Laban because he's taken his family away. He's taken the idols out.
His wife has taken the idols out of Laban's house. Laban chases them down. Jacob is able to make a covenant with Laban that they're going to leave each other alone.
There's a line where God is going to guard them from each other. And as Jacob is fleeing back towards his ancestral home, he hears that Esau is coming to meet him.
And he is fearful that Esau is going to kill him and destroy his family and his children.
And what you find is Jacob prays. He's wrestling with God, and there's this literal wrestling with a physical manifestation of God that occurs.
And so we are reminded of the need to come before God and to wrestle, to pray.
But in reality, what we have in our lives is there are many troubles that God brings into our lives, and when we're in the midst of trouble, we are reminded to turn back to God, to realize that our happiness, our security, our protection comes from him, and to wrestle with him in prayer, to call down the promises of God, to argue with God that he would bless us, and to not let him go until he does.
And so that application in the life of Jacob is clearly on display.
As we move forward, there is this meeting of Jacob and Esau, where they are able to come to a place where there's peace.
Esau forgives and accepts Jacob. We have Jacob being established in the land of Canaan, and there is this horrible incident where his daughter,
Dinah, is seduced. Some people will interpret it as a rape.
My understanding is that there's a seduction that occurs, and there's a marriage that's going to occur as a result of that, that fornication happens.
And so what happens is there's this agreement to then have Dinah marry a man who is essentially a prince of Shechem.
Now, we've had the birth of the sons of Jacob, and the sons of Jacob that are born to him again are the men who are the leaders of the tribes, the patriarchs of the tribes from which the tribes will come.
But these men, of them we have the firstborn is Reuben, who is viewed as unstable, but even after that you have
Simeon and Levi. And we all know Levi is the head of that tribe that the priesthood would come from.
But when we have Reuben and Simeon and Levi, Simeon and Levi apparently have a special relationship because they go together, they conspire together in evil to deal with the men of Shechem.
You see, what happens is when Dinah is seduced, what we find is there's an agreement that Dinah will be allowed to marry the young man from Shechem if the city of Shechem covenants with God.
And so this is the first time that we have an example of an unbelieving group of people that are agreeing to take on the sign of the covenant and to make profession about the
God of the Bible. And so there's this broad covenanting that occurs citywide, taking on a circumcision and agreement to acknowledge the
God of the Bible. This would be sort of like a whole city being baptized, everybody there agreeing and there's this baptism that would occur.
Well, these men all agree to be circumcised. And in response to this,
Simeon and Levi, they go. And while the men are healing, when they're incapable of moving because they're in pain,
Simeon and Levi go and they kill all the men of the city. This would be sort of like taking men and having them, you know, repent of their sins, acknowledge their need for salvation, to agree to be baptized and then drowning them in the midst of their baptisms.
So this act of Simeon and Levi is a horrific act of breaking covenant and killing people who have agreed to join you in covenant, to join you in the church.
They're acknowledging their wrongness of this seduction that occurs and at the same time seeking to have peace.
So that destruction creates a way in which Jacob is very concerned about how there is a loss of credibility of the family in the midst of the people.
And in Jacob's concern about this, he expresses worry that the people will find them to be sort of a stench in the land.
So Simeon and Levi's actions there, we have Reuben who gets disqualified from being the one who receives the double portion of inheritance.
We have the same thing with Simeon and Levi. And you end up with this interesting reality that Judah is the one through whom
Christ will come. And we have also the reality that he becomes the one who is now the double portion heir as a result of various actions that have occurred by his older brothers.
And so as we come into that incident, what we find is that there's a death of Isaac.
And Jacob, as he is an older and older man, we end up in this situation where there begin to be disputes amongst the sons of Jacob.
And this begins for us a major transition where we have Joseph, who is one of the sons of Jacob, and he begins to receive favoritism.
And Joseph, as a recipient of favoritism, we have the famous multicolored coat. And the multicolored coat makes it so that Joseph is viewed as being favored by his father.
And his brothers more and more begin to become frustrated with him. Now, Joseph also has dreams, and he tells his family about these dreams.
And these dreams have to do with him being raised up in authority. These dreams and the coat together result in the brothers of Joseph conspiring to kill him.
But ultimately, they end up selling him into slavery. And this selling into slavery results in Joseph being in Egypt as a slave, which will, of course, lead into the enslavement, ultimately, of the whole of the line of Jacob.
Now, there's this story in Genesis 38 that comes up that brings our attention to Judah.
And we're reminded of Judah, and he has this unsavory interaction with Tamar, where he ultimately ends up fathering the line that Christ will come through through this woman,
Tamar. We return back to the story of Joseph immediately after that. That little interlude in Genesis 38 is important because it points us to the line of Christ.
But it takes us then, in Genesis 39, we get to Joseph being a slave in Egypt. As a slave in Egypt, he ends up doing extremely well for his master.
He manages his property, makes him extremely wealthy. And we have a woman who comes, and the wife of his master seeks to seduce him.
And Joseph refuses. In the refusing, he has a false accusation. And this false accusation that's brought against Joseph is something that apparently, rather than giving him due process, the process that was given to him was roughly equivalent to the process that was utilized in the
Me Too movement where we just say we need to believe women and we need to not give due process to men.
And so Joseph ends up getting thrown into prison without a just basis of him being thrown into prison.
And while he's in prison for this false claim by the wife of Potiphar, the master of Joseph, we find that he is excellent in his work in prison as well.
And he becomes the man who's in charge of the prison. Now, this prison, by the way, Potiphar, his old master, was the captain of the guard for Pharaoh.
And as captain of the guard, he also would likely have been running this prison that's attached to the palace.
And so that being the case, as opposed to killing a man who is charged with adultery with his own wife, he throws him into a prison and ultimately makes him in charge of that prison, which would suggest to me that Potiphar doesn't even necessarily believe the charges that are brought against Joseph.
But instead, he is simply going along with some sort of a charge to save face and to avoid having the shame of his wife being at fault.
But still allows Joseph to be in the prison and takes advantage of the benefits of Joseph's managerial skill and his honesty by allowing him to run the prison.
While in prison, what we find with Joseph is that he has other political prisoners that he meets, including men who were serving
Pharaoh. And these men have dreams while they are in prison.
And Joseph is given the power of God to interpret these dreams.
This is a prophetic gifting. And this is an important thing that we find. We find this idea in scripture that dreams are given as a type of revelation.
But here's something that's interesting. Without the explanation, the visions or the images in the dreams don't themselves provide information.
We find this out because the men have these dreams and they don't know what they mean. And so Joseph explains the meaning of the dreams.
They have prophecies in them of things that are going to happen. One man is going to be killed and the other man will be restored to his station. And the prophecy of Joseph is fulfilled.
Later on, this man makes a promise that he's going to tell Pharaoh that Joseph was in prison and he would seek to have him released.
But it doesn't happen. And the man remembers his promise and comes back to the need to talk to Joseph when
Pharaoh has a dream that he doesn't understand. And so Pharaoh has these dreams. Nobody can explain the meaning of these dreams.
But ultimately, Joseph, as a prophet, is called upon to interpret the dream. And he does interpret the dream.
And the dreams are a set of dreams that mean the same thing. They have to do with the idea that there's going to be seven years of plenty, and seven years there's going to be a time of famine.
And so Joseph comes up with a plan for how to deal with this. He not only prophesies what's going to happen, but he comes up with a plan of how to deal with this scenario.
He says what you should do is impose 20 % taxes, and during those years where there's lots of growth, take those 20 % taxes, hold them in a granary, and ultimately use those during the time of the famine.
And we have this interesting problem where Joseph has a vision that he properly interprets, but he also has a plan that he comes up with.
And I think that when we come back we should talk about that plan of Joseph and what it is that is laid out there and the lawfulness of that plan.
Wow, you are timing it perfectly because we have to go to our midway break right now. And if anybody has a question, submit it to ChrisOrensen at gmail .com.
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And before we pick up where you left off on Jacob, one of the most fascinating and important figures in the entirety of the
Holy Scriptures, we do have a listener named
Ormond, and Ormond is located in Washington Terrace, Utah.
And Ormond asks, I have heard that although we know from biblical theology that every human other than Jesus Christ himself sinned, that there is no record in the
Bible of any specific mention of Joseph sinning. However, I was wondering if you think the way he was flaunting to his brothers his father's preference of him, if that was sin, bragging as it were.
That's an interesting question. If we look back at how he's interacting, you know, the interpretations of him variously are that he is kind of setting a stumbling stone before his brothers.
I don't know that I could make that clear. I don't know that I have a clear view of whether that is sin, but I would say that we find that there are at least two places where we have record of him sinning beside that.
So even if you interpreted the view that Joseph is not creating a stumbling stone for his brothers, not flaunting his favoritism that he's receiving, not flaunting sort of a promise from God or a prophecy in a way that's sinful, you still end up with him using deception with his brothers later on in a way that is a violation of the ninth commandment.
And you also find difficulty with what we're about to look at in terms of the way that he governs during the period of time of the seven years of plenty.
Okay, we'll pick up where you want to leave. So when we find in Genesis 41 that there's the plan, we have first of all the prophecy, the prophecy that there's going to be seven years of plenty and there's going to be seven years of famine.
And so that right there is revelation given in the dreams. There we just have
Joseph interpreting the dream that's given by God to Pharaoh.
That's just revelation. But in verse 33, what we have is a plan that's proposed, and this plan is not a part of the dream, is not a part of the revelation that was given to Pharaoh that was then being interpreted, but instead we have
Joseph taking his administrative skill and coming up with a highly effective plan for Pharaoh.
But there's a question about the lawfulness of the plan. Let me read the plan to you. It says, Now, therefore, let
Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man and set him over the land of Egypt.
Let Pharaoh do this and let him appoint officers over the land to collect one -fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt in the seven plentiful years and let them gather all the food of those good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh and let them keep food in the city.
Then that food shall be as a reserve for the land of the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt.
But the land may not perish during the famine. So we're told in verse 37 that Pharaoh viewed this advice as wise and so did his servants.
But let's consider the basic plan is to have a 20 % tax rate. Now, the question of what lawful tax rates are is not been answered for us yet in the scriptures.
We don't have a list of that, but we do have already two times where tithing has occurred.
One, we have Abraham having already given a tenth of all that he had to Melchizedek, and there was a covenantal meal that occurred with bread and wine.
And so Abraham tithes to Melchizedek and through him Levi tithes.
That's what we're told in the book of Hebrews. And so therefore the Melchizedekian priesthood is superior to the
Levitical priesthood because Levi tithes to Melchizedek. We also have when
Jacob is receiving a vision from God in terms of a dream and a vision.
He has this view of the ladder. We could refer to it as Jacob's ladder, the idea of angels coming down and going up to heaven.
And he swears to God that if God will preserve him and cause him to have food to eat and clothing on his back, that he will give a tenth of all he has to God.
So there's this idea of this covenanting to tithe, and there's also the giving of a tithe to Melchizedek.
Now from those, we can see that the idea that there's a giving of money to God in some way where this idea of a tenth already exists.
And then elsewhere in the Levitical priesthood, we have the tithe explicitly laid out. And so the difficulty is, is it appropriate for merely human kings to demand 10 % or more?
We find when we get to 1 Samuel chapter 8, there is this curse that if Israel selects a king like all the nations, that what will happen is a curse where that king will extract, and everybody's supposed to gasp here, 10 % from the people in taxation.
And that 10 % taxation, I mean, we're also used to 20, 30, 40 % taxation here. We're used to paying almost 10 % in sales tax in most places.
You look at the Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare taxation. You look at that, and those combined are supposed to be between what the employer is paying and the employee is paying, 15%, 16%.
We're so used to so many taxes being piled on that 10 % sounds laughably low to us. But the
Bible teaches plainly that a 10 % tax rate is a curse of tyrannical government, because if you tax 10 % or more, you are demanding as much as God demands in the tithe.
Who do you think you are, Caesar? You think you're God? That's the idea. So when Pharaoh, through the prime ministership of Joseph, extracts 20%, what we have there is a tyrannical level of taxation.
Now, the plan is highly effective, is used by God to save everybody, just like the enslaving of Joseph is used by God to save everybody.
But you still have an imposition of a 20 % tax rate. And so when this is imposed, what then occurs is
Joseph uses all of that money that was extracted by high taxation in the time of plenty and holds on to it to preserve everybody's lives.
He also uses it to enslave the nation of Egypt and centralize the power of Pharaoh in such a way that we find that Pharaoh ultimately ends up being one who is viewed as sort of a god king in future generations.
Now, after this plan is put into place, eventually the famine in other countries is so bad that people start coming to Egypt to buy from Egypt.
And in the coming to Egypt to buy from Egypt, that includes the brothers of Joseph going to buy from Egypt.
Now, this results in Joseph interacting with them.
He recognizes his brothers. His brothers don't recognize him. Through a series of interactions, he ends up getting the brothers to come back with their younger brother,
Benjamin, who is from the same mother that Joseph is from, and also then ends up using
Benjamin as a way of getting his father to come to Egypt.
And so he does so through trickery then. Now, one of the things that's very important to recognize is that the hatred of the other brothers to Joseph is something that was because of the fact that Jacob had shown favoritism to Joseph's mother, and therefore showed favoritism to Joseph.
And then furthermore, Jacob had another son through the same mother, and so that son is
Benjamin. And so what Joseph does is he tries to see if his brothers still hate
Joseph and still are unrepentant and do not care for their father,
Jacob, ultimately. And he does this by providing a test with Benjamin. He gives
Benjamin extra food at a party and notices that his brothers are not covetous and, in fact, just rejoice with him.
And then in the trick where Joseph is trying to cause
Benjamin to be stuck in Egypt and to be punished, Judah intercedes as sort of a type of Christ to say, no, take me instead of Benjamin.
And so Joseph sees there that his brothers have repented of what they did to Joseph in selling him into slavery, and they've repented of the pain that they've caused their father.
And so he reveals himself and causes them to bring their father to Egypt.
When Jacob comes to Egypt, it's followed by him giving blessings to the sons, and these blessings are important and prophetic.
And the two major blessings to be aware of are the blessing on Judah, which points forward to the crown rights of Christ, and the blessing on Ephraim as the great tribe that comes from Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh.
And the blessing on Ephraim points to the future sort of contentions that will occur between the northern tribes and the southern tribes, between those who are led by Ephraim and those that are led by Judah.
So as we come to the close of Genesis, what we find is there's also this death that occurs of Jacob where Jacob in his giving of his last words and blessings, his death leads to the sons of Jacob being worried that Joseph is going to punish them at Jacob's death.
But there's reassurance that's given where Joseph says, you meant for evil what you did, but God meant what you did for good.
And so this idea that God controls evil, that even he plans that evil be done for the purpose of displaying his glory is this great message of Genesis.
And you think about Genesis starting out with a good world that's created and having a fall so early on, you go, what's the deal here?
How can we deal with the fact that God made everything good and there's this evil that's come into the world?
What a tragedy. And what we're told at the end of Genesis is that what demons and men mean for evil,
God means for good. And so at the origins of the world and in a story that gives to us an understanding of these major events that lead out from creation, we are reminded that all evil is something that God has predestined and all evil is going to be used for the good of God's glory and for the good of his people.
And so we need to remember that. But as we also look at the death of Jacob and his burial, we have
Jacob gets taken to the promised land. He's buried in the promised land, and he's viewed as a man where there's 70 days of mourning for him.
And Pharaoh has only received 72 days, so that's a pretty high honor. So we have this idea of this long period of mourning.
And when we have that mourning that occurs and this formal state funeral is given, we realize that there's an interesting reality where there's embalming of bodies and burying of bodies in Egypt because there seems to have been a belief in the resurrection there.
And ultimately, when Joseph ends up dying, Joseph's body is preserved and there's a promise extracted that when the people leave
Egypt, they will take Joseph's body out, that there's this oath given.
God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from there. And so Joseph died being 110 years old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.
And so the next thing we get into in Exodus is we're introduced to the people in a time period where God raises up Moses to take them out of that bondage.
And that giving of Moses, when we get to Moses, we're now in the 1400s
B .C., and as we get into the 1400s B .C.,
we're at a place where we have gone through a huge amount of time, going from 4004
B .C. to about 1500 B .C., we're looking at having gone through 2 ,500 years out of the 6 ,000 years of world history by the time we get to Moses.
Well, why don't I squeeze in a question here from Cedric in New Castle, Long Island, New York.
Cedric says, responding to your very recent comment on the nature or the origin of embalming and burial, being connected to a belief in the future resurrection.
Cedric says, I have been plagued with relatives who are not
Christians trying to convince me at the ultimate death of a family member who is elderly that we should have that individual cremated.
I have been resisting, but I haven't had any real biblical proof that this would be inappropriate.
I know that no matter what would happen, that that would not prevent a truly born -again believer from going to heaven, even if they were cremated.
But at the same time, what reasons should I give these loved ones why this is inappropriate, if you believe that is the case?
That's a great question. I think that when you look at the Scriptures, there's three ways for us to understand what is good and evil.
One is the most simple and plain, looking at the commands that are principles and drawing out the principles from those commands.
So the big commandments are love God, love your neighbor. This is too big. You organize the whole ten commandments into those.
So you've got the first four commandments teaching how to love God. Know Godhood, the true God, know idols and how you worship.
Use the stuff that God commands us to use for worship. Use it without hypocrisy. Don't take it in vain. And then lastly, we have the idea of the
Sabbath day and worshiping God at the times he appointed. Then we have the duties to our neighbor. Commandments 5 through 10 teaches our duties there.
Nothing in those big principle commands teach us what we're supposed to do for burial or whether we do cremation.
So you go, how do I know? What would this be? Is there something about it that has to do with the preservation of life?
Well, no, they're already dead. Can God resurrect somebody who's been cremated? Well, absolutely he can.
We don't have to worry about that just because the body can turn to dust through some other means. So that's not it. What is it that was put in here?
Well, there's honoring the person and there's also the idea of whether or not we have to deal with any sort of ceremony.
And so the second commandment has to do with ceremonies, religious ceremonies. And we also have to deal with the idea of honoring persons.
So what kinds of things are done to honor persons? Well, we have to look for more details. So you go into case laws.
Case laws are things like if -then statements. And we don't find any if -then statements about the ceremony of burial, except certain things like if a person's hung on a tree, take them down before the end of the day so the curse doesn't come on the land and all that.
So you find, hey, there's a lot of stuff in the Bible about caring for dead bodies and the idea of curse and blessing. And then you get into the third category, which is approved or disapproved examples.
And you're not going to find any place where there's blessing on the idea of the destruction of the body.
What you're going to find is that those who are receiving honor and who are blessed, you find that they're buried with their fathers.
Whereas the people who are cursed, they're not buried with their fathers. Their bodies get destroyed. Jezebel gets eaten by dogs.
So this idea of the destruction of the body as a dishonor after life and a curse act is presented in the
Bible in the disapproved examples. And in the approved examples, you have the caring for the body, the honoring of the body, the burying of the body with care, the burying of the body in the promised land, the burying of the body with the fathers, those kinds of things.
So the approved examples is where it becomes really clear. And so that's what I would put forward. And if you have a view that the
Bible is sufficient to make all moral decisions, then you're going to read the Bible carefully looking for the approved things that we should do in life.
So that's why I think that burial is a Christian method for going with the body. Alrighty, why don't you pick up now where you want to take us next?
Great. So after we get to Exodus with Moses, what we find is
Luke goes through, you know, we have the famous story where obviously there's
Pharaoh forgets. There's a different line of Pharaohs that apparently come in. And I want to suggest to everybody that, that what we have looked at in terms of a lot of the secular chronologies, people have associated
Moses with Ramses the second, and they've associated him with sort of the 13th century.
The Bible, however, provides us with a clear timeline. What we have is when we get to the
Solomonic temple, which is about the year 1000 BC, we find that it gives to us a timeline backwards saying how many years it had been since the
Exodus. And so if we follow the biblical timeline, we're going to find that the time with Moses is occurring, not in the 1300s or the 1200s as we would find with Ramses, but instead in the 1400s.
And so if we come into a recognition that, that the Exodus is occurring in the 15th century, as opposed to the 13th, we're going to have a very different view of the timeline than a lot of the secular people want to say.
Now we need to remember that the Bible is the only infallible timeline we've got. And so there's a number of problems with secular chronologies that are built from this point forward.
There's some really big problems, obviously, in the earlier part of Genesis, everybody wants to point to the big bang in evolution, which dramatically differ from the
Christian view of creation from nothing. And also from the special creation of man by God, as opposed to some sort of evolutionary process.
But when we get to the Mosaic timeline, we need to realize that the Bible provides us the timeline, not secular chronologies.
And the secular chronologies are built upon the timeline by a guy named Ptolemy. And so the
Ptolemaic timeline is off. It has a number of difficulties. There's been some really interesting work that's been done on this by Isaac Newton, by NASA, and by a number of other people.
Lloyd Mellon Jones has some great work on it. Philip Kaiser has some great work on it. But I want to really encourage people to believe the biblical timeline and to realize that if somebody doesn't put
Moses in the 1400s, if they put him in the 1200s, that timeline is liberal and corrupt.
And so we want to follow the Bible as opposed to man -made timelines. So when we deal with this, we realize that Moses is born in the situation where Pharaoh has enslaved the people, forgotten
Joseph and has taken the Hebrews and has enslaved them.
So we have the 70 that went into Egypt turn into a great multitude.
And the great multitude that are in Egypt is a mixed multitude. We're told in the scriptures, we have a bunch of people that are born into the houses coming from the line of Jacob.
But we also have the people that were converted in a time where the preaching of the word, the teaching of the scriptures that had been given thus far was given to the people.
And so in the giving of the doctrine of the gospel to some of the people in Egypt, there were converts.
And we also find that there's a huge number of people that seem to be converted during the process of the 10 plagues and the pulling out of the people.
So we end up with something somewhere over 600 ,000 men at the departure, going from the 70 down to going to 600 ,000.
And we do this in a relatively short period of time, depending on how you calculate it. We can see this as being a period of time that's relatively small number of generations.
So you're having a number of children. You're also having converts. And so this mixed multitude that leaves out is a nation that becomes a covenanted nation after the
Exodus itself, where there's a swearing with God. And so this set up,
Moses is there. He is in a scenario where Pharaoh has ordered that the male children should be murdered.
The male children of the Israelites should be murdered because of the fact that there's a fear of a slave revolt.
And this is something that's a problem in any sort of unjust slave system is always this fear of slave revolts.
The biblical system of slavery is a system where you're not allowed to do this to the slave people. The biblical system of slavery very specifically requires that the only way that you could force somebody to do labor is if they are a prisoner of a just war and penalty for that war.
Or if they are a criminal or a debtor who owes some amount of money.
And there are limits on that type of slavery where there's a requirement for the repayment of a debt.
And furthermore, there was a limit on those who came into discipleship to a maximum of six years.
And so this idea of chattel slavery where men are property and they could be enslaved is a wicked institution that is not a part of what the scriptures provide.
But instead in Pharaoh basically enslaves the population without limit.
And then furthermore treats them as property in such a way that they just can kill the male children.
And so the murder of children, especially the murder of the children of Christians has been a policy of the wicked from millennia gone by.
And so we find that what happens is the mother of Moses sees that he is beautiful and to be protected as a child.
And she ended up putting him in a place where he is going to be found by a person who is a part of Pharaoh's house.
And this daughter of Pharaoh, a princess ends up adopting Moses and taking him in to be a prince of Egypt.
He's raised up and at 40 years old, he looks around and he sees some fellow
Hebrews being oppressed. He sees a fellow Hebrew being physically assaulted by an Egyptian.
And he understands the justice of the reality that this overseer that's assaulting him physically is participating in a man stealing exercise.
And the scriptures teach that man stealing wrongfully, kidnapping a person, stealing a person, enslaving a person unjustly is a capital crime.
And so what Moses does is he intervenes and the process kills the man who is oppressing and assaulting his fellow
Hebrew. He views himself as a redeemer. He thinks that God might use him and raise him up and cause him to free these people.
And certainly thereafter, he finds one Hebrew arguing with the other Hebrew and sees that there's an oppression that's occurring and he intercedes and seeks to stop the oppression.
And the Hebrew that's doing the wickedness says to him, who made you a judge? Are you going to kill me like you killed that Egyptian? And all of a sudden
Moses realizes this killing of the man that he had done is widely known.
It's going to be reported. And so he is going to not be able to function as this redeemer, as this savior of the people.
And instead he flees. He disappears for 40 years. In that 40 year period of time, he finds a priest of Midian who seems to be a priest that's a legitimate priest of God.
He seems to be, you might say of the order of Melchizedek or maybe the priestly order that you would see being extended out from Noah because of the fact that later on this priest of Midian is somebody who ends up bringing prophecy to Moses that gets accepted in Exodus 18.
So this priest of Midian, Moses ends up marrying one of his daughters. And what we find 40 years later when
Moses is old, 80 years old, God comes to him in a burning bush and calls him to free the people, to go back as a prophet and free the people at the order of God.
And Moses is not happy with this mission that's given to him and seeks to come up with all sorts of reasons to not carry out the mission.
And God gently moves him along and causes him to go on the mission that he commissioned him to do.
And in going on this mission, he's given the tool of a staff that God will cause signs and wonders to be brought through.
And he also tells him to work with Aaron and that Aaron, his brother who will be made high priest, is to be to Moses as a prophet and Moses is to be to him as God.
And that's given to us as this analogy. So we understand that words from God that come through his prophets are actually his words.
We have this amazing picture there of the way that Moses is working with Aaron. So we understand that the words of the prophets are the words of God.
And this amazing picture that's given. Okay, let me squeeze in. Oh, can
I squeeze in a little bit? Go for it. Yeah, okay. We have Wesley in Queen Creek, Arizona, who says,
All of my life until recently, I had believed that the
God in the burning bush was God, the Father. And then a
Christian theologian recently challenged me on that, where I began to view this as a pre -incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ, the second person of the
Trinity. Do you have an opinion on this? So I don't know. What I would say is, some people try to make the argument that every time you have a physical manifestation of God, which is called a theophany, it's an appearance of God, that every time you have a theophany, they will argue it's a
Christophany, which is an appearance of Christ. And the reason they argue this is because they say, well, there's
God, the Father, and then Jesus is his word. And so there's always, in terms of these manifestations, it's always
Christ. And they'll sometimes make arguments out of the mediation of Christ for that as well.
The reason I don't believe that, and I don't think it's a valid theological argument, is because when the
Lord Jesus Christ is incarnate and is baptized, you have two theophanies that are obviously not
Christophany. One, you have the dove, which is the Holy Spirit, as it is a theophany of the
Holy Spirit descending. And then you also have a theophany through the audible voice coming from the sky that speaks and says, this is my beloved
Son in whom I am well pleased. So you have a theophany of the Father with the voice, and you have a theophany of the
Holy Spirit with the dove. And obviously, you know, the incarnation of Christ is a sort of theophany.
The incarnation is a special theophany where there's the taking on of a human nature. But I don't think that it's necessary that we say that the bush is
Christ or Christophany because of the fact that we have theophanies elsewhere that are not
Jesus. So that's my main argument for why I don't know and would put that forward and say,
I'm not sure there, if there's some way, specifically the Son. It seems to me that the theophany would be representative of the triune
God in that case, because the name Yahweh is given, which is about the divine essence and the eternality of God, that I am that I am that God is saying that he is the holy one.
He is the eternal one. And he is the self -independent one. And that is applicable to the three persons of the
Trinity. And so I would have a hard time very specifically attributing it to one person.
Okay. We have to go to our final break right now. And if you do have a question, send it in immediately because we are rapidly running out of time.
Chris Arnsett at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.
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We are now back, and we do have a question for my guest from CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York.
And CJ just asks, I was hoping that you could clarify something that you said earlier before the station break.
I was a bit confused when you said that you were convinced it was likely not
Jesus Christ specifically in the burning bush because of the use of the term
Yahweh. I have been told and taught by the most highly esteemed
Reformed exegetes, theologians, and scholars, that it is very right to say
Jesus is Yahweh. And I'm assuming that our listener doesn't mean that Jesus alone is
Yahweh, but it seemed that you were saying before the break that we should only use the term
Yahweh when it comes to the Trinity as a whole. And I could be wrong about the way
I'm interpreting that and the way that my listener is. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to clarify.
So no, I absolutely have no problem saying that the Father is Yahweh, that the
Son is Yahweh, and the Holy Spirit is Yahweh. I'm just saying the term Yahweh is something that applies to all of the three or any of the three.
And so we wouldn't be able to know from that title, which of the divine persons is being spoken of.
And it may very well refer to all three. That's all that I'm saying there is that we don't know.
So I'm not trying to be confusing. I don't have an opinion as to if there's one person or the three that I would be willing to say is dogmatically true that I'm certain of.
I was just saying that I believe, obviously, Jesus is Yahweh. Jesus is
Yahweh. That's true. He is God. And what I'm trying to say is that there's nothing in the fact that he calls himself
Yahweh that would demonstrate that it's any one of the persons, and that because of the fact that there's an emphasis on the divine essence,
I'm inclined. Again, this is not an opinion I want to defend as something others have an obligation to believe.
I'm inclined to think that it would be more appropriate to think of the
Shrine of God there because what's said is applicable there. There's not a distinctiveness of the persons.
And I was simply trying to argue that the theophany at the time of the baptism of Jesus is something where you have the theophanies of the three different persons.
So you can't prove that all theophanies are Christophanies. If I said anything contrary to that, then what
I said before was wrong. This is what I meant to communicate, should have communicated, and hopefully I haven't contradicted myself.
Great. Let me squeeze in one more question. We have Lowell in New Gloucester, Maine, who asks,
Do you have any favorite commentators on the Old Testament whose books you can recommend?
Yeah. So in terms of old commentators, I think Matthew Poole is amazing, is excellent.
So I would strongly encourage people to read Matthew Poole. He has a commentary on the whole of the Bible. He was an excellent
Puritan, a lot of great stuff. So I think that's a good one. Gil is great on technical things.
And I think that generally speaking, it's worth reading Calvin as you're looking at commentaries.
But I think that for modern persons, I find that there are a number of modern writers that are helpful to look at.
And it's harder to find modern writers who have covered as much breadth as older writers.
But I have found that when reading stuff on the Pentateuch in particular, the first five books of the
Bible, that there are some neat things when you read Westerner's commentaries there.
It's not that we'd endorse everything it said or agree with all those interpretations, but I think that there's some useful insights to read.
And so those are some things that I've found helpful. But I really think Matthew Poole and obviously
John Gil, like I said, and Calvin, and then also Matthew Henry is a great value to have
Matthew Henry's commentary on the Bibles. Well, I'm glad you threw in there John Gil, the great Baptist scholar.
Oh yeah, Gil is a technical scholar of analyzing the language and everything.
I mean, it's hard to beat Gil. Gil's a magnificent scholar and a great
Baptist scholar. I think he is magnificent. Well, I just want to give a plug to solid -gram -books .com,
where you can purchase Poole's commentary on the entire Holy Scriptures at a significant discount, and also the book,
A Dialogue Between a Catholic Priest and a Protestant by Matthew Poole. Go to solid -gram -books .com.
Well, I'd like you to conclude with a summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of this episode in the series on the history of the world.
And I'm sure we have a part three coming up in the not so distant future. But if you could summarize what's most important to you today.
We've looked at the reality that God created, and when he created, he created man, and he made man in a covenant of works with the tree of life and the tree of death, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And so we need to understand that when we look at God in terms of dealing with him with justice, do this and live as the command, and we do not have the ability to do the law and obtain life for ourselves.
But rather God gave a gospel to Adam, and that covenant of grace given to Adam reminds us of the fact that the seed of the woman who crushed the head of the serpent, we are saved by Christ who defeats
Satan and who deals with our sin. And so we see that throughout the scriptures, and with Adam was given the symbol of clothing to show our need for the righteousness of Christ to cover us, animal sacrifice to show the need for the payment for the forgiveness of sins.
Noah was given the eating of meat in the sacrificial meals, and also the idea of the sword of the magistrate to restrain evil.
Abraham was given circumcision as a symbol of the covenant and for entry into the covenant and to the holy community and the institution of the tithe.
And Moses, we haven't talked about all the details and all the things he was given for the administration of the covenant, but we will next time.
And so this idea that Moses was also given a promise of the gospel with all of these sacrifices as symbols.
And I want everyone to remember that men have always been saved through the death of the
Messiah. In the Old Testament, looking forward to Christ and the New Testament, we look back to Christ.
And I look forward to continuing to see the work of God and his providential care and his saving of his people as we continue through the history of the world next time.
Amen. Well, I want to remind our listeners about your websites. First of all, for Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona, go to PuritanPHX .com.
PuritanPHX .com. For Armored Republic, the business where my guest is the
CEO, go to ArmoredRepublic .com. ArmoredRepublic .com. And don't forget about the special fund that my guest,
David Reese, is organizing. Go to ReeseFund .com to find out more information about that.
ReeseFund .com. Well, Pastor David, it has been an utter joy having you on again.
You are always superb on this program. And I'm eagerly looking forward to part three of this series and to all of the episodes in the series that you intend to host and also for any of your return visits to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.
Thank you so much, brother. I want to quickly remind our listeners, please, if you love the show, go to IronTripandZionRadio .com,
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