WWUTT 580 Q&A Myths on the Myths of Santa Claus?

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Responding to a widely circulated video from a Hebrew Roots guy named Jim Staley entitled "Truth or Tradition," which doesn't have much of either. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!

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In Ephesians 4 .15, the Apostle Paul says that we need to speak the truth in love in order to grow up in every way into Him who is the head into Christ.
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We don't grow according to lies. We grow according to the truth when we understand the text. This is when we understand the text having nothing to do with irreverent silly myths but training ourselves for godliness.
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Find all of our resources at www .utt .com. Now here's your host,
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Pastor Gabe. With my co -host, the ever -cold Becky Hughes. Hello. She is nice and chilly.
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I feel like I'm in the distance here. Why do I feel like I'm so far away? I don't know. Anyway. Okay. You sound clear to me.
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Good. Yes. Good. Good. It's good. Hey, did you have some of that mac and cheese tonight?
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I did. It was amazing. Was it better than last weekend's? Yes, actually. It was.
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It was. Which was hard to beat. I thought that I improved on it a little bit. You did. You did. Did you write it down this time?
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No, I did not. Of course not. I just threw the ingredients together and it came out better than it did the first time. Uh -huh. You know, I'll tell you what element of the baked mac and cheese was better this time that I did not have last time.
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What's that? Zieg helped me make it. Aww. Yeah. He's such a good cook. We have a part of the mixture was -
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There's probably more cheese. Yeah. I think there was actually. There might have been a touch more cheese in it.
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But part of the mixture was like butter, cream cheese, and flour kind of mixed together in milk and that was his concoction.
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Aww. So, what the element that he made that got poured into the dish, that was a Zieg thing.
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So he's moved on from trying to make the spider web. Oh, yeah. Things. Yes. Our son was trying to make
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Spider -Man's webbing the other day. There we go. So, somehow that morphed into a baked mac and cheese.
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Well, there we go. It was pretty good. Yeah, no. And when you pull that cheese up like that, it's got that stringy web look. It does.
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So, he gave it a good Spider -Man touch. I think I know what it is.
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Usually this mic is turned that way and now it's turned this way so it's picking up my voice twice. Oh.
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I think that's why it sounds that way. Do you want to adjust it? Yeah. Let's do a little adjustment here. Okay.
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There we go. Yeah. See that? I think we're good. That's clearer. Is that better? Yes. Are you even wearing the headphones?
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I am. Oh. Okay. You got the hoodie over. I couldn't even tell that you had your headphones on.
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Yep. My wife is quite cold so I went and got her my sweatshirt and so now she's got the hoodie on with that.
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All right. So, we've got a question here. They already know. This is one question because this is... If they see me on Twitter.
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Bundled up in your sweatshirt? No. I posted that you were stalling. I wasn't stalling.
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It's past my bedtime. I was waiting for you. I was waiting for you. I was waiting for you. I told you to go get your sweatshirt because otherwise
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I was going to sit here and listen to your teeth chatter in the microphone and... I said I'd just go to bed.
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You would not budge because you were too cold. So then
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I went hunting for your sweatshirts which I could not find. I know. That's why I didn't go get it because I couldn't figure out where it was.
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So then I brought you mine. I know. And pretty soon I'm going to need that shirt. But you've had it and you've taken it somewhere.
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All right. We've got one question today because this one question is going to take us the length of the program. Oh boy. So this comes from Chris.
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Hi, Chris. Who says that he lives in Alberta, Canada. Ooh, burr. I'm so sorry.
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On the subject of cold. This is from Chris in cold Canada.
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I discovered your ministry after watching a clip from Wretched TV where Todd Friel featured your video on Revelation 320.
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Man, that was like three years ago. It's been a while. It was one of the earlier what videos. Oh, wow. Since then,
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I have been deeply blessed to watch all your videos and listen to the podcast, especially the Q &A podcast with Becky.
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I have developed a deeper love for God and a higher view of church as a result of your faithfulness.
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My question is regarding the video that you made about Santa Claus two years ago. You claimed that Nicholas of Myra was a real person in that video and that the
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Santa Claus myths were based on him. Yet just today, I watched an expose by the
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Vigilant Christian, and he shares a video by Jim Staley, whom the Vigilant Christian does not support, about the myths of Odin, Santa Claus and Krampus, the evil elf that helped
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Santa Claus and beat naughty children. He also noted that the Roman Catholic Church at Vatican II denied
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Nicholas his sainthood and denied that he ever existed. So my question is, what came first?
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Was Nicholas of Myra an actual person, or was Nicholas of Myra a Christianized version of Norse and Germanic myths?
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Well, let's go ahead and play that what video first. This is a what video that I did on Santa Claus. I can't remember if this was last year or the year before.
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Why you should not teach your kids the myth of Santa Claus. That was the point of this video.
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Before jolly old Saint Nick became the myth known as Santa Claus, he was Nicholas of Myra, a pastor in modern -day
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Turkey. Nicholas was born into a wealthy family and gave his wealth away. In one occasion, he paid the dowries of three sisters by dropping gold coins in their window.
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He had a reputation for giving gifts in secret, putting coins in the shoes of those who left them outside their door. When Diocletian became emperor of Rome, he persecuted
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Christians severely, one of whom was Nicholas. In 313, when the persecution ended, Nicholas was released from prison, covered in his own blood, and the people called him
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Nicholas the Confessor. There's a story of Nick attending the Council of Nicaea in 325. When Arius sang his blasphemous hymn about Jesus being created by God, Nicholas slapped him.
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And that was the real Nicholas. Over time, legend turned to myth, and Saint Nicholas became Santa Claus. Now surely you've heard it suggested that if you teach your kids that Santa is real, you're lying to your children.
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But the Santa myth is also bearing false witness about a real person, a brother with whom we share our inheritance in Christ.
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Nicholas gave what he had to help others. He confessed Christ and was beaten for it. He was zealous for sound doctrine.
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Telling kids he's a magic man, watching their behavior from the North Pole with elves and eight flying reindeer distributing presents on Christmas Eve and eating their cookies is not a better story.
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Don't take Christ out of the life of a man who was all about Christ. First Timothy 4 .7
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says have nothing to do with irreverent silly myths. And folks, Santa Claus is an irreverent silly myth, when we understand the text.
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And all of that is factual. Yes, it is. In fact, while we're on the subject of facts, there is a
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Saint Nicholas of Myra Catholic Church in Hays, Kansas. Yes, there is. So the idea that the Catholic Church has decanonized
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Saint Nicholas or has made this statement that he didn't ever really exist.
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That's a total myth. Yeah, he even has his own feast. Oh, yeah. Wasn't that this past week?
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I think so. It was trending. Yeah, the Feast of Saint Nick, which is how we even got
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Santa Claus tied into Christmas because the Feast of Saint Nick was so close to Christmas Day. Interesting.
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So anyway, Saint Nick was at the Council of Nicaea, as was mentioned. And when you go to the list of the attendees at that council, visitor number 151 was a man by the name of Nicholas from Myra.
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Neat. So you can even go and look that up. John Chrysostom wrote about him.
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That was even within Nicholas's lifetime. So there is more than enough evidence to affirm that Nicholas was a real person.
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This video that Chris sent from the vigilant Christian who delves into a lot of myth himself.
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I don't know much about TVC, but the few videos of his that I've seen, I've gone, eh, no.
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I'm sure the guy means well. I don't know anything about his beliefs because I haven't watched enough videos. But he seems like one of those kinds of guys that delves into a lot of the weird corners of the
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Internet where you find myths and references to the Illuminati. Here's a general rule about looking up information on the
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Internet. If they reference the Illuminati, they're not credible. Move on. Go find another source.
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And if they're trying to debunk something, don't use Wikipedia. Yeah. Wikipedia is not it. You know, it's a good start,
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I guess. It is. You can kind of get an overview, but don't consider it. If you're doing a research project, don't use
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Wikipedia. No, they're more in -depth. Credible places that you can go to. And like the video that I just played, too, about Santa Claus, there are people that will email me and will say, where did you get your information from?
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That's always difficult because I got it from historians learning over a period of years. It's not like I went to a website and found that info and just banged out a what video real quick.
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So I can't point you to a website. Well, here's where I got all that information from. It's just education.
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It's just learning over a number of years. That's what I know about Santa Claus. That's the story that I've told my kids about where Saint Nicholas actually came from and how it turned into this myth called
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Santa Claus. So all of that stuff is you can look it up. You can test me on that. This whole thing from Jim Staley that was reposted by the
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Vigilant Christian is some of it is true, but a lot of it is myth. Staley is a
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Hebrew roots guy. So he's got a particular motivation with the stuff that he's presenting. He wants to decredit even the
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Protestant church so that he can draw people into Hebrew roots. He's a
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Hebrew roots minister. He denies the Trinity. He tells people that you have to partake in all of these different Jewish festivals and customs if you really want to be doing
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Christianity the right way. So the man is a false teacher. He is not to be followed, and he has an agenda when he's presenting this information about myths.
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And like I said, some of the stuff that Staley presents is true, but most of it is not.
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But the whole reason that he's putting this together is to kind of win people's fancy and make them doubt that some of the things that we have done in the
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Protestant church is true. Instead, we've drawn from myth and all this other kind of thing, and myth has infiltrated the
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Protestant church. I'm not going to say that's not true. There are some myths that the Protestant church adheres to, but he's not attempting to build up the church.
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He's trying to win people into the Hebrew roots movement. And this is why TVC should not have anything to do with him.
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The vigilant Christian states in his video that he doesn't agree with Jim Staley. So why is he even using him?
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That's what I was wondering. That's absurd. Yeah, that's ridiculous. If you know that his motivation is false, don't use his info.
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It's likely that his info isn't true, either, if his conclusion... That lack discernment there,
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I think. Right, yeah. Or wisdom. His ultimate conclusion is to try to win people to false teaching. You should not be using the guy's false teaching.
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So anyway, this whole video, truth or tradition, is about two hours long.
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And so this is a middle portion in which he starts going into the myths of Santa Claus and other
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Christmas traditions and stuff. And so anyway, this is Jim Staley, and he starts out talking about Odin.
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The same Odin who is the father of Thor. Oh, okay. But this is not the Marvel Comics Odin. This is the
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Scandinavian god, Odin. Let's move to this character called Odin, because this is where we're going to get into a little bit more detail of our holidays, where some of these symbols come from.
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Along with the celebration of the sun gods, the Scandinavians also worshipped this god called
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Odin. He was the god of intoxicating drink, ecstasy, as well as the god of death.
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And because of the Feast of Saturnalia, dealing with all those things, he naturally became the most popular god of the
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Feast of Saturnalia, which was a sun god, which we can trace all the way back to Baal himself.
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Guess who this character became. Look at him very carefully. What does he look like? The colors are wrong, but this guy became
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Santa Claus. That's right. Okay, so this is important. Be careful of the people who say, look at him, doesn't he look familiar?
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You know, you take pictures that you find on the internet like, oh, look, Odin's got a white beard. Santa Claus has got a white beard.
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These two might be the same. I think that's where Santa Claus came from. Having said that, though, there is somewhat of a correlation between Odin and Santa Claus.
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Between like the whole Father Christmas figure and Odin. There may be some connection there. But the popular understanding of Santa Claus, like you see him in media and in commercialization around Christmastime and stuff like that,
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I mean, this came from Clement Clarke Moore in his poem, A Visit from St.
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Nicholas, which later became popularly known as Twas the Night Before Christmas. So Moore is the one who came up with the figure of Santa Claus as we know him today.
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And he wrote it in a poem that appeared in the New York Sentinel. It wasn't some guy that was studying all this mythology and then grabbing all this stuff and then throwing together, here's
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Santa Claus derived from all these different things. I mean, it was a fun little poem that he wrote for his kids.
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And so any connection to a false god or some sort of Scandinavian thing would be purely coincidental because that's not where he got it from.
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The connection between Moore and Santa Claus, Staley never makes it.
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Everything that we know about Santa Claus now, he doesn't mention the poem at all.
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As he goes on talking more about Santa Claus here, he never gets to talking about Twas the Night Before Christmas. That has been the most influential work in our present myth of Santa Claus.
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It came from Moore's poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas. So anyway, we go on here with more about Odin.
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Odin, or Woden, was the god of wisdom, magic, and occult knowledge, runes, poetry, and war.
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His name meant the inspired one. And you're going to begin to see as we move through these slides, you're going to see that Santa Claus, or Odin, is awfully familiar to Jesus or Yeshua, which means salvation.
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We're going to see a god, Odin, who saves, and we're going to see another one called
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Yeshua who saves. Now, I want you to pay attention to some of the characteristics as we go through Odin because it's shocking to see the similarities in how
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Satan is trying to masquerade as an angel of light, as we know from the scriptures. He was a tall, old man that had a long, white beard and carried a spear or a crozier.
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Remember when we went through the crozier, the serpent crozier? Whoever holds a serpent crozier is connected to the power behind that serpent crozier, which is the serpent himself.
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Now see, that's a stretch because a spear and a crozier are not the same thing. All of the depictions that you will see of Odin have him carrying a spear.
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He doesn't carry a crozier. A crozier is like a big cane or a big staff. The pope carries a crozier.
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It is a silly symbol. But Odin has a spear. Staley is trying to connect the spear with the crozier, which was something that he talked about earlier in this whole truth or tradition thing, and there isn't any connection.
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It's a spear because he's a god of war. Right. So anyway, this is kind of part of the way how he'll manipulate the myth and delves into further myth that the spear is somehow a crozier.
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There's really no connection between the two. Let's continue. He traveled around the world on a white horse that had eight legs, which was an ancient tradition, the number of transportation.
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This is where the eight reindeer came from. Now you might say, Jim, there's nine. Originally, there was eight.
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Rudolph was added in modern times. There was eight reindeer, and it comes from that white horse that Odin traveled around on that had the eight legs.
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You can look up all of this stuff. It's very common knowledge on the internet and encyclopedias.
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You can see Odin and all the reference material that goes with it. Now, that might be true.
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I actually was not able to find any information on that. He did ride a horse with eight legs.
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Odin did. But you're supposed to be able to look it up on the internet. Yeah, right. I know. But I couldn't find anything that I would consider credibly factual that would make a connection between the eight -legged horse that Odin rode and the eight reindeer that was pulling
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Santa's sleigh. Did Moore actually understand that Odin rode on a horse with eight legs, and that's why he incorporated eight reindeer?
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Or did it just seem interesting to Moore to throw in eight reindeer? Now, some of the reindeer's names do have connections to the
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Germanic language. Like Donner and Blitzen, for example, come from the two German words that mean lightning and thunder.
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And Odin's son, Thor, was, of course, the god of lightning. So Thor that we know from Marvel comics.
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And he's not the mythical god character anymore. He's a being from another world or another planet.
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Right. But anyway, that's in the Marvel universe. Everybody knows that. Everybody watches
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Marvel films. And if you don't, then you can look it up on the internet. Or you can just go to the movie theater.
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Watch the latest Thor film that's out right now. So, yeah, look it up on the internet. Wait, we're not promoting.
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So whether or not Moore actually knew those connections with Odin when he named the eight reindeer,
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I don't know that for sure. Or he just decided Santa the Elf had eight reindeer, which is the other aspect of Santa Claus in Moore's poem.
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He was a little elf. Right. He wasn't the great, you know, full -size man that we picture
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Santa Claus as now. Anyway, we'll get to more of that in just a moment. Moore. Moore. And virtually every version of Claus, he carried along behind him a dark helper.
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These became the elves. OK, so virtually every single version of Claus, there was a dark helper.
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If you look carefully in that picture, you can see that kind of little demon guy with the long red tongue that comes out of him.
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These were called Krampuses. The Krampus, or the dark helpers, followed along.
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And if the children weren't good, they would beat the children. OK. And so you had the good guy,
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Saint Nicholas, who eventually would become Saint Nicholas, the Odin, who would come and he would give you gifts if you were good.
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And if you weren't, then the blackjacks or the dark helpers, they would be the ones that would institute the discipline to the children.
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And we're going to see that. So these Krampuses, which ended up being Santa's elves, according to legend, the
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Krampus accompanied Saint Nicholas during the Christmas season, warning and punishing the bad children.
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In contrast to Saint Nicholas, who gives gifts to good children. That comes from Wikipedia.
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It comes from Wikipedia. Wikipedia. It must be true because it was on Wikipedia. Actually, that part is true.
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Oh, really? So Wikipedia is accurate. In this case, yeah, it's accurate.
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So the whole thing with the he had these dark helpers that were called the Krampuses. That is where the whole concept of the elves was derived from.
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But the elves are turned into the elves are little friendly little guys that look like children instead of the dark, scary looking dudes.
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Yeah. But that is. How the Grimm fairy tales got turned into Americanized. Yeah, right.
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The Disney cartoons. Happy ever after. When you actually look at how Grimm wrote those fairy tales and not the
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Disney version of it, boy, they're dark. Oh, yeah, there's a big difference. I've read a few of them and I'm going,
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I wouldn't read this to my kids. My goodness. And I'll say that as far as this truth or tradition video goes, this one little segment right here is the part that I found the most fascinating because he shows actual video footage of the
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Krampuses. Oh, yeah. And and I don't think he's Saint Nick. I can't remember what it is they call him in the
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Germanic tradition, but he looks that way. He's carrying the staff. He's got the red the red garment on the cross on the hat.
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He's got the white beard. I can't remember if they call him Saint Nick or in Santa Claus or not. But then he's got the dark elves, the
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Krampuses that will go around with him. So and the kids are screaming. The kids are screaming. I'm not going to play that part because it's all video.
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You don't get any audio from that. Right. But anyway, here's Staley with that next segment, and then I'll stop it when he gets to his video.
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Here's another picture of Krampus and the Santa's elves. You can see the picture on your right is that you have.
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It's almost like a witch's brew broom where the children, the naughty children are being carried away by a
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Krampus, which is a combination of a human and a goat. OK, and you see this all throughout history is a human that's mixed with a goat.
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And I have a teaching on the Nephilim or the sons of God where I kind of go through this. But in a nutshell, on the holiday called
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Yom Kippur in the Bible, where once a year the high priest went into the Holy of Holies to make a sacrifice, there were two goats that were offered.
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One was called the La Adonai goat, and that goat was offered to Yahweh as to Adonai.
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And the other goat was called the La Azazel goat. And that goat was taken off into the wilderness and it was pushed over a cliff.
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And the La Azazel goat was where they took the hands of the high priest and they would incorporate all the sins of Israel onto the head of this goat and then send it off into wilderness to Azazel.
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Now, Azazel was a man -goat -god, OK, in ancient mythology.
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And so it was said that it was Azazel who caused man to sin. And so all of the sins of mankind for that year, the
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Israelites, would be placed on the head of the Azazel goat. And this is what we see transferred all the way down into another form of Santa's helper is actually
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Azazel, if you will, or the Krampus is what they call it today. And the picture on the left you can see is actually a modern -day picture of a festival, a
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Christmas festival in Germany where they continue to use this celebration and they bring out
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Krampus or Santa's helpers. This is a modern -day picture here. As crazy as this is for us
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American Christians to believe that this still goes on today, this is a picture of Saint Nicholas and his demons, his
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Krampus, are still celebrated in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and all over the world.
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And so what we're going to show you right now is an actual clip or a short movie of a montage of different videos that we've discovered of where they still make this celebration, still celebrate this all around the world, where they literally glorify the demonic part of Christmas in Saint Nicholas and these dark helpers.
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So how can you say like it's in a few countries still celebrated and then include all over the world?
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It's a few countries, but it's all over the world. Right. If I remember right, my geography, that's all in one area.
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But I mean, this is the way he stretches the truth. So some of the stuff that he's saying is true, but then he kind of stretches it out.
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So the whole thing with the Azazel goat, which I've called it the Azazel goat.
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I don't know that there's a correct pronunciation of that necessarily, but that's the whole concept of the scapegoat in Leviticus.
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That's where we get the scapegoat from right now, whether or not that has tied into the half man goat thing.
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I don't think there's a direct correlation to that because that's the what is it called a Seder? I don't remember.
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You know, like in the Chronicles of Narnia, Mr. Tumnus, he's half man, half lower goat.
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I can't remember what the actual mythical figure is called. But anyway, so then the Krampuses kind of look like that in some of those depictions.
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Anyway, they are creepy looking. And that's that segment of videos that they're scary. Yeah, that's a weird tradition.
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I don't understand. I mean, I know they're meant to be, but man, they're pretty intimidating. Oh, I apologize.
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It just keeps getting worse, doesn't it? And if that wasn't enough, there are some scholars that believe that the actual song
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Jingle Bells came from the Krampus bells that were in existence for a long time before that song was ever written.
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That every time you saw Saint Nicholas, he was accompanied by the bells of Christmas, if you will, from his elves.
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They used to have bells that would hang from their necks. And as you heard in the video, you would hear the bells as they announced themselves into the next town that they were going into.
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And some believe that that's actually where the term the Christmas bells or the bells of Christmas or Jingle Bells came from.
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Nope, totally not true. Now, hold on a second. Okay. Isn't Jingle Bells about, like, sleigh racing?
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Yeah, that's what it was. That's where it was derived from. The song itself, when you look at the lyrics of Jingle Bells, it doesn't have anything to do with Christmas.
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No, it doesn't. You don't even see Christmas referenced in it. Right. The guy that wrote... Just cold.
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Yeah, right. The guy that wrote Jingle Bells was writing about horse and sleigh drag racing in Boston.
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So the song was trying to promote racing. He was a gambler, kind of a scoundrel, and he was the son of a
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Unitarian minister. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but I know that there is a plaque of him at a place called
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High Street where the plaque commemorates this is the place where Jingle Bells was written.
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Oh, interesting. And so that's the story of Jingle Bells. It actually doesn't have anything to do with Christmas.
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And so, again, this is Staley's whole correlation with things that don't go together at all.
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And then stretch a little bit. Stretch the truth. Like it was Christmas bells, and then it was Jingle Bells. Make people feel like they're being manipulated by the devil.
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And then, oh, hey, come into the Hebrew Roots movement where we do everything right. Right. That's his pitch.
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That's the reason why he does this stuff the way that he does. So even when it comes to information that is indeed mythical and would lead us away from the truth of Christ, which
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Santa Claus does, it leads us away from the truth of a real Christian man who stood for sound doctrine and was persecuted because he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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And it draws you away, draws your attention away from that man into the myth of Santa Claus. But then
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Staley is taking you even further away from that into even more and more myth so that he can pull you into his false teaching of Hebrew Roots.
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That's the whole that's where he's going, because at the end of this whole presentation, he gives this whole pitch on, well, here's the true holidays that you should be celebrating.
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And you're just not doing. I'm sorry. So if you sit through the whole two hours of it. Right. If you can handle it.
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But I know people who've been conned by this stuff and they'll post videos like this and from guys like Jim Staley.
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And they sound like they know what they're talking about. And they say it matter of factly not. Oh, I think it's this, you know, or anything like that.
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Really, if it's going to convince you to change your mind, you should really do some hard research about it.
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Yeah. Instead of watching a video from a convincing person. Right. On the Internet. And I myself, as a creator of videos that you find online, when we understand the text, test what it is that I'm saying.
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Please. Do not take my word for it. First and foremost, it needs to be tested according to Scripture.
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It does. And as you quoted at the start of the program today, 1 Timothy 4, 7 have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths.
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Right. But rather train yourself for godliness. Please. Now we're going to move into discovering exactly where Santa Claus came from.
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So Odin, how did Odin become Santa Claus? Well, here's the rendition or the evolution of Odin becoming
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Santa Claus. By the 1500s in Holland, there he became Sinterklaas.
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Okay. So Saint Nicholas turned into Sinterklaas, a kind and wise old man with a white beard, white dress, red cloak, a crozier.
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And he rode on the skies and the roofs of the houses on his white horse, accompanied by his blackjacks, which were the
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Krampus that we just saw, leaving gifts for people under his sacred tree, the fir tree.
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He would visit you on his birthday, December 25th, of course, and give you gifts if you've been good or if you've been bad, his blackjacks would beat you.
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And it's amazing to me that these stories find themselves in modern
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Christmas traditions. Even today, two and three thousand year old pagan traditions find themselves.
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And now we smile about these traditions. So again, some of that was true and some of that was not.
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It's just by proxy that Saint Nick has come to be affiliated with December 25th, with Christmas time, because the
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Feast of Saint Nick is in December. That's the reason why. But he wasn't coming and visiting people on December 25th.
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The whole thing about, you know, the Dutch would refer to him as Sinterklaas. That's true because that's
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Saint Nicholas in Dutch. You pronounce it Sinterklaas. And Moore was fascinated by this tradition of Dutch children.
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So it wasn't like Cinderella, how she got the cinder part of her name. From the cinders in the fireplace.
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Right. So it wasn't that sort of thing. No, it's Sinterklaas because that's Saint Nicholas in Dutch.
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Got it. And Clement Clark Moore was fascinated by this tradition from the Dutch children who would put these wooden shoes outside their door at the
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Feast of Saint Nicholas, and then they'd get gifts in their shoes. And that was how they celebrated that feast day.
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And so he incorporated some of those traditions into his poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, which he put on December 24th.
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And the reason why Moore put it on December 24th, the visit from Santa Claus on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day is because many
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Protestants during the 1800s would not celebrate Christmas because it was a Catholic holiday.
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And he wanted his tradition, well, not his tradition, his poem. Right. To be accepted by children more than just Catholic kids, but also
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Protestant kids. So that's why he put it on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. So it wouldn't sound like it was directly associated with the with the proxy.
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Right. By proxy. Right. Wasn't directly associated with the Catholic holiday. So Moore's creation of these things is how we pulled
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Santa Claus into the Christmas holiday. This has only been since the 1800s. Staley is trying to say this has been going on for two or three thousand years.
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Right. Which is not true at all. That isn't. And he like I said, he never mentions the poem from Clement Clark Moore.
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Nothing has been more influential on the myth of Santa Claus than that poem. And Staley doesn't even mention it.
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So anyway, we we go on with with more of his explanation. The most famous phrase that Santa Claus ever says is what?
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But do we ever stop for just a moment to think, where did that come from? Well, if you go back in history, you begin to find where that phrase actually originated from.
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And here's where it originated from. In the history of Hobgoblin, the author
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Alan W. Wright reveals Robin itself was a medieval nickname for the devil.
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And Robin's trademark laugh is ho ho ho. Back in the 1600s,
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Robin Goodfellow played the devil in many, many plays, which plays obviously back then were incredibly important.
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They didn't have theaters or movies today. So the theater and plays were were an integral part of society back then.
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So before the devil would ever come on stage, he would announce himself by saying ho ho ho.
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And that's, ladies and gentlemen, where the ho ho ho comes from with Santa Claus. I failed to see the connection.
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Right, exactly. So it's it is true that there was a guy that played the devil in his plays.
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And before the devil came out on stage, he would announce himself with ho ho ho. But that doesn't mean that because Santa Claus says ho ho ho, that it's directly taken from the satanic tradition of announcing the devil with this laugh.
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And now we're putting it in Santa Claus. Yeah, I mean, that's as if somebody else says the phrase
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I am, that they already got it from the Bible. You know, I mean, well, you can take the same spin.
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Joel Osteen's book I am is blasphemous. So, well, OK, I wasn't referring to that.
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I just met some random person. The power of I am. Yeah, that's the name of God.
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By the year 1700, a Dutchman immigrated to North America, brought his center clause with him.
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The English dialect was then changed to Santa Claus. In 1930, a designer for the
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Coca -Cola company was trying to get people in the wintertime to buy their drink. So they took their company colors of red and white, borrowed the center clause story, changed a few things, and out came the modern
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Santa Claus, complete with reindeer and elves. So that 1930 designer borrowed a picture from,
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I think it was the 1800s, and modernized it, added the colors, and out came the
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Coca -Cola Santa Claus that we see today, complete with the long white beard and chubby cheeks and the red and white suit.
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Now, the Coca -Cola advertising is how we got to Santa Claus being a full -grown man. Right.
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But all the other appearance aspects of Santa came from Moore's poem, "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."
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Which Staley totally missed. He totally skipped past. But he didn't even do his research on that.
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Right. On that stuff. And yet he's telling everybody else, you can look all this up. But he says it so matter -of -factly that it's convincing.
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It's so confident. And he's got such great technology. And that's how Staley was able to become as well -known as he did, and pushing his church and the whole
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Hebrew Roots movement, is because he started, what is it, Passion for Truth Ministries.
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And he did all of this fancy technology, great, sharp -looking videos.
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And that was how he drew people into this. His church, which is in Missouri, only has about 200 people in it.
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It's not a real large church. But he's got a massive worldwide following because of all the stuff that he's produced and put on the internet.
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Right. The guy is a conman. And not just because he's a false teacher.
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He's literally a conman. He's in prison right now. Oh, yes. Back in 2015, he was convicted of conning people out of their money.
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Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wow. And so he was thrown in prison. I think he's there for seven years.
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The judge didn't give him the maximum sentence, but had to give him more than a minimum because he didn't believe that Staley really was apologetic or sorrowful about the fact that he conned people out of their money.
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The government had even given him a cease -and -desist order, and yet he continued to... For seven years? That has to be quite a bit of money.
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Yeah, it was a lot. A lot of money. Wow. But the reason why he didn't give Staley the maximum sentence is because Staley had a squeaky clean record.
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He'd never been in trouble with the law before. He was a family man. Was always good to his wife and kids. And so for that reason, the judge couldn't give him the minimum sentence since he didn't seem truly apologetic for what he had done.
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But wouldn't give him the maximum sentence since he did not have a record of breaking the law.
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So he's in prison for seven years. And likely he'll get out earlier than that on good behavior. Wow. In his life, he has shown himself to be a con man.
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And he lives in a very expensive elaborate home worth over a million dollars. And it's amazing that people, even this year,
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I mean, even in the past, what, four years now? No, no, no. I'm doing my math wrong. Because you said 2015.
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Yeah, 2015. Two years, a little over two years ago. Two years. Okay, so in the past two years.
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Yes. Goodness, my brain went crazy. Anyway, that people are still looking at his video as being legit.
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Well, they're probably not looking the man's name up and finding out he conned a bunch of people out of money and he's in prison.
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Why are you not looking this up? On the day that he was tried and convicted, the courtroom was packed with a lot of people who were even fans of Staley.
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And he made an address to his church. And so there were a lot of people behind him.
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And Staley just tried to say, look, I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even though he was told to stop doing what he was doing, and he continued to do it anyway.
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Right. Well, the judge found something on him for putting him in there that long. Well, yeah, clearly. I mean, he clearly broke the law.
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There's no way around that. Right. And again, this is not a man who is devoted to the truth.
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So nobody should be receiving the information he's given, even about Santa Claus. You can tell from my what video,
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I'm not a fan of Santa. But the point being that he's using this information to try to attract people who just love conspiracy theories.
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They just love the idea that everybody else is under some sort of influence from Satan.
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And because they're into Santa Claus, because Satan's got a hold of you. And if he can make you question even a little bit.
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Right. He's got you. Yeah. So you need to take that and go dive in and look it up.
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And we've just looked at 12 or 15 minutes of that video or whatever. There are other portions in which he talks about where steeples came from and how it's connected to these pagan myths and why roofs inside churches are pointed and it's connected with this paganism and all this.
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And none of that's true. Right. It isn't true. And so he even attacks the church in other ways. Not just Santa Claus, but there's a whole other plethora of traditions that he's confronting in that particular video to make people doubt the way the church does things and think, you know, boy, we've gotten way far from what
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Jesus told us we were supposed to be. And then he draws you into that whole Hebrew roots nonsense.
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Right. And that's how he grabs you. So even when it comes to confronting myths, which are prevalent, even within the
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Protestant church, I won't say that they aren't. But when it comes to confronting those myths, we have to confront it with the truth. You can't confront it with more myth.
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Right. Because then you're not speaking. Or stretching. Or stretching the truth. Then you're not speaking the truth in love, as we've been commanded to in Ephesians 4.
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So once again, in 1 Timothy 1, Paul was encouraging Timothy to remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.
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The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.
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Certain persons by swerving from these have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, which is exactly what
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Staley wants to fancy himself as, a teacher of the Hebrew law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.
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And so Staley doesn't even tie this into the gospel. In this whole video presentation, he ties it into, here's the holidays that you should be celebrating.
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And yet you have Paul saying in Colossians 2, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a
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Sabbath, which is all the stuff that Staley teaches. He will even say you have to be circumcised, which
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Paul was saying, those are the dogs. They're the evildoers that are insisting that you have to be circumcised in order to be a proper follower of Jesus Christ.
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So Paul says in Colossians 2 .17, these are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
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So Staley's Bible, it's as though he's completely removed the books of Galatians and Hebrews.
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And he's trying to win you into this false teaching with more myth. So he confronts myth with more myth.
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So he takes that Hebrews, but he's considered to be what type of religion? Yeah, Hebrew roots. I don't think he even calls it that.
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He calls it Christian roots. Oh, okay. Because Hebrew roots has such a negative stigma.
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Whenever somebody hears that name, they go, I think I heard somewhere that that's a false religion. Anyway, the whole reason that we got into this is because when
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Chris sent his email, he said that Staley denies that Nicholas of Myra was even a real person.
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Right. And that's the next part in this video. So I want to be sure to at least get that part in there before we finish up on Jim Staley.
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In the 1970s, let's continue. The Second Vatican Council, listen to this, formally stated that no
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Roman Catholic bishop by the name of Nicholas ever existed. They downgraded St. Nicholas.
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They took away his sainthood because there was evidence that brought forth to the Vatican that it was possible that he never even existed along with many other saints.
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Vatican II further confessed that the legends attributed to this saint had no Christian origin and probably came from pagan traditions itself.
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And yeah, like I said, none of that's true. And he doesn't even give a source as to where he got that from.
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So sometimes he'll reference something. He'll say, I got this off of Wikipedia. Well, Wikipedia doesn't say that.
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Right. It doesn't say that the Catholic Church had removed Nicholas of Myra or even doubted that he's a real person.
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See, like I said, he just goes to random dark places, the Internet, and finds this conspiracy theorist stuff that people have put out there that has no basis in fact or truth whatsoever.
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And then it's like, oh, I found it on the Internet. Right. It must be true. Staley is doing the very thing that he is condemning by saying that Nicholas of Myra never even existed.
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It's just as bad as saying that Nicholas of Myra is Santa Claus. It's bearing false witness about a brother in Christ.
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There is plenty of historical evidence that affirms that Nicholas of Myra was a real person and that that story that happened at the
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Council of Nicaea between him and Arius really did occur. Arius did take to the floor with this blasphemous song that he sang about Jesus Christ having been created by the
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Father. And then Nicholas walked up to him and smacked him. And it has given birth to one of the greatest memes on the
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Internet. Yes, it has. With Nicholas saying, I'm here to give presents to children and to smack heretics.
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And I'm all out of presents. Greatest meme online. All right. So thank you for your question,
43:19
Chris. I hope that you learned something edifying today, not just that we were dogging on a guy for presenting all of these myths and leading people astray, but our understanding that we should not have anything to do with irreverent silly myths, but rather train ourselves for godliness.
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And even when it comes to confronting those things that aren't true, we're confronting it with the truth, not with more untruth.
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And if you find something on it, if you get information and you find it to be part of it, to be false, just stop looking at it.
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Well, and admit your own errors. Oh, yeah. If you've presented something that you've later find to be false information, you say, look,
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I was incorrect on that. Yes, I need to do that. And I've done that before. I've grabbed information and then later found that may not have been factual or.
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Or complete. Complete. Right. Was probably partial, not the whole story. Or I misrepresented somebody, even somebody who was wrong.
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But that doesn't mean it's OK to misrepresent them. Right. I need to own my mistake and say
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I jumped to a conclusion there that I shouldn't have or attributed an opinion to somebody that simply wasn't true.
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Right. And be careful of those people that try to fancy themselves as historians and they make confident assertions, but they have no idea what they're talking about.
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Test your info and test all things according to the scripture. That's the first place we go. Amen. All right.
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Repent and believe the gospel. It is belief in Jesus Christ that will forgive your sins and guarantee you eternal life with God in heaven.
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Let's conclude with prayer. Yes, please. And then have a Merry Christmas, everyone. You know, we'll be backing in next week to say that again.
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I was going to say. Dear Lord, we thank you for this time this evening.
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I always love sharing this time with my wife as well. And I pray that that we would seek the truth above all things that we would compare whatever comes our way, according to what you have said in the scriptures.
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Your word is true. Jesus said heaven and earth will pass away. My word will never pass away.
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It is this word we write upon our hearts. We think about with our minds and that we will even be celebrating and rejoicing in for all eternity when we are with God in glory forever.
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So deliver us from evil. Make us worshipers of the Father in spirit and in truth and help us to know how to communicate this truth to others as well.
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So they might turn from their sin and know Jesus Christ the Lord. We pray and ask for this in Jesus name.
45:53
Amen. I told you,
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I don't know. Here, wear mine. Yay. So I don't have to hear your teeth chatter.
47:11
You won't have to hear my teeth chatter. I'll just go to bed. Uh, sorry that we record in the basement.
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Are you? Are you really sorry? We can move all this up the dining room.