92. INTERVIEW w/ Gary Demar (A Practical Postmillennialism. Section 1. Part 2)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 92, an interview with Gary DeMar. Well hello everyone and welcome back to a very special episode of the podcast.

As you know for the last couple weeks we've been looking at post-millennialism, which and we've been trying to really look at what does that mean practically. Post-millennialism is an eschatological view, it's a view of the end times, and we want to unpack what that means practically for our lives and for us as men, women, as the church, and all of those things.

Well today I am incredibly excited to have a brand new friend of mine. I just met a few minutes before we clicked start, Dr. Gary DeMar. And one of the cool things about Gary DeMar is that he's been influential in my life for about 10 years now.

I started out as a pre-millennialist. I started out as trying to figure out what the mark of the beast is and trying all those things and I stumbled upon a lecture that Gary DeMar gave on Matthew 24.

And then since then and with others, I've really come to the post-millennial view and it's created so much hope in my heart that I wanted to share Dr. DeMar with you. I wanted you to hear from him on how he got started on these things.

So without further ado, I'm so thankful, so grateful. Welcome to the show, Gary DeMar. Thanks for having me. Now tell us about who you are, brother, because maybe someone like me 10 years ago doesn't know who you are.

They don't know the work you've been doing, how you got into this crazy world of eschatology.

Tell us about you. Yeah, I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. And I graduated from high school in 1968. But I didn't really want to know. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life.

I was really involved in athletics. I wanted to coach at the college level. I had done very well in high school and track and field, and I was on a track and field scholarship. And then my senior year in college, I went to Western Michigan University.

I ran into a high school friend who presented the gospel to me and it came with my senior year and I kind of gave up my scholarship in my last year. And really, from that point on, I was trying to learn as much as I could about what the Bible had to say about everything, especially interested in the area of apologetics.

And remember, this is early 1970s. And at that particular time, the late great planet Earth was very, very popular. It was written by Hal Lindsay, sold 20 some million copies in the 1970s. All the types of things that people are hearing today about Bible prophecy, how Lindsay was talking about more than more than 50 years ago.

That book was published in 1970. And so you're looking at a half a century for people looking at the same Bible passages that people are looking at today and came to the conclusion that they were living in the last generation.

Hal Lindsay called it the terminal generation. And at that point in my life, I really wasn't that interested in eschatology. I was trying to get my life kind of back on track. And in 1974, I ended up going to seminary in Jackson, Mississippi at the Reform Theological Seminary.

And there I met one of the professors there was Dr. Greg Bonson, who taught apologetics. And that was really my interest was apologetics. And when I finally graduated and moved to the Atlanta area, taught school for a few years, and then got involved in the ministry that I'm involved in now, and that's American Vision.

And I started working on a series of books called God and Government, because this was by this time, this is 1980. And we just went through Jimmy Carter's administration. Ronald Reagan was running for president.

He won in 1980, won again in 1984. There's a landslide in both cases. And the moral majority had gotten started. And what I wanted to do was to put all of this into perspective. So Christians would understand that government isn't synonymous with politics, that the Bible talks about God being the governor of all things.

And then there's self-government, family government, church government, civil government. And I outlined this in a three-volume set called God and Government, which is available today in a single volume.

And any book I talk about that I've written and others have written for us, you can get them at americanvision .org. And in that book, I essentially laid out a biblical worldview of how the Bible applies to the individual, to the family, to the church, and to the civil area of government, which we call the state.

And as I went out and started teaching on this, invariably, somebody would raise their hand and said, why are we bothering with this? We're living in the last days. Now, Jesus is, you know, we're on the precipice of the rapture of the church, because in the late great planet Earth, it came out in 1970, Hal Lindsay made something of a prediction.

He said Israel becoming a nation again in 1948 was extremely important. Eschatologically and nationally. And he was saying that Matthew chapter 24 verse 34 says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

A generation was 40 years. And so you add 40 to 1948 and people were literally looking for the 1980s is to be the final generation before something called the rapture was going to take place. And so between 1981 and 1988, there was this great enthusiasm for, you know, the rapture of the church and so forth.

Well, here we are, 2024, we're still here. And people are making the same interpretive mistakes that they were making in the 1970s and the 1930s and 40s and in the 19th century, the 18th century, the 17th century, using the same Bible verses, trying to convince people that Jesus was coming soon.

And as a result of that, it's my belief that many, many Christians, millions and millions of Christians have laid aside their kind of cultural, social responsibilities because they didn't they didn't believe that we were going to be around much longer.

And as a result of that, I think that's one of the reasons we're in the condition we are in today, because on the one hand, a lot of people don't believe that the world in which we live today is anything that we should be involved in.

And on the other hand, they believe that we're living on the precipice of some great end time event. And those two things are kind of like a witch's brew of Christian inactivity, a lack of responsibility and a lack of optimism of what can be done if Christians were really to believe the Bible and apply the Bible to every area of life.

So good. It sounds like you've been busy for. Yeah.

And, you know, I didn't get in, like I say, I didn't get involved in eschatology as kind of an independent study. It became a necessity based upon what I was reading in the literature at the time. And also, as I went out to speak, you know, listen to people.

And the same thing is happening today. You go online, Facebook, and anytime something happens internationally, it's, you know, AI is the new thing. Hey, that's going to be the that's going to be the movement of the Antichrist.

Right. And this new global order, this great reset, all of these things are then turned around to say this is and then people try to find Bible verses to go along with that. And people need to realize that, again, this isn't a new phenomenon.

And, you know, Daniel chapter 12, you know, talks about going to and fro and knowledge will increase. And and people said, oh, that was that was the locomotive. The locomotive was was this was the sign of this idea of the transportation going into all the world and so forth done speedily.

And it was the locomotive, a locomotive, maybe 60 miles, 60 miles per hour. And because before that, the fastest thing that was was a horse. And today we've got we've got, you know, jets and so forth.

But people are still making the same type of mistakes, taking Bible passages, which I believe have already been fulfilled, and then trying to make them fit within our modern day context. And it has just been a complete perversion of the scriptures.

Yeah.

Well, why don't we why don't we jump into that? Would you say that that tends to be prevalent in eschatological positions that are more focused on futurism and and and with futurism? Maybe let's jump into.

What does that mean? How does that get applied? And then maybe we'll circle back and talk about premillennialism.

Well, everybody wants to know about the future. That's that's just kind of built into us. The stock market wouldn't be what it is that people weren't interested in the future. And so people want to know what's going to take place.

And when they and many Christians, when they see world conditions, you know, deteriorate, they start you've got prophecy, so-called prophecy experts out there. Who will come and say, here's the Bible verse for that, you know, there are wars and Jesus talks about wars and rumors of wars, false prophets, earthquakes, famines.

And they'll say, look, all of those things are happening today. And Israel has become a nation again in 1948. That's a prophetic that's a prophetic sign. And there's talk about rebuilding the temple. And then there's talk about this red heifer.

And so, look, most Christians don't have time to study all of this on their own. They're dependent on people who are, you know. They wouldn't claim to be experts, but they come across as experts. They write many, many books on the topic.

And these books are very repetitive. And essentially, the big name evangelicals are pushing this and type stuff are very popular. They have international ministries. And as a result, we got we got, you know, Christians today who have never studied this on their own.

They're they're not they have not taken the the the procedural advice of the Berberians who search the scriptures daily to see whether these things are so. And so what I did was I wanted to know, what does the Bible actually say about these things?

And so I did my own independent study. I came across a book that was published in 1948 when I was in seminary. It was republished in about 1977. And it was by a fellow named Marcellus Kick. His last name is spelled K-I-K.

And it was the title of the book was Matthew 24. And Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 17, Luke 21. Give the give the impression of the end of the world that the terminology that's used, the illustrations that are used, that's where you hear about wars and rumors of wars and famines and false prophets and the abomination of desolation and the sun, moon and stars.

And the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, et cetera, is that this is the generation that's seen all these things take place. But as my investigation was after reading Marcellus Kick's book, who just kick all he did was read the Bible.

He looked at the Bible. Let's see what the Bible has to say about these things on the basis of what the Bible says. That's how we need to build our eschatology and ultimately to build our entire Christian worldview.

Yeah.

What what would you say to someone who's dispensational or premillennial and say, but we are reading the Bible and we are seeing these things are saying this and such and so, how do we how do we respond to that?

Maybe hermeneutically, or how do we respond to that and show them that, no, they're actually not reading the Bible correctly?

I think we got cut off again. I still have you. Thank you. Well, of course, everybody, everybody appeals to the Bible for it. And so that's not the problem. That's the solution. Yeah. So what you have to start asking yourself, you know, some questions about this.

Let's look at Matthew, Matthew 24, and you really to understand Matthew 24, which is the Olivet Discourse. Jesus gave this prophetic pronouncement on the Mount of Olives. And that is where Jesus was when he delivered this message that includes wars and rumors of wars and so forth.

But if you got you have to go all the way back to chapter 21, which is when Jesus enters Jerusalem and he's he's at the Mount of Olives when this takes place. So chapters 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25 are a unit.

And you just you can't just take one verse out of the Bible and say, hey, there are Bible talks about wars and rumors of wars. We're seeing wars and rumors of wars today. Therefore. That prophecy must be about our time, right?

And so you have to pay attention to some very important things when you interpret the Bible, especially when you start dealing with Bible prophecy. And the first thing you have to ask is, who's the primary audience?

To whom was Jesus speaking? And if you follow Matthew 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, you will find in most cases the second person plural is used. You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars when you see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.

Jesus has that audience in mind. In Matthew 21, Jesus says, you know, he said, I'm going to I'm going to remove you from this nation and I'm going to give this to a nation producing the fruit of it. And the Pharisee says, oh, he's talking about us.

Jesus wasn't talking about some future generation. He was talking about that generation and the religious leaders of Jesus as they understood it. But unfortunately, a lot of Christians today hear a prophecy speaker or preacher say, no, no, no.

This all applies to the end of the world is right in the lead up to the, you know, to the to the rapture or the second coming or the millennial reign or whatever the case might be. But when you look at the original audience, if Jesus had a future audience in mind, Jesus has said when they see these things, they will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars when they see the abomination of desolation.

But no, Jesus uses the second person plural. This makes it very clear that he was talking about that particular generation. And I can spend I can go through every detail of this. I've written a couple of books.

One is Wars and Rumors of Wars, which is on Matthew 24, part of Matthew 23 and 24. And then I've written Last Day's Madness, which is much more comprehensive. And so all you have to do is stick to the text of scripture, you know, search the scriptures daily to see whether these things are so.

To whom was Jesus addressing when he was talking about these prophetic events? And it's obvious he had that generation in mind. In fact, in Matthew chapter 24, verse 34, Jesus says, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

And you and you then you ask yourself the question, well, what does that what's the meaning of this generation? Just by using the Bible, go go to chapter 10, go chapter 11, chapter 12. Every time, every single time the phrase this generation is used in the Gospels, it always means the generation to whom Jesus is speaking.

It never refers to a future generation. And so you'll have people, you know, say, well, what Jesus meant was the generation that sees these signs will not pass away until all these things take place. So look what I just did there.

I added words to a to a passage. It says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. And so people say, well, what Jesus really meant was the generation that sees these signs will not pass away until all these things take place.

So here you have to add words to a text of Scripture in order to make it mean what you need it to mean for your interpretation. But if you look at the very the previous verse, verse 33, Jesus tells his own audience that when they see these things, this is about them.

This is their generation. In fact, earlier, earlier in Matthew, Matthew, chapter 16, verses 27, 28, Jesus says there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.

Well, there's audience there. So when we so another thing is so after audience relevance and then just the timing factor, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Then you have to ask yourself, you know, just exactly what is on the table that Jesus is describing there.

And he's talking about the coming of the son of man. Now, listen to what this text says again. There are some who are standing here now. That's the audience to whom Jesus is speaking. There are some who are standing in that audience who will not taste death.

That is, who will not die until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom. So that means that when Jesus is Jesus is describing his coming. Some of them would live long enough in order to see that happen.

So now we have to ask the question, how does the Bible use the phrase, the coming of Jesus, the coming of the son of man? When you put the audience relevance and you put the timing relevance in there and then you look at how this generation is used repeatedly, and now we need to look at what does Jesus mean by his coming.

And when you do that, you're left with no other no other explanation that Jesus was describing his coming in judgment upon that generation before he passed away. Now, this is not an interpretation that's unique to me.

I didn't come up with it. There are many, many Bible scholars throughout history who have taught the same thing. So this it's not anything new. But once you adopt that particular view, then you are immune to all of those those prophecy writers, prophecy preachers who are trying to tell you, well, this is the last generation.

This is a terminal generation. Jesus is coming in your generation. The rapture is right around the corner, etc. And if you just all you have to do, you don't need any special apparatus in order to determine this.

It's all in the Bible. If you just pay attention to some very important, clear, interpretive principles, you can figure out what the Bible is saying and when and when it's saying it about. And that's the important case when it comes to Bible prophecy.

I remember listening to a lecture that you gave or it was a podcast episode was something and you said, I think it was Matthew 22 or Matthew 21. Jesus comes to the fruitless city that offered him only leaves and he curses the fruitless tree that only gave him leaves.

And it blew my mind when I heard that because I didn't really understand why Jesus was rebuking the tree the way that he was rebuking it. I didn't understand why he said, if you say to this mountain, be brought up and thrown into the sea.

And just that idea of reading the context and what it meant to the original people who were standing there watching it, it just opened up the Bible in so many ways. Same thing for Matthew 22. I think it's 14, but it's in the parable of the wedding feast where he says, I'm going to send my armies and set your city on fire.

I never understood what that meant until I saw that this is about Jerusalem. So you're right. That is a unit. And if we understand that correctly, it will bring hope and immunity to some of the pessimism and doom and gloom that we're seeing.

Yeah, you make a great point here that, you know, you get all of a sudden, first of all, Jesus cleanses the temple earlier in that same chapter, chapter 21. And he had, this was his second cleansing of the temple.

And a lot of liberal scholars saying, oh, you know, Jesus, you know, the gospel writers got this all mixed up and so forth. It was, you know, you got two different temple cleansings at different periods of time in Jesus's ministry.

This is obviously a mistake. We can't trust the gospel. But if you really, if you understand the Bible, you understand very, very clearly what Jesus was doing based upon something in the Old Testament.

I think it's Leviticus chapter 14, where the leprous house, the priests come in and they evaluate the house and they say, OK, we need to clean this house out and we're going to come back and examine it later on.

And if the leprosy, and when it talks about leprosy, it's not talking about Hansen's disease of what we know and call a leprosy today. And no one really knows what the significance of it was, other than the fact that it was created something as being unclean.

And so the priests come the first time to check it out and says there's leprosy in the house. And then they said, we're going to come back later on and see if there's this is still unclean. And if it is, that house is to be torn down and burn.

So Jesus takes that and applies that to what was having taken place. He goes to the temple the first time, then he evaluates it. Then he goes to the temple a second time and throws out the money changers and so forth.

That was the second time as Jesus as the priest was evaluating the house. And it was, in fact, unclean. And so this then you say, well, this whole context, these aren't just little stories within a bigger.

These are little stories within a bigger story, but these are not independent stories. So then Jesus comes down to the fig tree and many believe that the fig tree was representative of Israel. He sees a tree with leaves only no fruit on it.

And Jesus essentially curses the fig tree. Now, you think that's a strange thing for Jesus to do. I mean, what? Why would he do something like that? Well, if you understand the context and what's coming, it's very clear as to what Jesus is doing.

He's he's making a case for the judgment that's going to come upon Jerusalem before that generation passes away. And then the mountain, what mountain is he talking about? What's this mountain? And he's talking about the either Mount Zion or the Mount of Olives, this mountain into the sea.

It's it was it was a judgment that took place. So you have the judgment upon the temple. They have the judgment upon Israel as the fig tree. You have judgment upon that mountain that's going to be cast into the sea.

And I had mentioned earlier in here, if I can if I can read this. Therefore, I say to you, this kingdom, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and be given to a nation producing the fruit of it.

This was this in itself. So think of this. The fig tree did not find any fruit on it. Matthew 21, 43. Therefore, I say to you, he's talking about he's this is the religious leaders. The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and be given to a nation producing the fruit of it.

So you make all these connections and you begin to see that there's some really devastating thing to take place. And it goes on and it says. And when the chief priests and the Pharisees heard the parables, they understood that he was speaking about them, not some future generation, that generation.

And then you mentioned about the burning of the city, which is in the next chapter, chapter 22. And then you go then 22 goes into Matthew 23. And Matthew 23 is a stark indictment upon that particular generation of religious leaders.

And keep in mind, the entire nation of Israel did not reject Jesus as the promised Messiah. It was mostly the religious leaders that did. And you see this in the book of Acts as well. The people who were persecuting the early Christians were the religious leaders of the day, those who were took Jesus in the middle of the night to Herod and finally later to Pontius Pilate.

They were the religious leaders. They were the religious leaders who cried out that they wanted Barabbas rather than Jesus as their king. And remember, what did Pilate say? Did you want me to crucify your king?

And what what did these religious leaders say? We have no king but Caesar. So all this is a unit. This is not describing our time. It is it was describing events leading up to and including the destruction of the temple that took place within a generation in AD 70, because at the end of chapter 23, what does Jesus say to his disciples?

Your house or the religious leaders, your house is being left to you desolate. And then they come out of the temple, chapter 24. Keep in mind that the Bible never had chapter divisions or verse division.

So just because there's a 24 in front of 20, what we know today is chapter 24. That wasn't the case. 24 is dependent upon 23 and everything else that followed. And then the disciples asked the question, you mean this temple, this grand temple that was being rebuilt?

And Jesus says, not one stone here will be left upon another. They'll all be torn down. And then they asked Jesus, when is this going to happen? And so Jesus goes through Matthew 24, and it explains to them it was going to happen in their generation before their generation passed away.

And what you find here is Jesus gave a 40 year warning to that particular generation to repent or perish. And you didn't even have to repent. All you had to do is leave the city, escape the city, and you would, in fact, not be caught up in the conflagration that the Romans brought and burning and the temple ended up being burned and torn down, where literally not one stone was left upon another.

Yeah, it makes so much sense of the immediate context. It also makes sense. I'd never heard anyone, I've heard many people quote Matthew 24, but not Luke 21, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, which makes so much sense of the context.

And also the larger context of the Bible, like when Amos talks about a shepherd that's coming to replace the false shepherds, and he talks about the remnant that's going to be saved. You said earlier that not all of Israel rejected Jesus or not all of Judah rejected Jesus.

It was the leadership. It was the false shepherds.

Right. Yeah. Zechariah talks about them as well. And yeah, because the Day of Pentecost, what you have on the Day of Pentecost is a re-institution of what you find in Exodus, the pillar of fire, which was a national pillar of fire.

But when you get to the book of Acts, you begin to see that tongues of fire are on individuals now. This isn't a national entity, Israel. It is, in fact, a new entity. As Jesus said, this is going to be given to somebody who's producing the fruit of it.

And the first believers in the book of Acts were exclusively Jews. There were Jews living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven, Acts chapter two, verse five. There were thousands of Jews who came to Christ.

And the first persecutors of the Jewish ecclesia, the Jewish church, was a religious leader. What we know today is the Apostle Paul. He had Stephen executed in chapter seven, chapter eight. He persecuted the church, put some of them into prison.

And there was a persecution so extensive that the people left Jerusalem. Well, they had gotten a previous indication of this when Jesus in the Olivet discourse, hey, look, your city is going to be destroyed.

Your temple is going to be torn down. In fact, if you read on in Matthew chapter 24, it's a local judgment, a local judgment that could be escaped on foot. All you had to do was go to the mountains outside of Jerusalem in Judea.

And stay there and you wouldn't you wouldn't have been killed by the Romans. So this was this was for their time. This is what this was all about. And when you start with that, all so many other things make make sense.

Yeah, let's take that for a second and let's zoom out. How did. How did we get a view like dispensationalism, which takes all the passages we've just talked about, which has which have clear historical reference and make sense of the context and in so many ways?

How did they. How do we get to a place where all of these things are future and and there's so much confusion? Like, how did this happen?

Well, that's that's a question in and of itself that would take that takes book factors and a new book out. I can't I'm looking on my shelf over here. It's a book on on kind of the history of the rise.

I think it's the rise and fall of dispensationalism. But dispensationalism, as we understand it today, is a 19th century phenomenon. And people say, well, what's dispensationalism? Dispensationalists hold that there are two peoples of God.

There is Israel. And then when you get to the New Testament, there's a new there's a new thing because the because Israel rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Well, as we saw, the Jews didn't reject Jesus as the Messiah.

The first converts were, in fact, Jews, thousands and thousands of thousands of them. And the dispensationalists claim there's two peoples of God. God works with Israel one way and he works with non-Jews another way.

And so what the dispensationalists have claimed is that there's Israel and then there's this thing called the church. And what the prophecy, the prophecy clock stopped when when the religious leaders were they to say the nation of Israel rejected Jesus as the Messiah.

And so we're in what is today called a parenthesis. And God is then going to deal with Israel sometime in the future again after the church has taken off the earth in what is called a rapture. There is nothing, nothing in the Bible to support that view.

It's it's it's completely made up. There's not a single verse in the New Testament that says anything about a temple being rebuilt. Right. You just you don't you don't find it anywhere or or circumcision being reinstituted.

And Paul makes a huge effort, puts forth a huge effort in the book of Galatians and other places where circumcision is no longer a factor. It's part of the whole old bloody sacrificial system of the Old Old Testament, which the book of Hebrews shows has been done away with with the sacrifice of Jesus.

Yeah. And so there is no distinction between Israel and the church. The church isn't anything new. It's unfortunate that when they they translated the the Greek word ecclesia as church for Tyndale, William Tyndale, in his translation, translated it as assembly or congregation.

It's not anything new. It's a it's a common word. Ecclesia is a common word. It was a common word under the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, when it was translated into Greek. The first believers of were Jews who made up the ecclesia in Matthew chapter, I mean, Acts chapter five and again in Acts chapter eight.

And so this idea that there are two peoples of God is just is destructive of the Bible to the Jew. First, Paul writes, the gospel came to the Jew first. Paul, I mean, Jesus in Matthew 20, chapter 10, says, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes.

And they were only to go to the cities of Israel. They weren't supposed to go to the Gentiles. Why? To the Jew first. Yeah. And then once the gospel went to Israel. Gentiles were grafted in to an already existing, believing Jewish or is Israelite church.

There's there's the dividing wall between it between Israel and non-Israelites was broken down. Ephesians chapter two, there's only one people of God. There aren't two. Yeah. And really, I cannot explain what the the the reason was that they would come up with such a strange, strange system that that that prior to the 19th century, no one was teaching at all.

This is just completely out of out of touch with what the New Testament teaches and even historically. But it's become popular because, you know, what what these prophecy writers were doing was going around telling people, we're going to tell you what's going to happen here.

We're going to we're giving you a timeline for all of this. And then when Israel became a became a nation again in 1948, something that people have been working on since the 19th century, the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

And so Israel finally becomes a nation in 1948. And yet the New Testament doesn't say anything about Israel becoming a nation again. Right. And you would think that that being the most one of the most important legs of the dispensational system, that the New Testament would say something about it doesn't say anything about it.

Same thing with the rapture. There isn't a single verse in the Bible anywhere where it says God is going to return and he's going to remove the church off the earth before, during, after or right before God pours his wrath out.

There's not a single verse in the Bible that says anything like that. It's a it's a manufactured doctrine, but it's very popular. And the reason it's popular is that people don't do their own study to check check these things out for themselves.

It sounds like that. That a misunderstanding of the of the Jewish people and how they received the Messiah, because you hear this all the time, the Jews rejected Jesus, that it was the Jews who rejected Christ and crucified him and and all of that.

It seems like that that misunderstanding of not seeing the remnant come to Christ and not seeing that that it was the Jewish leaders really who are primarily the ones who are persecuting Christ, that we've taken all of these very clear prophecies that are near term events, and we booted them into the uncertain future because we can't reconcile the fact that, well, Israel is the people of God and they've got to come back.

Is that sort of what happened? Maybe.

Well, I think again, I think you find that the early church, especially if you go to the Book of Acts, there was always this always this debate that was taking place whether Jesus was the promised Messiah.

And many Jews came, you know, came to Christ as a result of they saw Jesus as the promised Messiah. And so the gospel had, in fact, gone out to the Jewish nation first. And these Jews embraced Jesus as what the Old Testament said he was.

But it's like anything else. There are people who have a. They have to they have to hold on to their jobs, so to speak, it was it would have changed so much among the religious establishment. And then then when they said, oh, Gentiles are included in these promises.

That is when things that's when the dam really broke. No, no, no. They have to be circumcised. They have to follow the dietary laws. Right. They have to do all the things related to what the Old Covenant was all about.

We see them struggling in that way in the New Testament.

Yeah. And, you know, who was persecuting the apostle Paul throughout throughout the Book of Acts? It was a religious establishment. Yeah, the religious, you know, early on with the execution of Stephen.

And then the Herodians, you have to keep in mind that the Herodians also it was a political power play for the for the Herod's going all the way back, you know, to the birth of Jesus, the birth. Think of that, that birth of Jesus, the execution of John the Baptist, one of the Herod's involved in one of the trials with Jesus.