Israel: God’s Chosen or Just Another Nation?

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Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the
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Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the
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Christian life. What we have for you today is an interview where I was on the
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Tearing Down the High Places podcast with a friend of mine, Pastor Jeff. He's been on this program before.
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And the topic he wanted to discuss is what's God's plan for national
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Israel. Israel has been in the news a lot, but in Christian circles, boy, has there been a lot of debate and argument and ridicule of not just Israel, but dispensationalism.
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Can we have a balanced view of this? I think this is a very important subject of why
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I did the one last week, and I'll probably have something else next week on the same topic of dispensationalism, because I think the issue is we need to resolve the fact of understanding how
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Israel fits into basically Christian life. Should we support
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Israel? Should we not support Israel? I mean, there are a whole lot of questions with it, and I think this is going to be very helpful to you whether you agree or not, whether you're a dispensationalist or a covenant theologian.
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I hope that you'll listen to this thoroughly and see that there's a lot we're fighting over we shouldn't be, and there's a lot that we really need to just come to terms with the fact of there is a national
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Israel today. It's not the same Israel as in the first century. It's different, but what is it?
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How do we respond to it as Christians? That's coming your way on this episode of The Rap Report, where I was on the
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Tearing Down High Places podcast. Check them out as well. I hope you thoroughly enjoy this, and if you do, please share it with others.
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Quickly, go and share it with at least five friends, whether on social media, text it to people, say, you've got to listen to this.
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That would be a great help. Now, what's God's plan for national Israel? Coming your way on The Rap Report.
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What I ended up seeing in that is watching everyone try to excuse away Israel. They got their country unjustly.
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Really? Because they didn't get it from the Palestinians. They got it from the UK. That's who gave it that in the land, right?
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The people who want it in warfare, the way every other country is done. So what you end up having is they just tried to make excuses.
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God believes in justice. And so, yeah, there are reasons to stand with the nation that exists today.
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Whether God is working through them or not, whether you believe that or not, you still stand up for any nation that is unjustly treated.
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Welcome to Tearing Down High Places.
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I am not your host, Average Joe Gormley, because sadly, Average Joe Gormley is leaving us.
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He's leaving the great, great, great state of New Jersey for the far west,
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Idaho. He's going to be Idaho Joe. We'll have that Cotton Eye Joe theme song with him. But good news for all those who are afraid, we are keeping
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Joe Gormley as the host of the show. He's going to be doing that remotely. So Tearing Down High Places is going to go on without a hitch.
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But today, I'll be the host. I'm Pastor Jeff, and I have one of my best friends.
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I've known you, Andrew, since probably 2017 when we started doing apologetics conferences. Andrew from Striving for Eternity Ministries, a great defender of the faith and my good friend.
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How are you, brother? I am starting to think New Jersey has had too much effect on you. You've lost your mind leaving the great state of, it's a communist country known as New Jersey.
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Get it right. I'm glad you actually brought that up because, okay, so the government of New Jersey under Phil Murphy.
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Yeah, pretty awful, authoritarian. But New Jersey is a great state. I love living here.
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The parks, the access to the beaches, you can go hiking in the mountains, river rafting. You can do anything in New Jersey.
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The big cities and the population centers, the economy is great, great jobs. I love living in New Jersey.
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You can get that anywhere else in America without communism. Just saying. Yeah. Well, we just exterminated communists, right?
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Murphy had us locked down, but our answer was, nope, we're just going to exterminate it. Okay. For the folks who don't know
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Governor Murphy, this is a guy who comes in, and I fled the communist country of New Jersey.
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I didn't get too far. I only got to Pennsylvania, but I'm looking to go further. But he got into office and one of the first things he did was he did not even want police officers carrying guns.
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You didn't know that he passed a bill, an executive order that wouldn't allow military or police when they're off duty to carry weapons.
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And there's a federal law that basically says that police can carry when they're off duty because of the fact that someone they arrest might come up to them.
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And so the best he could do to restrict them is to say they couldn't carry their service weapon. It's horrible, right? So he doesn't even want police officers to carry outside of work.
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That's how restrictive he is. Yes. Then because of the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, three
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Supreme Court justices put in place the New York decision. And all of a sudden, here we are, we're concealed carrying right here in the quote unquote communist state of New Jersey.
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Yeah. So I have passed the test to carry concealed in Jersey as someone that's out of state.
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The test was you basically had to do the same thing a police had to do. I had to be a timed test shooting at targets while falling to the ground and shooting, going behind things and shoot.
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So yeah, it wasn't an easy test. And so I passed it. The problem is that I'm trying to follow what they say.
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Oh, go to go to the local police department closest to you. So I do that. They go, no, go to the state police, please.
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There's no call this number. That number says go to a local police. I'm like, yeah, some people could carry.
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But if you're out of state, they don't want to tell you how. And I will admit, like the hoops that they make you jump through in this state are outrageous.
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The Department of Environmental Protection has had us locked up for almost two years just trying to get our our zoning based on the wetlands so that we can build and add to our current building here.
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And it's nonsense. Let me tell you this, Andrew, this will blow your mind. At first they said we might have long eared bats in our woods.
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Well, we had a bat study done that proved there's no bats whatsoever in the woods. And so months go by.
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They come back and instead of just issuing the LOI, the letter of interpretation, now they came back and said there there is a vernal pool in your woods.
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What's a vernal pool? It's an area of wetland that is sometimes dry and sometimes wet.
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And that's the kind of water works or whatever that can house endangered species.
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So they don't tell you if it's a frog, if it's a another kind of bat or it's any kind of animal, a fox.
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I don't know. But now we've been held up. And then when they're finally done with all of this nonsense, they issued the biggest wetland buffer they could do, 150 feet.
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So now there is a clause that we were able to access, a clause D. They're going to reduce that to 100 feet and we should be able to build.
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But this is a two year process. The nonsense of the Department of Environmental Protection.
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This is what Donald Trump and Elon Musk were talking about. Musk talked about that, you know, to be able to do
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SpaceX, he had to prove that the, you know, the boosters when they'd fall off wouldn't land on a whale.
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We had a two year study to prove that it wouldn't land on a whale. And then it was like, oh, it could fall on a shark in the ocean.
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Right. So this is this is the country we live in. And people just don't understand.
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If you don't own a business or have to deal with this stuff, you don't realize how much regulations affect.
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In fact, I know this isn't on topic, but, you know, the one thing that Donald Trump did in his first term that helped the economy feel like, oh, it was a growing economy.
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Was it his tax cuts? What was it? It was really simple. He cut regulation. That's what he did.
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The regulations we have in this country are preventing us from producing.
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And then what do you have? You have countries like China that go, well, we'll we'll fill that in. Hey, we don't care about the environment at all.
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We'll we could destroy it. Not a problem. Just keep giving us your money and we'll give you cheap labor. So they have a slave labor class who does produces all your iPhones and everything else.
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So all these liberals that are so against slave labor and yet they're the ones wanting to support
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China that is giving us all that slave labor. And when they say they're against slave labor, folks, just remember, they're the ones that say that we have to have illegal immigrants in this country to do the work they claim no
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American would do. And what did you have happen when they started to arrest some of these immigrants on the farms and all people started applying for jobs?
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What do you know when the farmers need somebody they're willing to pay more when these other companies need to pay somebody, they'll find it.
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So, yeah, it's. But what is this? What are the group of people that do the work that no
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American would do? That's called a slave labor class. You pay them less than you'd pay anybody else.
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So when they sit there and do that, remember, they're arguing for a form of slavery. Just saying.
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So what you're telling me is we just need to go back to a free market economy and try to absolutely let capitalism do its thing.
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All right. Well, Andrew, one of the reasons that we have you on, we're going to have you on again and again. You're one of our favorite guests.
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One of the reasons we have you on today is there's a moment in world history where Iran and Israel are at war.
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And here in America, the reason that America has been so supportive of Israel is that the pulpits across this country for more than 100 years have preached the truth about what we call dispensationalism.
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But someone doesn't even have to have that label or adhere to seven dispensations or have great charts that outline the eternal state and all of these kind of things.
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But what we need to understand is that the Bible teaches that God still has a plan for national
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Israel. And that was taught in pulpits for 100 plus years. And now that's being eroded and run back a little bit.
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And what would be the danger if we lose sight of national Israel? Well, I think if you lose sight of a nation of Israel, you lose sight of understanding the scriptures.
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If you look historically, let's take a step back historically. You had many people and you see us throughout history that want to be the replacement for God's chosen people to replacement of Israel.
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You had the Catholic Church and they started with creating priests. That's what they call them.
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Priests. Why? Because there was a priestly class in Israel, the Levites.
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That's actually my family line, Levitical. And so that is something that you had to be of the family of Aaron to be a priest.
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But now to gain an element of authority, the Catholic Church starts trying to claim this special relationship that Israel had with God.
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And so they start taking on terminology. They start to spiritualize. So now you don't have to be a physical descendant of Aaron, but you can be a spiritual one.
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And that the way they come about that change of taking the scripture literally to spiritualizing it to make the arguments they're making.
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That is becomes a dangerous thing. And you see this Mormonism. What do they have? They they do the same thing.
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They have people who are not from the Aaronic line, but they claim they're the
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Aaronic priesthood. And even worse, they claim that they have people of the Melchizedek priesthood.
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Now, there's only one person that is in the Melchizedek priesthood and his name is Jesus Christ. And so I would argue that you saying you're in that priesthood is blasphemy.
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Wow. Good. Let me push back on something you just said. Not because I don't agree.
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I do. But because I know some people will say that we're straw manning. Right. And that is replacement theology.
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So they would say, let's steel man the argument here that Israel was always referring to believing
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Israel. And that would then include Gentiles who are later believers.
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They're the true Israel. What would you say to that argument that the church never replaced
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Israel, but believers, the remnant believers are the true Israel all along?
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Yeah, this is a good question, because most that would hold to what they refer to as covenant theology, it should really be referred to as reformed theology.
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I can explain why in a moment if you want. But the the point being is they do not believe in replacement theology.
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There's there are some, but that's not the majority that hold to a reformed theological position.
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OK, so it's I mean, I know guys like John MacArthur will claim that, you know, any belief that doesn't that says
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Israel and the church are one body, he considers it replacement, but they don't.
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So I'm going to go with what they say about what they believe. The issue, though, is is it is the fact that it's not a replacement.
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However, historically, when you look at what defines the church and if folks want to dig deeper into this, get my book,
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What Do We Believe? I have a whole historical view of how the word ecclesia church has changed through history and become more and more precise.
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But we've we ended up seeing that historically, then when everyone kind of went to church, they had to differentiate between believers and unbelievers in a local gathering.
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And so they started to refer to an invisible or universal church versus a local visible church.
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So that local gathering on a Sunday could be in a building filled with believers and unbelievers.
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That's your local visible church. And it's made up of believers and unbelievers who are gathering together.
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We can't see who's the believer and unbeliever. But that's separate from that universal, invisible church that's only made up believers everywhere in the world.
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Right. I'm laying that out for this reason. They will say, well, see, Israel was always the believing community.
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That's not true. Any more than to say everyone who goes to church is the spiritual church.
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You have to do apples to apples. And so if you're going to do that, there is a whether you want to call it local, visible
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Israel, I call it national Israel or a invisible universal
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Israel called spiritual Israel. But you have part of the nation that was made up of believers and unbelievers that were part of Israel, the way your local church is called church.
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And it's made up of believers and unbelievers. But there's a spiritual church, a spiritual Israel that's made up only of believers.
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So what they do is they take the nation and then attribute that to the spiritual church.
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That's not the right way to do it. It's if you want to say that the body of believers that God has always had,
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OK, that would be spiritual Israel and spiritual church or universal Israel, universal church versus that local, visible gathering that's made up of believers and unbelievers.
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So you have to be consistent with it. And that's where I think the hang up is now.
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I don't know anyone else that makes the differentiation as I do with national Israel and spiritual
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Israel the way that I do. But it helps to I think what it does is helps people to see that when they're making the argument, they're comparing two different things.
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So I want to get it where we're doing the similar comparison. Yes. And I think the construct that you just laid out there maps perfectly onto Romans nine.
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So in Romans nine, three to five, Paul is speaking about national
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Israel when he says to them belong the covenants and the glory, the giving of the law, the patriarchs and from whose seed, according to the flesh is the
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Christ. So it has to be national Israel in view there. And then when he goes in nine, six and says, but it is not all who are descended from Israel, who are
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Israel, that second usage of the term is a spiritual one. It's not all who are national
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Israel who turn out to be the children of God as he interprets himself. This means chapter nine, verse eight, that not all are children of God, but those who who are believing.
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So within national Israel is the believing remnant. But that doesn't eliminate the fact that Paul has a discussion of national
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Israel to which he returns in Romans 11, and he makes the point that God has not done with them.
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He's hardened them for a time, but in the end, all Israel will be saved. He's speaking of a future coming time, 11, 25 and 26, the deliverer will come from Zion and he will turn godlessness away from Jacob.
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So now he's talking about national Israel and those who were hardened will become sort of jealous of the
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Gentiles who have come in and they will then, God will have mercy on them, a future
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Jewish revival. So I'm, I'm seeing that construct right there in Romans nine to 11, there is national
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Israel and there's a believing remnant within. And anybody who believes is saved the same way that all of us are by faith in the son of God.
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Correct. And how do we know that Paul's making that shift? Well, folks, if you're listening, pastor Jeff just told you because the scripture makes that distinction.
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He's talking of national Israel and then says not all of Israel. Well, who's the, all of Israel, their national
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Israel is spiritual Israel. So he, when he's makes that transition, we know he's doing that because the scripture is laying that out.
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He's mentioning both. And so now he's talking spiritual Israel. This is what we call hermeneutics.
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This is how we interpret. And if we, if you see Israel as the same exact body as the church and you start saying, well, the, the fulfillments are fulfilled in, in the church rather than Israel, then you end up in a case where we don't believe in the
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God of Islam that deceives the, in, in the Quran, uh, Allah is referred to as the great deceiver.
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And he is because they believe that it wasn't Jesus that went to the cross, right? Some say it was
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Judas. Some just say it was another lookalike, but they, they believe that a lot deceived his own followers into believing it was
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Jesus on the cross when it was a lookalike. Yeah. And there's a sewer for it says it, uh,
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Christ was not crucified as they suppose it only appeared that way to them. He's creating this like illusion to deceive.
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And so if all these thousands of years, God is saying to the nation of Israel, this is the specific land that you will be in.
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They've never, they've been in lots of it, but never have they filled, fulfilled the full dimensions of what
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God laid out. And so a lot of people say, oh, well, that was fulfilled in the church. And now what you do is now, can, do we accept that God can have a dual meaning of certain passages as a dispensationalist?
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I say, yes, but, and what I mean by that is when God says there's a dual meaning,
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I see a dual meaning when he says out of Egypt, I will call my son. And in the old Testament that is referring to the nation of Israel, but in the new
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Testament, it is identified as speaking also of Jesus. There's a dual meaning, but if scripture doesn't give it the dual meaning,
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I might be in error of blasphemy to say, thus says the Lord on something the
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Lord never said. It doesn't matter how much similarity there is between something in the old
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Testament and something in the new, we have to look at what scripture actually says. And so we have to really be careful not to say more than what the
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Lord says. And therefore, if we see God saying that this is the land, the physical land that the physical nation of Israel will be living in, and they never lived there,
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I don't suddenly say, well, now that applies to the church because he's done with Israel. But, but how do you know he's done with Israel?
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Because our systematic theology says so, right? It's a hermeneutic. This is why
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I say it's, this comes down to how you interpret. The issue is that what they do to get to the conclusion that God's done with Israel is to look at it and say, well, all this was fulfilled in the church.
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Now you're interpreting the scripture based on a conclusion that you're started with.
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And the conclusion is nonsense anyway, because as Paul gives these soteriological argument in Romans 9 about the chosen remnant within Israel, and also any child is chosen, whether Jew or Greek, those who would actually belong to Christ and be saved.
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He gives that soteriological argument, and then he keeps talking about Israel, referring in the pronoun to them as they.
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So they, they, they are national Israel. He refers to them and continues to talk about them from Romans 9 to 11.
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But now you have guys who are mockingly saying, what is Israel? You know, Tucker Carlson on the
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Ted Cruz show. And then I've heard some guys in the covenant camp, trying to equate that to the question, what is a woman?
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You can't know they say, but wait a minute. Remember Matt Walsh's series, what is a woman? The ones he was mocking were the ones who can't simply answer that question.
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And the answer actually is simple. It's God's chosen people in the promised land. The nation descended from Abraham, the
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Jews, the nation of Israel. It's an easy answer. So there's, there are people online that, and it frustrates me because you're seeing what's going on with just timeline when we're recording this, the 12 day war is over.
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The, the shortest, the shortest world war ever. It, it happened, it ended so quick that the rest of the world didn't even have a chance to get involved.
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You know, America got involved in one day it's over. And you know what, Andrew, what was funny is they online, all these guys were saying, see the dispensationalists are causing world war three.
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They have such unfettered, you know, support for Israel. They pushed the world into world war three.
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Yeah, right. We, we actually defended Israel against an existential threat, a nuclear bomb in the hand of an
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Ayatollah who shoots thousands of rockets into Israel. That aside, you know, the only people
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I see that's talking so much about Israel online, it's not the dispensationalists, right?
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It's all the covenant guys that are saying that dispensationalists are talking about. I'm going, where is all this talk coming from dispensationalists?
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Cause I don't see it. And I'm in a lot of dispensational groups right now. So is it because we're giving response to them or are we bringing it up?
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Well, we're, we're responding to their, to their constant claims that we're bringing it up.
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But the thing is I've, I've been seeing people who are saying in your question, what is
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Israel? There's some who are denying Israel exists. And I'm going, wait a minute.
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Like based on that is America, do we exist?
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We shouldn't exist because we had, we had a bunch of Europeans that came in here and therefore we shouldn't exist.
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We, we're not a country. I mean, no, Israel exists today because the country of great
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Britain in, in a war, world war one overtook the Turks and took over the land.
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And then, and by the way, folks notice there were no Palestinians. There's no Palestinian language.
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There's no Palestinian culture. The palace before 1948, every Jewish person that lived in that land was called the
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Palestinian. Okay. So there was no Palestinian country. It was called
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Palestine all the way back from Rome as an insult to the Jewish people because the
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Philistines were, were always the thorn in the flesh under King David. And so Rome called it
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Palestine as an insult to the Jewish people. And so it has been, that region had been known as Palestine and every
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Jewish person that ever lived there was called Palestinian, but there was no Palestinian country. It was owned by the
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Turks. And then by great Britain, great Britain in, in like 1917, talked about making it the nation of Israel.
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They didn't after world war two ended. They did in 1948, they declared, we're giving this as a new country.
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And it is a country, it does exist, but some people's theological system has so such an overbearing emphasis on their, their thinking that they're actually denying that Israel even exists.
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They want to claim that it's like, it's not a country. Yeah, it is. Here's why they do that. They acknowledge it's a country, but they say it's not a country of Jews because they are following what's called the
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Khazar hypothesis that the Khazari people in the eighth century
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AD not being Jew, Jewish accepted Judaism as their religion, having kind of put all three major religions on trial.
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The, the emperor there chose Judaism and the Khazar people became
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Jewish, but didn't have ethnic ties to Abraham. And then that's what populated the
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Rhineland of Germany to form the Ashkenazi Jews. And similarly, they have a theory that's like that for the
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Sephardic Jews of, of Spain. And then with the reconstitution of Israel in the land, they say, these aren't even ethnic
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Jews. They're only 14 % Middle Eastern. They're mostly, you know, having ethnicity that doesn't match the, the
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Middle East. And so their argument is that Israel is not even descended from Abraham.
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Have you heard this? The Khazar hypothesis? Yeah. And I mean, and what this is, is this is an attempt, as I said, throughout history, everyone has made to, to claim that they have some special status with God that Israel had in the
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Old Testament. Now, I will say that our Jewish people today,
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God's chosen people. I did a podcast. I did an episode, I do Apologetics Live every Thursday night, and my two co -hosts are
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Reformed. I'm, I'm dispensational. So we're discussing it. And my, one of my co -hosts who really doesn't,
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I think, engage with dispensationals. He was like, wow, you're, you're, you're, you're, I'm agreeing with you.
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He couldn't believe how much agreement there was because it's like, well, you know, instead of attacking so many people on both sides, just attack the other side rather than listen to the other side.
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And I knew my co -hosts would actually listen when we were discussing it. And, you know, as we, we went through it and, but the thing is that I don't,
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I won't say that the current state of Israel is God's chosen people in the sense that God is working through them in, in the only way he's working through them right now is in judgment.
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Okay. But he's going to bring them back in. So right now, when we speak of God's chosen people,
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I would say, okay, he's referring to the church. Are there some who are of the nation of Israel that are still a remnant today?
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Well, yeah, obviously I believe that because I believe in one of them. So I think that, but that is not the norm.
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That's more of a rarity. Right. And I would say, you know, for the people who want to make the claims that, well, the church is, is it like only
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Israel was God's chosen people. I don't know anyone that actually believes that only Israel, like the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were
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God's chosen people, because I believe that Nebuchadnezzar will be in heaven and he's a
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Gentile, but we would consider him one of God's chosen people in a spiritual sense, even though he was never part of the nation of Israel.
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Right. And even within the nation of Israel, there were many who were grafted in who were not of Jewish ethnicity or Israeli ethnicity.
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So you have Moabitesses, you know, Rahab the prostitute and Ruth, Naomi.
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So you have, you have, well, not Naomi. I don't know that her line ever came into Israel, but even at the time of Jesus, it was not a purely, it was not pure Israeli blood.
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There was genetic drift, even in the Messiah's line. Right. So when the true story of how the
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Ashkenazi Jews populated Europe was that Vespasian after the destruction of the temple, they displaced 100 ,000
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Jews as slaves in Italy. And there in Italy, they did continue to, to reproduce.
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And then they moved north up into the German Rhineland. And there was, there was a lot of mixture through conversion with Italians.
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So you'll see genetic drift within the bloodline, the DNA line of Ashkenazi Jews, but there's still a direct line from Abraham.
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And that was always allowed because even the bloodline of Jesus had conversion within it.
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It was never, it never had to be a pure bloodline. There was a way that conversion happened that would make someone identify as a
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Jew. So that whole argument, it's really a historical argument to say that modern day
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Israel is not Israel because they're not even ethnically Jewish, but that's not true.
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So it's a historical myth. The Kazar hypothesis is a lie meant to break apart that Jewish identity.
32:32
And many people, including John MacArthur will make a bad claim in saying that, well, in 70
32:38
AD, all the records were destroyed. And there's no way to know today who's
32:43
Jewish and who's not, and who the Messiah could be. The problem with that is you can go to places today, there are cultures in Africa and elsewhere where the tribe you are part of is majorly important.
32:56
And people have memorized 14 generations back. When your tribe is so important to you, yes, were the records destroyed in 70
33:07
AD? Yes. What do you think was the first thing they started doing when they had these important records get destroyed?
33:15
They start writing it down again, exactly like you would do if you had important documents that got destroyed, you try to recreate them as quick as you can.
33:24
And that's what they did. How do we know that? We know that. Hidden in the Dead Sea.
33:30
Right. And we rely on Matthew and Luke's record, which made use of the then destroyed documents.
33:36
And we trust that as a historical record, because it is, that's actually inspired by God, the line of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.
33:44
Um, but I agree with you, there would be oral tradition, there would be new writing, writing down the line.
33:51
I was actually going to ask you when you said that you're a Levite, how do you know that? Well, so my family line actually comes, as you mentioned, through Italy.
33:58
And therefore, I've always said I'm 100 % Jewish, but my stomach is 100 % Italian. So because it just loves
34:06
Italian food, but it is somewhere in my it's it's based off of the head records.
34:12
And then when the use of last names started to be identified with the each of the tribes, so the the rapport last name is is founded in Italy.
34:21
It's actually one of the few Jewish names that have a coat of arms. Jewish people don't have a coat of arms.
34:28
So somewhere in history, there was a rapport that had done something to earn a coat of arms there in Italy.
34:36
Don't know the history of what it was. But the the last name would be how we now start to identify.
34:42
So rapid port or Cohen, if you know Cohen, those are what we refer to as Cohen or core heights.
34:51
And so that is the family of Aaron. That is basically if you you'll read in your scriptures of those who took care of the temple elements.
35:01
Well, those are the cohorts. Ding dong job as witnesses. Ding dong.
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36:03
OK. And so we now use by last name, we can identify which tribes different people are in because they would write down son of so and so, son of so and so, just like you see in scripture.
36:15
That's how you would have it. And then in history, we started using last names to identify groups of of families.
36:24
Right. And that's what we do. You can't have 100 percent certainty in any in any individual case.
36:30
But with that multifocality, with so many oral traditions, so many documents over the thousands now of years, you can trace through northern
36:41
Africa, through Spain, through the German Rhineland. And then the immigration to the to the east from Germany is how how the
36:53
Eastern Bloc and Russia became populated by the Ashkenaz. So there's a great book by Thomas Sowell called
37:00
Migrations and Cultures. And he I've listened to it in audio form. And he just outlines exactly how this played out.
37:09
It is it is not doubted by historians who actually know anything about this, that there is a there is a line back to ethnic
37:18
Israel. Well, OK, so here's something to think about is if for the people who say, well, there is this, you know, the genetics of the people that say they're
37:30
Jewish today, they only have 14 percent and all this. OK, but how do you know that?
37:36
Because you need the DNA from like Isaac and you don't have that.
37:43
Right. So when they say, well, it's only 14 percent. Well, 14 percent is a relational number.
37:50
That's what a percentage is. Therefore, what's it relating to? You need you need to have that source element.
37:58
So they don't have that source element because it doesn't exist. So when you're saying that you're you're basically just going, well, just because we compare it to something that you don't.
38:08
OK, well, what they would say here is that we're comparing to, say, the Sephardic line or those the
38:14
Middle Eastern Jews that remained there. I forget the names of those streams of Jewish people.
38:21
But if you were to compare the Ashkenazi DNA with more Middle Eastern Jewish DNA, it was only like this 14 percent mapping.
38:30
But that's actually a significant number, by the way. That's a significant number. So but here's the thing. OK, so what do you have?
38:37
You have you have the Sephardic Jewish people who were left in the land. You had the
38:42
Ashkenazi that and we've seen this through history. Even when the Syrians came in, what did they do? They took the 10 tribes and spread them all out.
38:50
They left some in the land, but they spread them all over that empire. Yep. And they remain in that empire.
38:58
They're marrying with other people that have over time. You could take two people from China, put them here in the
39:08
United States, give them a couple thousand years. And if as long as or maybe start with more than, you know, start with a couple dozen.
39:15
Right. Move them here. And they keep remarrying with within that group that's here.
39:23
They're going to lose certain DNA that those in China have. And you would have to say, well, they're not they're only 14 percent the same as those in China.
39:31
Therefore, they they're not really ethnically Chinese. Right. And that's what they call genetic drift.
39:37
There's going to be genetic drift, but it doesn't undermine the argument. Correct. Yeah. The argument is born, you know, son of so -and -so, son of so -and -so, son of so -and -so, son of Isaac.
39:49
Right. Right. So that's the way that genealogies are done. It's not based off the
39:55
DNA, because just like languages, not only do you mention the cultures move around, but that's one of the ways we know some of that shifting of cultures is through languages, because we have 12, really 13 proto languages, first languages.
40:12
That's what would have happened at the Tower of Babel languages that when we go back, there was no beginning language.
40:19
It had this is the first language that started, which is a hard one for the evolutionists because they have to explain how not only did humans learn to speak a language, they learned to speak 13 languages all at the same time.
40:34
Now, the reason I said 12 or 13, there's actually a language called a click language. It is nothing but clicking noises.
40:42
But what defines a language is a grammar, and that language actually has a grammar. It's not written down. It's a bunch of what we would think of as clicking noises, but it is a language.
40:52
So what you have is, I grew up in the household speaking, we'd hear Yiddish. Yiddish is a combination of Hebrew and German.
41:01
Okay, that's what Yiddish is. So it has a mixture of both of those. I used to speak
41:07
Creole. Creole is a French dialect in Haiti. And so as people move from one area to another, the dialects that they start to speak, they take one language and it starts to form.
41:21
English is actually a dialect. It's not a language that just started on its own.
41:27
It's a mixture of several different languages that then became what we call
41:32
English. And when you follow the line, you can see how people moved around. But just because I speak
41:38
English doesn't mean that I'm not from a European descent or something.
41:43
You go further back and yeah, I have family that were born in Russia and Romania.
41:50
And you keep going further back, I have family that was born in what we'd call the nation of Israel today. Yes. Amen.
41:57
Okay. So I think this point is established for any fair -minded person. There is a scholar, he is
42:02
Jewish, so some people would just discount him as being biased to the subject, but his name is Dr.
42:08
Abramson. It's the Ashkenazim. And he has a YouTube series that traces and proves.
42:14
I think he's fair -minded in how he presents this. He talks about discoveries of bones from the eighth century that bear
42:22
DNA resemblance to the Italian stream, not to the Khazarian stream.
42:28
So you can disprove the Khazar hypothesis. And the truth of the matter is the people in Israel today, not necessarily to an individual, you can't prove that, but by and large, this is ethnic
42:41
Israel descended from Abraham. I think that's easy to demonstrate by scholarship.
42:47
Okay. So this being the case, Israel is Israel. I wanted to just kind of change the subject just for a minute, unless you have one more thing to say.
42:53
Well, I do, just for folks to pick up on what you said there, because the thing is, this gets back to what we said earlier.
42:59
Why is this important? It's important because what you see is every group wants to claim their
43:06
Israel in some way. They want to claim their God's chosen. They have this special relationship with God.
43:11
The way we see it today, Pastor Jeff, is real simple. We see people that claim they have a special relationship with God.
43:17
They hear directly from him. God speaks to them. They go up to heaven and get to be with Jesus in heaven, to have all these dreams.
43:25
You see this with so many groups of, especially unbelievers, but that want to claim a spirituality.
43:32
The way they do it is to try to claim some special connection with God. And an easy way for a group to do it, whether it's the
43:41
Catholic church, whether it's the Mormons, whether it's whoever, they try to claim that they're somehow
43:47
Israel. The Mormons actually claim that the Mormons here in the States, that Israel, the 10 tribes came to the
43:54
United States and that's who became the Mormons. And so, you know, the black
43:59
Hebrew Israelites claim that they're the Israel. And I find it amazing that somehow the slavers knew to only keep those that are from Judah, the kingly line, in America.
44:11
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SFE. That was really important for those slave traders to say, oh, you're from Judah.
45:35
Let me bring you to America because you can't go anywhere else. Right. And you just started answering the question, but I'll let you take a drink and then just wrap this up for us on this rap report slash
45:47
TVHP episode. So I want to know, why does this matter?
45:53
Does dispensationalism versus covenant theology bear practical significance in our lives?
46:01
Or is this just theological hand -wringing? Because I look at what just happened within the last week, and I think this is very practical.
46:11
I think it makes all the difference in the world, even geopolitically, in how the world is formed. Whether you bless
46:17
Israel or not will make a big difference in your country and in your life. And you mentioned it,
46:23
Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, and you're seeing everyone divide on that based on their theological convictions.
46:31
But Ted Cruz was basically saying, hey, those who bless Israel, God will bless. Those who curse
46:36
Israel, God will curse. And he's looking at it as the nation of Israel. And then you have
46:41
Tucker Carlson who's saying, no, no, no, God's done with that. What's Israel?
46:47
That's the church now. And so he's seeing the nation of Israel and saying, God doesn't have his hands on that.
46:55
And so let me start by saying, I think that there's far too many people, especially on social media, making far too big a deal of this distinction to where they're so busy trying to prove, and this is on both sides, try to prove that they're right so much so that they're
47:17
A, doing harm to the body of Christ by dividing it.
47:25
They're tarnishing the name of the body of Christ to the unsaved world that's watching.
47:32
I think this is an in -house discussion and we should keep it that way and stop fighting and divide all this tribalism within Christianity.
47:41
It just, it needs to stop because we're all on the same side. And I think what really what it comes down to is it's because so many people have stopped evangelizing.
47:51
They think evangelism is me getting people in my church. Therefore, who do they go to get in their church?
47:57
Other believers. Their mission field is not the unsaved. It's the saved.
48:02
And they're trying to get the saved converted to their beliefs and get them to their church.
48:08
And I think that's a real problem within American Christianity. So I do think that people have put an overemphasis on these issues.
48:18
I'm kind of okay with a Reformed person who's consistent, at least, in their hermeneutic.
48:25
I disagree with the hermeneutic, but I can see that they can be consistent with it. I think the danger is when you get into spiritualizing the literalness of God's word, and you start saying, well, this means that Israel now means church.
48:42
Where do you stop? This is one of the things, and it sounds weird for me to say that I agree with the
48:48
Catholic church, with the Pope that was putting Martin Luther on trial, but I also agree with Martin Luther.
48:54
The Pope at that trial, he said, but Luther, if you allow people to have a private interpretation, people could believe heresy.
49:04
That's actually true. But Luther was also right when he said, rather have the error with the truth than just the error.
49:14
Nice. Right? We need the truth. And so I think what my concern with folks that do this is you could far too easily fall into saying something
49:30
God doesn't actually say just because there's similarities. Now, many Reformed folks, many
49:35
Presbyterians, would believe in what's called the regulatory principle versus normative.
49:41
When we talk about these principles, it's usually dealing with worship. And the idea of the regulatory principle is that when it comes to the worship of God, we do not do anything that is not explicit in scripture.
49:54
So if it says, you know, no organ, if it doesn't say to use an organ, we don't use an organ.
50:00
If it doesn't, if it says, doesn't say to use drums or trumpet or, you know, then we don't do that. The other side would be, well, hey, if it doesn't say not to use it, it doesn't say you can't use drums, so we could use drums.
50:13
Right? So that's the difference with these two. The regulatory principle says that unless it's explicit in scripture that we can do it, we don't do it.
50:22
I apply that principle to the interpretation of scripture. If scripture doesn't say that this thing means this other thing,
50:33
I don't say it means something else. So I don't take the nation of Israel and start to spiritualize it and say it's fulfilled in the church unless God says that.
50:44
That's the limitation that I have. I love it. And I think there are places where scripture does that in a context.
50:49
So Galatians refers to salvation. It's talking about salvation issues. Same with Romans 9.
50:55
But there are other contexts, Romans 11, parts of Ephesians 3, and then certainly so many verses like Deuteronomy 7 and Jeremiah 31 and so many passages about national
51:08
Israel that you have to hold on to both. And you can't just collapse them together into one thing.
51:15
Now, the Bible in Romans 11 does say that Jews are enemies with regard to the gospel, meaning when a
51:24
Jewish person who's hardened against the gospel opposes Christ, him crucified, in that regard, they're acting like an enemy.
51:32
They're saying Jesus is not the Son of God. He's not the Messiah. And someone who is hardened against the
51:38
Messiah will oftentimes fall into sin, being given over as Romans 1 talks about, and then
51:46
Romans 2 referring to the Jews. So you're going to have a lot of people pointing out the sins of Jewish people.
51:53
And they'll say things like, look at the pornography industry, look at George Soros, look at the
51:58
Rothschilds, look at Marx, Karl Marx himself. And they say, look how much wickedness has come into the world through the
52:06
Jewish people. Now they won't point out the Nobel Peace Prizes in areas of physics and how many discoveries have made our lives better.
52:15
Even people like Dennis Prager, who have fought for the good very often, or other conservative
52:20
Jewish people, they'll focus on the evil things that Jewish people have done.
52:27
So just kind of as we close up here, Andrew, I wanted to bring that on the table to say, isn't this something that we should expect though?
52:32
If a person is hardened in their heart against the Messiah, that they would be prone to fall into sin.
52:42
And Jewish people are excellent in the terms of excelling the norms of a population, right?
52:48
In what they do, whether for good or for bad. So the number of Nobel Peace Prizes is so ridiculously disproportionate in good things, but they might also lead the way in some bad things.
53:01
Is that appropriate for us to recognize while at the same time saying, God still has a plan for national
53:08
Israel. He's brought them back in the land. He has a future plan for their revival. Can we hold all that together?
53:14
I think we can. One of these folks who are very much online, very much against Israel, it was actually claiming supposedly that Israel stopped existing in 70
53:29
AD. Right. And so someone asked me, he was like, well, how could the
53:35
Jews be in charge of everything? They're running everything. They control everything, but they stopped existing in 70
53:40
AD. Yeah. My personality, I just played this off and I said, well, you have to understand in 70
53:49
AD, we built the time machine. And therefore in 70 AD, we all vanished because we went into the future so we could know how to go back in time and control everything.
53:58
Because if you want to believe both arguments, then you're going to believe in the time machine theory because might as well, because it explains it.
54:05
Right. That's how ridiculous it is to say a group of people control everything.
54:14
These same people who are saying that are the very same people that want to push a Christian nationalism where only whites are making decisions.
54:24
So, you know, let's look at this and say, yeah, they're ones that say, oh, well, you're not
54:29
American unless you've been here for 13 generations. You know what? You know, well, actually there's debate.
54:37
Some are saying only three, but they're fighting over what really defines an American.
54:43
And the thing is they're having all of this type of thing because they want to say, well, now what they want to do is say, well,
54:50
Israel is the cause of everything. Okay. Well, you know, you can also say that, as you mentioned,
54:58
I mean, Albert Einstein, genius. He's Jewish. Did you know that? The fact is, is that every group of people have really good and really bad people.
55:11
And we should never sit there and bucket a whole group of people and say, well, this is, we got to treat people different because we've identified that this whole group is this way.
55:23
Right. There's a word for that. I know this is a historical use of the word and not the one we can use anymore,
55:29
Pastor Jeff, but that's a word called racism. Yeah. It actually has to do with treating people different because you're stereotyping a whole group of people has nothing to do with economics.
55:41
It has nothing to do with the way the woke use it today. But yeah, it's, it is very clearly just the same that so many would argue against the racism that we see using scripture rightly, but then they will use it now to attack the
56:03
Jewish people because they want to God is done forever with Israel.
56:08
Right. And I would say that makes no sense in Paul's argument in Romans nine, 10, 11, where the whole argument he's making is the reason you know,
56:19
God will keep his promises to you is because he will keep them with Israel. If he isn't going to keep him with Israel, how do you know he's going to keep his promises to you?
56:30
Maybe he said he has a house waiting for you that he went to and he's preparing rooms for you.
56:35
And maybe he just, yeah, it was spiritual. It really wasn't. You're really not going to heaven to be with Christ.
56:43
You see, if he, if he's not going to be faithful to his promises to his people in the old Testament, how do you know he's going to be faithful to his promises in the new
56:50
Testament? And if he could stay at leading them very clearly to, this is the meaning of that promise in the old
56:57
Testament, but he had a totally different meaning in the new Testament. How do you know he won't have a totally different meaning for what you think he is literally saying?
57:06
Yeah. And Andrew, that's, that's how he raises the subject. Paul in Romans nine, I think it's verse five, where he says, it is not as though God's word has failed.
57:15
And he wants to show that the salvation of individuals within Israel, the remnant was based on God's choice.
57:22
And this is a statement that he had made in Romans eight, 28 to 30 with the golden chain of redemption.
57:28
And that's how the question is even raised in the first place. But what about Israel? They were God's chosen people.
57:34
Did God's promise to them fail? And, and ultimately he's, he's, he's showing that God is saving whom he, he chooses.
57:42
And so we have that whole discussion. We won't go down that, that rabbit trail, but I could just hear in the back of my mind, what people must've been thinking.
57:51
Some of the opponents here in this discussion, when you use the word racism, they're probably thinking, oh yeah, you just call anything racism or antisemitism.
58:01
It's a boogeyman word because you don't have arguments. And here's what I would say to them in response to that. And I'm sure
58:07
Andrew, you'd probably agree to this. We would be happy to debate anybody on this subject.
58:12
Anybody who has some standing, who's done some work, maybe some pastors in Ogden or in, uh, in Texas.
58:19
Uh, I don't know. I'm just saying like, if there, if there are people who have made this an issue and have been posting things online and, um, would be willing to debate you and I I'm sure would sit down and have a long form discussion over this question.
58:35
We'd be happy to. Yeah. All right. Well, this is tearing down high places and this would be a great forum to do it.
58:41
So that, that, um, invitation is, is put out there and we'll see if anybody takes us up on it.
58:48
So any final closing words here, brother? No, I want to thank you for having me on. I think that, um, it is an important topic.
58:56
A timely topic for our time now, uh, with so many people asking questions about what is going on with Israel and Iran.
59:05
And I hope that that it literally is a 12 day war and it's over and done. And now people move on.
59:11
But I do, I do think that people have to have a right view of scripture.
59:18
And I think that seeing some discontinuity within, between Israel and the church is healthy and everybody believes almost everyone believes in discontinuity between Israel and the church.
59:31
How do I know that? Because none of the reformed folks who say that they're, that they're the spiritual Israel keep kosher just saying, right?
59:40
You believe in discontinuity. We're studying through Esther right now. And, um, in the latter chapters of the book of Esther, the whole point is that Jewish people, true
59:50
Israel need to forever keep Purim as a festival. So if there, if this is fulfilled
59:57
Israel, if the church has fulfilled Israel, why are you not celebrating Purim? Yeah.
01:00:03
Yeah. You got to keep the Passover forever. Forever. Yeah. Yeah. In the case of the
01:00:10
Passover, they'd say, well, Jesus, you know, Matthew five, he didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, his death is the sacrifice and it's kept in him.
01:00:19
But what with regard to Purim, why are they not celebrating the protection of the Jews from wicked Haman? Because that spirit is still in the world.
01:00:26
It was in Hitler. It was in Stalin before he died of a stroke, right before, um, executing whatever the doctor's plot was going to turn out to be, um, in 1953.
01:00:36
Um, the, the murderous spirit is in Ayatollah Khomeini since the 1970s to build a nuclear weapon to annihilate the
01:00:43
Jews. And by God's grace, there is protection over Israel. And a lot of it has been
01:00:48
America. The United States of America provided those weapons, not just the final bunker buster, but so much of what's kept
01:00:55
Israel safe in these days. And it was American Christians that kept America behind Israel for all these years.
01:01:02
So we can't erode that trust. We've got to keep it going, keep supporting Israel. It doesn't mean we support wicked things or policies that are wrong.
01:01:10
We can, we can criticize, but with regard to things like this, when, when the Jews are under attack by a wicked power, we do need to support their right to defend themselves and, and be the best support that we can be.
01:01:23
Okay. Let me, let me close with this. There was someone online that said there's no justification for supporting
01:01:28
Israel. And my response was how about justice, standing up for justice.
01:01:35
You have a country that was attacked viciously on October 7th, unprovoked.
01:01:43
And you think that them retaliating and defending themselves isn't something to stand up for.
01:01:51
You think that God is so light on justice that when someone is treated wrong, we shouldn't stand and defend that.
01:01:59
And, and what I ended up seeing in that is watching everyone try to excuse away Israel.
01:02:05
They, they got their country unjustly. Really? Cause they didn't get it from the Palestinians.
01:02:10
They got it from the UK. That's who gave it that in the land, right?
01:02:15
The, the people who want it in warfare, the way every other country is, is done. So, so what you end up having is like, they just tried to make excuses.
01:02:24
God believes in justice. Yep. And so, yeah, there are reasons to stand with the nation that exists.
01:02:31
Whether God is working through them or not, whether you believe that or not, you still stand up for any nation that is, that is unjustly treated.
01:02:40
Yep. And the Ayatollah, Ayatollah had as his driving motive to not have a
01:02:46
Jewish nation in the heart of the Muslim world. Well, guess what? This is God's world.
01:02:51
It's not the Muslim world. God's in there and they, the entire quote unquote Muslim world surrounding
01:02:57
Israel in 1948, surrounded them to try to annihilate them. And by the grace of God, they won that war.
01:03:04
They won the 1967 war when it happened again. And time and again, they've been attacked and the attempt was to annihilate them.
01:03:13
So yeah, just on the basis of pure justice, this is not like other people. This is not an ordinary situation.
01:03:19
There's a demonic hatred that desires to wipe Israel off the face of the map. That's right.
01:03:25
Amen. All right. Well, let's, let's end it here and I appreciate you coming on brother. Listen, we have a way of signing off on TDHP.
01:03:32
If you see a brother down, you help him up. So you got to reach down and pull up. And if you see a high place, you tear it down.
01:03:39
So we say that if you see a brother down, help him up. Now lift up your arms.