Part 2 of 2
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And on the day where you need yourself the most and you’re failing, you have nothing.
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Whereas if you’re rooting your confidence in God, on the day when you need God most, he’s there because he’s been there every day since before there were days.
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And that sort of certainty defies the worst things that could happen to anyone.
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And that is the comfort of the gospel, properly understood.
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And just to repeat myself and to repeat what you’ve said, we do not ultimately have to understand everything God tells us, because we understand enough of what God tells us, and we understand enough of God to know that we should trust him.
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My dog is the same way, and the difference between my dog and me is significantly smaller than the difference between me and God.
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My dog trusts me.
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He does not always understand what I am telling him to do, but he does it because he trusts me.
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I believe what God has told me because I trust God.
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I have excellent warrant.
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I have perfect warrant to trust God.
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And so it makes sense.
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It is actually ultimately rational to believe what God says in his word.
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Because God is trustworthy.
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Is there anything else that you would like to say about election before we move on to how it happens in time?
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The only thing I do is a tangent on fairness, but I think we can leave that for another time.
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Well, I think that’s actually what we’re just about to get into.
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That’s actually true.
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Fairness is nonsense is the short version, but let’s go with the longer one.
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Yeah.
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So we’ve been talking about election and your name being written in the Book of Life from before eternity, which is a mouthful, but it’s vitable to get every word in there because each of those words is comforting and each of those words means something, including that your name was written in the Book of Life, not your Social Security number, not an ID number or something, your name.
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And we’ll get into that in a minute.
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But first, as we’ve been saying all along, God foreknew you.
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He foreordained your salvation.
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He gave you the gift of faith to receive that salvation.
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You receive faith.
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You are saved.
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How do you come to faith?
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And that’s where all the people who say they believe in the doctrine of election, when push comes to shove in the modern world, many of them fall away and they no longer believe it.
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In Romans 10, it’s recorded, How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
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And how are they to believe in him whom they have never heard?
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And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
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And how are they to preach unless they are sent?
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Now, when you take that in the context of Romans in the first century, after Jesus has come and ascended, as Christians, we think about that strictly in terms of the New Testament Gospel, that Jesus, the promise of the Messiah was fulfilled, the sacrifice on the cross was made, he was raised from the dead, he ascended into heaven, it’s done.
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As Christ said, it is finished on the cross, the propitiating work is complete.
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And so when we think about how will they believe in him and who they have never heard, we’re thinking about that.
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But the point that I want to make now is that when you look at human history, not only Christian history, not only history of believers in God, but of every people, of every tribe and every nation, the manner in which they have believed reflects upon this too.
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As we’ve talked about in previous episodes, as Europeans, we are, as humans, we’re sons of Adam.
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As humans, we’re sons of Noah.
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As Europeans, we’re sons of Japheth, Bar Noah.
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That was his father.
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I have and you have, as a European, the faith of Japheth, the faith that Noah gave to him as his father, transmitting to him by teaching him.
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Now Noah predated Abraham, predated the covenant that God gave Abraham that included circumcision, that included the law as it was laid out to preserve the Hebrew people as they were bounced through time as frankly objects of wrath on many occasions.
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The faith that Noah had is the same faith that we have today.
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And I was watching a show recently that talked about ancient history.
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And it was done by a pagan who was clearly denied God, and he was clearly an evolutionist.
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And so some of his dates were wrong, but the work that he had done I found invaluable as a Christian who believes that the earth is about 6,000 years old and that the flood was a global event as recorded in Scripture.
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What he found as he’s traveled all over the world, doing excavations and learning about cultures that were separated from the Tower of Babel, these are people who clearly went in different directions.
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We’re talking about Aztecs, we’re talking about Egyptians, we’re talking about people in the Far Eastern Asia, people who never heard about Isaiah promising the virgin birth, people who never heard that Jesus had died until after it had occurred.
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There is still the case even in those scattered civilizations, those scattered nations where some of the nascent elements of the Christian faith are found.
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Now, they’re not found in a salvific sense.
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I’m not saying that these people were Christians secretly, but if you look at, for example, Egyptian mythology, the Egyptians about 1350 BC, they were originating the myth of Osiris and Iris and Horus where there was a virgin birth of a god who then died sacrificially.
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Now, the timing of that is interesting because the virgin birth thing doesn’t show up in scripture until 700 BC.
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650 years after they were coming up with this is the first time it’s recorded that there would be a virgin born.
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The import of that is that the first record that we have is in Isaiah, but if you look at how many places this shows up, now with the Egyptians, you could say maybe they heard it from the Hebrews who had just left 100 years earlier.
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So for the 400 years that the Hebrews were there, they may have been sharing the faith.
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But even then, for the Egyptians who had picked up the virgin birth of a god who would sacrifice himself, that story, that myth would have had to have been known to the Hebrews centuries prior to Isaiah.
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And even then, you would have contact between the Hebrews and the Egyptians to transmit that, and they were in the same place and time.
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So that’s conceivable.
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We don’t know if that was the case or not.
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However, you can look even further far afield to the Vietnamese and to the Aztecs who also have similar, more corrupted stories, but stories that repeat some of the same elements, that there would be a virgin birth of a god and that there would be some sort of sacrifice.
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And there are some other cultures where some of those elements are present, but they’re bastardized to the point that it’s really impossible to infer whether they came via transmission or they arrived at independently, not as some sort of prophecy that was originally rooted in Christianity.
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But the point I’m making with this is that the only way that the Egyptians and the Aztecs and the Vietnamese and others would have heard about the virgin birth of a god would have come from the time of the Tower of Babel.
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Long before there was an Abraham, long before there was a covenant, long before there was an Isaiah, they would have heard those promises.
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And that’s entirely consistent with Scripture, which doesn’t say anything about it.
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But the promises that are given in Scripture were given to the Hebrews and were given to us.
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Noah was a prophet.
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The men of Noah’s day and earlier, many of them were prophets.
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They walked with God, they spoke with God.
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There is every reason for us to believe that they would have had more than just the Genesis 315 promise, because there’s not much there.
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You could read it and if you didn’t know anything about Jesus, it might not occur to you that that was a fulfillment.
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And it is only later on in Scripture where other elements of, I think there are at least 300 odd prophecies of Christ’s birth and his life and his death and his resurrection in the Old Testament, that doesn’t mean that that was a complete picture.
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There may well have been more and the anthropological evidence strongly, strongly indicates that that was the case.
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That the promise of a Messiah was known, we know was known to Noah and his children because they were Noah’s.
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Their faith was transmitted by their father to them.
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We know that Japheth was blessed and we know that Shem was blessed.
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We know that Ham was cursed by God and his descendants bear that curse.
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Noah was a prophet.
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He didn’t have any authority to curse anyone or to bless anyone.
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Any curses or blessings coming from him came from God.
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That’s the only Christian conclusion that we can reach.
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So when we look in the historical record and we see those people who branched out from Babel, scattered across the earth as God had commanded them to do, carrying elements of the true Christian faith, again, bastardized to the point that they were no longer salvific.
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They no longer knew God, but they all knew about the flood.
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That’s something that’s preserved even in cultures that have no record whatsoever of anything that we would consider Christian doctrine.
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They still record that historical event.
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After that, many of them do also record things that could be considered to have been elements of the Christian faith.
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Now, this is a tricky area to get into because most of the people talking about it are atheists.
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They’re worldly men who deny and hate God simultaneously.
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Those men will twist what has occurred.
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So you have Jordan Peterson today and you have his spiritual father Joseph Campbell and you have Carl Jung before him, all basically making the claim that the reason that we have these repeated stories popping up globally, their rationalization for how that could occur, they say that it’s an upwelling of man’s own spirit, that there’s some indwelling of our own human nature that manifests these stories, these myths that are not connected to God because God doesn’t exist.
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They’re just us.
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They’re us doing our own thing in space and time and across space and time.
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And when they delete God, that’s the best they can do.
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It’s silly.
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But if you look at it scripturally, you can see that the opposite was true, that when the people got off the Ark, they were Christians.
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They had a belief in the Messiah who was to come at that time.
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They knew what God had revealed to them, which was clearly more than is revealed in scripture at that point for our benefit because it’s recording what we need and not what they needed at the time.
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Noah was talking directly to God.
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He didn’t have to write this stuff down.
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If he did, it was for the benefit of future generations.
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So as we look at this, it’s important to understand that the transmission of faith, how can they call on him in whom they have not believed and how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard?
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How do you hear?
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You hear from your father.
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You hear from the man that God has placed in your family as your head.
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You are his seed.
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You are your father’s seed.
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And he transmits the faith to you or he fails to transmit the faith to you.
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And so in time, we see that there were some fathers who came off the ark and their children and their children’s children who preserved the faith that was transmitted to them by their fathers.
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We see other fathers who were fateless, who were evil, who abandoned God just as quickly as their ancestors before the flood had abandoned God and went off in tremendously evil directions.
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And so the inheritance of those men for both good and evil is either faith or lack of faith.
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And that’s where we’re going to get into the intersection of election and faith in time, because you inherit faith one way or another.
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Either it’s inherited directly from your parents who give it to you, or if you were not blessed with faithful parents, you may have to rebel against them and inherit it through adoption.
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And we’re all adopted sons of God through baptism.
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I’m not saying that there’s not a sense here where there is a hereditary claim to God, which was what the Israelites misunderstood the Pharisees later on.
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They thought that it was a genetic claim.
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That was never the case.
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And what CI claims today.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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It’s the Christian identity and various other heresies all make a complete mess of these things because they don’t want to believe what is true.
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Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness.
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It wasn’t that God had given him a covenant and made a promise to him.
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It was that he believed the promises of God.
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That was counted to him as righteousness.
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That’s not the way of saying faith.
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Abraham had faith because he received faith.
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He gave faith to his children by transmitting the word to them.
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He preached to them.
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He told them about God and they received faith.
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So when we talk about election, it is always in terms of faith and faith is always transmitted.
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And the point of that, that historical snippet is that the faith was transmitted for a time outside of the sons of Shem, outside of the line that became the line of David.
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It was transmitted by fathers to their sons.
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That’s hereditary.
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Their posterity received the blessing of their faith.
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There were a couple recent surveys in the last decade that were done by some reformed and Baptist.
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According to data collected by Promise Keepers and Baptist Press, if a father does not go to church, even if his wife does, only one child in 50, one child in 50, that’s 2%, will become regular worshiper.
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If a father does go regularly, regardless of what the mother does, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will attend church as adults.
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That’s a difference of either 2% without the father or between 66% and 75% with the father.
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That is radical.
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And that is far more than simply a sociological effect.
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Because what we found, what another survey showed, was that if the first person in a household to become a Christian was a child, there’s about a 3.5% chance that everyone else in the house would follow.
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If the mother is the first person to become a Christian, there’s about a 17% chance.
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So quite a bit better than a child adopting Christianity first, if the mother did.
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When the father was the first to become a Christian, there’s a 93% chance that everyone else in the house will follow.
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Now this is not a sociological consequence.
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This is not something for demographers and sociologists to discuss.
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This is a theological discussion.
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This is a theological discussion of headship.
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The father is the head.
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That’s not just a metaphor.
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It is a reality.
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The father is the head of the wife.
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The father is of his wife.
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He’s the head of his children.
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He’s the head of everyone under his roof, in his household.
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And his faith becomes their faith on contact.
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Now, this is remarkable.
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We’re talking about what we must presume to be true faith.
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If children began attending church because their father does, and they do it into adulthood, for the most part, those are probably Christians.
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Whereas if only the mother does, it’s inconsequential.
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And so it’s a fundamental element of the manner in which election is delivered in time, that the faith of the father becomes the faith of the children.
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And the faithlessness of the father also becomes the faithlessness of the children.
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Well, that’s also why in Scripture, when we look at how God deals with humanity, he doesn’t actually typically deal with individuals.
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God works with families and nations.
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Yes, individuals are also involved, but God didn’t just call Abram, who would become Abraham.
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He called him to bring his family at the time, of course, just his wife and his cousins.
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But it is the head of the family that represents the family, in the same way that Adam represented creation, and so creation fell when Adam sinned, in the same way that Christ is the head of the new creation, and so those of us who are in Christ are also part of that new creation.
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That’s why you have to be in Christ in order to actually be part of that new creation, in order to see paradise, in order not to spend eternity in hell.
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But to go back briefly, I guess we’re going to mention CI, we may as well also mention a little more paganism.
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When it comes to myths and the various peoples who preserved them or failed to preserve them, I think one of the best examples, and I know there are those who will comment that this was written down in the 10th century, and that’s true, but it was an oral history before that, and I happen to believe it’s an ancient one.
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The Havamal is a great example of a corruption, but also a maintenance of some Christian truths in a number of places.
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I think one of the best ones though, Odin, in part of the Havamal, is hanged on the World Tree, Yggdrasil.
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He offers himself to himself on the World Tree.
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He’s stabbed with a spear.
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He receives neither food nor drink.
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He peers into the deep.
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One could consider that a corruption of the descent into hell.
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These parallels are extremely close to what we actually have as the truth in Christianity.
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And so you can see a preservation of the faith of the forefathers, even if corrupted by demons, by Gnosticism, over a course of time.
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And these sorts of things do not just happen.
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This is not something people in far-flung parts of the world do not create the same myths out of whole cloth with no interaction.
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And the Vikings and the Vietnamese were not really interacting in BC.
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That just wasn’t a thing.
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But just another example of the carrying forward of mythology, Christian mythology, and it’s not wrong to call it that because the term has multiple senses, the carrying forward, if also the corruption in time, because of the faithlessness of some of the fathers in that line.
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They failed to transmit the faith correctly.
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They permitted it to become corrupted, and so their children, instead of carrying forward the true faith, carried forward that corruption.
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Now, we have an advantage today that basically none of our ancestors until the last handful of centuries did, and that advantage figuratively is the printing press.
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Today, of course, we have iPads and computers and all that, but ultimately printed books do have more staying power.
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Computers can die.
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Yes, books can burn, but they are typically easier to preserve.
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And so we have the advantage, if we have a number of faithless generations as we have recently had, we can still return to the true faith.
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And what are we doing?
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We are returning to the faith of our fathers who gave us the sound doctrine, who preserved for us the Bible, who gave us these truths, carried them forward.
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We don’t have to, as many of our ancestors did, carry on the false and the corrupted faith of our immediate forebears, because that is all they had, because theirs would have been orally transmitted.
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And if all you heard was the corrupted version of the truth, well, all you had was the corrupted version of the truth, because that’s what you received from your head, whether it was your father or your grandfather or your king or just the leader of your tribe, you received that from your head.
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Today, again, we can actually go back to the truth.
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We can go back to things before they were corrupted by faithless generations, because we have that luxury, thanks be to God.
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But it is still a matter of headship, because that was transmitted to us by a far distant head.
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So for instance, Japheth is head of the European peoples.
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Ashkenaz is head of the Germans.
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And so you have nations descended from individual men.
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All mankind descended from Adam, and all mankind descended from Noah, because of course there was a little bit of a bottleneck there.
01:22:57.476 → 01:22:58.896
Europe descended from Japheth.
01:22:59.776 → 01:23:03.296
The East, roughly speaking, descended from Shem.
01:23:03.976 → 01:23:05.396
Africa descended from Ham.
01:23:05.696 → 01:23:09.296
And so those men are the heads of those large people groups.
01:23:09.716 → 01:23:13.256
But within those, you have nations and tribes.
01:23:13.896 → 01:23:16.256
And then under that, you have families.
01:23:16.276 → 01:23:23.076
It’s all a matter of hierarchy and headship and what is transmitted faithfully or faithlessly.
01:23:23.136 → 01:23:23.896
All right, ready to go.
01:23:26.256 → 01:23:41.836
And that’s why I mentioned up front that election is connected to all of this, to the way that the gospel is spread, to the way that we come to faith, and the way that the problems that we’re facing in the church today are really rooted in this.
01:23:44.936 → 01:23:51.616
When you look in scripture, you see that men are identified by name, but it’s not just their name.
01:23:51.776 → 01:23:54.916
It’s, for example, Jonah, the son of Amittai.
01:23:55.796 → 01:23:59.216
The prophet Zechariah was the son of Barakhiah, son of Edo.
01:24:00.076 → 01:24:06.656
When Samuel was born, there was a certain man of the hill country whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jerome.
01:24:07.276 → 01:24:11.596
And he gives his father’s name and his father’s name and his father’s name in the country that he was from.
01:24:13.156 → 01:24:21.996
That wasn’t simply genealogy for the sake of narrowing down which Samuel or which Zechariah or which Jonah was.
01:24:22.996 → 01:24:28.936
That was identifying the men in space and time as God created them.
01:24:28.956 → 01:24:34.176
And most of the names that are given in scripture in those ways are usually of faithful men.
01:24:34.736 → 01:24:37.496
There are not a lot of faithless men whose names are given.
01:24:39.196 → 01:24:50.436
In the show notes, there’s going to be two video links on YouTube that are an absolutely vital part of understanding the point that we’re trying to make with this episode.
01:24:51.576 → 01:24:53.996
The reason that there are two of them, it’s split into two parts.
01:24:54.116 → 01:24:55.056
It’s not very long.
01:24:56.036 → 01:24:57.816
One is The Spread of Christianity.
01:24:58.536 → 01:25:14.016
It’s basically just a map, a visual representation of where Christianity was held between year one and 81,000 and then from 81,000 to current day.
01:25:15.376 → 01:25:30.276
The reason that I want to talk about those videos as we wrap up here is that when we talk about election, when we talk about Christianity, we’re not simply talking about the hypothetical, well, one may have faith and one may be saved.
01:25:30.656 → 01:25:35.116
But we can point to particular people in space and time who were saved.
01:25:35.516 → 01:25:46.516
And we know that they were saved just as Paul knew when he was referring to those people who were known to him whose names he said were written in the Book of Life because of their confession and because of their Christian life.
01:25:47.016 → 01:25:52.916
So there was an immediate connection between their life and the fact that they were saved.
01:25:52.936 → 01:25:54.416
Those are demonstrable facts.
01:25:54.816 → 01:26:01.496
No, it’s not to suggest that you can perfectly judge someone’s heart the way that God can and will.
01:26:02.996 → 01:26:09.956
But in general, you’re going to be able to tell a Christian from a non-Christian just by talking to them, by looking at how they live.
01:26:10.796 → 01:26:12.676
And that’s always been the case throughout time.
01:26:12.856 → 01:26:21.356
So the reason that these videos are important is where the video shows Christianity spreading.
01:26:21.956 → 01:26:31.036
Like we said a minute ago, the faith was transmitted from Adam through Noah, through Japheth and through Shem to their sons.
01:26:31.216 → 01:26:36.616
And then most of them lost it over time, but they lost it to varying degrees.
01:26:36.916 → 01:26:38.596
Some lost it entirely.
01:26:38.616 → 01:26:46.116
Not to say that salvation comes by degrees, but a memory of the true faith can be lost by degrees.
01:26:46.136 → 01:26:48.476
And that’s clearly what we see in the historical record.
01:26:50.276 → 01:27:00.616
When you get back to Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection, the beginning of the church, the spread of the knowledge of the true faith begins again.
01:27:01.296 → 01:27:02.516
Now, it was always the case.
01:27:02.536 → 01:27:09.676
It wasn’t the great commission that Jesus gave to his disciples, saying go there for and baptize all nations in my name.
01:27:11.156 → 01:27:35.636
That wasn’t the first time that that had ever been true, but it was a command that was specifically given to them in the place of Rome and Judea, in a time when Greek and Latin were widely spoken, and in a place and time where the roads could carry the message of the gospel faster than the guards and the men chasing the apostles, trying to kill them.
01:27:36.416 → 01:27:43.916
So it was a very efficacious moment that God chose to enact the Great Commission.
01:27:45.136 → 01:27:51.116
And the maps and the video show where and how that Great Commission was followed.
01:27:51.736 → 01:27:55.936
And what you see in the maps is that almost immediately, St.
01:27:55.956 → 01:28:07.316
Mark, I believe, goes to the western coast of India, where to this day, there’s a tiny sliver on the coast of India where there have been Christians for 2,000 years.
01:28:07.736 → 01:28:12.576
It was an apostolic church that has been preserved there by God’s grace throughout time.
01:28:13.616 → 01:28:15.916
Now, it never spread beyond that place.
01:28:16.616 → 01:28:24.236
It never went to the rest of the Indian people, but at least within that tiny sliver, the word was rightly preached and those people did have faith.
01:28:26.256 → 01:28:36.416
The first thousand years of the video omits something that’s important for this conversation, but it does show up in the second thousand years, and that is Ethiopia and Sudan or the modern countries thereof.
01:28:37.536 → 01:28:41.956
Ethiopia is interesting because they claim a Solomonic dynasty.
01:28:41.976 → 01:28:56.156
They claim that they’re descended from the House of Solomon and continuously to living memory that some of their leaders have had that blood, and the faith has been preserved there as well.
01:28:56.996 → 01:29:12.256
What’s interesting is if you look at the many of the leaders for whom we have photographs in modern Ethiopia, they look more Persian than they do sub-Saharan African, even though Ethiopia is a sub-Saharan African country.
01:29:14.376 → 01:29:19.096
Ethiopia and Sudan, modern day, have had the faith since the beginning.
01:29:19.116 → 01:29:25.456
There were churches that were planted there because although it’s sub-Saharan Africa, it’s also adjacent to the Red Sea.
01:29:25.876 → 01:29:28.536
So there was maritime travel that was able to get there.
01:29:28.556 → 01:29:33.756
It didn’t have to go too far inland in order for those people to receive the gospel and to believe it.
01:29:34.216 → 01:29:37.176
And they too have kept it and preserved the faith under this day.
01:29:37.676 → 01:29:44.776
So as I said, the first thousand years of the video will omit Africa, but it’s there continuously in that one tiny corner.
01:29:45.156 → 01:29:48.736
Now Africa is an unfathomably large continent.
01:29:48.756 → 01:29:51.876
It’s three times the size of North America.
01:29:52.796 → 01:29:55.596
But in that one small place, there were believers continuously.
01:29:56.996 → 01:30:07.856
Real quick, in the case of Ethiopia, it’s also worth mentioning that the language they use, Amharic, is not a Hemitic, not an African language, but a Shemitic language, a Near Eastern language.
01:30:08.636 → 01:30:20.596
And so we also see that interchange, that relationship of the peoples in the area in the language they speak, which is further proof that you had this interaction and explains why they had the faith.
01:30:21.816 → 01:30:23.196
Yep, that’s a very good point.
01:30:23.956 → 01:30:38.216
And the reason that I’ve highlighted India and Africa is because those are the only places outside of the Middle East and Europe where Christianity existed prior to the 1500s.
01:30:38.856 → 01:30:40.516
And this is what the video shows.
01:30:40.536 → 01:30:44.516
It shows the spread of Christianity proper.
01:30:44.656 → 01:30:49.336
It shows the spread of Arianism, which is a heresy, a bastardization of Christianity.
01:30:51.996 → 01:31:03.096
One thing that’s omitted in the video, it doesn’t show that Arianism did make inroads as far as China, and I believe was preserved until well into the 10th and 11th century, and then it was stamped out.
01:31:03.596 → 01:31:22.636
Now, the Arian doctrine, which denies the divinity of Christ fully, it’s properly condemned as a heresy, but it is fair to say that even when there were Arian heretics that were in control, the word of God was still in those places.
01:31:22.816 → 01:31:32.476
So while their confession may not have been true, there are many cases where people are taught one thing and they believe another, and they believe what’s in Scripture.
01:31:33.116 → 01:31:49.256
That’s something that, as Lutherans, you and I run into all the time, where we’re talking to someone who has been raised Baptist or raised Reformed or something, and we’re talking about areas where we know that Lutheran and Baptist doctrine differ, and they say, oh no, that’s what I’ve always believed.
01:31:49.716 → 01:31:57.516
And it’s always interesting because we know for a fact that that’s not what any Baptist would have ever taught them, but it is what they read in the Bible.
01:31:57.936 → 01:32:18.576
And so it’s called Felicitous Inconsistency, that you may say one thing, you may be taught one thing, but in your heart, if you have faith and you’re receiving God’s Word, you may ultimately believe something that is true, even if what you’re taught, and maybe even what you think about when you’re just sort of mouthing the words, is contrary to it.
01:32:18.616 → 01:32:29.016
So I wouldn’t go so far as to say that where Arianism was spread, everyone is damned, although it is a false confession.
01:32:29.316 → 01:32:33.256
But I will say that where the Word of God is spoken, it is not returned to avoid.
01:32:33.276 → 01:32:35.016
So there’s hope in those places.
01:32:36.016 → 01:32:40.016
It’s better to be partly right than entirely wrong.
01:32:40.496 → 01:32:47.856
And we’re not saying that it will save you being partly right if you’re wrong about the core things.
01:32:47.876 → 01:32:54.096
If you get the atonement wrong and you’re right about some ancillary things, that’s not going to save you.
01:32:54.336 → 01:33:01.316
But there are still blessings, there is still good that is attached to believing the truth.
01:33:02.376 → 01:33:07.756
And if you get some of the things right, you are still believing some of the truth and there are still benefits to that.
01:33:08.116 → 01:33:19.076
And as mentioned, if at least these heretics believe that they are Christian, the Word of God will be present and the Word of God does not return to him void.
01:33:22.776 → 01:33:33.716
And so in the early part of the video, in the first five centuries or so, you’ll see that there’s a back and forth between Aryan Christianity, and I think they call it Nicene Christianity in the video.
01:33:34.776 → 01:33:47.396
Eventually Nicene, which is to say Trinitarian Christianity, which is to say Christianity, it’s redundant, but proper Christian doctrine did begin to prevail, and eventually Aryanism was effectively wiped out in Europe.
01:33:50.276 → 01:34:23.036
The import of the videos and the reason that we are talking about it is that if we truly believe the doctrine of election, that God elected those unto salvation for himself from before creation, and he knew those men’s names, and he wrote them in the Book of Life, then when you watch that video, you cannot help but conclude that virtually all of those who were elected to faith were sons of Japheth.
01:34:24.376 → 01:34:48.396
It’s the only possible conclusion when you look at the map because it’s showing the whole known world where Christianity was believed, and then it eventually zooms out in the second thousand years to show the entire globe, and there’s nothing until Columbus comes to the Americas outside of Europe and in the Middle East.
01:34:48.816 → 01:34:57.776
Now, when I say Japheth, obviously many of the sons of Shem, not many, but some of the sons of Shem did come to faith in the Middle East.
01:34:57.796 → 01:34:59.156
There were some Jews who converted.
01:34:59.836 → 01:35:03.716
Those men ceased to be Jewish in not too much time.
01:35:03.736 → 01:35:15.756
They simply became men of their area, but they eventually abandoned those cultures and that custom and became integrated as Europeans with their neighbors and brothers.
01:35:16.616 → 01:35:23.916
But that was still a small portion of those who received the faith.
01:35:25.256 → 01:35:34.196
Overwhelmingly, the number throughout time has been in Europe, which is, as Corey mentioned, you mentioned Christian identity.
01:35:34.216 → 01:35:35.576
They’re heretics.
01:35:35.596 → 01:35:38.076
They believe that only white people can be saved.
01:35:38.396 → 01:35:40.776
They believe that only white people, I think, are human.
01:35:40.776 → 01:35:45.316
They say some terrible things that are simply false, that are blatantly contrary to scripture.
01:35:45.556 → 01:35:49.796
They also happen to deny the Trinity because once you’re being a heretic, why not go all in?
01:35:50.576 → 01:35:58.116
Well, their history is also wildly incorrect because they couldn’t be right about anything, so they have to be wrong about everything.
01:35:58.616 → 01:36:04.776
I mean, they try to argue that the kings, in some cases, the kings of England are descended from David.
01:36:04.796 → 01:36:08.496
They make all sorts of just insane arguments.
01:36:09.416 → 01:36:10.716
Yeah, it’s insane.
01:36:10.736 → 01:36:11.256
It’s false.
01:36:11.316 → 01:36:19.976
And these are people with whom we are lumped in by those who say that we’re going to hell for what we’re saying right now, which is straight from scripture.
01:36:20.056 → 01:36:24.196
And it’s straight from history, not in contradiction to scripture.
01:36:26.336 → 01:36:27.856
I did some math.
01:36:27.856 → 01:36:30.676
This is my own work.
01:36:30.756 → 01:36:32.256
These are very rough estimates.
01:36:32.696 → 01:36:39.496
Basically what I did, I took the best estimates by century of the population of Europe.
01:36:41.436 → 01:36:46.316
So 700, 800, 900, 1000, up through the year 1900.
01:36:46.336 → 01:36:50.936
I took a look at the estimates of the population of Europe.
01:36:51.676 → 01:36:59.336
I then took a look at the estimate of approximately what percent of those people were nominally Christian.
01:36:59.636 → 01:37:05.476
That is to say that their king was Christian, they were baptized and lived Christian lives.
01:37:06.056 → 01:37:11.276
Now, obviously, that is not by itself proof that any particular individual is a Christian.
01:37:11.296 → 01:37:12.196
That’s not what I’m saying.
01:37:12.216 → 01:37:22.196
But when someone’s confession in their life claims to be Christian, that’s not something that I’m not going to question that when I’m looking back through time.
01:37:22.436 → 01:37:24.276
So these are very rough estimates.
01:37:24.836 → 01:37:36.616
But what I found was that in part of the reason that it’s possible to give a very rough estimate of the number of believers is when the kings converted.
01:37:37.176 → 01:37:39.436
Because that’s what’s borne out in history.
01:37:39.456 → 01:37:46.916
When the king converted, the head of a nation converted, generally within a generation or two, most of the people followed.
01:37:47.576 → 01:37:56.076
So in about the year 700 AD, about 25% of Europe’s population of about 32 million people were Christians.
01:37:56.096 → 01:38:00.856
So there were around 8 million Christians in Europe in the year 700, roughly.
01:38:02.616 → 01:38:11.916
That’s an interesting number because that is at least four, five times more than the number who have ever lived in Ethiopia and Sudan.
01:38:12.396 → 01:38:18.176
The area that we’re talking about where Christianity has been preserved there was never very populous.
01:38:18.356 → 01:38:20.116
The land simply couldn’t sustain it.
01:38:20.136 → 01:38:21.336
The people couldn’t sustain it.
01:38:21.796 → 01:38:28.236
So when we’re talking about, I don’t want to call it a numbers game because this is, we’re talking about salvation, we’re not talking about a game.
01:38:28.836 → 01:38:42.636
But when we’re talking about the number of names that are in the Book of Life, the number of African names prior to European colonization of Africa, which we’ll get to, was very small.
01:38:42.916 → 01:38:48.576
There were some, by God’s grace, and thank God that there were Ethiopians who were preserved.
01:38:50.536 → 01:38:53.616
But by and large, they were believers in Europe and nowhere else.
01:38:54.436 → 01:39:01.956
By Europe, I mean Greater Europe, so the Mediterranean, Northern Africa, which is like the Mediterranean is effectively Europe, not Africa.
01:39:02.836 → 01:39:08.996
Those countries were soon lost to Islam, which began to make inroads even into the rest of Europe.
01:39:10.616 → 01:39:20.696
By 81,000, the population had gone up about 10 million to about 42 million, and the percentage of Christians was probably about 85%, give or take.
01:39:21.256 → 01:39:25.956
So you’re looking at about 35, 36 million Christians in 81,000.
01:39:26.636 → 01:39:38.916
Fast forward another 300 years, and the population has gone up about 50% to around 60 million, and probably about 95% of those were at least culturally Christian.
01:39:38.936 → 01:39:43.236
Again, I’m not claiming that virtually everyone who’s ever been European is saved.
01:39:43.556 → 01:39:49.396
There’s no way to know that, and realistically, that’s probably not the case.
01:39:49.416 → 01:39:51.636
But they were in Christian lands with Christian kings.
01:39:51.916 → 01:39:53.136
They were living as Christians.
01:39:53.156 → 01:39:54.136
They were attending church.
01:39:54.156 → 01:39:55.316
They were hearing the Word of God.
01:39:56.216 → 01:40:00.216
There’s more hope for them than there is for the vast majority of America.
01:40:00.376 → 01:40:07.116
So if I’m going to place a stake somewhere, it’s going to be to say that most of those people are probably in heaven.
01:40:08.416 → 01:40:13.716
By 1900, Europe’s population had increased to about 240 million, and still about 90% were Christian.
01:40:15.856 → 01:40:26.416
Now, adding all of those up just at the century marks was about roughly a billion souls would have likely been Christian in Europe.
01:40:26.936 → 01:40:34.916
Now, when you compare that billion people, and that’s only at the century marks, obviously there are people who lived and died in between the century marks.
01:40:34.936 → 01:40:40.676
So again, these are numbers that I did this work myself.
01:40:40.696 → 01:40:50.816
I’m not claiming that these are absolute or they’re precise, but they’re definitely in the ballpark in terms of the ratios relative to other people groups.
01:40:51.196 → 01:40:55.416
So I would not stake a claim on these numbers being precision numbers.
01:40:56.336 → 01:40:57.716
They’re not at all unrealistic.
01:40:57.736 → 01:40:59.956
They’re based on what we know of history.
01:41:00.716 → 01:41:14.536
And so if there were a billion people alive right at the century marks between 700 and 1900, my guess is that there’s probably about two and a half billion Christians in that time period in those places.
01:41:14.656 → 01:41:19.576
Beginning in the 1800s, I also included the Americas, which was a very small number.
01:41:19.636 → 01:41:25.336
In 1800, there was about 5.3 million Christians in America, 5 million.
01:41:25.376 → 01:41:28.056
In 1900, there was about 69 million.
01:41:28.516 → 01:41:34.316
So about 10% of the total European population of Christians was in the Americas.
01:41:34.616 → 01:41:46.916
So give or take, you’re looking at about two and a half billion Christians, all of European descent, all sons of Japheth, all holding to the faith of Japheth in that time period.
01:41:47.516 → 01:41:54.716
Now, as I said, when you look to Sudan and Ethiopia, those numbers are minuscule by comparison.
01:41:54.936 → 01:42:03.696
Again, the tiny sliver in Somalia or Ethiopia and India, those numbers are necessarily minuscule by comparison.
01:42:04.276 → 01:42:15.836
And we as Christians should be able to say this without fear that we’re going to be murdered by someone calling us racist, calling us evil, calling us hateful.
01:42:16.356 → 01:42:19.976
I am simply recounting what has happened in time.
01:42:20.676 → 01:42:22.376
I was not the causal effect of that.
01:42:22.896 → 01:42:24.416
It is not what I would have wished.
01:42:24.776 → 01:42:29.096
I wish what God wishes, which is that all people would know Christ and would come to salvation.
01:42:30.636 → 01:42:33.516
The reality is that that is not what has happened in time.
01:42:33.976 → 01:42:52.816
And so the reason for discussing election in terms of genealogy and nationality and now specifically honing in on the sons of Japheth is that Japheth’s children were faithful where other children were not.
01:42:53.656 → 01:43:09.176
When you look at the second half, the second video, and it shows beginning with European exploration and colonization of the Americas, and then in about the 1700s, colonization and exploration began in Africa.
01:43:09.956 → 01:43:22.356
Those are the very first times for 4,000 years since the flood that the people living in those places would have actually heard the Christian faith.
01:43:23.356 → 01:43:33.216
Now, like I said earlier, there were elements of the faith that had been preserved as mythology among them, but it was no longer efficacious.
01:43:33.296 → 01:43:41.656
It was just a few tiny mangled bits and pieces, but that is in fact the demonstration that they had lost the faith.
01:43:41.976 → 01:43:47.036
There’s no way to say that someone who was an Aztec in the year 1300 went to heaven.
01:43:47.736 → 01:43:49.316
100% of them went to hell.
01:43:49.656 → 01:43:56.476
I can say that with certainty because the Christian faith, the true faith could not have existed in those places.
01:43:57.336 → 01:44:18.016
And when the Spaniards showed up and they saw what the Aztecs were doing, when Pizarro and his men went into the Aztec temples, they literally vomited because the stench was so vile from the death, the murder of humans who were sacrificed to the demon gods of the Aztec.
01:44:18.356 → 01:44:28.536
So although they had preserved some tiny piece of the virgin birth of a god and his death for some purpose, they were worshiping demons.
01:44:28.996 → 01:44:34.156
The ancestors of those people were worshiping demons until the Europeans showed up.
01:44:34.536 → 01:44:40.836
The sons of Japheth showed up, colonized those places and gave them the gospel for the first time.
01:44:41.496 → 01:44:54.416
And that’s why we’re talking about this story, because when you look at the video and you see the way in which Christianity spread, after about the first couple centuries where, you know, Paul obviously was a Jew who went to the Gentiles.
01:44:54.796 → 01:44:59.156
There were other Jews who converted to Christianity and became Christian.
01:44:59.176 → 01:45:00.096
They ceased to be Jews.
01:45:02.056 → 01:45:14.296
Apart from that little explosion in the Middle East at the very beginning of the church, virtually all of the spread and keeping of the gospel has been in white lands.
01:45:15.576 → 01:45:18.456
So think about that fact if you’re Satan.
01:45:19.276 → 01:45:33.076
If you seek that all men be destroyed, that every life is a life of evil and that they are cast bodily and soul upon death into the eternal lake of fire with Satan, who will be right there with them being punished.
01:45:35.576 → 01:45:51.396
To have white people showing up in the 1500s and 1600s and 1700s in Africa and in the Americas, going to people who had all been going to hell for three and four thousand years, and suddenly they began converting to Christianity.
01:45:51.936 → 01:46:06.136
When the colonizers showed up with crucifixes and they told these people about the Gospel and they baptized them, in some cases forcibly, those people were converted to Christianity and many of them were saved.
01:46:06.556 → 01:46:19.196
And there are places to this day that are now Christian in Africa and the Americas, among native populations who would never have had the Gospel if the sons of Japheth had not shown up.
01:46:20.136 → 01:46:39.876
So think about that when you hear rabid anti-white hatred, when you hear hatred against colonialism, when you hear hatred against patriarchy, when you hear hatred against kings versus democracy, where it’s a free for all and we do what we think is best in our own eyes.
01:46:40.616 → 01:46:42.516
Think about that like Satan would think about that.
01:46:42.716 → 01:46:53.756
When white people showed up happy, when they came under the cross, what was the response of the demons that the Aztecs were worshiping and sacrificing all those innocent people to?
01:46:54.616 → 01:46:58.296
They were not happy and they’re still not happy because demons don’t die.
01:46:58.396 → 01:46:59.676
Those demons didn’t go away.
01:47:00.116 → 01:47:06.116
They were still out there in the jungle and by many accounts, they are back on the prowl today.
01:47:06.736 → 01:47:27.556
And the backlash that we see against Europeans in particular, against Germans in particular, against Christianity, against patriarchy, against every form of headship that is ordained by God both for salvific purposes and for the purpose simply of proper order in this life.
01:47:28.036 → 01:47:31.076
Those are the things that the most evil people on the planet hate.
01:47:31.816 → 01:47:49.776
And I fundamentally believe that that is the root of all of these societal issues that we’re seeing that God’s election, his predestination, which was unfair, predominantly predestined Europeans for salvation.
01:47:50.756 → 01:47:51.416
I didn’t do it.
01:47:51.796 → 01:47:52.436
God did it.
01:47:52.796 → 01:47:57.556
But again, when you look at how were they saved, they weren’t saved because they were white.
01:47:57.876 → 01:48:01.456
They weren’t saved because their parents were anything in particular.
01:48:01.776 → 01:48:04.236
They were saved because their fathers were faithful.
01:48:04.736 → 01:48:12.096
And the Africans and the South Americans and the North American Indians were damned because their fathers were faithless.
01:48:12.556 → 01:48:13.696
They abandoned God.
01:48:13.896 → 01:48:15.856
They ceased to teach his word.
01:48:16.276 → 01:48:25.596
And just as you will die because Adam sinned, those people are in hell because their fathers failed to transmit the faith to them.
01:48:25.936 → 01:48:28.376
They inherited damnation and they lived up to it.
01:48:28.636 → 01:48:31.196
And now they’re suffering under it.
01:48:31.756 → 01:48:32.536
Is that fair?
01:48:32.956 → 01:48:33.276
No.
01:48:33.696 → 01:48:42.616
But at the same time, we look at that in the context of the spread of the gospel from the first century and think, oh, well, they were never told about Jesus.
01:48:42.636 → 01:48:43.336
How could they know?
01:48:43.856 → 01:48:45.136
They were told about Jesus.
01:48:45.396 → 01:48:49.176
Their fathers were told about Jesus 4,000 years ago when they got off the ark.
01:48:49.596 → 01:48:51.896
And those fathers ceased to believe.
01:48:52.336 → 01:48:55.456
And that is why their children are not believers.
01:48:56.016 → 01:49:13.996
And just as salvation is transmissible, not as a physical inheritance, but as a spiritual inheritance that comes directly by hearing from one’s father in an absolutely efficacious manner, so too unbelief is transmissible, it is heritable, and it’s inevitable.
01:49:14.196 → 01:49:26.456
If your father is evil, and as you said, Corey, without the benefit of access to go around your father, to go around your nation, to find the truth as we can do today, there’s no way for someone to be saved.
01:49:27.256 → 01:49:34.796
And that’s not fair, but that is God’s will, because if their fathers had been faithful and had obeyed, they would have been saved.
01:49:35.356 → 01:49:49.216
So election intersects with reality in ways that makes us extremely uncomfortable, because all of this sounds like it’s totally contrary to the gospel, and it’s certainly contrary to modern beliefs of morality outside the church.
01:49:50.156 → 01:49:50.876
But it’s true.
01:49:52.496 → 01:49:57.636
The reason it makes so many people uncomfortable is because it runs counter to the Enlightenment.
01:49:58.556 → 01:50:04.476
It’s not that it runs counter to Scripture, because obviously we have demonstrated this is all grounded in Scripture.
01:50:04.496 → 01:50:10.736
This is readily discoverable for anyone who reads Scripture, at least anyone who has the Holy Spirit.
01:50:13.036 → 01:50:17.216
But Heaven looks rather a lot like Europe at present.
01:50:18.436 → 01:50:28.136
Of course, depending on how long things continue and which areas become or remain Christian and which ones do not, that composition could change.
01:50:28.816 → 01:50:33.776
But as of today, Paradise is going to be very white.
01:50:35.196 → 01:50:38.236
And that is simply the fact of the matter from history.
01:50:38.596 → 01:50:41.296
That is how things have worked out in time.
01:50:41.836 → 01:50:47.556
And those who say that, well, that’s not fair, like I said, they are appealing to the Enlightenment.
01:50:47.636 → 01:50:54.996
To harken back to an earlier episode where I pointed out that that’s not fair is the cry of a child who didn’t get his way.
01:50:56.496 → 01:50:59.116
And that’s ridiculous to side with the child in that.
01:50:59.996 → 01:51:02.456
Because fairness is incoherent.
01:51:03.416 → 01:51:06.916
No one really actually wants fairness in the final assessment.
01:51:08.016 → 01:51:16.176
When we speak about fairness, if we are using it in a way that makes any sense whatsoever, then that would be that we want justice, not fairness.
01:51:17.416 → 01:51:23.016
You don’t want fairness because if God is perfectly fair, you get to spend eternity in hell.
01:51:25.336 → 01:51:35.436
Because charging your sin to Christ, crucifying Christ, and then attributing his righteousness to you is not fair.
01:51:36.356 → 01:51:38.276
But it is the only way that you can be saved.
01:51:38.556 → 01:51:41.516
It is the only way that any of the sons of Japheth were saved.
01:51:42.716 → 01:51:47.296
And so fairness is this concept that comes from the Enlightenment.
01:51:47.596 → 01:51:49.156
It is built on tabla rasa.
01:51:49.176 → 01:51:58.536
It is built on that blank slate idea that human beings are just little lumps of clay that arise by chance in a time and place.
01:51:58.556 → 01:52:01.976
They’re not really connected to the time, the place, their ancestry, any of that.
01:52:02.416 → 01:52:09.776
God flings a soul at random into this little lump of clay, and we should treat that as a blank slate.
01:52:10.616 → 01:52:13.376
Whatever that person does in life is the only thing that matters.
01:52:13.856 → 01:52:30.536
But of course, that’s completely ridiculous, because what the person does in life flows from what the person is, flows from where the person was born, flows from the family, flows from headship and hierarchy and all of these things we have been mentioning, because you are not an individual.
01:52:31.376 → 01:52:35.136
You are not an individual with no tethers, no ties, no connections.
01:52:35.776 → 01:52:47.836
You are the son of your father, who is the son of his father, who is the son of his father, all the way back through whichever son of Noah, through Noah to Adam.
01:52:49.596 → 01:52:51.096
You are part of that line.
01:52:51.336 → 01:52:53.996
You are part of a tribe and a nation.
01:52:54.016 → 01:52:56.596
You are part of a people, and these things matter.
01:52:56.616 → 01:52:58.916
This is the way God has designed creation.
01:52:58.996 → 01:53:01.476
This is the way God has designed humanity.
01:53:02.576 → 01:53:08.856
And so these appeals to concepts like fairness are not born of scripture.
01:53:09.276 → 01:53:10.536
Find it in scripture.
01:53:10.996 → 01:53:14.716
If you want to argue for fairness, go ahead, try to find it.
01:53:15.636 → 01:53:17.456
See if God has acted in that way.
01:53:17.616 → 01:53:19.316
See if that is what God wants us to do.
01:53:19.636 → 01:53:20.996
You won’t because it isn’t there.
01:53:22.456 → 01:53:28.756
That is something born of the mind of secular, which is to say atheist philosophers, not of Christians.
01:53:31.016 → 01:53:35.416
And you had mentioned the composition of Europe today, or sort of the composition of heaven.
01:53:37.256 → 01:53:50.056
I think that it’s important to acknowledge and to be grateful for the spread of Christianity in Asia and Africa in places that historically have rejected the gospel, have rejected God’s word.
01:53:50.756 → 01:53:52.036
They are now turning around.
01:53:52.056 → 01:54:03.256
And although African Christianity has some very serious problems with syncretism and demon worship and things, there are certainly many believers there.
01:54:03.276 → 01:54:21.036
And there are, based on looking at the numbers that have lived in Ethiopia for the last 2,000 years and before that, there are more living Africans who are Christians who will go to heaven than there are Africans in heaven.
01:54:21.536 → 01:54:23.376
That is an easy claim to make.
01:54:23.636 → 01:54:26.296
If you look at the simple numbers of history.
01:54:26.956 → 01:54:31.156
And again, none of this is what you or I would wish for anything.
01:54:31.596 → 01:54:32.396
I am thankful.
01:54:32.396 → 01:54:33.176
I am grateful.
01:54:33.196 → 01:54:38.796
It gives me joy to see Christians in Africa worshipping in their own languages.
01:54:39.176 → 01:54:55.496
It’s amazing in particular to see some of the churches there that are Lutheran churches that are trying to be confessional who are happily adopting the liturgy and the vestments that they’re inheriting from their European brothers.
01:54:55.956 → 01:54:59.576
They’re saying, if this is how God is worshipped, we want to worship this God.
01:54:59.596 → 01:55:00.756
This is how we want to do it.
01:55:01.236 → 01:55:03.296
They don’t seek to do it in their own way.
01:55:03.316 → 01:55:08.016
They don’t seek to do it as worship of old took place for the demons.
01:55:08.616 → 01:55:09.776
New God, new worship.
01:55:09.936 → 01:55:10.856
They’re fine with that.
01:55:11.236 → 01:55:13.176
And so it’s a wonderful thing to see.
01:55:13.836 → 01:55:18.056
And frankly, it’s at odds with some of the pastors in the Missouri Synod.
01:55:19.376 → 01:55:37.436
There is a man in the Northwest District named Rick McCafferty who is on the Northwest District’s web page, on the Vimeo page, giving a talk about how he and his Eskimo and other Indian ancestors always worshiped God.
01:55:37.796 → 01:55:42.016
Long before the white man showed up, they knew the Creator and they worshiped the Creator.
01:55:42.656 → 01:55:45.376
And they knew the Holy Spirit who was the Great Spirit.
01:55:45.396 → 01:55:46.136
These are his words.
01:55:46.316 → 01:55:47.416
These are his direct claims.
01:55:47.996 → 01:56:07.956
And the reason that he made the video, which is an anti-racist video directed at us, was to implore all of the Lutherans who want to evangelize the Indians to stop telling those Indians who have been communing with demons for 4,000 years to stop telling them that the way they’re worshiping is wrong.
01:56:09.236 → 01:56:16.336
He literally says in the video, well, Lincoln, he says, don’t tell us we can’t beat drums at the sunrise to our God.
01:56:16.696 → 01:56:18.816
He’s always been the same God you guys worship.
01:56:19.136 → 01:56:20.796
Don’t tell us we need to have a liturgy.
01:56:20.816 → 01:56:22.076
Don’t tell us how to worship.
01:56:22.396 → 01:56:23.656
We’ve always known God.
01:56:24.016 → 01:56:27.916
The only thing, we’re missing the details about the great warrior who is Jesus.
01:56:28.256 → 01:56:29.076
Again, his words.
01:56:29.776 → 01:56:37.736
So that’s pure syncretism and that’s pure universalism, because I say that all of Rick McCafferty’s ancestors are burning in hell.
01:56:38.096 → 01:56:39.456
He says that they’re in heaven.
01:56:39.796 → 01:56:50.576
He says that they’ve always worshiped God, and that it’s these Lutherans who are coming to their reservations, trying to tell them about the triune God and show them how to worship as Christians have always worshiped.
01:56:50.976 → 01:56:51.936
We are the problem.
01:56:52.616 → 01:56:57.896
Well, one of us is wrong and one of us is going to hell, because we do not worship the same God.
01:56:59.656 → 01:57:01.916
And again, this is an LCMS pastor.
01:57:02.296 → 01:57:06.996
We’re not talking about someone who’s just a random person on the internet.
01:57:07.516 → 01:57:14.956
He was ordained to evangelize to these people who need to hear the word of God, and he’s depriving them of it, because he’s a universalist.
01:57:14.976 → 01:57:17.536
He’s saying the exact opposite of what God says.
01:57:17.836 → 01:57:19.296
He’s saying, you’ve always worshiped God.
01:57:19.316 → 01:57:20.056
You guys are great.
01:57:20.316 → 01:57:23.096
Let me tell you about Jesus, but it’s a Jesus you already knew.
01:57:23.116 → 01:57:28.356
You just knew him by another name, which is not at all the point of the discussion early about mythology.
01:57:28.796 → 01:57:30.916
We are not saying that these people knew God.
01:57:31.036 → 01:57:36.976
We’re saying that a reflection of the truth echoed through time, but it was never salvific.
01:57:37.216 → 01:57:50.836
It was simply evidence of the fact that the truth at one point had been transmitted to them by their fathers, and then the children of some of those fathers at some point long ago abandoned God and damned their children to hell.
01:57:51.136 → 01:57:56.476
They damned Rick McCafferty’s ancestors to hell because they did not worship the true God.
01:57:56.696 → 01:58:00.276
They communed with demons and they did so in many cases to this day.
01:58:01.376 → 01:58:20.136
I have heard stories of actual Lutheran churches near reservations where the people come off the reservation targeting the Lutheran churches, and they will have demonic ceremonies in their parking lot to try to bind the spirits in those churches to keep them from threatening the reservation.
01:58:20.696 → 01:58:21.936
Those people serve demons.
01:58:22.036 → 01:58:30.776
Today, in the current year 2022, they are having demonic ceremonies in our church parking lots to stop the spread of the gospel.
01:58:31.416 → 01:58:33.596
Don’t tell me that this isn’t spiritual warfare.
01:58:34.056 → 01:58:35.676
We’re not talking about hypotheticals.
01:58:35.696 → 01:58:40.656
We’re not talking about some lethno doctrine that’s not relevant to life.
01:58:41.056 → 01:58:50.976
We’re talking about souls that will either go to heaven if they repent and believe the true God, or they will go to hell if they continue to worship as these demon-worshipping Indians do.
01:58:51.576 → 01:59:05.536
And in a future episode, we’ll talk about some of the other rejected doctrines in scripture, but one of them is the doctrine of shaking the dust off your feet as a curse against those who refuse to hear the gospel.
01:59:06.036 → 01:59:10.956
This is something that Jesus repeatedly commanded to his apostles, to the disciples.
01:59:11.536 → 01:59:18.116
And in Acts, as soon as Jesus ascended into heaven, there are multiple instances of them doing that very thing.
01:59:18.396 → 01:59:26.316
They literally shake the dust off their feet against a place to curse it, to say, you have rejected God, you are now rejected.
01:59:26.536 → 01:59:28.076
We take the gospel elsewhere.
01:59:28.716 → 01:59:30.276
Find a Christian who will do that today.
01:59:30.736 → 01:59:39.096
Find a Christian who will not spend a hundred years pouring good money after bad to people who want to worship demons.
01:59:39.496 → 01:59:40.776
They don’t want to hear about Jesus.
01:59:41.116 → 01:59:42.576
They want to do what they’re doing.
01:59:43.076 → 01:59:52.296
And in the name of a false gospel, we think that we have to just continue pouring out our treasure when there are people who need it.
01:59:53.656 → 02:00:00.736
There’s an example of a pastor in Ohio, Ben Meyer, an LCMS pastor, who was called to rural Ohio.
02:00:00.896 → 02:00:02.156
That’s kind of the middle of the nowhere.
02:00:03.916 → 02:00:05.236
An area without many people.
02:00:05.236 → 02:00:05.996
They’re all white.
02:00:06.856 → 02:00:19.516
And he gets up in the morning, and he drives 45 minutes to Columbus so that he can spend time spreading the gospel, in his words, to Ethiopian immigrants.
02:00:20.096 → 02:00:27.496
And I was fascinated by that because when he’s raising money for this project, when he’s telling all the gullible Lutherans, oh, this is so wonderful.
02:00:27.516 → 02:00:31.716
We have these Africans who are coming here who need to hear the Word of God.
02:00:31.736 → 02:00:33.896
Well, yes, everyone needs to hear the Word of God.
02:00:34.156 → 02:00:35.376
But for you to suggest…
02:00:36.096 → 02:00:41.996
I think that the Ethiopian immigrant, an immigrant is not a word, these people are being shipped here.
02:00:43.116 → 02:00:49.796
When an Ethiopian leaves Ethiopia and comes to Ohio, he’s going from a Christian country to a pagan state.
02:00:50.276 → 02:00:54.756
There are more Christians in Ethiopia today, by percentage, than there are in Ohio.
02:00:55.456 → 02:00:57.016
But where is Ben Meyers’ heart?
02:00:57.376 → 02:01:01.916
Is it with the people that God sent to him, to whom God sent him?
02:01:02.516 → 02:01:06.156
No, it’s 45 minutes away where he can preach to black people, because they’re foreign.
02:01:06.496 → 02:01:15.956
And he gets the benefit of all the social status of, oh, look at me, I’m so good, I’m reaching out to these Africans, when they’re Christian.
02:01:16.676 → 02:01:20.776
Now, some of them are Muslim, because that’s the other problem that Ethiopia has.
02:01:21.216 → 02:01:24.756
They’ve had problems with Muslims for many years, centuries.
02:01:26.716 → 02:01:31.816
But to pretend that it’s a non-Christian place where these people have never heard the gospel is insane.
02:01:31.976 → 02:01:32.636
It’s a lie.
02:01:33.276 → 02:01:34.656
It is a damnable lie.
02:01:35.096 → 02:01:37.016
Ethiopia is a Christian country.
02:01:37.516 → 02:01:39.536
And as a Christian, I’m thankful for that.
02:01:40.076 → 02:01:42.216
I don’t want anyone to go to hell.
02:01:42.656 → 02:01:46.556
And it’s got nothing to do with their skin color, their race, with their fathers.
02:01:47.056 → 02:01:50.576
I want the same thing that God wants, which is for all men to be redeemed.
02:01:51.256 → 02:01:57.156
But guys like Ben Meyer will drive right past all of those souls in Ohio.
02:01:57.176 → 02:02:03.996
You know, the Lutheran population in Ohio is something like 0.4% or something.
02:02:04.016 → 02:02:05.116
It’s miniscule.
02:02:05.596 → 02:02:06.796
It’s effectively zero.
02:02:07.056 → 02:02:08.096
It’s a rounding error.
02:02:08.796 → 02:02:11.916
And the number of Christians is not a whole lot better.
02:02:12.576 → 02:02:21.416
When you look at actual church attendance at actual churches and people who actually believe what their actual church teaches, it’s a tiny number.
02:02:22.256 → 02:02:35.116
He is neglecting white people because they’re white, even though they’re his neighbors, in the place where God sent him, so that he can tell people who already know Jesus about Jesus, because that scores good boy points.
02:02:36.296 → 02:02:37.816
That’s what these fights are about.
02:02:38.036 → 02:03:04.716
That is how much race matters to people who despise election, that they will drive past their white neighbors for the sake of an alien from 3,000, 4,000 miles away, because that person who looks completely different and sounds completely different and seems exotic, somehow is more worthy of the gospel than the men who live down the road from this man, who will never tell them, he’s not gonna spend all that time, he’s gotta go somewhere else and do it for strangers.
02:03:05.776 → 02:03:07.676
This is not love and this is not the gospel.
02:03:07.736 → 02:03:09.136
This is how the church dies.
02:03:12.096 → 02:03:32.356
And the men who are engaged in syncretistic arguments and worship, if we’re being very loose with the term, they are going to damn people to hell, because those who hear, well, no, your ancestors who were worshiping demons, he won’t say that, of course, but your ancestors, they were worshiping the true God.
02:03:32.376 → 02:03:34.876
You can continue to do what they were doing.
02:03:35.276 → 02:03:37.576
That’s the voice of Satan speaking.
02:03:37.596 → 02:03:38.336
That’s what that is.
02:03:39.396 → 02:03:41.716
I’m looking at a picture right now.
02:03:41.896 → 02:03:44.976
It’s a class of seminarians from Madagascar.
02:03:46.376 → 02:03:51.436
There are about three million Lutherans, baptized Lutherans in Madagascar.
02:03:51.456 → 02:03:54.116
It’s a country of about 28 million, give or take a bit.
02:03:55.036 → 02:04:30.196
And the reason there are three million believing, baptized Christians in the Lutheran churches in Madagascar is because two Norwegian men, John Eng and Niels Nilsson, I’m sure I didn’t get the last names entirely right, but you can look up their names, because those two Norwegian Lutheran men went there and spread the gospel to them, set up a seminary, started instructing them so they could teach their own people so you could have proper headship, so you can have fathers learn from their pastors who then turn around and teach their wives and their children.
02:04:30.876 → 02:04:32.416
And that’s the reason that you have them.
02:04:32.436 → 02:04:41.496
And they didn’t go over there and tell them, keep worshiping your ancestors, because ancestor worship is a problem in Madagascar, a huge problem in large parts of Africa.
02:04:41.516 → 02:04:44.436
They didn’t say, continue your animistic practices.
02:04:44.496 → 02:04:48.156
No, they said, your ancestors worship demons.
02:04:48.596 → 02:04:50.976
We are going to tell you about the true God.
02:04:50.996 → 02:04:52.396
We are going to tell you about Christ.
02:04:52.416 → 02:04:55.556
We are going to tell you how to be saved.
02:04:56.436 → 02:04:59.236
They did not let them continue syncretistic practices.
02:04:59.256 → 02:05:05.396
They fought against those, because these are men who actually want their brothers in Africa to be saved.
02:05:06.796 → 02:05:17.356
The men here and other places who tell them to continue traditional so-called practices, which aren’t even traditional, because if you go back far enough, the actual practices would have been worshipping the Lord God.
02:05:17.956 → 02:05:24.096
The men who tell them to continue those syncretistic and pagan practices are damning them to hell.
02:05:25.136 → 02:05:28.096
Maybe not the men who hear it, but their grandchildren.
02:05:28.616 → 02:05:30.816
How do you think all of this stuff was lost in the first place?
02:05:31.276 → 02:05:44.296
It was lost in the first place because someone loosened something here, changed something there, said, no, it’s okay if we engage in this heterodox practice over time that accumulates.
02:05:45.096 → 02:05:47.236
It never gets better, it always gets worse.
02:05:47.256 → 02:05:52.236
And that’s why you have to fight against it as soon as it crops up, no matter how trivial it may seem.
02:05:52.596 → 02:05:57.656
And it would be a blessing from God if the issues we have today were trivial.
02:05:58.956 → 02:06:03.816
We have serious issues that are matters of eternal life or eternal death.
02:06:04.416 → 02:06:09.236
We’re not dealing with squabbles over the color of the pyramids or something of that nature.
02:06:10.536 → 02:06:13.476
We are dealing with core issues of the faith.
02:06:14.156 → 02:06:16.036
Core truths about creation.
02:06:16.556 → 02:06:27.096
And if you deny core truths about creation, you are denying the first article of the creed because we believe in God who is the creator of heaven and earth.
02:06:29.236 → 02:06:34.336
And so these issues over which we are fighting are vitally important to the church.
02:06:35.296 → 02:06:44.396
The outcome of these issues will determine, will decide whether or not there is a Christian church on this continent in a hundred years.
02:06:45.496 → 02:06:46.576
Because we’ve seen it elsewhere.
02:06:47.256 → 02:06:48.476
You can have the gospel.
02:06:48.856 → 02:06:49.876
You can have the truth.
02:06:49.976 → 02:06:51.656
You can have the worship of the Lord God.
02:06:52.576 → 02:06:55.396
And a hundred years later, all of your children are apostate.
02:06:55.756 → 02:06:56.416
Look at Europe.
02:06:56.836 → 02:07:00.696
Because it depends on, exactly, look at Ham.
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How quickly did the children of Ham apostatize?
02:07:04.716 → 02:07:07.236
It seems in scripture like it was almost immediate.
02:07:08.456 → 02:07:12.376
And then you had thousands of years of almost no Christians in Africa because of that.
02:07:13.276 → 02:07:20.256
Most of the children of Shem apostatized, and so you had thousands of years of most of those in the Near Middle East, no Christians.
02:07:20.836 → 02:07:24.116
There are real consequences for this, and that’s why it matters.
02:07:24.756 → 02:07:27.956
Fathers have to be faithful, or else they will not have faithful children.
02:07:28.896 → 02:07:32.316
It takes one faithless generation to lose this.
02:07:33.156 → 02:07:34.116
And we have had several.
02:07:34.696 → 02:07:36.496
We are in dire straits.
02:07:37.736 → 02:07:42.756
Again, we do have the advantage of we have the written material to which we can return that is sound.
02:07:43.016 → 02:07:49.716
So we are not in as bad of a situation as those 4,000, 6,000 years ago, whatever it happens to be.
02:07:51.356 → 02:07:57.656
But we are still living in a country where a tiny percentage of people believe that Christ is God.
02:07:58.916 → 02:07:59.976
Look at the survey data.
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If you ask the question, Is Jesus Christ God?
02:08:04.656 → 02:08:10.376
Most who claim to be Christian, even those who claim to be evangelical Christians, will say no.
02:08:11.476 → 02:08:16.636
We are surrounded by apostates because of faithless fathers and grandfathers.
02:08:18.796 → 02:08:20.016
And you’re absolutely right.
02:08:20.036 → 02:08:28.716
We have a presumption that we’re living in the ashes of the faithful grandsons of Japheth.
02:08:29.296 → 02:08:33.996
Obviously, at some point, they lost their way and descended into paganism.
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They quickly took back to the true God when he came to them in the Word.
02:08:40.516 → 02:08:43.196
And that was the inheritance that their children received.
02:08:43.396 → 02:08:52.496
That’s the reason that we are Christian today because our fathers were Christian going back 1500 years in some cases, including my own.
02:08:54.376 → 02:08:57.856
The inheritance only works when it is transmitted.
02:08:59.296 → 02:09:05.816
And that is why there’s never been any claim that there is a genetic inheritance of faith.
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That’s not the claim.
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But the same father who gives you genes gives you belief in something, for better or worse, your father is going to teach you.
02:09:15.876 → 02:09:23.336
And either you’re, the only choice you have when your father teaches you is to obey him or to rebel.
02:09:24.076 → 02:09:27.456
And if your father is faithful and you obey him, you’re blessed.
02:09:27.996 → 02:09:30.296
If he’s faithful and you rebel, you fall away.
02:09:30.856 → 02:09:42.516
Now, if he’s faithless, you must rebel in order to obey God, but only narrowly within the confines of what is necessary to believe in God and to obey him.
02:09:42.936 → 02:09:48.916
In other ways, you should still obey your father, even if he’s faithless, as much as is possible within your conscience.
02:09:49.696 → 02:10:13.196
But we live in a time today where if the pastors who are running things and are synod and in the other Christian denominations in this country, if they continue on the trajectory they have chosen, not only will there not be any Lutheranism in a century, Christianity will be wiped out on this continent because there is no one left defending it.
02:10:13.776 → 02:10:17.936
And as I’ve said before, you can recite the creeds all you want.
02:10:18.336 → 02:10:22.056
You can point to scripture, and you can point to the Book of Concord all you want.
02:10:22.536 → 02:10:29.836
But if you tell lies in God’s stead, you are serving Satan no matter what else you do.
02:10:30.336 → 02:10:32.076
You can’t lie about any of this stuff.
02:10:32.456 → 02:10:50.556
And all that we see online, all that we see whenever these questions come up about race, about evangelism, about colonialism, and all these things that are, when those words are used, things like colonialism and patriarchy, they’re thought of as secular.
02:10:50.656 → 02:10:52.456
They’re thought of as political things.
02:10:52.736 → 02:10:53.396
They’re not.
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They’re Christian things.
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They are profoundly fundamental and vital to the faith, to saving faith.
02:11:02.116 → 02:11:04.996
And their absence proves the absence of that faith.
02:11:05.616 → 02:11:09.336
And we are in churches today where those things are despised.
02:11:09.556 → 02:11:10.716
Those things are attacked.
02:11:10.736 → 02:11:11.936
Those things are forbidden.
02:11:12.476 → 02:11:15.456
To speak truthfully is forbidden on many subjects.
02:11:15.816 → 02:11:19.876
In our churches, that’s only going to end one way.
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That’s why we’re talking about these things.
02:11:23.256 → 02:11:42.796
If we can change minds, if we can help point people to scripture to understand that this is going on and here’s why it matters, hopefully a few more voices will arise and eventually we will begin to see the only sort of change that will be able to present the death of Christianity on this continent.
02:11:43.356 → 02:11:49.976
Because who knows what sort of faith came across the land bridge when the American Indians came here?
02:11:50.296 → 02:11:51.056
Probably none.
02:11:51.516 → 02:11:53.956
But if they had anything, it long since died.
02:11:54.416 → 02:11:56.616
It’s going to die again if it’s not preserved.
02:11:56.636 → 02:12:05.356
And as you said, it is up to us to preserve it because it doesn’t take more than a generation to lose something entirely.
02:12:05.796 → 02:12:08.276
And we’re several generations deep in that apostasy.
02:12:13.076 → 02:12:18.396
We often hear that everything is political, particularly given the realities of the age in which we live.
02:12:19.216 → 02:12:26.756
But what we never hear is the more true and the more important statement, everything is also theological.
02:12:28.136 → 02:12:33.856
Because everything you do or fail to do is a confession of what you believe or what you do not believe.
02:12:35.256 → 02:12:48.356
And so when we have pastors lying about demonstrable facts, what does that say to the world about what those pastors believe?
02:12:49.316 → 02:12:50.356
It certainly isn’t good.
02:12:50.636 → 02:12:52.436
There are many things you could take away from that.
02:12:52.936 → 02:12:56.356
You could take away from it that they don’t really believe the things they say on Sunday morning.
02:12:57.416 → 02:13:01.736
You could take away from it that lying about these core truths is entirely fine.
02:13:02.716 → 02:13:15.536
You could take away from it that maybe they don’t really believe in a creator God who created this world and all the constituent parts of it, who set it up in a certain way if they are willing to lie about the way that He did things.
02:13:17.956 → 02:13:30.256
And so the witness that they are presenting, they are giving to the world, is going to, if not drive men away from Christianity, at least prevent them from ever coming into the Church.
02:13:31.136 → 02:13:32.796
And that is exactly what we see happening.
02:13:33.636 → 02:13:43.516
The Zumer generation and younger, many of them are not even going to consider Christianity because of what these faithless pastors are doing.
02:13:44.096 → 02:13:51.476
Because they see these faithless pastors just parroting all of the lies and the condemnation and the slander of the world.
02:13:52.356 → 02:13:58.496
So when they see that, why on earth would you go to service on Sunday morning?
02:13:59.356 → 02:14:00.116
Why would you do that?
02:14:00.596 → 02:14:11.916
If I’m just going to hear the exact same thing that I hear from university professors and the media and all of these others, why would I wake up early to go hear it at church?
02:14:13.156 → 02:14:15.976
Makes much more sense just to wake up late and go get brunch.
02:14:16.456 → 02:14:17.736
And this is not a hypothetical.
02:14:17.756 → 02:14:23.676
You and I have borne witness to this over and over again personally with our own eyes online as we talk to people.
02:14:25.716 → 02:14:34.596
It’s gotten so bad in the Missouri Senate that I honestly, in good faith and good conscience, could not recommend that someone join our churches anymore.
02:14:35.096 → 02:14:42.756
Now, that’s not to say that there are not specific congregations with pastors who are known to me to be faithful, where I could direct someone.
02:14:43.316 → 02:14:46.076
But as a church body, we are apostate.
02:14:46.156 → 02:14:46.976
We are shameful.
02:14:47.416 → 02:14:54.276
I am disgraced by what I see our pastors, by what I see our seminaries, by what I see our synod doing.
02:14:54.596 → 02:14:56.096
They are a disgrace to God.
02:14:56.336 → 02:15:02.976
These men are ashamed of Jesus, and they think that they are going to go to heaven because they said the right words in church.
02:15:05.256 → 02:15:06.296
God warns them differently.
02:15:06.456 → 02:15:09.556
And the worst part is, we are basically the best off.
02:15:09.936 → 02:15:12.336
Yeah, yeah, and that’s the thing.
02:15:12.436 → 02:15:15.396
That’s the terrible part.
02:15:15.536 → 02:15:19.536
We cannot make a blanket recommendation for our own churches.
02:15:20.276 → 02:15:25.176
We can make recommendation for specific ones, and I do that all the time, as I know you do as well.
02:15:25.716 → 02:15:32.696
But we cannot make the general recommendation because we know there are these apostates in some of our pulpits.
02:15:33.196 → 02:15:35.556
And nothing is being done to remove them.
02:15:35.776 → 02:15:48.916
And as we have mentioned many times, the district presidents and the presidents so-called, God is not going to judge you differently from a bishop because you declined to use the term.
02:15:49.536 → 02:15:55.416
You are going to receive the stricter judgment of a bishop because you held the office.
02:15:55.696 → 02:15:58.896
And so those men should fear, even though they don’t.
02:15:59.136 → 02:16:09.896
But when it comes to the other churches in the US, absolutely cannot make a recommendation to join them because we know the false doctrines that are being taught in those churches.
02:16:09.916 → 02:16:13.896
So we can’t any longer just tell someone, go to church on Sunday.
02:16:13.916 → 02:16:16.816
I mean, yes, I do post, go to church tomorrow every Saturday evening.
02:16:17.816 → 02:16:25.596
But we have so many apostate churches that it is nearly impossible to give a general recommendation.
02:16:26.476 → 02:16:29.796
And in particular parts of the country, there are no faithful churches.
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Not one.
02:16:34.276 → 02:16:45.016
I mean, I live in the south now, and I can say with absolute certainty that the number of truly faithful churches here is tiny.
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I can probably count on one hand the number of faithful ones within driving distance of where I live.
02:16:51.636 → 02:16:55.276
And I’m being quite liberal in terms of driving distance.
02:16:55.296 → 02:16:58.296
I used to live in LA, so driving distance for me is a considerable thing.
02:16:58.476 → 02:17:01.256
And you’re also lucky, because that’s an incredible concentration.
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Many people in most parts of the country would be lucky to have one.
02:17:07.876 → 02:17:09.136
It’s why we’re doing this podcast.
02:17:09.156 → 02:17:10.656
It’s why we’re talking about these things.
02:17:11.076 → 02:17:25.256
Because the intersection of everything that people see on MSNBC that’s called politics, that’s called worldly, that’s called left-hand kingdom, all of it is rooted in attacking the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
02:17:25.876 → 02:17:27.736
It’s not attacking justification.
02:17:28.076 → 02:17:30.156
It’s not attacking Jesus died for you.
02:17:30.436 → 02:17:32.896
And that’s why all these Lutherans have lost their minds.
02:17:33.076 → 02:17:34.176
They’ve lost their bearings.
02:17:34.196 → 02:17:36.276
They have no understanding of what’s going on.
02:17:36.556 → 02:17:42.616
Because all they can see is a battlefield in terms of 16th century wars that they’re not fighting.
02:17:43.096 → 02:17:45.396
We’re not fighting a battle for justification.
02:17:45.676 → 02:17:47.456
We’re fighting a battle for creation.
02:17:47.836 → 02:17:51.376
We’re fighting a battle for how God operates in space and time.
02:17:51.916 → 02:17:58.616
And he operates using election through fathers who transmit the faith for their sons.
02:17:59.056 → 02:18:00.076
That is racial.
02:18:00.356 → 02:18:04.896
Whatever the race is, you are of your father’s race going back to Adam.
02:18:05.316 → 02:18:08.396
But as those races branched out, they became distinct.
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They became distinct physically.
02:18:10.436 → 02:18:12.236
They became distinct intellectually.
02:18:12.256 → 02:18:14.996
They became distinct culturally.
02:18:16.696 → 02:18:18.016
And those things are permissible.
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Those are part of God’s order.
02:18:19.676 → 02:18:24.376
What is not permissible is that they also became distinct religiously.
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They adopted different faiths.
02:18:27.156 → 02:18:33.616
These men who went to all these various parts of the world began worshiping the demons they found there instead of worshiping the true God.
02:18:35.256 → 02:18:38.316
And it happened as soon as they got off the ark.
02:18:38.336 → 02:18:42.416
By the time you get to the story of Babel, they’ve lost their minds.
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They’re doing evil on an industrial scale again.
02:18:45.976 → 02:18:51.336
After God literally destroyed everything on the planet except for eight people, they’re right back at it.
02:18:52.796 → 02:18:54.716
And Noah was probably still living.
02:18:58.876 → 02:18:59.996
Noah wasn’t even dead yet.
02:19:02.576 → 02:19:02.756
Yeah.
02:19:02.776 → 02:19:13.236
So these subjects and these fights, I hope that the narrative arc that we’re starting to build here will become clear to people in the fullness of time.
02:19:13.676 → 02:19:14.896
These things are connected.
02:19:15.236 → 02:19:19.636
And the reason that we talk about race is not because we care about race.
02:19:20.196 → 02:19:22.616
It’s because we care about how God made us.
02:19:23.176 → 02:19:25.616
And we care about how God made us Christian.
02:19:25.976 → 02:19:28.436
And our race is part of both of those.
02:19:29.676 → 02:19:38.156
And to deny that or to attack that is to deny and attack your creator, which is the first article of the creed.
02:19:38.556 → 02:19:42.056
If you don’t have the first article, you don’t get the second article.
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You don’t get Christ’s salvation on the cross if you deny your creator.
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And we have churches who are second article only.
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They’re Jesus on the cross and they’re gospel only.
02:19:54.036 → 02:19:55.216
But it’s not the real gospel.
02:19:55.236 → 02:19:56.636
It’s not the gospel of scripture.
02:19:57.076 → 02:20:02.656
It’s a fabricated gospel that plays well on the internet with people who hate God.
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And that should be a warning to any Christian.
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It’s not a warning to these men.
02:20:08.676 → 02:20:12.716
And I think that on Judgment Day, we’ll see how that plays out.
02:20:12.936 → 02:20:15.976
But I am not optimistic.
02:20:16.296 → 02:20:20.976
But at the same time, I’m not despairing either, because all we can do is obey God.
02:20:21.496 → 02:20:27.456
And it is tremendously comforting to know that my name is written in the Book of Life from before eternity.
02:20:27.876 → 02:20:30.456
And the gifts that I have are all from God.
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And whatever good I do in this life is from God.
02:20:33.756 → 02:20:34.916
It is not of me.
02:20:35.356 → 02:20:38.056
It is not to my credit of my own volition.
02:20:38.476 → 02:20:42.036
It is solely of and for and by God.
02:20:43.116 → 02:20:45.856
And that’s enough.
02:20:45.856 → 02:20:47.856
My relationship is with my Creator.
02:20:48.336 → 02:20:51.316
My church is where I attend and I’m thankful to have a good one.
02:20:51.816 → 02:20:57.556
But these men will not ruin Christianity, even if they burn our churches to the ground.
02:20:58.176 → 02:21:04.216
And we will continue to fight to make sure that we don’t have to deal with either one of those because it should not be the case.
02:21:04.516 → 02:21:10.216
And as long as there are faithful men who draw breath, even who are willing to speak publicly, that will not be the case.
02:21:10.576 → 02:21:13.396
It’s only when the last man goes silent that that happens.
02:21:13.996 → 02:21:18.516
And we are on the tail end of generations who did go completely silent.
02:21:18.876 → 02:21:20.476
They abandoned all of these things.
02:21:20.836 → 02:21:23.676
The inheritance we have been given today is an evil inheritance.
02:21:24.136 → 02:21:29.716
In our own churches, the only good things that we are inheriting in our churches are centuries old.
02:21:30.136 → 02:21:34.536
All of the new things that we’re inheriting need to be set on fire and destroyed.
02:21:34.936 → 02:21:39.336
And if the men responsible will not relent, then they can be put on the pyre too.
02:21:39.356 → 02:21:51.196
I mean, in the Lutheran case, there’s really no better example than we have the Book of Concord, 1580, centuries old.
02:21:51.836 → 02:21:56.336
And then we have, in contrast, the CTCR documents that should all be put in a pile and burned.
02:21:57.936 → 02:21:58.936
Like you said, it’s word.
02:21:58.996 → 02:22:01.096
And those, of course, are largely from the 60s.
02:22:01.456 → 02:22:04.956
Yeah, no, they had everything on.
02:22:05.376 → 02:22:08.416
Oh, yes, but the 60s were a truly apostate decade.
02:22:08.436 → 02:22:08.716
They were.
02:22:09.116 → 02:22:13.656
Everything that came from the 50s and 60s needs to be erased from history.
02:22:14.116 → 02:22:15.296
Nothing can be left standing.
02:22:15.416 → 02:22:15.716
Yes.
02:22:17.296 → 02:22:33.356
Well, it is the election episode, so I think we’ll close out here, go through just briefly basically eight sentences describing the eight points on election, what election is from the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord.
02:22:33.816 → 02:22:40.456
So point one, the human race is truly redeemed and reconciled with God through Christ.
02:22:40.956 → 02:22:49.836
Point two, such merit and benefits of Christ are presented, offered, and distributed to us through his word and sacraments.
02:22:50.216 → 02:22:57.796
Point three, Christ will be effective and active in us, will convert hearts to true repentance, and preserve them in the true faith.
02:22:58.296 → 02:23:04.936
Point four, the Spirit will justify all those who in true repentance receive Christ by a true faith.
02:23:05.436 → 02:23:10.356
Point five, he will also sanctify and love those who are justified.
02:23:10.716 → 02:23:16.956
Point six, he also will protect them in their great weakness against the devil, the world, and the flesh.
02:23:17.416 → 02:23:23.916
Point seven, he will also strengthen, increase, and support to the end the good work that he has begun in them.
02:23:24.896 → 02:23:34.516
Last point, point eight, finally, he will eternally save and glorify in life eternal those whom he has elected, called, and justified.
