174. Think Christianly! (An Interview With Dr. Joe Boot)

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and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 174,

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Think Christianly. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

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It's been a little while since we have had an episode because I was hosting Presbytery for our denomination and there was all sorts of other things going on at the

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Shepherd's Church, so I'm glad to be back. And I'm glad to be back with a bang because today we're gonna be doing an interview with Joseph Boot.

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Joe, would you give us a little bit of an introduction? It's been a little while since you've been on the show, so remind people of who you are, brother.

01:10

Yeah, great to see you, Kendall. It has been a while, but delighted to be back on your show.

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So I'm the president and founder of the Ezra Institute. Some people just know it as Ezra, but the

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Ezra Institute, and we have now offices in the USA, in Canada, and in the

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United Kingdom, and we're a Christian worldview and cultural apologetics think tank and training organization, equipping

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Christians to think Christianly. We like to say we're helping believers think and thinkers believe.

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Yeah, amen. And you guys offer a fellowship, right? One of my friends, Jacob Tanner, has started that.

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Yeah, so in fact, we're about to announce four new fellows into the

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Ezra Institute. Fellows are people who, at one level or another, contribute to the thinking and the output of the

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Ezra Institute. So we'll watch somebody for a time, and their ministry, and their writing, their work, their output, and build a relationship.

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And sometimes we invite those people to be fellows. We're also launching soon a sort of Ezra Ambassadors Program where we're gonna be talking to church leaders and scholars and theologians who may not be fellows of the

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Institute, but are keen to advance the vision and mission that we propagate. And so we have ambassadors that we're working on as well.

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But yeah, the fellows, people can see who our fellows are via our website at ezrainstitute .com. That's awesome, and you guys are doing great work.

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You mentioned that one of the things that your purpose is as an Institute is to help people think

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Christianly, which, as a matter of fact, I just heard about a great book that just came out by that same title.

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Why don't you give us an overview of that book, brother, and congratulations on finishing it. It's a wonderful read.

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Thank you. Well, yeah, so just this past week, just actually in the last few days, my latest book,

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Think Christianly, came off the presses, which we're very excited about. And so we're very thankful for friends like you who are doing some interviews at the moment to talk a little bit about the book and its content.

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I kind of see Think Christianly as sort of finally a sequel to my major work,

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The Mission of God. I have written a number of books over the last 10 years. After Mission of God came Gospel Culture, Gospel Witness, and what

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I believe was quite an important book, actually, during the COVID era, Ruler of Kings. They've all been shorter works that have been just dealing with one particular theme or another.

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But Think Christianly, which is approaching 500 pages, is a work in 12 chapters that's grappling with a number of worldview issues in one place and trying to build it thematically and systematically, line by line, one chapter on the next, and hopefully will be seen as a worthy sequel to The Mission of God.

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Yeah, I liked how you laid it out. It really starts with a biblical worldview and then works its way out into the peripheries of the things that we're really struggling with in our culture, like Marxism and other things that we'll get into.

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But I think that you're right. It is a wonderful sequel to that book, and I would highly recommend both of them.

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If you have the time for about 1 ,000 pages of reading, go after it because they're great books.

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So congratulations again. I wanna jump in, brother, and ask you a couple questions about it just so you can help us understand what the theme of the book is and what

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God was really pressing on your heart. And I guess the first thing that I wanna ask is, you argue that the greatest crisis in the church today is the lack of an undivided

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Christian mind. What do you mean by that? And what do you mean by thinking Christianly? And why does recovering the

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Christian mind so essential to the future of Christendom? Well, I think it's fair to say that for quite some time, the majority of Christians have been, often through no direct fault of their own, schizophrenic in their thinking.

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We've had a divided mind. And by that, I mean that we have been part Christian in our thinking, perhaps about the church, about some moral questions, but part humanist or part secularist in our thinking as well as we think about culture, as we think about law, politics, the arts, education, media, sciences, all of these different areas of life.

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We've tended to think that those things belong to a different realm and that we're not obligated to think in distinctly biblical or Christian ways about those areas of life.

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And that's meant that the majority of Christians have tended to be a bit like a

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Toyota Prius, the hybrid vehicle. We're part running on the energy of secular and humanistic or neo -pagan philosophies in our thinking and partly on Christian ideas.

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And that's one of the reasons actually, Kendall, why we're losing about, depending on which study you read, between 65 and 80 % of our young adults to the church by the age of 23, because they're growing up in this schizophrenic environment.

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They have a divided mind and when they leave home and they arrive in their first job or at university, they find their faith is undeveloped and increasingly indefensible because they've never learned a robust biblical world and life view.

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So thinking Christianly is basically about putting on the lenses of scripture, the claims of Christ and the word of God on our nose so that we view every single area of life and thought in terms of the word of God.

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And I think that's taught explicitly in scripture, that we're told that the fear of God or reverence for God is the beginning of wisdom.

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That word beginning literally means the principal part. It's the foundation. It's the starting point of all wisdom is reverence for God, which means submitting ourselves to his word.

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And of course, even as we share the faith and defend the faith, Peter tells us, set apart

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Christ as Lord in your heart. That is in the root, the root unity of your being.

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And only then can you give a defense. That's the prerequisite, the Lordship of Christ. And so the

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Psalmist says, praise actually, give me an undivided mind to fear your name.

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And we've wrestled with this for a long time as the Christian church in the West, we've wrestled with this divided mind, a mind torn between two opinions.

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And yes, I mean, I've written the book because I really do believe that Christian action in the context of culture presupposes the

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Christian thought and Christian thought thinking presupposes a Christian mind.

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You can't actually have authentically Christian action without a Christian thinking and you can't have

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Christian thinking without the Christian mind. And Paul tells us that as believers, we have the mind of Christ.

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So we have to cultivate that. We have to nurture that. We have to, as Paul says to Timothy, think over what

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I say, he said, so that God will give you understanding in all things. And I think there's been a deficit of thinking.

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There's been a widespread anti -intellectualism in the life of the church that has tended to think, well, if you're a bit too bookish and you're too thinking about these things, maybe you don't have the spirit of God or maybe you're a weird kind of Christian.

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And that kind of mentality does need to be broken. And we need a recovery of distinctly

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Christian ways of thinking. I wanted to refer actually just to one scripture on that to what

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Paul says in Colossians 2, verses eight and nine. He says, be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit.

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On human tradition are based on the elements of the world rather than Christ. For the entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ.

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And you have been filled by him who is the head over every ruler and authority.

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So you have it all there. Here is the head over all things. And we have to not have our thinking rooted in the elements of the world, in empty philosophies of men, but grounded in Christ.

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There is a true Christian philosophy. There's a true Christian world and life view.

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And we need to cultivate and develop that if there's gonna be hope for our culture and our civilization.

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That's so good. I really feel like just as I'm listening that whatever the ethos of fear and dread that has descended upon the

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Christian church over the last 50 to 75 years or whatever, fear that we're not going to be able to compete in the intellectual space that that's people much smarter than us are there because we've abandoned academia.

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We've abandoned some of these pursuits. And like you said, we've looked at that as that that's not very spiritual.

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And then the dread that is associated with just an immunitized eschatology where we're always on the precipice of Jesus returning.

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So all we really need to do is make converts and not disciples. And I think those two themes have really left the church paralyzed.

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Yes. Yeah. And it's interesting the way you've articulated that. One of the thinkers that's influenced me most in my life has been the

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Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Duiverd. And he talked about the intellectual disarmament of Christianity.

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And that's what's happened through fear and dread, through failure to develop a distinctly

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Christian mind, through the failure to develop a distinctly Christian world and life view. He talked about the fact that we have, by becoming a synthesis culture, by trying to blend together

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Christianity and, Christianity and plus, and trying to synthesize basically contradictory worldviews, we have been intellectually disarmed.

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And it's time for the moral and the intellectual rearmament of the Christian.

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And that's really what my book Think Christianly is about. Yeah, I would say even the center of some of the book,

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I don't know if it's the central thesis necessarily, but it was certainly a central theme that I picked up on, was not the question of, do you believe in God?

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The question is, who is your God? And as you're talking, I'm noticing a theme here that this anti -intellectual, undeveloped sort of Christianity is a

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Christianity foreign to scripture. It's an idolatry even, it's a Christianity with a different God.

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Indeed. And that is why very often we seem powerless and totally non -influential in culture.

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I mean, if you look at the United States, for example, which still has in the West by far, the highest level of church attendance, you would think that the impact of the

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Christian faith over the last 30 years, let's say, would have been felt much more deeply than it has been given the sheer number of Christians.

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But actually it hasn't been, it's not been giving shape to the development of Western society or American culture over the last 30 years.

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And that's because of that very thing that we have, in a sense, the organization

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I mentioned that I founded and lead today, the Ezra Institute. Ezra was a scholar who went in amongst the people of God in that time of Ezra Nehemiah.

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Nehemiah is often spoken of because he did the rebuilding of the walls and it's a bit more sexy.

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But Ezra was the scholar who went in before and his task was to call the people back to the word of God.

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And they rediscovered the law of God and he read it aloud and the people abandoned their synthesis culture, their syncretism to return to the

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Lord. So that when Nehemiah says, right, who's up for some rebuilding, there were actually volunteers.

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And that's been our problem and our difficulty, but you're right in saying in a certain sense, the central thesis that I'm dealing with is that there are no non -believers.

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There are unbelievers, there are those who do not believe in the living God, but there are no non -believers. Every single person has a worldview that has a religious root, inescapably so.

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There is nobody who is neutral. And that means that if you don't worship the living

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God, there is a divine per se that takes the place of the living

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God. There is a substitute divinity that is put in the place of the living God.

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And of course, the Bible calls that idolatry and of idolatry are as broad as the ocean.

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We have put in over the history of man, we have put everything from numbers, the whole world number or number world theory of the

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Pythagoreans who sang hymns to the number 10 because they believed that numbers were at the root of the all creation depended on this abstract world of numbers.

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And sometimes we put history historicism in there or rationality or reason or matter and energy or the biotic aspect of our lives, that's kind of vitalism.

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Almost anything has been proposed as a substitute divinity upon which everything is to depend and find its root and meaning other than the living

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God. And Paul talks about that in Romans one, doesn't he in a crystal clear way? Because he says, we exchange the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who's blessed forever.

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So he says, there's a truth exchange, there's a worship exchange, and then there's a cultural exchange, which is expressed,

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Paul says in Romans one, one of the initial expressions of that rebellion is a sexual exchange and confusion.

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That's the meaning of Romans one. So there are no non -believers, there are only unbelievers.

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And it's not a question of whether you believe in God, it's what is your God? And the

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Bible doesn't recognize the notion of atheism, it only recognizes the notion of idolatry or true belief.

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And that of course has ramifications and implications because everybody has a faith function.

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That's the nature of being human and heart commitments govern how we will engage with culture.

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Yeah, I love how you said that too. And it reminds me, one of the influential books that I read when

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I got out of the military, I was a new Christian back in 05. And I was reading this book that a pastor recommended to me called

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Spiritual Depression by Martin Lloyd -Jones. And he connects, he's one of your fellow countrymen or was.

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But he connects the head, heart and hands in a way that I thought was so helpful in that the heart actually doesn't feel rightly if the head is not connected rightly.

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And the hands don't even move to serve God faithfully if your head and your heart are not engaged.

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And he wrote about it as this sort of cascading waterfall that you must train the mind in order for the heart to feel sincere affections for God.

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And then when the heart feels sincere affections for God, the hands begin moving. And you see that in Romans one,

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God gives over the mind and then eventually it's the hands and culture that become depraved to the point to where they're celebrating sin.

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I think that you did a really good job of pointing that out that Sunday service

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Christianity is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a robust Christianity that engages the mind that eventually changes the culture.

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It's necessarily so that right Christianity eventually ends up acting Christianly in the world.

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Yeah, exactly. I think that's the distinction I draw between the churchianity and Christianity in the early chapters of the book, which relates to what we were talking about earlier, how we've sort of truncated the meaning of Christianity and we've allowed this sort of schizophrenic posture to come in.

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One of the implications of all of that is that we've tended to see, Christians have tended to conflate the gospel of the kingdom, that is the reality of the kingdom of God with the church as an institute.

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So it's familiar to people in terms like, well, if you really wanna serve God, go into full -time ministry, by which they mean go and become an officer of some sort in the church institute.

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Now, of course, scripture thinks about the church in a variety and talks about the church in a variety of different ways.

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There is the body of Christ, the invisible body of Christ. There is the church as it is everywhere in the world.

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It's not visible to us, but the church is everywhere in the world. Then there is the historical church, the historical temporal church that we see expressed through its institutional life.

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And then we have the local expression of the church, which is often what we mean when we're talking about the church.

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We're thinking about the local expression of where we have a gathered community where there's elders, pastors, and church discipline, and there's the communion and the preaching of the word of God, that there's an institutional form there to the church.

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And what we've tended to do is we've confused the basileia, the kingdom of God, with the ecclesia. But the ecclesia, which actually, interestingly enough, is a political term that was adopted by the church from the

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Greek world. It was a governing council, basically, in terms of the public affairs of the city.

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The New Testament takes that word. God actually takes that word and says, okay, the church is a people who are concerned with the government of the affairs of my kingdom.

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So although they're always found together in scripture, then kingdom and church are not identical.

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In fact, Jesus says, the kingdom is taken from you, speaking to the leaders of the

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Jews, and he said it's given to a people who will bring forth its fruits.

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So the kingdom and the people are distinct conceptions in scripture, though they are bound together, because the people, the ecclesia, are on mission in terms of the kingdom of God.

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What we've tended to do, though, is we've confused those two. We've kind of collapsed them into one and said that the gathering, the institutional life of the people, is the kingdom of God.

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A way of describing that is to say that we've ecclesiasticized the gospel of the kingdom, and as a result, we've ecclesiasticized the

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Bible, the word of God, and we've said that the Bible really is a church book. Christ's claims are for the institutional church, but the word of God is not really for the world, and the lordship of Jesus Christ and his kingship is not really for the whole world and for all of life.

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It's for this kingdom institution, rather than seeing the kingdom as the expansive reality of wherever Christ is ruling and reigning, and the problem,

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Kendall, has been that as we ecclesiasticize the word and the kingdom, we call forth the secularization of the world, because we say, oh, well, it's only for this area, small area of life, and therefore we end up calling forth the secularization of every other area of life, and that's had a dramatic impact upon the state of our culture in the

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West today as we've ecclesiasticized and then privatized the message of the gospel of the kingdom.

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Right, I say it to our church a lot that we are called salt, and if you reckon with what salt is in the ancient world, it's a preservative agent.

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It's not, first and foremost, a seasoning agent, and if you remove the salt from whatever corpse or carcass of an animal that you're trying to preserve, it rots and it stinks and it festers and it all sorts of stuff, so it's essential that you pack the meat with as much salt as you possibly can so that it preserves it.

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Well, in that sense, we should look around and see the rotten stench of the world, and the finger should be pointed back at us, the church, because we've abandoned it.

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We've not given it its salt. Yeah, the interesting thing is that for us as believers, there's only one totalizing concept, and that is the reality of the kingdom of God, and in failing to recognize that, we have lost our savor, and increasingly, we're seeing that the

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Lord has said to certain quarters of the church, you're good for nothing to be trampled underfoot, and whole denominations are becoming real estate boards, just selling off property because they have no people, they have no growth, they have no money, they have no converts because they have no message, and the totalizing reality, the only totalizing reality that Scripture recognizes is the rule and reign of Christ, not the church, not the family, not the state, not any other area of life except the kingdom of God, and that means it reaches into every sphere, and that's what it does mean to be salt and light, to be the shining the light into all of these situations and circumstances, and acting as the preservative agent in whatever corpus, as you mentioned, we're found in, and by withdrawing from all these different areas of life, the body politic, for example, it's rotting and decaying, so yeah, that image is critically important.

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Yeah, so it seems to me that if we have a divided mind, we are going to be discipled by our culture, and if we're discipled by our culture, our culture rots and decays, so.

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One of the things that you do so well, and I think that one of the things we have to recover is the law of God, because you've got guys like Andy Stanley who use these phrases like we need to unhitch ourself from the

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Old Testament, and we just need to be about the New Testament, and that's the gospel, and of course, yeah, but Jesus looked in Luke 24, and he said the whole

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Bible's all about me. I really believe that an abandonment of the law of God has been absolutely critical in causing a downfall of the

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Christian mind, along with Proverbs as well. I'm preaching through Proverbs right now, and I'm so blown away at how much of this is never preached and never taught, and yet it's wisdom from God.

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Yeah, well, Proverbs, of course, is a king teaching his son the practical application of the law of God.

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The king was required to make a copy of the law himself, write it out, and then to read it every day, and so you've got

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Solomon teaching his son in the Proverbs applied wisdom of the law of God.

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The habit of reading a proverb a day is a very, very good one, because it keeps the drip feed of the wisdom of God's law going into our hearts, but you're absolutely right that antinomianism, that anti -law perspective, has gripped the life of the church.

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We've been up against, really, an antinomian church and an antinomian culture, therefore, for a long time.

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We don't have the law in front of us as we used to. It used to be part of the weekly communion service for many churches.

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Usually, the Ten Commandments would be displayed on the walls. They were displayed in public buildings very often.

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In our courts in England, they were displayed on the walls of all of our crown courts. It was public law.

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It was common law. And we have ceased to preach the law of God, which means we've actually, according to Scripture, we've abandoned the teacher, because Paul says that the law is a tutor.

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It's a teacher that leads us to Christ. Now, the last thing that Jesus did was unhook himself from the

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Old Testament. I mean, those sorts of statements, they boggle the mind from a

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Christian standpoint, from a historical Christian standpoint, from a biblical standpoint. In fact, I have a whole section in my book, and there are actually two chapters on the law, and in the second chapter,

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I deal specifically with Jesus' attitude and approach to the law of God.

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And we see that the last thing Jesus did was unhook himself from the law. In fact, when he's confronted with the devil and temptation, and the devil is trying to thwart the kingdom of God, Jesus wields the law of God.

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He wields Deuteronomy. It's the chosen tool to defeat the temptation of Satan.

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So any Christian who unhooks himself from the law, unhooks himself from Christ, and unhooks himself from the kingdom of God, that's the reality.

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So you're talking about a concept with the law. Maybe somebody might have heard the concept of theonomy.

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Maybe they think that that's, oh no, that's a bad word. What is your thought about the applicability of the law of God today, and how do we pursue developing a

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Christian mind through the law? Give us some practical wisdom there. Well, yes, theonomy is basically the biblical view of ethics, which is that God's law commands men and nations.

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It just means God's law. That's what theonomy means. Autonomy means self -law. Theonomy means

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God's law. It is really a very simple choice. We either accept that God's law word binds us as, and let's remember that every word of God in an important sense is his law.

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When he says, let there be, and he calls creation into existence with the 10 utterances, his word is a law word.

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It calls all things into being and is the structure which sustains them. It is the condition of the existence of all things.

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So God's law is in the very bone and marrow of creation itself.

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And when then God creates not the earth, but a people for himself at Sinai, he creates them with the 10 words again.

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And it's interesting that the time where God actually, there's actually three, there's only three times where God himself writes with his own finger in the

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Bible. One is when he's giving his law. Let's remember that, that when we talk about God's law, which is sometimes called the law of Moses, because Moses is the one who's making it concrete.

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He's positivizing it for the Israelite community. This law is God's law. This is the one time where the human agency is set aside in the scripture and God's own finger writes his law, because it, and the reason for that is that it is the republication really of the creation word.

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So the creation law, as God calls all things into existence, as he calls a people into existence, as a covenant people, and he reiterates his creation law.

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He writes with his own finger to avoid people being annoyed that I haven't mentioned the other two time God's rights.

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Well, he writes in the hall of Babylon, mene, mene, tekel pasen, you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting so law, judgment.

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And then the only other time is when Jesus writes on the ground in John eight.

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And we don't know exactly what he wrote, but the outcome was grace. And so you've got law, judgment and grace, grace and truth.

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They always come together in the word of God. So theonomy is just, is

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God's law. It's his standing law. I think it was GK Chesterton who famously said, you'll live by the 10 commandments or you'll live by the 10 ,000 commandments of the unbelieving state.

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And so the importance is that just as Moses positivizes the law and we have the standing law of the 10 commandments, then we have a case laws and we have their application to specific circumstances.

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So the apostle Paul does the same thing in the newer Testament, for example, when he's writing about the family in Ephesians five and marriage.

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And he's talking about children. He says, children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right.

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Honor your father and your mother for this is the first commandment with a promise attached to it.

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That you may live long in the earth. He doesn't say the land there. He says in the earth, because you've got the breaking of all the regional national boundaries of ethnic

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Israel with the word now. And he's applying the law to all.

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When he says, do not muzzle the ox, when Paul says in reference to pastors and teachers,

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I don't muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain. He's taking the case law of the treatment of animals and he's applying it now to pastors and leaders who teach the word of God.

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So the theonomy is basically the recognition that God has given his law.

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He's given his law word that it binds us. In fact, if we say the law doesn't bind us, then the gospel has nothing to say to us.

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Because if you're not under law, then you cannot possibly be under grace. You cannot be a recipient of grace.

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The law we're told in scripture shuts all men up under the judgment. The confusion comes in,

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Kendall, as you know, when people think that the law, one of the images, a helpful image for the law is it's like a mirror.

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It's a teacher is one image. It's also a mirror. It shows us our condition before God.

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But you can't take a mirror off the wall and wash in it. The mirror can tell you what you look like, but you can only be washed according to scripture in the blood, in the blood of Christ.

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For there is no, without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sin. And that's why when Moses receives the law on the mountain, he also received the instructions for the tabernacle, which prefigured the sacrifice of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So it's not that we can be saved by the law. That's not what theonomy is. It's not legalism.

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Some of the charges, oh, this is like, you know, these are Christian Taliban. And they think you can be saved by the law and all this sorts of nonsense.

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No, the law is the path of life. It's not the source of life.

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We're fallen. No one can keep the law perfectly, but the law is given to us as a measuring rod.

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It's given to us as a mirror. It's given to us as a tutor. And of course, the location of the law has now changed.

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So with the newer covenant, just as the priesthood has changed, now it's the priesthood of the order of Melchizedek, which predated the

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Jew -Gentile distinction in Abraham, which is why Abraham paid a tithe to Melchizedek.

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The location of the law, we're told, in Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8, has changed from the

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Ark of the Covenant, where the tables of the law were kept, and they've been written onto the tables of our hearts.

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So the law has not changed. When Jesus cuts covenant, the Last Supper with the disciples, he says, here's the newer covenant in my blood, but he doesn't issue a new set of commandments because the law is already given.

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The priesthood has changed, the blood has changed, but the law remains. And that's because the purpose of the gospel is that Paul says the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us.

33:04

And that means as well that not just the Christian, but the law binds all men and nations. And Paul tells us in 1

33:10

Timothy 1, verses 8 through 11, he says, the law is good if one uses it lawfully. And it's not actually made for the righteous, who is already fulfilling the law by the work of the spirit in our lives, but for the unrighteous, for the unholy, for those who kill fathers and mothers, for the immoral, the sexually immoral, and so on and so forth.

33:28

Paul goes through the deck a lot. And he concludes interestingly enough in that passage by saying, and anything else, he says, which is contrary to my gospel.

33:41

So he does not drive a wedge between law and gospel. He says, this is gospel, this is good news.

33:47

God's righteous law is part of the good news of the gospel. Gospel contains law, law contains gospel.

33:54

That's the meaning of theonomy. Yeah, amen. You said earlier that it's either theonomy or autonomy.

34:00

Would you also agree that autonomy is a twisted form of theonomy, but just with yourself as the

34:06

God of the system? Precisely, yeah. It is just, again, it's not about unbelief.

34:12

It's about non -belief. It's about what kind of belief. And we cannot do without law. Man cannot live without law.

34:18

So the question is simply whose law will govern? And typically man's answer has been my law, not

34:25

God's law. You will be as God. That was the essence of the first temptation. You can define for yourself good and evil.

34:30

So man has said, it's gonna be my law. And that's come in all kinds of guises, radical forms of libertarianism, various forms of statism.

34:38

Sometimes even natural law has been used. Oh, well, we're gonna derive our law from nature but not directly from God and his revealed word.

34:47

And usually these are efforts to get around or to move around the law that was written by the very finger of God.

34:55

It also occurs to me too, it's something that hit me so hard whenever I saw it, that the sacrificial system has not been abolished.

35:05

It's been fulfilled in the perfect sacrifice. The priesthood has not been abolished. It's been fulfilled in the perfect priest.

35:12

The law has not been abolished. It's been credited to us by the one who did it perfectly. But if you unhitch yourself from the law, then what are you actually saved from and by and for?

35:24

Because there's nothing that you're saved from. The fact that Christ credited his righteousness and his righteous obedience of the law to us means the law actually has to have a place in the life of the

35:35

Christian. And it's the engine by which now we obey. And it makes me think a lot of the reason why we see so much antinomianism and lack of cultural engagement and immorality in the church and apostasy in the church is because we've forgotten the law of God.

35:53

Indeed. And I mean, Jesus says precisely that, doesn't he? In Matthew 5, he says, I've not come to abolish the law, but to put it into force, to bring it to its fullness, to fill it up to its full measure.

36:06

And he says, anyone who teaches men to do otherwise will be called least, where?

36:13

In the kingdom of heaven. So he's assuming there, Jesus is basically teaching that there will be believers who teach men not to obey the law of God.

36:23

But if you wanna be great in the kingdom, not some past dispensation, but in the kingdom of heaven, in the kingdom of God, those who teach the law and do it, those will be called great.

36:33

And he concludes that marvelous treatment of the law by saying, therefore, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

36:43

And that's the calling, isn't it, of the Christ? That's the meaning of sanctification. We are in this process of being transformed from one degree of glory into another.

36:52

And that was the meaning, of course, of Leviticus of the law, be holy as God is holy.

36:58

Jesus says, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. It's the same message. I have an analogy or a metaphor that I wanna ask you and see if this makes sense.

37:08

If it doesn't, that's fine. But the Old Testament is a vehicle without any gas. The New Testament, the gospel, the spirit of God being poured into you is the gas.

37:19

And it seems like to me, many Christians are like, oh, thank goodness I have the gas. And they grab the can and they walk down the road without the car.

37:25

Sure, yeah, that's quite good. Yeah, yeah. And I guess you could say, interestingly, because the newer covenant is the newer covenant's meaning, again,

37:35

Christians often forget this or they don't notice it, that the newer covenant itself is not the cross.

37:42

The newer covenant is that the law is gonna be written in our hearts. The means of that happening is the cross.

37:49

And then at Pentecost, which was by Jewish tradition, the day on which the law was given on the mountain, that was the day on which

37:56

God gave his law at Pentecost. That's when the Jews celebrated it. At Pentecost, the

38:01

Holy Spirit is given and the newer covenant church is born because the work that God is doing is inscribing there.

38:10

And you will not say to one another, know the Lord, for you will all know him from the least to the greatest.

38:16

So yeah, that image of the, this is the gas, that the spirit of God writing the law in our hearts through the gospel doesn't mean we can leave the car behind.

38:25

And as you say, wander down the street with a jerry can thinking, what's this fuel for? I like that,

38:30

I might use it. Well, I just, the image just popped in my head and I was like, that's what we're doing, where the fuel is given to us as a gift to make the engine run.

38:41

The spirit's given to us to make us obey, to make us love the law of God, to make us obedient.

38:47

Like we've thrown away the car for the gas. It just seemed like that was what we were talking about.

38:53

Indeed. So let's ask practical questions because you spend a lot of time on the law.

38:59

And I think for good reason, let's say someone's listening to this and they don't really know much about the law.

39:05

They can maybe quote five or six of the 10 commandments and they're like, okay, so what do

39:11

I do about this? If the law has been fulfilled by Christ and now I'm supposed to, through the spirit, begin obeying the law, what would you tell someone to do?

39:22

Maybe they read it and they say, oh, this is confusing, I don't get it. What would you instruct people to do to learn and grow in the law of God as they develop their

39:30

Christian mind? Well, something that I did, two very simple things, one I've already mentioned, but two simple things would be what

39:37

I did when I was in my early days, when this started to really hit home for me, I wrote out the law, the 10 commandments, the standing law.

39:46

And I wrote it out on a big sheet of two pieces of paper and I stuck it on the wall over my desk so that I learned and I looked at it every day and read it every day till I knew the 10 commandments in order.

40:01

And as you say, Kendall, it's not to condemn people, but most Christians today, if you said to them, what are the 10 commandments in order?

40:09

They usually can't tell you. How is that possible that what God wrote with his own finger that Jesus says

40:17

I've not come to abolish but to fulfill, we don't know. We can start by just simply just put it up somewhere visible in your house or over your desk or wherever you have your leisure time, wherever you sit and read or whatever, and just look at it every day and commit it to memory.

40:32

Memorize God's law. Remember that this is important to God because the longest chapter in the

40:39

Bible is a song about the law of God. Psalm 119 is a celebration of God's law.

40:48

God devotes that longest section, that longest part, the longest Psalm, the longest portion of scripture is devoted to a celebration of the law, which is a marvelous thing.

40:59

So we can start there. And then you've already mentioned reading the Proverbs. The Proverbs is the practical application of God's law into the life of the young person.

41:11

So just start by reading the Proverbs, meditating on the Proverbs. And of course, the

41:17

Psalms are this great theonomic declaration from Psalm 1 to the end of Christ's theocracy.

41:27

They are about the rule and reign of the Messiah King. That's the meaning of the Psalms. That's how they're quoted in the

41:34

Newer Testament. Psalm 110 is quoted multiple times. Psalm 8 is quoted.

41:42

So these Psalms are, Psalm 2, of course, is actually quoted multiple times.

41:47

So those key Psalms, their significance is unpacked for us in the Newer Testament, that this is about the

41:53

King, the King and his reign. And then you've got the celebrations of the King and his reign, which is filled with God's law, the

41:59

Psalms. And then you've got this wisdom teaching. So it's in a sense, the law of God is a journey into wisdom.

42:06

That's one of the ways I articulate the nature of law. It's a journey into wisdom.

42:11

So go on that journey, start the journey where you are. And then there's some tools that can help you with that journey.

42:19

There's a few books that I would recommend. You know, a good starting point would be my book,

42:26

The Mission of God. Sorry to self -promote. You know, I deal - That's a good book. Extensively with the nature of God's law there.

42:33

And then a real classic work that was written on the law about 40, 50 years ago was the Institutes of Biblical Law by the

42:41

Armenian, not Arminian, Armenian -American scholar, R .J. Rashduni. And I would encourage people to look at that as well.

42:49

Another wonderful book on the law was The Doctrine of the Christian Life by Dr. John Frame.

42:55

And that's PNR Publishing, I think. The Doctrine of the Christian Life. Big, thick book. A wonderful exposition of the meaning of the

43:02

Ten Commandments. So there's three possible resources to get you started along with scripture.

43:08

You know, for me too, I didn't know this. And I didn't really have any mentors who were telling me this. So when

43:13

I was becoming more reformed, I was reading the Heidelberg Catechism and I was falling in love with reformed confessionalism and catechesis.

43:23

And I stumbled upon, next, the Westminster Standards. I read the shorter and it was beautiful.

43:29

I got to the larger and I was blown away at how the larger catechism deals with the

43:35

Ten Commandments and how every commandment has hundreds, and those are still summative, hundreds of applications of the

43:45

Ten Commandments. And it really forced me as a pastor several years ago to think, why don't we do this every week in church?

43:54

So every week now we go through one of the Ten Commandments in rotation. I preach a 10 -minute sermon on the law and explicate one of those applications from the

44:04

Westminster larger. And every week we're doing it over and over and over again to remind us. And I feel like it's supercharged our church.

44:13

Yeah, yeah, that's a wonderful practice. There is actually, I was just trying to think of it while you were speaking there, there's a wonderful five -part series of huge commentary.

44:23

I think it's by Joe Moorcroft, actually, on the larger Westminster Catechism, where he expounds, so you've got, it's five volumes, but it's worth delving into.

44:34

And I think it's Joe Moorcroft on the Catechism, which is, as you say, a marvelous resource, because they were concerned, these

44:43

Puritans were concerned with the details of God's law in a way that modern Christianity isn't. And that's why we're in such a mess, because they were concerned to hear the law and then to think through the implications and apply it to their people and to Christians at the time.

44:58

They took it seriously. And we don't, if we're honest, we don't. And so what you're doing there is, in a sense, pioneering.

45:05

You're re -plowing foundations. And we did similar things when I was pastoring. I was a founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto.

45:14

And the law would be part of the communion service every week. Remembering the law, we hung the law on the

45:21

Ten Commandments on the walls of the church, on either side of the stage of the platform in a traditional old building.

45:28

We hung the law of God so that every week, people could see it, they could see God's commandments.

45:34

And it just starts to sink into people's hearts and lives. It's so important that however we can do that, we need to do it.

45:41

Yeah, I completely agree. And one of the things I was gonna say is just how much it's discipled our people and how much, like,

45:51

I really do believe it has supercharged our depth of growth as people.

45:58

You know, when people come to our church, it's not very long before they're coming to me saying, I'm excited to read the

46:04

Bible again. I'm reading the Old Testament. And it just, it blows me away. So I would encourage anyone who's listening to this, in addition to the books and the resources, go to a church that holds the law of high and highest, or the law of God in high esteem.

46:18

Yeah, yeah. That's not an easy task. Right. But you're absolutely right. We need to find, as best as we can, we need to find a church that takes the law of God seriously.

46:31

Yeah. Are there any denominations? I'm in the CREC, and I think we do a pretty good job with that. Are there any denominations you would recommend that do a great job with the law of God and holding it high?

46:42

My experience is that it's a scattered issue. So there are pockets in most of the, there'll be church's pockets in most of the denominations,

46:52

Baptistic and Paedo -Baptist, that will take it seriously. But I don't think there's one particular denomination that does, partly because Two Kingdoms theology has made its way deeply into reformed churches.

47:06

Very often, natural law thinking is replacing or supplanting the centrality of biblical law.

47:12

So off the top of my head, I wouldn't be able to say, oh, this denomination, I think, is really advancing the law of God effectively across the board.

47:19

I think it depends on the pastor and the leader of any given church. Yeah, that makes sense. So maybe a question that the head of household should ask when he emails the pastor, like, hey, do you do communion every week?

47:31

And do you have a high view of the law of God? Maybe those two things should be on the list. Well, that was one of the things that certainly supercharged the growth and maturing of our church in Toronto was when we introduced communion every week.

47:45

Especially when, because we were using the Book of Common Prayer, because the law is part of the communion service every week.

47:52

And it made a huge difference in the life of our church. Same for us. I tell people, if you don't skip meals, why would you skip a week eating the most important meal of your life?

48:03

Yeah, yeah. So I know that we're bumping up against our hour right now, but I really feel like the law is so central.

48:11

And maybe we could do a part two, because we've only covered about 30, 40 % of the book so far.

48:17

But the law is so important to even get to the final chapters of what you're pointing out.

48:23

If you take a sort of Kuyperian model of,

48:29

I've got my home, I've got the government, and I've got the ecclesiastical government, there's three governments

48:35

God has instituted. How would you encourage someone who lives in a home, who maybe they're a head of household and they're trying to figure out how do

48:43

I lead my family? I go to a church and also I'm a part of a government that seems like it's lawless.

48:49

How would you encourage us that the law of God applies in those three spheres and how can we be growing in the application of the law of God?

48:57

Yeah, so I think that central to all of this and certainly central to the thesis of my book and underlying it is the principle of sphere sovereignty.

49:08

That would be both a sort of creational level, at the metaphysical level that there are multiple aspects or functions within creation that God has created that are governed by a specific law.

49:20

And then at the societal level, at the social and cultural level, this authority, these spheres of authority which are all placed in scripture under God, under the

49:31

Lord Jesus Christ, have a distinct role and jurisdiction. And you mentioned three of the most prominent, the civil form of government, the family form of government and church government.

49:43

I think at the civil level, wherever Christians are engaged or involved in a political life, we need to be taking the law of God seriously and recognizing that human beings have been established in an office.

49:57

We've almost entirely lost this biblical idea of being an office bearer under God.

50:03

In the contractarian view of civil government today, tend to not think in terms of the vertical area of accountability.

50:10

We don't think in terms of civil authority as covenantal and that we occupy an office under God that is delimited and brings with it certain responsibilities.

50:19

We tend to think purely in terms of the horizontal is what's gonna get me the most votes and how can I please people?

50:25

And what's the wind doing? What's the social consensus? But if we're engaged politically as Christians, we need to be thinking in terms of the word of God and this principle of sphere sovereignty.

50:36

And so the first task of somebody who takes God's law seriously in politics is to delimit, put limits on the role of the state, to recognize that there are other forms of government, church government, family government, and that they have to obey their own law, the law order for the family, the law order for the church.

50:54

These are areas of civil private law in legal terminology under God and that the state needs to be reined back in to being a ministry of public justice under God concerned with the harmony of public legal interest, public legal interest, but not invading and dominating and trying to swallow these other realms.

51:15

The biggest problem we have is basically a totalitarian drift where the movement is towards treating these other forms of government in society, the economic sphere, business, the school, the family, the church as lesser parts of the state.

51:33

But the family and the church and the school are not lesser parts of the state.

51:38

And so that would be, I think, the key application for biblical law. We see, of course, the distinction right there from the get -go in the life of the judges where Saul, the first king of Israel, loses the kingdom over his presumption to act as a priest.

51:55

And Samuel rebukes him. So the separate jurisdictions you've got, it's very interesting, you've got this sort of division of power, you've got the monarchy, you've got the king, you've got the priesthood and the

52:07

Levites, of course, who are the teachers, and then you have prophets as well. Who have the audacity to rebuke kings and so on, and the civic authority.

52:18

So you see that everywhere. I mean, look at Daniel, look at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I mean, they say to the most powerful man on earth, the king of Babylon, we have no need to answer you in this matter.

52:28

We're not gonna bow down to your image. And those men were prepared by God.

52:33

And they said, we're gonna stand on God's law in the small things. And we're gonna be faithful to God in the small things.

52:40

And God, we're told explicitly in Daniel, gave them wisdom and understanding in all matters pertaining to the government, and they were found to be superior to everyone else.

52:50

That's the goal in the political sphere. Yeah, amen. Go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, my mind is busy right now.

52:58

I'm so excited about what we're talking about, because the three offices that you just pointed out, prophet, priest, and king, really do correspond to those three spheres of government, because in Jesus, we are a kingdom of priests, and we're a holy nation.

53:13

Every father is a priest of his home. The pastor is the prophetic voice in our culture.

53:20

The king and the civil authority, all of them need to work together under the law of God to build

53:25

Christendom. And if the church, and this drives me insane, the church will say things like, we preach the gospel, we don't deal with culture.

53:34

We don't talk about culture. And to me, that's such a weird way of viewing the gospel. Yeah, yeah.

53:41

It's that bizarre truncation of the gospel of the kingdom. Culture itself, cultus, cholerae, are literally the origin of the word culture in our language, means worship, esteem, inhabiting, caring.

53:56

So the very idea of culture is governed by our idea of worship. Culture is religion externalized, as Henry Van Til correctly pointed out.

54:05

So we need to think about all of these areas in terms of those offices that you've talked about, that Christ occupies, prophet, priest, king, and in Christ, we are prophets, priests, and kings.

54:16

Peter says you are a royal, you are a kingly priesthood. You are a holy nation, a people belonging to God.

54:24

And the role, of course, of the nation of Israel, as we see from Deuteronomy 4, when they're given the law, is that the other nations will look at Israel and say, who has a

54:34

God like this God? Who has laws so righteous and just as this nation so that they would be looked at and they would be copied?

54:41

And so the world is meant to look at God's people in our families, in our churches, as we occupy office in civil government and say, we need to copy them.

54:50

Look how righteous, look how ordered, look how good, look at the blessing that follows when you obey the

54:58

God of Israel, when you obey the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you honor this

55:05

God, look what happens. And so in the family, it means recognizing that we have the responsibility to train and teach our children in the fear and admonition of the

55:14

Lord. Education essentially is given to the family, and that's a critical area of God's law that we've overlooked.

55:22

And we're not speaking of Him when we walk down the street, when we sit around the table, when our discussions are often of other things, and we're not raising up our children in the way they should go, so that when they're old, the

55:32

Proverbs says they won't depart from it. That's our obligation there. And then of course, God's law in the church is just as we've got a king teaching his son in the family, the law, the

55:43

Proverbs, in the church, the role of the law of God is expressed not just in our preaching, but in the faithful exercise of church discipline.

55:51

And in an antinomian culture, the church has generally failed to exercise godly discipline. We see that as almost as though it's kind of a punishment rather than the privilege, the right and privilege of being disciplined by the

56:03

Lord. The writer of Hebrews is crystal clear about this in Hebrews 12, the Lord disciplines those

56:09

He loves. And He chastises every son that He receives. He says, if you are without discipline, you are bastards, you are illegitimate.

56:18

And it's not, He says that the writer of Hebrews says, probably poor, it's painful at the time, it's not pleasant at the time, but it reaps the fruit of righteousness.

56:28

Why does He do it? Why are we disciplined? That we might share His holiness. That's the purpose of discipline, whether it's in the state or the family or the church is that evil be restrained and that we be trained in righteousness so that we might share

56:45

His holiness. And why is that important? Why is it so important that we share His holiness? Well, the scripture tells us, without holiness, no man shall see the

56:53

Lord. Amen. Amen. And what a gift, what a gift that the last several years have been, especially

57:01

COVID, because what we saw and what you're arguing for is a

57:07

Christian mind developed that engages the heart, that propels the hands, that transforms culture.

57:14

And what we've seen, culture is a wonderful thermometer for the health of the church. And what we've seen is that our government said, your children are not your own.

57:26

Your churches are not your own. We are God over all the spheres. That's what they said.

57:31

That was the truth claim that they advanced. I think it's probably true in Britain as well. I know in America, it felt that way.

57:38

And the reason that they've done that is because we have not held the law of God in high esteem and our cultures have become lawless.

57:48

100 % correct. I couldn't agree more. And yes, it was the same here in Britain at the time

57:53

I was living in Canada and it was extreme in Canada. Perhaps one of the worst places in the world to have lived during that period.

58:02

It was during that time that I drafted the Niagara Declaration and Ruler of Kings was written dealing with the issue of sphere sovereignty and the restrictions on the state.

58:14

And it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times of the very reasons you're talking about.

58:20

It was the best of times because it started to expose these fault lines and it marked out the men of God from the boys.

58:26

It started to distinguish between a faithfulness and unfaithfulness and show people where faithfulness lay and where the weaknesses were.

58:35

And that antinomianism and the failure to recognize the centrality of sphere sovereignty to God's law and the importance of that being worked out in the life of the family and the church and the state became so obvious.

58:48

So it was a terrifying time in many respects because the way of the wicked is hard. And that's the reality.

58:57

So we can be - When the wicked rule, the people perish. Exactly, yeah. And we saw that and we saw it in stark reality.

59:06

And for us as a ministry, for the Ezra Institute, certainly that was one of the triggers of people beginning to express much, many more people expressing an interest in the work of Ezra because suddenly here you have right in front of you this most practical reality and people were casting about for resources saying, well, what do we do in a situation like this?

59:27

And by God's grace, we were one of the groups that were there to be able to say, well, hear God's word, hear

59:32

God's law. And Christ's lordship over all things, this is the answer to our situation.

59:41

Well, if we get a chance to do a second, I would love that because I'd love to get into the apologetics piece. And then also further down the line, because the more you abandon

59:50

God's law, the more that lawlessness enters in and things like Marxism and racism and sexual sin and all the things that you deal with.

59:57

If this is the last episode on this book, Thinking Christianly, one question that I think remains that somebody might struggle with is, okay, well, the law says that I'm supposed to love the

01:00:09

Lord my God with all my heart and also says, don't eat shrimp. Help me understand how do

01:00:15

I approach the law because it seems like there's different kinds of laws and how am

01:00:20

I supposed to think about it Christianly? Yeah. So that in of itself is a long question in the sense that there's a lot that could be said about the issue of rightly dividing the word of truth.

01:00:31

And I would say that the harder work, which is why the work of scholarship is so important and it's why

01:00:38

Christians actually, we as believers, just need to be a little bit disciplined to not say, oh,

01:00:43

I've reached Leviticus in my reading calendar. I think I'm gonna skip over that. No, get into it, read it.

01:00:49

It's just such a rich and rewarding book to read and to study. So for those interested,

01:00:55

I deal with the general categories of the law and think Christianly. In my previous book, Mission of God, I do deal explicitly with this question, moral, civil, ceremonial elements to God's law.

01:01:06

Perhaps the simplest way of talking about this is that the principle and practice, there are times when they coincide for the

01:01:17

Christian today in the law. And there are times when the practice no longer coincides with the principle.

01:01:25

So you do have some interesting laws like, don't boil a baby goat in its mother's milk.

01:01:31

What was that all about? These are case laws. These are specific applications of the standing law that were being made.

01:01:38

So this is law being positivized, which means being made concrete in a particular situation.

01:01:43

And so it's not that God's law is an evolving thing. The standing law is there, but our awareness of the implications, just like you were saying the confessions tease out are the various implications of the law.

01:01:56

As new historical circumstances open themselves up, the implications of the law start to open themselves up as well.

01:02:03

And we have to positivize the law in terms of new circumstances. I'll give you a very good illustration from the law that requires one in the

01:02:10

Older Testament to fence your roof. When we read that, do we then need to sort of hire a contractor and have a fence erected around our roof?

01:02:19

I mean, my roof in England is like this. What would be the point of putting a fence around a pitched roof?

01:02:26

Well, the reason was in ancient Israel, as in much of the Mediterranean today and in the Middle East today, people build houses with flat roofs.

01:02:35

When my parents were living in Asia, it was in the

01:02:40

Islamic world, it was a country where the houses generally had flat roofs. And because they have flat roofs, you've got your useful space up there and they were used for social gatherings.

01:02:50

So a lot of the social gatherings in ancient Israel and in the modern

01:02:55

Mediterranean and in the Middle East and parts of Asia happen on these rooftops.

01:03:01

Now on a Canadian roof, where you're gonna expect a lot of snow and rain or a

01:03:07

British roof, you're not having social functions up on your slate roof. It's just not happening. That's not what the roof is for.

01:03:13

The pitch is there so that everything slides off, right? That's the idea of it. And depending on which state you're in in the

01:03:18

US, obviously the way they build in California, very different from the way they're gonna build in Buffalo and because of the climate.

01:03:25

The rule about fencing, the law about fencing roofs is a case law. It's an application of, a positive application actually of the law that ultimately that we don't take life lawlessly, right?

01:03:38

That manslaughter or criminal negligence with regard to somebody's life.

01:03:43

So you've got the commandment is framed negatively, you shall not murder, okay? We can maybe restrain ourselves from murder, but does that require any positive applications from us?

01:03:54

Yes, the positive application is we're obligated to protect life. Life can only be taken on God's terms.

01:04:02

So the case law there is God applying the importance of protecting life to the fact that it's negligence.

01:04:10

If you don't fence your roof and you've got parties going on on the roof and social gatherings, if somebody falls off, you're liable.

01:04:15

So fence your roof. Well, we do have an equivalent of that today. In Canada, for example,

01:04:21

I think it's probably the same in the US, we were required to fence our swimming pools or the enclosure where our swimming pool is.

01:04:28

A young person, a child couldn't accidentally get in there, fall into the pool and drown.

01:04:34

It's a law that is dealing with the issue of negligence. And in some cases, even criminal negligence if we fail to make sure that other people are kept safe around our property.

01:04:45

So that's what that law is about. So it's the creativity of applying and positivizing God's law as new circumstances, different contexts arise.

01:04:54

Now with something like eating shrimp, that has to do with the clean, unclean distinction of animal life in the scriptures.

01:05:05

One of the, it's a law of separation or distinctions. In order for God to mark out the holiness of his people, the distinction of his people, the fact that here is the messianic people, here's the model, here are the people that to whom

01:05:18

God has given righteous laws and to mark out their cleanness from the rest of the pagan non -believing,

01:05:25

I should say unbelieving world, not non -believing world, the unbelieving world. There were certain outward distinctives that in what we would call the ceremonial elements of the law, the purity elements of the law that were to be kept by the

01:05:38

Jews. Now this is an interesting one because interestingly, the clean, unclean distinction of animals is not actually mosaic in origin.

01:05:50

It goes all the way back to Noah because Noah takes more of the clean animals onto the ark, you'll recall, because of the need for sacrifice when they come out of the ark.

01:06:02

So to reestablish sufficient number of animals for sacrifice more clean animals needed to be taken onto the ark for the priestly sacrifice.

01:06:12

So there's a distinction there because of what's acceptable to God for sacrifice. And the clean, unclean distinction was setting the

01:06:19

Jews apart. Now I would say that the kosher laws, the food laws or what we would call the dietary laws, when we talk about principle and practice, the principle remains that we are to be a pure and holy people, that we're to be set apart unto holiness, that we are to ensure that no unclean thing touches us.

01:06:42

But those laws were a shadow of the full filling up the full meaning of the law, which is made plain in the newer

01:06:50

Testament that Jesus tells us, he said, it's not says it's not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of a man, what goes into the man's mouth is taken by the stomach and then it becomes waste, but it's what comes out of the heart of man, out of a man's mouth.

01:07:05

This is what defiles a man. So whether it's washing with it, you're cleaning this washing with hands or whether it's various foods.

01:07:12

So in Mark's gospel, we're told in parentheses that Jesus cleansed all foods.

01:07:18

And then of course you have, I think it's Acts 10, if memory serves, the sheep coming down, Peter seeing the sheet and it's full of unclean animals.

01:07:27

And God says in the vision, kill and eat. Yeah, that's my life verse. Yeah, and Peter says,

01:07:33

Lord, I've never touched anything unclean. And God says, well, what I've cleansed don't call unclean.

01:07:39

And this of course is in reference to going to the house of Cornelius, who's a Gentile who wants

01:07:44

Peter to come and tell him more fully about the gospel, about who the living God really is. And it would have been forbidden for a

01:07:51

Jew to enter the house of a Gentile and to eat with him and commune with him in that way. So Peter needed to know that those laws of separation between Jew and Gentile had been overcome.

01:08:00

And as you said correctly earlier, Lennox, this is not about they're being abolished. As John Calvin said, they're actually being transposed.

01:08:08

They're being applied fully in the intercession and the cleansing that Christ is doing now, that he separates us into holiness in himself.

01:08:18

And these former shadows, these pictures that we were having of that sanctification, that cleanliness, that ceremonial washing was depicting the washing that we have in Christ.

01:08:29

Now, so they're not abolished. So the principle remains, even though that practice of saying not eating shrimp as a moral requirement is abolished.

01:08:41

So it's not a sin to eat shrimp or bacon or whatever.

01:08:46

Or bacon wrapped shrimp. Or any of those things. We can do that. We're free to do that as Christians because that was a pointer to the true cleansing, the truly being set apart as God's people, that was happening.

01:09:01

However, I would add this, nothing in God's law is given disjoint from practical wisdom.

01:09:11

So it's interesting that Peter says in Acts 10, he doesn't say, well, why are you showing me this sheet?

01:09:18

I've been eating shrimp, bacon, pork. I've been chowing down on mice and carrion and stuff that's been killed and left for dead ever since Jesus came and told us that we didn't have to worry about the dietary laws.

01:09:31

He doesn't say that. He says, Lord, I've never touched anything unclean, which means in all the time that he walked with the

01:09:38

Lord Jesus, they're keeping the dietary laws. That's very interesting, isn't it? They actually, they've not been thrown overboard.

01:09:47

This is after the resurrection, after the ascension. Preaching's been going on for nine chapters of the book of Acts.

01:09:54

And here Peter is learning this lesson. Now, one of the reasons for these dietary laws was they were given for health reasons.

01:10:01

That if you look at the animals that were being forbidden for eating, it was things that had been killed by a wild animal.

01:10:08

It was animals that didn't chew the cud in the, say, like a sheep or a cow or the nature of the hoof, the clovenness of the hoof.

01:10:17

And so animals that prey on other animals or animals that are basically bottom feeders that are cleaning the ocean or they're eating, those are the ones that toxins build up in, right?

01:10:28

Because they're killing the weaker animals. The predators are killing the weaker animals. And so it wasn't particularly safe from a health point of view to eat these animals.

01:10:37

There's a particular kind of bacteria in the skin of the pig, for example, that only if you can heat them to a very particular kind of temperature, which was difficult in more primitive methods of cooking as well, that were difficult to kill.

01:10:49

So, and God knew all about, of course, bacteria, even though they didn't, the science of it wasn't known to the

01:10:56

Jews. Isn't it interesting, for example, Lennox, Kendall, forgive me for taking a bit of extra time on this, but I find it fascinating.

01:11:02

I do too. That when somebody had a disease, for example, and they had to come and show themselves to the priest, if that person died of their disease, their clothes were to be burned, their house was to be burned.

01:11:15

Well, the thing that cured medieval Europe of the bubonic plague was certainly

01:11:21

London, was the fire of London, because the fire of London destroyed most of the homes and burned.

01:11:28

It was the only thing, the temperature, which would destroy that bacteria. Wow. And so God knew when man's science was not there, which developed with the

01:11:39

Christian era, God knew all about bacteria and he knew the only way to keep people healthy and God's people healthy.

01:11:45

This is why they were becoming so populous in Egypt. They were multiplying really fast in a way that the

01:11:54

Egyptians weren't because they were keeping God's law. So there were all kinds of health benefits to the dietary laws, just as there were health benefits to circumcision in terms of sexually transmitted diseases and so on and so forth.

01:12:06

So even those things today, which are not moral requirements for us as Christians can still be part of a journey into wisdom in terms of what we eat.

01:12:16

That doesn't bind anybody's conscience to say you must follow these dietary restrictions because foods have been cleansed.

01:12:23

It's still lawful for me. Paul says everything is lawful. Well, everything's beneficial. So is it beneficial to really chow down regularly on the bottom feeders?

01:12:31

Not necessarily. That's not necessarily wise from a health point of view. So I would say it's still wisdom.

01:12:39

It's not morally binding upon us. God didn't give any of those laws for no reason at all.

01:12:46

Right? It's what I'm saying is they weren't just, oh, God thought up a, what kind of silly rule can I think of that make my people look separate?

01:12:54

No, they were based in the practical reality. Take, for example, the mixing of fabrics. Well, in a time when you light, you live in a tent or a hut made of wood or bitumen, basically mud bricks and straw and so on, or you're living in a tent because you're traveling in the wilderness, your lighting is candles, torches.

01:13:16

Well, if you're mixing fabrics, you're gonna go up like a tinderbox. Whereas unmixed fabrics like wool, for example, is a fire retardant.

01:13:25

So even those kinds of laws had a very important practical beneficial application that helped protect

01:13:32

God's people. So this is one of the fascinating things about a study of God's law.

01:13:38

It just is so rich and so full of wisdom. And you see how in our developing society and developing culture, where technologies have moved on and everything else, we need new positivizations, fresh applications of the meaning of God's law for today.

01:13:53

And these cases give us basic illustrations of how we can go about doing that. Yeah, I would certainly love

01:13:59

Kendall another, why don't we plan another podcast before Christmas to maybe talk about the second half of the book and some of the applications of God's word in those other areas that you've mentioned.

01:14:10

It'd be amazing. And just to encourage folks, I think what we're talking about here is to think

01:14:16

Christianly, we really need to take the whole Bible seriously. And as Dr. Buddha has just said, there's different kinds of laws.

01:14:23

There's moral laws that we're still responsible for. There are ceremonial laws that point to the fulfillment in Christ that are still wisdom.

01:14:29

And there are civil laws which have a general equity underneath it that we still need to apply today in new and creative ways.

01:14:37

His law is always good. His law is the beginning of knowledge and we do really well to submit ourselves to it.

01:14:43

That's what we're talking about, man. And I would encourage anyone to go on the Ezra Institute website.

01:14:48

You guys have your store there. You can find the book, Think Christianly. You can also find that on Amazon and other bookstores and tell us where else you're working and what other resources we could be involved with.

01:15:01

Yeah, thank you, Kendall. So as you mentioned, all of our resources, finding our bookstore can be found at ezrainstitute .com.

01:15:09

We have a weekly podcast called the Podcast for Cultural Reformation where we deal with these kinds of subjects and that people might be interested in signing up or subscribing to that show that comes out every

01:15:20

Wednesday and you'll get that wherever you get your podcasts. Some exciting news is actually that next week we are launching a learning portal that we've been working on for a long time, a digital learning portal where people will be able to take in courses and conferences and a lecture series and all kinds of resources in a sophisticated digital platform.

01:15:43

So watch out for announcements for that where you can really start to delve deep into some of these issues. And of course,

01:15:48

Think Christianly is available everywhere now. Praise the Lord, brother. And thank you so much for coming on.

01:15:54

I look forward to our second episode where we can dive more into some of these things. Congratulations on the book.

01:15:59

I hope everybody buys it. God bless you, brother. Thanks, Kendall. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, let's stay on just for a second.

01:16:06

Thank you everybody for watching another episode of the podcast. Next week, we're gonna be back on the seven churches of Revelation.

01:16:13

And until then, thank you to Dr. Boot for coming by. Go check out the Ezra Institute and all of the wonderful resources that they have, especially his new book,

01:16:23

Thinking Christianly. And until next time, God richly bless you. See you again on the podcast.