Calvinist Boo Crew Discussion with Andrew Rappaport

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Welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian Podcast Community, of which this is a proud podcast member. Check out

Striving for Eternity at strivingforeturning .org or go to Christian Podcast Community at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

Check out all we have to offer there. On this episode, I was invited on to the

Calvinist Boo Crew. Great conversation. We kind of never got to the main topic that we were supposed to, which was a specific area of the doctrine of salvation.

But we went into a whole lot of other areas, discussed apologetics, discussed the doctrine of salvation, a lot of different things we discussed.

Great conversation. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host,

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right. Hello. Welcome to the Calvinist Boo Crew. And I just want to say this is

J .C. Bear. I'm with Bradstert. And we have a special guest today.

And it is a pleasure. It is an honor and a privilege to be talking with Andrew Rapoport.

Andrew, it is a joy to have you on. You come with great bona fides as we get to talk with you here.

And it is just a joy to have you on. Brother, the first thing I want to do is just say welcome to you.

Happy New Year. And how did your holidays go? Uneventful, the way I like them. Just got to spend some time with family.

And the cold of north of New Hampshire. But we had a great time.

That's great. We know Bradstert is from California. So he is no stranger to some pretty great weather.

And I live in Florida. So I've also been blessed with perhaps more than my fair share.

But New Hampshire is definitely up in the snow belt. But I am told that it is beautiful up there this time of year.

So is that part of the charm for you? Are the beautiful winters and the luscious, cool, winter chill air?

No, my daughter lives up that way. And she's pregnant and couldn't come to me. So my wife's whole family all went up to her.

And so, yeah, I'm more looking forward to tomorrow when I leave for Florida. I'll be preaching New Year's Day at a church in Orlando, actually in Winter Garden, Florida.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, let me just introduce you. This is Andrew Rapoport.

He is the executive director of Striving for Eternity Ministries.

He has written a systematic theology. He travels the country preaching, and it is a beautiful thing,

Brother Andrew, to have you on today. Welcome to Calvinist Boo Crew. And if it's all right to just start off asking, how did you come to the

Lord, and what was it like, and how did it change your life? Sure, I came to Christ out of a

Jewish home. I was not looking to become a Christian, or actually didn't want anything to do with Christ.

I always preface this with a warning because Christians get upset when I say this because they just don't understand

Judaism. But growing up a generation after the Holocaust, the Roman Catholic Church supported

Hitler. And so to Jewish people, all Christians are just Catholic, just different denominations of Catholic.

And so because of that, I was raised believing Jesus Christ is Hitler's God. I wanted nothing to do with Christ.

So it wasn't that I was looking for anything. In fact, I thought my Judaism saved me.

But I had a conversation with a gentleman who basically was sharing the gospel with me, and I told him, literally,

I said, Hey, I'm God's chosen people, I'm in like Flynn, because I thought my

Judaism saved me. That's what I was raised to believe. And he ended up saying some things that got me to say,

Well, you give me a logical reason to believe, and I'll believe. And so we sat down, and here's a guy.

People ask, Does God have a sense of humor? We know he weeped, but does he have a sense of humor? And I always say yes.

At that time, 16 years old, I was very proud of my intellect. I have 168

IQ, which is just barely above genius, barely. But I passed the test for Mensa, and I was very arrogant about my intelligence back then.

Here's a guy that never even passed the sixth grade, and he's going to give me the most important information I ever had. So here's a guy who knew his

Bible. That's something he knew. And so in 3 1⁄2 hours, we sat down, and he just shared basically prophecies.

And I was trying to argue them away and realize that mathematically it's impossible for these prophecies to be fulfilled by chance.

Now, there's some things that are self -fulfilling, so I ignored those. But I was running calculations in my head, and I just said, Chuck, we're beyond statistical impossibility, which is 10 to the 48th power.

He said, What does that mean? I said, Well, that means it's impossible for these things to have been fulfilled by chance.

So at that point, I accepted the New Testament had to have been written by God. But I didn't know anything about the

New Testament. So he starts explaining to me that Jesus came and died for our sin. He died, was buried, rose from the dead.

And I said, Stop, Chuck. People don't rise from the dead. People rot. And so the resurrection became a major thing of,

Can I explain that away? And I gave most of the, if you ever read Josh McDowell's work, all the false views of the resurrection.

I had all of them. I came up with all the ones that are in his book. I have one that I believe is still original with me. My last argument was maybe they dug a hole underneath the tomb, came up through the center, stuck the body out.

And Chuck's like, Through stone? In three days? They didn't have heavy equipment back then. So I just, I remember putting my hands, my head in my hands, and just shaking my head.

And he says, What's wrong? I said, Well, if Jesus rose from the dead, he's God. He said, That's what I've been trying to tell you. Well, if he's

God, I'm accountable to him. I knew I was a sinner. That was not a problem. I almost burned my house down twice, once we put it out with a fire extinguisher, the second time with the fire department.

Me being a sinner was not hard to believe. It was more that I didn't think I needed a Savior. And so recognizing that Jesus is

God and he died in my place for my sin made me realize I needed a

Savior, and I needed one specific Savior being Christ. And so within three and a half hours,

I turned from believing Jesus Christ is Hitler's God to being a follower of Christ. That's amazing, brother. Praise God.

Praise God. Now, I noticed on the Statement of Faith for Striving for Eternity Ministries, I noticed the very first entry in there talks about the

Holy Scriptures. And you've already talked about there was this immediacy to them, there was this impactfulness to them that really puts you in a place that,

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounded compelling. What is it about the Scriptures that you think are so convincing that they are the

Word of God? Well, so I'm a presuppositional, so let me explain what that means. It means that there's—and everyone has presuppositions, things that they believe that ultimately you can't go beyond that to try to prove it.

In other words, God exists, he has spoken. If there's anything that can prove

God exists, that thing is greater than God. So you have axioms, things you have to accept as true, but you ultimately have nothing that you can prove.

But the reality is you can't explain anything that we talk about in reality or science without God existing.

It's a necessary starting point because you can't explain anything without— you wouldn't be able to explain our ability to reason, which is required for science and having conversations like this.

Things like knowledge, intelligence, truth, all of these things are immaterial things.

They require an immaterial source. So if you reject God, you have no way of explaining your ability to reason.

That's not what chemical reactions do. They don't produce things like reason or laws of logic.

The laws of logic exist outside of human thinking. So you have to start with certain things.

And the fact that God has spoken, well, the only way we can know anything about him is if he reveals it.

There's no other way. You can sit there and look at the stars, and you can know some things about God. Scripture even says this.

You can look at the stars, Romans chapter 1. You can look at creation and know something about God's attributes, but you can't know about salvation.

You only know that from Scripture. In fact, I remember an interview that was done with an African guy.

He was from Africa. Staring up at the stars, he looks at the stars and says, there's got to be a

God. How did all of this just come about? And he said, he just called out and said, God, whoever you are,

I know if you exist, you must be good, and I'm not, and I need to get right with you, but I don't know how.

And he ends up leaving and coming to New York City to get a degree in art. And in New York City, he's walking around, he picks up a gospel tract, and he reads this gospel tract and says, that's the

God I was talking to on the beach. Well, God gave him what? Scripture. That gospel tract was filled with Scripture that told him how to get right with God.

So creation can tell us some things about God, but it can't inform us with how we get right with God or tell us as much as we can know about God without him revealing it to us.

Because he is utterly holy, and that means he's utterly unlike us. And we cannot even begin to conceive what

God is like, a being that knows everything. He doesn't learn a thing.

He just knows it all. He's eternal. Everything is an eternal now to him. Just try to picture

Adam and Eve are in the garden, Abraham's offering Isaac, Jesus is on the cross, we're having this conversation.

All of it's the same now. We can't even conceive of something like that, because we're so bound by time.

We learn. We know things after learning it through observation. God didn't observe things to know them.

He just knows it. We can't comprehend that kind of being. And so if he doesn't reveal it to us, we can't know it.

And he hasn't revealed everything to us. He makes that clear, Deuteronomy 29, verse 29. The secret things belong unto the

Lord, but that which he has revealed to us, that we obey and teach to our children. So there's a lot more to God than he's revealed to us, because our finite minds cannot comprehend him.

Andrew, I love that story about the man looking up at the skies and believing and calling out, because it reminds me of what

Psalm 19 says. The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.

Day after day, they continue to speak. Night after night, they make him known.

And that is power. That's one of the things that I think is important for us to communicate to people, because I hear a lot of people talk about, well,

I could believe the Bible is inspired in the way that Shakespeare is an inspiring form of English, or Homer might inspire wondrous thoughts of adventure for me.

But when we Christians talk about inspiration, we're talking about a power that has an immediacy to move and act the human soul.

Did you have any thoughts or evidences of such things happening in your life prior to that conversation where you came to Christ?

As far as things that revealed God existed? Right. Were there any echoes of this

Psalm 19 in your life before that you maybe saw, but maybe you hadn't put everything together?

Well, I always knew God exists, because you can't, like I said earlier, you can't explain everything we see in reality without God.

There's no way to deal with the fact that here you have all of these immaterial things.

Let's do a little explanation here then. So you say to someone that says, well, I don't believe

God exists. Okay, well, you have a couple of options. We look at the universe. One, option one is that the universe has always existed.

It never had a beginning, and therefore, you don't have to explain the universe having a beginning, because it just always existed.

Option two is the universe created itself. Or option three, someone or something created the universe.

Now, there are no other options other than those that I know of. So as we examine these, well, if we study the law of thermodynamics, both the first and second law, the first law of thermodynamics shows that the universe had a beginning.

There was a beginning to mass and energy. So if there was a beginning to the universe, then the universe cannot have always existed.

So we can exclude that one. We can look at the second one and realize that when we look at the second law of logic, law of non -contradiction, that says you can't have

A and not A at the same time in the same way. So let me explain that, because that sounds a little technical. I can't have $20 in my wallet and not have $20 in my wallet at the same time and in the same way.

Now, I could have had $20 in my wallet, but you took it out of my wallet, and now it's not there.

That's the same time. Or I could say I have $20 in my wallet, but really, it's monopoly money, and you're talking actual

U .S. currency. That would not be in the same way. Well, for the universe to have created itself, it would first have to exist, and therefore, it breaks the second law of logic, the law of non -contradiction, because the universe would have had to first exist to be able to create itself.

So it could not be a self -creation, because that violates the laws of logic. That makes the argument invalid.

So now we've excluded the first two. So what are we left with? Someone or something created the universe.

It is the only logical and scientific argument. In fact, when we do science, when we follow a scientific method, there has to be an experiment that we can create.

We can recreate it. It could be documented. It's observed and documented.

Well, there's only one case where we have that for the creation of the universe, and that's in Scripture, when God, who created the universe, observed that creation, documented that creation, and that's all we have to go off of, of what

He has documented. So to reject that, you have to reject both science and logic to be able to make the argument that the universe always existed or that it created itself.

The Occam's razor, which is that the simplest argument is usually the right one, the only one we're left with is that someone or something created the universe and that someone is, we call,

God. Now, an interesting challenge to these ideas, this foundationalism that you're speaking of, this idea that revelation is a necessity to have knowledge of such a kind of God, has been challenged in the past few hundred years in, for example, secular forms of the

Enlightenment. Think of here of the turn from the objective to the subjective, the turn to the inner look, looking inside of one's self to determine what is ultimately true.

Think of the usurpation of science. Now, when I was young,

I'm not all that old, but when I was young, science actually referred to something that we would quote -unquote say was hard in the sense that it was objective and independent.

But today now we see that this formerly great word is now being used to justify all sorts of things that don't have those same objective qualities.

And so one of the statements that you put on your statement of faith that thrilled me, that I loved how you put it, was you said this.

You said, the only means of interpreting Scripture is a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation.

And I think what I liked about that, and I think what called out to me with that, was this idea that there really is, in some sense, a science of theology.

It's not just a bunch of us getting together and coming up with a God by consensus, coming up with a

God by looking into the inner self. How do you talk with people who speak these sorts of modernistic ideas of the supremacy of self and your truth, my truth, those kinds of things?

How do you talk to those people? Well, they unknowingly lost the argument right from the beginning. Because once they deny truth, they end up in a position where they want to tell you you're wrong and they're right, but they've just given up that argument.

And I usually would like to point that out to them. I usually say, well, you're wrong. They go, no, I'm right. No, no, you're wrong.

No, I'm right. No, you're wrong and you have no argument against it. Because in your world,

I have my truth, you have your truth. So it doesn't matter that I think you're wrong. Now, are you wrong because I said you're wrong?

No, I'm right because I think I'm right. So then which one of us is actually right?

They will always argue for truth when you point out that they're wrong. Now, I tried this with a friend of mine.

She asked me, what do I do when I go to college campuses and these students just want to argue there is no right and wrong.

There's just your truth and my truth. I said, ask them for their wallet. And when they give it to you, leave.

And she said, it doesn't work. I said, why? She goes, because they let me walk off. I said, yeah, because they know you as a

Christian are going to come back. Don't come back. Just leave. And when they call the police, say, first off, you got it on video that they gave it to you, so they can't accuse you of stealing, but when they call the police, give it back to them and say, why'd you call the police?

Did you believe that I was wrong? Right? The reality is that they live in a world where they believe in absolutes, but they want to deny that absolutes exist because if there's absolutes, then that, again, goes back to the necessity of God existing.

Why? When we talk about right and wrong, where do we get this from? When we talk about morality, it's universal, meaning that it applies to every human being that ever lived in history everywhere.

It's absolute, meaning that there's no wiggle room. It's not a truth for you and a truth for me.

It's truth. And it's immaterial. Now, when we look at this, that requires an absolute, immaterial, universal being or source for these things.

When we say something's wrong, and this may be something that people don't think about, what makes lying wrong?

The answer to that is God is not a liar. We know right from wrong or good and evil from the nature of God.

I had once in New York City, I had this guy, Jason, he's challenging me as I was doing open -air evangelism, and he says, there is no

God because there's evil in the world. There is no God because there's evil in this world. I said, sir, tell me how there could be evil in the world without God.

See, one of the things is that he was used to just challenging and throwing out arguments. He never actually had to answer.

And so I said, you tell me how you can have evil without God. He goes, well, you tell me what evil is. I said, I didn't say it exists.

You did. You have the burden to answer that. He says, you tell me what evil is. I said, okay, evil is the absence of good, and good is defined by the nature of God.

So how can you have evil without God? He threw up his hands and walked out of the crowd because he had no answers.

Because in a secular worldview, you have no basis to say anything is right or wrong.

Therefore, you have to agree with the Nazis when they were on trial and said, hey, we said it was okay to murder millions of people.

Therefore, it was okay because they decided. The culture had accepted that.

That's our thinking of the culture today. They want to argue that just because numbers of people agree, that makes it right.

Well, what ultimately happens then? Might makes right. It's whatever is, who's ever stronger, who's ever has the power and the control, that makes it right.

And people will say, if you get someone to finally go, okay, well, that's fine. Really? So you're okay with rape?

And they go, I never said that. Well, what is rape? Rape is always might makes right. If the rapist is stronger, he rapes.

If he's weaker, no rape occurs. That's might makes right. So you should never be against rape if you think might makes right.

And suddenly they go, wait, no, no, no, no. Rape is wrong. You see, let's look at that. What makes rape wrong?

So the question I will ask people is, is the act of rape always wrong? I'm being very specific here.

The act itself of raping, is that always? Now, if it's always, it means that's universal.

It applies to everybody everywhere. Is the act of rape always wrong? Now, every one of your listeners, every one of you listening, you're saying yes.

Why? Now, this is where we get to the question. I will say rape is wrong because God is not a rapist.

That's what makes it wrong. But if you don't believe in God, how do you argue? Well, you argue, well, it's because it causes harm to somebody.

That's the answer I always get. Okay, harm. Let's examine that. In New Jersey, there was a dentist and it was discovered that he was putting women out to do surgery and he was raping them.

But they didn't know they had sexual intercourse. One woman did because she knew she hadn't slept with anyone and she was pregnant.

She figured the only way it could have happened, the only time she was unaware of what she was doing was that time, had a paternity test.

Yep, that was the guy. Interesting that as that came into the news, many other women ended up realizing that they too had gotten pregnant, had a paternity test, found out that was the guy.

Interesting thing that happened with these women, they never suffered the harm of rape until they discovered they were raped.

Therefore, it wasn't the act of rape that was wrong, that caused harm. It was the knowledge of rape.

So if you're going to be consistent, what you should do is keep people ignorant of being raped because that causes no harm. The interesting thing is that what happened with that was that after they had the knowledge, then they started suffering all the things that people suffer when they realize the

PSD and all that. They started having that after the knowledge of it. So people will suddenly jump to, well, consent.

Okay, so now we're moving the goalpost. Now it's okay. Well, this was the reason. Now that's the reason. So we're going to start with the conclusion and move the goalpost so we can get something that sticks.

Well, how do you know that they didn't consent? They were unconscious. They were unaware. Consent didn't matter then. You see, whatever their argument, they're going to keep moving that goalpost.

Why? Because they don't have an absolute standard for why rape is wrong, but they'll say it is. I have an absolute standard

I can appeal to, the nature of God. God's not a rapist. Therefore, rape is wrong. Now, Andrew, one of the things that also comes up in relation to these modern ideas,

I remember just a generation or two ago, there seemed to be a much greater understanding that there is something off, and that's in the kindest sense, but there's something wrong with the human animal himself.

And that is to say, we are not the rational animals of philosophy.

We do not behave in that way. In fact, we live up to standards that we ourselves agree that we cannot meet.

With that in mind, before you were saved, you said that you knew, you had an understanding that you had fallen short.

As you became saved, and as you read about what your nature was in sin in the

Scriptures, how did that unwind to you, and how do you talk to people today who maybe haven't put the pieces together that there's another component, and that is to say, the doctrine of man and how we are affected and who we are?

Yeah, and I would, I guess I just may clarify, I would not say humans are animals.

I think that's actually an argument that seeps in in people's thinking from evolution, right?

We're made completely separate from animals. Animals don't have a self -consciousness like we have. They're not made in the image of God.

They don't have his attributes. But our starting point has to be God exists. And actually, here's the thing.

If you come across anyone that says, I'm an atheist, my response is, no, you're not. And what do you mean?

You're going to tell me what I believe? No, the creator, the one who created you, who knows everything, says that everybody, every single human knows

God exists. This is Romans chapter one, but they suppress that truth in unrighteousness.

So there's not a single human being that doesn't know God exists. That's the starting point.

This is why I say we don't argue whether God exists or not, because the person you're talking to already knows

God exists. They know that to be true. As it says in Scripture, it's evident to them, but they suppress that.

And so what you're observing, as they're arguing that God doesn't exist, you're observing their suppression of truth.

That's what you're observing. Now, when they do that, well, what does Scripture say? The fool says in his heart there is no

God. Why does he use such language? They're using their God -given ability to reason to reason that God doesn't exist.

So you would not have an ability to reason without God, but you're using that ability to reason that God gives you to say

God doesn't exist. You've already proven yourself false, okay? And this is, by the way,

I'll say this. What you often have people wanting to do is they want to use the natural sciences to prove the existence of God.

You prove to me God exists using natural science. That's a category error, okay? That's a fallacy in logic.

It makes an invalid argument because if you're going to use the science of the natural world to study something that created the natural world and therefore is by definition supernatural or outside of nature, you cannot use the natural world to prove the immaterial.

So you can't use material things to prove the immaterial. It doesn't work. It's a category error.

So you have to rely, as you had said, on philosophy and religion. Those are the sciences.

Those are the branches of science that we use to discuss whether God exists. And when we look at that, the only way we can know anything about God is if he reveals it to us because he is utterly unlike us.

So that's why we have to have scripture. We have to have his word so not only does he have to exist, but we can't really know him unless he reveals it to us.

And so these are things that I know a lot of Christians get worried and, oh, I don't know how to answer these really intelligent atheists.

I do a show every week, Apologetics Live. It's on Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern Time. Anybody can come in.

They just go to apologeticslive .com. There's a link to join every week, usually unless we're doing a formal debate, but anyone can come in.

And I was asked once, are you ever afraid of who's, I never know what the conversation is going to be. I never know who's going to come in.

Are you ever afraid? Do you ever feel like you're not ready to handle it? And I tell people, all I do is I study scripture and logic because the scripture is going to tell me the truth and the logic is going to point out their fallacies.

And that's all I do. You don't have to be a genius to figure it out. You just study the scriptures, study logic, and you're good.

I love that. I love that. When you read the scriptures and you heard about Christ, first of all, in that initial two and a half hour conversation with that gentleman, there were aspects of salvation that you hadn't fully fleshed out.

And yet there was that immediacy, there was that belief, there was that regeneration. When you started reading the scriptures afterwards with an eye to understanding what

God had done in you, how did you start to sort that out? And you talk about reading the scriptures and you talk about this grammatical, historical approach, this way of understanding and interpreting the scriptures carefully.

Is it not necessarily about getting hung up on a particular method, but how did it unfold in your life over the first, what was it, first few months, first few years?

More years, yeah. No, I was two years before I met any other Christians. I knew that when my parents found out, and they almost did, they went casket shopping when they found out

I became a Christian. And so they were going to bury an empty casket and I was going to be dead to them. And that's what I fully expected they would do.

So it was just me and a Bible. And there's a lot of things I did not know. Did I believe Jesus was

God? Yes. But I had no knowledge of the Trinity. And people say, well, how did you understand

God the Father? I just figured Jesus is God. I couldn't comprehend that, but that's okay.

There's a lot of things about God I can't comprehend. And some of it came much later, many years later, as I got into studying theology.

But a lot of things were just read the Bible. And how do we read any work of art?

Right? We're going to follow the laws of language. I know a lot of people will argue, well, the Bible is a supernatural book.

It's God's revelation. And therefore we have to use a different method to interpret it. But what is it that God gave us to interpret language?

Oh, it's called language. It's grammar. The rules of interpretation don't change. What you want to do is understand what's called authorial intent.

What did the author mean by what he wrote? Now, with Scripture, there's two authors, the human author and the divine author.

And so we have to get to the question of what did, sometimes the human author doesn't have a full grasp of what the divine author is having him write.

We see that in Scripture where some other authors will say that. They don't fully comprehend, or they'll call things a mystery.

And so we have to recognize that we're going to look at this and interpret it in its time frame, what it meant at that time, and to the meaning that it had from the author to that audience.

Not trying to read it in a 21st century mind first. That's a mistake. And a lot of people make mistakes because they don't understand something of the culture.

Let me give you an example I use all the time. A passage I hear many, many people preach about is in Matthew where Jesus says, when they ask him, when is the end times?

And he says, basically, no man knows the day or the hour, not the angels, but only the

Father knows. And people say, oh, see, in Jesus's humanity, there's something he didn't know, but he knew it in his divinity.

Well, that's actually a heresy when you start dividing the nature of Christ. And people don't even recognize because they're trying to rationalize, how could

Jesus know something and not know something? And if you understand Judaism and understand something of the times of Judaism, you understand that there's an idiom that says, no man knows the day or the hour, not the

Son, only the Father knows. It refers to a Jewish wedding. What does it mean? Well, the idiom is one where the father would tell the son, you're going to get married, prepare a house.

And so the son prepares the house. It might be an addition onto the father's house. But once it's ready, at any time the father sees fit, he says, go get your bride.

Who is it that knows when the marriage is going to take place? Not the son, only the father. And so this idiom became an idiom to mean live your life in expectancy as if any moment is the moment.

Anytime it can happen. Well, actually, if you keep reading in Matthew what Jesus says there, that's exactly what he ends up saying.

He reinforces the idiom by saying, live and expectant lifestyle as if any moment could be the moment.

So it matches with the idiom. It is easier to say, well, hey, this is the way that, this is what they would have understood at the time.

Now, granted, the idiom that we use today does not mention angels. And so we all say, well, see, the idiom that's used in Judaism today doesn't mention angels.

Therefore, it's not the same idiom. Well, idioms do change sometimes. Maybe the thing of angels was dropped.

It's easier to believe that the idiom had dropped the idea of angels. Why? Well, because we know that Judaism, rabbinic

Judaism over time also dropped the belief in angels. So maybe that argument got dropped because they weren't believing in angels anymore.

And so that didn't work in the idiom. That's an easy to understand thing to see why that idiom could have changed over time.

So once you look at that as an idiom, it fits with the context. It's right in line with that.

It's talking about the same thing that the marriage is talking about with the idiom. There's no other explanation necessary.

But once you start saying that Jesus can know something and not know something, you're actually into a heresy without realizing it.

And this is why we have to dig into the scriptures to say, yeah, it's hard work to dig in and say, well, what's being said here?

When Jesus said that, I believe his listeners knew very clearly what he was saying.

Another example would be John 10, John 9, John 8, and John 10, when he claims to be

God. People will say, well, Jesus never said, I am God. I had this debate with a Muslim once at a university.

And he said, Jesus never said, I am God, worship me. I said, that's right.

Jesus never said those exact words. But Muhammad never said, I am Muhammad, the last prophet, and you should listen to me.

Nowhere did he ever say that. And people were yelled out in the crowd even. They said, but he implied it. Exactly.

He didn't need to use the 21st century words. He used the words of his century.

So when Jesus says, the father and I are one, or before Abraham existed,

I am, they understood he was claiming to be God. How do we know that? Because in John 10 he says, for what good works do you stone me?

They picked up stones in both those occasions to stone him. And they say, the hearers of what

Jesus said, they say, not for good works, but you being a man claim to be

God. So when he says, before Abraham was, I am, that was a claim of deity.

The language in our day doesn't communicate that. The language in his day did.

When Jesus, he often called himself son of man. When the one time he calls himself son of God, they wanted to stone him for blasphemy.

See, son of God doesn't mean he's the Austrian God. It means he is God. Now, we don't think of it in the 21st century that way.

That's why we have to understand, what did the term mean in the first century when it was written?

Well, it's a claim of deity. Now we can bring that into our generation and say, okay, so Jesus is claiming to be

God. This is why when I'm on the streets doing open air evangelism, I don't say Jesus is son of God. I say Jesus is

God. And a number of times I'll have people, I remember in California, a guy that he wanted to lovingly, and I'm putting that in air quotes, correct me, because he said, you said he is

God, but Jesus is son of God. And I said, but what does that title mean? And he thought about it.

He says, well, that means he's like God or an offspring of God. I said, no, it means he is God. That's how the

Jewish leaders understood it when he used that term. They accused him of blasphemy of claiming to be

God. So it's important for us to do that hard work of understanding what things meant in the time it was written.

What did the author mean? What did his audience understand it? How did they understand it to be? Andrew, I love your section on ecclesiology, on the statement of faith.

And I would have never thought that you were by yourself in a sense for a long period of time early in your faith, because what you have to say, the doctrine of the church is so robust.

It's so mature. And it also is there. It's so easy for people to talk, to make a big deal about God and not similarly make the same kind of big deal about the church, because the church is so precious to God.

And so how did you arrive at this ecclesiology? That's the abstract question. But on the more concrete and personal side, how did you go from being young in the faith, not really around very many

Christians, to being able to fellowship with a body and to live out these doctrines?

That's the second one first. So I actually hadn't attended church for six years after being a

Christian. So I was saved in high school. So I went through two years of high school, four years of college, never really going to church.

I was baptized in a church when I was at college, a friend of mine's church. And I would attend some services, but I never attended regularly until I graduated college and got into a

Bible study and then got into a church. So it wasn't something that came quickly because I just didn't know any better.

I was ignorant. And unfortunately, the other students in college were all word of faith.

And so they weren't all that focused on theology and going to church and whatnot.

So it became something that, through studying the scriptures, and I have a more robust, actually, if you get my book,

What Do We Believe?, I have a whole chapter of the history of the word church, ekklesia, how that changed over time.

Because church became more and more precise. If you think about it, ekklesia is a word that was, a

Greek word that was used for just a general gathering. Actually, the first time we see it is used in Ephesus for voting.

It was a gathering to vote. And over time, it changes. Paul uses this in a new way to refer to the idea that you have a gathering, not just of a general gathering, but specifically a gathering for the purpose of the worship of God.

Over time, it changes through the Reformation period and the Puritans. It becomes more and more specific that there are certain elements you must have in church, things like the preaching of the word, things like the practicing of the ordinances, and the purity done through church discipline.

As you start to see history, and you start to see things changing in history, as the church comes under attack, what defines the church has to be specified.

And so over time, we see that that specification ends up helping us in how to be a member of the church.

What does it mean to be part of the body of Christ? So, we just recently had Christmas, one of the, if there was a

High Holy Day for Christians, Christmas would be it, right? Because in Judaism, you have the

High Holy Days, Passover, and Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah are two days everyone goes to temple or synagogue.

Passover is a major festival. But if there was something like that in Christianity, it would be

Christmas and Easter, because that's when most people show up to church, right? For some people, that's the only time they show up to church.

So, what did we have? We had a whole bunch of people this year that canceled church services because Christmas landed on a

Sunday. And they said, well, we need to, it's better to let people celebrate Christmas with family.

And what those churches unknowingly are saying is the worship of God is not the priority. We're not here to worship

God. We're here for family. And when family, a celebration for family takes precedence, hey, we'll cancel worship of God.

Now, people make the argument, oh, but I went to church on Saturday. And so, we canceled services and had it on Saturday.

But why? To not interfere with the celebration of family, right?

So, what becomes the higher priority? Is the purpose of the church family or worship of God?

In fact, Jesus himself said in Matthew 10, 36, 37, that he came to cause division in family, that he's above family.

You put him first. So, if you're canceling services for family, now, canceling for weather,

I understand things like that happen. But when you're making the purposeful decision to cancel the worship of God on Sunday, so that families could gather and give gifts, then you've just said that you put family above God.

And we have to then say, well, what's the purpose of the church? Well, the purpose of the church is to worship God. And that's the primary thing.

If you have Resurrection Sunday actually happens always on a Sunday. It doesn't get canceled.

But if Christmas happens to fall on a Sunday, you know what? You should even more so have church, so that all the family will bring their unsaved family to church to worship

God and maybe hear the gospel. Right? So, it's interesting because the way we view church or ecclesiology, that's just a big fancy word for the study of the church, the way we understand church is going to affect the way we view things, the way we practice.

And so, people that have a high view of church as a body of Christ and seeing that the purpose of the church is not for us to attend, but for God ultimately, they're not going to cancel so families could gather.

But those that have a poor view of God and see the church as more like a social club where we gather and meet and get along with one another and try to help people in this life, they're going to cancel so that people can go and celebrate with family.

So, you see, the way we view these things has a huge impact on how we practice our faith.

I love that answer. I'm reminded of the idiom, growing up, cutting off your nose despite your face.

And I think it applies here. I'll tell you another one that I think is an interesting application here, and I'd love your feedback.

For many years, I wondered about do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk, which is a prohibition in Exodus 23, 19 and Deuteronomy 14, 21.

And I think we have this idea of something that was meant for nurture being used for the exact opposite purpose.

And so, for God to give us the family, only for the family then to become the occasion or reason for neglect, is there's truly a heinousness to it.

And that brings me back to this idea I wanted to ask you because I want to explore this topic generously and gently.

And that is this idea, this idea that in the intertestamental period before Christ, there was a large shift in Judaism as Judaism developed from a religion built upon the

Old Testament Scriptures to a religion built upon the Old Testament Scriptures to some degree, but then these other additional books.

The rabbinical tradition, it's sometimes called. And I think when

Christ comes in the New Testament, we see that He is in fact ministering to a people who are still claiming the brand, but have moved on to something else.

What's your view of that? What's your take of that? How would you relate? We think, for example, the

Pharisees, the Sadducees, there have been other sects and groups within Judaism. How would you relate the rabbinical tradition to the

Scriptures, to the Old and the New, and the subsequent, what happened between Judaism and Christianity in the early century?

So you raise a good point because people think that modern Judaism is the same as what we see in the

Bible, and it's not. Within Scripture is a biblical Judaism. What some will refer to as Second Temple Judaism, I refer to it as rabbinic

Judaism, is you had this rise, and you actually start to see it earlier.

You start to actually see it when the dispersion occurs because as they dispersed and no longer had a temple, you start to see the rise of the synagogues and the rabbis within the synagogues.

And so as people start coming back to Judaism, what they started doing was bringing back in a works -based

Judaism. Now, it hadn't fully developed. It developed more over time, and what ended up happening with it is you end up seeing that in that intertestimonial period is when they start really codifying this new religion.

And it is something new. It's very different. It's a man -made religion. The modern Judaism, this rabbinic

Judaism, is man -made because it's all about man works. Instead of having, as Leviticus clearly teaches, that we can't atone for our own sin,

God has to do it for us, it turned from that into you doing the Torah, you obeying the law, and you getting heaven.

So there was a shift, and that shift really in the intertestimonial period became codified in what started to, during that period is when they claimed they had the oral law that they said was passed down generation to generation, and they wrote it down.

And then you have two commentaries, a commentary on the written law that we would call the

Old Testament, and a commentary on the oral law that was then written down. That is called the

Tammud. The Tammud is what most Jewish rabbis study. It is the commentary on the oral law.

And this is where we get much of Judaism that we look at today. Rabbinic Judaism is from that.

And that was started to be codified before Christ. So what you end up seeing is a shift that occurred very much like what happened with the

Roman Catholic Church. You had Christianity, and then now that you have an emperor say, everyone's

Christian! Well you had unbelievers that were suddenly being called Christian, and they're only interested in power.

And so in a quicker way than you see in Judaism, you saw a shift into a man -made religion that's a false religion that's developed.

Now, some of it happened slowly. Really, the Roman Catholic Church that we know of today really wasn't codified in all of its teachings until around Pope Innocent, which is,

I think, 1000 AD. So you have several hundred years of development, and then, boom, you start having this codification of it, and that's this now totally different religion than from what it started.

So we see this in history, and this is what happened with Judaism. So you have two different Judaisms, biblical

Judaism and rabbinic Judaism, and they're not the same. One is a divine religion, one is a false religion.

It's a man -made religion. And so you have to recognize that that occurred, and the Judaism that Jesus is interacting with is this beginning of this, because not all of the

Talmud was written at that point. Some of it started before the time of Christ, but it's written up till 7 -800, some up to 1000

AD. So it really wasn't fully developed for 1000 years after Christ, but a lot of it had been there just in oral form, and it was the rabbinic thought.

So this was the teaching of the rabbis. So what you end up seeing is that this is what

Jesus is responding to. When he's going after the Pharisees, what he is reacting to is the rabbinic

Judaism, which is very similar to the Judaism we see today. The legalism, the works -based system, that's what he's addressing.

Thank you for that insight. I'm quite concerned in that I suspect,

I suspect, and I want to throw this out to you, given the challenges of modernity, given the challenges of the move to schools of thought along the

Geisteswissenschaften, the liberalizing academy, the modern humanities, as well as other features of the

Enlightenment, I actually have quite a concern that the Christian church may in fact be experiencing a similar movement.

We were just talking in the Calvinist Boot Crew, there was this op -ed piece, Christmas Eve and the

Guardian, from an atheist, talking about reinventing Christianity along more reasonable lines, as if they just get to do that.

And I really wonder, I'm searching for a term here, rabbinical Christianity comes to mind,

I don't know if it's a great fit or not, but I just wonder when you interact with people from that side of things, and we could name names if we needed to, but let's just say the seminaries where the students are praying to the plants for forgiveness would be a good candidate here.

But when you see that sort of thing, does it look to some historical degree like a counterpart of what happened with Judaism all that long ago?

Well, you're talking about the university with the plants, and people say, oh, that's extreme. Actually, let's get it closer to home.

There are groups, and maybe we need to call it Big Eva Christianity, but there was, look, a well -known person,

I don't know if I can name names, he came out this year and said that if you if you criticize churches canceling service for Christmas, you're just a

Pharisee and a legalist. Wait, we're a Pharisee and a legalist because we want church to serve the purpose that church serves?

That's the purpose of the church. Like, how's that legalism to serve its purpose? In fact, if it's not serving its purpose, it's not a church by definition.

But you're a legalist. Why? Because so many of these people have given in to the social justice movement, and that is now there's been talk, and I have not seen this substantiated, that the

Southern Baptists have been funded by George Soros. But if that's true, it explains a lot of it.

Because once that money gets in there, they start to act different. It's like they got to keep that money coming in because they got to pay bills.

But you are seeing that with that organization right now. They're going through it.

They're starting to accept social justice. They're pushing it, and they don't even understand, many of them don't understand the ramifications of it.

This is why several of us, there were about 75 of us that got together and wrote a letter privately to John MacArthur to say, hey, we want to put together a statement on social justice in the gospel.

And we wanted him to see if he would back that, and he agreed. And out of the 75, 19 men got together, and MacArthur being one of them, and drafted what's now the

Statement on Social Justice in the Gospel. And you can go, just do a search on social justice in the gospel, and you can sign your name there.

And you'll see the 19 men that did the initial draft, and it went to the rest of us as initial signers that reviewed it and were put in comments.

And I can tell you that comments that I made made changes to the original.

So I know that they took the comments of all 75 of us serious because we see a serious threat to the gospel with what's happening in the social justice movement.

And maybe we end up calling it a social justice Christianity because that's really what the atheists are pushing for.

And it's scary that the atheists are the ones defining church, and the church, church leaders who should stand up and say, no, this is

God who defines this. They're not doing that. Instead, they're following the way of the world in the world's definitions.

That is where the problem is, to make a Christianity that's more comfortable to the

LGBT crowd. Well, this is why they want to redefine marriage. If most of those that say they're

LGBT, it's interesting. Many of them hold to a separation of church and state here in America.

They say that the church should be out of everything with the state. And I remember going before when

New Jersey was discussing this, and I went before the Congress, the Senate, the legislature that was discussing it, and it had an open forum.

And I asked the question, do all of you on this panel believe in a separation of church and state?

And they all said yes. And I said, then I need an answer why you, the state, are getting involved in a church issue.

If you believe in a separation of church and state, stay out of the definition of marriage because God defined marriage, and he defined it as a man and a woman.

Now we're trying to redefine what, because they keep pushing the envelope. Now we got to redefine what a man and woman is.

Can't even come to that. Which, by the way, side note to take us to some we were talking earlier.

When those atheists say that we're just products of the natural world, there is no God, there is no immaterial, we're just chemical reactions?

Really? So you believe we're just chemical reactions, sir? Yes. Okay. Let me ask you a question. Do you believe that a biological man can identify as a woman?

Yes. How? If they're biologically a man, they're just chemical reactions.

All the chemical reactions are man. How do they suddenly identify something? Oh, wait. They identify differently because they have an immaterial part of them.

Something that's working against that biology. Oh, so there is an immaterial part of us.

Thank you. And therefore, you need an immaterial source for that. Oh, that's God. Thank you very much.

So we're redefining, trying to redefine man and woman now, and it is pathetic that you have the church that is arguing for this.

Now, here's an interesting thing, and this may be a longer answer than you expected, but in the 80s,

I was, my parents moved to Florida, I was in Jersey at school and I stayed on campus during the summer break,

Christmas break, and I was there, it was basically me and international students. I was one of very few Americans, but one

American that was was the resident assistant. He was in charge of the dorms. And he came in my room once drunk, and he wanted to show me something in the janitor's closet, and it was a homosexual magazine.

Now, to this day, my personal belief is he really wanted to see my reaction to the magazine, because I think he was that way, and there's no one else on campus.

And he was drunk. But it was interesting, the article he gave me to read, because it laid out a game plan for how to get homosexuality to be mainstreamed.

This is in the 80s, and they said, we gotta be the victim. As long as we're victims, people will side with us, and we gotta get homosexuality taught in school at the youngest ages so people think it's normal.

But we always have to be a victim. But who's gonna, how can we, to be a victim, we have to be victimized, but we don't actually want to be victimized.

And so this was actually the layout that they made in the article was, we need a group that everyone will accept as victimizing us when they won't really do anything.

And that would be Christians. They won't actually fight it, but everyone will accept that they're really victimizing us.

In fact, it said in the article, in fact, in the end, they will be pushing our agenda, and they'll be the ones to help us mainstream it, because they'll want to get along.

Well, that article was exactly what we saw happening since the 80s. You ended up seeing that, and their first victimization was

AIDS, if you think back to the 80s. That's a disease that is almost completely from homosexual activity.

Blood transfusions also, but that's the only way. So scientifically, that is a homosexual disease, but they couldn't call it that.

And oh, if you call it that, oh, it's because everyone's attacking homosexuals. Well, they use that to play the victim, and now you end up seeing now churches that are promoting that agenda, and saying, oh, look, we're so open to this.

Why? Because you want to be accepted by the world? What does Scripture say? And this gets back to the question you asked about ecclesiology.

Scripture says we are to be in the world, but not of the world. But these churches want to be of the world.

They're looking to get acceptance from the world. And when they're looking to do that, okay, you've just revealed you're not really a church now, and I'm going to question your

Christianity as well, because that's not what a Christian would do. And so, yeah, I think you're exactly right that we see a move to try to redefine the church.

And I'll even tell you, there's $100 million that was put up for a recent campaign

He Gets Us. Maybe you saw those commercials, but if you go and you look at their website, the

He Gets Us website, and you look at what they're doing, it is all the reimagining or the recreation of Jesus as a social justice warrior.

And so they're trying to rebrand, as it said in one of the things, to rebrand Christianity.

Christianity doesn't need a rebranding. The Word of God doesn't need to change. It is what it is for thousands of years because it's true.

And you don't need to rebrand the truth. When we try to rebrand it, it's because we're trying to water it down and make it something other than the truth.

And that's what that campaign is doing. They spent $100 million. Now, whose money that is, we don't know, because they've kept that.

Let me throw this out there as a hypothesis. Could that be George Soros? Just saying. I mean, if that is, you have someone who's from Jewish descent that actually worked with the

Nazis. Everyone says, oh, you can't call someone Nazi. George Soros actually was a Nazi.

He worked with them, even though they were killing his own people. And he believed in that doctrine and is trying to spread that everywhere.

And so here you have the rebranding of Jesus. Well, what is the Jesus that they want? A social justice

Jesus. And that's really what we're seeing. And Big Eva, Big Eva stands for Big Evangelicals.

It's the celebrity pastors. Many of them are on board with this. They're just pushing this agenda because it gets them a bigger platform and a bigger audience.

And that's been a major problem, I think, for Christianity is social media because people are trying to build platforms and not ministries.

And when you're trying to build a platform, you want to reach as many people as you can. Well, I'm not looking to reach as many people as I can.

I want to reach those that God wants to bring to hear the truth. So I'm going to say things that are not comfortable for some.

I'm going to say things that people disagree with. Oh, well, if it's true. Now, if it's not true, then I need to be corrected.

But if it's true, oh, well, I'm not preaching so that you could feel good about yourself.

I think one of the great surprises of my lifetime is to realize that wars and battles can be fought over the contents of a dictionary.

And so the redefinition of words, the redefinition and the use of soft power in the culture is a force that I greatly underestimated in terms of power.

Just let's take, for example, the idea of pronouns and the proper usage of them.

One of the things that is very striking about this is that advocates will say practically simultaneously that it's a matter of grace, that it would be a courtesy to use somebody's preferred pronoun.

And yet, at almost the exact same time, they will act or speak as if it is not just courtesy, but in fact, it is a requirement.

And I say this in the sense that it would be a legal requirement, that one could be penalized or civilly discriminated against or hurt.

And so there's this simultaneous juxtaposition that's going on that I didn't appreciate just how powerful a tactic that is.

And you have mentioned the failure of Big Eva, which is a group that I, five years ago,

Andrew, I would not have thought, I would not have thought I would have seen the collapse that I have seen.

And precisely as Big Eva sort of steps down, I see atheists stepping up and saying,

I identify as a cultural Christian. We need a new Christianity. And let me tell you what needs to be included.

It needs to be a message of inclusivity, a message of love for the poor, a message of not so much about politics, unless, of course, they might be the right kind of politics, in which case, yes.

But this idea that it can happen right in front of our eyes has astonished me.

And when you think about the issues involved, there are so many fronts that these cultural wars are happening on.

Where should culturally engaged Christians try to concentrate and try to work together?

I don't even want to say to oppose, because it's not just a matter of opposing, it's a matter of also just standing for what our position is and doing it successfully.

So, when you think in your, when you think about it in your mind, where are we in terms of the

Christian who wants to participate in a wholesome way? Well, when you talk about the language, if you've ever read the book 1984, and I have a friend who has a t -shirt that says

Make 1984 Fiction Again, in 1984, that book was not an instruction manual, but it seems some have used that.

And when I read that back in the 80s, I thought that that was preposterous.

And what I thought was so unbelievable is when they talked about new speech. Now, if you're not familiar with the book,

I encourage you to read it. You'll see so much of what's going on today in there. And it was this idea that we could just, the government could just change the language.

And the argument they said is if you can control the past, you can control the future. And so they would just rewrite history and change things and just, and everyone would just, oh, here's the new definition of this.

And I said, that can never happen. But it has. We're having regularly new definitions for words that everyone just gets in line and accepts.

A birthing mother, had someone in my church just, they had a baby a year ago. And on the paperwork, they had to fill out which one of you is the birthing parent and which one is the non -birthing parent.

And they were like, what, you mean father and mother? No, we have to remove those terms because some people might not like that.

We are changing definitions in such a radical way. If you think of what social justice is, it's racism.

So when we talk about RTC, racism, critical racism theory,

CRT, it's really cultural racism training. That's really what it stands for.

It is racism. And yet, what have they done? They've redefined racism to be about economics.

And therefore, blacks can never be racist. What? You're arguing for racism. You're arguing that blacks should have a supremacy.

There's a clear teaching of black supremacy right now. Just heard about a school that, because they wanted to give people, they were, they were not telling certain students who excelled in school that they were receiving awards because it would help them in college to get into a college.

So they would only do that for the students that didn't, that couldn't get into schools.

They would give them, they would announce for them that they got awards. And so, it's just interesting how these things go.

So the redefinition of words, it's like a whiplash how fast they're changing definitions.

But this is what we have. There's a saying that goes, that control the story and you have the power for the future.

Now, what it means is that really, if you can control the narrative, you have the power.

And what we're seeing today, especially in the church, truth doesn't matter, theology doesn't matter, the narrative matters.

People don't care what's true. They don't care what theology teaches.

In other words, the study of God. What they care about is the narrative. Are you showing love to your neighbor?

Well, you should shut your church down for COVID. What is church? It is a gathering.

By definition, you cannot do church without gathering together. It's the very definition of church.

And so, you see them redefining things and telling the church how to conduct itself.

And it's coming from the unbelievers, which is the crazy thing that the church is going, okay, well, let's go back to the book 1984.

What did he do? Well, in the book, he had to stand up to the establishment. Christians don't like this, but that's what it's going to take.

We need to stand up to the establishment as many of our brothers and sisters do in China and in the

Arabic world where Islam rules. They stand up and they proclaim the truth of the gospel.

Should we get involved in politics? Politics is not our answer. The answer is the gospel. And right now,

I'll tell you, it is the best time to share the gospel. Everybody is afraid. If they're liberals, they're afraid of a disease.

And if they're conservative, they're afraid of socialism. So here in America, everybody's afraid. We, the

Christians, have the truth. We are the only ones that have a hope for them to overcome that fear.

We should be sharing the gospel. I got news for you. If every Christian was out there sharing the biblical gospel with everybody they can, and God chose to bring people to salvation,

I could tell you, son, the culture would change because the politicians will pretend to be Christian for the votes.

Go look at Geneva and look what happened when John Calvin came to Geneva. They brought Calvin because Geneva was a cesspool.

And the leaders of the area said, we need to clean up the town.

What do we do? Well, this Reformation thing is running all over the place. Let's bring in one of those guys.

And what happened in Geneva? Because people started hearing the proclamation of the gospel, they got saved.

And as they got saved, they wanted to read the Bible. So that meant they had to be literate. So all of a sudden, people started learning to read and to write so they could read

God's word. They were also concerned with the gospel. They were concerned with their testimony. What happened? They started to want to take care of making money so that they could provide for the poor because that's a

Christian responsibility. So what happened? All of a sudden, people who were begging are now working so that they could care for others.

And they're sharing the gospel and doing it. And all of a sudden, Geneva becomes not a cesspool, but becomes an area that is known for its intellect, for the studies.

What brought that about? It wasn't politicians. It wasn't Donald Trump. It was the preaching of the gospel.

We need to stand up at this time even more than ever and preach the gospel over the political message.

It is a time where more Christians than ever before know the Republican Party's message more than the gospel message.

That is anathema. Sorry. We should know the gospel message and be proclaiming that.

You want to see the culture change? It's not going to be solved in politicians. It's going to change when people's hearts get right with God.

And are they going to put us in prison? Yes. I've been saying this for two decades now.

People have thought I was nuts. Now they're starting to see what I've been saying for all this time. We will have another

Holocaust, but it will be here in America and it won't be Jewish people. It will be the Christians. I anticipate,

I said it when Trump got elected, whoever comes in after him, we will see such a shift to socialism that within a generation,

I think within 10 years, maybe 15, they will be arresting Christians for their

Christian belief. So if we won't stand up now, then when? When will we rise up and proclaim the truth of God's word to a lost and dying generation?

Not because we want to see them have more morality, but because we want to see people get right with God.

The reality is, it is going to get worse for us Christians. And you're going to see the fake

Christians fall away. Oh, when the government starts arresting real Christians, you're going to see Joel Osteen, he's going to just, he'll shut down.

He's got enough money. Same with all the rest of them. They're not doing it because they care for souls. They're doing it to make money.

If there's no money to be made, they're done. But now's the time. How do we see this happening in China?

One of the interesting things in China is there's a rise of Christianity and they are trying to suppress it.

What is the rise? The number one thing that we see with the Chinese Christians, because they have nothing in this life to live for.

The number one element that they see with Christians in China is they have an eternal perspective.

It's actually the reason we named the ministry what we named it, Striving for Eternity. It's not about salvation. It's about after salvation, our sanctification, that we have a mindset that is focused on eternity.

And if our mindset's focused on eternity, then living this life, this is not our home.

And if we're going to be persecuted, okay, it's for a short time. What, 50, 60, 100 years?

Compare that to forever. This life is short. But if we have a mindset that is for eternity, then we can live with that in mind.

And that is going to be far -reaching. So in other words, when we sit there and think about persecution, that's a short period of time.

And what will that do? 2 Corinthians 5 tells us as our bodies fail, what does it do? It gives us more of a longing to be with Christ.

It should purify us. Let go of all the things in this world, all the material things and things, the distractions.

That's what it should do for the genuine Christian, is cause them to focus on Christ, to study

Christ, to want to know our Bibles, to want to proclaim the truth of the Bible. So that's really what, now in this generation, that's what's needed.

We need all the Christians, genuine Christians, to stand up, proclaim the truth of God's Word, even though it's uncomfortable, even though it's not acceptable in our society, even though we may be persecuted, may be jailed, may be tortured for it.

Now's the time to stand up, Christian, and proclaim the truth. Do you have to stand in New York City on a street corner as I do?

No, you don't. Reach out to the people in your sphere of influence, your co -workers, your family members, the people you go to school with, the people that you see in the stores, whoever it is, that's who

God has given to you to share the gospel with. And when they get saved, if they get saved, that's who

God has given to you to disciple, to teach them all things that Christ has taught you.

And you say, but I haven't had a seminary degree. Well, you don't need one. Paul said to Timothy in 2

Timothy 3, 16 and 17, all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate and equipped for every good work.

So when we look at that, teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, that's a way that Paul is using, a

Jewish way of arguing, to say every area of life, training, what you have there is teaching is the right thinking.

Reproof is wrong behavior. Correction is right behavior.

And training in righteousness is right thinking. So what he's saying here is whether in thinking or in behavior, in right and in wrong,

Scripture is profitable for all that. But what's it really profitable for? So we talked about the

Scriptures and interpretation. Well, what you have there for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, those are prepositional phrases.

In other words, those are supporting the main phrase. What's the main phrase? All Scripture is

God -breathed. That's what that word actually means, inspired. Paul created a brand new word, theos muna, to be

God -spoken. He breathed it out for the purpose that you, Christian, would be adequate and equipped for every good work.

Don't say you don't have what it takes. You have the Bible. You have everything you need.

Study the Bible. The Holy Spirit indwells the believer to help us, to enlighten us to God's Word.

So you have everything you need, Christian. You have the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Now is the time to study that word and go out and practice it.

Andrew, what a joy. What a joy to hear. And you have been so generous with your time.

Let me just try one more to throw at you, and then we'll open it up for anything else.

But I just want to at least ask you to talk about something you might be passionate on.

I'm just teasing. You've been very passionate. But I wanted to talk about your ministry, Striving for Eternity Ministries.

What are your hopes and dreams in the new year and in the coming years?

And what is on your heart for this ministry? Yes, so I'm a pastor by heart.

That's really where I started out in ministry. I never planned to be a speaker that travels the world and speaks as I do.

But one of the things that, why I started Striving for Eternity the way I did what I did is it's a discipling ministry.

We're trying to do discipleship, to train to disciple, to get into churches and give them the tools they need so that they can disciple.

And so this is why we do what we do. And the thing is, so many parachurch ministries focus on one thing, evangelism, finances, family, evolution versus creation, whatever it is.

And that's the only thing they do, which is fine. You need that. The problem is within the church, people get latched onto that one thing and think that's everything.

And it creates imbalance. I know this as a pastor because what most people don't understand, they go, well,

I tried talking to my pastor about this parachurch ministry and he's not excited about it because he's probably,

I had many other people that were excited about something and the church should be doing this. No, everyone in the church should be discipling.

That's what everyone in the church should be doing. That's the Great Commission. And so we wanted to provide ways for discipling.

And so what we end up seeing is as we look at that, what we decided to do is the complete opposite of what everyone else is doing in parachurch ministries.

Everybody else reaches out to big churches because they want, they'll say, well, it's a minimum this many people or this much money or whatever.

They have some speaking fee that eliminates certain churches. And so if you've ever gone to a conference, everyone at a conference is thrilled with the fellowship, with the talks, with everything about it.

And when people have a conference in their church, it really revitalizes the church. It helps to get everyone excited.

And that's why so many churches will host these conferences within their church. But the small churches, guess what?

They can't afford that. They don't have that. And that's where the need is. The majority of churches, the average size church in the latest study that I saw was 75.

Now, you think about those mega churches with tens of thousands of people. Tells you that there's a whole lot of churches, a majority of churches, that are only 25 people.

You think they would like to be more? Well, of course they would. But you know what? There's nobody helping them. They can't afford to pay their pastor full time.

So he's got to do a job to pay the bills and feed his family. And then he's trying to just focus on sermons.

And these guys are trying to do everything they can to help the church, but there's just not enough hours in the day.

And so we as a ministry focus on those churches. We focus on the churches that everyone else ignores.

We come into those churches for a weekend and give them some training on how to interpret the

Bible, evangelism, apologetics. We'll deal with issues of social justice. We deal with these issues, train them, and a new workshop or seminar we're working on is, and this might get some people upset, but cessationism, along with the new film that we have coming out that we're working on.

But these are things that we think are important for the church, and therefore, we want to give them the discipleship.

We come in for a weekend, but we're only in for a weekend, so what do we want to do? We're going to give them training, leave them with some books and materials for them to then put in place in their church so the pastor doesn't have to try to write everything himself, but he can use that stuff, whether he uses it with the videos that we have or not.

He does the teaching, whichever. But we try to make it where the church, the local church, can start discipling within their church.

But we use the weekend, a weekend seminar, to have that conference that they can't have within their church.

So that's one of the big things we try to do. We try to, as you mentioned in the beginning,

I have books. I have a book on both our systematic theologies. One is a Christian systematic theology. One is a systematic theology of major Western religions.

We have our podcast. One of the ways we disciple is to disciple other podcasters. So we have the Christian podcast community.

And I have two main podcasts I do, Andrew Rapport's Rapp Report, which right now, what we're doing is going through a systematic theology.

We're going through, actually, a doctrinal statement that you referred to. And we're working our way through it. And right now, we're talking about the doctrine of salvation.

And then I have the Apologetics Live, which anyone can join on Thursday nights. You just go to ApologeticsLive .com.

And that's kind of a free -for -all. Anyone can come in and ask anything. And so those are ways we disciple that way.

And so that's really the heartbeat of what we try to do. I'll tell you, it is getting difficult.

COVID has tripled the price of travel. And so when you're targeting churches that can't afford to be able to pay for speakers to come in, it limits.

It really cuts in. We have our monthly donors that help us to go to those churches. But it's limiting us with what we could do because we can only go to a third of those churches now.

And so, because the money just runs out. Right? And so, that's why we use things online as well so that that stuff can be free and churches can use some of the materials free because that doesn't cost them anything.

How are we going to people sit there and say, big ministries, oh, well, we got to make money. Well, you know what? One of the things that Striving Fraternity, none of our speakers make their living at Striving Fraternity.

We have a retired dentist. We had a guy who is a pastor. And we have other ways of making money.

Some are retired or whatnot. But we do that so that the money we raise goes into the ministry of local churches.

And we want to target smaller churches. So, you have a church that goes, well, we can't afford it. We know.

That's why we're here. That's why we have donors. Very strange model. Why would I do, why would we do such a model?

Why would I promote it when we founded it? Because we believe God will do what God wants to do.

And if God wants to raise that up and help the local church, He can do that. And He's fully capable.

We don't need man -made efforts to try to figure out a way to bring money in. God's fully capable, and we can trust in Him.

Amen. God is able. He is capable. And He is willing.

Bradster, we have been so blessed here. We want to thank our brother, Andrew Rappaport, from Striving for Eternity Ministries for being with us.

And Bradster, would you close our discussion session down with a prayer, please? Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing

Andrew on the show. We thank you for bringing all this together. It's always a blessing to get together with brothers and talk about fellowshipping, evangelism, witnessing any way that we can to bring the truth of your gospel to the lost.

And nothing else matters to us in the Boo Crew other than giving people the truth. And we here today have heard it, and I appreciate it from my brother, and I appreciate it on behalf of the

Boo Crew. We thank you, Lord Jesus, for everything you do each and every moment of each and every day, because it's only by you that anything good, right and just, and true, comes to pass.

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