September 1, 2016 Show with Dr. Russell T. Fuller on “The Centrality of Christ Throughout Redemptive History”

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this first day of September 2016.

And obviously, you are not hearing the typical theme music and announcer that we have opening up our program every day because there was a technical difficulty that we are unaware of why that has occurred today.

But we don't need that. It's not required to conduct a good interview. So I am looking forward today to discussing the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history again.

Last time we discussed this program with my dear friend Pastor Josh Fryman, who is one of the speakers at the upcoming

Christ Our Redeemer conference at the Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana.

But today, we're going to be following up on that same theme with Dr. Russell T.

Fuller, who is the plenary speaker at that conference. He is also a professor of Old Testament interpretation at the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the co -author of An Invitation to Biblical Hebrew.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

Russell T. Fuller. Hey, well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be with you this day. And this conference is coming up very soon that Dr.

Fuller will be speaking at, along with several other speakers. This will be September 9th and the 10th.

That's a Friday and Saturday. And we'll be giving you more details about that during the course of the program.

That's going to be held at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana. We've already had at least two of our listeners from Indiana who say that they're going to try to attend.

So we hope that you and many more of you listening can attend this conference.

Before I even go into our discussion today, Dr. Fuller, I would like to know something more about you, your upbringing, the religious upbringing that you had, if any, and how you came to Christ and how you were eventually led to be on the staff at the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Okay. Well, I grew up in a home that really was not a

Christian home. When I was real young, my parents took me to church, but then later on,

I think that pastor fell away, had a scandal, and I think it affected my parents.

And they just didn't go back, really. And, but when I was, and I was definitely lost, just lost.

And when I was 15 years old, one of my classmates just simply said, hey, I'm going to church tonight.

You want to go with me? And I don't know what came over me, and I said, yeah. And, you know,

I'd heard the gospel preached when I was young, but it just bounced off of me.

And, but that night when I heard the gospel preached, it was completely different. It was like, wow.

I saw myself as a sinner like I have never seen myself as a sinner before. And it was just the spirit of God drawing me to himself.

And, you know, for the first time, I mean, God really opened my eyes, that I was under his wrath and curse because of sin.

And then he showed me who Jesus was, and that, you know, he was, he died in my place.

And so I received him that night. I believed on him. And it was, it was, and it really changed my life.

The way I was leading my life at that time, even though I was only 15, I was going in the wrong direction very quickly.

But the Lord got ahold of me, and it just completely changed me. And I became a very different person.

And, and I went to a rather large high school in the Atlanta area.

And, you know, it was full of drugs and everything. I mean, it was in the seventies. And I just felt like when people asked me questions about my conversion, that I had to give them the answers.

And so I started studying scripture because I knew people had all kinds of questions for me.

And that's what got me started. Then I went off to college and did an undergraduate degree in business management.

But I noticed these guys walking around with these Greek New Testaments. And I thought, that's what I want to read. I want to read a

Greek New Testament. And so I started taking Greek. And then

I thought, you know, Greek is neat. Let's try that Hebrew stuff. And when

I took that, that was it. I mean, that, when I took that,

I really loved Hebrew. And so after that, I went and I attended two Jewish schools. And so I went to a

Jewish school in Philadelphia, which no longer exists. It's called Dropsy College. Today it's part of the

University of Pennsylvania. But it was a Jewish school for many years in Philadelphia.

And then when it shut down, my first year there, it shut down. And then I went to a school in Cincinnati called

Hebrew Union College. And that was the other Jewish institution. And that's the one I graduated from.

And I did my work in Hebrew and related Semitic language. So the languages, the

Hebrew, the Greek, that's the stuff that I really enjoyed. But again, language is not an end in itself.

It's just because I can, I want to read the scriptures out of those languages. That's what drove me.

And so the Lord just put something in me. And you can ask my parents. Before I was saved, they couldn't get me to study anything.

The only thing I would study when I was a kid was the sports pages. But after I got saved,

I just felt like I had to tell people about the gospel and to answer questions. And so that's where I am.

And what got me to Southern Seminary is, of course, when Al Mohler came in 93, and he changed the theological direction of the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I heard him speak in different things, and I'm like, hey, he's got the same theological vision that I do.

And so I taught at a small school called Midcontinent, which no longer exists in the western part of the state.

And after two years, Dr. Mohler invited me to come to Louisville and to teach here.

And I've been at Southern for the last 18 years. Now, what happens with all these schools that you're a part of? They all disappear.

That's right. And I have certain professors that say that to me. They say, how can you go?

You destroy everything. And that's right. That one, it was rare, but they actually were doing some things they weren't supposed to be doing money -wise, and they went out of business.

It was not a good situation, but I'd already left. It was years after I was there. It was another five or six years before they were to shut down, or maybe 10 years, really.

It was pretty recently when they shut down. And they have, for a while, they had three different organizations, the federal government, state government, and others investigating them, but they're no longer in existence.

Now, what is a more difficult language to study, Koine Greek or Hebrew? Oh, probably most people would say

Hebrew, but here's what I would tell you. I think if you really get into advanced Greek and do some classical

Greek and stuff like that, I believe when you get on that level, Greek becomes more difficult than Hebrew. But when you just begin,

Hebrew is much more intimidating because the letters don't look like English letters, where some of the

Greek letters look like our letters. So I think when you first start off, Greek is the easier language, but if you really get to advanced stuff,

I think Greek becomes harder at that point. And there are people who perhaps have a certain level of anxiety that they really will never know what the scriptures are teaching us because they don't know the original languages of the scriptures, and they have to rely on other people like you to teach us what the passages in our

English translations really mean. I mean, because obviously on occasion, there are differences of opinion with biblical scholars as to how these

English translations have been interpreted. And so you have corrections desired to be made in some of the modern translations and even the

King James and so on. How do you respond to people who would have that kind of a mindset?

Yeah, if you look at the old Baptist confession, the old London confession, it talks about the importance of Greek and Hebrew as sort of the ultimate that we need to use to solve, let's say, theological controversies.

But then it goes on to talk about English translations and how it's very important that we translate the

Bible into as many languages as we can to get the gospel out. And let me say for our

English translations, if you go back like to the King James and even to the other ones like the

Geneva Bible, all these other translations back in those days, they were very good. And then when you look at not all of our translations today, when you look at most of our evangelical translations like a

New American Standard Bible, the English Standard Version, the ESV, when you look at these, they're very accurate to the

Greek and Hebrew. I'm very glad that you listed the New American Standard first because they happen to sponsor this program, the publisher.

That's the one, that's the one I go to first. That's the one I read every day is the

New American Standard and now let me say this, and I don't want to get in trouble now. I like the first edition of it better than the second edition.

But anyway, but don't let them get me for that, but really both of them are excellent and they've done a really good job.

And really for the person out in the pew, let me tell you, the Bibles that you have out there like the

New American Standard and so forth, King James, these are fabulous translations. Sometimes, let me, the advantage of the

Greek and the Hebrew, like a passage like in 1 John, it talks about a

Christian does not sin. And what it's saying is, it's kind of like what we would say is he's not living in sin.

The translation's a good translation, but in Greek, the idea is he's not continuing in sin.

He's not constantly in sin. In other words, sin is not ruling his life like it was before his salvation.

So that's an example where, understanding Greek can help you a little bit what it means not to sin because,

I mean, even as Christians, we know we still struggle with imperfections in our sanctification. And so when you read that, it looks like it's teaching maybe some type of sinless perfection.

But again, when you look at the Greek, clearly it's not saying that. It's saying a person is not going to be living in sin.

In other words, he's not gonna be dominated by sin like he was before salvation. That's exactly what that's saying.

But again, if you've got a New American Standard Bible, you've got an excellent

Bible that really does help you. Maybe I'll say one more thing. If you can read the

Greek and Hebrew, it is kind of like watching television in color as opposed to black and white, but still.

I don't know. But maybe, you know, I mean, I can see, put it this way, in the Hebrew, I can see emphasis that you just can't see in English Bibles.

So for instance, when in Genesis chapter 20, when

God comes to Abimelech and says, you're a dead man, okay? When Abimelech starts talking, the

Hebrew just goes off the charts. You can tell he is begging for his life. He uses very emphatic statements, but there's no way you can put that into English.

But these are just nuances, okay? But the real meaning of what he's saying is exactly what, again, the

New American Standard Bible's saying. But you can just tell by looking at the Hebrew, that man is begging for his life.

He is, you know, the language, the way he's saying it in the

Hebrew, he's just begging God, please don't kill me. So it's just really neat.

But again, those are just subtleties. But other than those little subtleties like that, your

English Bibles, they work. Let me tell you. They are, let me put it this way.

They are accurately reflecting the Greek and the Hebrew. And so virtually you have the original text.

That's virtually what you have. It's like ivory soap, 99 .999

% pure. That's what it is. Yeah. And I'll just say that you're really reading the originals, just like it came from Moses, in my opinion.

That's what I'm saying. Well, praise God for that. Now, how much of the original manuscripts of the scriptures were written in Aramaic?

Well, in the Old Testament, there's about 10 chapters of Aramaic, and they're in the

Book of Daniel, starting about chapter two, verse four, and they go through around chapter seven.

And then if you look at Ezra, around, again, it starts around, I'm gonna get this wrong if I'm not careful, but around chapter four, and then again, it goes through around seven as well.

And again, there's some pieces in there that's Hebrew, especially in Ezra. And then there's a few words in this one little statement here and there that's in Aramaic, in the rest of the

Bible. So most of what you have in the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, and about 10 chapters are written in Aramaic.

And there are Aramaic translations of the Bible that were done by the Jews back around the time of Christ and even earlier.

And those are very interesting. And they're telling you the old, like official

Jewish interpretations of passages. So those are fascinating. But again, those are just interpretations, but to me, they're fascinating.

And do you know Aramaic? And how commonly is Aramaic taught in the seminaries alongside

Hebrew and Greek? Yes, we teach Aramaic here. I teach it. I teach two semesters.

One semester, we go through all of the Hebrew, I mean, all the Aramaic portions in the Old Testament. We read them all.

And if you know Hebrew, you can do Aramaic quite quickly, really. They're really close languages.

And so with just a few adjustments, you can really read both of them. Then we read another course where we're reading those

Jewish translations. So that's the more advanced course that we teach around here. So we have two classes, but we're starting, we're gonna start some more.

It's a different language, it's called Syriac, but really that's part of Aramaic. And we're gonna be teaching that around here,

I think, pretty soon as well. So really we teach, you know, for a seminary, we teach quite a bit of Aramaic here for a seminary.

Now you co -authored Invitation to Biblical Hebrew, a beginning grammar.

You co -authored that with Kyung Won Choi. I hope I didn't butcher his name. That was perfect.

Wow. Absolutely perfect. And is this only for a person involved in seminary studies, or is this something that somebody with the time and the interest,

I hate to use the word layman, but just so people understand where I'm coming from. The average person who's a

Christian who has some time and interest, will this book be of value to them? Yes, because the way

I wrote this book, there's three parts to it. You have the textbook, then there's a workbook, and then there's these

DVDs where you can actually see me lecturing on Hebrew. And in the second book that I mentioned, the workbook,

I give keys to all the exercises, both in the textbook and in the workbook.

So that a person who's highly motivated, absolutely, they could teach themselves biblical

Hebrew, because again, you'll have all the answers, all the keys. And again, if you want to, you can even buy these

DVDs where I'm doing the lectures. And you don't even need that, really.

I mean, you could just do it from the textbook and you could do it from the workbook, but some people really like to watch me do the lectures as well.

And so, no, I wrote it. And by the way, homeschoolers are using this book. And let me say this.

I get letters from time to time from guys in prison or people in prison are using my book.

So, yeah, there's all sorts of people. Oh yeah, there's all sorts of people using my book.

I know of two prisons in America that are using it right now. Wow, praise God. Yes. That's something.

Well, if anybody listening wants to pick up this book, one of our sponsors is

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com. That's C -V for Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for BibleBookService .com.

You can contact them. And if they don't already have it in stock, they will order it for you.

It's a Kriegel Academic Publication. So just to make sure you tell

Todd and his wife, Patty Jennings over there at cvbbs .com

that you heard about them through Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And so if Dr.

Fuller believes that the average Christian can pick this up and be blessed by it,

I would urge you to do that. And you are gonna be speaking at the

Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana. As I said, one of my dearest friends,

Pastor Josh Fryman is one of the speakers. In fact, he almost became my pastor, but the

Lord had mercy on him. And I, unbeknownst to me, was going to be moving to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I now reside.

So God had a different plan in mind. And, but Josh remains a dear friend and also

Reverend Isaac Evans from Glastonbury Baptist Church in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

Reverend John Peoples from Grace Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. And you,

Dr. Russell Fuller, will be all speaking on the theme of the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

What are some of the specific themes that you are gonna be addressing at this conference?

There'll be, let's say two things in particular I think I'm gonna stress. One is in the

New Testament, the New Testament writers, when they're talking about Christ, Messiah, they say things that lead to the idea that Christ is not just in a couple of chapters or just in this verse and that verse in the

Old Testament, but actually Christ is throughout the Old Testament. He, from Genesis basically chapter one all the way through the

Old Testament and then obviously in the New Testament. And so that's one thing

I'm going to really stress. The fact that Christ is, again, not just in Isaiah 53, Isaiah nine,

Isaiah 11. Clearly he's there, that's true. But I wanna get people to see that, look, he is throughout the

Old Testament. He's just not in a verse here and there or a chapter here and there. But the way the

New Testament writers, the way Jesus describes himself, it's he's throughout, not just here and there.

And so I'm gonna stress that. Then I'm gonna talk about how a lot of scholars today are going away from that notion.

There are some of them, some of them are just basically saying

Christ is not in the Old Testament at all. Are you talking about the liberal scholars?

Of course, any scholar who would say that in my opinion would be a liberal, that's correct. But there's schools like at Calvin Theological Seminary.

There's professors up there, a man named McCrump wrote a book on the Old Testament.

And in there he says there is, he's talking about the Old Testament. And he makes a certain statement, let me see, where he says, and I'm quoting him now.

He says, there basically is no preexisting messianic paradigm, written or symbolic, that he healed the sick, raised the dead, forgave sins, was crucified, rose on the third day and then ascended to heaven.

That's a direct quote from him. Wow, I mean, why on earth believe that he is the

Messiah then? That's right, and here's how he's thinking. He looks at things like the

Dead Sea Scrolls or let's say pre -Christian Jewish literature. He looks at that and he goes, I don't see a lot about Messiah here.

Well, first of all, I think he's wrong there, okay? I think if he looks at pre -Christian

Jewish material, you'll see they do talk about it. Now, he says, but wait a minute. He'll say, but they're not talking about some type of preexisting messianic paradigm, healed the sick, raised the dead, and so forth.

Okay, here's how I would respond to that. And like I told you, I attended Jewish schools. And if you look at what the rabbis say, matter of fact, maybe

I'll quote some rabbis. Yeah, definitely. Is this Talmudic sources or modern -day rabbis?

The, excuse me there. The rabbis clearly believe, now again, the reason

I wanna bring the rabbis up is not because what they say is somehow authoritative for the church.

That's not what I'm saying. Now, I want your listeners to understand that. The reason I bring them up is because so -called

Christian scholars like Mr. Crump at Calvin, he's saying, hey, listen, it's

Christians basically made up all this Christ in the Old Testament stuff, okay?

They made it up. That's his claim. Wow. Yes, and so what I wanna do,

I'll tell you what, I'm gonna read to you. I'm reading from a book here called Every Man's Talmud, and it's written by Abraham Cohen.

He's an Orthodox rabbi, okay? And he has a chapter on Messiah, and so let me read just a few passages here, and it's gonna be very short because I don't wanna get into reading too much to you.

First of all, he talks about how Messiah is going to suffer when he comes. That's according to the rabbis.

As a matter of fact, they call him the son of Joseph, and now when I say son of Joseph, I'm not talking about New Testament, that his father was

Joseph. They mean, they call him son of Joseph. They're talking about Joseph in the Old Testament because the way they're reading the

Old Testament is they look at Joseph's sufferings, and they go, uh -huh. Do you see how Joseph's suffering?

The Messiah is going to suffer. Like, not in the exact way that Joseph did, but they look at what

Joseph did, and they go, uh -huh, Messiah's gonna suffer the same way. They even call him, listen to this title they give

Messiah, the leprous one. And they call him, he's got leprosy.

And they say this, and this is by Rabbi Judah the Prince. Here's what he says.

The reason we call him the leprous one is, quote, "'Surely he hath borne our grief and carried our sorrows.'

We did esteem him stricken and spitten of God." He quotes Isaiah 53. Wow. Saying Messiah's going to suffer.

Now, again, this is not a modern rabbi. This is a rabbi back, you know, close to the time of Christ.

Now, this rabbi Judah the Prince is after Christ, but not too far, and not too many years after Christ he wrote that, you see.

They believed he would die. And when they talk about the death of Messiah, they say he's gonna die because in Zechariah it talks about the wounds in his hands.

It's talking about Messiah's wounds, they say, you see. So the rabbis,

I hate to say this, many times the rabbis are more messianic in their interpretation of the

Old Testament than Christian scholars are. Wow. Let that sink in for a minute.

I mean. Now, are you using the term Christian scholars loosely there?

Very much so. Very much so. The part of Christendom is what you really mean.

That's correct, correct. I appreciate your correcting me on that.

Let me see, what else do they, oh. Again, if he, see the

Jews had this problem in their thinking. They said Messiah's gonna die, but yet they also taught

Messiah's going to live forever. So they had a hard time putting that together, but we know today the solution to that, that's the resurrection.

He was raised from the dead. That's what happened. They don't describe Messiah as being raised from the dead, but they have what looks like a contradiction for them.

Namely, yes, he dies, but he lives forever, you see. And so again, even though they don't say it directly, that's the, again, the resurrection.

Something else they said, they said when Messiah comes, and again, I don't agree with totally what I'm about to tell you. They say there's gonna be sacrifices when he comes, but not sacrifices for sin offerings anymore.

Well, that tells you they believe that when he comes, he was gonna deal with sin. So clearly the rabbis had what this guy is denying.

They had a preexisting messianic paradigm. And basically I can show you from the rabbis that everything that they're saying here, forgive sins, raise the dead, and so forth, that's exactly what they say

Messiah's gonna do, you see. Yeah, well, yeah, if you'd like to share some more of that, in fact, let me just give our email address again for anybody who'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state and country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. I'm sorry, so you could continue there. Okay, let me give you two quotes of the rabbis.

It's very important to me. And there's two quotes, I think, that are just so essential to understanding how the rabbis see

Messiah. Now, again, they have no problem with Messiah. The Jewish problem is they don't see

Jesus as Messiah. I wanna make sure, again, our listeners understand this. But they have two quotes that I think are fabulous for Christians, and that's this.

The first one is, the prophets only prophesy of Messiah. Now, when they say that, you gotta understand, when they say prophets, they're not just talking about Isaiah through Malachi.

The way that the Jews, you can see this in the New Testament. The way the Jews describe the Old Testament is

Moses and the prophets. So when they say the prophets only prophesy of Messiah, what they're saying is the

Old Testament only talks of Messiah. That's what they're saying, okay? Their other statement is this.

The world was only created for Messiah. So, again, what they're saying is, all of human history is designed to go to Messiah.

He is the gold. He is the ultimate fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecies.

And therefore, the whole world, the whole history of the world is really aiming toward him.

Now, I think this is very important, and this is why sometimes when the rabbis, there's certain verses. Let me read you, there's a verse in Leviticus 26 that I think is very interesting, that the rabbis say is messianic, but I think if you and I were to think about this, we would say, wait a minute, where is this messianic?

It's in Leviticus 26. Let me see if I can find it very quickly here for you. Because it's not describing the future, it's describing the past.

And let me see here, hold on just a minute. I'm just going to repeat our email address while you're looking. Go ahead. chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And I also want to give a plug to one of our sponsors since our computer, the computer aspect of our program that airs commercials isn't working right now.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air. But I'm sorry, I would now like to return to our discussion,

Dr. Fuller. Okay, I was gonna talk about Leviticus 26, verse 13.

It says this, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you should not be their slaves.

And I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. Now, this is

Moses talking about something that happened earlier in time. He's not talking about the future. But yet the rabbis say, that's a messianic passage.

And you go, wait a minute, the Messiah's in the future, not the past.

Again, they'll say, no, no, they'll say all the prophets, meaning the whole Old Testament, only prophesize of Messiah.

And so what they see is that even Israelite history is a window into the messianic age.

So what they're saying is, you think it was a great redemption at the time of Moses, and he caused you to walk upright.

You just wait till Messiah comes. You've seen nothing yet. Wait till he comes in his redemption.

And so they would look at the Passover and the Exodus and all that, and they'd say, that's just a window into the messianic age, you see.

And that's why, again, with Joseph, you see how he's suffering? That's a window into the messianic age.

Messiah's gonna suffer. This is why Jesus, again, when he looks at the Old Testament, he'll say, do you see how they lifted up that serpent in the wilderness?

So they're gonna lift me up. You see that manna in the Old Testament? I'm the true manna.

And so you can see how the New Testament authors, or in the one that everyone gets stuck on sometimes is, out of Egypt have

I called my son. And you read that and you go, wait a minute, that's talking about Israel in the past.

Yes, but you've got to understand, all of Israelite history is a window into the messianic age.

It's as if when Messiah comes, he's going to repeat Israelite history. So just like they're gonna go to the wilderness for 40 years, he's gonna be tempted for 40 days.

He's gonna be baptized. They went through the sea, you see. Messiah is gonna repeat the history of the

Old Testament, but on a much greater scale, you see. This is the way the rabbis understood it.

I think they're absolutely right. And by the way, those two quotes, you can basically find them in the

New Testament. For instance, in Matthew chapter 11, it says, for the prophets in the law prophesied unto

John. That's very much the same thing that the rabbis were saying. In other words, the prophets in Moses everything they said was up until John.

Everything they were talking about ends with John the Baptist. And then what does it say in Colossians chapter one?

It talks about Jesus and it says, all things were made by him. All things were made for him.

So again, all human history, biblical or even outside the

Bible, all human history ultimately centers upon Christ. And that's why

I would say, no, we need to see Jesus from the very first verse of Genesis all the way until the very end of the

Old Testament. And then of course, in the New Testament, I mean, that goes without saying. We do have a listener from Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York, CJ, who wants to know, are there any theologically sound faculty members left at Calvin Seminary?

And if so, are they protesting such heresy that is being taught there?

That's a good question. I really don't know the answer to that. There's some guys there that teach, obviously on a better than let's say

Mr. Krupp does, who's again, I think he teaches Old Testament. But are there any people who would really push the type of doctrine that I would believe inerrancy of scripture, strict orthodoxy about the person of Christ, the

Trinity and so forth? I doubt it, to be honest with you. Wow, and then that was not always the case, right?

No, no, no, there used to be fantastic professors there, including people like Burkhoff. Yeah. Oh yeah, no, no, that was a fine institution.

Now this was affiliated with the Christian Reform Church? That's correct. And I guess it's gone downhill with the domination then.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a shame. And there's a lot of post -modernism being taught there today.

Really Krupp, whose quote I gave you, he's, and by the way, Krupp goes on basically to say even passages like Isaiah 53 have nothing to do with Jesus.

But yeah, those, he and many of the other professors there have now totally gone over to post -modernism.

And to me, there's no, orthodoxy and post -modernism simply cannot be brought together. Well, that's a shame.

Now, I am, I don't know if you are, because I haven't asked you this, but I happen to be a theologically

Reformed, a Calvinist, a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace. I don't know if you share those convictions, but one of the reasons

I'm adding that to my question is that obviously, according to my way of viewing the scriptures and of the gospel, there needs to be a supernatural miracle that actually occurs in the heart of a dead sinner before they can embrace the truth.

So I understand anyone, whether they are Jewish or Gentile, rejecting the truths of the

Messiah, the prophecies of the Messiah and so on, until they have been born from above.

But excluding that supernatural issue, what are the arguments that the rabbis have that would lead them to reject

Christ as fulfilling their messianic prophecies? Yes, let me just say first,

I totally agree with you. I'm completely Reformed in my thinking. I get a big fan of the

London Confession that I just gave you. I really like the Westminster Standards very much.

Of course, I'm Baptist, so I would make a couple of adjustments here and there, but really, the Westminster Standards are, to me, probably the best expression of theology that's out there.

But now with that said, the way the Bible describes it is it's a blindness of mind, and the

Jews of that time, obviously, they were under Roman persecution. And you can understand, and again,

I'm not absolving anything. I'm just talking about the historical situation. When you're under political oppression, a lot of times, and this is because we're sinners, we would prefer to get rid of our political oppressors rather than get rid of our sins.

And unfortunately, that was the situation they were in. But really, we're sort of that way, too. We would love for our politics in this country to get fixed, but if you say, well, to do that, we need to get sin fixed.

Oh, no, no, no, don't forget that. We're not gonna fix that sin. But look what Paul says, like in 1

Corinthians chapter one. There's really two ways of thinking. To the

Gentile mind, Messiah dying on the cross to be our substitute is absolute foolishness, but to the

Jews, it's a stumbling block. Because again, they were looking for the coming king. And one of the rabbis says that the days of Messiah will be just like our days today, except Israel will be the nation over all other nations.

Okay, so again, they're still looking for that. But just for Messiah to come and die for sins and not destroy the

Romans or whoever their current oppressors are, no, no. And again, when they look at Jesus, well, of course it's prophesied.

If you look at the very end of Isaiah 52, it talks about the Gentile nations.

And it says, it talks about Messiah sprinkling them. And it says this, a very important prophecy.

They who had not heard, meaning the gospel, they will believe. And they who did not see, they will see.

And what that means is the Gentiles, when Messiah comes, the Gentiles will receive him. But then

Isaiah 53, the very next verse, 53 one says, but who has believed our report? And so what's being prophesied at the very end of Isaiah 52 and the beginning of 53 is that when

Messiah comes, the Gentiles will receive him, but the Jewish people, not 100%.

There's always the elect. There's always a remnant according to God's election, but as a whole are gonna reject him.

That's what's said there. And of course, when Jesus, on the day of his crucifixion, he told the Jews, you will not basically receive me until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the

Lord. And that's gonna be toward the second coming, I believe. So I do believe that at the end of time, when the times of the

Gentiles have been fulfilled, then all Israel will be saved. And all Israel at that time will be saved, is what

I think. You mean all of those who are ethnically Jewish? I don't think it'll be 100 % necessarily, but I think it will be predominantly.

So I think when the times of the Gentiles are finished and the last Gentile is called in by the

Lord, then I think at the end of time, I think you'll see the conversion of the

Jews again. Now I'm not a dispensationalist here. The Jews will become part of the

Christian church, I believe. Well, the dispensationalists believe that two thirds of them will be murdered in the great tribulation.

Do they not? Some of them do, yes. Some forms of dispensationalism would see something like that.

Again, I believe we're in the tribulation now. I believe we've been in the last, see in the

Old Testament, the term last days is really days of Messiah. And so when

John talks about this is the last hour and things like this, yes, because we live in a messianic age, from his first coming all the way to his second coming.

And so that's the way I would see it. And we actually have a related question here. We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks, is your guest amillennial, pre -millennial or post -millennial?

Yes. Yes is a good answer. And let me say, sometimes when

I read the Bible, I say, you know, I could see that view on that verse. Overall, I'm an amillennialist,

I'm an amillennialist. Yeah, right now, that would be where I see myself, optimistic amillennial.

Yeah, now let me say this. I would see, when you say amillennialist, it sounds like I don't believe in a millennium.

I really do believe in a millennium, but I don't take it as a literal 1 ,000 years.

In the book of Revelation, there's a lot of types and symbols, and what it describes there is that Satan during this time is no longer deceiving the nations.

In the Old Testament, you know, the oracles of God were just to the Jews, and at that time,

Satan was deceiving the nations. But I think today that he's been not completely bound, but only bound in the sense that he's not able to deceive the nations like he was in the

Old Testament, and therefore, the gospel's going out to all nations today. And so I believe we're in the millennium right now, and at the end of the millennium, then you'll have, you know, the

Gog and Magog, Armageddon, you know, the last battle, as it were, and again, at that time,

I would see the resurrection, the final judgment, so I'd see a general resurrection, a general judgment, things like that, and then the hereafter, new heavens and new earth.

That's the way I would see it. Great, and we have John in Augusta, Maine, who asks, one of your former guests had presented the idea that there were many

Jews who, at one time, in the days of Christ, were accepting an understanding of Yahweh in a

Benetarian concept. They were not completely refuting or rejecting the notion of different persons of God, although, obviously, not having reached the point of being

Trinitarian. Does your guest agree with this, that there were many

Jews who had a Benetarian understanding of Yahweh? That's a very good question, and you can tell by the

New Testament that it's not like at the beginning of the New Testament they have to explain the

Trinity. They just describe the Holy Spirit and Jesus almost already from, let's say, a

Trinitarian framework. If you read some Jewish books, like in the old days,

I'm not talking about a theology book like we think of a theology book. For instance, I'm thinking of a work that's called the

Song of Solomon, but it's the Aramaic interpretation of it.

It's called a Targum. If you read in there, you can see how they personify the

Holy Spirit, and they, of course, and they look at Messiah, and again, they almost see him as divine.

And so, when you look at some of the Jewish writings, they are very,

I mean, they're Unitarian. Listen, they're Unitarian. I don't wanna give the idea that Jews are not strict

Unitarians, they are. But yet, when you read their literature, the way they personify the Holy Spirit, and they even use the term

Holy Spirit, when you see how they view Messiah, you can see how, when a

Jew comes to Christ, Trinitarianism is not a problem. And so, to answer the guy's question, our listener's question, the answer is, he's onto something here, that's right.

It's not that they were, I mean, they were still Unitarian, but they were really close.

And once Jesus comes, by the way, I mean, the question is, who is this man? And once you say he's

God, then Trinitarianism becomes inevitable. I mean, and that's where, there's not some theologians in a back room somewhere making up this doctrine, no, no, no.

Once Jesus came, it's like, wait a minute, and this man is

God, and that means, and now Trinitarianism becomes inevitable, really.

And now, when we look back in the Old Testament, and I love what B .B. Warfield says, he talks about the

Old Testament, he compares it to a dimly lit room, that when the light of the

New Testament is shined back on it, we're not reading the New Testament into the Old Testament, but when you shine that light back in there, you say, hey, wait a minute, the

Holy Spirit was there all this time. Jesus was there all this time. We just needed the light of the

New Testament to brighten up the Old Testament so we could see it more accurately. I think Warfield is exactly right.

By the way, our guest, our previous guest, who our listener in Perry County was referring to is

Douglas Van Dorn, and he did a program not long ago, Christ in the

Old Testament. If you want to look that up in our archive at ironsharpensironradio .com,

you can do so. That's ironsharpensironradio .com, and that's actually the title of his book,

Christ in the Old Testament, From the Shadows to the Savior. And Doug Van Dorn is also a

Reformed Baptist, and so I hope that if you missed that program, enjoy it. Again, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. What you were saying just now, it probably explains why some of the

Hasidic groups, when they have believed that a modern day figure was their

Messiah, they really border on, if not going over the border of worshiping that individual.

And that should be anathema in Judaism, but the way that they have embraced and responded to some of these modern day figures who have passed away, it seemed that they were really holding this figure up as a figure to be worshiped.

Yes. Even if you go to Israel today, sometimes you'll see pictures of these rabbis, and they'll call him

Messiah and so forth, and you're right, he's deceased. And they almost have, exactly like you're describing it, a worshipful attitude toward him.

That is correct. And we have, let's see, we have

Bebe in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know,

I've heard some Messianic Jews say that the

New Testament was truly written in Hebrew and then later translated into Greek.

Is this true, or is there any evidence of it? When it comes to the

Gospel of Matthew, there's an old church historian named Eusebius, and he was writing,

I think, in the 300s. And he mentions that Matthew wrote his

Gospel, or a Gospel of his, in either Hebrew, probably it was Aramaic, and also

Greek. So there may have been a Hebrew or Aramaic edition of Matthew at one time, but we don't have that.

We have the Greek. And, but there's no other book in the New Testament that there's any evidence whatsoever of a

Hebrew or Greek, excuse me, a Hebrew or Aramaic original. So I would have to disagree with Messianic Jews that would say that.

And again, the Lord did not preserve for us that Aramaic version of Matthew.

And therefore, it's Matthew in Greek, and it's properly translated, again, like a numeric and standard and so forth.

That is what is scripture for us, for the church. Yes, and obviously not all Messianic Jews hold that view.

That would probably be a minority view, even with Messianic Jews, but. Yeah, I hope so.

And I bet you that's true. I bet you that's true. And we also have a listener in, in, let's see here.

We have Terrence in Queens Village, New York. And he wants to know if you are familiar with the writings of Moses Maimonides.

A little bit, yes I am. He did, you know, a guide to the perplexed and so forth.

So yes, I am somewhat familiar with him. I think Maimonides also was the man who basically gives us the

Jewish calendar today. Like, I think this year might be like the year 5776, or maybe we're at the 77 now.

And that's been that many years since creation. And I believe that comes from Moses Maimonides. But yes, he was a famous Jewish philosopher and theologian.

And by the way, Terrence, since you're a first time questioner, you are receiving a free

New American Standard Bible. And that is compliments of the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible. Their website is nasbible .com, nasbible .com.

And it's going to be delivered to you absolutely free of charge as well by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

C as in Cumberland, V as in Valley, B, B as in Bible Book, S as in service .com,

cvbbs .com. Thank you very much, Terrence, for your question. And we look forward to receiving more from you in the near future.

I just - Yes. The Jews also say about Moses Maimonides, they held him in such high regard that they talk about from Moses to Moses, meaning from the biblical

Moses to Moses Maimonides. So they have a very high view of him, by the way. So I just want to mention that.

And I just need to now take a break since our system is not permitting me to air commercials at this point.

I do want to make sure that our listeners know about a conference that I will be attending,

God willing, January 19th through the 21st, 2017. This is the

G3 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. And the lineup of speakers is more lengthy and more impressive than any lineup

I've ever seen at a conference because I don't think I've ever seen this many speakers on the roster at a conference before.

I think there's nearly 20 speakers and they include Paul Washer, Stephen J.

Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Baucom, James R. White, Tim Challies, Conrad M.

Bayway, who I keep repeating this, but it just is so true. I think he is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful preacher on the face of the earth today.

He is pastor of Kobwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa. He's a reformed Baptist, helped to launch a reformed seminary there in Zambia.

But he is going to be speaking. Phil Johnson, who's the executive director of Grace to You Ministries with John MacArthur.

He will be speaking. Rosaria Butterfield, who we've had on this program at least twice.

She is a former leftist lesbian tenured professor at Syracuse University who was saved by the grace of God.

Totally transformed, is not only a heterosexual, but a Bible -believing Christian now and married to a conservative

Presbyterian pastor. And she is going to be giving her testimony there and Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio and a whole host of other folks.

If you'd like to have more information on this conference, go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com

and that's G and then the number three, conference .com. And please, if you do attend this conference, look me up at the

Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth, which is going to be right next to the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exhibitors booth.

And we are going to be working together to spread literature there and so on. And I would love to meet as many of my

Iron Sharpens Iron listeners as possible there. So hope to see you there in the future.

And that is January 19th through the 21st, 2017. And my thanks to Lindbrook Baptist Church in Lindbrook, Long Island for helping to finance my way to get there.

One of our sponsors, Lindbrook Baptist Church, Nassau County, Long Island, New York, and also

Pastor Josh Bice, who is orchestrating this event. He is enabling me to have a free exhibitors booth there and I really appreciate that and hope that Iron Sharpens Iron gains a larger audience than it already has.

When we have our exhibitors booth there, we thank them so much for accommodating us in that way.

And I also want to remind our listeners about one of our other sponsors who helped to make

Iron Sharpens Iron possible, helped to make our program enabled to relaunch a year ago when we had been on hiatus for several years.

Many of our listeners remember the old Iron Sharpens Iron program broadcasting out of WNYG and WGBB radio in New York.

Well, we relocated here to Carlisle, Pennsylvania and our key sponsor at the time,

Wading River Baptist Church in Suffolk County, Long Island. They helped with all the expenses necessary to get the program back on the air.

Pastor Ron Glass of Wading River Baptist Church is a former professor at Talbot School of the

Bible and he is a pastor there now and he is a dear friend and a powerful preacher and a brilliant man of God.

And if you live out in Suffolk County or are visiting there, especially the Eastern part of Suffolk County, I strongly urge you to visit there.

And if you don't have a church of your own that you are a member of, I urge you to seek them out and consider them for a church to join.

Their website is wrbc .us, that's wrbc .us

for Wading River Baptist Church. And we are discussing

Christ our Redeemer, the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history with our guest today,

Dr. Russell T. Fuller, who is professor of Old Testament Interpretation at the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, co -author of An Invitation to Biblical Hebrew.

And he is one of the speakers at the Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana.

For more details on that conference, which is being held next weekend, the 9th and 10th of September, Friday and Saturday, you could go to pittsburghbaptist .com.

That's P -I -T -T -S -B -O -R -O, baptist .com.

And you can find out all the information that you need when you click on Upcoming Events at the top of the masthead there at the

Pittsburgh Baptist Church website. And one of my dear friends, Pastor Josh Fryman, is also going to be speaking there, among others,

Pastor Josh Fryman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead, Long Isle, New York, which nearly became my home church before I moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which was an unexpected move at the time.

So I really strongly urge you to go to that conference if you either live in, near Indiana, or if you are able to get there by plane, train, or automobile.

And I do know, as I said earlier, that there are at least two that I know of in our audience who live in Indiana who have told us that they intend to go to the conference.

So we look forward to hearing a good report from you when you return.

Dr. Fuller, just to get a little bit more of a thorough definition of the course you teach there at Southern, what exactly makes the course

Old Testament Interpretation different than some other Old Testament studies?

It's a pretty general term, the way we're using it. And so most,

I think all of our Old Testament professors are called Old Testament Interpretation, but each of us usually have our own kind of specialty at Southern.

So again, language is more my specialty. We have Dr. Duane Garrett teaches here, and he's theology, and he does also what they call literature, so he's examining a lot of what people say about the

Old Testament. We have a Dr. Terry Jo Betts, and his specialty, again, would be history.

So he's done some archeology, but especially the history of the Bible, of the

Old Testament. He's in, let's say, background studies to the Old Testament. That's his specialty.

And then we have a man named Peter Gentry, and again, he's into Septuagint, sort of intertestamental, also into Old Testament as well.

And so he does a variety of things. Now, you brought up the

Septuagint, which is an interesting subject, the Greek Old Testament that was available in the time of Christ.

And there are Roman Catholic apologists who will try to use as a proof that what they would call the deuterocanonical books, which we would call the apocryphal books, they would use the

Greek Septuagint as proof that they were a part of the canon of the

Old Testament because they are a part of the Septuagint which Jesus used. How do you respond to that?

Yes, my response to that would be that just like when the, if you go back to the time of King James and the

Bibles produced at that time, many times they would put the apocrypha in Bibles like the

King James and so on, not because they thought it was inspired, because again, this is a Protestant -more translation, but because they thought that those intertestamental books, the apocrypha, can help give you historical background that can help you understand

Old and New Testament and sort of the link between the two, but not that they're inspired. When Paul, in Romans chapter two, when he talks about what advantages a

Jew have, he goes, well, first of all, to them were given the oracles of God, and we know what the

Jews thought the oracles of God were, and it's the Old Testament that we have today, again,

Moses and the prophets, the very books we have in Protestant Bibles today, not those extra books, not the apocrypha, those books the

Jews have never accepted as scripture, and even really to the

Catholic Church. Now, there were people all through history that accepted some of those books at times, but it really wasn't until the

Council of Trent in the 16th century that the Catholics made that a article of faith.

They made a dogma, whereas before, scholars could disagree over it. That's correct.

Because even Jerome, who wrote the Vulgate, who compiled the

Vulgate, he didn't believe that they belonged in the Old Testament. That's, yes, that's what it looks like.

That is correct. And so, yeah, those books, again, they're

Old Testament books. That's the first thing I should say. They're Old Testament books. And so, again, the

Jews ought to accept those if they were truly Old Testament books, but they say no because, again, what the rabbis will say is at the time of Malachi, the spirit of prophecy departed

Israel. And when you read Maccabees, it talks about they're looking for a prophet to come in order to sort of rededicate the temple that had been defiled during the time of Antiochus Epiphanes.

And so that shows you right there, they're looking for a prophet. They don't have prophets at that time because the spirit of prophecy departed with Malachi and it doesn't come back till John the

Baptist, you see. So this is absolutely amazing to me that serious

Roman Catholic scholars would insist that books that the

Jews never, anywhere in recorded history, accepted as a part of their canon, that they would say that they are a part, with certainty, a part of the

Old Testament canon. That's correct. And to me, that just cannot be. Also notice in the

New Testament, they never quote the Apocrypha as scripture. Now, Paul will sometimes quote books, even heathen poets, he quotes, but as scripture, he never quotes

Apocryphal writings. But from almost every book of the

Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, either as scripture or just as authoritative.

Let's put it that way. And by the way, our listeners may be interested in viewing a debate that I organized a number of years ago with my friend,

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. He debated Roman Catholic apologist,

Gary Machuta, on the issue of the Apocrypha, or as the

Roman Catholics call them, the deuterocanonical books. So you could go to the Alpha and Omega Ministries website, aomin .org,

aomin .org, and you can look up the debate with Dr.

James R. White, who was defending the historic Protestant view of the

Apocrypha, actually also endorsed, who was defending the Jewish view of the Apocrypha, and Gary Machuta, who is defending the fact that the deuterocanonical books are a part of the canon.

So go to aomin .org and just, I guess you could either put

Apocrypha in the search engine or Machuta, perhaps, M -I -C -H -U -T -A, is,

I think, the way he spells his name. But I'm sure you'll find it if you try enough different variations of that and get to that debate that you can order through them.

Quite a remarkable debate, as I recall. And Mr. Machuta was a very respectful individual and very bright and knowledgeable, but I think with certainty,

I believe he is on the wrong side of scholarship with that issue and the wrong side of faith.

But we do have another listener who is asking a question.

We have, actually, he's anonymous. He prefers to remain anonymous, and he is writing from North Carolina.

He says, I have a pastor of the church that I have been attending that I have not joined yet, but he is convinced that no other edition of the scriptures other than the

King James Version are God -breathed. They are not inspired of God, and therefore, those who use them are in eternal peril.

I find many other things about this church that are wonderful, and my heart has been knitted to the people there, so I don't know if this issue is serious enough to compel me to leave.

What are the thoughts of your guest on this? I know this is kind of off -topic, but I think it relates a little bit here.

Sure. Of course, there's some problems with that. If the

King James is the God -breathed document, what do you do with stuff before King James?

Right, I've never understood that. But also, remember this, the King James that is probably being used at his church is not the 1611, but it's the one that was edited, it was in the late 1700s.

It had a major revision to it. So even the King James has really changed.

And so, are you talking the 1611? You know, because if that's the God -breathed one, then they changed it.

The one he's got is not the 1611. Yeah, I'm sure he's reading, again, the one that was revised in the late 1700s.

No, this is... Remember, there was great

English translations even before the King James. Yeah, those who believed that the

Genevan Bible was superior, they condemned and looked down upon those using the

King James as having a liberal Bible. That's correct. That's exactly right. The Puritans, many of them, anyway.

That's right. It took about a generation before the King James really caught on, because people, again, preferred the

Geneva Bible. That's correct. And so, no, I would disagree with that.

Now, I know a lot of godly people who hold to that position about this, the King James and the King James only. But, you know, to me,

I'm just telling you the way I would view it. If a pastor was really pressing that hard, I don't think I could join the church.

I think that is an erroneous view. I think it's wrong. But again, let me just say,

I have a very high regard for the King James Bible. I think it's a fantastic Bible.

There'll never be, in my opinion, there'll probably never be another Bible in English like it that had that type of influence for over about 400 years.

That's absolutely remarkable. And the guys who worked on that translation, they did a marvelous job.

But yet, the problem is, you know, there's so many people in our country today that if you give them a King James Bible, they can't understand it.

Where something like a New American Standard or something like that, they can understand the gospel.

And really that's, when you look at the Greek that the New Testament's written in, it wasn't the scholarly

Greek of the time. It was Koine Greek. It was the Greek of the common person on the street, which shows you that God wants his word to be understood.

And so I think it's important that we do have modern translations so that the man on the street can understand

God's word. And I think today, and again, this is not the fault of the King James translators, but you know, we're 400 years later and the way they spoke

English and the way we speak English are different. And I think if you give that Bible to just regular people out there, that's gonna be a hindrance for the gospel.

And so I want them to have a Bible that they can understand like the New American Standard, because I think that's going to help them understand.

It's almost like giving them a, the King James is like giving them something in another language. And again, it's not the fault of the

King James, but it's just English language has changed. And so we need to translate Bibles so that modern speakers of English can understand

God's word. Yes, and let me also plug again, my friend, Dr. James R.

White of Alpha Omega Ministries for his book, The King James Only Controversy, which you could also get at AOMIN .org,

A -O -M -I -N .org, which stands for Alpha and Omega Ministries, A -O -M -I -N .org,

or you could go to CVBBS .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

And Dr. White also points out in that book that the translators of the

King James Bible did not view their translation the way King James onlyists view it.

They did not view it as the exclusive and superior version of the scriptures that were to be used to the exclusion of any other translation.

And they did not discourage or reject comparison when reading the

Bible. In fact, I believe that they encouraged it strongly to be viewed as a companion to other translations, so.

That's correct. And also, they used a lot of the translations earlier, like the Bishop's Bible, that really influenced them a lot.

The Geneva Bible influenced them, Wycliffe, even Luther's translation. And the

Vulgate, all those things were influential to the King James guys, to their translators.

But of course, they were looking at the Greek and Hebrew, but I'm telling you, all translators also look at how other translators have done it, just to see, okay, oh, that's pretty good, or, you know.

So they all do that. But the King James translators were heavily influenced by other translations of their day.

And it is ironic that many, not all, but many of the King James -only advocates today are

Baptists, and yet all of the translators of the King James Bible were

Anglican. And in fact, the Baptists were even persecuted by the Anglicans in the 17th century.

And I believe one was even, at least one Baptist was executed in the town square in London in 1611.

So why on earth these Baptists who, most of which would frown upon Anglicanism altogether, and not even view it as a part of the true church, how they would view this as some kind of exclusive version of inspired scripture, it would also involve miraculous revelation, wouldn't it, of the

Holy Spirit to guide these Anglicans to perfectly interpret the

Bible into the form it is in their King James Bible? That's right, that's right.

Yeah, that's a difficulty, that's a difficulty, that's correct, for that position.

Mm -hmm. Well, I'd like you to give us some recommendations, some advice, some counsel when we are evangelizing our

Jewish friends, family members, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, on the biblical evidence that Jesus is the

Messiah, that he fulfilled biblical prophecy, and perhaps some responses to the typical arguments that our

Jewish friends may have. Okay, yeah, when you're witnessing to Jewish folks, a lot of times it's already offensive to them.

The idea that they need to be evangelized,

I'm telling you, it's offensive. And the way Paul describes it is there's a certain jealousy, is the way

Paul describes it in Romans 11. When you witness to them and so forth, it doesn't go over well.

But here's what I have found, that once, like if you really, like I have a good relationship with many

Jewish people, once you establish a good relationship, they are more willing to listen to you.

If you just, sometimes, and I'm not saying just don't walk up to them off the streets, you can do that, but if you have a little bit of a relationship and they sort of know you and they have respect for you and you're just not some stranger, a lot of times they'll listen to you more.

It's still gonna be, it's not gonna be easy, but I've found that they've been far more open to talking about Messiah.

And usually what I'll say to them is, what do you think of Messiah? What, when

I'm talking to them about, I won't start off immediately with Jesus. I'll just be saying, what do you think

Messiah is gonna look like when he comes? And let them say some things.

And then what I would do is, and a lot of times what they'll describe is something similar to Jesus. And I'll say, well, look how he, and then

I'll show them how he does fulfill scripture and how things connect between him and the

Old Testament scriptures and how, again, it's prophesied that Jews aren't gonna reject him. And so forth.

And that there's going to be, the Jewish people are gonna be in a situation of dry bones for a long time.

And that's describing them in their spiritual state. But at the end of the period of the dry bones, when they get restored, it says, then they'll seek

David, their king. And in other words, they're gonna go a long time without Messiah. But then after that, they will recognize him as Messiah.

And of course it's David, their king, meaning the son of David. But when you talk to them, it's very similar to what you see in the, what

Paul, some of the objections Paul has. Jesus is a stumbling block, dies for our sins?

No, he's a conquering king. And I have to say to them, well, wait a minute, I agree with you.

He's gonna be a conquering king, but that's gonna be at the end of the Messianic age, not at the beginning. And you have to, again, show them how

Jesus really does fit what the scriptures say.

But again, also, I think it's very important if you pray for them, that the Holy Spirit will open their eyes for just like you said earlier, for anybody to come to Christ.

It's the Holy Spirit has got to call them and thereby convincing them of their sin and misery and lightening their minds in the knowledge of Christ and renewing their wills.

That's how he draws them, you see, through the calling of the Holy Spirit. And so that's what you, don't put it this way.

Don't think that you're gonna give them the magic argument that's gonna draw a Christian or a Jewish person to Christ.

The main thing we have to do is give them the gospel and then pray that the Holy Spirit will open their eyes.

Never feel like, oh, if I could have just said that right, oh, this, this. Now, yeah, I want you to say things right, but ultimately give them the gospel because the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.

And so it's the power of the gospel that enlightens the eyes that they'll see who Jesus truly is.

And that was the same with Paul. Paul in what, Galatians chapter one around verse 15, 16, talks about when

God was pleased to reveal his son in me and that's what you wanna do. So to me,

I would just give them, don't feel like you have to be an expert in Judaism in order to talk to them. Just give them the gospel just like you would give to anyone else.

That's what I would tell you to do. And the Holy Spirit will draw. Amen. And you mentioned that Christ will be a conquering king, but isn't there a very strong sense where spiritually he already was on Calvary.

Oh, that's correct. That's right. I was thinking the Jewish way that time, but no, he rules as king even when he was on this earth.

And then of course, after his resurrection, when all power and authority was given to him, he's sitting at the right hand of God, the father right now.

And absolutely, he reigns and rules right now. But at the end of time, that's when we'll see the ultimate.

Put it this way, all the enemies will be, you know, put under his feet at the end of time.

So yes, I appreciate you correcting me on that. Thank you. Yeah, and he conquered sin and death when he said, it is finished.

I mean, that was right. He was a conqueror in a more important way than people view earthly conquerors of earthly nations and earthly enemies.

That's correct. And he led captivity captive. That's correct. Amen, we'll praise

God for that. And there is a view that it's a controversial disagreement that Christians have, even very biblically sound

Christians who maybe even agree on most of what we have in the scriptures, but have other things that divide us.

But there are those who say that Satan right now is the

Lord of this earth. Obviously not one to be admired and worshiped as Lord, but they say he is the

Lord of this earth. And others will say, no, Jesus Christ is the Lord.

Satan is not the Lord of this earth. How do you respond to that controversy? Yeah, I would of course see that Jesus is the one who rules and reigns.

However, Satan is the prince and power of the air, but that's by, you know,

God's allowing that. Christ is allowing him to be the prince and power of the air right now. It talks about in scripture that Satan leads the unregenerate captive according to his will, talking about Satan's will.

Satan, I think right now is sort of in a sense, you know, death is sort of his kingdom, but Christ by his resurrection, of course, has defeated death.

And so, and of course, death is the last enemy that's going to be defeated.

But Christ by his resurrection though, has already dealt a death blow to Satan and his kingdom.

So I think Satan does have a kingdom right now, but of course that kingdom is effectually destroyed.

And the way I like to describe it, this is an analogy, and you know, not all analogies are perfect.

I'm from the deep South originally, even though most people can't tell by what I say, unless I say y 'all or something.

But we have some pretty good rattlesnakes down there. And when you kill a snake, that snake can still bite you.

You don't just play, when you kill a snake, you don't just play with it. Even though it's dead, it can bite you and put venom in you.

That's a very important lesson for some of our Pentecostal brothers to learn. But I hope you understand what

I'm saying. Yes, I do. He's a defeated foe, but he still has some venom. And if we play with him, he can still, he's still doing some, he still has a kingdom, but let me tell you, his head has been crushed.

And as Paul says, soon he will, Jesus will bruise him under your feet. And indeed, that day, that total bruise, the total crushing of his head was done on Calvary, but at the end of time, that last enemy will be destroyed and Satan will be thrown in the lake of fire for all eternity.

We look forward to that day. Yes, we do. Amen. And there are some very, for lack of a better term, some evil people who profess to be

Christians who would dismiss the notion that they are racist, they are anti -Semitic, and they dismiss the notion that Jesus was a

Jew. And they would insist that the true

Israelites are white Anglo -Saxons, Aryans, whatever you want to describe those who are in that group ethnically.

This is just pure nonsense, isn't it? Because if Jesus was not a Jew, he's not the

Messiah. Am I right? That is absolutely correct. As a matter of fact, now that you say that, I'm just going to read from Romans 1 .3.

Concerning his son who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh.

Well, David was a Jew. There was no lost tribes or anything.

It's through Abraham's seed that all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And of course, the seed of Abraham is

Jesus, according to Paul in Galatians chapter three. No, to hold that view is just awful.

That's just an awful view. What you hope is that those people will repent and look to Christ for salvation.

That's what they need. Yeah, praise God. Because I would agree with you. I have a hard time believing that people who subscribe to that kind of thing are regenerate.

It would not appear to me that that kind of thought pattern would be embraced by someone who is a temple of the

Holy Spirit. That's correct. Like 1 John says, there's certain things that you have no need for someone to teach you this.

You have the anointing abiding on you. If one of those people were to get saved, I think they would get out of it very quickly.

The spirit would lead them out of that very quickly. Yes, I agree with you. And well, we actually have our computer ability to air commercials now.

So I'm going to go to a final station break. And we're going to be back after these messages with Dr.

Russell T. Fuller. And I hope that you don't go away. And our email address, if you'd like to join us, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr.

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Iron Sharpens today. Welcome back, this is

Chris Arnzen and it looks like our technology is working but not quite up to snuff because we had other commercials that were supposed to air.

So hopefully that will all be restored by the time we return to you tomorrow with a live broadcast.

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

USA. Obviously, there are certain circumstances that would compel you to remain anonymous like an earlier listener who is a member of a church or actually considering joining a church that he saw as having some problematic teaching.

He obviously did the right thing by remaining anonymous because we don't want to publicly ridicule a specific congregation that we know nothing about.

So anyway, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

We do have a listener. Let's see, this one is

Cindy who is in Corpus Christi, Texas.

And Cindy asks, I have met Messianic Jews who claim to love

Jesus Christ, who believe that he is their Messiah, who believe that he is

God, but they reject the Trinity as an unbiblical and Roman Catholic invention.

Could you respond to this? And my follow -up question would be, would you embrace such people as brothers and sisters in Christ?

Could there be salvation for them in spite of their serious error?

Yes, I would have a problem, again, with this type of view of not seeing the

Trinity. The Trinity is a foundational doctrine, and to me it's not just a

Catholic doctrine, but Protestants, if you go back and look at, from the earliest

Reformers through the Westminster Confession, and just keep reading through time, you can see that the

Trinity, the Nicene Council, and so forth, what they produced, really, was just the proper view of how we view

God and Jesus, because what you have is one God, but yet the Father is

God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, you see. And so these three are one

God, the same in substance, meaning they're one divine substance, and each of the three persons of the

Godhead, obviously, are all equally God, and they all have the fullness of the

Godhead in each one of them. And don't ask me to explain that. I don't explain it, but that's what Scripture teaches. And they each have what's called personal properties, so that we can see that there are...

It's one God, but yet three subsistences, or three persons. But when we say three persons, you don't want to think of it exactly like a human person.

There's no analogy that's going to work for the Trinity. And so, you know, it's proper to the

Father to beget the Son. That's His property, His personal property, is begetting the Son. And for the

Son to be begotten of the Father, and for the Holy Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son. But this is from all eternity, you see.

So there was never a time when the Son was not. He was begotten of the Father from all eternity.

And so I think the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is one, but yet the

Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, is something that all

Orthodox Christians must hold to, in my opinion. And what

I would love to do is be able to talk to a congregation like that, and say, look, who is Jesus? And clearly the

New Testament writers tell us who He is, that He is God, that the titles of God are given to Him in the

New Testament, the attributes of God are given to Him in the New Testament, the works of God are given to Him in the

New Testament, and the worship of God is given to Christ in the New Testament. And the same can be said of the

Holy Spirit. And therefore they're all three one, you see.

By the way, let me say one more thing, because this is important for the discussion I'm going to do at Pittsboro Baptist Church in Indiana.

Anytime the Father does something, whether it's in the Old Testament, New Testament, whatever, what it says in John chapter 14, what

Jesus says is, when the Father does His works by me, through me, in me, you see, so anytime one member of the

Trinity is working, all members are working. Or what Jesus says in John chapter 5, my

Father is working until now, so I have to work. Because, again, when one member of the

Trinity is working, all three are working, you see. And so in the Old Testament, when you see

God doing something, that's not just God the Father. So every time you see God in the

Old Testament, that's God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And so each of them work together, you see.

This is what's called in theology the inseparable operations of the Trinity, of the

Godhead. And that's correct. When the Father works, how does He work? He works through the Son. And when the

Father and Son work, how do they work? Through the Spirit. And so, again, the doctrine of the

Trinity is absolutely essential. And in my opinion, to reject it is to really reject

Scripture at such a fundamental level that I would not recognize them as Christian brothers.

Now that would dovetail into others that would view, and I believe, in fact, the listener did say that these messianic so -called groups identified

Jesus as both Messiah and God while simultaneously rejecting the Trinity. So these would probably be in the realm of modalism, like the

Oneness Pentecostals. Is this also an issue that's so serious that you view it as placing those who adhere to it outside of saved brothers and sisters in Christ?

Yeah, I would not recognize them as brothers in Christ if they believed into a modalism or what was historically called

Sabellianism. In other words, what they're saying is there's one God, but yet He appears in three different modes.

There's not separate... And when I say separate,

I mean, again, they're one, but not separate subsistences. Or there's not personal properties between the

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or, how do you explain in the Scriptures how they can talk to each other using pronouns like I, You, Him, and so forth?

The way the New Testament describes Him, it's not one God in three different types of modes or manifestations.

No, it's three persons in one God. There's a triunity going on here, you see.

And so there's a sense in which the Father is distinct from the Son, and the Spirit is distinct from the

Father and Son, even though there is a sense in which they're one. So there's a sense in which they're one, and there's a sense in which they're three, but we're not teaching tri -theism here, you see.

No, we're not saying there's three gods. No, they're equal in power and glory.

They're equal in substance. They're the same divine substance, you see. So, again,

I would reject this modalism that's being taught, yes. We have

Robert in White Plains, New York, who says, I know that the Catholic catechism teaches that Jews and Muslims adore the same

God, the one true God that we Christians worship.

Many conservative evangelicals, if not most, would reject the concept of Allah embraced by Muslims as a false god, and yet somehow many of them seem to be inconsistent where they will view a

Jew's concept of God as being, in some sense, faithful to biblical understanding.

Can you have your cake and eat it too in this area? If you reject any concept of a non -Trinitarian

God, could a Jew be rightly viewed as worshiping the true

God of the Hebrew Scriptures? That's a good question. And what

I would say to that is that the God of the New Testament is the God of the Old Testament, but the

God of the New Testament is more, we get a greater revelation of Him in the

New Testament. Just with the Old Testament, we would be more Unitarians, I believe.

But again, as I said earlier, once Jesus comes, it forces us into being

Trinitarians. And I don't mind that. That's exactly correct. So I would say now that the

Jews, with this new revelation through Jesus Christ and so forth, yes, the

Old Testament God is the same as the New Testament God, but they have a very defective view of Him now, is what

I would say. Now you're not saying, or should I say, are you saying, but I believe that you're not saying that the

Hebrew Scriptures teach Unitarianism. You're just saying that the way that they concealed the fullness of the

Godhead until the ministry of Christ and the New Covenant, that one could easily view

God in a Unitarian sense. Is that what you mean by that? That's what I meant to say. Thank you for getting me out of that heretical state.

I appreciate that. What you're saying is absolutely correct. In other words, what I meant is, if we only had the

Old Testament Scriptures, and we did not have the New Testament revelation, we would be like the

Jews, I think, in that way. But once we have the New Testament revelation, and a fuller understanding of who

God is, it's Trinitarianism now. So what I would say is, it's still the same God between the

Old and New Testament. What I would say today is that Jews would have a defective view of the

God of the Old Testament. But they do have a view of the true God, but I think it's defective.

Whereas when I look at something like Islam, oh no, no, no, no. It's wrong from the get -go.

I hope you understand. Now look, I believe that there is salvation in no other but Christ.

There is no salvation in any other but Him. And so I don't believe just being a sincere

Jewish person, Muslim, or whatever. And I don't think that all religions all lead to the same

God. Oh no, no, no. I don't hold to anything similar to that at all. And I will give to the

Jews that, again, they have the same God as the New Testament God, but they don't understand

Him properly. So therefore they have a defective view of the God of Scripture, Old and New Testament.

But the other religions, I would say, no, completely defective. Now would you say that the prophets in the

Old Covenant, who were actually receiving new revelation at the time it was new, who were actually communicating with God, or God was communicating with them, in a much more vivid and real sense than even somebody reading the pages of the

Torah or the scroll, would you not say that they had perhaps a deeper understanding of the nature and Godhead, the nature of God and the

Godhead, than the average Jew might have had? I mean, did you think that they were totally also blind to a

Trinitarian concept? Or is this something that we just don't know and cannot know?

It's difficult to know, but I'll say this. In the Old Testament, it is clear that Messiah would be divine, that there is a divine

Messiah. One of the titles in Isaiah chapter 9 is

Mighty God. So a divine title is given to Messiah.

Did Isaiah fully understand what he was writing there? If he did, then he's on the way to Trinitarianism.

But remember what Peter says. Peter talks about how the prophets in the

Old Testament searched and made inquiries. So you can see they didn't have full understanding of their prophecies.

So they were searching out. What they were doing was probably looking at other prophets and trying to put the pieces together.

But there's different places in the Old Testament where Messiah is divine.

Also, for instance, in Jeremiah 23, where it talks about Messiah, and his title there is

The Lord Our Righteousness. It uses a divine proper name, Yahweh, as Messiah.

Messiah's title there is Yahweh is Our Righteousness.

So he's being called directly God. I mean, Yahweh himself, you know.

So, I mean, you can't be any stronger in a statement of the divinity of Messiah than something like that.

So it's there in the Old Testament. But I think it wasn't until Jesus came that we're really like,

OK, now what do we have here? We're in the Old Testament. I'm not sure they fully understood it.

Now again, I'm with you. Moses, those prophets, and even passages like, you know, when

Jesus says, Abraham, rejoice to see my day. Well, how much of it did he actually see?

Did he understand the divinity of Christ? It's possible. It's very possible.

Well, we're going to try to give honor to whom honor is due one last time, and go to our final station break.

And don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Russell T. Fuller after this message.

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen, and we thank the Lord that he resolved our technical difficulties and enabled us to air the commercials for those who keep

Iron Sharpens Iron on the air through their sponsorship and advertising dollars. And we have been interviewing for the last nearly two hours with about ten minutes to go,

Dr. Russell T. Fuller, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and co -author of An Invitation to Biblical Hebrew.

He's one of the speakers, in fact, the plenary speaker at the Christ Our Redeemer conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana next

Friday and Saturday, September 9th and the 10th. And the theme of the conference is the centrality of Christ throughout redemptive history.

If you'd like to get more information on this conference, how you can attend, the website is pittsburghbaptist .com,

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Upcoming Events option at the top of the masthead of the website.

That's pittsburghbaptist .com, and please let everyone know there that you heard about the conference from Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Dr. Fuller, I would like you, oh, actually, before I ask you to wrap up things with a summary of what you most want etched in their hearts and minds,

I was just curious if you know from any genealogical investigation you may have done, are you related to the great

Andrew Fuller? You know, I've talked to some Fullers who've really investigated our past, and they say that we all go back together to England somewhere.

But I really don't know. I hope I am. But I'll tell you this one, though. What people who are kind of experts in Fullers, especially the ones who come from South Carolina, because originally my folks are out of South Carolina, they said we're usually preachers or criminals.

I'm on the preacher side so far, and hopefully the Lord will keep me there. Well, I would like you to summarize those things that you most want our audience to remember when they leave this program today.

Well, I think it's important, again, as we read our Bible, that we realize there's one author of Scripture, and God Himself is the author of Scripture.

Or when you look at the end of 2 Peter 1, it's the

Spirit of God moved men in order to write Scripture. And therefore, even though it's written by different human beings, it's the

Spirit of God who's the ultimate author of Scripture. And therefore, there's going to be a consistency in Scripture.

That's why, again, according to the London Confession and the Westminster Confession, ultimately,

Scripture needs to interpret Scripture. And we need to understand that as we read

Scripture that there is a person who's coming from the

Old Testament, the way it's described in the Old Testament. There's a person who's coming who'll be the fulfillment of all the

Old Testament prophecies, all the salvific promises in God, which are yea and amen, they're fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

And so, again, Jesus is not just in the New Testament or just a couple of places in the Old Testament. But we need to be able to read

Scriptures and see Christ in it from Genesis 1 -1 all the way through.

Now, again, it's not that Jesus is equally on every page of Scripture. You know, like when you get certain passages about clean and unclean.

Obviously, these things are showing us that in every aspect of our life, there needs to be holiness. And therefore, you know, there needs to...

Christ is the center of our righteousness and so forth. So we've got to be careful not to, you know, just force

Christ into every single thing in Scripture and sort of misinterpret it that way.

Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with Harold Camping, who really morphed into quite a dangerous heretic before leaving this earth.

And he did that. I believe he used a lot of eisegesis in the

Old Testament. That's exactly right. So sometimes it's direct prophecies of Christ.

Sometimes it's through types and through certain ordinances in the Old Testament.

Sometimes the way Christ is in the Old Testament is in different ways, and we've got to understand that.

But any time, again, that you see God, especially when God, like, you know, for instance, in the New Testament it says, no man has seen

God at any time. But yet there's passages where people do see God in the Old Testament. And again, we can tell.

Like, when you compare Isaiah chapter 6, verse 1, to, like, John chapter 12, there's no doubt it's

Jesus who they saw in the Old Testament. So Isaiah, when he saw the Lord high and lifted up, according to John chapter 12, he saw

Jesus in a pre -incarnate form, you see. And so I think we need to read our

Bibles in a way that is very consistent, that we see that Christ is the glue that holds it all together.

Again, all things are made for him, by him, and for him. And I think we need to see him as the center of Scripture.

You know, everything in the Old Testament is pointing forward, everything in the New Testament is pointing back toward him. And that's what all of Scripture is about.

It's about him. And we've got to read Scripture in a very consistent, and in a way that it goes together, because there's one author.

And therefore, we need to let Scripture interpret Scripture. We need to compare Scripture with Scripture. That's what I'd like to leave to your readers today.

And if you could, perhaps for a final two moments, leave our Jewish listeners with a couple of words, because even though there may not be any

Jewish listeners listening to this live broadcast, this program will be archived, perhaps

God willing, for decades to come. And I'm sure that eventually Christians who appreciated this discussion will share the

MP3 with their Jewish friends. So if you could, leave our listeners who happen to be

Jewish with a word for about a minute and a half now. Sure. I think, again, in the

Old Testament, again, even Orthodox rabbis would agree with me that Messiah is the fulfillment of all the

Old Testament prophecies. And I think it's important as Jewish folks to look at the

New Testament, read the New Testament, read the Gospel, and I think as they look at the

Word of God, as they look at the New Testament, and see how Jesus and the way the

Messiah is presented in the Old Testament, how those connect, I think that the

Holy Spirit can bring them unto saving faith, that they too can see

Jesus as the true Messiah. And, again, God's not through with the Jewish people.

He's saving Jews today. And I think at the end of time, you're going to see all

Israel be saved. Now, I'm not talking about all Jews from all ages, but at that time. And so this

Gospel is the way Jesus and Paul, it says, first was given to the Jews, then the Gentiles. And so I think the

Jewish people today need to look at Jesus and who He is and how

He connects to the Old Testament. And I think by the Holy Spirit, they too will come to see

Jesus as the Lord and Savior and as the Messiah, the fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecies. Amen.

Well, I want to thank you so much, brother, for being on our program today. I definitely want you back on Iron, Sharpens Iron as soon as possible.

And I'm sure that there are many other discussions we could have that will benefit our listeners. And do you have any contact information you care to share?

Yes, you can reach me. We have a website for Southern Seminary. And you'll find my email there.

My name is Russell Fuller, so it's rfuller at, and then the initials for Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sbts .edu

for education. And again, if you forget that, just look for Southern Seminary on the internet, and you can find my email.

And please feel free to email me. It's been a blessing being with you today. I've really enjoyed it.

I hope our listeners have as well. God bless you, Chris, and God bless you listeners out there. Great.

And if you could just hold on for a moment after the program, I'd like to just finalize the conversation with you.

Okay. And I hope everybody always remembers for the rest of their lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater