In What Sense are OT Civil & Ceremonial Laws Still Relevant?

Conversations That Matter

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00:30

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris. I hope everyone's doing well out there in internet land.

00:38

I have a special guest with me today who's been on the podcast before. He actually helped produce.

00:43

He did produce my album, Driving Down a Mountain Road, which you can get at johnharristunes .com.

00:49

But he is the pastor of Syracuse Baptist Church, and you can find his sermons on YouTube.

00:54

Go to syracusebaptistchurch .com for a link to that, and he's working on his own album, Battle Hymns 3, the one and only

01:00

Tim Beauchamp. Welcome, Tim. Hi, John. Good to see you, man. Tim, I don't know if it was...

01:07

Man, was it Mick Jagger or was it Timothy Leary who said, never trust a guy over 30?

01:13

Who said that? I think that could have been Timothy Leary. Yeah. Sounds like a Timothy Leary thing to say.

01:19

Yeah. So there's a spirit out there today, both on the left and the right, ironically, that you really shouldn't trust anyone who's older, especially boomers.

01:29

But you are one of the boomers that I trust. So people can trust him.

01:35

They can... You could message him on Facebook. He might even get back to you. And he loves the

01:40

Bible, loves this country. And I've never seen you get all up in arms or offended or go crazy about an idea that was offensive.

01:53

Some guys, they get freaked out. I've never seen you freak... It's like you've seen it all or something. I don't know.

01:59

Well, to be honest, all the years I spent on the road with a real metal band, not a

02:08

Christian one, just pagans, you end up hearing a lot. You see a lot. And I always tell people, just trust the

02:17

Lord with this. You know where you're at. You can't change this, right?

02:22

It's not within your distance. And you can always say, you know what?

02:28

I want to get back with you on that. If you don't know something, you don't know something. That's just, that's how it is.

02:34

I think my problem is, and I'm probably too comfortable in my own skin. I think it's what Heidi thinks, so.

02:40

Well, you do walk around barefoot even on cold days.

02:45

I've seen it, so. I wore flip -flops to prayer meeting last Wednesday night. And Heidi's like, really, Tim, really?

02:52

It's cold out. You could have been born and raised in Indiana, but if you're part of a rock band, there's like this little

02:57

California that starts welling up in you or something. I don't know. I'm afraid so, yeah. Well, we're gonna talk about something that I think is really important.

03:07

And because this is really, I think, determining kind of where people line up politically today, what project they wanna be part of trying to build.

03:17

And of course, the scary word, Christian nationalism, that the media has used for years to describe

03:22

Christians who wanna be politically minded, describes this very large group of very different kinds of people with different visions.

03:31

And one of the visions, obviously, is more of a theonomic vision. And there's even a spectrum there, but they wanna import

03:37

Old Testament laws that are specific to Israel into modern contexts. Then there's more of a natural law kind of vision that sees the general equity in these things, but doesn't think the unique things that apply to Israel apply to us.

03:53

And then, and of course, I'm being very broad here, but you have your libertarians who wanna find these very abstract kind of ideological principles and on and on and on, right?

04:04

But every group, if they're Christian, they have to figure out, okay, so what do we do with God's law in the

04:09

Old Testament? How does that apply? And you've done a lot of thinking on this. And I really wanna just give you the floor to talk about the separations between different kinds of laws and what applies and what doesn't and the intention behind God's law.

04:24

So take it away. Okay, well, there is a subset of Christianity that sees absolutely no validity to the law whatsoever.

04:35

That's the so -called free grace movement. I don't even bother interacting with them.

04:41

Their hermeneutic is so inconsistent. And so then you're left with guys like us who would say, okay, there's an eternal moral law that God gave

04:56

Adam in the garden. And I'm referencing now my own confession of faith, 1689 Baptist, where the comprehensive law of obedience was given to Adam.

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And then later was codified and fully enunciated in the 10 commandments.

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And then right after the 10 commandments, you'll notice in Exodus 21, Exodus 20 is where we find the

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Mount Sinai. Exodus 20, 21, then goes on to say, and now here are the rules.

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And so even in the Bible, we see there's a differentiation between the eternal moral law of God, the ethical norm, the norming norm of all norms, and what was particular under the

05:41

Mosaic covenant. So I just finished 37 sermons on the law of God, literally, is it last week?

05:50

Yeah, yeah, last week. Literally just finished it. I thought, well, maybe we'll do two sermons on each command and then some odds and ends, and then ended up 37.

05:59

So I wanted to be thorough. So what we usually see from orthodox

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Bible -believing theologians, mostly Reformed, I mean, that is orthodox, correct?

06:12

I hope so, is that the law is divided into three categories.

06:18

And this is where I got in trouble the week before. Before I delivered the sermon, there were like two, one of those, okay, this is providential.

06:29

I really need to preach this sermon. One was I got on X and I saw an article by Doug Ponder, who's a, he teaches at a seminary.

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So I've never met him personally, but same circles. And where he did a really fine job of summarizing the threefold division of the law.

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We would see the moral law, that is that totalizing universal for all time, for all people's law.

06:53

Then you have the ceremonial law, which was given to Israel as a type in a shadow, prefiguring the

07:01

Lord Jesus Christ. Then we see the civil laws. That's where guys like Bonson would say, hey, we need to apply these.

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We would look more at general equity, but all that to say, here's the, if this happens in your situation, then you do this.

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So these are more based on certain situations rather than eternal.

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And I just ask you a quick question as we're going here, because we've used general equity twice now.

07:27

And we're just assuming people know what that means. But yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to define it or?

07:33

Yeah. So general equity would point out the moral principle behind a certain civil law in Israel's day.

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And I think one of the best examples was the one that I can't remember who brought this up first, where I first heard it.

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The law says you shall build a parapet around your roof. Okay.

07:59

We don't do that anymore. We don't go up on our roof to have a picnic or whatever, but we put fences around our swimming pools.

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So we would take that command to Israel specifically and extrapolate out what's the moral principle.

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What's the same moral principle that you want to preserve life. You don't want someone to accidentally fall in your pool and die or be injured, anything along those lines.

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Similarly for Israel, thieves weren't caught and put in jail. No, thieves had to work hard, pay back what they had stolen and tack on 20%, sometimes more than that if it was livestock.

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So we can look at that. And even non -reformed guys like Chuck Colson would look at those principles in the old covenant law for Israel and say, hmm, there's an ethical issue here that I think we could apply to our own situation.

08:58

You know, just a side tangent here about the conditions. Cause we could probably do, we could fill up 10 podcasts just on the differences between our world and the world that the

09:06

Israelites inhabited. But one of the things you just mentioned brought it to mind that you didn't need prisons in the same way that, and I actually don't know.

09:16

I actually, I would like to sidestep the prison issue for now cause I think our prison system is kind of bonkers. But there is more of an argument to be made for prisons in our modern context.

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And one of the reasons is, you remember the story of David? He goes to Gath, he starts slobbering over the door and they said, oh, he's a crazy guy.

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That actually I think is a pretty good description of what the ancient world and at least in Israel's context, you would have been recognized if you tried to escape to the next town over, right?

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You can only really get as far as you can get on your feet or on an animal, but even with an animal you need to make stops.

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And it's like the old West, right? Like you have to, you don't know who's coming into town and you're gonna be suspicious of a stranger.

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You can't fit into the crowd like you can today. And so. Yeah, there's a cloak of anonymity and I'm not even suggesting that prisons are completely out.

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We don't even need to have them. Obviously some people cannot be allowed to be around the other kids.

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They just can't do it. But Colson's point was that the modern system acts almost as an opposite of the dialectic.

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You get the thesis, the antithesis and you put your ideas together and something better occurs.

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Well, the opposite occurs in prison where you get the thief or the thief over here who got caught robbing a bank.

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You get the murderer over here who just murdered. They put their ideas together. Oh, I left witnesses.

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That was my problem. Oh, I'm murdering and not making any money. Boom, you've got something even worse than that.

10:57

And that was Colson's point. It dehumanizes, there's no, you're not paying back the victim of your crime and all of that was involved.

11:06

There's also the idea of like the local or the county sheriff locking someone up for the night because they're a nuisance during that.

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Get them out of that particular situation. I understand that to some extent. But anyway, to get off the prison thing,

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I was just trying to point out, look, there are differences between the world that they inhabited, the world we inhabit and some of these specific laws seem tailored to that world and not ours.

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Sure, very agrarian, nomadic in some senses. That's why we always return the family generational land because you're moving around a lot.

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You've got sheep and all that. So we see that, we see the differentiation between the moral law and its application through the civil laws.

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One of the comments on, so we go back to the Doug Ponder's tweet and I made the big mistake of complimenting his short article.

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I said, that was so well done, succinct. It's very timely. All of a sudden, the crazy

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Hebrew roots people start coming out of the woodwork. There's no logical reason to divide the law.

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I mean, right there at that point, that's their main issue. You have no logical way to divide the law.

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The law is the law, full stop, end of story. So mixed fabrics and adultery are the same, like they're in the same category to them.

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They're both law -breaking. They're both lawlessness, which 1 John tells us lawlessness is sin or sin is lawlessness.

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But they have to make a distinction between the sacrificial system, don't they? Well, okay. So here's what

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I came up with. And then let me just relate a couple of things in my own history. So we're comfortable saying that the ceremonial laws were completely typified and fulfilled in Christ.

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The civil laws passed away except for their general principles, but the moral law stands.

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Now that's a really succinct Reform Baptist and even Reform Presbyterian way of looking at a

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Christian's relationship to the law given to Israel. So in my own experience,

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I got serious about the Lord in May of 1987. The church we were a part of had a group within it that was called the

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Israel Support Group. And come to find out, they were on the path to Hebrew roots or what we call

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Torah observancy. And here's an anecdote. I remember during one of the worship services, and this was a charismatic church.

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You know, this is before I changed my mind about that. But anyway, I remember overhearing a lady say,

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I wonder what it's like to be one of God's chosen people. Hmm.

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And even in my kind of immature Christian thinking,

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I was like, I seem to recall that Titus, Paul writes to those chosen of God in faith or in 1

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Peter. I had some of these written down. I thought, well, these were like early on stuff. Yeah, Colossians 3 .12,

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therefore, as God's chosen people. And even back then, I'm like, no, God's chosen people are

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Christians, not ethnic Jews or Jews. And they had a family in that church that got so deep into this.

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He ended up uprooting, quitting his job, uprooting everybody and moving to Israel so they could work on the archeological dig to find the ashes of the red heifer.

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Because without the ashes of the red heifer, we can't get back to doing temple sacrifices.

15:00

And if we're not doing that, then Jesus can't return. I am not kidding.

15:08

Then the next phase of my experience with these folks, the early version of Love War used to rehearse at a

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Calvary Chapel. That's your band for those who don't know. Oh, everyone knows that,

15:24

John. Okay, all right. I'm kidding. It's not like you're talking to the lead singer in Metallica or something.

15:31

Right, so we used to rehearse at this old elementary school. This is in about an hour north of here.

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And Calvary Chapel, definitely associated with them. And I remember being invited to a

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Passover Seder and they were gonna just do this as a little historical reenactment. Won't it be neat to act like we're the

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Israel of old? And it eventually turned into full

15:59

Torah observance with celebrating Passover, the festival of booths and first fruits.

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And so they put themselves under these obligations to do these things. Pretty soon family starts splitting up because, hey, they're not with us.

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So they're supposedly part of this church that still observes Christmas and Easter. That's one of their idiosyncrasies.

16:28

And it just decimated everybody. Now, let me give some good news right at the outset.

16:36

Last weekend, I was at the funeral of my old drummer's father, who is a great irascible old guy.

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And there were people there that I met 30 years ago when we were rehearsing at this church who had gone along with the move into Torah observance and Hebrew roots, who now have come back to just plain old ordinary

17:00

Orthodox Christianity. And I was like, you were my friend's cousin and you guys were separate.

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You wouldn't even talk. And I know we had to repent. We're so sorry. But they were telling me all of these different little anecdotal stories of how they came back to an understanding of the

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Bible as I believe it's intended to be used. Especially the law of God.

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And so, when I was preparing for this final sermon,

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I thought, let's go back over the three categories, moral, ceremonial, and civil, and break down why it is we believe this is a legitimate thing.

17:45

Because you can imagine, if someone is in modern evangelicalism, and as Walter Martin said, the cults are the unpaid debts of the church.

17:58

And so, if you're in a church that really doesn't talk about what the principles of the law are, what it means,

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I have a great quote from a Puritan, Samuel Bolton. The law sends us to the gospel that we may be justified.

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And the gospel sends us to the law again to inquire what is our duty as those who are justified.

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I think that's a great way of looking at it. The other personal experience

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I had was, I literally had a guy visit our church who I had met before, I knew was a

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Paul is bad, Jesus is good guy. He was part of this Hebrew Roots thing. And I had met him at the print shop and he wanted them to print some of his stuff for free.

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I don't understand what he was thinking. But I talked to him for 45 minutes, realized this guy's a heretic. He denies the sufficiency of the entirety of the word of God.

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And then he visits our church. And so, I'm trying to be a responsible shepherd of the sheep.

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It's before worship. I go to him, I said, listen, I'm not going to name his name. Listen, you're welcome to sing with us, to pray with us, to hear the word of God.

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You can't have the Lord's Supper and you can't talk to anybody because I know you're a heretic.

19:23

Okay, all right. Well, sure enough, he's, well, I was only asking questions.

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I said, nope, I said, you can't speak with people. You're a heretic. You're a false teacher. Keep in mind, this is after a lot of conversation with the guy personally.

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You're very magnanimous to even allow that. Well, hey, we do what we can.

19:47

You don't wanna say, you're not even allowed to hear a convicting message. Well, of course, a third of the way through the sermon, all of a sudden,

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I hear this King James style verbiage start to come out from the congregation.

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And I'm like, oh, it's this guy. So I just said, so -and -so, I had already instructed you.

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You're not to speak. So you have to stop talking now. And I went right back to the sermon and you know, later on, everyone was like, wow, you were so cool.

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You didn't freak out. Well, about five minutes after I told him to shut up, ostensibly, he gets up, walks out, puts his sweatshirt hood.

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So he's walking around hooded on the phone. And he just freaked everybody out.

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Outside the church. Outside the church, because I had a line of sight. I could see the guy. Huh. So it's not like I haven't been around these folks.

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So I thought, I really should know what this is.

20:58

You know, after this funeral last weekend, I ended up having a phone conversation with the pastor of the church that was doing the funeral.

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He used to be in this Hebrew Roots movement full on. And there was a conversation

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I had on Facebook in 2012 with one of their elders. Now, it didn't go well.

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It was, you know, they trying to shut me down and weird hermeneutics. He has now repented and come out of the movement.

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Okay. So if anyone in this would apply to anyone who gets caught up in false teaching, pray, trust, trust

21:38

God, try to have dialogue that's meaningful. But ultimately it's going to be a move of the spirit that does the work.

21:46

So what you just critiqued was an attempt to take the ceremonies minus the sacrifices.

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But it sounds like some of them actually did want to start the sacrificial system. They do go that far.

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Those would be the very hyper dispensational -based

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Torah observant people. They literally think, okay, there's going to be a temple sometime.

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And in order to have the sacrifices, according to the Torah, we have to have the ashes of the red heifer.

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But it's not Christian though. I mean, even if you're like a hyper dispensational view would be like, all right, the

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Jews are going to do this. And it's not something that's, you're not actually going to participate in it.

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You're just predicting it will happen. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Bible -believing dispensationalist,

22:40

I know. So, okay. Let's just, big categories here. These people want to take as much as they possibly can from the

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Old Testament law, including the dietary and all of this. And they want to import it into their own personal lives.

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And they end up rupturing churches and families over this. But obviously also there's those who just say, they're not doing any of that, but they think all the civil laws should be.

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And so I have been in, I don't know if you've been in these circles, Tim. I shouldn't say I've been in these circles.

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I've listened to, I've heard people from these circles in podcasts and that kind of thing say, out loud, when are we going to bring back death penalty for homosexuals?

23:28

You know what I mean? Oh, I've heard that. I've heard that in person. Right, right. You know what my response was?

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What's that? My stars, they're still having gay pride parades.

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And you're talking about execution of homosexuals. Aren't we jumping the gun a little bit? I understand wrapping your brain around something, but this is ridiculous.

23:52

You know, and one of the reasons that, you know, as much as I love Greg Bonson and I appreciate his work, even

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Rush Dooney to a great degree, there's a passage in the

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Bible that lets me know that the civil penalty for certain sins that would have been a capital crime in Israel is no longer in play.

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And that's in 1 Corinthians 5. This is where the London Baptist would get its proof text.

24:20

Oh, let's talk about that. Yeah. Right, for general equity. So in the

24:26

London Baptist confession of faith, chapter 19, verse three, God was pleased to give the people of Israel ceremonial laws, typical ordinances, some of worship, which prefigure

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Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, on and on, which appointed only to the time of reformation.

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That is the first advent are by Christ Jesus, the true Messiah and only law giver, furnished with power from the father, abrogated and taken away.

24:56

So in other words, those are no longer in play. Jesus completely fulfilled.

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That was finished. And then the next chapter is to them, speaking of the

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Jews. Also, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by virtue of that institution.

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In other words, if you're in a society and you want to apply that civil law, well, it's not because you're obliged by the institution of the state of Israel.

25:29

You're taking general equity principle and applying it, which that's the next verse or the next section, their general equity, only being of moral use.

25:40

And the proof text to that is from first Corinthians chapter nine, verses eight through 10, where Paul says,

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I'm not speaking these things according to human judgment, am I? Or does not the law also say these things?

25:56

So here he goes, law of Moses, which isn't the exact identical thing with the 10 commandments.

26:03

That's one of the keys here. For it is written in the law of Moses, you shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing.

26:13

Okay, what's the moral principle behind that law? Because again, as you said, we live in a pretty industrialized age.

26:21

Even my farmer neighbors don't use oxen anymore. They use tractors. Green tract, you know, guided tractors too.

26:29

Yeah, yeah. I still see people in them, but yeah, right. Got it.

26:34

And so he goes on and say, okay, what does it mean? God is not concerned about oxen, is he? Well, apparently he was at one time, but that's not the overall point.

26:45

Or is he speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our sake it was written because the plowman ought to plow and hope in the thresher to thresh and hope of sharing in the crops.

26:57

Yeah. That's the moral principle of don't muzzle the ox while he's threshing out the grain.

27:04

Yeah, and that, so I mean. There's one more too. Oh, go for it.

27:09

1 Corinthians 5, where we have a man who's having sex with his stepmother in the old covenant would have been executed.

27:17

That's a capital offense. In the new covenant, he's put out by different means called excommunication.

27:25

And the church does it, not the state of Israel. And this is where I think things can get somewhat confusing where you had in the state of Israel a somewhat of an overlap in the magisterial and ecclesiastical authority structure, right?

27:43

So the priest actually served in a magisterial function to some extent.

27:49

And I'm thinking especially pre -King. But as you had kings that, you know, you see the somewhat of a separation there, but there's still, even the kings had prophets that were assigned to them and they were expected to uphold the law of God as a civil magistrate.

28:05

And my point being that to parse these out downstream from that point in a very different kind of arrangement, it can be challenging because, you know, which does the priest come out to your house to see if your house has leprosy, you know, mold?

28:24

Does the priest do that? Or do we have building inspectors that are agents of the state who are going to condemn the building and say it doesn't match code?

28:32

Same kind of thing, right? But that's not a magisterial ecclesiastical role anymore.

28:40

So these things are, we have to parse them out. And it sounds like in Paul's time, they were under the

28:48

Roman empire. Same thing with Jesus, right? The whole New Testament, they're under the Roman empire. And the church is in this formation stage and they're trying to give instructions to this new community called the community of saints, the family of God, the church, the bride of Christ, of how to operate within this framework.

29:07

And it would also give us universal principles for how to operate in the frameworks that we live in today.

29:13

So I know the comeback tends to be that was a Roman arrangement. And under that arrangement, you could have excommunication.

29:21

But in a proper arrangement where the magistrate is doing what they ought to do, I think a strict theonomist would say, and after they're excommunicated, then the magistrate comes down and does his thing as well.

29:33

Let me answer that. So that's an assumption, right?

29:39

I mean, the hardcore theonomist doesn't know that. He's assuming that that's what the intention of the law.

29:47

We just saw an example where the exactitude of the law was interpreted in a different way by the apostle to apply to humans were originally applied to animals.

30:00

So just by way of example, that is also what

30:07

Hebrew roots people do with Acts 15. What I mean is, so Acts 15, and we just heard

30:18

Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas. Barnabas, yeah, son of thunder. We always love him.

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To go to Jerusalem because there's a problem. And that is certain people have arisen and they're now saying, you know what?

30:32

If these Gentiles really wanna come into this community of faith, they need to be circumcised and observe the law of Moses.

30:40

Okay, we all know how Acts 15 played out then, right?

30:47

You've got Peter rising up and saying, here, let's see, here we go.

30:56

They claim that, I'm trying to find it. I'm gonna grab my Bible and go there too,

31:01

Acts 15. Yeah, yeah. In Acts 15, you have a council that's declared and the apostles are there.

31:13

Paul and Barnabas are there, Peter, James, and you've got this other group of people called the

31:19

Judaizers. Right. And the Judaizers are the ones that are saying, unless you're circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.

31:28

Well, it wasn't just circumcision at that point either. Verse five says, it is necessary to circumcise them and direct them to observe the law of Moses.

31:39

So they come together for the debate. And I think that's really important for people to know because when you get to Galatians, the issue is circumcision.

31:51

But I've tried to point out to people, that's actually sort of shorthand for a bigger disagreement that was existing.

31:57

It is the law in total that's specific to Jews. It was never less than circumcision, but it's not only.

32:06

Yeah, that became like a big hangup, but it was more than that. So they are requiring exactly what

32:15

Hebrew roots people are requiring, that you observe the law of Moses.

32:21

So Peter starts talking. He goes through what the prophets related.

32:29

He even goes back to Simeon, taking Gentiles from the Gentiles of people for his namesake.

32:37

And at the end of his talk, he goes in verse 15. Therefore, it's my judgment that we don't trouble those who are turning to God from among the

32:46

Gentiles. Write to them, abstain from the things contaminated by idols, from fornication, from what is strangled from blood.

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And then the next verse for Moses from ancient generations has in every city, those who preach him, since he has read in the synagogues every

33:04

Sabbath. So what's Peter's point in saying that? He says, we're gonna instruct these people, not only in the moral law of God, but specifically abstain from things contaminated by idols, fornication, what is strangled from blood, because there's a lot of Jews in these cities.

33:27

Because Moses has been read in the synagogues every Sabbath, and that's part of the law of Moses.

33:34

The other two, not fornication, but contaminated by idolatry and from things strangled with blood.

33:40

You're not to eat meat with blood in it. This way, we don't give undue division to the early church, and neither do we bind the consciences of the

33:49

Gentiles into doing all of these other things that are passed away or are in the process of passing away.

33:57

So why did I say it's analogous to what you just said? It's because what the

34:02

Hebrew roots people will say is, ah, that's only until the Gentiles mature and grow up in the faith, then they can obey the law of Moses.

34:13

So all that speech - Painting wheels. Right. All that speech is not for the benefit of the

34:18

Jews, like the text says, it's for the benefit of the Gentiles, so they don't get worn out too quickly.

34:25

First time I heard that interpretation. Yeah, bonkers. Yeah, it's an assumption.

34:31

So this is interesting because I take - I haven't really given my background on this, but I grew up in more or less a sort of a fundamentalist vibe.

34:41

It was evangelical, but there was those elements of fundamentalism still there. Baptistic, independent

34:46

Bible church, okay? And my dad was the pastor and he went to master, so MacArthur strain, but very observant of good order,

35:02

I would say. And so when I was a kid in the 90s, right, the men would come in suits, the women would dress in dresses, we would hear an organ and a pianist, and we would sing hymns.

35:12

Profanity kind of off limits. Some of the elders who were there thought, you know, you can't drink wine, you can't go to a movie theater.

35:19

My dad stood against a lot of these things because it's not biblical, but there was order and there were rules essentially in that kind of community.

35:29

And now it's a very more evangelical, kind of shifting towards kind of a reformed -ish, more traditional style,

35:37

I would put it that way. That's kind of the world that I've been in for -

35:43

I mean, I've traveled and been in other places as well. I've widely visited churches.

35:48

I've been in family integrated churches and Presbyterian and Anglican and all of that. Even EO and black churches and Roman Catholic, but so outside the

35:57

Protestant tradition. And I find it fascinating how people do things differently, the different liturgies and all of this.

36:05

But so much of it is tradition. And I don't actually think tradition's bad as long as you put it in its proper place.

36:12

But tradition is very, it roots you, it gives you a sense of self and identity.

36:21

It helps you to understand, I think, how to treat people, what's socially acceptable. For example, you can hug people at my church.

36:28

There's a lot of Italians. I've gone to places where I go to hug someone and it's like, get away from me.

36:35

And it's an extremely awkward thing, especially with the opposite sex, because you don't really know what's appropriate, what's not.

36:44

The rules change based on region and tradition and all of this. And so my point in bringing all of this up is

36:51

I found in my teens, I started reading Bonson. I started reading North, McDermott, who's gone off way off the rails, but whatever happened there.

37:01

I started reading guys who were more theonomist and reading them fairly heavily. And I started buying into this notion and I'm glad I didn't get too far, but I did start buying into this notion that you know how we could solve all these things?

37:16

The Bible. Because the Bible gives us, and this is really just scriptural sufficiency. That's what I mistook it for.

37:22

The Bible gives us an extensive array of laws in the Old Testament. And we just got to figure out the way that they apply in our context.

37:30

But there is a way they apply, every single one of them. This was the assumption. And what

37:36

I've come to realize is a lot of these challenges I'm talking about aren't necessarily solved by an

37:42

Old Testament law. There may be a principle in there that guides you or helps you, but there's actually a plethora of ways we interact with other people that falls in a realm of prudence and wisdom.

37:56

And it's very specific to a situation. And the Jerusalem Council seems like that to me, where it's like, hey guys, we got this situation.

38:04

How are we going to address this particular moment we're in? It's not a universal kind of, this is going to guide the church through every situation.

38:14

It's just saying in this situation, these are our expectations of people. And then when you start looking at Jesus and what he says to the

38:21

Pharisees about the Sabbath is made for man, the purpose of the law is not, man's not a slave to it in the sense of dying.

38:33

Man is supposed to do this. God gave this to man for his own good. And then

38:38

Jesus saying things like, Moses didn't even really want you to divorce. God basically made these rules for divorce.

38:46

It was a concession because of the hardness of your heart. It suited a particular set of circumstances.

38:52

And I think you and I are in a similar place here where I look at things we have today. For example, we have laws against slavery.

39:00

You can't practice the kind of slavery that existed even in the

39:06

Old Testament. A better example actually was marriage. We don't regulate polygamy in any sense.

39:12

We outlaw polygamy. And is this in keeping with the law of God?

39:19

Well, in the moral sense, that was God's rule from the beginning. But this is a different situation than the

39:26

Old Testament Israel. This is a situation where we've had centuries of Christian development in Anglo -Protestant circles to get to the point of, hey, we can actually ban this practice completely.

39:39

And it's actually still in our society. That's an amazing thing that that still is a standard.

39:45

People think, oh yeah, even with gay marriage, they're like, well, you can only do one. Like you can't.

39:50

Yeah, polyamory, it's still stupid. Like if people do that, they do so outside the bounds of the law.

39:56

That's a really Christian thing. And I think it's a good thing. You think it's a good thing. But you know,

40:02

I would even go so far as to say, well, yeah, and I would say that every general equity principle, well, okay, rephrase that.

40:13

Every situation that we find ourselves trying to navigate in modern culture has definitely an ethical biblical principle that we could point back to.

40:25

Book of Proverbs, the civil law, the moral law. There's nothing out there.

40:30

And the problem happens in the church when we start importing categories that have no biblical foundation, such as orientation.

40:37

And we start applying those to situations. Now we're off into an area where according to the experts, the

40:46

Bible just doesn't speak to it. But that's an ethical issue. That's not like saying, you can only use a

40:53

Holley 650 CPM carburetor on that Adele Brock intake manifold. Well, the

40:58

Bible wasn't intended to give us those instructions. It does intend to give us instructions on how to arrange for the work to be done, how to do what you've agreed to do, pay the mechanic, and how to drive your car within a safe distance of an elementary school once the carb is on the intake manifold.

41:19

Boy, that was a mouthful. So when Israel's a light, Isaiah says Israel's a light to the nations and part of that's the law.

41:29

I think that that means the nations see the moral law practiced and distilled through these case laws applied to a very specific set of circumstances.

41:40

And they see, wow, the wisdom of God, the Queen of Sheba says, this works. I'm gonna go back and we're not gonna do everything

41:47

Israel does. We're not gonna have the mixed fabric rules or some of these things, but we will take these moral principles and we're going to apply them in our context.

41:58

And that's how I think we should take them, right? That's how Calvin talked about the prudential application of God's law in each country.

42:09

I've heard guys say, well, I'm no longer a full -blown theonomist because, well, even

42:15

John Calvin wasn't and his argument is sound. There are gonna be situations.

42:21

Not that they're outside of God's moral, eternal, universal law.

42:27

That's not the point at all. It gets into what was God trying to do with these case laws?

42:34

What was his point? And it seems like it was for public order. It was for making them a strange or distinct people than the other people around them.

42:43

So they dress different. They look different. They have different festivals. And so it suited us a particular uniqueness, right?

42:53

It's not unique if everyone does it. So this was specific to Israel that they were supposed to be strange. And it's supposed to point people back to the

43:02

Lord. And that's the thing that in our situation, we have to, I think, apply it.

43:10

Well, we want to have laws against things like pornography, banning this, especially now there's a push to do it for children.

43:17

That's a good thing. They didn't have pornography in Israel's times, right? So we're looking at a unique set of circumstances, applying principles.

43:26

You might have, I've thought of this, like you might have a society that actually doesn't need all these laws because they already self -regulate and it's just in the social fabric not to do certain things, right?

43:37

I mean, I lived in an area, you kind of live in this area now where like you don't really have to lock your doors.

43:44

In urban environments, you have to have extra caution to make sure that you lock your doors, you have a security system and there's plenty of policemen around.

43:52

Yeah, it's a little different now. I remember, so I was born in 60,

43:58

I remember growing up and my dad intentionally not locking the house and intentionally leaving his car because, hey, no one would dare steal my car or break into my house.

44:11

This is Indiana, baby. I don't mean like going out of his way, but it just wasn't part of growing up was making sure all the doors are locked at night because he didn't worry about it.

44:24

Now we lock the doors at night, just, you know, come on. But people live in this kind of environment and just think, okay, this is just the way it is and this is just how it's gonna be forever.

44:38

You don't know that stuff, you don't know. And that what you said about particular instances and things like that, getting back to the

44:50

Torah observant folks, one of the first things that you can easily assess there, what did

45:00

God require of Adam in the garden? Well, it was perfect, perpetual obedience to his law.

45:09

What does God require of man now? Perfect, perpetual obedience to the law.

45:14

That's why we need Jesus. That's why we must flee to Christ. That's the first use of the law.

45:21

Even the moral law, the first use is to act as a mirror of God's holiness and a mirror of our own wickedness.

45:29

And it acts as a harsh schoolmaster going, go, go, leave your filthy rags here and go to Jesus.

45:37

And then the second law is, of course, to restrain evil in society. Maybe that's the third law, third use.

45:44

Whatever the other use is to give us guidance in how we're to act now.

45:50

So that's all dealing with the moral law. And I've told these guys, you guys cannot keep the law at all.

46:01

You've broken one part of it, that's the rest. So when you're having a big feast of tabernacles and everyone has their little tent out in the parking lot or whatever, there's no temple and there's no sacrifice.

46:12

So you're breaking God's law. You've already violated the first principle. And any of those kinds of things, you could make some kind of application.

46:23

So I don't think they don't really take the law that seriously, to be honest. Let me ask you a question about this.

46:30

These are some of the laws for unique circumstances in the ancient world are used against us as, this is out of step with the liberal order or just...

46:41

Well, right, that's obviously, you're just having allegiance to a different law. That's the liberal order.

46:47

But, or they're just legitimately so, they're maybe in conflict with our

46:52

Christian understanding of how things should work today. And I'll give you an example of this. I saw this online.

46:58

It was a little surprising, but not... I mean, I wasn't like super surprised because when you're dealing with anonymous people that you could say anything, right?

47:06

And it doesn't come back to bite you necessarily. Are you listening? So I saw some accounts that were trying to make the point that genocide, and that's the word you use.

47:17

That's actually a very new word, by the way. It's not a biblical word, but that genocide is somehow in, it's in bounds, killing babies in the woods, mowing them down.

47:29

That's perfectly acceptable because God commanded the children of Israel to go into the land of Canaan and wipe out tribes who live there and including babies.

47:41

And this is one of the hard things that Christians have to deal with in an apologetics setting because we're very pro -life.

47:51

We don't, we are against abortion. And this is of course, in keeping with God's law, but you have,

47:57

I would say people with either an extreme amount of ignorance or nefarious intentions.

48:02

I don't really know how else to describe this thing. I mean, there's either some kind of problem.

48:08

There's some kind of problem there. Trying to make an application of an Old Testament, unique principle, it's not even a principle, a unique charge.

48:17

And then importing it into present day and saying, well, with our enemies, we can do these kinds of things.

48:24

Now don't, for those listening, please don't freak out too much. My hope is that this is not a very big group of people who are thinking this way, but there's some people going down some dark paths and they are thinking this way.

48:36

There is a dark web and a deep web. So yeah, just talk to us about that. Like, okay,

48:42

God said that to the children of Israel. That's a pretty, that's - Well, you've just, right there, you've just answered your own question.

48:48

God said that. He commanded those people at that time to do this thing.

48:55

And if you read Leviticus 18, in between the bookends, here's why God commanded them to do that.

49:03

Because they were involved in all kinds of sexual twistedness and they polluted the land to such a degree that the imagery is really vibrant.

49:12

The land is throwing them up. Just can't take it anymore. You know, there's so much bloodshed, so much wickedness that they know is wrong.

49:20

Everyone knows is wrong and they keep doing it because they wanna sate their pagan gods. No one has heard from God like that.

49:32

There's no one alive today that can say, God said that we should. No, he didn't.

49:38

No, in fact, love your enemies counters all of that. And you're not at war, you're not a situation where the just war theory can just be suspended because God decided to judge wicked people by using his own wicked people to do the job.

49:56

That's just silly. And you can't be consistent with that anyway. Those guys are crazy.

50:02

Yeah, okay. But it seems a lot like monogamy in a way. So obviously there's a creation principle here, but you've developed this tradition that's very

50:13

Christian to say we're not gonna allow more than one wife or husband. And I think that goes back to first Timothy three.

50:20

Here's the example to the whole church. It would be an elder who's only got one wife.

50:26

Right, I'm saying though with this, it's like we've developed this just war theory. And part of that, it's in a very uniquely

50:32

Christian thing to say there's innocence out there. We don't target innocence and we don't, and children certainly fall within that.

50:41

Now it doesn't mean that there's not fallout when you bomb a city or a strategic military complex, you can't always help that.

50:49

There's gonna be innocent people nearby, but. The euphemism collateral damage. Right, you're trying to avoid this.

50:57

And that's one of the things that I think Christians have excelled in. And that's part of my

51:02

Christian inheritance. There is no contradiction between that and God giving a very unique command to Israel as the extension of his own judgment to a people that he knows more about than me.

51:18

And I forget which book it is. It might be Isaiah where he says, he actually judges some of these

51:25

Canaanites for killing their own children. Like he says, they're my children. And of course, there's all kinds of apologists have tried to say, well, who knows, they would have grown up and been enemies of Israel or they would have been straight into the arms of the

51:39

Lord if you believe in the age of accountability. Or I mean, we don't know any of these things. All we know, yeah.

51:46

All we know is God said at that one time. Yeah, our modern evangelical God would never do anything like that.

51:53

And everyone knows it. So just stop even thinking about it. I had a dispensational friend of mine who actually was the president of Grace Theological Seminary.

52:02

I think he's still alive. He might be 87 now. And I brought this up to him and he just laughed and said, these people don't think

52:12

God judges sin. And so in the Old Testament, God is judging those people and it all leads towards the perfect timing of the coming of Christ in the first advent.

52:26

But all of those pagan nations and then when Israel would take on those practices, the syncretistic religious practices and the sexual weirdness,

52:36

God would say, okay, I was gonna give you this land. You have the land. Now you don't have the land and you're gonna be sent to another land.

52:44

To pagan central, what do you think Babylon was? Assyria, all that stuff. Well, they very much believed in group punishment in the

52:51

Middle East and they still do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your father does something bad, the whole family is on the hook for that.

52:59

And it's literally not part of their thinking to just judge the father individually. And which is interesting because you do also have this principle from the

53:07

Old Testament of the fathers and the sons, they won't pay for each other's sins. But also there's a principle of there's a, it's very likely the sons follow in the footsteps of the fathers.

53:19

So it's, yeah, anyway, like there is more of a group emphasis. I think in those -

53:25

Yeah, corporate responsibility. And maybe part of that is this, what you were talking about earlier, how our situation is different in some ways.

53:33

It's not necessarily better. It's just different. People don't think in those terms. I mean, we have in our country, what the

53:39

Hatfields and McCoys where the kid grows up and then it's like, oh, that's what they did to my grandpa.

53:45

Like, you know, let's go get him. It just continues the - John, think about how

53:51

God has spared the United States from those kind of regional and interceding, what's the word?

54:01

Not interceding. I can never pronounce it correctly. Paraphernalial, I don't know. Right. Conflicts that, you know, when

54:10

Tito was deposed as dictator in Yugoslavia, all those old wounds got reopened and now we're gonna go get revenge.

54:20

We had a civil war. 800 ,000 Americans died in the war.

54:26

And yet we don't still fight that war. Why not? Well, for a number of reasons.

54:32

But for some reason, some of these, I mean, think of the Muslims in modern day Spain. They don't forget.

54:38

That was 500 years ago, guys. Don't care. That was our ancestors. I've wondered about this.

54:45

And I don't think they're gonna reopen the same way because demographics have shifted so much.

54:50

It's more a rural urban split now than it is. Yeah. Country mouse, city mouse. Yeah. Well, with the country wide,

54:57

I mean, there's certain regional differences, but now you have like Atlanta in the middle of Georgia. That's like a Yankee outpost, right?

55:03

Yeah, right. The new south. But like, we also went from the civil war to we, and there was a lot of conflict.

55:11

There was a lot of, I mean, look, even my grandfather was, his generation was still,

55:17

I remember my uncle Fred saying, I'm not coming up north. He wouldn't do it. Doesn't trust those people.

55:23

I mean, they trusted the black people who lived around them more than they did a

55:29

Yankee coming in. Exactly. People don't understand this today because now there's, anyway, not to get off on a.

55:36

But the point there was because I believe because of the influence of the church and the gospel in the

55:45

United States, as a particular people today, this is where we live. The kind of conflicts that would always follow a civil war like that just didn't.

55:58

Yeah, we also. Nothing like what we see in middle Eastern countries where everything's tribal.

56:05

And as soon as the big boss is deposed, now that's licensed for you to go get revenge on those people that killed your grandfather.

56:13

So one of the things too, in the 20th century, I think was unique to us is that we had two world wars and then we had a cold war.

56:19

Yeah. And in those conflicts, it was very, it was scary. I mean, I don't know if you remember hiding under your desk.

56:25

Well, you have to do the drills or. I'm a little young for the duck and cover.

56:31

My parents remember that. And they're, and they were actually, well, they were on a coastal area too, which is a little different animal, but.

56:37

We probably figured any nuclear bombs going to be so far from us. Just forget the duck and cover.

56:43

When you're in Los Angeles, it's a little different. You think where it's already, but anyway. Yeah. I mean, you had up Southerners and Northerners and everyone was working together to face a bigger threat and they mingled and prove them their loyalty once again.

56:59

And I think, and it seems to me what's happening now. And this is the unique moment we're in, which we'll have hindsight on years later is.

57:08

We, the roar and terror extended that a little bit, that spirit of togetherness. Yeah.

57:14

Now it's kind of gone. Now Trump is the last gasping breath of a sort of like that kind of an

57:20

American arrangement when he's gone. I'm not sure what it's going to look like.

57:26

You know, Obama was the beginning of that fracture and that Obama's why we got

57:31

BLM. Yeah. Oh yeah. Let's go back to all the, and nurture all the sort of the differences and the hangups we have with each other.

57:41

Uh, and, and I, I think, I don't know if it's like stoppable in every way. Like these are sort of the way humans function.

57:48

Like they, they, they look, I mean, when you're on the playground as a kid, right. Who gets made fun of it's like the kid who's got the glasses.

57:54

Who's got the red hair. Who's different than the others. So, um, we're so off the beaten path in God's law and that's all my fault, but to bring it back.

58:03

It is John. We'll tell you what, let me cover a couple of things because go for it. You have the floor. Well, originally we were, we were talking about in, you know, those people who believe that even as Gentiles, they need to observe parts of the ceremonial law.

58:19

Now they'll even admit, and it's not a monolithic movement. There, there are genuine heretics in there that deny the

58:26

Trinity. There's also Christians who are just kind of caught up in this. And one thing to keep in mind, just holding to an error doesn't make you not a

58:36

Christian. Oh my goodness. I'm glad that's, you know, the fact. So let's talk about the two things that, that would separate them.

58:43

First food. How do they get around passages that you and I would immediately go to?

58:50

Mark chapter seven, thus he declared all foods clean or the sheet coming down from heaven.

58:57

So let's talk about Mark first. Their, their argument is that, uh, bacon wrapped shrimp was never food.

59:06

So Jesus wasn't saying that bacon wrapped shrimp is now clean because it was never food.

59:12

Okay. We can stop right there. Remember a little passage called Genesis nine, where before that, what could man eat?

59:22

Anything that grew out of the ground. I think if you're going to eat shrimp, you better wrap it in bacon. I'm pretty sure.

59:27

Always wrap it in chocolate chip cookies, crumble bacon, right? He said, from now on, you can eat anything that creeps on the ground.

59:36

It's carte blanche. It's a buffet for you. It was only later when God gave the

59:42

Exodus 21 rules to Israel, that there were certain foods they were to avoid.

59:47

And you've seen that list. Cloven hoof, chewed the cud. Oh, who can keep track? Right. So right there, you're like, no, there was a time when shrimp was food.

59:58

Then it wasn't. And now with the coming of Christ, it is. What about Peter's vision?

01:00:04

You know, it's like a parable. There's a material issue and there's a formal issue.

01:00:12

So when Peter gets the vision, and it's still in that in between, I like to use the analogy of a crossfade, one song going into another.

01:00:21

Well, the old covenant, remember in Hebrews, it says that which is passed away is being made obsolete.

01:00:28

In de facto, it's passed away. But there's a time where there was some intermingling and, you know,

01:00:35

Paul would circumcise Timothy, but not Titus. It all depended on prudential concerns.

01:00:40

No problem there. So in Acts, you know, they're still saying, well, the

01:00:46

Gentiles, they're unclean. I'm glad I wasn't born a woman or a Gentile or a dog.

01:00:51

You know, that was their worldview. And God gives him a dream three times of this huge sheet full of all kinds of creeping things.

01:01:01

And he says, Peter, rise, kill, and eat. Oh, Lord, I've never eaten anything unclean, because don't call what

01:01:07

I've made clean unclean. All right. So the object lesson obviously is pointing to the inclusion of the

01:01:15

Gentiles into the community of faith. But God used a true thing to illustrate the spiritual thing.

01:01:24

In other words, the material issue there with the sheet full of creatures wasn't untrue.

01:01:31

God's not going to use a lie to make a greater spiritual point. And, you know, they have their answers for that, but I don't think we can be consistently applying their answers.

01:01:45

Of course, if there was a time where these supposedly unclean foods were a food, and then at a certain time later,

01:01:54

God says, OK, that's that was only for those people for that time. Now you have all kinds of different food.

01:02:02

That's where I go with that. I'm like, you guys, you're making God use some unclean thing to illustrate what is now clean.

01:02:09

That doesn't make sense. Um, there's one other thing to think about, too, with those folks.

01:02:15

They'll appeal to Matthew 5. I had a guy on Twitter basically, you know, patting me on the head. They're their little man.

01:02:21

You'll get this someday. And he went to the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, 17. Don't think that I've come to abolish the law of the prophets.

01:02:28

I didn't come to abolish but fulfill. I say to you until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished.

01:02:37

Whoever then annuls one of these teaches other to do the same. He's less than the king. So what commandments is

01:02:43

Jesus talking about? Well, the very commandments he then goes on to further explicate murder.

01:02:50

Don't hate in your heart. Adultery. Don't lust in your heart. Bearing false witness. Let your yes be yes.

01:02:56

Love for your neighbor. Godly justice. All these things that are part of the 10 words. So again, some of their big slam dunk arguments aren't that good when you consider the immediate context and it's almost like a

01:03:12

King James only person who approaches the Bible from that perspective. Only the

01:03:18

King James is the word of God if you don't use the King James. Well, it's the same with them. There's an ingrained perspective that equivocates between believing the

01:03:28

Bible and following the Torah. And if you're out there and you flirting or dipping your toes into the water of Torah observance, let me tell you, it is a treadmill that goes nowhere.

01:03:43

You will never live up to the standards that your spiritual leaders think you should. And you want to put the shawl on.

01:03:52

You want to celebrate the feast. All of those have been passed away and done away with in Christ.

01:03:58

I got one other thing. And then I'm done. So as far as celebrating feasts and observing the days, what does that sound like?

01:04:10

When Paul is talking to the Galatians, you know, Galatians doesn't start off with, oh, greet my best friends in the world.

01:04:17

I love you. No, he just comes right out swinging and saying, I can't believe that those

01:04:22

Judaizers influenced you guys so quickly. How quickly? So in chapter four, he talks about you who've been justified by faith.

01:04:31

You want to put yourself back under slavery to the law of Moses. I think that's the exact wording in the passage.

01:04:41

Yeah, bondage. Yeah. Yeah. How is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things to which you desire to be enslaved again?

01:04:51

And what's the very next thing comes out of his mouth, out of his pen? You observe days and months and seasons and years.

01:04:58

I fear for you. Why is Paul so concerned? It's because they're going back and observing ceremonial functions of the law, which, by the way, in themselves for Israel were moral.

01:05:13

No one's saying that those things weren't ethical and moral. All we're saying is that's not part of the

01:05:20

Christian life anymore. Pastor Tim's opinion, Passover Seder. A lot of churches will do this.

01:05:26

Here it comes. Do it or not do it? I don't recommend it. Now, I've heard other people.

01:05:33

And by the way, there's a YouTube channel. I can't remember what it's called right now. They were on Apologia Radio about a year ago.

01:05:43

It goes into great depth in a lot of this stuff and is really, really - Cultish, right?

01:05:48

Yeah, they were on the cultish probe, but I can't remember who the folks are who were on cultish.

01:05:55

Anyway, my opinion is, and they would say, okay, if you want to do a reenactment, you have that freedom.

01:06:03

But I say unto you, the desire to reenact the thing is a concern for me.

01:06:09

If you were in our church, Syracuse Baptist, and you were saying, Pastor Tim, I think we're going to have some folks over and we're going to do a

01:06:17

Seder. I would say that's not a very good idea. Every Lord's Day, you participate in what is called the

01:06:27

Lord's Supper. And we take bread and wine, and we remember Christ, and we look back on something very specific, which was his sacrifice on the cross so that your sins could be forgiven.

01:06:41

That's your Passover. Once you start doing these, I wonder what it's like. I just think it would be cool to kill a lamb and eat it really quickly.

01:06:51

And come on, people, you're not Jews. You're Gentiles. Now, do they have the liberty to do that?

01:06:58

I suppose so. I just don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, yeah, because if you're

01:07:03

Jewish, ethnically speaking, and you become a Christian, but you want to pass down something to your children.

01:07:12

I don't have to face this dilemma because I'm not Jewish. I agree. Yeah, you know where I'm going.

01:07:18

So that's a different category. Yeah, yeah. As long as you're not seeing this as your spiritual duty, but you want to say this is part of our family history,

01:07:29

I have a sympathy, I suppose, for that. When you start bringing it into the church, that's where I get a little bit uncomfortable,

01:07:40

I would say. And if our church is going to do a Passover Seder, I don't want to say it's sin outright.

01:07:46

Because you have a guy, a little kid, right, comes up on stage and demonstrates the armor of God for the church.

01:07:52

This is what a Roman soldier wore, and it's usually some plastic Fisher -Price, you know. By the way,

01:07:58

I've got my son, who's your age, I've got his old armor up in the attic.

01:08:04

Oh, right. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think my brother was that kid. He'd go up, and my dad'd be like, well, this is what they would do.

01:08:11

So anyway, yeah, if the church, I think that's how it's sold a lot of the time. The church will say, well, we want to teach our people about this feast by participating.

01:08:21

And I don't know, even there, I'm like, maybe could someone do it at their house, maybe?

01:08:27

Or like, do we bring it into the church? I am a little, it can easily jump.

01:08:32

I just saw, I saw what that curiosity brought to at least two different church groups.

01:08:41

The first group, they ended up kind of filtering out, I remember the lady that I quoted earlier,

01:08:48

I wonder what it's like to be one of God's chosen people. She ended up leaving the

01:08:53

Christian faith and married an Orthodox Jew and is now

01:08:58

Jewish. Yeah, yeah. I knew a girl just like that, just like that, Catholic.

01:09:04

And obviously, she was coming to Bible studies at college, and I was really trying to convince her towards a

01:09:10

Protestant outlook. And I didn't know if she was truly saved or not. You know how it is.

01:09:15

Those conversations can get confusing. Okay, are you relying on Christ? You're relying on your works. What are you, what's going on?

01:09:21

Right, right. And she just like completely bypassed Protestantism and went straight to,

01:09:27

I think, Hasidic Judaism or something. She married a Jewish guy, but she said, though, it was the, it was the attraction to the traditions, the stability of the family.

01:09:39

And she just wanted that. It was kind of like the trad wife thing, too. Like she wanted to be that Jewish wife without.

01:09:47

Trad Jewish. Yeah, she didn't want to go into the workforce and they still keep some tradition. So, but it was like, but she was fascinated with the festivals and the laws and.

01:09:58

Well, see, think, okay, so what did I say here? I quoted Walter Martin, the cults are the unpaid debts of the church.

01:10:06

So when the church doesn't have, I'm not saying we do this as in a seeker sensitive way, but real good, solid traditions that we grow up in, we raise our children in, even things like Christmas and Easter, where we do it up and we recognize this, the incarnation that God breaks into his creation, this person of his son and writes the wrongs and sets the new kingdom up and it started.

01:10:36

And, you know, many, so the resurrection, the power of God and the salvation, you're united to Jesus and his death.

01:10:42

Therefore, and you, and you go for it and have, have parties and stuff with it. You know? I mean, you know how many, this is the 1662 book of common prayer.

01:10:51

You know how many festivals are in here? I'm like, and I don't celebrate any of these. Well, John, let me tell you as a conference

01:10:59

Scott. I mean, we have Holy Week coming up, right? So the

01:11:05

Monday before Easter, the Wednesday before Easter, you know, the Easter, the Eve before, like there's, there's just readings from,

01:11:12

I'm like, I mean, we do good Friday and Easter, but yeah, it's, we, we probably should get back to a more of a liturgical, you know,

01:11:20

I'm not saying you have to go full bore, but. Right, right. Well, you, you have this, you have these, these common threads through, you know,

01:11:29

I'm noticing it with all the young families that are, you know, part of our church is, is they're, they're definitely taking it upon themselves to fellowship with one another and to stay up way too late and play board games and do things with their, so there are family traditions being, being enacted and repeated.

01:11:50

And then at the church, we kind of fell into, it was, it wasn't even intentional, you know, every third

01:11:57

Sunday carry in. Great. That's wonderful. Monthly. No, it's every Sunday and you can hang out if you want, you can leave if you want, no one cares.

01:12:06

But if you want to stay and you want to eat good food and you want to get, stay there till two. So I have to be there to lock up, you know, that's fine.

01:12:14

Everyone's having a good time. Well, I've, I've been there. It is a good time. It's a, it's that Syracuse, Indiana style.

01:12:22

Like to think so. With good chili. Chili is the thing I, yeah. You guys have good chili, good soups.

01:12:28

I'm not a big soup guy, but when I came to your soup thing, I was really good soup.

01:12:35

All right. Well, we got to end the podcast. So thank you, Tim. Thank you for helping us navigate some of these things.

01:12:42

And if people want to reach out and you know, in, in a good faith way, not to argue with you because they're

01:12:49

Hebrew Israelites or. Yeah. To be, to be honest, I, it's like, it's almost like arguing with a provisionist.

01:12:58

I am simply not interested. Right. I'm not interested in debating infant baptism.

01:13:03

I'm not interested. But questions. Right. If you have genuine, but I thought this, you said this.

01:13:11

Uh -huh. Perfect. Where do they go? Um, you can reach me at Syracuse Baptist church,

01:13:16

Indiana at gmail .com. Syracuse Baptist church, Indiana at gmail .com.

01:13:22

That is, that is a mouthful, but that's easy to remember the domain. So there look for, so you can go right now to, to Spotify or iTunes, get a battle hymns, one and two battle hymns.

01:13:32

Three is coming out. Tim doesn't know when, but he's working on it. You can also down if you like the more metal stylings of, uh, of love war, you can listen to, uh,

01:13:40

Oh, come Emmanuel, my 2016 hard rock Christmas record. Oh, right.

01:13:47

Yeah. If you like, uh, Christmas, Christmas, hard rock, you know, Tim, I should probably say this too. You're coming out to our conference, music and masculinity .com.

01:13:55

Music and masculinity. Yeah. I literally have the domain. I own it. Music and masculinity .com.

01:14:03

Oh, yeah. That's how I could, I could sell it to you for an upcharge. Um, I know

01:14:09

I'm not Jewish, but I, I have learned. Uh, no. Okay. So let me, let me end with this, my end of things.

01:14:15

So I was at this funeral and all these X Torah observant people. One of them is, is dry as a bone.

01:14:22

He's a couple of years older than me. A really good friend. He hates the fact that I'm reformed. He just can't fathom it.

01:14:28

He's a good Calvary chapel guy. But I went up to him. I said, this, this is my Hebrew roots. I grabbed his lapel and said,

01:14:35

I can't believe you paid retail for this. I could have got it for you wholesale. My brother -in -law. And he, he thought it was, he thought it was appropriate.

01:14:43

That could work for Italians or Jewish people either way. But, uh, but yeah, check, check out music and masculinity .com.

01:14:51

I'm not pushing it big yet, but Tim's going to be one of the speakers. And, uh, we actually have, uh, someone coming,

01:14:57

Mark Steinmeier, who's, he's a very traditional, like, you know, very piano. Hims. Yep. Uh, I w

01:15:03

I'm, I'm really looking forward to seeing you guys interact. Cause you're like Kim's, but you also, you're like, let's do a metal arrangement.

01:15:10

So we're going to have fun at this conference. Um, let's just put it that way. I think Martin Luther's on my side.

01:15:16

Martin, good old Marty. Uh, and if you want to check out my latest book against the waves, uh,

01:15:22

Christian order in a liberal age, go to against the waves book .com. And that's it. That's the podcast. Thanks Tim. All right.