The Ben Shapiro Show - John MacArthur | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 29

00:00:00.000 So then they tell you, you've got to join the Me Too movement, you've got to join the LGBTQ movement, you've got to join the transgender identity movement.

00:00:06.000 And so what happens to the church is it chases the world until it abandons its own message.

00:00:12.000 We are here on the Sunday special with the great John MacArthur, who is the president of the Masters University, and we are going to get into an enormous amount of his philosophy and work.

00:00:28.000 We're going to get into religion and free will and politics.

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00:01:35.000 Well.

00:01:36.000 Mr. MacArthur, Pastor MacArthur, thank you so much for showing up here.

00:01:41.000 I know that we had more anticipation in the office than we've had for, I think, virtually any other guest that we've ever had on the Sunday Special.

00:01:48.000 That's amazing, but I'm honored to be here.

00:01:51.000 Well, I'm honored to have you.

00:01:52.000 So let's jump right into the issue of the day, and that is religion and politics.

00:01:58.000 So you're not known as an overtly political preacher.

00:02:01.000 You talk more about values than politics.

00:02:03.000 What do you think the relationship should be between folks who are in the business of religion and trying to inform people about religion and politics?

00:02:10.000 How often should they be speaking about politics?

00:02:11.000 Should they be doing so openly or just preaching values?

00:02:15.000 My calling, my mandate, the command from heaven to me is to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.

00:02:23.000 That's the message that I am committed and mandated by God to preach.

00:02:27.000 It's the gospel.

00:02:29.000 Politics is the art of reordering human society on a temporal basis.

00:02:35.000 The message of the gospel has to do with eternal issues.

00:02:38.000 That doesn't mean I avoid everything political because I also want to do anything I can to elevate justice and righteousness in the world.

00:02:46.000 And so as a Christian, I want to take responsibility for whatever political avenues that I can go down that are going to increase the order of society, the blessing of society.

00:02:57.000 I want to be pro-family, pro-life, pro-character, pro-virtue, pro-morality, all those kinds of things, pro-honesty, pro-kindness, pro-mercy, pro-grace, all of those things in my culture.

00:03:09.000 That's mandated to me as well.

00:03:11.000 I'm to be a citizen who submits to the powers that be.

00:03:16.000 I am not to be a revolutionary.

00:03:17.000 We don't start riots.

00:03:19.000 That's not a Christian thing to do. 0.99

00:03:20.000 We don't even start revolutions.

00:03:22.000 And you could argue about the American Revolution, whether that was actually legitimately a Christian act or not.

00:03:28.000 We don't start revolutions.

00:03:29.000 We submit to the powers that be and we work to change the culture from the inside one soul at a time.

00:03:34.000 Okay, so let's talk about that for a second in terms of the leadership that we pick.

00:03:38.000 So, obviously you're talking a lot about submitting to the temporal nature of government.

00:03:43.000 If you go back to the Old Testament, it was prophets who were anointing kings.

00:03:47.000 What should our role be in a democracy in terms of shaping the values of that democracy for political reasons?

00:03:52.000 You see a lot of pastors who endorse particular political candidates.

00:03:55.000 Do you think that that's worthwhile, especially because A lot of the issues that you talk about are inherently political.

00:04:01.000 They may not have been political 50 years ago, but when you say pro-life, pro-family, pro-religion, these actually do have real-world consequences in the world of politics.

00:04:09.000 Yeah, it was a little different 50 years ago when we might have been talking about some sort of social structure and economics.

00:04:16.000 We're not talking about that anymore.

00:04:17.000 We're talking about morality now. 0.86

00:04:19.000 We're talking about whether we kill babies or don't kill babies.

00:04:21.000 We're talking about what is marriage.

00:04:23.000 We're talking about what is a family.

00:04:25.000 What is male?

00:04:26.000 What is female? 1.00

00:04:28.000 Those are the issues now that have made their way into the political world so that it's fraught with moral issues.

00:04:35.000 And if you are one who has a moral authority, which would be the word of the living God, the Creator, then your responsibility in any society is to make sure that God's moral standards are heard.

00:04:49.000 I can't force people to take those things, but when it comes, for example, 2 Samuel talks about rulers are to be just and to fear God and not take bribes.

00:05:00.000 I mean, that is what the Old Testament says.

00:05:02.000 So, that means if I'm looking at a politician who has a history of being bribed, who has no fear of God, who is atheistic or practically atheistic, that's not a divine qualification that I can support.

00:05:15.000 Somebody, for example, who advocates the slaughter of babies, which is murder by any biblical definition, any moral definition, that is not a just ruler.

00:05:27.000 That is not a man of mercy.

00:05:29.000 When Moses was selecting the rulers who would come under him in the book of Exodus, the qualifications were very, very clear.

00:05:37.000 They had to be just, and they had to be moral, and they had to fear God.

00:05:41.000 So, as much as I can, as a Christian, that's the kind of leader that I want to see.

00:05:47.000 That's the direction I want to see a society go for, temporally, the benefit of that society, the immediate benefit of that society.

00:05:56.000 Ordered families are a tremendous common grace.

00:06:00.000 Obedient children are a common grace, an ordered culture where people submit to the authorities, as it talks about in the New Testament, the powers that be are ordained of God.

00:06:12.000 God has ordained structure.

00:06:14.000 So I want to vote for the structures that produce the most ordered society.

00:06:18.000 And so how do we distinguish in leadership terms?

00:06:20.000 Obviously we have a serious problem as religious people. 1.00

00:06:23.000 I had a big problem personally in 2016 because the representative of the party to which I am an adherent typically, and I have voted straight line Republican as long as I can remember, the leader of that party was somebody who, while he stood for some of my values and has turned out to stand for many more of my values than I thought he would in 2016, that On a personal level, he doesn't fulfill certain basic moral precepts about character, about the necessity of cleanliness in business dealings, about the decency with regard to women, for example.

00:06:52.000 As religious people, how should we approach issues like that, about how to choose between candidates who may not be personally moral but may forward our priorities, and disengage completely?

00:07:03.000 What do you think the solution is?

00:07:05.000 Yeah, I mean, it's a challenging reality.

00:07:07.000 It's less challenging today than it used to be.

00:07:10.000 Because again, you have a party that advocates the killing of babies.

00:07:14.000 I can't vote that. 0.92

00:07:15.000 I don't care who the other guy is.

00:07:19.000 You're looking in some ways at the lesser of two evils, but you always are in society anyway because nobody is perfect.

00:07:25.000 So what I'm looking for in a leader, and it may come down to a simple analogy, If I'm going to have a brain surgeon open my brain, I'm really not too concerned about his moral life.

00:07:37.000 I would like to know that he's been in somebody else's brain and done the right thing whenever he's been there and he knows his way around.

00:07:43.000 There's a certain skill set for leadership.

00:07:46.000 There's a certain ability that people need to affect change.

00:07:50.000 And if you have a guy who manifests the ability to do that, the presidency is not a moral job.

00:07:56.000 It's not a position of moral authority.

00:07:58.000 It never has been.

00:08:00.000 We don't want to make it into that now.

00:08:02.000 You choose the best you've got, which would be someone who does justice, fears God, that is to say there's a transcendental ought that binds his heart.

00:08:13.000 An atheist doesn't have that. 1.00

00:08:14.000 Even the founders of America who were not Christians, they were deists. 1.00

00:08:19.000 New God had to be in there somewhere because there had to be some kind of existential power that had exerted a threat over people if they misbehaved.

00:08:29.000 So, you're looking for that in a president and then you're looking for competence.

00:08:33.000 And competence is really defined, in my judgment, at that level as leadership ability.

00:08:39.000 So who has the leadership ability?

00:08:41.000 Who can move things in the right direction?

00:08:45.000 And who's closest to a biblical moral standard?

00:08:47.000 Without expecting that he would be faithful to that fully, who's closest to it?

00:08:52.000 So it sounds like you think that as a society we've made a pretty grave mistake in trying to see the president as a moral figure anyway.

00:08:58.000 I mean, there's been a lot of talk that the presidency is basically two jobs.

00:09:01.000 One is implementing policy, making sure certain things happen.

00:09:04.000 And the other is, as sort of a moral leader of the country, creating a sense of social fabric in the country.

00:09:11.000 On one of those scores, the current president has been good on policy.

00:09:13.000 He hasn't been very good at putting together social fabric, from my point of view.

00:09:17.000 But maybe it sounds like what you're saying is that What we ought to be doing is stop looking to the presidency at all as the builder of the social fabric.

00:09:24.000 In other words, it's our job in our communities to build the social fabric, let the president do what the president needs to do policy-wise.

00:09:28.000 Yeah, and look, you can't blame him for the complete destruction of the family.

00:09:33.000 Sure.

00:09:34.000 He had nothing to do with that.

00:09:35.000 That's why the fabric's coming apart.

00:09:38.000 You know, when you think about how God looks at this or any society, the default position of humanity is brutally corrupt.

00:09:47.000 I mean, you read the Bloodlands.

00:09:49.000 So between Soviet Russia and Germany, between the late 1930s and 1945, 13 million people are killed.

00:09:59.000 None in a military uniform, none in a war.

00:10:01.000 13 million people were massacred by Russians and Germans in those brief years.

00:10:10.000 That is a testimony to what will happen to people when evil is not restrained.

00:10:17.000 Evil is restrained.

00:10:18.000 God has designed evil to be restrained three ways.

00:10:20.000 Number one is conscience.

00:10:22.000 And everybody has a mechanism.

00:10:24.000 It's a skylight that reacts, the Bible says, to accuse or excuse you.

00:10:29.000 But conscience only works if you have a defined belief system.

00:10:35.000 The 9-11 guys blew up a building.

00:10:38.000 That worked in their conscience because they had a faulty belief system.

00:10:43.000 So you can tamper with conscience when you alter belief.

00:10:47.000 When you tamper with truth or when you eliminate truth, the conscience is lost.

00:10:54.000 The second mechanism God put in society to govern and constrain is parents.

00:11:00.000 And the Old Testament is so clear.

00:11:01.000 That's the one commandment with a promise.

00:11:03.000 Children obey your parents for this is right and it'll go well with you and you'll be successful.

00:11:09.000 And the way to destroy that mechanism is just to tear the family to shreds, redefine it, abuse men, turn men into some kind of joke, dispossess them of all moral authority, There's only one other mechanism God has put into place to restrain evil, and that is the government.

00:11:31.000 The government is to, according to the New Testament, honor the good and punish the evildoer.

00:11:38.000 And the Bible even says they don't bear a sword for nothing.

00:11:41.000 They even have the power of capital punishment.

00:11:44.000 Which was instituted back in Genesis.

00:11:46.000 So, if you attack the conscience by destroying the belief system, if you attack the family by destroying the roles there, and then the next step you're going to face, you attack all authority.

00:12:00.000 You just do anything you can to just strip authority of its power and its honor.

00:12:08.000 You literally have decimated a culture.

00:12:11.000 Then you take a guy and stake him in a presidential role.

00:12:13.000 You think he's going to restore moral authority in a culture?

00:12:18.000 That's an impossible task.

00:12:20.000 So when we talk about restoring moral authority in the culture, it seems like there are a couple of ways that have been pursued, with regard particularly to young people.

00:12:27.000 And one is a biblical path, and one is, for lack of a better term, the utilitarian Judeo-Christian path.

00:12:34.000 The biblical path would be, get people back in churches, tell them about the veracity of the Bible, in your view the New Testament, my view the Old Testament, and then Train them basically step-by-step.

00:12:46.000 Believe in God.

00:12:47.000 Believe in the Bible.

00:12:48.000 Believe in biblical values.

00:12:49.000 Enact those values in your own life.

00:12:52.000 Build social fabric around that.

00:12:53.000 The other way is, I think, tailored more to a secular audience, which is take the same messages of the Bible without actually mentioning biblical text and use those values and say that these values work.

00:13:05.000 These are the values that have worked.

00:13:06.000 These are the values that built civilization.

00:13:07.000 These values are useful and that's why you should bear them out.

00:13:11.000 Do you think that one is preferable to the other?

00:13:13.000 Are they both useful, these two paths?

00:13:17.000 And which audiences should we tailor to?

00:13:19.000 And the reason I ask is because what I've found is that, as an Orthodox Jew, I never cite the Bible in any of my lectures.

00:13:25.000 And the reason I do is because most of the people I'm talking to don't have that common frame of reference.

00:13:28.000 And what I find is that I get a lot of emails from people then saying that they've started to re-engage with biblical thinking Not because I've cited the Bible, but simply because they've heard the values I'm talking about and now are interested in those values.

00:13:40.000 But that's only one way of coming at it.

00:13:42.000 Another way is to actually inculcate people in the reality of the religion itself.

00:13:45.000 Which one do you think is preferable and when are these useful?

00:13:49.000 I think both of them could be useful.

00:13:51.000 I think the biblical approach is preferable by a long shot. 0.92

00:13:57.000 Because, again, you're taking the authority to an existential level.

00:14:02.000 You're moving the authority up to its highest level.

00:14:05.000 If I tell people that they ought to do this because it's reasonable to do this, and it's historically the way it works, they can show me in history where it didn't work.

00:14:13.000 They can go back to the bloodlines and show it didn't work then, it didn't work when they killed six million Jews in the Holocaust. 0.87

00:14:21.000 It doesn't work.

00:14:22.000 The Lord of the Flies is the default position of human behavior.

00:14:25.000 I don't like to be caught in the trap of trying to make history authoritative.

00:14:32.000 Because there are too many exceptions to that.

00:14:35.000 We've got the best of it, in a sense, in Western civilization.

00:14:37.000 It doesn't really look so good if you go some other direction, like Africa or something like that, or even the Middle East.

00:14:46.000 I need something that is a rock-solid, immovable, unchanging and absolute authority.

00:14:52.000 I really don't have enough power.

00:14:56.000 I don't have enough verbal power or enough persuasive, convicting speech in me to convince people to live a certain way.

00:15:06.000 I'm not ever going to be anybody's moral authority, but if I say what the Old Testament prophet said, the Word of the Lord came unto me.

00:15:15.000 The Word of the Lord came unto me.

00:15:18.000 Now I understand that I have a divine authority.

00:15:22.000 I don't ever want to speak without referring to the Bible.

00:15:26.000 And I don't want to apologize for that because it's a secular culture and they don't like it.

00:15:32.000 I really feel badly that they don't like that, but if they don't ever connect with that, they're lost.

00:15:40.000 They're lost, both in life and eternity.

00:15:44.000 I have to connect them to the Word of God.

00:15:46.000 Okay, so in just a second, I want to ask you about how that view meshes with sort of the Enlightenment values that are enshrined in the Constitution Declaration of Independence.

00:15:55.000 Let's talk about what happens when you die.

00:15:57.000 I'm not talking about what happens after you die.

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00:16:58.000 Well, let's get back to the sort of meshing of biblical values with American values.

00:17:04.000 So early on you mentioned that you weren't sure that the American Revolution is in consonance with biblical values.

00:17:11.000 I was wondering if you could expound on that a little bit because I think it's an interesting idea.

00:17:14.000 Well, the Scripture says, submit to the powers that be that they're ordained of God.

00:17:18.000 That does not mean that every ruler represents God.

00:17:22.000 Clearly that is not the case, but that governmental authority is a God-given institution to repress evil and to reward good behavior, just as parents have that role and the conscience has that role we've talked about.

00:17:36.000 So when I talk about the government, I'm not saying that the government is a divine authority or that the rulers are divine authorities.

00:17:47.000 But what I am saying is that they represent a God-given constraint to human behavior.

00:17:54.000 And that's why they have to be upheld and not broken down.

00:17:57.000 So Christians don't attack the government.

00:18:00.000 We don't protest.

00:18:01.000 We don't riot.

00:18:02.000 We don't start shooting people who are in the government, even if the government is King George from England and we don't like him.

00:18:09.000 And even if we're upset with taxation, we don't start riots and we don't start revolutions.

00:18:14.000 We live quiet, according to the New Testament, peaceable lives.

00:18:19.000 We pray for those that are over us.

00:18:21.000 We pray for rulers.

00:18:23.000 We pray for all those who are in authority.

00:18:25.000 We pray that they might come to know God.

00:18:28.000 Through the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

00:18:30.000 So we pray regularly for our rulers.

00:18:32.000 We do not overthrow them.

00:18:34.000 And that is how a Christian, a real biblical Christian, would look at the American Revolution.

00:18:39.000 I mean, I hate to say that because that's not a popular idea, but it is nonetheless what the Scripture says Christians are to do.

00:18:47.000 Submit, pray, pray for the salvation of your leaders, live a quiet and peaceable life, and let the The character of your life, the godliness, the virtue of your life affect that society one soul at a time.

00:19:01.000 So what does that mean for individual rights?

00:19:02.000 Because obviously the American Revolution is based on the idea that we are individuals with certain rights that are inherent in us.

00:19:09.000 I think that has history going all the way back to Genesis talking about us being made in God's image with certain creative faculties.

00:19:16.000 And that comes along with the ability to think for ourselves, the ability to worship God, the ability to build these families.

00:19:23.000 The founding ideology was based around the idea that if the government itself was a threat to your fundamental rights, including as a religious person, then the government had lost its legitimacy.

00:19:34.000 Is there a point in your philosophy and theology where the government loses its legitimacy?

00:19:38.000 It's the Soviet Union.

00:19:39.000 They're cracking down on churches.

00:19:40.000 It's Nazi Germany.

00:19:41.000 Is there a point where a revolution would be justifiable or necessary?

00:19:45.000 Not in a biblical sense, no.

00:19:46.000 I don't think there's ever a time when you would be justified in starting to kill the people that are in power.

00:19:53.000 I don't see any justification for that.

00:19:55.000 That is not what Christians do. 1.00

00:19:58.000 We would rather suffer, but I don't want to say we don't dissent, because we do.

00:20:04.000 And one of the things that comes up in this is freedom of speech.

00:20:08.000 Is freedom of speech a biblical right?

00:20:11.000 It's not really an issue in the Bible, freedom of speech.

00:20:13.000 Speech is controlled.

00:20:15.000 We're to speak kindly.

00:20:16.000 We're to speak with grace.

00:20:18.000 We're to speak what edifies and builds up and encourages and comforts.

00:20:21.000 We're not to lie.

00:20:24.000 We're not to curse.

00:20:26.000 We're not to blaspheme.

00:20:28.000 So speech is controlled in the categories of righteousness as opposed to sinful speech.

00:20:34.000 So we don't have complete freedom of speech.

00:20:37.000 We are also in the New Testament told to speak what edifies.

00:20:40.000 But, we also are commanded necessarily to dissent in our speech when the government is asking us to do something that is wrong, or that God is telling us to do one thing, they're telling us to do something else.

00:20:55.000 Illustration in the New Testament, the apostles go out and they preach Christ.

00:20:59.000 And the Jews arrest them and say, stop! 0.97

00:21:03.000 And so they said, you judge whether we obey God or men.

00:21:07.000 And they went right back out to preach Christ.

00:21:11.000 Freedom of speech for us is freedom to preach the truth of Christ even when the society says that's against the law.

00:21:18.000 And then you don't get an army, You go to jail.

00:21:23.000 They went to jail.

00:21:24.000 They took the consequences.

00:21:26.000 They suffered the consequences of the faithfulness they had to preaching the truth.

00:21:31.000 So we do dissent.

00:21:32.000 Christians have always dissented through history. 1.00

00:21:34.000 They've always had a dissenting message when persecution came.

00:21:37.000 And inevitably, just to generalize that a little bit, When persecution of free speech comes, it always comes against the people who have the religious absolutes. 0.86

00:21:46.000 Always!

00:21:47.000 Because that's what threatens people's freedom to sin.

00:21:52.000 So we're always going to be the culprits.

00:21:54.000 At that point, we become dissenters because we continue to preach the truth no matter what the price.

00:21:58.000 So my question with regard to sort of your vision of government is that, on the one hand, it seems as though in a utopian world there would be a biblically-based government that is theocratic in nature.

00:22:09.000 And that is scary to a lot of folks who are Enlightenment fans.

00:22:12.000 It's scary to me, frankly.

00:22:14.000 I'm not a big fan of theocracy, even as an Orthodox Jew.

00:22:18.000 And at the same time, It could lead to the possibility of, as I say, a tyrannical government that we can't do anything about except, I guess, complain.

00:22:28.000 So how do we live that life?

00:22:31.000 Are you advocating for a theocracy in a utopian world?

00:22:34.000 Would that be a good thing?

00:22:37.000 That was what Israel was supposed to be, a theocracy, right? 0.99

00:22:41.000 I mean, the people who ran the government were priests.

00:22:45.000 Essentially, the orders of the priests, they were the officials of the government.

00:22:49.000 That was a theocratic kingdom, and God was king. 0.70

00:22:52.000 There was a very, very deep-seated difficulty in pulling that off.

00:22:58.000 And we know the history of that because of disobedience, because of rejection of God.

00:23:02.000 God had even punished the people He loved, you know, with captivity.

00:23:06.000 The northern king goes into the Assyrian captivity.

00:23:08.000 The southern king goes to Babylon.

00:23:10.000 You have the history of the Old Testament.

00:23:11.000 It's a sad history of punishment.

00:23:13.000 And yet God continues to extend grace to Israel and still does to this very day.

00:23:19.000 There's not going to be, even though it would be, God would want a theocratic kingdom with him as king and everybody subjected to him.

00:23:27.000 That doesn't work in this world and that's why he had to send a savior.

00:23:30.000 The New Testament teaches us this.

00:23:33.000 That there will never be a utopian kingdom.

00:23:36.000 It's impossible that there would be.

00:23:38.000 That's why you have to keep the restraints in that God has placed there.

00:23:43.000 You have to have absolute laws.

00:23:46.000 You have to have absolute convictions, absolute precepts, moral precepts that you believe because that's what makes your conscience work.

00:23:56.000 You have to have ordered families, and you have to have authority with the power to restrain evil and reward good.

00:24:03.000 And as those break down, it just gets worse and worse.

00:24:06.000 In fact, the New Testament says evil men are going to get worse and worse.

00:24:09.000 This is going to continue to get worse.

00:24:11.000 New Testament says in the future, the Messiah will return and establish his kingdoms.

00:24:17.000 The kingdom he promised, really, starting in Genesis 12 with Abraham.

00:24:21.000 The kingdom he reiterated to David, that when the Messiah came, the greater son of David would establish his kingdom forever.

00:24:27.000 The kingdom he promised to the prophets.

00:24:30.000 The kingdom he promised with salvation to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31, that he would put in Israel a new heart and a new spirit and they would walk after his laws.

00:24:40.000 And the New Testament says the Messiah came the first time to be the sacrifice for the sins of his people, the second time he comes to establish that kingdom.

00:24:48.000 So we can't do that in this world with a fallen humanity.

00:24:54.000 It's not possible.

00:24:55.000 The Lord will do it in the future when he returns to establish the kingdom on earth.

00:24:59.000 And the New Testament teaches that that's a real, actual kingdom.

00:25:03.000 Even Isaiah defines the lion lying down with the lamb and the desert blossoms like a rose.

00:25:08.000 There's a lot of elements that are physical as well as spiritual.

00:25:10.000 With all of this said, how do you view the Enlightenment?

00:25:12.000 Right now there's a big debate that's happening in conservative circles, but I think it's crossed across Ideological lines.

00:25:18.000 With regards to the Enlightenment.

00:25:19.000 On the one hand you have folks who basically argue that the Enlightenment is a break with religious tradition.

00:25:24.000 That religious tradition is about submitting to a governmental authority that may in fact be pushing certain theocratic ideals.

00:25:32.000 And that the Enlightenment comes along, it tosses out the Bible, it replaces it with the deistic concept of God and reason.

00:25:38.000 And that we get human rights flourishing, great economies, iPhones, all sorts of cool things because we tossed out the Bible. 0.98

00:25:45.000 That's sort of Sam Harris's view, Stephen Pinker's view of the Enlightenment.

00:25:49.000 And I think to a certain extent the view of some thinkers who are not so pro-Enlightenment, who look at the downsides of the Enlightenment, people like Alistair McIntyre, who look at the Enlightenment and they say, well, this kind of cleaned out Western civilization of meaning.

00:26:03.000 Sure, we got iPhones, but we gave up meaning in the trade.

00:26:06.000 And then there's the other view of the Enlightenment, which is basically that the Enlightenment is, in fact, an outgrowth of 2,000 years of Christian history and 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian history as filtered through historically.

00:26:18.000 I think you have to get the bigger picture.

00:26:21.000 religious sectarianism, and that without Judeo-Christianity, there is no Enlightenment.

00:26:24.000 So there is no iPhone without Judeo-Christianity. 0.90

00:26:26.000 The Enlightenment was just sort of a midpoint in that view.

00:26:29.000 So do you see the Enlightenment as a break from religion?

00:26:32.000 Do you see it as good?

00:26:34.000 Do you see it as bad?

00:26:35.000 I think you have to get the bigger picture.

00:26:38.000 When Christianity comes and the The church flourishes in the first century. 0.97

00:26:49.000 By the time you get to the third century and you get Constantine, you have organizational Christianity, institutional Christianity.

00:26:56.000 They decide that everybody's going to be a Christian, so they baptize all the babies, and everybody is a Christian, and you have essentially state-sponsored Christianity. 0.73

00:27:07.000 That launches a thousand years of the Dark Ages.

00:27:11.000 Where religion and relationship to God is not personal.

00:27:14.000 The church is a surrogate.

00:27:16.000 It's a surrogate for God and you connect to the church.

00:27:20.000 You don't connect by faith.

00:27:21.000 You don't connect in your heart by loving the Lord or knowing Him.

00:27:25.000 You connect by mechanical means and all the fall to all that made up that thousand years of developing Christianity, where wherever there's a shortage of reality, there's an overabundance of symbol.

00:27:40.000 So they started dressing like, you know, they were going to a five-year-old's birthday party as a clown.

00:27:47.000 And you had this institutionalized kind of Christianity that was dead, cold, and the gospel was lost and truth was lost. 0.79

00:27:56.000 But it had massive power over people.

00:27:58.000 And what kept that power was, don't put the Bible in their language.

00:28:01.000 Don't let them read it.

00:28:02.000 The church is the only interpreter of the Bible.

00:28:04.000 They can't interpret Scripture.

00:28:05.000 If anybody tried to do the interpretation on their own, they would be murdered.

00:28:10.000 We know the story of William Tyndale.

00:28:12.000 He translates the Bible into English.

00:28:13.000 They chase him all over the place until they finally kill him.

00:28:15.000 What was his crime?

00:28:17.000 Translating the Bible into the language of the people so that every, quote, plowboy in England could read the Scripture. 0.62

00:28:22.000 That is a crime that brings down that kind of false system.

00:28:27.000 But it led to the Reformation.

00:28:29.000 What happened in the Reformation was the power of that institutionalized, detached, surrogate God Church was broken, and Christianity went personal, and the gospel was preached to individuals, and faith became the way you access salvation, personal faith in Christ and His work.

00:28:53.000 That was the massive transformation.

00:28:57.000 Sad to say, the Reformation might have turned out differently if they hadn't decided to take it and make it state churches and then baptize all the babies into it, which is what they did. 0.95

00:29:10.000 But having said that, I think it's important to note That in all those European countries, for example, where the Reformation went, you have high levels of advancement.

00:29:20.000 They are the leading edge of Western civilization.

00:29:24.000 Those countries that remained profoundly Catholic were restrained in their ability to develop on any level, educationally, scientifically, industrially, and we know that historically. 0.89

00:29:36.000 It was the Protestant countries that flourished.

00:29:38.000 They developed the education, they moved us forward.

00:29:41.000 But inevitably, you have the same problem again, because this is the default of sinful humanity.

00:29:46.000 It wants to control, and it overextends its control, so it wants to make everybody a Christian, get everybody on board, and eventually, if everybody's a Christian, then really nobody knows if anybody's a Christian, and that descends really fast into what I see as the enlightenment Where people didn't have a personal relationship with God at all. 0.79

00:30:09.000 They only had another form of an institutional relationship because the Reformers never protected the personal character of Christianity.

00:30:20.000 It descended into the Enlightenment and I see the Enlightenment as the abandonment of Judeo-Christianity.

00:30:27.000 And it was okay for a while because there was still the vestiges of believing in absolute truth and they hung on to that.

00:30:35.000 But one or two generations go by, and if they're like the generation that knew not Joseph, if they don't know what the principles are for that, it all disappears and disintegrates.

00:30:47.000 And now we're at a point in postmodernism where not only do we not know what is absolute truth, we don't even believe there's such a thing.

00:30:55.000 So I want to talk to you about that.

00:30:56.000 What are the great threats to the development of Western civilization right now?

00:31:01.000 And why is it that if we have this great biblical history and this possible connection with God that makes our lives richer and better and more profound, why everybody seems to have abandoned that?

00:31:11.000 I want to talk to you about that in just one second.

00:31:13.000 First, let's talk about how you can make your life better if you're suffering, right?

00:31:18.000 You actually need to talk to somebody.

00:31:20.000 You need to talk to somebody over a Talkspace.

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00:31:33.000 I'm not a touchy-feely dude.

00:31:34.000 But, I can tell you, there are times when people are depressed, there are times when people need to talk to somebody, and you should talk to somebody if you're having those sorts of feelings.

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00:32:16.000 To match with the perfect therapist for a fraction of the price of traditional therapy, go to Talkspace.com slash Shapiro.

00:32:21.000 So let's talk a little bit about why it is that the church seems to have fallen away pretty dramatically in the United States.

00:32:25.000 That's Shapiro, Talkspace.com/Shapiro.

00:32:28.000 Go check it out right now.

00:32:30.000 So let's talk a little bit about why it is that the church seems to have fallen away pretty dramatically in the United States.

00:32:36.000 So the United States was sort of the last bulwark of Western religion. 0.61

00:32:41.000 We're a much more religious country than any of the other European countries.

00:32:45.000 And church attendance remained relatively high in the United States up until the 1950s.

00:32:49.000 It's been steadily declining.

00:32:51.000 Religious adherence has been steadily declining.

00:32:53.000 The phrase spiritual, not religious has been introduced into the lexicon.

00:32:57.000 What do you think happened with all of that?

00:32:59.000 And do you see the sort of spiritual but not religious movement as a good thing?

00:33:02.000 Like it's an indicator that people are still looking for something?

00:33:04.000 Or is it just the last vestige of people trying to graft to something?

00:33:08.000 Yeah, if you just take what you said about spiritual but not religious, which is kind of a popular little mantra for people today, essentially what that means is I'm my own God.

00:33:17.000 That's what they're saying.

00:33:18.000 There's no authority outside me.

00:33:21.000 I'm spiritual.

00:33:21.000 I'm not religious, which means I don't subscribe to any transcendental religion.

00:33:26.000 I don't subscribe to any higher authority.

00:33:29.000 I'm spiritual.

00:33:30.000 That just means I contemplate my own navel and I develop convictions about spiritual reality from looking inside of me, which is a form of insanity, really. 0.99

00:33:39.000 To think that you can Navigate the realities of eternity and life and death and life after death and the great questions by looking into your own brain is pathetic. 0.89

00:33:55.000 It's sad, but that's what people are saying when they say, I'm spiritual, I'm not religious. 0.98

00:34:00.000 That means I don't look For spiritual reality, anywhere but in my own self.

00:34:06.000 That is a formula for total disaster because there has to be external authority.

00:34:13.000 There must be God.

00:34:16.000 You cannot believe that nobody times nothing equals everything.

00:34:19.000 That's insane.

00:34:22.000 There has to be a God.

00:34:22.000 He has to have personality.

00:34:23.000 He has to be relational because we are.

00:34:25.000 He has to be able to reason and think.

00:34:27.000 He has to be able to love.

00:34:28.000 And He has to be righteous and holy and just as well as gracious and merciful and kind because we see that manifest.

00:34:34.000 He is the Creator.

00:34:35.000 We're in His image.

00:34:36.000 We create.

00:34:37.000 You have to have God to get out of yourself and find someone who can deliver you from what you are and where you're headed.

00:34:45.000 Well, I mean, I certainly see and agree with you that reason alone can't get you to morality.

00:34:49.000 It's one of the big debates that I've been having with Sam Harris repeatedly for the past couple of years, where Sam basically thinks that just by reason alone we can get to a sort of moral system.

00:34:57.000 Kant tried it.

00:34:58.000 He tried it the best.

00:34:59.000 He failed.

00:35:00.000 Everyone fails.

00:35:01.000 Because it turns out that the moral law is not within, in fact.

00:35:03.000 The moral law has to come from someplace without.

00:35:06.000 What do you think is the best proof to people who don't believe?

00:35:09.000 of why there has to be a God?

00:35:10.000 Why should they take any of this seriously and not just think, okay, it's a compilation of various texts by various old people over time?

00:35:16.000 Why should they take the Bible seriously in the first place? 1.00

00:35:19.000 Well, I think the Bible is its own defense.

00:35:21.000 I've never defended the Bible.

00:35:24.000 I've just preached it for almost 60 years.

00:35:28.000 I have basically gone through the Bible verse by verse by verse, every single passage from Genesis 1-1 to the final verse of the book of Revelation, Old Testament and New Testament, and I can only tell you that I have never ever questioned the veracity and the divine character of Scripture.

00:35:47.000 And this is, I'm talking about in-depth study of every passage in the Bible.

00:35:53.000 And I'm not the authority, but I can only tell you that under the most The most intense scrutiny that my feeble brain can bring to the Bible, it stands the test.

00:36:07.000 You can talk about defenses of Scripture.

00:36:10.000 You can say, well, the Bible predicts things that came to pass.

00:36:15.000 There are Old Testament prophecies that came to pass in the Old Testament, like the destruction of Tyre and Sidon.

00:36:21.000 Those are recorded after they were predicted.

00:36:24.000 So you can look at that.

00:36:26.000 You can look, for example, Hindu writings say that the earth is on the back of elephants who produce earthquakes when they shake. 0.98

00:36:32.000 Well, that's ridiculous.

00:36:33.000 The Bible says in Isaiah, he hangs the world on nothing. 0.79

00:36:36.000 He rolls the earth like clay to the seal, which means it rotates on an axis like you were rolling your signature over soft clay.

00:36:43.000 The hydrological cycle is completely explained in the book of Isaiah.

00:36:47.000 There's not foolishness.

00:36:49.000 Sacred writings say that the world is on layers of honey and butter and cheese and crazy things like that.

00:36:56.000 You can argue for a fulfilled prophecy in the birth of Jesus Christ that He would be born in Bethlehem, that He'd be born of a virgin, that He'd be in a line of David and all of that, and that all comes to pass and the genealogies are laid out in the New Testament.

00:37:09.000 So there are things external to the Scripture that, and not totally external, but you can look at the history that is tied to Scripture.

00:37:16.000 But I think the The power of Scripture is in the Scripture itself.

00:37:21.000 I think God has a glory all His own, and He manifests that in the Old Testament.

00:37:26.000 His glory is on display.

00:37:27.000 We see that glory of God throughout the history of the Old Testament.

00:37:31.000 His glory comes to worth in His Son.

00:37:33.000 He is the glory of God personified.

00:37:35.000 God has a glory also that manifests itself in Scripture.

00:37:38.000 Scripture has in itself a glory, a power that comes through.

00:37:44.000 For someone who hasn't studied it, that sounds odd and maybe a little mystical.

00:37:50.000 But what I'm continually overwhelmed by is the absolute truthfulness of Scripture.

00:37:57.000 And I don't ever have to defend it.

00:37:58.000 I've been doing this for a long time.

00:38:00.000 I've never been in a position where I had to try to explain something that was a legitimate contradiction in the Bible.

00:38:07.000 So what do you do with the so-called difficult sections of the Bible?

00:38:10.000 So the case that, to play devil's advocate for a second, and obviously it's interesting to do this because you and I agree about the veracity of at least the first half of the Bible.

00:38:17.000 We have a disagreement on where to file the New Testament.

00:38:20.000 You put it in the non-fiction section, and I don't, I'm Jewish.

00:38:23.000 But with that said, and we'll get to those disagreements in just seconds, I'd be remiss if we didn't.

00:38:30.000 To take the difficult sections of the Bible.

00:38:31.000 Sam Harris makes the case.

00:38:33.000 And I use Sam, but Richard Dawkins does the same thing.

00:38:35.000 People who sort of have a cursory glance at the Bible, read it once, through on their nightstand at a hotel, and now are experts.

00:38:42.000 And I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do.

00:38:44.000 But the idea is that they will pick out a section that is particularly awkward.

00:38:49.000 And they will say, okay, well the Bible was fine with this.

00:38:52.000 So let's do a couple of those sections if you don't mind.

00:38:55.000 So let's take slavery. 1.00

00:38:56.000 This is the example that's very often used, that the Bible is okay with slavery.

00:38:59.000 There are particular sections in the Old Testament that specifically talk about, for example, taking female captives and then shaving their heads and then marrying them, forcing them into marriage.

00:39:11.000 How do we square this with the basic sense of Western morality now, which is that slavery is a terrible evil?

00:39:18.000 Why didn't the Bible just abolish slavery 3,000 years ago?

00:39:22.000 Well, first of all, the Bible would never condone taking women as slaves, shaving their heads, and turning them into some kind of abject slavery.

00:39:31.000 That would never be advocated.

00:39:33.000 The Old Testament elevates women, obviously. 1.00

00:39:36.000 So does the New Testament.

00:39:37.000 But let's talk about slavery.

00:39:41.000 The Bible never condones mistreating anyone, not even an animal.

00:39:46.000 The Bible never condones mistreating anyone.

00:39:48.000 I want to make that very clear.

00:39:50.000 The Bible calls for love and kindness and support and encouragement and protection and provision.

00:39:57.000 One of the social constructs in which that occurred in the purposes of God was a form of slavery.

00:40:05.000 And the fact that slavery and being a servant were so close is shown in the word ebed, which could mean both.

00:40:14.000 Which is to say that the only difference between being a servant who showed up in the morning at nine o'clock and left at six and being a slave was you lived, you had been purchased.

00:40:26.000 What that meant was you had food, you had family, you had protection, you had provision.

00:40:37.000 This was for many people the most secure Kind of employment they could have ever hoped for with a good master, with a faithful master, with a loving master.

00:40:48.000 And in the New Testament, fascinating, the New Testament word for slave is doulos and it's the equivalent to ebeth in the Old Testament, but doulos is the word for slave and it is used dozens of times to refer to a Christian.

00:41:04.000 When we confess Jesus as Lord, we are saying, He is kurios, Lord, I am doulos, His slave. 0.96

00:41:12.000 I can't think of a more wonderful relationship that any human being could ever have than to be the slave of one who loved and died for Him, who provided everything he or she would ever need Who promises eternal protection, eternal blessing, who raises that slave to become a son, adopts that slave into his family and makes him a joint heir of everything he possesses in the eternal kingdom.

00:41:36.000 So just taking the concept of slave and turning it into some kind of a pejorative thing misses the point that there were lots of social constructs.

00:41:46.000 Some of the safest places people could be in the ancient world would be with a master who loved them and cared for them.

00:41:53.000 The Bible explicitly rejects any mistreatment of slaves ever.

00:42:01.000 They are to be treated with kindness and love in a way that honors God and demonstrates care for them.

00:42:11.000 That's very different, that kind of thing, than transporting people across an ocean, putting them in chains, making them basically nothing but an elevated animal, if even elevated.

00:42:26.000 That the Bible would never tolerate. 0.82

00:42:27.000 But keep this in mind.

00:42:29.000 There were probably 70 million slaves in the Roman Empire during the life of Jesus.

00:42:34.000 Jesus never tried to abolish slavery.

00:42:37.000 If Jesus came to abolish slavery, he failed.

00:42:40.000 If the apostle Paul came to abolish slavery, he failed.

00:42:43.000 If the rest of the apostles' agenda was to change the culture, knock off Caesar, and wipe out slavery, they failed.

00:42:51.000 If that's true, then Jesus went to the cross and said, it is finished, but it wasn't.

00:42:55.000 He didn't pull it off.

00:42:57.000 But if he came To prevent us from going to hell forever by bearing our sins in His body on the cross, then He did accomplish His mission.

00:43:08.000 That was His mission.

00:43:10.000 Not to restructure the social order of society.

00:43:14.000 There's a book in the New Testament called Philemon.

00:43:17.000 And Paul writes this letter to Philemon because Philemon had a slave named Onesimus and he ran away.

00:43:25.000 So he ends up in Rome and he runs into the Apostle Paul and Paul tells him about Christ and he becomes a brother in Christ.

00:43:32.000 So Paul says, go back.

00:43:35.000 Go back to Philemon and tell him you're his brother and tell him you're sorry that you left and make it right with him.

00:43:45.000 And he writes this letter to Philemon and says take him back.

00:43:48.000 Contrary to abolishing slavery, Paul is saying go back and fulfill your responsibility to him as his brother.

00:43:56.000 So slavery is just a social contract.

00:44:02.000 At its best.

00:44:03.000 At its worst, it is the horrible kinds of thing that people sort of depict it as today.

00:44:10.000 That's unacceptable.

00:44:11.000 So let's talk about a couple more of these issues, because it's, I think, edifying for folks and informative.

00:44:16.000 The one, obviously, the hot-button issues that have come up now.

00:44:19.000 The big one, obviously, is Leviticus 18.22, which bothers the hell out of people.

00:44:23.000 The same references in the Book of Romans and the New Testament.

00:44:26.000 Any reference that has to do with the sin of homosexuality, obviously, is hot-button these days.

00:44:31.000 When to even mention this in a biblical context offends people to no end.

00:44:36.000 Even in a free society where religious people are not forcing anything with regard to this sort of behavior, to even suggest that certain behavior is sinful is extraordinarily bothersome to folks.

00:44:45.000 How do you defend that in a society where our general perspective is, if it's not an act that violates consent, then we haven't done anything wrong?

00:44:53.000 Well, first of all, let me say this.

00:44:55.000 The Bible identifies, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, homosexuality as a sin.

00:45:01.000 Clearly.

00:45:02.000 There's no getting around that. 0.92

00:45:04.000 That's the story of Sodom, where you have homosexuals in the city of Sodom trying to attack angelic beings who are at the house of Lot. 1.00

00:45:12.000 That's why the term used to be Sodomite. 0.67

00:45:14.000 The Bible is clear on that.

00:45:15.000 It's clear on that in the Pentateuch about that kind of behavior.

00:45:19.000 It's listed with things like bestiality, sex with animals.

00:45:22.000 The New Testament affirms that.

00:45:25.000 But I want to hurry to say That's a sin, but that's not some kind of sin that leads the parade and is separated by light years from all other sins.

00:45:35.000 That is a sin to which humanity is susceptible, and some people have more strong desires in regard to that sin than other people do, for reasons that may be psychological, may be part of their history and their past.

00:45:49.000 It is a sin. 0.96

00:45:51.000 In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says, such were some of you, homosexual, effeminate. 1.00

00:45:58.000 Then he says, but you are washed, you are sanctified in Christ. 0.94

00:46:05.000 This is a very basic question.

00:46:09.000 The whole purpose of the Christian message is to confront the sinner's sin so you can call the sinner to repentance and forgiveness.

00:46:20.000 The center doesn't like that.

00:46:24.000 We had a question on the little questionnaire that your people sent me.

00:46:28.000 It said, do you feel like you might be offending Democrats with some of the things you say?

00:46:33.000 And my response to that is, look, my goal is to offend everyone.

00:46:40.000 That is my initial goal, to tell you that you are without God in the world, that there's only one Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you're in sin, that sin brings death and punishment, but the good news is Jesus Christ is the Savior who has provided a way for you to be forgiven by burying your sins in His body on the tree so that God's justice is satisfied and His love can be extended to you by putting your trust in Christ.

00:47:09.000 So I offend people all the time because that's necessary.

00:47:16.000 If you try to develop a kind of Christianity that's inoffensive, it's not Christianity.

00:47:22.000 It's not the gospel.

00:47:23.000 So I'd be remiss if we didn't actually talk about the differences between Judaism and Christianity, because on so much of this stuff we're on the same page considering that legitimately half of the book is the same.

00:47:33.000 But when it comes to the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, as a Jew, whenever I hear pastors speak about Christianity, Very often I think to myself, right, all that stuff's in the Old Testament.

00:47:44.000 So when they say things like, you know, sin has to be cleansed by God, right?

00:47:49.000 We have an entire day, Yom Kippur, that is for that.

00:47:51.000 I say three times a day a paragraph about doing repentance before God, plus an additional section for repentance in the morning prayers.

00:48:00.000 The idea of repenting and confessing your sins before God is something that is endemic to Judaism and has been for thousands of years.

00:48:07.000 The idea that God is sovereign, obviously, the two religions share.

00:48:12.000 Philosophically speaking, putting aside the basic crux of belief in one story or one historic incident in your view, If you put that aside, what do you think is the key distinguishing factor between the philosophy of Christianity and the philosophy of Judaism?

00:48:29.000 Well, first of all, I don't like to talk about it as a philosophy.

00:48:33.000 I'd rather talk about it as a revelation, because it's divine.

00:48:39.000 So, the same God who wrote the Old Testament wrote the New Testament.

00:48:43.000 That's my conviction.

00:48:45.000 The Scripture has one author.

00:48:48.000 And I need to say this, I am a Christian because of the Old Testament.

00:48:53.000 Without the Old Testament, I don't know whether I could believe the New Testament.

00:49:02.000 And that may sound strange to you, but how do I know that Jesus is the Messiah?

00:49:09.000 If I don't have all the predictions of the Old Testament defining Him when He shows up.

00:49:17.000 For example, I wrote a book called The Gospel According to God, and it's from Isaiah 53, that great chapter.

00:49:27.000 And you read Isaiah 53, and it's the biography of the Messiah, the servant of the Lord, and it lays out his arrival, and his rejection, and his death, and his resurrection, and his ascension, and his coronation.

00:49:48.000 It explains the gospel in more specific terms than any chapter in the New Testament.

00:49:53.000 He was wounded for our transgressions.

00:49:55.000 He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace fell on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.

00:50:01.000 Wow!

00:50:01.000 That sounds like the Christian doctrine of justification, because that's exactly what it is.

00:50:06.000 And then it says His life was cut off, and then it says He will see His offspring.

00:50:10.000 Well, if His life was cut off, how could He see His offspring?

00:50:13.000 When I die, I'm not going to see my offspring.

00:50:16.000 That's the resurrection.

00:50:17.000 And then you have the coronation.

00:50:19.000 You even have in that chapter, A shift, because the chapter begins with the plural, we, you know.

00:50:30.000 We saw him and he was like a root out of dry ground.

00:50:32.000 He was like a root sticking up you trip over. 0.56

00:50:35.000 He was like a sucker branch. 0.94

00:50:36.000 You whack it off. 1.00

00:50:37.000 He was meaningless, useless, and there was no beauty that we would desire him. 0.94

00:50:41.000 He didn't fit our messianic picture, and he didn't do what we thought he would do. 0.89

00:50:46.000 He didn't knock off the Romans, and he didn't set up the kingdom.

00:50:50.000 He just didn't fit our model, and so we considered him as nothing.

00:50:55.000 And the language there, they considered him as non-existent.

00:51:00.000 And that's exactly what happened because they completely rejected him and the Romans took him as a criminal and crucified him.

00:51:06.000 And then you have this stunning reality in that chapter.

00:51:09.000 It's like time stops and you hear this in the past tense.

00:51:17.000 He was bruised for our iniquities.

00:51:19.000 He was chastised for our peace.

00:51:21.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:51:22.000 What happened?

00:51:23.000 Zechariah says, the day will come when they look on him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as an only son.

00:51:32.000 Wow!

00:51:33.000 That's what they will say.

00:51:35.000 That's what the Jewish people will say when they look on the one they pierced and mourn for him as an only son.

00:51:40.000 They'll say, we thought he was stricken by God.

00:51:44.000 We thought we were doing the work of God and taking his life because he was a blasphemer.

00:51:49.000 Now we see He was wounded for our transgressions.

00:51:52.000 He was bruised for our iniquities.

00:51:54.000 And then, says Zechariah, a fountain of blessing is open to Israel and a fountain of salvation.

00:52:00.000 And then you have that followed by the kingdom and all the fulfillment of the old covenant.

00:52:04.000 And all of it comes when Israel looks at the Messiah and sees him for who he is.

00:52:10.000 The interesting thing about Isaiah's prophecy of that is, he doesn't say it's going to happen.

00:52:15.000 He doesn't use future verbs.

00:52:16.000 He uses past verbs because he's looking past Christ to when the Jews look back on the past. 0.96

00:52:22.000 Now we see it.

00:52:23.000 Now we see it.

00:52:24.000 And the New Testament, Paul says in Romans 11, all Israel will be saved.

00:52:29.000 That is the purpose and plan of God.

00:52:31.000 There is a Christian kind of popular doctrine that I Reject with all my heart and that is that the church has replaced Israel and the promises of God.

00:52:39.000 It's called supersessionism.

00:52:42.000 I don't believe in that.

00:52:42.000 I think that honestly, hate to say this, but I honestly think it is a latent form of anti-Semitism to say that.

00:52:51.000 You can't tell me that God made promises in the Old Testament to his people Israel concerning his future kingdom and salvation and that he would give them a heart, a new heart and a new spirit and he would write his laws in their heart and they would be saved and he would be their king and they would be his people and all those kingdom prophecies.

00:53:11.000 You can't possibly tell me that God didn't mean what he said.

00:53:16.000 That is one of the reasons I'm an originalist.

00:53:19.000 It's very popular in Christianity today to say the Old Testament is interpreted by the New Testament.

00:53:25.000 That's not true.

00:53:27.000 Because if that's the case, then nobody in the Old Testament had any idea what was going on.

00:53:31.000 Right?

00:53:32.000 That's not revelation.

00:53:34.000 That's obfuscation.

00:53:35.000 That's just a pile of riddles.

00:53:38.000 Other people say, well, you have to superimpose Christ, a Christological hermeneutic, over every part of the Old Testament.

00:53:44.000 That's not true either.

00:53:46.000 There's authorial intent.

00:53:48.000 I mean, you're an originalist when it comes to constitutional things.

00:53:51.000 I'm an originalist when it comes to the Word of God.

00:53:54.000 And I know you would say that you feel more comfortable probably in following a rabbinical interpretation than you do your own interpretation.

00:54:06.000 To some degree.

00:54:07.000 Sure.

00:54:08.000 So you've removed the authority one step from the one who said, the word of the Lord came to me and I said this.

00:54:15.000 You're looking to this guy.

00:54:17.000 So here's the take on rabbinical Judaism.

00:54:19.000 So rabbinical Judaism in the orthodox view, and I'm sure you know this already, but the orthodox view of rabbinic Judaism in the oral law is that basically at the time the Torah was given, There was an understanding of what the Torah meant that was orally transmitted to Moses and the rabbinic tradition is a part of that.

00:54:37.000 So basically me handing off authority to rabbis to interpret this stuff doesn't alleviate me of my duty to study, which is why Jews over time have been extraordinarily well educated, because we all study the Talmud, we do it daily, we study the Torah, we do it daily, we are obligated at least three times a week to read directly from the Bible itself.

00:54:55.000 All of the Jews have been extremely literate over time because we take the text very seriously.

00:55:00.000 But with that said, there always was an assumption that God had given a text to human beings who are fallible and live within the context of the time in which They live, meaning that if God were to come down and then speak in tongues to folks, they wouldn't understand.

00:55:16.000 So he has to give it to people.

00:55:18.000 Those people have interpretive faculties.

00:55:19.000 God knows that, which is why he gave the Torah to people with interpretive faculty.

00:55:24.000 So in other words, it's not me failing to Go back and look at the text of the Torah.

00:55:30.000 It's me understanding that the text of the Torah has been interpreted by people who have spent more time with it than I am, who are smarter than I am.

00:55:37.000 Sure, I understand that.

00:55:38.000 And who have, you know, spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out exactly what the Torah means in particular sections.

00:55:45.000 So, for example, the example we use in Orthodox Judaism most often is, there's one commandment that you're supposed to take the Sabbath, that you're supposed to guard the Sabbath and keep it, right?

00:55:56.000 Zecharta Shabbat. 0.53

00:55:57.000 You're supposed to remember it in one section, you're supposed to guard it in the other.

00:56:02.000 But there's no actual commandments as to what that means, right?

00:56:04.000 So what does it mean to keep the Sabbath?

00:56:06.000 So unless you actually have some sort of explanation of what Sabbath is, it could mean anything, right?

00:56:12.000 It could mean keep the teddy bear, right?

00:56:13.000 You have to actually have an understanding of what the Sabbath is, which is where the oral law comes in.

00:56:18.000 So me delegating out the interpretation of that to people who were trying to boil down what that meant at the time, is a form of originalism, but it does certainly have more of a common law aspect than the originalism of just picking up a Bible and saying, I can read it myself and understand every permutation of it.

00:56:35.000 Yeah, and I think that's really a good answer.

00:56:38.000 And I would say this, as long as you understand the Bible as revelation intended to be understood, that you believe in the perspicuity of Scripture— In other words, this is not mysticism, this is not fantasy, this is not some kind of allegory that isn't inherent in what you're reading.

00:57:01.000 To say, for example, as one rabbi I was reading said that Abraham's consonants in his name add up to 315, so that means he has 315 servants.

00:57:09.000 Well, I mean, come on, give me a break.

00:57:12.000 No, no, I mean, that kind of rabbinical allegorism, which is all over the place.

00:57:16.000 So all I'm saying is, when Jesus came, he said, the rabbis have said this, the rabbis, you've heard it said, you've heard it said, you've heard it said, but I say to you, but I say to you, but... So he was busy correcting what had developed as very complicated machinations that turned the Sabbath into a terrible burden, and he was assaulting that, that To the degree where he said, you've substituted the traditions of men for the commandments of God.

00:57:44.000 Here's a guy in a ditch.

00:57:45.000 You don't go over and pick the guy up out of the ditch because you're trying to conform to these machinations that have developed around it.

00:57:51.000 So I just think that when Jesus confronted the crowds and particularly the Jewish leaders, he would say, have you not read?

00:57:59.000 Have you not read?

00:58:00.000 He said it over and over and over, which is to say, That the Word of God can be understood.

00:58:05.000 The Old Testament is revelation.

00:58:07.000 Well, this is why it's so interesting, because when I read the New Testament myself, and I obviously am not a believer in the divinity of Jesus, but when I see what Jesus actually has to say about the Old Testament, it seems to me very similar to stuff that Zachariah is saying, or that Jeremiah is saying.

00:58:21.000 Jeremiah says that the sacrifices themselves are basically of no use unless there's actual meaning behind the sacrifices.

00:58:27.000 God wasn't there because He likes the barbecue, right?

00:58:30.000 It actually has to have some meaning.

00:58:31.000 And when Jesus comes along and He says, you're focusing in on all the details of the Sabbath without actually recognizing the rationale for the Sabbath, and then He exaggerates it beyond the point.

00:58:39.000 It's interesting.

00:58:40.000 Without loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

00:58:42.000 Right, exactly.

00:58:43.000 And then he, even to make a point, exaggerates it beyond the scope of what Jewish law would permit.

00:58:47.000 So, for example, when he says, you're going to leave a guy to die in a ditch on the Sabbath?

00:58:50.000 That's against Jewish law.

00:58:51.000 You can't do that.

00:58:51.000 You have to violate the Sabbath in order to save a life.

00:58:53.000 This is like basic, black-letter Jewish law.

00:58:55.000 But he's making a point, which is, you guys are ignoring what's important in order to focus in on the mundane aspect of practice.

00:59:03.000 Like, that's not unique to Jesus, in other words.

00:59:05.000 There's a long prophetic tradition of people saying exactly that, and in the modern Jewish world it's called Musar.

00:59:11.000 It's basically just telling people what they should understand about the values beyond the black letter law.

00:59:17.000 And this is why I think it's fascinating to me when I talk with people who are real biblical scholars from the Christian side, that a lot of the areas where Christian scholars think that Christianity has departed dramatically from Judaism, I think are not really dramatic departures.

00:59:36.000 They seem to be reflections of Judaism from a slightly different angle.

00:59:40.000 Even so far as a lot of the stuff in the Sermon on the Mount about, you know, when it says that you're supposed to love thy brother as thyself and you're supposed to treat your brother as you would wish to be treated and all of this.

00:59:55.000 That's present in the Old Testament, too.

00:59:57.000 No, I think what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount was elevate the teaching of the rabbis.

01:00:04.000 Elevate it.

01:00:04.000 He went above them.

01:00:07.000 He said, well, you've been told you shouldn't commit adultery.

01:00:10.000 I'm telling you, if you look at a woman and lust after her, you've committed adultery in your heart.

01:00:13.000 He got to the heart of the law.

01:00:16.000 They were content with the practical application of the law.

01:00:21.000 He was not content with that.

01:00:23.000 So I would say that Jesus was the purest Jew that ever lived because he understood the elevation of the law to the heart and the soul.

01:00:35.000 It would be a monstrous responsibility for some committee to have invented Jesus.

01:00:44.000 You know, when you hear even the people in his time saying, never a man spoke like this man.

01:00:49.000 He is a person that doesn't seem to have been a product of human invention.

01:00:55.000 And you can say, well, Jesus is a good teacher, but good teachers don't claim to be God.

01:00:58.000 They don't say, I and God are one.

01:01:00.000 They don't say, I created the universe.

01:01:02.000 That's not a good teacher. 0.99

01:01:03.000 That's somebody who's crazy, is a lunatic, or somebody who's trying to pull off a huge deception. 0.96

01:01:10.000 So, you cannot come to Jesus and just patronize Him as a noble, good Jewish teacher, because He crossed a line. 0.97

01:01:19.000 He crossed a severe line, and the Jews saw that. 1.00

01:01:23.000 Either He's the Messiah, or He is a blasphemer, and He needs to be put to death. 0.99

01:01:29.000 And those are really the choices you have. 0.98

01:01:31.000 So, when you ask me to show the variation between Judaism and Christianity, morally, no, there's none. 0.80

01:01:38.000 And in terms of God, the same, we don't have the same God as Muslims. 1.00

01:01:43.000 Allah is not the same God as Jehovah. 0.99

01:01:47.000 We don't have the same gods as any other false religion, but we have the same God as Jews and Christians.

01:01:53.000 He is the one true creator God, the one true living God.

01:01:58.000 He has a seity.

01:01:59.000 That is, He is eternal by His own nature.

01:02:02.000 He is uncreated, the uncreated one.

01:02:04.000 We believe He is more than one person in one God.

01:02:09.000 That's why Genesis says, let us make man in our own image, and relationship comes from a God who has relationship within Himself.

01:02:17.000 But the distinction between Christianity and Judaism is what we do with Jesus Christ.

01:02:23.000 The writer of Hebrews says, if a sacrifice had been enough to atone for sin, they would have stopped making them.

01:02:30.000 But they never stopped.

01:02:31.000 Morning and evening, morning and evening, morning and evening, morning and evening.

01:02:34.000 You know, basically a priest was a butcher.

01:02:36.000 He had blood up to his waist.

01:02:38.000 That's true.

01:02:39.000 He was a butcher.

01:02:40.000 He had blood up to his waist.

01:02:42.000 And the frustration of it, even on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, all the bloodletting.

01:02:46.000 And year after year after year after year, this goes on, this goes on, this goes on.

01:02:51.000 You have this most amazing thing.

01:02:53.000 You come to the death of Jesus Christ, and at the death of Christ, the veil in the temple is rent from top to bottom.

01:03:00.000 The Holy of Holies is thrown open.

01:03:02.000 Wow!

01:03:02.000 That's a statement from God.

01:03:04.000 Because it couldn't have been ripped by men from the top down.

01:03:07.000 The way to God is open.

01:03:08.000 There's no more barriers because a suitable sacrifice has been found.

01:03:13.000 This is the Lamb of God.

01:03:15.000 And amazingly soon after that the whole sacrificial system ends because that's the final sacrifice and God validates that sacrifice by raising him from the dead.

01:03:27.000 The resurrection is a provable historical fact.

01:03:30.000 So I think that's the issue.

01:03:34.000 It's what do you do with Jesus?

01:03:37.000 That's the issue of Christianity and I would just say I have such a love for Israel.

01:03:42.000 I mean, all the people I love the most are Jewish, from Abraham, you know, to the Apostle John, who wrote the last book in the Bible.

01:03:52.000 I have the same passion that Paul had.

01:03:53.000 He could almost wish himself a curse for Israel's sake, because they have a knowledge of God, But they don't know him because he can only be known through Christ, and that's the Christian message.

01:04:09.000 This is Judaism's culmination. 0.98

01:04:14.000 So I don't see Judaism and Christianity as antithetical.

01:04:18.000 I see them as Perfectly complementary so that what the prophet said the Messiah would be, Jesus was.

01:04:27.000 That fulfills it.

01:04:28.000 The sacrificial system ends.

01:04:29.000 It's never been reinstituted again.

01:04:31.000 The one sacrifice, the writer of Hebrews says, he perfected forever those that are sanctified by his one offering.

01:04:39.000 He was God's lamb, a spotless lamb without blemish.

01:04:43.000 God put on him the sins of us all.

01:04:47.000 This is a stunning theological truth because All the people who will ever believe through human history, their sins are covered by Christ.

01:04:56.000 Even those who believe, going back to Adam, all of them had to have a sacrifice that paid the price for their sins, whether it happened before Christ, their belief, or after Christ.

01:05:07.000 Christ is the focal point.

01:05:09.000 He bears in His body all the sins of all who would ever believe through human history.

01:05:14.000 This is a stunning thing to think about.

01:05:16.000 God putting all the sin and all the punishment on Him.

01:05:19.000 People say, well, how could one person bear that?

01:05:22.000 The answer is because He's a cosmic person.

01:05:26.000 He's an eternal being.

01:05:27.000 He's vast beyond us with a capacity to take that punishment.

01:05:33.000 So He gathers up all the punishment for all the sins of all the people because sin must be punished.

01:05:37.000 God is holy.

01:05:39.000 And that frees God, satisfying His justice, to offer grace to all who believe in Him.

01:05:46.000 I think that the Jewish believers in the Old Testament, who were true believers in God, and who did repent, were waiting for that sacrifice, knowing that no animal sacrifice ever did it, because they had to go back and make another one, and another one, and another one.

01:06:01.000 When is the one sacrifice going to come?

01:06:05.000 And that's why that Isaiah 53 chapter is so critical, because that's the focal point.

01:06:11.000 That's the focal point of Isaiah, by the way.

01:06:13.000 Anyway, Isaiah, interesting book, 66 chapters, like the Bible.

01:06:18.000 The first 40 are judgment, kind of like the Old Testament.

01:06:27.000 The first 39, like the Old Testament. 0.90

01:06:29.000 And the 27 in the New Testament are about salvation.

01:06:32.000 The 27 chapters are about salvation.

01:06:34.000 The first nine are the salvation of Israel from nations around it. 0.96

01:06:39.000 The back nine are the salvation of the planet, the new heaven and the new earth, and the middle nine are the salvation of people personally and individually, and in the middle of the middle nine you have Isaiah 53.

01:06:50.000 It's unbelievable what that book of Isaiah, it pulls it all together, and as you narrow down and you end up with, He was wounded for our transgressions, and this becomes the confession of all who believe in Christ, including one day Israel.

01:07:04.000 So, I want to say this to you personally.

01:07:11.000 You are a testimony to the glory of God in man.

01:07:17.000 I see the beauty of God's creation in you.

01:07:20.000 I see the use of reason and compassion and care.

01:07:28.000 I see so many things in you.

01:07:30.000 So I'm not denying that reflection of God in you, but I'm saying You either believe Jesus is the Savior or you don't, and that's the distinction.

01:07:44.000 Apart from that, just this one conversation with you, I could spend endless hours with you and be far richer for it, but I would always be saying the same thing.

01:07:58.000 Well, I do have one final question for Pastor John, and that question is going to be about the future of Christianity in the United States, whether you're optimistic or pessimistic, and what the Church has done wrong.

01:08:07.000 But for that answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:08:09.000 To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.

01:08:14.000 Pastor John MacArthur, I'm so glad that you could come by.

01:08:17.000 I really appreciate the time.

01:08:18.000 We need to go so that you can take pictures with everyone in the office, because we have a huge line out the door of people who want to take pictures with you.

01:08:24.000 It's really a pleasure to have you.

01:08:25.000 And again, you know, in the fight for Western civilization, I'm honored to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with you, even if we may part ways at the very end of the book.

01:08:35.000 It's amazing to have you here, and again, thank you so much for coming.

01:08:38.000 No, it's been my pleasure.

01:08:39.000 Anytime you'd ever want me to do it, I'd love to do it again with you.

01:08:42.000 Sounds great.

01:08:43.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:08:43.000 Thank you, Ben. Ben.

01:09:01.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 02, 2018

John MacArthur | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 29

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