Responding to Hyper-Preterists w/ Dr. Sam Frost @zachdavis3882

Contending for the Gospel of Grace

Well, hello and welcome to The Apologetic Dog, where it's our heart's desire to contend for the gospel of grace. And so, embedded in The Apologetic Dog logo, hopefully you see 1 Timothy 6, verse 20, where Paul tells Timothy and all Christians by principle, oh, Timothy, guard the gospel of grace, this deposit that's been entrusted to you.

How do you do this? Well, you avoid pagan philosophy, irreverent babble, and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge. And so, at The Apologetic Dog, my heart is to simply stand on God's truth, because that is the only place where we get truth is his word.

And so, I talk about irreverent babble and pagan philosophy. I had to have someone join me today to talk a little bit about that irreverent babble that creeps into Christianity. And we gotta be on guard for, Dr. Frost, you know what I'm talking about?

We gotta be on guard for the things that creep in from outside the church and sets up strongholds within. Have you ever had experience with that?

Oh, yes.

For your guests and those that are familiar with my history and who I am, you know. Some people might say I'm the king of babble. I don't know.

Well, hey, you've been an absolute blessing to me in my life, especially in the world of eschatology, because today, I want to do a response video to a response video. This isn't your first rodeo. You've actually been on The Apologetic Dog before doing all these response videos.

You know what I'm talking about? Has it been about two years ago? Me and you did a response video to Don Preston and Michael Sullivan getting into all the heresy, as we would say, of hyper-preterism.

Yes.

Yeah, we've been through this before.

You keep, you've kept me in.

You've kept me in the race.

Well, it's only because people are sending me shirts like this now.

Guys.

But whatever. Shout out to Claude Ramsey for the merchandise.

Guys.

And I've got that shirt. And thank you, Claude Ramsey, for that. I got that in the mail. My wife was like, what is that? And I showed her, and she was like, you gotta be kidding me.

Well, hey, it fits me good. I was like, you know, we gotta, I gotta wear this for our episode today. So, if people are just now tuning in, living under a rock, and it was like, why is Jeremiah having Dr. Frost on again?

Well, hopefully they saw this thumbnail. But there was a response video to Jeremiah Nortier, aka The Apologetic Dog, part one, by Zach Davis. And I wanna be real charitable towards Zach. Me and Zach used to be good friends.

Dr. Frost, I've told you a little bit about this. And we used to be close. We used to have great conversations about eschatology. In fact, if you go deep into the archive of The Apologetic Dog, you will see, it's just a recording, but it's called An Evening of Eschatology.

And I was defending pre-millennial dispensationalism, so you gotta forgive me. And Zach Davis, at that time, was defending the post-millennial position. But we were having a friendly dialogue with a few of our other friends.

And so, I wanna encourage people to talk about that. You'll hear my voice, you'll hear Zach's voice. And so, that's been, goodness, over three years ago, easy, maybe four years. So, a lot has happened since then.

And so, Zach has made his way into full preterism.

Full Preterism, Eschatology, and the Problem of 70 AD

So, Zach was a post-millennialist that became a full preterist.

Okay, so, as far as I remember, he started out pre-millennial dispy. Then, he went to all mill. I think he was at all mill for like a week or two. Very short period of time. I don't wanna ever misrepresent Zach.

He tells me I don't understand his position. And we'll see about that. Maybe there are certain things I don't understand that I'm willing to further understand. But anyway, he told me, I'm pretty sure, he was all mill for a really short time.

Then, he was post-millennial for a long time after that. And then, it was just a handful of months, Dr. Frost, until he gave me the phone call and said, oh no, Jeremiah, I think I'm a heretic. And I just said, pump the brakes, man.

You don't have to do this. You don't have to preach it from the pulpit. And I said, please don't. There are hard things to understand in the word of God. It doesn't mean we have to preach it. And so, I remember those conversations.

He was worried. He goes against all the creeds, 2 ,000 years of church history. And I just said, look, those are good indicators that we need to slow down in what we're studying. So anyway, it was just a few months later until he did the nosedive into full preterism.

And that's about the time that I called you and just said, hey, I need help. I don't know what to say anymore to a good friend of mine that I've lost to full preterism. And so, these are important matters.

And by the way, you've wrote many books on the matter. And so, we'll kind of dip into this a little bit later on this evening. But is there anything you would like to say for those that are maybe in the post-millennial camp or those that are studying full preterism and they're trying to make heads or tails of which direction they should go?

Well, I mean, I was post-millennial, certainly. You know, preterist, post-millennial and then became full preterist and then left that whole thing. And eventually, began to see the problems with just preterism in general.

And in post-millennial, the two are, you know, very closely linked together. So I would just always issue a word of caution. When you find yourself going down the road where virtually every passage in the scripture is related to 70 AD, that seems to be the whole buzzword going around in some circles.

But, you know, just a word of caution.

Yes, well, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Because the reason why we see it as a caution, I believe, if you've watched my content at all, full preterism essentially redefines all of Christianity. Meaning, it goes against everything of what Christians have held on to for 2 ,000 years.

Me and you have done content about that. And the gospel not only frees us from the penalty of sin, right? We have our sins washed away, removed as far as the east is from the west when we put our faith alone in Christ alone.

But Jesus says that he will not leave us. He will send us the Holy Spirit, not to be left as orphans. But when he was ascending on high, he said he would return, Dr. Frost. And when we start studying in Titus chapter two, a Christian's blessed hope, we hang on to that.

We rebuke those who contradict this doctrine about Jesus' appearing, his great parrhesia, that great and awesome day of the Lord when he will judge the world in righteousness. And full preterism says that already happened at 70 AD, at the destruction of the temple.

And so to me, that takes away, even though the gospel's the good news, you can have your sin forgiven and have no more condemnation credited to your account, what's also embedded is a future blessed hope that sin will be no more, not even the presence or power of sin will be on this earth.

And so that's where full preterism, I think, takes a wild turn. I mean, and there's all different kinds of full preterism. But full preterism would say that the presence of sin, the power of sin, that's not really covenantally what was meant to take place.

It's all done away with at 70 AD. And I want to caution people that totally contradicts not only our reality, but many good scriptures that we'll get into today as we are responding to Zach Davis.

Yeah, it certainly contradicts reality. And you have to redefine all of this. And then you come up with this framework, covenantalism or however they want to, Don Preston does that interpreting everything covenantally, virtually to the point where nothing really is relatable to you anymore.

Because if you mentioned wars today, those are just going to go on forever. They really don't have anything to do with anything, really. So we're just left in this kind of vacuum. So, and they have no end.

The end has already passed. And so there's no, it's everything's already fulfilled. So now you have to define all of the fulfillment passages in terms of what we experienced today. And this is where the just radical Gnosticism like tendencies as my debate with Ward Finley, I think demonstrated quite plainly with Ward where he's, Ward's claiming that he's actually, he's perfect covenantally speaking.

So you see the disconnect there. It's okay, that's great. I don't know what that means to be perfected covenantally. Because the only thing I'm working on is what you're seeing here in the screen. I'm working on that covenantally.

So it's just this wild discourse and the well over a decade now that I've been out of it. And when I hear Ward and people like that anymore today, I wish, I just didn't have the thinker, thinking cap that I have on now.

I didn't have it on then. And I have it on now. And so when I hear full preterist today, I'm just, I just shake my head like, man, oh man, you are not living in the real world here.

When you were in the full preterist movement, did you kind of use that word covenantal as kind of that get out of jail free card?

Yeah, we were trying to, I mean, I remember having conversation with a family member and I was drunk on the poolside. This was in Orlando, just drunk. And the person was another person, family member that went to church.

And how can you sit there and you're a teacher and you're drunk and you're proclaiming Jesus. And I'm talking about the Bible and all this other bunch of stuff, just completely just out of it. And I said, because what you're looking at, Jesus has perfected me and you're judging me according to what you're seeing in appearances, but Jesus has fulfilled all things.

And so even though I may have a drinking issue, that has nothing to do with my relationship with God. I was just living in such a disconnect that I could excuse my sinful behavior, drunkenness. I could excuse that under the rubric that I'm already sanctified covenantally.

So what I do doesn't matter or does not affect in any way, shape or form the salvation and justification that I have in Christ who has fulfilled all things and fully dwells with me now as he will always fully dwell with me now, covenantally speaking.

And so using that phrase covenantally, that allowed, that was it, it was a get out of sin free card. It was just, and that's, I spent many years living just like that, excusing and justifying sin and all kinds of stuff because, and I think you saw that very clearly with Ward Finley.

And that is the ethics that comes out of that. And with Zach or anybody else listening, that is your ethics that comes out of that because God is just not concerned with your biological life here on earth.

And he certainly isn't concerned with perfecting your bodily biological life at all because that is not the goal. That is not the end of redemption, the redemption of your body. As Paul says, well, what's the body there?

Well, you can't define it as this body that you're seeing in the screen. You have to come up with another term and that's the corporate body, the covenantal body. Everything gets redefined. And so I don't, it just, that's why this will never sell in mainstream.

No one can relate to it. It's only a cloister of people that get into this cultic buzzword mentality and they got their own language and everything going on. And those on the outside looking in just don't understand any of it at all.

And the majority of the people in the many multitude of churches, church ministers that I've been with over the last several years and see these videos and things like this, their number one question, how did you ever get into this?

Because this is just so far off the reservation. That's what I know, I understand. Let me explain to you how I got into it. So that's been my, and I've watched a lot of people. There's three reactions to full preterism that I get among the church.

And these are hardworking, family oriented, good ethical, moral people who are dealing with themselves in a biblical fashion, confessing their faults and sins and accountability and responsibility and all of that kind of stuff.

The first one is just incredulous that something like this even exists. It's just complete insanity. That's the first reaction. I'd say that's the majority reaction. The other reaction are those that are looking into it, but then they begin to see the conclusions and then they don't go down that path.

They say, well, I got to go down another path. And then the third is those among the full preterists that have come out of it. And I would say that by now, within the years where I'm at now, there's been literally hundreds that I have worked with, that I have dealt with through emails and other exchanges on the phone that have dropped the view and come out of it completely, saw for what it was and have left it.

And so I'm very thankful to be put in a position and people like you that tell me to stay in and keep doing this and sounding the alarm.

You know what I'm going to say now?

No, yeah, but whatever.

But whatever.

Whatever.

Well, Dr. Frost, thanks for coming on. I want to play a few clips. Zach did about a 12 minute video. I'm actually glad he made it super small for me to look at, but then he told everybody, Jeremiah's last video was over an hour and a half.

So if you want to continue to watch my responses to him, you got to become a member on his YouTube page. I was like, oh, I got to pay to watch the rest of it. No thanks. But so I just want people to know we actually have a number of full preterists watching, filling out, I asked people in the live chat to fill.

Is there a way to get in the chat room?

Say again.

Oh, I see it. Okay, chat room.

Yep.

Yeah, so we got a number of full preterists. I'm glad they're watching. That way they can hear your heart in real time. And I just want everybody to know, I don't hate you. We say all these things out of love and this goes especially for Zach Davis.

So let me play this first clip where I believe this is something that he quotes me in my last response video. And he told me he didn't appreciate it too much.

So this one statement really is something that he said at the beginning of the video at the 623 mark. And he commented this on full preterism. Jeremiah said that full preterism is not a look at redemptive history.

It's a look at Israel's history. Let me read that again. That full preterism is not a look at redemptive history. It is a look at Israel's history. And my first thoughts when I heard that were, I'm not really sure he can play that angle and play that route because even futurists are gonna have to agree to an extent that Israel's history is connected to redemptive history.

Okay, so I wanna bring some clarity on this because at our position, I believe the orthodox view of eschatology, namely that Jesus's second return is going to be bodily in our future. The resurrection of the dead, that's bodily in future.

And Jesus is going to judge the world in righteousness and restore all things. That includes the physicality. Everything that has dirt that has been cursed by sin will be restored. Catching people up a little bit, I did a video with Dr. Stephen Boyce and we talked about basically how full preterism fails logically, historically, which is Dr. Boyce's area of expertise.

And then we talked about how full preterism fails exegetically. And one of the comments that Zach did quote me correctly on, I said, one of the problems with full preterism is redemptive history for them is basically, and I was using kind of the language of saying is basically Israel's history.

Now, I believe true Israel that have been given the promises of gods and blessings are found in Jesus Christ. The true Jews are those that are believers. And so I think all of history is God's redemptive story.

Now, I think there is a story of redemption for the ethnic Jews that brought forth Messiah. And so when I told Zach that the full preterist paradigm is centralized around ethnic Jews, I'm saying, yeah, that's really all y 'all care about leading up to the destruction of the temple.

And so I'm making the case that for you to think all of our blessed hope and eschatology is realized with the ethnic Jews, that's where you see the end that scripture is talking about because our view is that history keeps going.

Therefore, redemptive history keeps going and God is still saving true Jews. So before I hand it over to you, I wanna kind of show a few scriptures of what I'm talking about. Zach and I actually talked about this in Isaiah 46 long time ago.

So at the beginning of Isaiah, he is actually talking to Israel. Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel who have been born by me from before your birth, carried from the womb.

So this has a historic context, Dr. Frost, as I'm sure you're aware of, but it moves into God. He is Yahweh, there is none like him who declaring the end from the beginning. Now, there's a whole context here.

I remember talking with Zach a while back and he just said, oh, this is talking about Israel. And I said, so you're gonna interpret the end. You know what they interpret the end, Dr. Frost, to be?

70 AD.

70 AD.

What else would it be?

I know. And a couple of things. I believe in the old covenant. Yes, you had an ethnic people, but you had a remnant. You had true Jews, which Paul in Romans chapter two and Romans chapter nine would say.

It'd be those who have changed hearts that are trusting in Christ alone. And so I was trying to get Zach to see that redemptive history continues on past 70 AD. Now, this is where I was wanting to maybe get a little bit of your thoughts.

Because I think what Zach is trying to do, can you hear me okay?

Yes.

I think what Zach's trying to do is saying since eschatology is realized at 70 AD, him and Gary DeMar, Michael Sullivan, maybe Don Preston, they're trying to now apply those fulfilled principles of eschatology for us today.

And I'm saying they are for us today because we are true Israel, those that truly believe in Christ. So what do you think so far?

The other verse that's parallel is the one in Isaiah. You quoted Isaiah 41, four, who performed and done this calling the generations from the beginning. I am the first, I am the last, and I will be with the last.

And with the last what? The last generation. Who's performed and done this calling the generations, plural from the beginning. I, the Lord, am the first and will be with the last. You need to put there the last generation.

So he's with the beginning generations and he's with the last generations. And I brought this to Paul Preterist like Larry Siegel and others. And I said, what's the... He said, what's 70 AD? So everything's 70 AD.

The only end that God is concerned with is 70 AD. That's it. And last I checked, the Bible does not begin with Israel. The book of Genesis does not begin with Israel. It begins with Adam. And then there's this chapter in 11 or 10, rather, that's called the table of nations.

Noah was not an Israelite and Noah's sons were not Israelite and their sons were not Israelites and their sons and their sons were not Israelites. So you've got chapter 10, which is the table of nations who are clearly none of them clearly are not descended from Abraham.

He doesn't come until chapter 11 and 12. So now I brought this up before to like Israel only Paul Preterist and they are completely dismissive of that entire section of scriptures, which is the primeval history.

Genesis one through 11. If you read biblical scholarship, biblical Old Testament scholarship, Genesis one through 11 is the primeval history and is the foundation for everything else that you find in the Bible is Genesis one through 11 because 12 is where the covenant is made that God is entering into a specific plan through which he's going to bring about the new heavens and new earth and the bringing in of the seed and the bringing in of the one who will undo everything that was done through the sin and transgression of Adam.

So it involves world history and Israel is included in that certainly. God made promises to Abraham and to the seed of Israel, Israel according to the flesh who are promised to inherit the earth forever.

God made these promises to them. Now, unless God is a liar, I can conclude two things. One, he made a promise to the seed of Abraham to inherit the land, the earth forever and two, that has not been fulfilled yet and I can safely conclude that it hasn't been fulfilled yet.

Take a look around you, it has not been fulfilled yet and so this is what Paul is waiting for. This is where the Bible ends. The Bible ends with new heavens and new earth. That's where history is going is to the restoration of all things.

Resurrection of the dead, glorification, immortality, eternal life. God dwelling with us and we being his people and he being our God and there's absolutely no filters whatsoever. We will know God as Jesus.

The man is one with the father, we will be one with the father. I won't have to die to go to heaven to be with Jesus. That's all God. There's no separation, nothing and we will walk with God forever, forever and ever in his creation.

That's the hope that I'm looking forward to. That's why my labor today as a pilgrim in this world, in this age, in this day, it's laborious, it's hard, there's deception that's all around. So I can relate to all of these themes that we find in the Bible, I can relate to it.

We're fighting it every single day. We fight it in the government, we fight it in the politics, we fight it in philosophy, we fight it in our schools, we fight it with our families, we fight it in our church, we're fighting it all over the place.

And so this language is very much relevant to me but when you reduce and fulfill everything to 70 AD, now you're left out here in la-la land. And that's why full preterism is falling apart because they have no world history.

So they can't tell me the beginning of the world, they can tell you the beginning of Israel and they can't tell me the end of the world. So they don't know where the world is going. And for them, the world teleologically is heading towards an infinite whatever, whatever it is, I don't know, they don't know.

So they have no hope. There's no hope for this world here that we see that we're actually operating within. There's no hope for this world. It's to infinitely spiral with sin and evil and destruction and death and everything else because none of that is related, again, as we were saying in the beginning, none of that is related to the biological reality that we live in, it's all covenantal and a superstructure of spirituality.

That's the realm within, they define everything. So you're right, they don't have a world history. They can't account for a world.

Covenant Creation, the Table of Nations, and the Scope of Redemption

Yeah, so I did wanna speak back to this a little bit. Zach said, you know, the statement I made was full preterist is concerned with not redemptive history, but Israel's history. Now, I think maybe I didn't speak as super clear, but I definitely believe all history is redemptive history.

Therefore, ethnic Israel's history is a part of redemptive history. So I've never denied that. I just, I understand they have divorced what was going on with Israel, what God was doing in the Old Testament from what God is continuing to do.

And so I think, Zach, tell me, is this a minority view if you have a realized eschatology? Now, did you try to do this back in the late 90s, early 2000s, but then try to take principles and then just, to me, if you just take those principles and apply it today, then to me, you're trying to have your cake and eat it too because you have those Israel-only groups that just say, nope, we're living post-redemptive history.

You're reading someone else's mail. It's not for you.

Yeah, we, I never let go of being raised in the church, being in the church, and then before I became a full preterist, I had four years of my Bachelor of Theology. So I had a foundation of churchianity, you know, laid there.

And in that foundation was that Genesis is a creation narrative of the world, and the whole world, what eventually is spread out. And so I never left that. However, that was a big, giant problem. So to get around that, there was a group, Jeff Martin and Tim, Jeff Vaughn and Tim Martin.

And I was friends with them and spoke with them at several conferences and this, that, and the other. They wrote a book called Beyond Creation Science, very popular full preterist book, and they call it Beyond Creation Science, or they call it, here's your word again, Covenant Creation.

And so since 2 Peter 3 is apocalyptic language and it's obviously speaking Genesis language, because nobody would disagree with that, whatever 2 Peter 3 is talking about is talking about Genesis creation language.

But since that's 70 AD language, then we go back to Genesis 1 and that's apocalyptic Israel language. And Adam is the first covenant Israelite. He's the first covenant person. He's not the first human being.

And this is not the story of world history. This is the story, again, it focuses back in again on Israel, so it becomes very Israel centric. Well, I thought that was just ludicrous. And many within full preterism, like the Ed Stephens camp, they, you know, young earth creationist type.

So Ed Stephens never left that either. And that was one of the pillars that I was just not ready to, I was not going to, I was not going to give that one up for full preterism. And so I tried to incorporate an actual young earth creationism in with full preterism.

That was one of the let's spend versus just didn't, just among many. That was one of them that just did not work. And I think that Tim Martin and Jeff Vaughn, to their credit, that in the full preterist scheme, if you're going to be consistent, you would have to go the route that they went with the beyond creation science and the covenant creation and all of that.

And that Adam was not talking about the first primeval man. It's not talking about, it's not talking about, it's really not talking about, it's really not a cosmogony at all. And so they've solved the, you know, Tim Martin would run around saying he's solved the creationist evolutionist problem.

And full preterism is the key to solving the young earth, you know, and all that bunch of other stuff. So it, and I was just not going to go that route. In fact, I got criticized by Tim Martin and others.

When I left full preterism, one of the things that they would say to me quite often is that the reason why Sam left is because he's a young earth creationist.

Israel, the Nations, and the Redemptive Story of Scripture

Yeah.

Before I play this next clip, I want to make sure people hear us correctly. We know the full preterists say the Bible's not written to you, it's written for you. But my critique is if it's already been fulfilled at 70 AD and we're living in post-redemptive history, then how is it even for you?

You know what I'm saying? Like, that's first audience relevance. So why are you trying to glean principles for yourself today? So we're not misrepresenting the position. We're actually calling to question that the full preterists can even say it's for you.

So I wanted to say that real quick. All things being, thank you for chiming in. Keep your questions coming. And we may get into this question a little bit later on because I want us to talk about the covenantal language of heaven and earth, right?

And so all things being, says young earth creation is not at odds with full preterism. So I'm gonna table this. And all things being, let me know if I seem to kind of miss this later on because I do want to touch on this because personally, I do not believe young earth creationism is consistent with full preterism.

It's because full preterism has certain definitions that I would press for consistency that leads you all the way back to Genesis 1 if you were going to be consistent. So let me play this next clip because I believe Zach is going to continue to say, hey, we're not supposed to divorce redemptive history from Israel's history.

I'm not. I'm saying there's a problem if you think that is the key capstone to understanding eschatology because that's very similar to dispensationalism.

I wanna just make some points here that I think will be kind of helpful to push back against Jeremiah's idea of disconnecting redemptive history from old covenant Israel's history. Israel's history laid the foundation of what Christ would fulfill.

And that redemptive history is now applied to the nations all who believe. And that's the whole essence of really the eschaton. When I think about eschatology, I don't think about the burning up of the planet.

I think about the completion of the redemptive plan, which is centered around old covenant Israel. So Jeremiah whiffs it whenever he says that we don't see redemptive history, we see Israel's history.

Well, Israel's history is redemptive history.

The last thing he said there, redemptive history is Israel's history. That was my entire point. That's what they see the plan of redemption is Israel's history. I do not divorce the two. I think Israel's history are for true believers the way that Paul says.

In fact, I even pull it up here in Romans chapter two, because I think when you understand that Israel, the way that Paul speaks about it is something much deeper than the ethnic people. Let me see if I can pull this up.

Tell me if you can see this on your end.

Yeah.

Okay, let me read the kind of the concluding verses for the apostle Paul. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the spirit, not by the letter.

His praise is not from man, but from God. So something I wanna submit to you, Dr. Frost, and tell me your thoughts. I believe that full preterism does not have a redemptive historical hermeneutic, meaning the New Testament scriptures are the best interpreters of the Old Covenant.

Now, scripture is perspicuous, and we wanna understand language written in the proper timeframe, but as Christians, we take Christ with us as we go into the Old Testament. When you look at Isaiah 53, oh, well, Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of that.

And so for the apostle Paul, he is saying, oh, the blessings that God promised of salvation, God's promise of an eternal kingdom, oh, that's for the Jew who is one inwardly, according to the apostle Paul.

In fact, I see the Jewish people, I mean, even early in Romans chapter three, the ethnic people of Jews brought forth the oracles of God, the scriptures, and so, of course, they are foundational in the history that God is working out all things together after the counsel of his will.

Now, when Isaiah 46 talks about he declares the end from the beginning, well, the full Preterists want that to be the end of ethnic Israel's history, and I'm saying all of history is redemptive history, and so we get into deeper terms that need to be defined.

Hopefully, we get into this age and the age to come. That's where we're gonna really part ways, and perhaps that's where we're gonna see a major disconnect with the full Preterists and the Orthodox position.

Any thoughts with that?

No, I think in the main, I would agree with that. God clearly makes a covenant with a particular people that he separates out from the rest of the nations that are surrounding them. The Amorites, they're not Israelites.

The Hittites and Babylonians, they're not Israelites. They're not, you know, he starts the Hebrew people with a guy named Abraham, and he starts there, and then Genesis 17 is the beginning of the whole process, but then you notice what he's doing with Hagar.

God makes a covenant with Hagar, and he makes a covenant with her son. He makes her promises. Already, he's showing these. You see this in various stories. A wonderful story, you see it in his Ruth. Here's another wonderful little story that's going on about the nature of redemption.

Ruth is a Moabitess. Moabites are sworn enemies of Israel, and they're not Israelites at all, and yet what does God do with Ruth? Notice that she uses that covenantal phrasing that we find originally in the covenant with Abraham.

I will be your God, and you will be my people, and Ruth says to Naomi, I will go with you, and your God will be my God, and your people will be my people. That's covenant. Now, that, that's covenant talk, but this is a Gentile woman who is being assimilated into the faith of Naomi, which is a very strong faith that Naomi had in her God, lamenting as she is, but she understands who she can lament to, the maker of heaven and earth, who is covenanted with the people, and she realizes that there's a God in Israel.

There's a God of Israel. Let's go back to Israel, and Ruth goes with her, and Israel's God becomes her God, and she becomes assimilated into the people of God, and we find her later on in the genealogy.

There's a very strong point why Matthew includes her, and she's a Gentile. She's a Moabite. She is not an Israelite. We find this in several places. For example, the register of the names of the people who will say Israel's God is my God, the registers in the Psalms talks about, and the Ethiopian will say, this is my God, and the Philistine will say, this is my God.