Pastor John MacArthur, the President of the Masters University, joins us to talk about his philosophy and work, religion and free will, and politics. He also talks about why pastors should be more interested in politics than they should be in religion, and why it s important to be a citizen who submits to the powers that be, rather than a revolutionary who seeks to start revolutions. The Sunday Special is brought to you by Helix Sleep, a company that matches you to a mattress that will give you the best night s rest you ve ever had. HelixSleep is offering up to $125 off all mattress orders. Get up to 125 bucks off your purchase when you take their 2-minute sleep quiz, which takes 2 minutes to complete, and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress. Whether you re a side sleeper, a hot sleeper, whether you like a plush or firm bed, there s no more guessing and no more confusion. With Helix, you really have nothing to lose. You ve got it all in front of you when it comes to getting the perfect night's rest you never thought you d ever needed. Plus, you ll get 10% off your first purchase when checking out Helix's new mattress! and a 10-year warranty! You get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free, so you have to lose it for a chance at 100 nights without having to pay for a new one so you got nothing but a 100 nights worth of risk free! Thanks to Helix for sponsoring the Sunday Special with Ben Guest, Ben Guest! Ben Guest is a listener of the podcast and Ben Guest. Thanks Ben Guest to Ben Guest: BenGuest: . Thank you for listening to Sunday Special. Ben's Sunday Special: Sunday Special Epilogue: Pastor John MacArthur: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 25. 26. 27. Intro Music: "I'm Not a Revolutionary: How Can I Be a Christian? Intro and Outro: "Solo" by Jeff Perla (feat. ) Music by Ian Dorsch ( )
00:00:00.000So 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.
00:00:06.000And so what happens to the church is it chases the world until it abandons its own message.
00:00:12.000We 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.
00:00:28.000We're going to get into religion and free will and politics.
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00:01:36.000Mr. MacArthur, Pastor MacArthur, thank you so much for showing up here.
00:01:41.000I 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.
00:01:48.000That's amazing, but I'm honored to be here.
00:01:52.000So let's jump right into the issue of the day, and that is religion and politics.
00:01:58.000So you're not known as an overtly political preacher.
00:02:01.000You talk more about values than politics.
00:02:03.000What 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?
00:02:10.000How often should they be speaking about politics?
00:02:11.000Should they be doing so openly or just preaching values?
00:02:15.000My calling, my mandate, the command from heaven to me is to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.
00:02:23.000That's the message that I am committed and mandated by God to preach.
00:02:29.000Politics is the art of reordering human society on a temporal basis.
00:02:35.000The message of the gospel has to do with eternal issues.
00:02:38.000That doesn't mean I avoid everything political because I also want to do anything I can to elevate justice and righteousness in the world.
00:02:46.000And 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.
00:02:57.000I 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.
00:03:29.000We submit to the powers that be and we work to change the culture from the inside one soul at a time.
00:03:34.000Okay, so let's talk about that for a second in terms of the leadership that we pick.
00:03:38.000So, obviously you're talking a lot about submitting to the temporal nature of government.
00:03:43.000If you go back to the Old Testament, it was prophets who were anointing kings.
00:03:47.000What should our role be in a democracy in terms of shaping the values of that democracy for political reasons?
00:03:52.000You see a lot of pastors who endorse particular political candidates.
00:03:55.000Do you think that that's worthwhile, especially because A lot of the issues that you talk about are inherently political.
00:04:01.000They 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.
00:04:09.000Yeah, it was a little different 50 years ago when we might have been talking about some sort of social structure and economics.
00:04:28.000Those are the issues now that have made their way into the political world so that it's fraught with moral issues.
00:04:35.000And 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.
00:04:49.000I 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.
00:05:00.000I mean, that is what the Old Testament says.
00:05:02.000So, 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.
00:05:15.000Somebody, for example, who advocates the slaughter of babies, which is murder by any biblical definition, any moral definition, that is not a just ruler.
00:05:29.000When Moses was selecting the rulers who would come under him in the book of Exodus, the qualifications were very, very clear.
00:05:37.000They had to be just, and they had to be moral, and they had to fear God.
00:05:41.000So, as much as I can, as a Christian, that's the kind of leader that I want to see.
00:05:47.000That's the direction I want to see a society go for, temporally, the benefit of that society, the immediate benefit of that society.
00:05:56.000Ordered families are a tremendous common grace.
00:06:00.000Obedient 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.
00:06:14.000So I want to vote for the structures that produce the most ordered society.
00:06:18.000And so how do we distinguish in leadership terms?
00:06:20.000Obviously we have a serious problem as religious people.
00:06:23.000I 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.
00:06:52.000As 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?
00:07:19.000You're looking in some ways at the lesser of two evils, but you always are in society anyway because nobody is perfect.
00:07:25.000So 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.
00:07:37.000I 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.
00:07:43.000There's a certain skill set for leadership.
00:07:46.000There's a certain ability that people need to affect change.
00:07:50.000And if you have a guy who manifests the ability to do that, the presidency is not a moral job.
00:07:56.000It's not a position of moral authority.
00:08:00.000We don't want to make it into that now.
00:08:02.000You 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.
00:08:14.000Even the founders of America who were not Christians, they were deists.
00:08:19.000New 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.
00:08:29.000So, you're looking for that in a president and then you're looking for competence.
00:08:33.000And competence is really defined, in my judgment, at that level as leadership ability.
00:08:41.000Who can move things in the right direction?
00:08:45.000And who's closest to a biblical moral standard?
00:08:47.000Without expecting that he would be faithful to that fully, who's closest to it?
00:08:52.000So 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.
00:08:58.000I mean, there's been a lot of talk that the presidency is basically two jobs.
00:09:01.000One is implementing policy, making sure certain things happen.
00:09:04.000And the other is, as sort of a moral leader of the country, creating a sense of social fabric in the country.
00:09:11.000On one of those scores, the current president has been good on policy.
00:09:13.000He hasn't been very good at putting together social fabric, from my point of view.
00:09:17.000But 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.
00:09:24.000In 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.
00:09:28.000Yeah, and look, you can't blame him for the complete destruction of the family.
00:11:01.000That's the one commandment with a promise.
00:11:03.000Children obey your parents for this is right and it'll go well with you and you'll be successful.
00:11:09.000And 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.
00:11:31.000The government is to, according to the New Testament, honor the good and punish the evildoer.
00:11:38.000And the Bible even says they don't bear a sword for nothing.
00:11:41.000They even have the power of capital punishment.
00:11:46.000So, 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.
00:12:00.000You just do anything you can to just strip authority of its power and its honor.
00:12:08.000You literally have decimated a culture.
00:12:11.000Then you take a guy and stake him in a presidential role.
00:12:13.000You think he's going to restore moral authority in a culture?
00:12:20.000So 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.
00:12:27.000And one is a biblical path, and one is, for lack of a better term, the utilitarian Judeo-Christian path.
00:12:34.000The 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.
00:12:53.000The 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.
00:13:05.000These are the values that have worked.
00:13:06.000These are the values that built civilization.
00:13:07.000These values are useful and that's why you should bear them out.
00:13:11.000Do you think that one is preferable to the other?
00:13:13.000Are they both useful, these two paths?
00:13:17.000And which audiences should we tailor to?
00:13:19.000And 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.
00:13:25.000And the reason I do is because most of the people I'm talking to don't have that common frame of reference.
00:13:28.000And 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.
00:13:40.000But that's only one way of coming at it.
00:13:42.000Another way is to actually inculcate people in the reality of the religion itself.
00:13:45.000Which one do you think is preferable and when are these useful?
00:13:51.000I think the biblical approach is preferable by a long shot.
00:13:57.000Because, again, you're taking the authority to an existential level.
00:14:02.000You're moving the authority up to its highest level.
00:14:05.000If 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.
00:14:13.000They 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.
00:15:18.000Now I understand that I have a divine authority.
00:15:22.000I don't ever want to speak without referring to the Bible.
00:15:26.000And I don't want to apologize for that because it's a secular culture and they don't like it.
00:15:32.000I really feel badly that they don't like that, but if they don't ever connect with that, they're lost.
00:15:40.000They're lost, both in life and eternity.
00:15:44.000I have to connect them to the Word of God.
00:15:46.000Okay, 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.
00:15:55.000Let's talk about what happens when you die.
00:15:57.000I'm not talking about what happens after you die.
00:15:58.000I mean, like, when you actually plot, your family's going to need to bury you.
00:16:01.000And they're going to need money to do that.
00:16:02.000And that's why it would have been good if you'd gotten life insurance.
00:16:04.000You should have thought of that before, shouldn't you?
00:16:54.000Policy genius is the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
00:16:58.000Well, let's get back to the sort of meshing of biblical values with American values.
00:17:04.000So early on you mentioned that you weren't sure that the American Revolution is in consonance with biblical values.
00:17:11.000I was wondering if you could expound on that a little bit because I think it's an interesting idea.
00:17:14.000Well, the Scripture says, submit to the powers that be that they're ordained of God.
00:17:18.000That does not mean that every ruler represents God.
00:17:22.000Clearly 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.
00:17:36.000So when I talk about the government, I'm not saying that the government is a divine authority or that the rulers are divine authorities.
00:17:47.000But what I am saying is that they represent a God-given constraint to human behavior.
00:17:54.000And that's why they have to be upheld and not broken down.
00:17:57.000So Christians don't attack the government.
00:18:34.000And that is how a Christian, a real biblical Christian, would look at the American Revolution.
00:18:39.000I 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.
00:18:47.000Submit, 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.
00:19:01.000So what does that mean for individual rights?
00:19:02.000Because obviously the American Revolution is based on the idea that we are individuals with certain rights that are inherent in us.
00:19:09.000I think that has history going all the way back to Genesis talking about us being made in God's image with certain creative faculties.
00:19:16.000And that comes along with the ability to think for ourselves, the ability to worship God, the ability to build these families.
00:19:23.000The 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.
00:19:34.000Is there a point in your philosophy and theology where the government loses its legitimacy?
00:20:28.000So speech is controlled in the categories of righteousness as opposed to sinful speech.
00:20:34.000So we don't have complete freedom of speech.
00:20:37.000We are also in the New Testament told to speak what edifies.
00:20:40.000But, 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.
00:20:55.000Illustration in the New Testament, the apostles go out and they preach Christ.
00:20:59.000And the Jews arrest them and say, stop!
00:21:03.000And so they said, you judge whether we obey God or men.
00:21:07.000And they went right back out to preach Christ.
00:21:11.000Freedom of speech for us is freedom to preach the truth of Christ even when the society says that's against the law.
00:21:18.000And then you don't get an army, You go to jail.
00:21:32.000Christians have always dissented through history.
00:21:34.000They've always had a dissenting message when persecution came.
00:21:37.000And 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.
00:21:47.000Because that's what threatens people's freedom to sin.
00:21:52.000So we're always going to be the culprits.
00:21:54.000At that point, we become dissenters because we continue to preach the truth no matter what the price.
00:21:58.000So 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.
00:22:09.000And that is scary to a lot of folks who are Enlightenment fans.
00:22:14.000I'm not a big fan of theocracy, even as an Orthodox Jew.
00:22:18.000And 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.
00:23:46.000You have to have absolute convictions, absolute precepts, moral precepts that you believe because that's what makes your conscience work.
00:23:56.000You have to have ordered families, and you have to have authority with the power to restrain evil and reward good.
00:24:03.000And as those break down, it just gets worse and worse.
00:24:06.000In fact, the New Testament says evil men are going to get worse and worse.
00:24:09.000This is going to continue to get worse.
00:24:11.000New Testament says in the future, the Messiah will return and establish his kingdoms.
00:24:17.000The kingdom he promised, really, starting in Genesis 12 with Abraham.
00:24:21.000The kingdom he reiterated to David, that when the Messiah came, the greater son of David would establish his kingdom forever.
00:24:27.000The kingdom he promised to the prophets.
00:24:30.000The 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.
00:24:40.000And 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.
00:24:48.000So we can't do that in this world with a fallen humanity.
00:25:19.000On the one hand you have folks who basically argue that the Enlightenment is a break with religious tradition.
00:25:24.000That religious tradition is about submitting to a governmental authority that may in fact be pushing certain theocratic ideals.
00:25:32.000And that the Enlightenment comes along, it tosses out the Bible, it replaces it with the deistic concept of God and reason.
00:25:38.000And that we get human rights flourishing, great economies, iPhones, all sorts of cool things because we tossed out the Bible.
00:25:45.000That's sort of Sam Harris's view, Stephen Pinker's view of the Enlightenment.
00:25:49.000And 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.
00:26:03.000Sure, we got iPhones, but we gave up meaning in the trade.
00:26:06.000And 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.
00:26:18.000I think you have to get the bigger picture.
00:26:21.000religious sectarianism, and that without Judeo-Christianity, there is no Enlightenment.
00:26:24.000So there is no iPhone without Judeo-Christianity.
00:26:26.000The Enlightenment was just sort of a midpoint in that view.
00:26:29.000So do you see the Enlightenment as a break from religion?
00:26:35.000I think you have to get the bigger picture.
00:26:38.000When Christianity comes and the The church flourishes in the first century.
00:26:49.000By the time you get to the third century and you get Constantine, you have organizational Christianity, institutional Christianity.
00:26:56.000They 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.
00:27:07.000That launches a thousand years of the Dark Ages.
00:27:11.000Where religion and relationship to God is not personal.
00:27:21.000You don't connect in your heart by loving the Lord or knowing Him.
00:27:25.000You 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.
00:27:40.000So they started dressing like, you know, they were going to a five-year-old's birthday party as a clown.
00:27:47.000And you had this institutionalized kind of Christianity that was dead, cold, and the gospel was lost and truth was lost.
00:28:29.000What 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.
00:28:57.000Sad 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.
00:29:10.000But 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.
00:29:20.000They are the leading edge of Western civilization.
00:29:24.000Those countries that remained profoundly Catholic were restrained in their ability to develop on any level, educationally, scientifically, industrially, and we know that historically.
00:29:36.000It was the Protestant countries that flourished.
00:29:38.000They developed the education, they moved us forward.
00:29:41.000But inevitably, you have the same problem again, because this is the default of sinful humanity.
00:29:46.000It 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.
00:30:09.000They only had another form of an institutional relationship because the Reformers never protected the personal character of Christianity.
00:30:20.000It descended into the Enlightenment and I see the Enlightenment as the abandonment of Judeo-Christianity.
00:30:27.000And it was okay for a while because there was still the vestiges of believing in absolute truth and they hung on to that.
00:30:35.000But 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.
00:30:47.000And 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.
00:30:56.000What are the great threats to the development of Western civilization right now?
00:31:01.000And 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?
00:31:11.000I want to talk to you about that in just one second.
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00:31:20.000You need to talk to somebody over a Talkspace.
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00:32:21.000So let's talk a little bit about why it is that the church seems to have fallen away pretty dramatically in the United States.
00:32:51.000Religious adherence has been steadily declining.
00:32:53.000The phrase spiritual, not religious has been introduced into the lexicon.
00:32:57.000What do you think happened with all of that?
00:32:59.000And do you see the sort of spiritual but not religious movement as a good thing?
00:33:02.000Like it's an indicator that people are still looking for something?
00:33:04.000Or is it just the last vestige of people trying to graft to something?
00:33:08.000Yeah, 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.
00:33:30.000That 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.
00:33:39.000To 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.
00:33:55.000It's sad, but that's what people are saying when they say, I'm spiritual, I'm not religious.
00:34:00.000That means I don't look For spiritual reality, anywhere but in my own self.
00:34:06.000That is a formula for total disaster because there has to be external authority.
00:34:37.000You 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.
00:34:45.000Well, I mean, I certainly see and agree with you that reason alone can't get you to morality.
00:34:49.000It'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.
00:35:24.000I've just preached it for almost 60 years.
00:35:28.000I 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.
00:35:47.000And this is, I'm talking about in-depth study of every passage in the Bible.
00:35:53.000And 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.
00:36:07.000You can talk about defenses of Scripture.
00:36:10.000You can say, well, the Bible predicts things that came to pass.
00:36:15.000There are Old Testament prophecies that came to pass in the Old Testament, like the destruction of Tyre and Sidon.
00:36:21.000Those are recorded after they were predicted.
00:36:49.000Sacred writings say that the world is on layers of honey and butter and cheese and crazy things like that.
00:36:56.000You 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.
00:37:09.000So there are things external to the Scripture that, and not totally external, but you can look at the history that is tied to Scripture.
00:37:16.000But I think the The power of Scripture is in the Scripture itself.
00:37:21.000I think God has a glory all His own, and He manifests that in the Old Testament.
00:38:00.000I've never been in a position where I had to try to explain something that was a legitimate contradiction in the Bible.
00:38:07.000So what do you do with the so-called difficult sections of the Bible?
00:38:10.000So 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.
00:38:17.000We have a disagreement on where to file the New Testament.
00:38:20.000You put it in the non-fiction section, and I don't, I'm Jewish.
00:38:23.000But with that said, and we'll get to those disagreements in just seconds, I'd be remiss if we didn't.
00:38:30.000To take the difficult sections of the Bible.
00:38:56.000This is the example that's very often used, that the Bible is okay with slavery.
00:38:59.000There 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.
00:39:11.000How do we square this with the basic sense of Western morality now, which is that slavery is a terrible evil?
00:39:18.000Why didn't the Bible just abolish slavery 3,000 years ago?
00:39:22.000Well, first of all, the Bible would never condone taking women as slaves, shaving their heads, and turning them into some kind of abject slavery.
00:39:50.000The Bible calls for love and kindness and support and encouragement and protection and provision.
00:39:57.000One of the social constructs in which that occurred in the purposes of God was a form of slavery.
00:40:05.000And the fact that slavery and being a servant were so close is shown in the word ebed, which could mean both.
00:40:14.000Which 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.
00:40:26.000What that meant was you had food, you had family, you had protection, you had provision.
00:40:37.000This 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.
00:40:48.000And 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.
00:41:04.000When we confess Jesus as Lord, we are saying, He is kurios, Lord, I am doulos, His slave.
00:41:12.000I 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.
00:41:36.000So 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.
00:41:46.000Some of the safest places people could be in the ancient world would be with a master who loved them and cared for them.
00:41:53.000The Bible explicitly rejects any mistreatment of slaves ever.
00:42:01.000They are to be treated with kindness and love in a way that honors God and demonstrates care for them.
00:42:11.000That'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.
00:44:11.000So let's talk about a couple more of these issues, because it's, I think, edifying for folks and informative.
00:44:16.000The one, obviously, the hot-button issues that have come up now.
00:44:19.000The big one, obviously, is Leviticus 18.22, which bothers the hell out of people.
00:44:23.000The same references in the Book of Romans and the New Testament.
00:44:26.000Any reference that has to do with the sin of homosexuality, obviously, is hot-button these days.
00:44:31.000When to even mention this in a biblical context offends people to no end.
00:44:36.000Even 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.
00:44:45.000How 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?
00:45:25.000But 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.
00:45:35.000That 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.
00:46:24.000We had a question on the little questionnaire that your people sent me.
00:46:28.000It said, do you feel like you might be offending Democrats with some of the things you say?
00:46:33.000And my response to that is, look, my goal is to offend everyone.
00:46:40.000That 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.
00:47:09.000So I offend people all the time because that's necessary.
00:47:16.000If you try to develop a kind of Christianity that's inoffensive, it's not Christianity.
00:47:23.000So 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.
00:47:33.000But 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.
00:47:44.000So when they say things like, you know, sin has to be cleansed by God, right?
00:47:49.000We have an entire day, Yom Kippur, that is for that.
00:47:51.000I say three times a day a paragraph about doing repentance before God, plus an additional section for repentance in the morning prayers.
00:48:00.000The idea of repenting and confessing your sins before God is something that is endemic to Judaism and has been for thousands of years.
00:48:07.000The idea that God is sovereign, obviously, the two religions share.
00:48:12.000Philosophically 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?
00:48:29.000Well, first of all, I don't like to talk about it as a philosophy.
00:48:33.000I'd rather talk about it as a revelation, because it's divine.
00:48:39.000So, the same God who wrote the Old Testament wrote the New Testament.
00:48:48.000And I need to say this, I am a Christian because of the Old Testament.
00:48:53.000Without the Old Testament, I don't know whether I could believe the New Testament.
00:49:02.000And that may sound strange to you, but how do I know that Jesus is the Messiah?
00:49:09.000If I don't have all the predictions of the Old Testament defining Him when He shows up.
00:49:17.000For example, I wrote a book called The Gospel According to God, and it's from Isaiah 53, that great chapter.
00:49:27.000And 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.
00:49:48.000It explains the gospel in more specific terms than any chapter in the New Testament.
00:49:53.000He was wounded for our transgressions.
00:49:55.000He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace fell on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.
00:52:31.000There 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.
00:52:42.000I think that honestly, hate to say this, but I honestly think it is a latent form of anti-Semitism to say that.
00:52:51.000You 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.
00:53:11.000You can't possibly tell me that God didn't mean what he said.
00:53:16.000That is one of the reasons I'm an originalist.
00:53:19.000It's very popular in Christianity today to say the Old Testament is interpreted by the New Testament.
00:53:48.000I mean, you're an originalist when it comes to constitutional things.
00:53:51.000I'm an originalist when it comes to the Word of God.
00:53:54.000And I know you would say that you feel more comfortable probably in following a rabbinical interpretation than you do your own interpretation.
00:54:17.000So here's the take on rabbinical Judaism.
00:54:19.000So 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.
00:54:37.000So 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.
00:54:55.000All of the Jews have been extremely literate over time because we take the text very seriously.
00:55:00.000But 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.
00:55:18.000Those people have interpretive faculties.
00:55:19.000God knows that, which is why he gave the Torah to people with interpretive faculty.
00:55:24.000So in other words, it's not me failing to Go back and look at the text of the Torah.
00:55:30.000It'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.
00:55:38.000And who have, you know, spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out exactly what the Torah means in particular sections.
00:55:45.000So, 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?
00:55:57.000You're supposed to remember it in one section, you're supposed to guard it in the other.
00:56:02.000But there's no actual commandments as to what that means, right?
00:56:04.000So what does it mean to keep the Sabbath?
00:56:06.000So unless you actually have some sort of explanation of what Sabbath is, it could mean anything, right?
00:56:12.000It could mean keep the teddy bear, right?
00:56:13.000You have to actually have an understanding of what the Sabbath is, which is where the oral law comes in.
00:56:18.000So 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.
00:56:35.000Yeah, and I think that's really a good answer.
00:56:38.000And 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.
00:57:01.000To 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.
00:57:09.000Well, I mean, come on, give me a break.
00:57:12.000No, no, I mean, that kind of rabbinical allegorism, which is all over the place.
00:57:16.000So 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.
00:57:45.000You 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.
00:57:51.000So I just think that when Jesus confronted the crowds and particularly the Jewish leaders, he would say, have you not read?
00:58:07.000Well, 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.
00:58:21.000Jeremiah says that the sacrifices themselves are basically of no use unless there's actual meaning behind the sacrifices.
00:58:27.000God wasn't there because He likes the barbecue, right?
00:58:31.000And 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.
00:58:51.000You have to violate the Sabbath in order to save a life.
00:58:53.000This is like basic, black-letter Jewish law.
00:58:55.000But 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.
00:59:03.000Like, that's not unique to Jesus, in other words.
00:59:05.000There's a long prophetic tradition of people saying exactly that, and in the modern Jewish world it's called Musar.
00:59:11.000It's basically just telling people what they should understand about the values beyond the black letter law.
00:59:17.000And 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.
00:59:36.000They seem to be reflections of Judaism from a slightly different angle.
00:59:40.000Even 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.
00:59:55.000That's present in the Old Testament, too.
00:59:57.000No, I think what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount was elevate the teaching of the rabbis.
01:03:15.000And 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.
01:03:27.000The resurrection is a provable historical fact.
01:03:37.000That's the issue of Christianity and I would just say I have such a love for Israel.
01:03:42.000I 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.
01:03:52.000I have the same passion that Paul had.
01:03:53.000He 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.
01:04:47.000This is a stunning theological truth because All the people who will ever believe through human history, their sins are covered by Christ.
01:04:56.000Even 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.
01:05:39.000And that frees God, satisfying His justice, to offer grace to all who believe in Him.
01:05:46.000I 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.
01:06:01.000When is the one sacrifice going to come?
01:06:05.000And that's why that Isaiah 53 chapter is so critical, because that's the focal point.
01:06:11.000That's the focal point of Isaiah, by the way.
01:06:13.000Anyway, Isaiah, interesting book, 66 chapters, like the Bible.
01:06:18.000The first 40 are judgment, kind of like the Old Testament.
01:06:34.000The first nine are the salvation of Israel from nations around it.
01:06:39.000The 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.
01:06:50.000It'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.
01:07:04.000So, I want to say this to you personally.
01:07:11.000You are a testimony to the glory of God in man.
01:07:17.000I see the beauty of God's creation in you.
01:07:20.000I see the use of reason and compassion and care.
01:07:30.000So 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.
01:07:44.000Apart 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.
01:07:58.000Well, 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.
01:08:07.000But for that answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
01:08:09.000To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
01:08:14.000Pastor John MacArthur, I'm so glad that you could come by.
01:08:18.000We 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.
01:08:25.000And 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.
01:08:35.000It's amazing to have you here, and again, thank you so much for coming.