August 19, 2016 Show with Douglas Van Dorn on “Christ in the Old Testament”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet earth listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 19th day of August 2016.

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And I'm very happy to have back on the program again Pastor Douglas Van Dorn who is pastor of Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado and today we are discussing one of his books,

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Christ in the Old Testament. And if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Pastor Doug, our email address is

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ChrisArnton at gmail .com. ChrisArnton at gmail .com

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and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Douglas Van Dorn.

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Thanks for having me on Chris, I appreciate it. And as we always do, if you could describe a little bit about Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado, even though you've already done that in the past, there are people who are discovering

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Iron Sharpens Iron, it seems, every day for the first time listening in, and we would love to have you give a further explanation of where it is you pastor.

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Yeah, we started the church back in 2000 and end of 2002, I guess, and kind of constituted the next year.

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It is a confessional Reformed Baptist Church. As far as we know, there are not very many in Colorado.

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We were the only ones that we knew about of any persuasion for most of our history, and then

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I've met a couple of guys that are, I think, 1644 confessional guys or, you know, that kind of a thing, but we're kind of out here alone, but...

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And you would be a 1689 confessional.

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Yeah, we're a 1689 church, right? Right, also known as the Second London Confession, and that is the confession that is nearly word -for -word identical to the

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Westminster Confession, and that was by design because the

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Baptists of the 17th century wanted to demonstrate harmony with their

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Presbyterian brethren and not be viewed as some kind of a novelty or a cult or anything like that.

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They wanted to say, hey guys, we're very much like you except for the distinctives we have in regard to church polity in baptism.

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So that's pretty much the 1689 in a nutshell, isn't it?

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Yeah, I think that's a fair way to talk about it. And of course, it also incorporates some of the Savoy Declaration, which is the

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Congregationalist statement of faith or confession, and so it's a very sad state of affairs that today there are very few

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Congregationalist churches or churches that wear that name, Congregationalist, that would even know what that confession of faith is, and if they did, they would certainly, most of them, not ever adopt it, which is a sad state of affairs

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I'm speaking particularly about the United Church of Christ, which is the denomination that most typically today wears the sign

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Congregationalist. So the book that you have written,

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Christ in the Old Testament, this is obviously a very important subject, especially when we evangelize our

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Jewish friends, family, loved ones, and neighbors, and colleagues from the shadow to the

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Savior. If you could tell us why you initially had the, you felt the need to even write this book, because there have been books on this subject that have been in print, some of them for centuries, and why did you feel that there was a void that needed to be filled?

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Well, this book was started as a series of, I think, Sunday night lessons in our church, and I had been learning about this subject from a different perspective than most of the books that are written on Christ in the

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Old Testament. In fact, it's kind of related to the subject of giants that we talked about when

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I was on the show last time, believe it or not. I had discovered this scholar named

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Michael Heiser, who works for Lagos Faithlife Company out in Washington, and long story, but he had written a book that he was giving away for free at the time, and I saw that it had some things of interest in it, so I started to read it, and it had some stuff on giants in it that got me thinking about that, and then it also had a bunch of stuff on Christ in the

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Old Testament in ways that I had never thought of in my entire life. So this is a lot more than just talking about Christ in terms of prophecy, which

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I grew up with that, or even in typology where something in the

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Old Testament foreshadows Him, whether it's an event or a name of a person or anything like that.

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It's much deeper than that. This is an incredibly deep ocean that we're about ready to wade into, depending on how far we get into it.

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So I wanted to make it available to people in a book form.

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It's also available on the DECA blog, which I sometimes write for with several of my other friends, so you can get that same material if you go to the

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DECA blog and start looking up Christ in the Old Testament. Great. Let me give our email address again for anybody wanting to join us on the air.

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It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. You may remain anonymous if you would like, especially if you are bringing up something perhaps that your church disagrees with, or perhaps you are

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Jewish and you just don't feel like identifying yourself at this point in time, asking a question about Christ in the

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Old Testament, or as you would phrase it if you're Jewish, the Jewish scriptures or the

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Hebrew scriptures. But we will accommodate your request if it makes you feel more comfortable to be anonymous.

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Well, before we even go into the Old Testament, where in the

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New Testament does it speak about Jesus Christ being a fulfilled prophecy in the

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Old Testament? You're talking in terms of actual prophecies themselves?

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Or even anywhere in the New Testament that you would like to start with and reflect on why the study of the

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Old would be profitable to us. Well, there's a, you know, there's just,

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I'm actually of the opinion, Chris, that the entire New Testament is basically a commentary on the

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Old Testament, where it is actually seeing the Lord Jesus as the fulfillment of, whether it's the law, or whether it is typology, or whether it's prophecy, or whether it's various terms that were used for a very specific person that shows you know, at the very beginning of Genesis chapter 1 and going all the way through to the end of Malachi, there is a figure that is there that too often,

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I think, in our, you know, even in our evangelical and Reform context, we just think of this person as God, but we, you know,

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God the being, God in His nature or essence. Some people might think of Him as the

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Father, but really it is God coming to us through the person of the

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Son in the Old Testament, and when we miss this, we end up doing all sorts of just terrible things to the

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Word of God. I mean, I grew up in circles where some of the people, certainly not all of them, but some of them saw just this great chasm between the

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Old Testament God and the New Testament God, where, you know, the God of the Old Testament is this warmonger, this hate -filled deity that, you know, likes to kill people and give horrible laws, and you know, all this kind of stuff that you hear.

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And then the New Testament, we get this lovey -dovey Jesus who never has anything bad to say, and is just accepting intolerance of everything that we do.

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I mean, that's a bad reading of not only the Old Testament, but also the New Testament, of course, but it shows that people have this view that there's really basically two gods that are going on in the

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Scripture, and Jesus is not the same deity as that God in the

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Old Testament. So, the New Testament, when it's writing its books, it's taking this from every possible angle, and prophecy is just one of them.

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I mean, we could go to things like Psalm 2, which is used more than just about any other psalm, or maybe

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Psalm 110, where you see two figures in those psalms.

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The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand and I'll make your enemy the footstool.

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That's Psalm 110, quoted by Hebrews several times and found in Acts. Or Psalm 2, where you've got this idea of a son, an only begotten son, who is going to inherit the nations, and you better kiss the son lest he be angry with you.

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And this is pointing to somebody who is far greater than David the psalmist, who actually wrote the thing.

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So, and there's just a million prophecies about Christ that we could go to. Yeah, yeah, you're right that there are people that seem to set up a contrast between God the

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Father and God the Son, like bad cop, good cop. You know, that God the

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Father, if he had his way, would just be nothing but wrath, and Jesus would be nothing but mercy and kindness and gentleness.

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And obviously the scriptures paint a different picture than that contrast, or a much deeper and rich understanding of the person and work of the

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Godhead, or the three members of the Godhead. And if you could also, we'll start with some of the pictures of Christ that we have in prophecy to begin with, and then we'll move on to typology and the law.

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Did you have any particular prophecies that you want to think about or look at? Well, like for instance,

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Isaiah 53 is a prominent text that Christians will go to, to the suffering servant.

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They will go to that text as a picture of the Messiah, and yet many

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Jews, in fact most, would resist and say that that has nothing to do with Jesus, that it's a picture of Israel or something.

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If you could go to that to begin. Yeah, Isaiah 53 is not a very liked passage, because it seems to pretty clearly point to an individual, a figure, not just a corporate entity of Israel.

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And of course the New Testament comes along and takes the ideas of Isaiah 53 and this person who's being beaten, and he's being handed over basically by God himself to die.

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And then at the end of the thing, he's raised from the dead, and in the midst of it, he's taking our transgressions upon himself in a way that could only be true of some kind of a sacrificial lamb.

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And so this is what many of the Jews in the New Testament era were actually looking for, this kind of a figure, believe it or not.

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And the New Testament comes into this and says that it's been fulfilled in this person called

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Jesus of Nazareth and the works that he did when he was on the earth. And even if we go back further, all the way back to the book of Genesis, where Christians will make much of the fact that, like for instance in Genesis 1 -26, where God says, let us make man in our image according to our likeness, we as Christians will typically say that this is

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God the Father speaking to the other persons of the Godhead, whereas the

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Jews may respond and say this is merely a plural use that depicts majesty, like royalty often does when they speak about themselves in a third person or in a plurality and so on.

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But if you could comment, is that God speaking with other members of the Godhead there? Believe it or not, that's not actually my view.

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If I was going to go to the Trinity and try and argue from the Trinity in Genesis 1,

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I would actually do it in the first three verses instead of going that late, because I think you've got a pretty clear indication there that you've got

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God creating, but he's doing it as the Spirit is hovering, and he's doing it through his

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Word that John picks up in the very first verse of his Gospel and says is

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Christ. I really hope that we get to that later, but the plural, let us make man in our image,

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I actually go with Old Testament scholarship on this, where they actually believe that this is

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God speaking to a heavenly council of beings, and it's a heavenly scene in this council, and God is saying let's go make man in our image, and then the very next verse those plurals turn to singulars, where he says

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I will make man, I will do this, I will do that. And actually this whole concept of a divine council was very important in my own journey into thinking about Christ in the

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Old Testament in ways that I had never considered before. And before we even start looking at some more specific references,

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I don't know if you were familiar with the late Harold Camping. He was someone who basically over time morphed into a cult figure, and he had some very novel approaches to exegesis, which were most often involving eisegesis, where he was importing ideas.

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But one of the things that his biblically orthodox critics would say about him is that he was often involved in eisegesis and seeing

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Jesus in parts of the Old Testament where he really wasn't there. Isn't that also a danger when we go looking back into the

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Old Covenant, is to really twist and bend things to make it appear as if it's some kind of a prophecy or discussion about Christ?

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Yeah, I think it can be a danger. I mean, and it's kind of a fine line, and good

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Christians actually disagree among themselves, let alone with a guy like Harold Camping. They'll disagree amongst themselves over different parts of the scripture that one person will say, this is talking about Christ, and another one will say, well, no, it's not, and actually have kind of a saying to people about this that, you know,

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I figure nobody can be perfect in how they interpret the Old Testament with regard to the person of Christ.

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So you're going to make errors one way or the other. You're either going to not see Him in every place that He is, or you're going to see

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Him in more places than He is. Because if you're not perfect, it has to be one of those two, right? So I tell them, you know, you want to be as responsible as you can be.

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You want to be as, you know, you want to have good reasons, good scholarship behind your reasons for seeing

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Christ where you're seeing Him. You don't just want to do what a seminary professor of mine called helicopter exegesis, which is really what you're talking about with eisegesis, where you just kind of hover down on a verse and just make it say whatever you want.

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That's not acceptable, but if you have to err, if I have to err, I actually want to err on the side of seeing

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Christ in more places than He is, because when I die and go to heaven, He could ask me one of two questions, and I guess

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I'd rather have Him ask me, why did you see too much of my son in the Bible, rather than why didn't you see enough of my son?

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Right. I guess the main issue would be if where you saw

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Him in the Old Testament, if He wasn't there, if it formed an unbiblical or heretical idea about Christ, that would be where the danger would be,

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I'm assuming. Sure. Oh, absolutely. That could be definitely a danger. Well, we have another classic text

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I'd like you to talk about for a bit in Psalm 2. I will surely tell you of the decree of the

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Lord. He said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you. If you could explain that one.

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Yeah, so this of course unhandles Messiah, for anybody who loves to listen to that, but it's talking about this enthronement of a future king, and you go to verse 6, as for me,

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I have installed my king upon Zion, my holy mountain. Now, you have to ask this question of who is the

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I there, and that has to be God, and I would call that God the Father, and then you've got the king who's being installed on Zion.

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You know, and I guess in the original setting, we could think that it's maybe King David, but this is a prophecy of the

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New Testament season, and so that king who's enthroned, installed upon Mount Zion is actually

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Christ, and so the next verse says, you know, I will tell of the decree of the Lord.

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He said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give the nations as your inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as your possession.

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Now, that verse, verse 7, is actually probably the most important verse in my mind for seeing and understanding

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Christ here, because there's a whole worldview that's going on behind here, where, you know, going back to Deuteronomy, and even back into Genesis, and the promise of the seed that's given to Eve, the idea is that there is coming a day when the

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Son of God is going to inherit all the nations. So there's really a whole story that goes behind this, if you'd like to talk about it.

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Oh yeah, sure. Let's see what I'm saying. So if we go to, if you just kind of go to the event with the

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Tower of Babel, you end up having these nations that are dispersed over the earth, because they have tried to reach up into heaven, and God has enough of that, and so he separates them into 70 nations.

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If you read the table there, there's a list of 70 nations, and curiously, Israel is not one of those nations, and so the thing that really got me started thinking about this is a very specific text in Deuteronomy 32 that's very, very, very related to Psalm 2 that you bring up there.

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The text is Deuteronomy 32, 7 through 9, and Dr.

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Heiser actually calls it the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. He sees it as so important, and he wrote a 40 -page paper that was in the

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Bib Sac journal on a section of this text, and the passage says, remember the days of old and consider the years of all generations.

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Ask your father, and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. So he's talking about some time long, long ago, long before Moses, and then the next verse, verse 8, when the most high, so it's called

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Elyon, that's the name there for the most high, gave the nations their inheritance, and the event that's being spoken of there is the

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Tower of Babel, and the next part of that verse explains what he's talking about.

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He says, and I'm reading from the ESV here, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

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But the Lord's portion in verse 9 is his people, and Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance.

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So there's that language, inheritance, that you find in Psalm 27. So what's happening here is that you go back and you can read this in Deuteronomy 4, you can read it in Deuteronomy 17, you can read it in Deuteronomy 29, there's these verses that talk about how

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God has not allotted to Israel. Allotment is the language. The stars of heaven, and then it calls them the host of heaven to bow down and worship them.

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And the idea that, and I've looked extensively into this, Chris, you can find this idea in Plato, believe it or not, where they say that the heavenly beings, we'll call them angels for the sake of our discussion, were given over to rule over the nations at the

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Tower of Babel, and Deuteronomy describes this in terms of a punishment, that you guys wanted to reach up into heaven and have your religious fun apart from my will, and, you know, apart from me, the

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Lord God who created you, so fine, I will give you over to them, and they will be your inheritance, and you will be their inheritance, and you're made for each other.

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But, verse 9 here in Deuteronomy 32 says, but Yahweh's portion is his people, and Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance.

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Now, the Lord there is not speaking of the Father, because you've got the most high in verse 8.

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There's two figures that are here. There's the most high, and then there's the

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Lord. And the Lord there is seen, should rightly be seen, as who will later become, well, actually he was earlier in Genesis, throughout

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Genesis, the angel of the Lord. He's got Yahweh's name, and he actually is

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Yahweh's God, and he's the one that, you know, walks among the patriarchs.

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He's the one that comes to Abraham's camp, and Abraham washes his feet, and sacrifices, you know, a calf to him, and has a great meal, and later that night he says to Sarah, I will return in a year, and you will have a son.

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I will give you this son. And later in, you know, the story, he comes with two other angels, and those two angels go to Sodom and Gomorrah, and they go to Lot's house.

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There's that whole scene with him trying to take Lot out of Sodom, because the Lord is going to destroy

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Sodom and Gomorrah. And then you find this really strange verse in Genesis 19 -24 that says, the

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Lord, so you got Yahweh, rained down fire and sulfur from the

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Lord, Yahweh, out of heaven. And you end up having this huge discussion going on among rabbis and then early

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Christians. I've got 20 different quotes from church fathers on this verse, where they're all saying, and this included some of the rabbis, believe it or not, that there's actually two

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Yahweh's in this verse. You've got the Lord who's there on the earth, talking to Abraham, making a covenant with him, having an argument at the end of chapter 18 over how many people he's going to save, and he calls down fire from Yahweh who's in heaven.

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And the idea there, as a Christian would put it, is that you've got the Father is the

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Yahweh in heaven, and the Son is the Yahweh on earth, but they're both just simply called Yahweh.

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They're both just called the Lord. So you've got these two figures. And so what gets me so fired up about this subject is that this isn't just prophecy about a coming person.

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This is about God who is covenanting with Israel as the

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Son of God. The God who is in Psalm 2, and he's starting the whole project of inheriting the nations, okay, that's in Psalm 2.

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He's starting that project with Israel in Deuteronomy 32, where it says the

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Lord's portion is his people, and Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance. And the idea there is, there was no

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Israel at the Tower of Babel. And so God calls Abraham out of nothing, out of pagan worship, and he makes him into a new nation.

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And this figure called the Angel of Yahweh, who is shortened just to Yahweh, ends up, you know, covenanting with that people.

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And then the promise comes in Psalm 2 that this Son will be enthroned on Mount Zion, and ask of me, my son, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.

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And the New Testament is really then the story, especially the book of Acts and Paul's journeys, of Jesus making all of the nations his inheritance so that Israel spreads beyond the nation, and true

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Israel throughout all of the world can be saved. So this is really hammering home the eternality of not only the second person of the

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Trinity, Jesus Christ, but also his Sonship. Because as you may be aware, there have been folks who were biblically sound in many regards about the deity of Christ and the

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Trinity, but who made a departure from biblical orthodoxy by claiming that Christ being the

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Son was only a role that he was in after the Incarnation, when he was walking the earth.

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But I'm assuming from what you're saying is you would view that as aberrant. Yeah, absolutely.

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So if you, again, if in that Deuteronomy, this one is verse 8 there, in 32 .8, you've got this number of the

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Sons of God. The language is the Sons of God. And here's the connection to the Giants, because if you go remember back in our discussion a couple months ago, in Genesis 6, it says the

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Sons of God took among themselves the daughters of men, and they had

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Nephilim. So the question is, who in the world are the Sons of God? And so every time that this phrase is used in the

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Old Testament, it's only a handful, a couple handfuls, about 10 times I think, it's always referring to heavenly beings.

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In Job 38 .7, I think is the verse, where were you when the

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Sons of God were shouting for joy when I created the foundations of the earth? It's not possible that those are humans, because man hadn't even been created yet.

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You know, and early in the book of Job, the Sons of God go with men into heaven, and that's another, it's a divine courtroom scene of this divine counsel.

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And so you've got these beings that are called the Sons of God there.

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And I was talking with a pastor friend of mine right before we got on here, and where we're actually thinking very seriously about writing a book on the

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Angel of the Lord, and his claim, and I agree with him, is that the central claim of Jesus in the

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New Testament, and especially in the Gospel of John, is that he is claiming to be this figure from the

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Old Testament, who is sometimes called the Word, sometimes called the Name, sometimes called the

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Angel, and sometimes, like in Psalm 2, he's called the

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Son. And, you know, in fact, in Deuteronomy 32 there, I would say that he is also a

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Son of God. He's the Lord, the Lord's portion. He's one of the Sons of God, but the craziness of it is, and that's what made the

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Jews so angry, and if we actually have Jewish listeners here, there's a fascinating history to this.

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Something happened in the 2nd century, and this is according to a book called

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Two Powers in Heaven, written by an atheist Jewish scholar of all people named

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Alan Segal, who was looking up, studying this, what the

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Jews called a heresy. They called it a Two Powers heresy. And the idea was that there was two figures in the

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Old Testament that were both good powers, both seem to be Yahweh, and yet they seem to be distinct.

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And so he actually called it Binitarianism instead of Trinitarianism. And he says that in the 1st century,

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Jews, this was kind of an undercurrent, and it was an acceptable one to believe in two powers in heaven.

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And the rabbis went to texts like Genesis 19 -24, where Yahweh's raining fire from Yahweh, or they went to Daniel 7, where you see the ancient of days, and then you see one like a son of man who's coming to him.

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And by the way, that's another one of these same kind of verses. What ends up happening is that in the

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Daniel 7 passage, the one like a son of man who comes riding on the clouds of heaven, which is a figure of deity, he ends up inheriting the nations again.

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And Jesus picks that theme up at his death and says, you won't see the son of man until you see him coming on the clouds of heaven.

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And he's basically claiming to be that person of Daniel 7. And so what happened is these

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Jews, they were seeing this in the text. And when the Christians started saying, look, this has been fulfilled in this person over here named

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Jesus of Nazareth, all of a sudden all these Jews started converting to Christianity. So out of control,

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Seagal argued that the Jews made it a heresy to believe in two powers.

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And they functionally became for all time thereafter, a Unitarian religion, rather than one that is

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Binitarian, or as we would say, Trinitarian. That is something I've never heard that.

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I've never heard that before. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating, the history of this.

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And it's all because this person, Jesus, came along claiming to be this, and the Jews were buying it hook, line, and sinker.

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They said, yeah, we believe you. That is fascinating. So in other words, the

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Jews were not Unitarian going all the way back through Abraham, the father of the

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Jewish people. They had an openness to this understanding, you're saying, of at least, if not

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Trinitarian, Binitarianism. And it was the Christian error. It was

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Christ's arrival on the scene that changed things in that regard. Yeah. So the whole

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New Testament is basically, I would argue, the whole New Testament is taking this

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Jewish plurality of a Godhead idea and saying, look, the whole

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Old Testament, your entire scripture, Jews, is written from that perspective.

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It's not a Unitarian perspective. There's more than one figure here in a

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Godhead, and we're going to show you who he is from your own scripture. We're going to prove it to you. Wow.

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We have to go to a break right now, and I'd like you to pick up where you left off there, Doug. And if anybody would like to join us on the air, we do have a couple of people waiting to have their questions asked and answered.

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And if you'd like to join them, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

35:14

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

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39:44

This is Chris Zarnes. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is

39:49

Douglas Van Dorn. He is pastor of Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado.

39:55

And he is the author of a number of books, including the book we are discussing today,

40:01

Christ in the Old Testament. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

40:10

chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the

40:19

USA. And you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable. Now, what you are going through right now when you're talking about how

40:27

Christ was clearly present, the Son of God was clearly present in the

40:34

Old Covenant Scriptures and the Hebrew Scriptures before his incarnation, before the dawn of the

40:41

New Covenant. Would that be more in the realm of what is considered typology?

40:49

Typology is not excluded from it. Christ is there in typology all over the place, especially in sacrifices and the

41:00

Torah, things like that. You find it in other places, other kinds of types as well. You find the typology, for example, of Christ being the rock in 1

41:12

Corinthians 10, things like that. But I'm actually talking about an actual figure himself who is,

41:20

I think Vos basically says he's the main character or actor of the Old Testament.

41:26

He is Israel's God. There's a really interesting verse in Genesis 48, and this is, it's two verses, and it's

41:39

Jacob speaking, and I think he's talking to his son Joseph.

41:44

It's kind of his deathbed discussion there with his boys, and this is what it says.

41:53

Listen to how he puts it. And he blessed Joseph and said, the God before whom my fathers

41:58

Abraham and Isaac walked, the word there is Elohim, the God before whom my fathers

42:05

Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day, same word,

42:12

Elohim, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys.

42:18

He puts the angel as equal, the same person as the

42:25

God there. And, you know, so these guys were actually seeing this figure, interacting physically with this figure, actually touching this figure, looking at him, washing his feet, wrestling with him, very physical thing that we just don't seem to, for whatever reason, you know, read that.

42:48

Would that be considered a Christophany? And if not, if you could define what that means. Yeah, Christophany is a hard word for me.

42:56

I mean, it's basically a Christophany is an appearance of Christ. And so as far as that goes,

43:01

I would say, yeah, it's an appearance of Christ. It's not the father. It's not the spirit. The spirit has his own comings,

43:09

I guess, in the Old Testament, and it's almost always accompanied with the son. But this would be, this would be an appearance of Christ.

43:19

But he's a regular, it's a regular thing. A pre -incarnate, a pre -incarnate appearance of Christ.

43:26

Yes, it's not human flesh that he's coming in. And that's an important distinction. He's coming in some kind of an angelic, you know, body that can be touched and eaten, so on and so forth.

43:38

But it can also disappear up in a fire like it did with Samson's father. Now, obviously, a distinction has to be made because many of our listeners may have had encounters with Jehovah's Witnesses, who try to diminish the person and nature of Christ by saying that he is

44:00

Michael the Archangel, and therefore he is not deity. They will say he's divine.

44:06

They will say he's a lesser god. But they will say that he is not Jehovah, he is not

44:14

Yahweh, he is not God Almighty, etc. If you could distinguish between the concept, the angelic concept that the

44:24

Aryans might have of Jesus that would not be what you're talking about. Yeah, so in any area, you're always going to have some truth to it.

44:34

And for example, you know, you bring up the Michael idea. Well, there's plenty of Orthodox Christians throughout the ages who have thought that Michael is the angel of the

44:43

Lord, that that's just his proper name. And you find Matthew Henry and Meredith Klein and all sorts of people talking about that.

44:51

So that's not where their error lies. Their error lies in, like you said at the end there, in saying that this angel is not

44:59

Yahweh, he's a lesser being. Well, so they're not Trinitarians, and so they can't understand the concept of one and three.

45:09

So they make the error that there's only one, and that they're Unitarians. And so they would hold that the angel of the

45:17

Lord is, like you said, is a created being. He was the first one, but he's still created. And you know, the whole witness of the

45:25

Bible from beginning to the end is that this person that's coming in the

45:30

Old Testament and who came in the New Testament in human flesh, it's the same person in the

45:35

Godhead. It's the second person. And he is God. He is one with the

45:41

Father. His name is Yahweh. I mean, like, go back to that Genesis 19 -24 one is a good example.

45:47

He's simply called Yahweh, which is Jehovah. So when they say that his name isn't Jehovah, they're just completely wrong and don't have any idea what they're talking about.

45:56

This is not a created being. This is God who created all things.

46:03

And we do have a listener in Lindenhurst, Long Island, CJ, who asks, do you believe that the three visitors in Genesis 18 who met with Abraham are, in fact, appearances of the

46:21

Trinity? I've heard that before. I don't think so. I think that one of them, though, is the

46:29

Son. So it takes out that story, and it goes from really all of chapter 18 all the way through chapter, most of chapter 19.

46:39

You have three visitors. One of them identifies himself as Yahweh, and he's the one that actually goes into Sarah's tent and causes her to laugh, because he says,

46:50

I will give you a child in a year from now. It's crazy, so she laughs.

46:57

And then later in that chapter, this same figure goes out on the plains with Abraham, and they have a discussion.

47:06

So most people, when they read that second part of chapter 18, I think what they have in mind is somehow

47:13

Abraham is having this disembodied experience, or he's hearing voices from heaven, or he's talking to himself or something.

47:21

But no, that's not the way that the text causes you to read. It causes you to read that he's having a conversation with a person right in front of him, and they're having a debate.

47:33

So that happens. Meanwhile, these other two figures go into Sodom and Gomorrah, and it simply calls them angels in the text.

47:42

So you could say that they're messengers, but there's no possible way that they could get that far from where they were in the course of just a few minutes, unless they were angels.

47:53

They're clearly heavenly beings in the story. I don't know anybody who denies that, but the idea that they would be the

48:00

Father and the Spirit, we don't have any record that I know of.

48:06

I'm willing to have my mind changed, but the idea of an embodiment of the

48:11

Father, or a human embodiment of the Spirit. The Spirit shows up in other images, like the cloud, the fire throughout

48:21

Exodus, or the image of the bird at the baptism of Jesus, and so on.

48:27

But never as a person. It's always the Son is the one who's coming in a, and I wouldn't say a human form,

48:33

He's coming in an angelic form. And they're overlapping, but they're not the same, because angels are not

48:39

Adam, they're not human serks, they're not flesh, they're not the same flesh that we have.

48:46

Well, you just said you were referring to God the Father not appearing in Scripture in human form.

48:52

What is it that Moses saw when God acquiesced to show him his hindquarters?

48:59

I could never figure that out, what that really meant. Yeah, I know, you're not alone. It's a really hard passage.

49:04

I struggled a lot with that. I had a priesthood a few years back, and I was just getting into this whole worldview. And I came to the conclusion, and the more

49:12

I think about it, the more I think it's right, is that Moses has had, you really have to go back to the beginning of Exodus to see this.

49:19

The burning bush story is where it starts, and Moses sees this fiery bush, and I would argue that the fire there is an image of the

49:29

Spirit, it's the Holy Spirit, it's not consuming the bush. But it says, inside this bush, the angel of the

49:36

Lord spoke to Moses and said, I am who I am. And most of us think that that's the

49:42

Father's talking. It's not, it's the Son saying, I am. When you come to John in John's Gospel, and Jesus says the seven

49:51

I am's, what's he doing? He's claiming to be the angel that spoke to Moses. What's he doing? So you go throughout the story, and you see that Moses keeps having this conversation with the angel, but he never gets this, like, unveiled glimpse of him, is the best way

50:09

I can put it. So when he's up on Mount Sinai, again, I believe he's speaking to the angel, and he's not seeing the

50:16

Father, because no one can see the Father in life. He's speaking to the angel, as he's been doing throughout his ministry there, and he, you know, it's a really strange episode, and you know, the angel's getting upset, and Moses is getting upset, and Moses just finally says, unless you go with us, we're all going to die, because the angel says,

50:36

I'm not going to go with you, I'm going to send another angel to go ahead of you, and Moses says, you have to go with us,

50:43

I have to know that your promise is true, show me your glory, and so I guess maybe the best analogy

50:48

I can give is something like the Transfiguration, where he was veiled in some way to Moses, and he unveiled himself in a way that satisfied

50:58

Moses on the mountain. By the way, CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, you are getting an absolutely free copy of Douglas Van Dorn's book,

51:10

Christ in the Old Testament, and that is compliments of the publishers of that book, and we thank

51:18

Doug Van Dorn for making those books possible and available to our listeners who submit questions today, at least a limited number of them, and give us your full address,

51:31

CJ, so we can have that shipped out to you, and that will be shipped to you by our sponsors,

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Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, and they ship out all of our listeners' books who win books by submitting questions, and we thank

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Todd and Patty Jennings over at cvbbs .com for being faithful supporters of since its inception, and we look forward to many years of cooperation for the gospel with you, and we do have

52:08

Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, who says, are there any good books you would personally recommend on Christology in the

52:15

Old Testament, apart from the one that you have written? Oh boy,

52:22

I'd have to think about that. Well, you could go back to it. Yeah. All right, thanks for the question,

52:28

Tyler, and the more I think about how fascinating what you revealed to me today about the

52:37

Jews prior to the Christian era, prior to the incarnation, at least be willing to conceive of the idea of a binatarian concept of God, this really does great damage to the modalist understanding that the

52:59

Oneness Pentecostals and the Unitarians have, if they were to think that this understanding of different persons in the

53:08

Godhead being separate, co -equal, and co -eternal was the invention of later

53:16

Christians in history. How many heresies, Chris, do you suppose have started because of some kind of a separation in the mind that is unwarranted between the

53:28

Old and the New Testaments, especially as it regards God? Yeah, well, I wouldn't even be able to count, obviously.

53:35

Now, there's another fascinating passage that I think will be fun to look at, which is the very first verse of John's Gospel.

53:44

Mm -hmm. You know, most people know this verse in the beginning was the Logos, the

53:50

Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. So we won't get into the

53:55

Jehovah's Witness part, you know, the way that they misinterpret that. Let's just talk about what's really going on there.

54:01

And, you know, most people are of the opinion that, well, you know, this was written pretty late in the first century by John, and he's countering this

54:11

Gnosticism that had crept into the Church. And there's another way of looking at this, though, and that is that John's opening

54:21

Gospel and really the entirety of his Gospel is talking about Christ from the

54:28

Old Testament. And so when it says that in the beginning was the Logos, the Word, the

54:34

Word was God, this is a Jewish concept from the Old Testament.

54:41

So what happened is that there were translations of the Old Testament that were written into Aramaic very early on, and they were called

54:50

Targums, and they would be read in the synagogues, and sometimes they were pretty loose and they added traditions, and other times they were pretty strict so that they could almost be considered a translate, you know, a thought -for -thought translation or something like that, like we would think of the

55:08

Bible in English. And anyway, they had a word for the Logos, and it was called the

55:15

Memra. There's been whole studies on this word, this Aramaic word Memra, and how the

55:21

Jews conceived of it. What they've concluded is that the conceit of it is almost a hypostasis of God, which is a really interesting word that they're using, because that's what we speak of, that's the way we speak about the

55:36

Son of God in the New Testament. The hypostatic union. A hypostatic union. So what they're saying is that there is this conception of the

55:44

Logos, and I know that's a Greek word, but it was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, but there was this idea that the

55:52

Word in many places in the

55:57

Old Testament can be thought of as a person. This is one of the chapters in the book, and one of the first places that I take people to is

56:06

Genesis chapter 15. So this is just a couple verses, or sorry, a couple chapters before the chapter 18 story, and it's again this person that has been covenanting with Abraham.

56:23

And the way it starts out is really strange, because after these things, the Word of the

56:28

Lord, so there's our phrase, came to Abraham in a vision. Now what's strange about that?

56:39

The Word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. Words don't come in visions, they come to the ear.

56:47

Right, yeah, you're right, right. They don't come in a vision. The idea is that Abraham saw the

56:54

Word. So he's actually called the Word of the

57:00

Lord, and we can go to all sorts of places. You see the same thing in the call of Jeremiah, and there's this embodiment language there that most people will say, well that's just an anthropomorphism of the divine essence.

57:15

And I would say, no it's not. It's a literal language used of a person who is coming to Jeremiah and touching him with his mouth, with his hand, because he's an angel.

57:29

He's embodied in some form. Find the same thing in the call of Samuel when he's a little boy, that famous story when he's in the temple and he hears this voice.

57:40

And he keeps going to Eli and saying, who are you calling me? And Eli's too dumb to figure out what's going on.

57:48

And what's really strange is it says, the story starts off and says, now Eli couldn't see very well.

57:54

He was basically blind. Now why in the world would it care? Well it's because it introduces us to Yahweh.

58:02

He's called Yahweh, but he's also called the word of Yahweh. And then you get this embodiment language again, where you see the word.

58:13

How do people see the word? Well, so this is the whole Old Testament concept of this word of God that John is picking up at the beginning of the gospel, which isn't

58:22

Gnostic and Greek, it's Jewish and Old Testament. Wow.

58:28

Well that's something. We have to go to another break right now. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

58:38

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Pastor Douglas Van Dorn and Christ in the

58:46

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01:03:42

Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Doug Van Dorn, who is an author and pastor, and we are discussing one of his books,

01:03:53

Christ in the Old Testament. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:04:01

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, and please include your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside of the

01:04:12

USA, and we have another listener, this one in West Virginia, Martinsburg, West Virginia.

01:04:21

Ed, he asks, can Doug discuss pre -existence of Christ in the

01:04:27

Old Testament? Well, we have been actually, as opposed to the angels who do not share this attribute.

01:04:34

Also, does Doug see any deity connection linguistically with the

01:04:40

G -K -A -G -O -I -M -E that Christ attributes to himself or tributes to himself multiple times in the

01:04:49

Gospels, and Yahweh, Y -H -W -H, the covenant name of God as he gave

01:04:57

Moses? That's basically the question that he's asking.

01:05:04

Yeah, we kind of dealt with that second one, didn't we, there in the bush? Right. It's the angel of the

01:05:10

Lord who comes and, you know, Moses asks what his name is, and he says, I am who

01:05:15

I am, and, you know, we just, we have to, we have to be reading the text more carefully than we are.

01:05:22

Verse 2 of Exodus 3, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush.

01:05:29

In fact, Stephen, in his speech in Acts 7, refers to the very same thing and mentions that, yes, it was indeed the angel that spoke to him, and so when

01:05:39

Jesus is claiming, you know, when he's saying all these I -am statements, he is saying, I am that person who showed himself and talked to Moses.

01:05:50

By the way, Ed, since you are a first -time questioner,

01:05:55

I don't know if you're a first -time listener, but since you're a first -time questioner, not only are you receiving a free copy of Doug Van Dorn's book,

01:06:03

Christ in the Old Testament, but you're also receiving a free New American Standard Bible, compliments to the publishers of the

01:06:11

NASB, who have been sponsoring Iron Sharpens Iron since 2006, and so we need your full mailing address,

01:06:18

Ed, there in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Cumberland Valley Bible Book Services will be shipping both of those out to you, both

01:06:28

Doug Van Dorn's book, Christ in the Old Testament, and the new copy of the

01:06:34

New American Standard Bible, and our thanks again to Todd and Patty Jennings at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com,

01:06:46

for their faithful sponsorship. And we do have another listener, and she is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and her name is

01:06:59

Erin, and she writes, I have to enlarge her question because I'm going blind, she writes,

01:07:09

I wondered if today's guest might explain a bit about Melchizedek as a type or shadow of Christ.

01:07:18

Oh yeah, Melchizedek. So there's basically two views of Melchizedek, and I tend towards one view, but I'm not 100 % on it, but the more

01:07:35

I study it, the more I actually think that it's true. So the first view is that Melchizedek is somehow a type of Christ, and that you go to the book of Hebrews, that starts talking about Melchizedek there in chapter 6, and it gives all this, you know, in chapter 7 it gives all this kind of strange language about him, and it makes it seem like Melchizedek is somehow, because he's the king, and because he's a priest, that he is foreshadowing in a typological way that, you know,

01:08:10

Jesus himself. There's actually a second view, and it predates even the New Testament.

01:08:15

It goes back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and you find various fathers that hold to it, and it's the view that actually

01:08:22

Melchizedek is a name, I don't know if it would be a proper name, it may be a title, but maybe a proper name,

01:08:30

I don't know, for the angel of the Lord, and that his territory was this land of Canaan, and just like, you know, like we were talking about the territories of these heavenly beings that were allotted to the nations, and Plato says that, do you remember when, you know, the nations were divided?

01:08:53

It's language that's almost exactly the same as Deuteronomy 32, and he says, when Hermes and Hephaestus, or something like that, were allotted to Greece, and so the idea there would be that Melchizedek is the angel of the

01:09:07

Lord, and he's ruling somehow from Jerusalem, and he decides to come in an embodied form, and he is the

01:09:17

Lord, and the reason why some Christians think that that could be true is because of the strange language that Hebrews uses, that he's without genealogy, and just, it's a very strange thing to say, and you wouldn't normally say that just because, you know, it's kind of a point of, who cares if he's without genealogy if he's just a type?

01:09:39

The language there lends itself to that interpretation, and I think that that's actually a possibility, believe it or not.

01:09:47

Well, Aaron, thank you for the question, and you are getting a free copy of Christ in the

01:09:53

Old Testament by our guest Douglas Van Dorn, so make sure you get us your full mailing address, and we thank you for participating in today's show.

01:10:05

We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants you to comment on the picture of Christ in Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 11, if you have time.

01:10:21

So those are both probably put in the category of prophecy. Chapter 9, starting in verse 6, for to us a child is born, and to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulder.

01:10:40

Notice that language of government and ruling there. That's the same, very similar to, well,

01:10:46

Psalm 2, ruling the nations with a rod of iron as the prophecy. His name will be called

01:10:52

Wonderful Counselor. Interesting, there's a variant in the Greek Septuagint, which the

01:10:59

New Testament writers used quite a bit, and which almost all of the Church Fathers used there.

01:11:05

So instead of saying Wonderful Counselor, it actually says the Angel of the Great Counsel, which would link him, in the ways

01:11:15

I'm talking to, back to this angel. So the idea would be that the angel incarnates, and then he's called

01:11:21

Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. The increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end.

01:11:27

And on the throne of David and over his kingdom, again Psalm 2 language, to establish it and uphold it with justice and righteousness,

01:11:34

Daniel 7 language. Then Isaiah chapter 11, starting in verse 1, there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his root shall bear fruit, and the

01:11:49

Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. That's language that the New Testament even uses at Jesus' baptism as fulfillment.

01:11:56

You've got this idea of the sevenfold spirit here, the Spirit of the Lord, Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding, Spirit of Counsel and Might, Spirit of Knowledge and the

01:12:06

Fear of the Lord. So the Holy Spirit is guiding his ministry, and again the

01:12:13

New Testament sees that as being a prophecy that's being fulfilled in the coming of the

01:12:19

Messiah. Now one of the things that the aforementioned

01:12:24

Oneness Pentecostals will point to, and you may have guessed already where I'm going here, they and other modalists would point to Isaiah 9, 6, where Jesus is being referred to as the

01:12:40

Eternal or Everlasting Father, as the Handel's Messiah puts it. How can you say that Jesus is not the

01:12:49

Father when this is a very prophecy of Jesus identifying himself as the Eternal Father or Everlasting Father?

01:12:58

Well, I mean, I guess you just go to the New Testament is the easiest way to go and see that he is speaking to the

01:13:04

Father over and over and over. The Father is doing things that he doesn't have the ability to do himself.

01:13:11

He's giving him a people, he's sending him to the earth, and all these kinds of things.

01:13:17

There's very clearly an object and a subject going on there, and they're not the same person. As far as the language there of him being a

01:13:24

Father, that's language that the ancient Near East used over and over of their gods, and I'm speaking in kind of this

01:13:31

Divine Council way again. So like, if you take Baal as an example, Baal was one of 70 sons of El, and the whole story of Baal is of his rise and ascendancy to become kind of the vice -regent of the council that rules in place of El when he usurps a different deity named

01:13:52

Yom, but he's given the title Father, even though El is really the

01:13:58

Father God in the way that the Canaanites understood it. So it's just kind of ignorance of knowing how the language of Father was used in those days.

01:14:09

Yeah, and I've heard that, I've heard someone say, and I can't remember who it was, but they said that the

01:14:14

Hebrew of that phrase would have more been in harmony with the phrase or the meaning

01:14:22

Father of Eternity, like the creator of all eternity, and since Christ was certainly a part of the creation, it wouldn't violate the concept that he is a separate person in the

01:14:37

Godhead from the Father. Right. Would that be an acceptable explanation as Father of Eternity?

01:14:44

Sure, I think absolutely. He's the yesterday, today, and forever, you know, the beginning and the end.

01:14:53

Yeah, the author and finisher of our faith. Yeah. The Alpha and Omega. And Tyler, once again in Mastic Beach, Long Island, and by the way,

01:15:03

Tyler, you asked before about any other recommendations in addition to Doug's book on Christ in the

01:15:11

Old Testament, I would just suggest that you go to Solid Ground Christian Books' website, they're one of our sponsors, solid -ground -books .com,

01:15:21

solid -ground -books .com, and look in their search engine for anything on that issue, and you could also go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who

01:15:32

I've been repeating throughout this program, their website, cvbbs .com,

01:15:37

cvbbs .com. Both resources are thoroughly reformed in their theology, so you could be safe in venturing through their catalogs without fear of getting something aberrant or heretical, so I highly recommend those sources to you.

01:15:54

But Tyler asks, do you think that Jesus clearly is foreshadowed by Moses due to his similar circumstances, such as all of the children being ordered to be killed in Egypt, and with Herod's order to kill all children under two?

01:16:13

Yeah, that's a great question. I think he's referring to, that's in Matthew's Gospel, so this would be something

01:16:20

I would put under the category of typology now. And the way that Matthew writes his

01:16:26

Gospel is absolutely fascinating. He begins with this baby that's born, like he said, and Herod tries to kill him as someone who's under two years old.

01:16:38

He then flees to Egypt, which is something that, you know, recalls the

01:16:46

Moses story. He then, and I'm missing a couple things here, but he then comes back into the

01:16:52

Promised Land. He's baptized in the Jordan. There's a very deliberate echo of a verse in Exodus 15 that begins, or it ends the baptism story.

01:17:04

It says, and then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

01:17:12

And the echo comes when it says, and Moses led the children of Israel into the wilderness to be tempted.

01:17:19

And so then Jesus is tempted for a period of 40, and in his case it's 40 days, but what ends up happening is the

01:17:26

Israelites are there for 40 years, and then he goes on top of a mountain and he gives the law, which then kind of,

01:17:34

I don't even know that it concludes the typology, but it's kind of the highlight of the typology, where Jesus, you know, is now retaking that scene of Mount Sinai where the law is given in the

01:17:46

Old Testament. So Matthew's audience is most likely a Jewish audience, and as they're reading this, they would have easily seen that he's recreating the story of the

01:17:56

Exodus for his audience, and he's basically saying that Jesus is not only the new and better Moses, he's not only the new and better Israel, but he's actually the lawgiver of Mount Sinai.

01:18:13

Wow, praise God for that. Tyler, you are getting a free copy of Doug Van Dorn's book as well if you send us your full mailing address, and we thank you again for joining us on the air with a question.

01:18:28

And our email address for anybody else listening who'd like to join us is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:18:35

chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you could, go to Jeremiah 17 and to that classic text of,

01:18:51

I the Lord search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds, isn't that clearly revealed in the

01:19:02

New Testament as being Christ? The searcher of the mind and the heart, are you thinking of something in Revelation, aren't you?

01:19:09

Yes. Yeah, Revelation is just filled with language. If you don't know your

01:19:15

Old Testament, you cannot understand Revelation. End of story. That's just the way it is.

01:19:23

There is so much Old Testament going on there, where Jesus is time and time and time again being related to the

01:19:31

Lord, and that's a great verse, Chris, because who is it that searches the mind and the heart in that verse?

01:19:37

It is Yahweh. It is Jehovah. It doesn't even say the angel of Yahweh, it's just simply

01:19:43

Yahweh. So when that's attributed to Christ, what it's saying is

01:19:48

Christ is Yahweh. Amen. And that is,

01:19:54

I think, a good verse to bring our Jehovah's Witness friends to, who try to make a distinction between Christ and Yahweh.

01:20:05

And that is a big issue there that we face in regard to our discussions with not only

01:20:20

Jehovah's Witnesses, but with Jews and with Muslims, and even with liberals, who try to paint the picture that Christ is perhaps a wonderful prophet, a wonderful sacrificial human, great teacher, great role model, but not

01:20:45

God. What you are talking about today defies all that so clearly, if you give any credence at all to the inerrancy of the

01:20:54

Old Covenant Scriptures. Yeah, and just to add to that, one of my main passions in life is to get even conservative

01:21:04

Christians who have unwittingly been influenced by people that have kind of aberrant theologies, that we ourselves come to see that there is a person in the

01:21:20

Old Testament that is Israel's God. And there's a really interesting verse in Exodus chapter 23, and it's a promise of this angel.

01:21:33

And I want people to listen to this really carefully. And then we'll go to Judges chapter 2.

01:21:39

This is a promise that God gives after He kind of gives a bunch of laws, and starts in verse 20.

01:21:46

So this is Exodus 23, 20. Now, you think about, my mind goes to, again, who can forget sin but God alone in the

01:22:15

New Testament? Well, here, Moses is being told that an angel can actually pardon your sin, and then it says, my name is in him.

01:22:27

So there's this prophecy, and at the end of the conquest, the beginning of the book of Judges, the angel shows up in Judges chapter 2.

01:22:38

And it's a complete reflection upon the passage we just read. It says, now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bacchim, and he said,

01:22:47

I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers.

01:22:55

I said, I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land, but you shall break down their altars.

01:23:05

But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this that you have done?

01:23:13

That verse says that the angel is the God of the covenant. I mean, it just flat out says it.

01:23:20

And then it says that I am the angel you were supposed to obey in Exodus 23, and you did not do it.

01:23:29

And now what's going to come is the rest of the book of Judges and my judgment upon you.

01:23:36

Malachi then takes these two verses, and like I said, this is from the beginning of the

01:23:41

Bible, Old Testament to the end of it. Malachi 3, behold I send my messenger, or my angel, and he will prepare the way before me.

01:23:52

That's the word malech there, and messenger is a good, it's a good translation there.

01:23:58

It's referring to John the Baptist preparing the way for the Lord. But then it says, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant.

01:24:10

Now that's the same word, but it's a different figure, not John the Baptist. It's the Lord whom you seek, the angel of the covenant in whom you delight, behold he is coming, says the

01:24:23

Lord of hosts. So Malachi is basically taking the Exodus and the

01:24:28

Judges passage, and saying that that angel of the covenant is now going to come in the coming days, and you will know about it because I'm going to send the person who ends up becoming

01:24:41

John the Baptist to prepare the way, and then you know, you read the rest of what happens there, and you start saying, oh my goodness, this is not

01:24:50

God in his bare naked essence, this is talking about the second person of the trinity coming in the flesh.

01:24:59

Praise God. So we have to make it clear then that all references to an angel in the scriptures are not referring to creatures, creations that dwell in heaven who are not

01:25:17

God. In fact, these are beings who, even in some sense, have a lesser role in the whole story of redemption than we do, because Christ died for us and not them.

01:25:32

We're not talking about those creations, those creatures known as angels, and neither are the scriptures always to be viewed as referring to those creatures when the term angel appears.

01:25:46

So obviously you are if you're saying that Christ is the angel of the Lord, this is a completely different angel.

01:25:56

Well, it sounds kind of like two questions there. First of all, the word angel just means a messenger, and you can have human angels in both testaments.

01:26:07

That word is spoken of human beings that become messengers. You've also got heavenly beings that are created that are called angels, and you've got this one figure who is called the angel of Yahweh, or just Yahweh, who is different from all of the rest of them.

01:26:24

Yeah, I was just saying that people have to be careful not to overreact to what you're saying, because they broad brush the term angel to always mean a creature rather than to God himself in any circumstance.

01:26:40

Yeah, we do have to be careful there, because we would want to say that we have to say that this person came in some kind of physicality, because you can't have feet and hands, and you can't eat, and you can't be seen unless there's something physical going on.

01:27:00

So that physical manifestation has to be a created thing, but it's so united or so one with the person that is behind it that that figure is the second person of the

01:27:15

Trinity who is not created. So, and that's kind of the, you know, the rightness and the wrongness of the

01:27:21

Jehovah's Witnesses. They'll say that the angel was created, and I would say, well, all right. I mean, the physical manifestation, sure, because God has no body in eternity past, but the angel is

01:27:33

Yahweh, and the second person of the Trinity is not just a physical being, he's an eternal spirit, you know, that is united in a theophanic or christophanic, you know, kind of a way to this manifestation, so.

01:27:50

And now we have to go to our final break, and if you'd like to join us on the air, can you believe that 90 minutes went by already?

01:27:57

That's blown by like a bullet. If you'd like to join us on the air, you have about a half hour left, so try to get your questions to us as soon as possible.

01:28:07

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

01:28:13

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

01:28:19

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01:28:25

We're going to be right back with Doug Van Dorn and our discussion on Christ and the

01:28:30

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01:32:12

This is Chris Arnzen, and before we return to our discussion, one of our sponsors has some exciting news.

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The G3 conference celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, or more specifically when

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Door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, on October 31st to be more precise.

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That celebration is being held January 19th through the 21st in Atlanta, Georgia of this next year coming up, 2017.

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And there is a lineup of speakers like I have never seen at one gathering.

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An amazing lineup, not only because of the length of it, but because of the quality of it.

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We've got Paul Washer, Stephen J. Lawson, D .A. Carson, Voti Baucom, my dear friend

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, whose voice you just heard a little while ago promoting the

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Iron Sharpens Iron program on Friday, September 2nd. Conrad M.

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United States for the first time and preaching at the church where I was formerly a member in New York.

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Conrad M. Bayway, pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa. Phil Johnson, who is the executive director of Grace to You, the publishing and media ministry of John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California.

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Phil Johnson, who has also been a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, probably more than anybody. He will be there.

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And Rosaria Butterfield, who is our scheduled guest this Monday, August 22nd.

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Rosaria Butterfield, who is, as she describes it, a former leftist lesbian who came to Christ and has been totally transformed by his mercy and grace and power and is now not only a heterosexual

01:34:36

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And she will be discussing this Monday her second book that she has written, and I'm looking forward to that.

01:34:48

Todd Friel, who we just had on this past Monday to discuss his book

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Stressed Out. Todd Friel is going to be there. John Kratz, who we've had on this program before, and a number of other speakers.

01:35:02

I am going to be there, God willing. I am so delighted that Josh Bice and the folks at Praise Mill Baptist Church, who are running the

01:35:11

G3 Conference, I'm so delighted that they invited me there to set up an exhibitor's booth at no expense to Iron Sharpens Iron.

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So if you are able to go to the G3 Conference, please come up to my exhibitor's booth and introduce yourself to me.

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I would love to meet many of my listeners that I've never met face to face before. And for more details on how to attend the

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G3 Conference, go to g3conference .com. That's G, and then the number three, conference .com.

01:35:43

And as I said, this will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, January 19th through the 21st, 2017, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

01:35:52

Reformation. So we hope to see you there. Our guest, as I've been announcing throughout this 90 -minute period so far, is

01:36:03

Douglas Van Dorn. We are discussing his book, Christ in the Old Testament, From the

01:36:10

Shadow to the Savior. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:36:21

Before we go to any more of our listener questions, Pastor Doug, I wanted to give a little teaser, if you will, to our listeners for some future interviews

01:36:34

I'd like to do with you on a couple of other books that you've written. And if you could start with your book on Covenant Theology, a

01:36:45

Reformed Baptist primer, if you could let our listeners know something in summary form what that is about.

01:36:54

Let's see. That was also a Sunday night series of lectures that I gave, and my goal there was to kind of make it as simple as I could to go through what

01:37:08

Covenant Theology is from a Reformed Baptist perspective. There's not a lot written on that from our perspective.

01:37:15

There's more than one thought of how Covenant Theology works itself out, even among Reformed Baptists.

01:37:23

I don't take the more Presbyterian line where the

01:37:30

Old Covenant and the New Covenant are just kind of basically the same thing. I take more of a 1689 or federalism approach where the

01:37:41

New Covenant is really a brand new thing because the one who cuts the covenant has come in human flesh.

01:37:49

So anyway, I lay it out in terms of the various covenants of the Old Testament, and maybe my kind of unique contribution to it is

01:37:58

I speak about all the different covenants, the covenant of redemption, the covenant of works, and then

01:38:05

I call them something like typological promise covenants of works or something like that where I'm kind of melding together all these terms in the

01:38:14

Old Testament saying that the covenant that God made with Adam after the fall, with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, with David, these are all, they all have kind of works things attached to them, but they're also gracious because they're not the covenant of grace, properly speaking.

01:38:32

That comes in the New Testament with Christ. But I also look at a little miracle covenant, which is a covenant that's missed many times in discussions of this, but which

01:38:44

I think is really foundational to properly understanding maybe the other book you were going to talk about, which is the issue of why

01:38:53

I'm a credo Baptist and not a pedo Baptist. Now just out of curiosity,

01:38:59

I don't know if you've ever read Jeffrey D. Johnson's book, The Fatal Flaw on the

01:39:04

Theology Behind Infant Baptism, where he has a understanding of covenant theology as a

01:39:13

Reformed Baptist that may be different than the one that is more similar to Presbyterianism, as you mentioned.

01:39:20

Have you read Jeffrey D. Johnson's book on that? No, I've only read parts of it. I can't speak very well to it.

01:39:26

Okay. I was just curious about that. And you've also written a book on baptism that we'd like to interview you on eventually,

01:39:39

Waters of Creation, a biblical theological study of baptism, if you could let our listeners know something about that.

01:39:48

My goal in that book was to help us think holistically biblically about what baptism is, and that's something that I've found really lacking in books from Baptists and from pedo

01:40:03

Baptists. Baptists seem to start their theology of baptism really in the

01:40:10

New Testament, which, you know, we're talking here about Christ in the Old Testament. I'm an

01:40:15

Old Testament guy. I love it, and I think we just don't know enough about it, and if we did, it'd really impact many more theological doctrines than we are even aware of.

01:40:25

On the other hand, Infant Baptists, they like to go to the Old Testament. Well, Baptists do too. They go to Jeremiah's New Covenant, but that's about it.

01:40:32

Infant Baptists, they'll go back to Abraham, and they'll start talking about circumcision. And then they start making these

01:40:39

By the way, Doug, if you could be careful on how you're moving around, because for some reason you're breaking up.

01:40:47

I'm not sure why. So anyway, my idea was,

01:40:53

I wanted to ask, well, where in the world does baptism come from? And I didn't want to just say, well, it comes from the

01:41:00

Dead Sea Scrolls or something like that. I wanted to see if it comes from the Old Testament itself. So I kind of start with Jesus' own baptism.

01:41:08

Why was he baptized? The Exodus chapter is foundational to my whole view, which is that Jesus was being baptized in fulfillment of a very specific law that ordained him legally into the priesthood.

01:41:23

It comes from Exodus chapter 29, and when he does this, he begins his ministry as God's High Priest, according to the law.

01:41:33

Even though he's from the line of Melchizedek, he still is obeying the law. Doug?

01:41:45

Yeah, for some reason you keep cutting out, and I'm not really sure why. I don't know if your battery's going dead or something, but...

01:41:51

Oh, boy. I hope not. Now you sound clear. But if you could just repeat everything you said in the last 30 seconds.

01:42:00

Okay. Let's see. So, oh, I was... The baptism...

01:42:07

Yeah, go ahead. Baptism was actually an act of obedience to enter into the priesthood, you were saying.

01:42:14

To enter into the priesthood, right. Jesus is obeying the law. John's baptizing for the remission of sins, and Jesus says, well,

01:42:24

I need to be baptized, and John says, no, I need to be baptized by you. And Jesus says, no, you don't understand,

01:42:30

John, I have to do this. Whatever that meant,

01:42:36

John and Jesus said, oh, okay. So they said, well, Jesus had to obey the law and be baptized as a priest.

01:42:45

That's what the priest had to do. And again, you broke up and you said that John baptized

01:42:53

Jesus as a priest, is that what you were saying? Doug?

01:43:00

Are you still there, Doug? Well, it looks like something was happening that was cutting our guest off.

01:43:08

I'm not sure what was happening, whether it was his phone or something atmospheric or his battery, but we are now no longer in connection with our guest,

01:43:20

Doug Van Dorn. I am going to ask that he calls us back, and I'm going to go to one last station break so we can hopefully get him back on the air to continue the last 15 minutes or so of the show.

01:43:37

So, don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back after these messages.

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01:46:11

I believe we have our guest, Doug Van Dorn, back on the line. Doug, are you there? Yeah, I'm here.

01:46:17

I'm back on my landline. The cell phone is not working. Very, very strange. I've never had that problem before.

01:46:23

Yeah, well, that is actually, in the world of radio, something that frequently happens with cell phones.

01:46:31

And I usually actually ask guests to try to use a landline when at all possible.

01:46:37

And so we're glad to have you back. And our email address for any of our listeners who want to ask a question within the next 12 minutes or so, because we're rapidly running out of time, is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:46:51

chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you could, just finish what you were saying about Jesus being baptized as a priest, which was actually an

01:47:00

Old Covenant ordinance that he was fulfilling there. Yeah, when Paedo -Baptists talk about baptism and circumcision, they make it sound like the

01:47:12

Abrahamic Covenant is the end -all of every covenant in the

01:47:17

Old Testament. Yet when they do a treatment of covenant theology, they don't speak that way. They actually go through the various covenants.

01:47:24

So I wondered, why link it to the Abrahamic Covenant? Why not link baptism to Noah?

01:47:31

He had a covenant. Why not link it to Adam? He had a covenant. Why not link it to Moses?

01:47:36

He had a covenant. Why not link it to Levi? He had a covenant. What you end up finding is that there's actually forms of baptism in every single one of those covenants.

01:47:47

And there's a specific ordination sacrament, which would be the comparable to circumcision in the

01:47:55

Abrahamic Covenant, which is in the Priestly Covenant, or what the prophets called the

01:48:01

Levitical Covenant. In order to be ordained into that covenant, you had to meet certain qualifications, and you also had to be baptized in water.

01:48:11

And that's what Jesus is doing at his baptism. So he's actually, his baptism is in fulfillment of an

01:48:18

Old Testament covenant, but it has absolutely nothing to do with circumcision. Great.

01:48:24

Well, we hopefully will have you back to discuss those topics, and as you said, these are issues that even within the comparatively small fellowship of Christians, and that's today, there are comparatively small fellowship of Christians known as Reformed Baptists.

01:48:46

At one time, I believe we may have dominated the Baptist scene centuries ago. But today, even the small fellowship of Reformed Baptists globally would disagree on issues like this, but I always like to have, that's one of the reasons

01:49:03

I call the show Iron Sharpens Iron, is that I like to have guests who have studied these issues at great depth come on the program and share with our listeners what they have discovered from their searches of the scriptures.

01:49:20

But, and just so I don't run out of time before I give this information, Doug Van Dorn's own website is

01:49:28

DougVanDorn .com, Doug Van Dorn, and that's

01:49:34

V -A -N -D -O -R -N .com, there's no e at the end of that, and we hope that you investigate these resources available on Doug's website.

01:49:47

And we do have, let's see, we have

01:49:52

Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is

01:49:58

Christ the glory of the Lord? Yeah, that's one of the chapters in the book.

01:50:07

There's kind of disagreements about this. Some will say that Christ is the glory, we're talking here about the

01:50:14

Shekinah, this thing that, you know, is called the glory.

01:50:20

Others will say that the Shekinah is the Holy Spirit. This is where I think the

01:50:25

Trinity is so fun, because they're three, but they're also one, and so you can actually speak about one in many instances, and you can speak about another using the very same word.

01:50:39

So we saw that with Yahweh, right, where the Father is Yahweh, but the Son is

01:50:44

Yahweh. They don't make any kind of a distinction there. Same exact name, and it's probably the case that you could speak of the

01:50:53

Shekinah as both the Spirit and the Son, but there's good reasons to believe that the

01:50:59

New Testament, and especially John's Gospel, again, connects the glory directly to the

01:51:05

Son. Well, thank you, Harrison, and I believe you're getting the last copy of Doug's book that we have available, so if you could give us your full mailing address, you are getting a free copy of Christ in the

01:51:20

Old Testament, thanks to our guest Doug Van Dorn and his publishing ministry.

01:51:26

And actually, the publishing ministry's title is actually the same as your book on baptism, is it not?

01:51:33

Yeah, it is. That's where it came from, Waters of Creation Publishing. Can I finish that?

01:51:40

It came to my mind, the last question there, an example of this is in John 12.

01:51:47

It says, Isaiah said these things because he saw His glory and spoke of Him.

01:51:55

The Him there is Jesus, and that's referencing back to Isaiah 6 -1, where he sees the

01:52:03

Lord enthroned in the temple, right? And what he's saying is that he's saying that Isaiah saw

01:52:11

Christ sitting on the throne, the Son of God sitting on the throne in His pre -incarnate form, and he calls

01:52:20

Him the glory there, the Shekinah. Praise God. Well, I want to make sure before we run out of time that you summarize what you think is most important for our listeners to have etched in their hearts and minds about this subject of Christ in the

01:52:40

Old Testament before they leave this program. Well, thanks.

01:52:46

I think I want to finish it the way I started it. I want people to know, I want

01:52:51

Christians to know, I want conservative Christians to know, I want Reformed Christians to know, that the

01:53:02

Bible that we have, Old Testament and New Testament, speaks of one

01:53:07

God in three persons, and that those three persons are manifested not just in the

01:53:13

New Testament, but in the Old Testament. And specifically, the way that we come to know what

01:53:19

God is like is through the Son of God. He's the personal manifestation of this incomprehensible divine essence to you and I.

01:53:33

We know the Father through the Son. Jesus chided His own apostles because they wanted to see the

01:53:41

Father. "'Show us the Father,' Philip said. And Jesus said, "'Have I been with you so long?

01:53:47

And you don't know that if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father.'" There's something about the

01:53:53

Son that is just completely central to how we come to know what

01:53:59

God is like and who He is. And we don't just have to go to the

01:54:04

New Testament. We can go to the Old Testament to discover this as well. Jesus is found in the

01:54:10

Law in the Old Testament. He's the fulfillment of the Law. He's the Lawgiver. He's found in typology.

01:54:18

He's found in the meaning of sacrifices. He's the Lamb of God. He's the door of the temple.

01:54:26

He's the temple itself. He's found in prophecy after prophecy after prophecy that predict the second person's coming in human flesh, in His works,

01:54:37

His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His second coming. And He's also found in a person that walks around with the patriarchs, talks face -to -face with Moses, is the commander of the armies of God who

01:54:54

Joshua bows before when he sees Him with the sword in his hand. He's the one who is

01:55:03

Israel's God. He is the Son who takes Israel for His own treasured possession.

01:55:11

And in the prophecies, He ends up taking the new Israel, the true Israel from all the nations of the earth to be

01:55:19

His treasured possession because they're His elect, and He loves them, and He set His love upon them, and He wins them over.

01:55:27

And this is the work of the Son of God from the beginning to the end. The first prophecy in the

01:55:34

Bible is about the seed crushing the head of the serpent. And every one of the covenants in the

01:55:39

Bible talks about the seed, the seed, the seed, the seed keeps going through here, here, and here, and here.

01:55:45

That's more foreshadowing, and typology, and predicting, and prophecy of the coming of the

01:55:52

Son. And it's all, it all finds its climax in the New Testament, in the coming of the

01:55:58

Lord Jesus who we love, and who is our Savior. And I want people to know that He is everywhere in their

01:56:06

Bible, everywhere in their Bible. And when we start to see that, when we start to see

01:56:12

Him being unfolded before our eyes in the Psalms, and in Deuteronomy, and in Genesis, and in Malachi, it changes a person,

01:56:21

Chris. It changes you in a way that is profound, and it deepens your faith.

01:56:27

And it strengthens your faith, knowing that this is not something that the

01:56:34

New Testament apostles made up. It's something that they got from Christ Himself, who revealed it, all of the scriptures, concerning Himself from the beginning of it to the end of it.

01:56:45

That's what I want people to know. Amen. And that really heightens the guilt of the

01:56:51

Pharisees who rejected Christ, because they were, it was revealed to them by God that this

01:57:02

Jesus fulfilled these prophecies, and types, and appearances in the

01:57:11

Hebrew scriptures more vividly than we would typically think today.

01:57:17

These Pharisees really had little excuse for rejecting Him, other than the fact that they required regeneration like every other lost sinner.

01:57:29

Right. They had the, believe it or not, they had a worldview that was capable of accepting Him as their

01:57:35

God, even though they believed in the Shema, in one true God. They had the worldview, and they rejected it.

01:57:43

They rejected Him. We have time for one more listener. We have Bibi in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who asks,

01:57:52

I tuned in late, but am I getting you correct by saying, in summary, that you believe that many of the descriptions of God from the

01:58:03

Old Covenant that we think are about the Father are really more about the

01:58:10

Son than we ever realized? Amen. And I say that strongly.

01:58:16

We've got to see this. It is the Son of God who appears to people. It isn't the

01:58:21

Father. It never is. And that John chapter 1 is all about that. God, the only

01:58:28

God, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known in the New Testament and in the

01:58:34

Old Testament. And it starts to explain a lot of things that people are fighting over these days that I really don't think they should be fighting over, because we're not talking about God and His naked essence.

01:58:46

We are talking about the Son of God coming to people in the Old Testament and in the New Testament in a brand new way, because He became a human being.

01:58:55

Well, thank you so much, Doug Van Dorn. I want to make sure our listeners again hear your website.

01:59:01

It's dougvandorn .com. That's dougvandorn .com.

01:59:09

You can also visit the website of the Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado at rbcnc .com.

01:59:18

rbc for Reformed Baptist Church, nc for NorthernColorado .com.

01:59:23

That's rbcnc .com. I really thank you for being on. I look forward to your return.

01:59:29

I hope everybody has a safe and joyful and God -honoring weekend and Lord's Day.

01:59:36

And I look forward to receiving your questions next week for our guests on Iron, Sharp, and Zion, including

01:59:42

Rosaria Butterfield, who's on Monday. But I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater