The Practical Implications of Our Beliefs- A Conversation with Jeremy Slayden

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm joined here with my co-host, Nate Guarantano, and our special guest, Jeremy Sladen. Jeremy is a former professional baseball player. Then he transitioned out of that with selling rooves to the government. COVID hit, and he decided to become a researcher and start putting things out on his social media and video and podcasting platform. And one of his videos is what we're going to be talking about really today. It's called The True Origin of Dispensationalism, The Rapture, and Christian Zionism. And so we're excited to welcome Jeremy and get to know him a little bit. So, man, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's great to see you. Man, happy to be here. And after our off-camera talk before we went live, man, I realized it's going to be a comfortable place to have a conversation about some topics that not everybody is willing to have. So thank you for that. Yeah, absolutely, bro. Hey, why don't we start out, just tell the people what you're all about. How did you come to faith? You know, kind of what was your journey to even come to Christ and a little bit of your story. Yeah, thank you. So I was one of those, I forget what they call it, cradle Christians, where, you know, my family was definitely, they were poor. They needed God. They were in the Word. They were praying a lot because we had nothing. And there's a whole background there, but kind of a history of alcoholism in my family and brokenness. And so my family, when I was a baby, was really seeking God because they had nowhere else to go. There's kind of a beauty in that. And so I was raised in the church and, you know, accepted Christ at a very early age. And I, you know, sometimes I feel weird about that, right? Because if people say, well, you can't possibly understand Jesus or God or salvation when you're five years old, you just can't, right? And there's that little part of me that's like, well, I do know so much more today than I knew then. And, you know, so I've wrestled with that, but I do know that I've never fully felt alone. I've always, I've always had a desire to know my Lord and Savior and follow him. I don't always do a good job of it, but that's the deepest desire of my heart. That's what I want. So, um, and alongside of that with me, there's always been this deep desire to understand truth. It's like, okay, I didn't ask to come into this world, but here I am. What's the truth about it? And one of the earliest wrestlings with God that I ever had, and this isn't the topic of the show, but I'll give 10,000 foot level was, you know, I would, I was eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old, right in there. And I would, they'd have these creation scientists come to our church and talk about, you know, Noah bringing little dinosaurs onto the arc or eggs at, you know, and, and then I was in, and the earth being between six and 7,000 years old or 8,000, whatever the creation scientist was saying. And I wanted to believe that because it made sense. It fit within what I knew in my brain of a biblical worldview. I knew nothing of Latin or whatever, but then you go to school and regular public school where most of the teachers would say they were Christian. This is in the eighties in Tennessee or the early nineties in Tennessee. And yet they're teaching and they're saying that the earth is 4.3 or 4.5 billion years old with a age of the universe. That is 13 billion years old. And this is coming from the lips of a professing Christian teacher as well. And I'm supposed to not ask questions about that. And I noticed that I was built a little different than a lot of the other kids at my church who actually didn't ask questions about that. It was almost like there was a mental block where you kind of say what you need to say for the test at school, but you go home and go to church and you believe a completely different thing. That wasn't going to cut it for me. So that was one of the first times I realized like I'm a digger. I'm a researcher. I want to know the truth. And there's a lot of, here's where I'll land on that. There's a lot of super smart people on all ends of the spectrum when it comes to the age of the earth, creationism. And man, like CS Lewis, for instance, everybody loves CS Lewis. I love CS Lewis. He's an old earth creationist. I mean, he's an old earth guy. So they can really throw people for a loop when they find out just who they respect and where they actually land. And, but that right there, the reason I say that story is I wrestled with God. And every time I was willing to wrestle with God, I would hear this whisper. Are you willing to follow the truth all the way, even if it means either walking away from your faith or walking right back to, I mean, I remember I'd have that question. Like there was one time I was really doubting and I think it was, I think it was the enemy who was in my ear saying, you know that you're going to cling to this Christianity no matter what, because you're, you're soft, you're weak, go study, go read Richard Dawkins, go read, go read the books against your faith, go figure it out. And are you willing to walk away from your faith? And I remember answering that question. This is going to sound really weird, but I remember saying, yes, if the truth is so apparent that it, I would actually walk away. But what happened was I saw these massive gaps in atheistic thinking in new age thinking, the questions that they leave unanswered on purpose and the bias. I was, I was shocked because I thought, well, they're going to be pretty solid out there in the science world. And I was studying geology at Georgia Tech at the time. So like I had a lot of people around me telling me the opposite of a Christian worldview. Um, but what happened is every time that happened, I walked away with a stronger faith because God revealed himself even more and there were mysteries that were uncovered. Um, I, one of the, my favorite verses, I'm going to get it wrong. So how could it be my favorite verses? Um, It is, it is the glory of God to conceal a matter. But it's the glory of to Kings to seek the matter out, right. To search a matter out. And I'm not saying I'm a King, but I am saying like, I want to understand some of the deeper things of God. And it's just how you, how God made me. And so I'm, I'm, I'm incredibly affected. When I see a large segment of society in a country or around the world that I feel are being deceived by, by a deception, by, but, you know, and in 2020, I'd had enough, you know, I saw it down there in Atlanta with government and the way things were going and, uh, just, just some little, little us-based deceptions. We can get into those later, but then COVID, then COVID hit. And I, and I saw just blindness by people on all sides in the Christian world and in the secular world and willingness to follow a narrative because it means their comfort. If I just don't say anything, that's enough for me as long as like I can watch my Netflix and my family's not hurt. Right. Yeah. But ultimately I saw that where, where I saw where it was going. Where is that logically leading us and who's leading us? Do the, are the people leading us have our best interests as the common people? And as Christians, do they have our best interests at heart? And almost every time I'd have to say no. Right. So if we continue to say, I'm going to trade in my company, I'm going to hold my comfort at the expense of truth. This is going to come to a really dark place, really dark. So I felt God call me to leave my job and to begin to not only seek truth, but speak it. And, uh, man, it has been a journey. And as we'll get into some of these topics, I'm sure it's even put me at odds with many in the Christian world that rooted me on at first, but then I uncovered something that I, I could verify. I can't unsee it. And, and, but people, again, it's like, if you're shaking up their worldview, uh, not, not their Christian faith at all, but their worldview, the way that they frame their world, it's kind of like in the matrix, you said that they will fight to protect it. They'll fight, even though they're on your team, they'll fight you because they don't want to, that discomfort of the rug being pulled under from something they've maybe held dear for a long time. So that's kind of where I'm at today. I'm trying to, uh, build the platform for everybody watching. If you'll follow me on Instagram, rumble and sub stack J Slay USA. Those are three great places where I kind of lead. That's

And bro, like that to me is not the church. Like the church is that, it's sort of that really uncomfortable space where we're rubbing shoulders with people that God has brought us next to that we might not otherwise have gravitated toward. And so we got to we got to sort of embrace each other and just figure this out together. So I appreciate you being on the podcast. And, you know, I think this this podcast is always about thinking Christian. And so we're just going to try to think Christian about these topics we're going to discuss today. And I think particularly your your rumble video, your rumble movie, I suppose we call it. Yeah, a little short. It's 30 minutes long, maybe a little less than that. So it's a quick watch, but it gives a strong overview of a lot of research I've done on to some eschatology. Yeah. And so the title of it is The True Origin of Dispensationalism, The Rapture and Christian Zionism. We'll have the link in the show notes so folks can link out to it and see it if they want to see it. You also have a substack article. And remind me of the title of that one, because it wasn't you. So you think you're, you know, the rapture? It was the The Dubious Origins of America's Most Popular End-Times View. It's the second to the last thing that I've posted. So if you follow me on Substack, you'll see it as a very recent article. It's my first article that's really made a splash in terms of what I've done there. But it also, what it does there is you can go deeper with the research I've done. I provide lots of research links there. And I made sure to put stuff that also disagreed with my points because I make a pretty strong statement throughout my article saying premillennial dispensationalism wasn't really a fully formed view until around the mid-1820s to 1830s. And it still had a long way to go. But that's the time people like Edward Irving, the Scottish minister, or John Nelson Darby began to put it out. It was formed. So I'm making that claim, but there's also YouTube videos that are called Dispensationalism. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Dispensationalism before Darby that talks about a little sect here or there. And I want people to see, like, I'm not being biased and I'm not doing this and saying I'm not going to look at that. I just think that where those opposing videos land or where research lands is not nearly as strong as the positions I'm holding. Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, I think there's always little minority reports around, you know, it's very difficult when you start getting back into the history of interpretation of things. You can almost always find somewhere that this view was popping up and bubbling up somewhere. Yeah, there's kind of a lot of people in the world. Right. Exactly. The critical mass, the critical mass of a movement is very different than just having a little pop here and there. So we'll we'll also link to that substack article. But talk a little bit about, you know, why you got into that. What's your passion there? Why is this why is this something you wanted to address in the first place? Well, it actually came to me inadvertently without me trying to seek it out. I through through Jay Slay USA on my show because I'm a Christian, because I'm looking trying to look at things through a biblical worldview, even though I also bring in people that don't believe on my show. I have a lot of missionaries, Christian authors and ministers, also seminary professionals. They like the head of one of my recent interviews was with the I forget what you call the head of a theological school. But it was Ben Witherington, the third. He's the head of the doctoral program at Asbury University. And he affirmed, I'm not going to say everything in my article, but pretty much everything in my article was just like, yeah, you're right. He's like the majority of the Christian mainstream church does not see this because they're refusing to see it. Right. But. What happened was, as I had these people on the show, I would because I saw where the world's going, this globalization, I was watching COVID closely. I was watching the WHO and how they're wanting to to have us do these treaties, basically, that say that we can write off our constitution with a flick of a president's pen and hand that over to the WHO with the next pandemic. I mean, that sounds kind of revelatory, kind of biblical, right, especially when it has to do with bodies and marking your body potentially. Right. Right. So I'm asking these ministers, where do you think we're at in a in a in terms of end times or what do you believe? Now, I notice on the show they would give me these really soft general answers. And I was like, why didn't they really answer the question? So we'd get now this is, I'd say, 75, 80 percent of the time. And I talk about this in the article. After the show, I'd say, hey, like I noticed you really didn't answer that question just between you and I. And they said, well, don't put this out or are you not recording? And I'd be like, no, I'm not recording. And they'd say, I used to hold to the whole left behind Kirk Cameron, you know, premillennial dispensationalism eschatology. But as I learned more things, I'm not really there anymore. And I said, what what was the things? And many times they'd say, well, it's not very old. It's it's a newer theology within the Christian church and specifically the American evangelical church. Doesn't mean it's wrong necessarily, but it puts you in a weird it's embarrassing. And they kept saying two names, John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Schofield. John Nelson Darby being the first guy. He was the first true salesman who came to America and sold some of the seminaries moody being one of them on the eschatology. And, you know, it found its way into the Schofield reference Bible where he even took it further. And then it really got into the seminaries, Chicago, Dallas, many others. Biola. I mean, it spread like wildfire. And at that point to get a Schofield reference Bible was a big deal. You know, that that was the thing for a while. So I'd said I got to I got to know on this. So I started to do my own research and I was like, wow, they're they're correct. This was not a widely held view at all. It was not a form, a well-formed view, fully formed view at all until about 1830, give or take about five years. And even the and it's like, well, who were these men? Who was who was Darby? Where did he get his ideas from? And there was a group of conferences going on in England at the time. And I found this Jesuit priest named Manuel LaCunza who wrote a book called The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty. And he faked who he was. He said on the title of the book that he wrote, it said that he was the converted rabbi Juan Yosef Ben Ezra. So he pretended to be a Jew even though he was not. Right. And I read this book. I mean, it's a hard read. This guy's I mean, the Jesuits are some of the most intelligent. I'm giving him kudos. He is intelligent. But if you read the Jesuit oath of induction, what it's called the extreme oath of induction. And these are like the deepest. These are the 33rd degree Freemasons of the Jesuits. All right. It says in their oath of induction, you have ultimate, you know, your allegiance at the end of the day is to the Vatican and the Pope, period. And what you will do is you will go to other countries. You will pretend to be a Protestant. You will pretend to be a Jew when you need to be a Jew. You will ingratiate yourself to the bankers, to all the doctors, to the attorneys. It's incredibly detailed, this oath they take. And it basically says even when you need to fight against the Vatican in order to ultimately bring about an end that serves the Vatican, do that because you're going to fake people out. And then I was like, well, that's the oath they took. Then he writes a book that's all about Christian Zionism and reestablishing a nation state for Israel. And that and the old covenant coming back in the end times. He wrote all this down in the book and this idea of three comings of Christ, the original coming of Christ where he died on a cross and rose again and ascended. Then the rapture, then another second coming. And it kind of reads a lot like what we

to view in the sense that we're the bride of Christ. We are going to win this war. Yes, we're seeing major pushback right now, but we are going to become closer and closer and closer. It's the golden age of the church. And when we're ready, then Christ will return to receive a bride that's worthy of him in that sense. Now, if Kirk watches this, if I got a couple of things wrong, brother, I'm sorry. But generally speaking, that was a big moment for me was hearing what even Kirk Cameron, the guy that was the, you know, whatever his name was in the books, because I read all I devoured those books as a kid. The Left Behind series. Yeah, the Left Behind series. Well, I'm thinking his name was Buck, right? That was, that was the, the, the role he played of this, this uh journalist or whatever who was, who was involved when the rapture happened. Um, but yeah, Buck no longer believes in the rapture. Well, you know, it's, it's really interesting. I mean, you know, and, and I think every theological system I've ever run across, you know, you, you always end up, uh, one of my seminary professors told me, you know, every system makes you do a dance when you're reading the biblical text. And he said, so what you're trying to do is find the system that makes you dance the least. But a couple of places where I see dispensationalism making you dance are some of these passages like 2 Peter 3, you know, where Peter talks about uh the our holy and godly living hastening and hastening the day of God, hastening the coming of the Lord. And there was a, you know, a second temple Jewish understanding that the uh lives of the Jewish people, the way that they repented, their um their sort of um cleaving over to the Lord, uh, that, that would ultimately bring about the coming of the Messiah. And so you see this in the New Testament, actually in Peter's sermon in Acts, he, he kind of references this, but then specifically in 2 Peter 3, and so there is a sense in which uh the way we live sort of draws forward um God's coming. Now, do we know like, you know, if I do six good works, is that going to take six days off God's coming or something like that? We have no idea what, you know, what that looks like, but we know that it does do something. No doubt. And the pushback on this to, to, to go against maybe what I said that Kirk Cameron, I feel guilty now because that may not have been exactly it. No, that's what it. Yeah, we get it. We get it. Um, but, you know, in terms of suffering and persevering for the cross, that, that, that doesn't sound like, like if it's going to get worse and worse and it's our job to still push forward with the gospel, that's a very holy thing. You know, that, that, and I think in God's eyes, that is, that is awesome. So there's kind of two views of this. Uh, post-millennials would say what's going to get better and better because the church, greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. We're going to win this thing. That's that Doug Wilson kind of uh channel there. And, and there's a lot of hope in that. I mean, if that's what I would want to tell a young athlete is like, hey, you may be down in the count right now. You may be losing the game, but ultimately you fight, you're going to win. You're the leader of your team. He's got the secret sauce. You're going to win this game. You know, um, I, that, that's, that makes me want to go out and fight, kind of do the William Wallace thing. The other way is a lot harder road. It's that, no, it's our holiness through persecution that is going to hasten the return of Christ. Um, it's harder, you know, and it's, it's not necessarily a recipe to go out and want to win games because it's like, you're probably going to, until the last inning that has nothing to do with you, you're not going to win until Christ comes and he does it, you know? Yeah. I know that's, I feel guilty when I, when I feel like I'm not saying it right, but I think generally speaking, you probably get where I'm coming from. I do. I mean, I, I, so here's the picture I usually use with people. It's uh, it's Rocky. Right. Uh, in the first Rocky movie, if you remember the first Rocky movie, uh, Rocky, he visits the stadium, he comes back and he's talking to Adrian and he says, you know, nobody's ever gone the distance with Apollo. I'm just going to go the distance with Apollo. And in that moment, he redefined success. Yes. And, and so by the end of the movie, Rocky, when he's still standing at the end of that match, you feel the victory. It doesn't matter that he loses the match. You feel the victory. And I think we have something similar to that, although obviously much greater in Christianity, right? Um, because what Christ did was he walked to the cross to win. Like he is the slain lamb who wins that victory comes post this life, right? Um, I don't think we usher in utopia, right? But I do think that our endurance and staying faithful till the end is the victory. That's how we win. And so that now, does that mean that the win only comes when Christ comes back? Not exactly right. But even if we read through some of the pieces of Revelation, you know, one of the most powerful scenes in that book, I think is when the martyrs are crying out from under the altar and they're saying, well, you know, how long, Oh Lord, until we're avenged? Like when are you going, when is this going to happen? And so I think even the, the sort of picture in heaven is that um this endurance is a requirement of the victory. We have to do it. Um, now there are other, there are certainly other views, but that's just how I've always pictured it. It's, it's this idea that, you know, our responsibility is not to make the world better necessarily. Our responsibility is to be faithful in a world that may not get better, but that that is the march to victory. Now there's definitely, yeah, there's definitely other ways to view it, but that's kind of how I've always conceptualized it. I love that framing because I love the Rocky movies and I've not wanted just because I've walked away from some of the elements of premillennial dispensationalism. I'm not one to poo poo it. And I think the way you just put it with Rocky, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's, it's that, you know, we think about Jesus as the, as the conquering lamb, which he's often pictured as the conquering lamb in Revelation. You, you know, I think we're supposed to see the paradox in that picture, right? The conquering lamb. Lambs don't conquer, right? Right. And so there's a redefinition of success. There's a redefinition of victory. And that victory comes through that endurance being faithful to the end, even unto death, which is what Christ demonstrates on the cross. But the reality is he's the only person who's ever lived a life that resulted in resurrection and glorification. Right. I mean, that's why we tie ourselves to him because what he did worked, right? You know, in part, that's what happened. So, um, yeah, that's how I think, you know, we can kind of, we, that's how I conceptualized it. But yeah, I agree with you. I think, I think a couple of things. Number one, you know, what you're saying about this sort of being a, let's say a taboo to come out against the, you know, these type of eschatological um positions uh in the church is a really strange phenomenon. And I think in part, you know, as we talked again before the interview, I think in part it is due or it's at least tied up with a particular political stance with regard to nation of Israel with, um, obviously with rapture. Um, but I think that sort of Israel piece has become a strange one for me. Talk a little bit about your, your thoughts on that and what you found in your research as you were looking at those. Yeah, man, this is a deep, wide topic. So I'll, I don't even know, honestly, I do not know where to start. And, you know, NRB for all the good that it does, the National Religious Broadcasters Conference. Um, I was in this area discouraged because it helped, it, it really made me understand how difficult it's going to be um to overturn some of these ideas that I think for our country at least are, it's, it's, it's life or death. And I, I mean that with all importance that people would say, well, what, no, no, no, no. We got to support Israel because if not, there's going to be Islamic caliphate. You know, I asked basic questions to people at NRB. Um, I kind of took a poll because I knew I'm not going to penetrate the ideology here. It's just, it would be impossible, but I want to know what they know, right? So this is, this is modern concerns. Let me pull up my questions real quick and I'll kind of tell you the general and I video, the people that would let me video them. I videoed. Um, let's see, hold

Egypt had intercepted these transmissions and they were telling the Israeli government 10 days in advance, watch out, this is coming. And they were basically told to shut up, like they weren't paid attention to. And and then you see on October 8th, Netanyahu and the head of the defense forces and others are saying, this is our 9-11, this is our 9-11. I looked at that and immediately knew, yeah, it's your 9-11 on multiple levels. And number two, I knew because I understood the state of the church, almost the entire church is going to buy this and we're going to dump praise money and support on your nation because we feel so afraid of Islamic extremism on the one hand, but also it's God's chosen people. All right. So we're just going to support, right, we support, support. Again, I want to make a disclaimer here. I sent money to a family that I that came to my church to talk about the devastation that happened that day and they're struggling, you know, so I'm not I want to help innocent people on both sides. That being said, next question I asked, how many Palestinians have died in the current war in Gaza? Out of probably the 30 people I asked, one person knew. And they said it's around 30,000, right? And I said, yeah. Everybody else is like, uh, 2,000 maybe, because they're thinking, well, it's been about 2,000 Israelis, if they even knew that. So most of them did not know. Next question. How many Israelis have died in the current war in Gaza? Again, most people didn't know, but they thought, well, 1,200 that day, maybe 3,000 to 5,000. It's around, I don't even want to say, but it's in the very low thousands, maybe 2,000, maybe 3,000. Do you know the name of Israel's artificial intelligence bombing technology? This is what, and you can, this is not Jeremy saying it. You can find this all over the internet where they're talking about it and going the sophistication of this AI artificial bombing that's now taken the lives of 30,000 Palestinians. So you know, most of these are not Hamas. Most of these are Palestinian citizens who were displaced back, their families back in 48. It's just, it's just what it is. Well, they named that, no one knew this answer, but it's readily available. It's called the gospel. That's what they have named that, that bombing technology. Then I wrote, do you know the combined, now you've got to think, NRB is loaded with stars of David, or as I like to say, stars of Remphan. They're loaded with stars, those Israeli stars. And you see that far more than you actually see symbolism-wise of the cross. And, but you've got Donald Trump showing up there, and we think, okay, Christians think they've got the market cornered on support for Israel. Like, we support God's chosen people. The left does. And Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and all those people, they fall all over themselves trying to support Israel. Most Christians don't know that. But the question I asked was, do you know the combined Jewish and Israeli political lobbies, so all of them, AIPAC, ADL, and others, who did they give more money to in 2016 and in 2020? Was it the Democrats or the Republicans? Was it Trump or was it Biden? And I said, because they gave four times more money to one or the other. Either they didn't know, or they said Trump, because they're like, well, Trump's the one, we support Israel, we're Christian, we voted for Trump. Of course, they gave money to Trump. No, no. So we're dumping money over there. They're using, and we're sending our tax dollars as well. We've sent more money to Israel than any other nation since 1948. It's closing in on $300 billion at this point. We're dropping white phosphorus bombs, which are burning down to the bones of these people, and we're calling it the gospel. Because we're giving them the money to do it. They could not do this on their own. And I see all the support, and I'm kind of heartbroken over it, but I know I will be a pariah if I openly speak about this. That's why I decided to just ask the questions at NRB. But yeah, four times the amount went to Joe Biden. So all this talk that the conservative right does about supporting Israel and all this stuff, they're turning around and giving money right back to their ideological enemies in America. It's just what's happening. And then last, how important is the Talmud to modern Jewish belief? I think one person out of the 30 even knew what the Talmud was. Yeah. I can't imagine it's that important, is it? Well, let me read real quickly. It's very important. Give me one second here, because there's a quote I want to give. That's why I'm taking a moment to pull it up. They still take it seriously. That's crazy. The thing is, it's the religion of the rabbis. If it's the religion of the rabbis, and it's purposely kept hidden from Christians. Now, we can go find it, but how many Christians actually sit and do research? Like, not many. We just believe what our pastors typically tell us. Say, well, they're a man of God. We're not going to distrust them on this issue. And I think most pastors don't know what I'm about to say. So this is from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia in 1943 and in the iterations since. The Jewish religion as it is today, today, traces its descent without break through all the centuries from the Pharisees. Their leading ideas and methods found expression in a literature of enormous extent, of which a very great deal is still in existence. Our Talmud is the largest and most important single piece of our literature. The study of it is essential for any real understanding of modern day Phariseeism. They called it Phariseeism. And then the Jewish Encyclopedia also says, this is the last quote I'll read. With the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, the Sadducees disappeared altogether, leaving the regulation of all Jewish affairs in the hands of the Pharisees. Henceforth, Jewish life was regulated by the Pharisees. The whole history of Judaism was reconstructed from the Pharisaic point of view, and a new aspect was given to the Sanhedrin of the past. A new chain of traditions supplanted the older priestly tradition. Phariseeism has shaped the character of Judaism and life and thought of the Jew for all of the future. So I could go on with other things, but that is what most Christians don't know that. The rabbis, this is not a simple commentary. It's not like, well, occasionally I'll break open Matthew Henry's commentary. No, this is what, it's in every single synagogue, and it is the lens through which they view the Torah. And oh, by the way, a lot of modern day rabbis, they don't believe in the God of the Old Testament any longer. They respect it as nice children's stories for morality, but they're very much secularist, and they can still be rabbis. You may not know this, this is a side note, but I think as people explore this issue, it matters. The owner of Pornhub is a Jewish rabbi. So you don't have, it's not like when you say you're Christian, if you say you're Christian, by default, you cannot be an atheist. That is not true in Judaism. It can be an ethnicity. It can be a culture. It can be a religion. So it's a different thing. And Christians got to wrap our heads around this, because I believe that we are inadvertently shooting ourselves in the foot from an eschatological perspective, as well as financial, political, and otherwise, not understanding what's really going on here. I think we've been hoodwinked in a big way. It's really interesting. I mean, you know, I haven't studied this from the angles that you have. So, I mean, I'm familiar with the Talmud. I understand what it functioned as early on in early Judaism. And I knew that it kind of continued on to contemporary, but those are some interesting passages to think through. I think the other side of this, where I've often thought through this, is it's just not clear to me, here's what I'll say, our eschatological system, particularly our dispensational eschatological system, lends itself to the Jews having a continuing special relationship with God, that they are still God's chosen people. But when I read something like a Romans 9 through 11, or, you know, I look at sort of the way that the church is described in 1 Peter 2, for instance, where these titles that were ascribed to the former nation of Israel are now ascribed to the church, it's difficult not to just sit back and say, you know, I think that the church age is the age in which the Jews and the Gentiles are now going to be united in Christ, and that Israel has really become just another nation. There's a really fantastic portion of 1 Peter where 1 Peter talks about Christians, the church, Christians, all these different things. And then he talks about not being reviled in front of the Gentiles. And so now instead of, you know, Jews, Gentiles, what he's saying is Christians, Gentiles. Which is sort of this fascinating thing where it's like, wow, what's going on there? And so I think there's the direct evidence that, you know, the Jews right now, it's not that they're excluded from faith in Christ, right? Jewish people, Gentile people, all of us could be united in

40? Is it 60? Like, when do you get to be God's chosen people then? Because it's like, it's muddy, you know, and that's true of all races, right? Let me read, to wrap this back to what we opened with, we were talking about the article, and I mentioned the Jesuit priest Manuel Lacunza and just how sophisticated and smart they were. You brought up Romans. This is from the King James because that's what he used. Now, what he did was this coming of Messiah in glory and majesty where he pretended to be the converted Jewish rabbi, it functioned on two levels, this book. On the one hand, it was a book giving his thoughts. On the other hand, it was truly a Bible commentary. So he changed words. Well, he changed one word of the Bible. And it's something that would mostly go unnoticed, but this is, so he changed the word and then he did a commentary on it. All right. Let me ask you a serious question. 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And again, King James, because that's what he was using. For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits, that blindness in part is happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. Now, this is where it gets important. And so, so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, there shall come out of Zion the Deliverer and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob. So the commentaries, the biblical commentaries prior to this writing, Lacunza's writing, agreed that not all of genetic descendants of Israel are going to be a part of faithful Israel, okay? Romans 11.26, according to Lacunza, uses the word so. He changed the word. He made it an adverb of manner or how something would be accomplished. Only faithful Israel would be saved by conversion. I'm sorry, I got that backwards. Forgive me. That was what the word so is the original, all right? That's not Lacunza's. I got that all backwards. That's the original King James is an adverb of manner. And so all Israel shall be saved by a conversion to faith in Christ. So all these different commentaries, Matthew Henry and many others, all said this is what that means. Now Lacunza changed it. Here's what he wrote. When the fullness hath entered in or the time of the nations are concluded, then all Israel shall be saved. That is, Israel shall be saved a little while before the end of the world, after the death of their false Messiah. So he changed the adverb, the word so, an adverb of manner to the word then, an adverb of time. And he even in his commentary provided specifics of this time period. And he believed that it was a singular event in which all ethnic Jews would be converted. So these guys, Irving, Darby and others, just took that and ran with it because it wasn't about an individual heart change with the Jews. It was this future time in history where the Jews were going to be converted. But it's incredibly sophisticated. And you almost wonder, like, did he really do that on purpose knowing? But then you find out, no, these guys, Ribera was a Jesuit. Lacunza was a Jesuit. And they were all writing books to do one thing. The Protestant reformers of the day were looking at the Catholic church, the pope and the Vatican, saying the pope is the Antichrist and the Vatican is the beast system. That's what they were saying. And they were gaining followers in droves, pulling away from the political power of the Catholic church. The priest was commissioning these writings saying we have to infect their reformed eschatology because you're killing us over there, reformers. And they could not penetrate. But when Lacunza pretended to be a Jewish rabbi that had converted, that pulled at the heart strings of Edward Irving. And man, off to the races. That's how this thing got started. Well, this is definitely one of the passages, like in Romans 9 through 11, where I'd say dispensationalists overread. You know, the reality is, you know, when you're looking at it, what is all Israel? You know, if there's a way to read these passages, just those passages you just read and to understand the mixed multitude of Jews and Gentiles. Now that the full number of Gentiles come in. Now, that's all Israel. In other words, all Israel doesn't have to be the Jews. It can be this mixed multitude of Jews and Gentiles who are now united in Jesus Christ. They're united in Messiah. Well, all you've got to do to prove your point outright is jump back a few verses. I didn't read these. I don't want to read these quick ones. It's Romans 9, 6 and 9, 8. Not as though the word of God has taken no effect, for they are not all Israel, which are of Israel, which are of Israel. And then Romans 9, 8 really drives it home. They which are children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted for the seed. And I mean that children of the promise, you're playing with now Galatians where, you know, Paul contrasts Hagar and Ishmael with Sarah and Isaac. You know, you're playing with Romans four, where he talks about, you know, Abraham in, you know, you're not ancestors of Abraham, sons of Abraham, not sons of Abraham in the flesh. They're sons of Abraham in faith. Like you've got this whole interpretive trajectory. And then to get here and to use this as sort of the basis for your system is a really difficult thing to do. I mean, I've seen the arguments of this too, but I find it fascinating. Yeah, these are the type of passages that we are choosing to lean an entire eschatological system on. And, you know, you read them. You have to ignore many others or at least let them carry no weight. That's right. And I mean, with this, you know, what you kind of sit back and say, it's like, yeah, everybody, we want to be doing evangelism and we want to be doing a discipleship. We want to be welcoming everybody into the church. But there is not this, you know, special apple of the eye place that a specific ethnic group continues. If we can even say ethnic to your point earlier, right? I don't even know how to refer to them. But, you know, a group who identifies themselves as God's chosen people now simply are making that assertion, right? God's chosen people are always found in Christ. And so it's just a very interesting way that we've, I think we've lost our way on these issues. And part of it is that it's much more difficult to understand the distinctions between these groups than it is to recognize them and fold them all together. It's a simpler way of understanding it in a lot of ways. Like, we don't have to distinguish between the, you know, we distinguishing between church and Israel is much more, much easier than understanding that now Israel is sort of manifest in the people of God brought together. It's just a very difficult thing to understand. So I think this does work itself out in a lot of ways. Obviously, this forms the basis for a lot of the support that Christians give to the modern state of Israel. Yes. Right. And I think it cuts Israel an awful lot of slack. Now, however we land on the political side of this, you know, what Israel's response to Gaza was and all that kind of other stuff. I do think there is a leaning toward giving Israel the benefit of the doubt almost always. Oh yeah. Well, it is happening. And if the numbers were reversed and it was 30,000 Israelis killed and 2,000 or 2,500 Gazans, you better believe you'd know about it. But this disproportionate death, most Christians have no idea. That's, this has happened in the same way since 1948. Every time there's an attack on one side or the other, way more Palestinians die than Israelis. One other thing I've noticed, and I want to get your thoughts on this, that I want to be fair because at NRB or with pastors that are total Christians Zionists, I've felt very often that there's less because of this eschatology that when the fullness of the Gentiles have come in, then all Israel shall be saved or much of it. There's kind of this lackadaisical approach to actually trying to evangelize Jewish people. I could be wrong on that, but I've just seen very much. It's more like we got to support God's chosen. We got to support God's chosen people. This desperation even from pastors like John Hagee and some

qualified support for the Jewish people and particularly for the state of Israel. I also saw the other side, which was the zeal to convert the Jews. And so I think the real point of confusion lies sort of a step backward, I would say. I think it lies in our unwillingness to pick up the weapons of the spirit and our contentment to work with the weapons of the world. And so if I read something like Ephesians 6, where we read, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the powers and the principalities and the authorities in the heavenly places. And then we have this list of the entire army or armor of God. That is our armor. That's what we battle with. That's what we're fighting. These are spiritual battles. They're not physical battles. They may involve the physical. They may involve the temporal, but ultimately what we're doing is we're, we're, we're fighting a spiritual war. And so we fight a spiritual war with the actual gospel, not the AI enabled gospel that, you know, is targeting people. But we, we win this war by, by pulling people under Christ's authority through conversion and into Christianity. But I think that there's a confusion about this and a contentment to just use the political machinery of the world to an almost an enamorment with that power and to, to be able to see the effect of a political lobbying effort to say, let's support Israel. Let's give them money. Let's let's, you know, let's do all these things and to sort of leave aside this spiritual darkness that Israel continues. I mean, I remember the first time I went to Israel and saw people at the wailing wall, it was one of the more disturbing things I have ever seen in my life. People standing at the wailing wall, crying out to a wall, putting prayers in a wall. Don't you think it's, is it an idolatry in a sense, in the old sense? I think it is. Yeah. I mean, I, I think it is. I would say, and not idolatry in sort of like the, you know, where we might construct some sort of a weird system of like, you know, they're, they're forming a new God. I think what they've got is they've got, they're, they're, they're trying to worship a God. They don't know because they've rejected Christ. They now no longer know who God is. They're outside of the new covenant and thus missing, lacking revelation of who God is. And so as they're standing at this wall, they're crying out for a God who's moved past them. Yeah. And it's just a really sad and disturbing thing, but you're right. There are groups who address that. We don't want to leave those out, but I do think some of the more popular calls to let's support Israel financially. Let's get on board. You know, let's vote for the politicians who are going to support Israel. All those kinds of things are that to me is sort of that contentment with the weapons of the world. It's that idea that we can affect this temporally and then wait and see what happens spiritually. And I just don't think that's the, and I see that confusion a lot, that sort of merger of Christianity and politics. It's not that we shouldn't be participating. It's that we also have our own power over here. That's really, really great. And we should be, we should be exercising it, but we too often just sort of say, well, we have this, but the political machinery seems really, you know, potent. No doubt. And there's a third group here that we really need to address. It's not just you've got Christians and then you've got these, you know, these religious Jews going to the wailing wall. You know, Joe Biden has gone to the wailing wall. Barack Obama has gone to the wailing wall. Donald Trump goes to the wailing wall. They all go to the wailing wall and they either wail or pray or both. You know, so many of these are secular people. Most of being that they don't, they're not, they don't care about any of this stuff that we're actually talking about. But all day long they will take your prayers, your love, your support, your money under the guise of, well, we're Israel, we're God's chosen people. Keep, keep sending it churches. Keep helping, you know, like, and they, they actually aren't even in the spectrum of these two groups that we're talking about. And they are a very large, this would be the, the Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, you know, Nancy Pelosi has said with feeling conviction, if the United States crumbles to the ground, the one thing that will remain is our support of Israel. Like, and so it's, it's just a, there's really three groups here, man. There's the Christians that I think are hoodwinked in many ways. Then you've got these, these religious Jews that it's like you said, it's sad. There's kind of a darkness around it and wailing and they're, they're crying out to God. They no longer know. Then you've got a third group that's just enjoying the benefits of all of it. Yeah. Well, bro, I, we've covered a ton of ground. I kind of, I kind of hate to stop talking, but we're, Let's do a part two, man. Let's talk about solutions. Yeah, we'll do a part two. We'll have you back on. Cause I, I think at the end of the day, you know, here's sort of where I think we can land this is just to say, you know, and this is something I think we advocate for on, on the podcast is let's just get back into the biblical text. Let's really deeply try to understand it. Let's understand the histories that we're dealing with. Let's think well about these issues and let's not worry about who we're going to, whose feathers are going to ruffle. Right. Let's just think well about the only person we have to please is God. And so let's not get too enamored with our own thoughts. Let's make sure we're letting the Bible lead. Let's make sure we're letting theology lead and let's be transformed in our thinking as opposed to stuck in it. And so I appreciate having you on bro. And let's definitely do a part two. I'd love to sort of finish this out with some some ways that we could kind of solve this and rethink different things. But yeah, thanks for being on. I really appreciate having you. I loved a great conversation. I appreciate both you guys. Thank you. Absolutely. Take care, everybody. And we'll catch you on the next episode of thinking Christian. Just want to take a second to thank the team at life audio for their partnership with us on the thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. The historical Jesus podcast is the sweeping saga of the life and times of Galilean Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the faith, religion, and church founded to honor and disseminate his acts and teachings. Join me, Mark Vinette, on this fascinating journey through time exploring the many great works of Christian theology, literature, architecture, music, and art inspired by the words and deeds of Jesus Christ.