John MacArthur Claims Jews and Christians Worship the Same God

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December 15, 2018

John MacArthur was interviewed by Ben Shapiro on his Sunday show. MacArthur stated some things that we somewhat debatable and some that caused controversy. Some disagree that Jews and Christians worship the same God. Many came to Andrew to get his opinion as a Jewish Christian. So here is Andrew's response. Watch the Interview Mentioned...

00:00: Okay, John MacArthur was on with an Orthodox Jew, Benjamin Shapiro. Now, folks from the
00:06: Wrap Report, you've heard the name Ben Shapiro because I have brought him up before when he talked about whether or not
00:12: Jesus was the Messiah. We did a whole episode on that. But this time,
00:17: John MacArthur was directly in studio with him, sharing the gospel with him over and over. But there are some things that MacArthur said that, well, ruffled the feathers of some, and we will deal with that now on the
00:29: Wrap Report. Welcome to the
00:35: Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.
00:41: This is the Ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
00:52: That is right. We are gonna deal with someone that we love here very much, John MacArthur. We love his teaching and what he has as his coming on 50 years of pastoring at one church.
01:06: Talk about faithfulness. And the thing, though, is there are some things he said that ruffled feathers, and we want to get to that.
01:14: Now, I do wanna give a shout out to the guys over at Just Thinking Podcast. They did an episode, well, actually,
01:20: Virgil Walker did an episode on his own called The Religion of LGTB.
01:27: And the interesting thing is he brought out some really good points. One thing I do wanna, I guess, kinda disagree with him, maybe,
01:34: I guess, publicly here a little, but not in a bad way. He mentioned that he was talking about this comedian who was supposed to do the
01:41: Oscars, and they went back eight years and found a quote. He said something the homosexuals didn't like, and they made him apologize.
01:49: And he was saying that this was their, this
01:54: LGTB community going after someone who's a non -Christian to force their will on them, sort of.
02:03: And I kinda disagree. I think the real reason they went after this guy is not because he's open and affirming of them, or not open and affirming of them.
02:12: It's really because they made it, they want him to go back eight years and say, well, hey, this is something that wasn't an issue eight years ago, and it was something that he believed back then, and they want him to apologize for the way he believed back before the current culture's view of this whole issue.
02:31: And he thought that was somewhat ridiculous. I think, really, the reason they went after him is because he refused to apologize.
02:37: He was like, I'm not gonna apologize for that. And they decided they were gonna put enough pressure on him to make him apologize, which is exactly what ended up happening.
02:45: I think that's why they did it. I think what it is is they wanna so force their view on everybody and want everyone to affirm their view that they couldn't handle someone like,
02:56: I think, Kevin Hart, I believe is his name, they couldn't handle someone saying they're not going to apologize.
03:01: Because if people start doing that, people start saying they're not gonna apologize, especially for things they said years ago, then, boy, they're gonna have some troubles because they expect everyone to honor their demands.
03:14: But that's with that. So we wanna talk MacArthur. And before we do, it would be a good time to remind folks that we are, well, listener -supported, for the most part.
03:25: And we need your support. As we come to the end of the year, if you are getting any value from this ministry, from these podcasts, well, if you're finding value in it, would you mind helping us and showing that value?
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03:53: We have a lot we would like to do with the Christian Podcast community, and we need your help to do that.
03:59: So the thing is, John MacArthur was given an opportunity to go onto a secular program and talk about morality, social justice, stuff like that.
04:12: Now, we recently had people, well, actually, you've always had people who go on Larry King or things like that.
04:20: And I always think of one thing that Larry King had said to John MacArthur was that when he has
04:28: Joel Stein or these other guys come on, he knows that they're giving the answer that they want to be heard by people that disagree with him.
04:38: And one of the things Larry King always appreciated about John MacArthur is he told you what he thought. He told you what he believed.
04:44: You always knew where he stood. In fact, when he was on Ben Shapiro's, he said this is how he described his calling, what his purpose is as far as whether he should be involved in politics or not.
04:57: This is what MacArthur said. My calling, my mandate, the command from heaven to me is to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.
05:05: Okay, this is clear. John MacArthur knows what his role is. He's not a politician.
05:12: He's not there to create social justice. He is here to, his mandate, as he says, is preach the
05:20: Bible. And this was later in the interview, but I think it's very fitting to put in is the fact that he had a very clear objective of whether he might offend people, whether he's concerned about offending people.
05:32: And this is, I wanna put this out early because this is a call to anybody that is a
05:37: Christian, that professes to be a Christian and gets a platform where they can go and speak to unbelievers, okay?
05:45: This is what John MacArthur said, whether he's worried about offending people. We had a question on the little questionnaire that your people sent me.
05:53: It said, do you feel like you might be offending Democrats with some of the things you say? And my response to that is, look, my goal is to offend everyone.
06:03: That is my initial goal to tell you that you are without God in the world, that there's only one
06:09: Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you're in sin, that sin brings death and punishment.
06:14: But the good news is Jesus Christ is the Savior who's provided a way for you to be forgiven by bearing your sins in his body on the tree so that God's justice is satisfied and his love can be extended to you by putting your trust in Christ.
06:28: Now, you know, I love that. He says, he's a Christian, he's aware he's going to offend people. He plans on it.
06:34: Why? Not that notice, not that he himself in his person, in his character, in the way he conducts himself and his behavior, not that he will offend people for that reason.
06:46: He knows that the gospel will be offensive to the unbeliever and he plans to be offensive in that way.
06:53: This is the thing. So many Christians get a platform and when given that platform on secular areas, they back down from an opportunity to share the gospel.
07:05: This is someone speaking to an Orthodox Jew on his program and does not back away from sharing the gospel message.
07:12: It was beautiful. Actually, I encourage you, we'll have the link for the full interview on there.
07:18: I mean, just gospel throughout. I mean, that was the thing. Someone asked me what I thought of this interview and I said, wow, the gospel, it was great because that's really the thing.
07:28: He took the opportunity to share the gospel to those in Ben Shapiro's audience, but as we're gonna get to later, he took the opportunity to share the gospel specifically with Ben Shapiro, something
07:42: I would like to do. I'd love to have the opportunity to sit down with him and go through Isaiah 53, that he disagrees with John MacArthur's take on that, and obviously, but I'd love to work through it with him.
07:54: It doesn't have to be public, but he needs to understand that he needs Christ. And so here's the thing, they're talking politics.
08:01: They're talking about morality, justice, things like that. And John MacArthur provides three things that God has given us when it comes to discussing things of morality.
08:14: Let's listen to this. Evil is restrained. God has designed evil to be restrained three ways. Number one is conscience, and everybody has a mechanism.
08:21: It's a skylight that reacts, the Bible says, to accuse or excuse you. So you can tamper with conscience when you alter belief.
08:30: When you tamper with truth, or when you eliminate truth, the conscience is loss.
08:36: The second mechanism God put in society to govern and constrain is parents.
08:41: And the way to destroy that mechanism is just to tear the family to shreds, redefine it, abuse men, turn men into some kind of joke, dispossess them of all moral authority.
08:54: There's only one other mechanism God has put into place to restrain evil, and that is the government.
09:00: Now, this is on a political show. You'd expect him to talk about the government, but he starts off with the conscience.
09:06: He talks about how we can have a seared conscience, the problem we have in culture where they have destroyed their conscience by trying to deny the only source of absolute truth,
09:17: God's nature, and in doing so, that has gotten them to where now they don't have a properly informed conscience, and that's why wrong can be right.
09:26: He then talks about the parents, and we've seen this. He mentions about how the attack on the fathers, and you see this in the sitcoms.
09:33: I mean, years ago, when I was a child, it was Father Knows Best. That was a TV show.
09:38: For those who don't know, that was the name of the show. And the idea is that the father knows best, really simple.
09:45: Brady Bunch, all these different shows where what you have is the parents are an authority.
09:52: The parents know better than the children, but marketing's changed because there's more teenagers and young children watching
10:00: TV, not the adults, so to market to them, they wanna give them what they wanna hear, and so now what you end up seeing is, in sitcoms and things like that, the father is a complete knucklehead.
10:13: The mother is gonna be more dominant, and the intelligent one, the father is a doofus, and if the real people that are the authority, the real people that know everything are the children, and we end up seeing that, and it's been going on for a while.
10:31: We've seen the destruction of marriage, attacking marriage and divorce and all that for generations now.
10:38: And then last is the government, and he mentions the government. The government is a force that's to be used to curb evil, and I think that he did a great job of doing this, and I think what was good about this is,
10:50: Ben Shapiro wanted to talk about government because it's a political show, and yet what MacArthur wants to do is give a basis for the rest of these things of how we develop and know what's right from wrong.
11:04: We know right from wrong first off because it's a God -given conscience. That's the only way we can know right from wrong in the first place, but then
11:11: God gives us the family before government, and so I think that MacArthur did this in a specific order.
11:17: The individual has a God -given conscience. They also have their parents that are to instruct them, and they all are to follow the government that God established.
11:27: In other words, what you end up seeing is it's God. God's giving you the conscience. God's giving you the parents, and as parents, we have a stewardship of those children, and then
11:36: God has given us the government, but that government has a stewardship of how they address people. I think this was a great handling of this, and I think he did well, but there are some things that MacArthur said that were somewhat controversial, and even here when
11:52: Jim and I start talking about this, we're gonna have maybe some differences, differing views at least maybe, but MacArthur said some things just off -comment, and I should say that the reason we're doing this is because of the fact that I've gotten some feedback, some questions that people wanted answered.
12:10: There's gonna be some specific things that people wanted me to answer, and therefore, we decided we'd do this as a podcast.
12:19: So MacArthur said this, and this is, I kind of agree with MacArthur for the most part on this, but he made these comments.
12:27: I am not to be a revolutionary. We don't start riots. That's not a Christian thing to do. We don't even start revolutions, and you could argue about the
12:35: American Revolution, whether that was actually legitimately a Christian act or not. Christians don't attack the government.
12:42: We don't protest. We don't riot. We don't start shooting people who are in the government, even if the government is
12:48: King George from England, and we don't like him, and even if we're upset with taxation, we don't start riots, and we don't start revolutions.
12:56: We live quiet, according to the New Testament, peaceable lives. We pray for those that are over us.
13:03: We pray for rulers. We pray for all those who are in authority, and we pray that they might come to know
13:08: God through the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. So we pray regularly for our rulers.
13:14: We do not overthrow them, and that is how a Christian, a real biblical Christian, would look at the
13:19: American Revolution. I mean, I hate to say that because that's not a popular idea, but it is nonetheless what the
13:25: Scripture says Christians are to do. Submit, pray, pray for the salvation of your leaders, live a quiet and peaceable life, and let the character of your life, the godliness, the virtue of your life affect that society one soul at a time.
13:41: Now, one soul at a time, and this is the thing that you end up seeing here, is this shows you Dr. MacArthur has a proper view, and that view is that foundation is based on good theology.
13:54: You have to have a good foundation to be able to build on something like this. That is a good reason you should consider, if you don't have a good, firm foundation, if you're starting out, maybe you're a new believer, or you are someone who is starting to realize that I need to understand a good foundation like John MacArthur laid out there, then let me encourage you to consider getting the book,
14:17: What Do We Believe? What Do We Believe? is a systematic theology of the Christian faith. I have written that, and you can get it at whatdowebelievebook .com.
14:26: It will give you that foundation because what you see here with John MacArthur is he has a foundation that is going to inform the way he applies scripture and theology to his life.
14:39: This is the Christian view. The Christian view is not to be going against government. In fact,
14:45: Romans 13 would tell us we are to submit to a government, even a tyrannical government, even a government like Rome, we are to submit to them.
14:56: Now, this brings up the question, was the Revolutionary War a just war?
15:02: Were those that were Christians, would they be in the right for being part of that? Now, Pastor Jim Osmond and I are gonna disagree on this a bit, but before we get to it, the thing you have to first see is this is the view that a
15:17: Christian should have, that we are to put Christ first before our rights, that we are to be citizens of heaven, not citizens of earth.
15:26: If this is Philippians 3, 20 and 21, you'll see there that actually the contrast, if you look at verses 17 to 21, you end up seeing the contrast there of those who are earthly -minded versus us
15:40: Christians who are citizens of heaven, and that's where our focus should be. We should be, well, striving for eternity.
15:47: That's the concept there. That's the meaning of the name of our ministry, striving for eternity, that we are striving for that which is eternal, not fixed and focused on the things here on earth.
15:58: This is also, by the way, as a side note, why I think the homosexual groups go after Christians, because they know that we do not rebel and attack and riot, and we are concerned about the gospel, and they knew that.
16:13: They knew that, and that's why they go after us, so they could say that we're making them victims, that we're attacking them, and that way they could play the victim card, but the reality is they know we're not going to come after them, because that's not what
16:26: Christians do. Christians are concerned about the gospel, the gospel message, so there is some disagreeing views on the
16:34: Revolutionary War. I tend to think that, I don't think that it was, I tend to agree with John MacArthur on this one.
16:41: I think that, for the most part, there were people rebelling against the
16:47: British government, and therefore, the Revolutionary War wouldn't have been just in my mind.
16:53: Jim, you disagree, a little bit, not completely, but what's your views on the Revolutionary War? I can say that I would agree with much of what
17:02: MacArthur said there, and you and I are going to have more agreement than disagreement on this. Probably 95 % of where we're at, we're going to be in agreement.
17:10: But that 5 % is where you're wrong, right? Well, yeah, we're where we can discuss, maybe, and I can convince you, so I would preface this by saying that I'm neither an
17:21: American Revolutionary historian or scholar. I have been curious, myself, over the years, how did the men who started the
17:29: American Revolution, how did they justify the action? Because they were descendants of the Puritans, they had
17:35: Romans 13 in their Bibles as well, and many of them quoted Scripture as a justification for the actions that they took.
17:43: So where I would agree with everything that MacArthur said in that clip, and everything you just said, I would agree that, as Christians, we should not be attacking the government.
17:51: I agree that we should not be revolting. We should be living in submission, demonstrating a peaceable and Christlike character in our handling of disagreements and in our pursuit of justice, and I don't use that in a social justice sense, but I mean in our pursuit of a just and orderly society, which is what our goal is.
18:09: I agree that we should be praying for our leaders and living in submission to them. The argument,
18:15: I think, with the American Revolution is, from their perspective, I think it was the actions of great
18:22: Britain, the actions of a legitimate authority, because the claim of the revolutionaries, and I just say this, and I'm using this broadly, because that's a big group that included a lot of disparate factions, obviously, as it would in any group of people, but their claim was that what
18:38: Britain was doing was actually unlawful and illegal, which is why they pursued a redress of the grievances on multiple occasions that they mentioned in the
18:47: Declaration of Independence. They viewed King George's actions toward them as the unlawful and illegitimate actions of an illegitimate authority over their colonies.
18:56: They viewed themselves as British subjects, which is why I think it's something like two -thirds of the people who lived in the 13 colonies were opposed to going to war with Great Britain because they viewed themselves as loyal British subjects.
19:07: John Adams defended the Boston Massacre, the Redcoats who did that, and they viewed themselves as loyal British subjects, but loyal British subjects who were being improperly represented and oppressed and attacked by Britain.
19:21: So there came a point where Britain went from being the king to whom they were loyal to being an invading force that threatened their life and property.
19:30: So if you're in a situation where the government comes in and says, okay, as the legitimate
19:35: God -ordained authority, we are going to make it illegal for you to preach the gospel, we would have to quietly, humbly, graciously disagree with that and preach the gospel anyway and suffer the consequences.
19:48: Submitting to that authority and recognizing that they're gonna come and try and make us do something or not do something against our conscience and we're just not gonna do it, we ought not to take up arms.
19:58: But if my local sheriff and three of his deputies came and without a warrant, without any legal jurisdiction, without proper authority, came and decided that they were going to kill my children and steal my property, they're no longer a legitimate authority.
20:11: They may have a position of authority by the fact that they hold that position, that badge, but they're doing something illegal and immoral and threatening the lives and property of my family.
20:21: I believe in that situation, I have a moral responsibility to protect them. And that's what the Revolutionary War came down to.
20:28: At least I can, at least that's the argument that I have seen and read from the Christians who really struggled with Romans 13 at the time of the founding.
20:36: That's kind of my perspective. I guess the thing I'm thinking is, when I look at, in the first century, they're being fed to lions,
20:43: I don't see Christians making an argument for going after Rome or attacking
20:51: Rome, it was submitting to Rome even if it meant the end of their life. And you and I, maybe it would be good to pick this up as an episode because I think there would be a lot of differing views and maybe you and I are not historians, revolutionary historians, but it might be good to do some digging in on this and really have an answer.
21:13: But some people did have issue with MacArthur mentioning that. As he said, it is somewhat controversial. And he then went on, basically, you can't have, for if you're
21:24: Ben Shapiro, you can't have someone like MacArthur on who is known for his Bible teaching and not ask the question of why take the
21:31: Bible seriously. He has a secular audience. It's something that has to be addressed. And this is what
21:38: John MacArthur answered with this question. Of why there has to be a God. Why should they take any of this seriously and not just think, okay, it's a compilation of various texts by various old people over time.
21:48: Why should they take the Bible seriously in the first place? Well, I think the Bible is its own defense. I've never defended the
21:54: Bible, I've just preached it. And that is a great presuppositional argument right there. He does not need to defend the
22:01: Bible, just preach it. Just open it up and it doesn't need a defense. There's a subtle trick there that Ben Shapiro is playing.
22:10: He's asking MacArthur to justify the teaching of Scripture in light of modern moral standards, psychology, psychiatry, the human enlightenment or the enlightenment movement or rationality or logic or something else like that.
22:24: He's actually in the very question, the premise of the question is, justify Scripture's teaching in light of these other things which are greater authorities than Scripture.
22:32: And MacArthur just reverses the premise without even Shapiro as brilliant as he is recognizing what has happened.
22:38: MacArthur just reversed the premise. He doesn't need to defend it or explain it in terms of any of those other things because it's revelation.
22:45: Yeah, and this is one of the things that you see with MacArthur. He doesn't back down from stuff.
22:52: He's making it really, really clear. He is focused on the truth of Scripture.
23:00: He doesn't wanna get sidetracked. And folks, if you ever get an opportunity to get a platform on a secular, this is what you do.
23:07: I mean, I'll go, I will go anywhere and I'll preach in the Vatican if they let me as long as they don't restrict what
23:14: I say. I may only get there, be there once, but hey. But that's the thing.
23:20: And I like what he says. This is a good presuppositional argument. This is not, hey, how do you answer this?
23:26: How do you deal with the fact that to take the Bible seriously God exists, how do you explain all these things?
23:32: I don't, this is, the Bible doesn't need defense. It's God's word. That gives it the authority right there.
23:39: It's God's word. Now, another one that came up and it's gotta come up because this is the argument that the unbelievers make all the time is the issue of slavery.
23:48: And I wanna play this because it's a longer clip but I think MacArthur does a pretty good job of explaining some of this issue.
23:56: So let's take slavery. This is the example that's very often used that the Bible is okay with slavery. There are particular sections in the
24:01: Old Testament that specifically talk about, for example, taking female captives and then shaving their heads and then marrying them, forcing them into marriage.
24:11: How do we square this with the basic sense of Western morality now, which is that slavery is a terrible evil.
24:18: How could the Bible not, why didn't the Bible just abolish slavery 3 ,000 years ago? Well, first of all, the Bible would never condone taking women as slaves, shaving their heads and turning them into some kind of abject slavery.
24:30: That would never be advocated. The Old Testament elevates women, obviously. So does the
24:35: New Testament. But let's talk about slavery. The Bible never condones mistreating anyone, not even an animal.
24:41: The Bible never condones mistreating anyone. I wanna make that very clear. Bible calls for love and kindness and support and encouragement and protection and provision.
24:50: One of the social constructs in which that occurred in the purposes of God was a form of slavery.
24:58: And the fact that slavery and being a servant were so close, this shows in the word ebed, which could mean both, which is to say that the only difference between being a servant who showed up in the morning at nine o 'clock and left at six and being a slave was you lived, you had been purchased.
25:15: What that meant was you had food, you had family, you had protection, you had provision.
25:22: This was for many people, the most secure kind of employment they could have ever hoped for with a good master.
25:30: And this gets into a little bit of the issue of slavery. And I do plan to have a full episode dealing with the issue of slavery because this comes up all the time, just as Ben Shapiro said, you gotta bring this up with him, with MacArthur, because it does come up all the time.
25:46: And yet there are good, easy answers. Our friend over at the Freedthinker, Tyler, Tyler Villa has a series,
25:53: I think it's a three -part series on his podcast about slavery, excellent work that he did.
25:58: But here's the thing people don't understand. Old Testament law required a half day's wage for slaves.
26:05: Wait a minute, slaves aren't supposed to get paid anything, that's right. This was not the slavery that people think of.
26:12: When people hear slavery, they think of what happened to the Africans being kidnapped and brought to England, to America, to other places, and they had no rights, they were considered property.
26:26: This was different than Old Testament slavery. Old Testament slavery was more of an economic system of employment where the owner had responsibilities to provide for the slave everything that he needed, healthcare, food, housing, everything, and he got a wage.
26:46: The reality is most of it when people got in that position was because they couldn't basically take care of themselves.
26:51: They would get themselves in a position where they needed to have someone care for them, and that's what this system was set up for.
26:58: And it is not the slavery. In fact, Leviticus, I think it's Exodus, sorry, condemns the kidnapping of a person, period.
27:07: So that wouldn't be the case. People say, well, here you have a case where people are seen as property because the
27:17: Israelites would come into a land, they would wipe out all the men and take the women as slaves.
27:23: Well, that was taking them and providing for their livelihood because they, in that culture, had no other means of taking care of themselves.
27:33: They would've basically starved to death, and so it was actually an act of grace for the
27:39: Israelites to bring them in and employ them, and they had a responsibility to care for them.
27:45: It is a very different type of slavery than the slavery we think of in the Americas and Europe and things like that, okay?
27:53: So the better model, if you wanna look at the biblical view of slavery, would be Japan in the 80s, where people would work for a company, the company bought all their clothes, paid for their house, paid for their car.
28:06: Basically, the people didn't own anything. Everything was owned by the company. Wherefore, you wanna make sure that company does well because the better the company does, the better you do.
28:16: That was the model they had, and therefore, the employer had a responsibility. Kids go to college, employer pays for it.
28:24: Everything was paid by the employer. They had that responsibility. That is the model that we see in the
28:30: Old Testament, and the real proof is when you see someone that has property, cattle, something like that, they're to return them.
28:40: That's not the case with a runaway slave, okay? So there's a difference here. They're not treated and explained in the same level as you would with property.
28:50: So that's some of the things that we have to deal with, but this is where we get into the controversial things that came up, and I wanna deal with two of them.
29:01: Now, one of them upset folks that are Christians that are covenant theologians.
29:07: Now, John MacArthur's gonna say some things. I think we need to, as we listen, let's put this into context, okay?
29:14: The fact of the matter is, remember that John MacArthur is speaking to a
29:21: Orthodox Jewish man, okay? He is very much aware of that as he's speaking to Ben Shapiro.
29:29: He's bringing things up that are more of a Christian disagreement. I think that in the context, he's trying to explain things that, to the person he's directly speaking to, and yet,
29:42: I think there's others who have taken this maybe in a wrong way, and yet, at the same time,
29:48: I think there's some things that could, where I might disagree with him a bit. So he talks about the relationship between Israel and the church, and the way to interpret the
29:59: Old and New Testaments. So let's, I'm gonna play this first clip and interact with that. That is the purpose and plan of God.
30:06: There is a Christian kind of popular doctrine that I reject with all my heart, and that is that the church has replaced
30:12: Israel in the promises of God. It's called supersessionism. I don't believe in that. I think that, honestly, hate to say this, but I honestly think it is a latent form of anti -Semitism to say that.
30:23: You can't tell me that God made promises in the Old Testament to his people,
30:29: Israel, concerning his future kingdom and salvation, and that he would give them a heart, a new heart and a new spirit, and he would write his laws in their heart, and they would be saved, and he would be their king, and they would be his people, and all those kingdom prophecies.
30:42: You can't possibly tell me that God didn't mean what he said. Now, this is where some podcasts,
30:48: I've listened to a couple who have criticized because they're reformed. One would be our friends over at Theology Gals.
30:54: They obviously took concern with what he said here. I think there, what you ended up seeing,
30:59: Colleen Sharp from Theology Gals is from a Jewish descent, and her father was an
31:06: Orthodox Jew that converted to Christ, and to make the claim that it's anti -Semitism, well, yeah, some people are gonna take that personally, her even more so being from a
31:16: Jewish background, but here's the thing. Jim, you and I talked about this before we recorded live.
31:23: There may be a way of explaining this as far as the latent anti -Semitism. I do not believe that covenant theology is anti -Semitic.
31:32: I don't believe that believing in covenant theology automatically makes you against Jews.
31:39: I do think that MacArthur may have gone, and let me bring folks up to speed with what he's talking about.
31:45: This is what's sometimes referred to as replacement theology, that the church replaced Israel. The thing is there is some disagreement within Christianity of the continuity and discontinuity between Israel and the church.
31:59: The truth, I think, is somewhere in the middle, that you have continuity and some discontinuity.
32:06: Yeah, I would agree with it. When MacArthur says a latent form of anti -Semitism, he's not suggesting that covenant theologians are rabidly anti -Semitic like the alt -right or like Nazi Germany.
32:20: He's not talking about that type of anti -Semitism. He is talking about, he talks about a latent, and he's talking about they're a very subtle form of opposition to or belief that God has done with the
32:31: Jews. It is a form of anti -Semitism in the sense that it is against the idea that God has any kind of plan for national
32:40: Israel. I don't believe that MacArthur believed that R .C. Sproul was an anti -Semite. If you asked him, was your buddy R .C.
32:45: Sproul an anti -Semite, MacArthur would never have said that. But that theology has been used to justify anti -Semitism in the past, and it is a form of rejecting the
32:56: Jewish people as unique and distinct in the plan of God. Not every form of anti -Semitism is equal to every other form of anti -Semitism.
33:04: So, you know, taking what he said as far as he said it, I don't know that I can disagree with it. If he had suggested that amillennialism and postmillennialism and supersession theology and replacement theology are equal in moral weight to the
33:20: Nazi Germany or the anti -Semitism of the alt -right, then of course we would disagree with that and rightly so, but that's not what
33:26: MacArthur was saying. Yeah, and I think the issue that I have is people who just take this comment, ignoring the fact that the audience he's speaking with, the fact that, and you know, he does, he makes it clear he strongly disagrees with this, but I don't know that it is, let's put it this way.
33:48: I believe that over at Theology Gals, one of the arguments they made is a very good and fair argument that sometimes people are responding overtly to their position and mischaracterizing someone else's position.
34:01: I think that John MacArthur may have done that a little bit here in overstepping.
34:07: Now, I think that he's absolutely right at the end when he said, because this is a big reason why
34:12: I would be a dispensationalist, when you look at the promises that God made to Israel, literal land promises, it was always explained that the land was laid out, they knew exactly where the area was, it's always been accepted that it was literal.
34:28: To suddenly say that that's a figurative or spiritual promise in its fulfillment, even though it was given as a literal, when you start doing that, where God makes a promise and it's said this way, and then to fit a theological system or to view it this way and say, well, it wasn't really literal, it was really figurative or spiritual, then you have to wonder that with all the promises.
34:52: Can you really trust any of the promises that we were told in a literal way that God is going to prepare a place for us, that Jesus is gonna prepare a place for us in heaven?
35:02: Can we really trust that he's gonna do that or is this just a spiritual place and it's not really a place and we're not really gonna be there?
35:07: So you end up having to question all the promises. I believe that God then is not faithful if he makes promises and then changes, leads you to believe that that promise is one thing, but he actually has a different thing in mind.
35:21: I think that to do that would be unfaithful because he's the one that is explaining this is how
35:28: I'm gonna fulfill this promise. And if he says it one way with a plan to fulfill it another way, it becomes a deceptive thing.
35:36: Islam has a God who is deceptive, not the Bible. And so that's a big reason that I would have an issue with the idea that those promises that were promised to be literally fulfilled like a literal
35:49: King of David literally reigning as a king over the nation of Israel in a land and here's where the land is laid out, all those promises
35:59: I think would be literally fulfilled as they were made. And that's MacArthur's point that he ends up saying is
36:05: God can't say it one way and then change it, okay? Yeah, God's already demonstrated how he fulfills prophecy.
36:12: You look at all the other prophecies that he has fulfilled thus far, they're not spiritually fulfilled or metaphorically fulfilled or replaced by some other meaning.
36:19: God has already set the precedent of how we are to interpret prophecy by fulfilling all of these other prophecies in quite literal ways.
36:26: Yes, and not only does he fulfill them in quite literal ways, but I think he makes that point I believe in Romans 9 through 11 quite clear to say, hey,
36:36: God's gonna fulfill those promises to Israel because he's faithful. And he gets into how to interpret the
36:43: Old and New Testament. And here again, I think some covenant theologians and even some reformed
36:49: Baptists are gonna have problems. But I think MacArthur makes an excellent point.
36:54: And again, he's speaking to an Orthodox Jew who is an originally, Ben Shapiro's an attorney, he's a lawyer, he's an originalist when it comes to the law.
37:03: And MacArthur makes the point that where Ben Shapiro is a literalist with the law, MacArthur is a literalist or an originalist, sorry, with the
37:12: Bible. It's very popular in Christianity today to say the Old Testament is interpreted by the New Testament, that's not true.
37:18: Because if that's the case, then nobody in the Old Testament had any idea what was going on, right? Then you've got it, that's not revelation, that's obfuscation, well, that's just a pile of riddles.
37:29: Other people say, well, you have to superimpose Christ, a Christological hermeneutic over every part of the
37:35: Old Testament, that's not true either. There's authorial intent. Okay, and what it means by authorial intent means that when these authors wrote this, it had an understanding at the time it was written and that understanding is the purpose of why it was written.
37:48: That's how we interpret, is we look at the authorial intent. What did the author mean by what he wrote to the audience who he wrote it to?
37:55: We don't say that God writes and it takes thousands of years before anyone understands the meaning of it.
38:01: I don't think that's the way to interpret. Now, I understand some folks disagree. And in fact, let me invite you to come in and discuss some of these disagreements.
38:10: We have folks, friends of ours over at Theology Driven. We love those guys, great podcast.
38:15: I encourage you, if you're gonna be anywhere in the D .C. area the first weekend in January, January 5th and 6th, we are gonna be getting together.
38:25: Theology Driven is gonna drive out to the Museum of the Bible. Striving Fraternity rap report will be there and some others may show up.
38:33: We are gonna be, basically we're gonna do a tour through the Museum of the Bible and on that Saturday.
38:40: And you're more than welcome to join us and let us know if you want to attend, you can contact us at strivingfraternity .org.
38:48: We're probably gonna be doing some podcasting from there. I'm gonna be setting up a nice tour for us.
38:54: And so the reality of what we wanna do is we wanna discuss and here's
38:59: Christians who disagree on things like this. And yet we can, even amongst our disagreements, we can get along.
39:05: So that's gonna be January 5th that we're gonna go down there. So the 4th and 5th actually. But the 5th is when we're gonna go through the
39:12: Museum of the Bible. If you wanna check out the Museum of the Bible, great. If you wanna meet some of the people you listen to on podcasts, great.
39:19: If you're a podcaster and wanna join us, hey, you can do that too. We're gonna actually start to create a annual podcasting event.
39:28: If you're a podcaster, we're gonna do it at places like the Museum of the Bible where we're actually gonna have some talks about how to improve podcasts, things like that.
39:37: Some of the stuff that we're gonna do as part of the Christian podcast community. And what I'm saying that to say is we can disagree.
39:44: We have a differing view on what John MacArthur just said about the way to interpret the Old and New Testament with theology gals, we get along great with them.
39:53: With guys over at Theology Driven, but we get along great with them. Because this is not an essential doctrine.
39:59: This is a difference that we have on how we go about interpreting scripture. But it does not affect salvation, the fundamental things of the faith, that Jesus is
40:09: God, that he rose from the dead, that were saved by faith alone. Those are the essentials that we are going to agree on.
40:18: And we can disagree on some of these other things, and it sharpens us as we disagree. But I do think this is an essential thing that people have to understand.
40:26: I think a lot of people get into trouble when they start changing the way they interpret the Old Testament because of what they read, what they think they read in their
40:34: New Testament. And why do I say think? I think what you end up seeing is sometimes people get their theological systems in order, and therefore they start saying, well, how do we understand this in the
40:44: Old Testament then with understanding what we think is being said in the New Testament? And then what you have happen is that you're saying the
40:51: New Testament interprets the Old Testament. I think that we have to interpret the Old Testament in its cultural historical context as we see the authors intended to their audience, understand that meaning, and then bring it into a
41:04: New Testament understanding to say, well, what is it we should be understanding? That is how we do hermeneutics, rightly.
41:11: And I agree with MacArthur on that. Now, I understand that there's some folks who say, well, this is a problem because you have to understand it in the light of all the covenants and covenant theology and the systematic theology, but your understanding of hermeneutics should inform your theology, not your theology inform your hermeneutics.
41:29: And that becomes the difference. Look, systematic theologies are great. People do a great job with it.
41:35: They're going to be good systems. Folks do not ever think that, gee, this systematic theology, this system has everything answered and worked out, and therefore it must be right because every theological system does that.
41:52: And all of them ignore the parts where they don't. I mean, there's some that'll be honest and say, okay, this is a weakness in our view.
41:58: This is a weakness in that view. But the reality is all systems work out the kinks in those things.
42:03: Jehovah's Witnesses work out all the kinks so that they have answers for things. Mormons do the same thing.
42:09: They all have a system that tries to answer the issues. They may jump through hoops to do so, but they all have answers.
42:15: So do not reject a system because you think that the system you're agreeing in has everything figured out because they all figure it out.
42:23: It's just sometimes they jump through hoops to do that. Now, we need to get into the issue. 45 minutes into the podcast, get into the issue of why we're doing this.
42:30: I wanted to do this episode because several people contacted me. They contacted me because of this next thing that really kind of started some folks raising some questions with what
42:40: John MacArthur says. John MacArthur is gonna say some things about Christians and Jews that brings up issues that people have.
42:48: There are differences and there are some similarities between Judaism and Christianity, where those differences are, where those similarities are.
42:56: That's the issue. If you really don't know a lot about Judaism, maybe there's some people who are arguing this and they don't really understand.
43:03: So before I play the clips from MacArthur, I wanna give some preface so you understand. And a good thing you could do if you wanna understand these issues is get my book,
43:11: What Do They Believe at whatdotheybelieve .com. Why? Because I'm gonna give you a systematic theology of Judaism.
43:17: I'm also gonna give you one of Christianity at the end. So it's the first and last chapter of that book. But you need to understand some things of Judaism.
43:24: Now, let me give you some things that are not in the book that are more historical in nature, less of a systematic theology, because this will help you to understand maybe some of what
43:35: John MacArthur said that so many are taking issue with. And that is this, we talk about Judaism, we need to talk about Judaism in three stages.
43:44: You have Old Testament Judaism. Old Testament Judaism is what we read in the Old Testament Bible, the
43:51: Jewish faith, the way that God had ordained it to be that led to what we know as Christianity.
43:58: Now, that was, I think, maybe what MacArthur is speaking of somewhat, but there's also
44:04: Second Temple Judaism. Now, for those who remember their scriptures, you know that Israel wanted to be like the other nations.
44:13: In doing so, they wanted to have the idols, they wanted a king, they wanted to be like the nations around them.
44:18: They ignored the commands of God, keeping a jubilee year where they let the land rest.
44:24: And for 70 of those jubilees, they ignored that, and God brought a judgment on them.
44:29: God said because of that, because of their idolatry, because of their desire to be like the other nations, because of the fact that they're ignoring the law,
44:38: God was going to take them into captivity. God was gonna put them into a 70 year captivity for the 70
44:45: Sabbath rests of the land that they ignored. And so in doing so, this was a judgment.
44:52: And God said that in this time, God would curb them of their idolatry, that they would not have issues with idolatry ever again.
45:01: And historically that has happened. But what did happen? During that captivity, they went away and they started to build up the synagogues because they had no temple during this time.
45:11: It was sacked by the Babylonians and all the elements were carried off. And so there was no temple at that time.
45:19: And they got into what is really where you see the starts of the Pharisees and you have a synagogue system set up.
45:28: Now that being done, you have this being set up. You then have the Jewish people return to Israel.
45:34: They build the second temple. It ends up being the Herodian temple. He ends up adding to it and making it much nicer, but it is the second temple.
45:42: Second temple Judaism is really based around this legalism with the Pharisees and the
45:48: Sadducees. And it becomes a legalistic one where they have all these rules that they must follow.
45:54: And now they've replaced the Old Testament Judaism with a workspace Judaism that is the second temple
45:59: Judaism. Now, what is their view of God? Well, we don't know so much because just before Christ and mostly after Christ is where we have the writings of the
46:10: Talmud, the commentary on the oral law where they have all these rules that they were following.
46:15: Well, the thing is, is that that was a redacted work. So you only really have the older stuff that's left.
46:23: And much of that was in response to Christianity. And this would be a third stage that we'll call rabbinic
46:30: Judaism or modern Judaism, where they have a very different view of God that he's strictly monotheistic and that he is not
46:37: Trinity. Did the second temple Judaism or Old Testament Judaism believe that? Well, it's hard to know because we don't have ancient documents old enough that give us that kind of detail.
46:49: And so we're gonna see three stages. Why do I bring all this up? I bring this up, well, basically, I think the reason
46:54: I have been asked so many times to respond to this is MacArthur is gonna make a comment that Jews and Christians worship the same
47:00: God. I guess I'm the token Jewish person that everyone feels, well, someone mentioned something about Judaism.
47:06: So Andrew, what is it? What's the answer? So I'm your token Jew to answer for you, I guess.
47:12: So let's start with this. There is a great thing that MacArthur first says, he's asked the question of the differences between Judaism and Christianity.
47:20: And I think he lays out a really good argument here just right off the bat. But before we get to that,
47:26: Jim, is there anything that you wanna bring up before we get to these clips? No, you misspoke here a few minutes ago where you said that Jews are strictly monotheistic and not
47:36: Trinitarian. I don't think you intended to say that, but just it should be clear to our audience that there is no conflict between monotheism and Trinitarianism because Trinitarianism is monotheism.
47:46: You probably would have been better to say, and I'm sure I know this is what you mean, a strictly Unitarian view of God instead of a
47:53: Trinitarian view of God. Yeah, that's a very good point, thank you. And sometimes when we speak a lot, as you know, as a pastor, it comes out not the way we intended, but it's the idea of one person versus three persons in the
48:05: Godhead. And that's a key distinction because that's gonna come down to how is
48:12: Ben Shapiro and John MacArthur looking at this being of God? Ben Shapiro is saying Christ cannot be
48:17: God because God is of Unitarian nature, one person, a
48:22: Unitarian personhood. And MacArthur is gonna argue that Christ is God, he is divine because God is of Trinitarian nature and not a
48:30: Unitarian in terms of his personhood. And it is an important distinction because of the fact when we talk with drove witnesses, we talk with Mormons, we talk with Muslims, and they try to argue that we believe in multiple gods.
48:43: No, we don't, we believe in one God. Even if you speak with Jewish people, Ben Shapiro would probably disagree with MacArthur on this issue saying, no, you believe in multiple gods.
48:52: No, one God, three persons. We are monotheistic, but we believe in one
48:59: God in three persons where Ben Shapiro would believe in one God in one person. So it's, we both agree in one being, one
49:07: Godhead. We disagree on the number of persons that make that up. All right, so let's hear the initial question and how
49:14: MacArthur dealt with it. And what do you think is the key distinguishing factor between the philosophy of Christianity and the philosophy of Judaism?
49:21: Well, first of all, I don't like to talk about it as a philosophy. I'd rather talk about it as a revelation because it's divine.
49:28: Now, this again is a presuppositional argument. Notice, he doesn't back down, immediately, and this is the thing
49:34: I love about John MacArthur is he gets on these programs and he doesn't back away from the soft peddling of, oh, it's just a philosophy.
49:43: No, it's not, it's divine. It's given by God. Therefore, it has an authority. Notice, he's not trying to argue that.
49:51: I find it very interesting in some of the rabbinical works that I study, I'm teaching in a Bible study through the book of Genesis, and one of the rabbis was arguing that the book of Genesis never tries to give an argument for God or explaining what
50:05: God did. It takes it for granted. That's what MacArthur is doing here, takes it for granted because the
50:12: Bible speaks and it speaks from an authority. Why?
50:17: Because its author is the creator of the universe. Therefore, it has an inherent authority.
50:23: You do not need to defend the Bible. You do not need to talk about Christianity as a philosophy.
50:32: No, it's divine, done. What are the two presuppositions that I hold to? I hold the two presuppositions that I will not back away from.
50:39: God exists, he has spoken, there you go. And that's what you see from MacArthur. This one is
50:44: God exists. The other one that we saw earlier, he has spoken. But here's the comment that got a lot of people kind of saying that MacArthur was wrong because they think that Judaism and Christianity have two different gods.
50:58: This is what John had said. When you asked me to show the variation between Judaism and Christianity, morally, no, there's none.
51:05: And in terms of God, the same. Okay, morally, notice morally, there's none.
51:11: That's an important distinction. He's saying morally, there's none. And that would be the case. When we look at the morals, we both would go to the same
51:19: Old Testament, the same Bible, the same God, because we would both see that our morality is in the nature of who
51:28: God is. That's where we get morality from, is from the nature of God. Therefore, we both would go to the nature of God as that sense of morality.
51:36: But let's listen to the rest of what he said. The same, we don't have the same God as Muslims. Allah is not the same
51:42: God as Jehovah. We don't have the same gods as any other false religion, but we have the same
51:47: God as Jews and Christians. He is the one true creator God, the one true living
51:53: God. He has a seity. That is, he is eternal by his own nature. He is uncreated, the uncreated one.
51:59: We believe he is more than one person in one God. That's why
52:04: Genesis says, let us make man in our own image. And relationship comes from a God who has relationship within himself.
52:10: But the distinction between Christianity and Judaism is what we do with Jesus Christ. Okay, so here's the thing to notice.
52:17: And if you listen to the full interview, he went through Isaiah 53. He was making it very clear that he was trying to reach
52:25: Ben Shapiro with the gospel. You hear it in this clip. Now, in Old Testament Judaism, do
52:30: Christians and Jewish people, Old Testament Jews, have the same God? Yes, okay.
52:36: And here's what MacArthur says about who wrote the Bible with regards to that. The same God who wrote the
52:41: Old Testament wrote the New Testament. And that would be true. The Old and New Testaments were written by the same
52:47: God. The issue is now in modern Judaism, with modern Judaism, are those people worshiping the same
52:54: God? Well, MacArthur's saying that the God that they worship might be the same, but the issue is what do you do with Jesus?
53:01: Here would be a way I explain this. Look at the Old Testament. Aaron takes all the gold. When Moses is up getting the commandments, he's up with God for 40 days.
53:11: Aaron is sitting there. He takes the gold. He creates a golden calf, and they worship it.
53:17: What are they doing? They're actually worshiping the right God in the wrong form. They declare that this golden calf is the
53:26: God that brought them out of Egypt. And they put upon this calf all of the character, nature of the true
53:34: God, except for the fact that they're worshiping him in the wrong way. That is similar to what we see in modern
53:40: Judaism. They might have the right view of God of the Old Testament view of God, but they worship him in the wrong way because they deny some of his nature.
53:50: They have a misunderstanding of it. He ends up saying this about whether Judaism and Christianity are compatible.
53:57: So I don't see Judaism and Christianity as antithetical. I see them as perfectly complementary so that what the prophets said the
54:05: Messiah would be, Jesus was. That fulfills it. The sacrificial system ends.
54:10: It's never been reinstituted again. The one sacrifice, the writer of Hebrews says, he perfected forever those that are sanctified by his one offering.
54:19: Okay, and so his one offering, that gets us into the question of, well, were Old Testament Jews saved the way we would think of it?
54:26: Well, John MacArthur answers that. I think the Jewish believers in the Old Testament were true believers in God and who did repent were waiting for that sacrifice, knowing that no animal sacrifice ever did it because they had to go back and make another one and another one and another one.
54:42: When is the one sacrifice going to come? Now, I find this amazing because here's what you have
54:48: John MacArthur doing. He's talking to an Orthodox Jew and he's basically telling him, you're not having any sacrifices anymore.
54:54: You have no means of atonement. But the one sacrifice came. He's pleading with him to share the gospel while teaching things.
55:03: But he's saying the Old Testament saints were saved. We would agree with that. And I think the issue that people have is, are we worshiping the same
55:11: God as modern Jews? There's going to be two ways. And I'm going to give a little bit of wiggle room on this.
55:18: And then I'm going to see what Pastor Jim thinks. I think that do Christians and Old Testament Jews worship the same
55:25: God? Yes. Do Christians and Second Temple Jews, Second Temple Judaism prior to Christ believe in the same
55:34: God? Maybe we don't have enough documentation to know if their view held to multiple persons in the
55:41: Godhead. And we also don't know whether it was just, maybe it wasn't clear enough for people to define it that way.
55:47: In modern Judaism, the difference we have is this, their view of the nature of God is lacking.
55:54: It doesn't mean that it is a wrong God. It's that they have a faulty view of him and they definitely have a wrong view and faulty view of how to get right with him.
56:03: Jim, you had some analogies of how you explain this. Yeah, their view of God is incomplete.
56:10: It's lacking certain information. And MacArthur, in the context of what he's trying to do, his overall point is, and you can't isolate his statement from the context, his overall point is that the
56:21: God revealed in the Old Testament is the very same God revealed in the New Testament. And the God who wrote the
56:27: Old Testament is the God who wrote the New Testament. And then MacArthur tries to make the point that that God, whom
56:33: Ben Shapiro is worshiping in ignorance, trying to worship in ignorance, according to a limited understanding, is revealed in his fullness in Jesus Christ.
56:42: That's the overarching goal of where he was going. And I don't know how anybody who knows their
56:47: Old and New Testament could possibly argue against that. So I would use this analogy. I've used this before when answering this very same question.
56:53: Imagine that you ran into somebody who attends our church, the church
56:58: I pastor, Kootenai Community Church. And you're in an airport or something, and they say, where do you go to church? You can find other
57:03: Christians. And the person says, you say, I go to church at Kootenai Community Church, pastored by Jim Osmond.
57:10: And the guy says, oh, I know Jim Osmond. He wrote that book, Truth or Territory. And you say, yeah, that's right.
57:16: And then they say, and he wrote Prosperity of the Wicked. Yeah, that's right. And Selling the Stairway to Heaven. Yeah, yeah, he lives in Sandpoint.
57:22: Yeah, same Jim Osmond, pastor of Kootenai Community Church. And you say, yeah, you go to church with he and his wife and his four kids.
57:29: And then the person says, well, hold on a second. Jim Osmond, that I'm thinking about, doesn't have four kids. He doesn't have any kids.
57:35: He doesn't have any children at all, just a wife. And you say, no, he's got four kids. I've met them, I've known them. I've had conversations with them.
57:41: You are actually talking about the same person, but it's the person that you ran into doesn't know that I have four kids.
57:46: They have a lot of things right about me. We're still talking about the same person, the author of those three books, the person who pastors
57:53: Kootenai Community Church, but he doesn't know, this person you run into doesn't know that I have two sons and two daughters.
57:59: And you would be right to say that we are talking about the same Jim Osmond because they are one and the same, but the person that you run into lacks some information about that is essential to who
58:08: I am. And you may even, to draw a real good analogy, you could say, well, he speaks of those four kids in the last chapter of his book about the author.
58:17: His four kids are named in the back of that book. And that person might say, well, I've never really read or accepted the about the author portion of the book.
58:23: I just have read all the other books and agree with that. See, there you would have two people talking about the same person, Jim Osmond, but you are, one person has an incomplete or a lacking understanding of the identity of that individual and some things that are true about it.
58:35: That's where Ben Shapiro is at. He is talking about, when he talks about God of the Old Testament, he is understanding certain things about that God.
58:43: As Christians, we are talking about the same God, but Ben Shapiro does not understand that this God has a son and that his name is
58:49: Christ and that he is a Trinitarian God. Morally speaking, they are the same God. Revelationally speaking, they are the same
58:55: God between Judaism and Christianity. But Ben Shapiro does, because he has not read the end of the book, what he calls the right -hand side of the book, the back end of the book, because he hasn't read that, he is lacking in understanding of some of that God's qualities and personhood.
59:10: When it's not that he hasn't read it, it's that he's not believing it. But I hate to disappoint you, Jim. You don't have four children.
59:17: You didn't realize that? No, but let's take your analogy a little further because we talked about this.
59:22: There could be another Jim Osmond who happened to write a book with the same title, right?
59:28: Yeah, yeah, could be. This is a case where, in that case, this other Jim Osmond, maybe he's
59:34: Jim Osmond, with a D, and you're Jim Osmond. But this other one, he doesn't have children.
59:40: Then you're speaking of two different Jim Osmond. Yeah, maybe the other Jim Osmond is good -looking and he's a black man and he voted for Hillary Clinton.
59:49: Now, that's not the way you explain this to me. I think when we explain this, I said that maybe he's black and you said, and not good -looking, as if you were the good -looking one.
59:57: But I noticed, when we're live, you change that around to, okay, I see. Well, I'm just trying to show a little false humility there.
01:00:04: Yeah, yeah, there you go. But no, but that's the point. Then you're talking qualitatively. Yeah, then you're talking qualitatively about two different people.
01:00:11: Correct, in your scenario, what we end up with is you're speaking of the same person, but one person's more informed than the other.
01:00:21: In the second scenario, it's two people that happen to have the same name, happen to have a lot of similarities, but you're fundamentally talking about two different people.
01:00:30: That's the difference we have here. I think MacArthur is trying to say that the God that we see in the
01:00:35: Old Testament, the God that the Jews worship, though flawed because they're not fully informed, and therefore, they're following a legalistic system, that is the issue.
01:00:47: One thing, Andrew, if I could bring this out. What MacArthur was trying to show Ben Shapiro is that to believe in Jesus Christ is not to change deities.
01:00:56: It's not to change gods, and that's essential for an Orthodox Jew to understand. You are not switching deities, like going from Yahweh to Allah, to simply acknowledge that God has revealed himself in the person of Christ and that Christ is divine.
01:01:09: You're embracing all that is revealed of the one true God instead of only part of what is revealed about the one true
01:01:15: God. You're not changing deities, and that's what MacArthur was getting to in explaining that to Shapiro.
01:01:21: He wants Shapiro to understand, I'm not asking you to embrace Christ. I'm not asking you to commit idolatry because we're not talking about a different God in that sense.
01:01:30: We're talking about different information about the same God that you do not accept and embrace because you are not coming to terms with who
01:01:39: Jesus Christ is and what he said concerning himself and what's revealed in scripture by the same God that you claim to worship.
01:01:45: And this is the thing that we need to think about when we see this, because you have to give the person who is speaking an ability to have the benefit of the doubt.
01:01:59: Give MacArthur the benefit of the doubt with this. Don't just look for, oh, we can point out how he's wrong.
01:02:04: As Christians, love believes all things. We should be believing the best of MacArthur and not trying to say he's some sort of heretic as some people have come to me with.
01:02:15: I'm saying this as your token Jew, I guess, all right? But here's the reality. MacArthur said this in the context of trying to witness to an
01:02:25: Orthodox Jewish person saying, look, Judaism is there, you believe this, well,
01:02:30: Christianity is the continuation of it. You need to correct some views so that you can follow the rest of the story.
01:02:36: That, I think, is important to do. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people are not doing, is they're so quick to, they're just so quick to go after people and be critical.
01:02:51: And not to now be critical of someone, but I do wanna draw a contrast. I mentioned this
01:02:58: Christian performer, artist, that went on to the, she went on Ellen DeGeneres' show, basically then asked about homosexuality.
01:03:08: Ellen DeGeneres is a practicing homosexual. This woman goes on the show, does a song that's, it's not overtly about Christ, but still, she is asked about homosexuality.
01:03:21: Now, this is where she's come up with a way that she answers to avoid having to actually answer. And her answer is, well, just read the
01:03:28: Bible and tell me what it says, because I don't really know. I have friends who are in this and I love them.
01:03:34: Well, it doesn't matter if you love them or not. I mean, if you love them, you should tell them the truth. Now, look at a difference there where someone once goes on to a show, is looking to get the promotion from it, to expand their platform from it, and they're saying they're a
01:03:48: Christian. Well, if you're gonna say you're a Christian, then you need to be about the business of what
01:03:53: Christ was about. Not your platform, not making money, but the gospel. And in light of that, this is how
01:04:00: MacArthur ended his interview, at least the free part of the interview, with Ben Shapiro.
01:04:06: And listen to how he makes this personal. He wants to, and we don't have the whole, I don't play the whole thing, but you'll hear how he does try to get the gospel to Ben Shapiro.
01:04:16: I wanna say this to you personally. You are a testimony to the glory of God in man.
01:04:23: I see the beauty of God's creation in you. I see the use of reason and compassion and care.
01:04:33: I see so many things in you. So I'm not denying that reflection of God in you, but I'm saying you either believe
01:04:43: Jesus is the savior or you don't, and that's the distinction. Apart from that, just this one conversation with you,
01:04:49: I could spend endless hours with you and be the far richer for it, but I would always be saying the same thing.
01:04:56: And he went on to say that same thing is basically the gospel, okay? The gospel, the gospel, the gospel.
01:05:02: The very thing that he went through the whole interview talking about. If you're gonna get a platform on a show or on whatever with unbelievers, and you're gonna say you're a
01:05:13: Christian, share the gospel, that's the issue. I don't have a problem with MacArthur going on Ben Shapiro's show any more than I do this
01:05:21: Christian artist who went on to Ellen DeGeneres' show. The difference is what they did when they were on there.
01:05:27: One sought to promote herself and the other sought to promote Christ. What are you gonna do when faced with that?
01:05:34: Now, I will say this as closing. I wish there was a camera on John MacArthur when
01:05:40: Ben Shapiro, and Ben Shapiro does his ads, and he did an ad, and it was like this. Let's talk about how you can make your life better if you're suffering, right?
01:05:50: You actually need to talk to somebody. You need to talk to somebody. And this is the thing that I thought interesting. Here's MacArthur after years and years and years of talking about biblical counseling, sitting there and listening to Ben Shapiro talk about making phone calls to get help therapeutically.
01:06:08: That's some irony there that MacArthur, who has done a great deal towards restoring biblical counseling to its proper role in the church, in his books, that he sat there and listened to Ben Shapiro pitch some sort of online counseling service.
01:06:23: It was just, there was a sweet irony there. There was, this is where I say, I wish that there was a, I wish there was a camera on MacArthur during this.
01:06:33: Yeah, I wish I could have read MacArthur's thoughts. Hey, you know what?
01:06:40: There is someone that's trained to listen and give those positive changes. They're called the pastor. That's probably what
01:06:47: MacArthur was thinking. Yes, that's the role of the pastor. Go to church, read the Bible, study the word of God, repent, believe in the
01:06:56: Lord Jesus Christ, and talk to your pastor. But if you don't have Christ and you don't have a good church and you don't have a biblical pastor, then you might as well call the 1 -800.
01:07:04: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the one place where I wish the camera was on MacArthur so we could have seen the look on his face.
01:07:12: That would have been classic. So folks, I hope this was helpful. I hope that maybe this clarified some of the issues that people had with the statements that MacArthur made.
01:07:21: Now, I'm not John MacArthur. I don't know him personally. I can't speak for him. But I do think that as someone who understands
01:07:29: Judaism, maybe I've provided for you a little bit of insight that you can have a better understanding of what he might have been trying to get to and a different way of viewing this to see what it is that the issues are.
01:07:43: If you find this helpful, if you find this valuable, would you do us a favor and share it with others?
01:07:49: This is how we get known by people you know. If you find value in it, there's no way they're gonna know it unless you share it with them.
01:07:58: And so, please share this. Also, you can do one other thing. You can write a review on iTunes for us.
01:08:05: There's a link to the iTunes in the show notes. You can write a review. Now, does the review help us to get better ratings?
01:08:14: No, it doesn't. I know so many podcasters say that. No, but you know what? It's an encouragement to me when
01:08:19: I read it because I know you're actually listening. Now, we had some issues that are kind of controversial.
01:08:26: I'm gonna tell you a way that you can discuss these with us. If you're on Facebook, you can go into the
01:08:31: Striving for Eternity group and in Striving for Eternity group, you can discuss the differences.
01:08:37: Where do you disagree with some of the things that we said? Maybe it's the Revolutionary War. Maybe it's the view on covenant theology.
01:08:43: Maybe it's the view on Israel, the Jewish view of God and the Christian view of God. Whatever it is, if you wanna discuss it, the place to do it is on Facebook in the
01:08:52: Striving for Eternity group. If you'd like to contact me and disagree with me, okay, we can do it.
01:08:58: Let's just make sure you're gonna have a Bible ready because that's how you're gonna have to disagree with me is with a
01:09:03: Bible. But you can contact me. Just contact info at strivingforeternity .org.
01:09:09: Let me know what your thoughts, and I should let you know, we are booking for next year and the year after that.
01:09:16: If you'd like to have Striving for Eternity come to your church and speak, we have three speakers, myself,
01:09:22: Dr. Silvestro, known as The Dentist, and soon -to -be Dr. Frank Mullis.
01:09:28: Right now, we'll just call him Pastor Frank Mullis. But the reality, if you want any of us to come speak at your church, we have a plethora of topics we speak on.
01:09:37: We will come to you to speak, and that is something that we really look to do.
01:09:42: It's a great way of discipling folks, and that is what our ministry is about, is discipling.
01:09:48: And one of the other ways we're discipling is the Christian Podcast Community. We are gonna be present down at G3.
01:09:53: If you're gonna be at G3, please come visit our booth. Check us out. Why? Because we will be giving away 1 ,000 copies of What Do We Believe?
01:10:04: That's right, you heard that correct. We're bringing down 1 ,000 copies of What Do We Believe to give away basically for free.
01:10:13: And so, if you're at G3, come check us out at the booth to see about how you can get your free copy as part of Striving for Eternity and the
01:10:22: Christian Podcast Community. There's probably 1 ,000 things I'm forgetting to mention, but I do wanna say
01:10:28: January 5th is coming up. Please come down to D .C. if you can. If you're gonna come, email me at info at strivingforeternity .org.
01:10:37: Let me know you're planning to be there. Why? Because I will tell you where we will meet because I'm gonna try to put a private tour together with the
01:10:47: Museum of the Bible where we're gonna go through the ancient text area of the museum.
01:10:53: They have basically a whole area where they have all these ancient manuscripts. We're gonna go through them, have them explained to us, have it explained, the
01:11:03: Bible, how it came about. It will be a great time. If you're interested, if you're in the D .C. area, contact us so we can add you to the list because we're gonna put together a private tour just for us.
01:11:14: Those that are part of this Christian Podcast Community event. So we hope that you've found this helpful.
01:11:21: If you're in the northern Idaho area, might I recommend Kootenai Community Church.
01:11:28: Pastor Jim Osmond is up there. That is a church that is gonna give you some sound theology, good preaching.
01:11:36: Just don't tell him I said that. And you're going to learn a lot. I will also mention that their conference that they're gonna be having in the spring will have
01:11:47: Dr. Jason Lyle. And so if you want to get some great teaching there, you should contact
01:11:54: Kootenai Community Church and find out about their spring conference so that you can be part of that.
01:12:01: And so until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.
01:12:07: This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.