THE SERMON - Dont Be Hasty And Make A Foolish Vow
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Toxicity
22
sentences flagged
Hate speech
99
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Pastor Joel continues our series on the book of Matthew, "The Gospel According to Matthew." Today's reading is from Matthew 5:33-37, and focuses on the question of whether or not it's appropriate to take an oath.
Transcript
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Please join me in standing for the reading of God's word.
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We're continuing our series through the book of Matthew.
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We have one gospel, and that's the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the gospel of God.
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But we do have this one gospel according to four different men inspired by the Holy Spirit.
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It's not the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of John, the gospel of Mark and Luke.
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But it's the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Matthew and according to Mark and according to Luke
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and continue with our series through the gospel according to Matthew.
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But those who may be joining us for the first time,
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just to assure you, one of the great protections
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I'm not quite smart enough to be as nefarious or sinister
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as a highly intelligent person would be capable of performing.
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And so with my gracious gift from the Lord of a 120 mediocre IQ, I couldn't plan some of the things that providentially play out, even if I tried.
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And what I'm referencing specifically in the case of this morning is God's providence, not Joel's plan.
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But God's providence sometimes is so sweet that perhaps the best word that I could think of to describe it is delicious.
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a delicious providential gift. And so, as you'll see in our text today, the main theme is the idea
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of oath-taking or making vows. And at first glance, it seems as though Jesus is saying that
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his people should not make any vows at all. But we all do this. We do this in various contexts.
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One example would be particularly a wedding ceremony. We make vows to our bride. Our bride
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makes vows to her groom. And so it has been within Christian thought and tradition for centuries
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that it is appropriate, in fact, to make vows. What Jesus is condemning is not the idea of making
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any vows at all, but rather making hasty vows. Making a vow that is rash, that is hasty, that's
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foolish, vowing towards something that you ultimately cannot keep, or oftentimes making a
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vow that not only can you not keep, but that in a moral sense, you find out later as you grow in
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wisdom that you should not actually keep. And so this would include vows, for instance, that someone
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would make in a court of law, that they would be under oath, or vows that you would make, like I've
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already mentioned in a wedding ceremony, or for instance, vows that you would make. And this is
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strictly hypothetical, but if there was a theological and cultural statement that was
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composed by multiple ministers of the gospel, but contain multiple facets that aren't true to
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scripture, that would also be a foolish vow. So let's begin again. Our text is Matthew chapter
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5, verses 33 through 37. That's Matthew chapter 5, verses 33 through 37. The Bible says this,
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Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely,
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but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. But I say to you, do not take an oath at all,
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either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool,
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or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king.
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for you cannot make one hair white or black.
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All right, please be seated and we will go ahead and begin.
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I'm going to be using the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.
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That is the specific statement of doctrine that our church adheres to.
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Again, if you're new to the church, as it pertains to our membership,
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what we have determined is that every member of the church,
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not an officer, an ordained officer being a deacon or an elder,
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would have to subscribe and affirm a statement of faith.
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But we have chosen, we think that it's prudent and wise to bifurcate
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instead of just one statement of faith for elders and deacons and members alike, we have
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bifurcated and have two different statements of faith. Neither is in contradiction to the other,
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but one is intentionally more broad or vague. It's clear, but it's clear on what we would
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consider to be top shelf theology in terms of theological triage, prioritization of what
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theological tenets are most important. It would merely be those primary theological truths,
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things pertaining to theology proper, that is doctrine of God, things like the Trinity,
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things like the hypostatic union, the idea that Jesus is both fully God and fully man,
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the dual nature of Christ, that we have one God who eternally exists in three persons,
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and then within the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, within his one person there
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are two natures, the divine nature and the human nature that in the incarnation have been brought
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together but without mixture but also without being severed or completely divorced and that
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we do not have Jesus having two halves of two natures. He's not half God and half man but fully
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God and fully man. So these are things that have been ironed out in the province of God throughout
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church history very early on, within the first 500 years of church history, and Christians have
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affirmed these truths for over a millennium. So these are non-negotiable. So what we have done
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here at Covenant Bible Church is we have what we call our general statement of faith, and our
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general statement of faith for the most part simply follows a creed rather than a more specific
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confession so our general statement of faith is creedal and we have selected the apostles creed
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which we recite in our liturgy each lord's day as the particular creed that our general statement
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of faith follows and so everyone who is a member of covenant bible church must affirm covenant bible
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church covenant bible church's general statement of faith which is creedal by nature rather than
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confessional following the apostles creed for the officers ordained officers of the church
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those being deacons and elders they must also affirm the general statement of faith which
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follows the apostles creed but in addition to that also affirm are what we've considered or
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called our specific statement of doctrine so general statement of faith creedal apostles creed
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members. Specific statement of doctrine, confessional, we have selected the Second
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London Baptist Confession of Faith, the 1689, as that specific statement of doctrine, that specific
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confession, and that needs to be recognized by the members of the church, but not necessarily
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affirmed. So you can be a member of our church and disagree at certain parts of the 1689, say,
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well, I don't necessarily prescribe to that, but there's still a general recognition from the
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membership, an affirmation of the Apostles' Creed, the general statement of faith, but a recognition
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of the specific statement of doctrine, namely the 1689, saying, I understand that this is a
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Reformed Baptist church. I understand that, and I'm not here to turn it into something else,
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right? That if you feel a calling to a particular set of doctrines that our church doesn't hold,
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then we're simply asking that you recognize before you even enter that it would be better
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use of your effort and time to simply join a church that you already agree with rather than
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trying to lead a hostile takeover or something like that that's that's the purpose there but
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for again the ordained officers elders and deacons they're going to affirm the general
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statement of faith apostles creed and in addition the specific statement of doctrine
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the 1689 london baptist confession of faith so all that being said i have selected for our text
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today by way of exegeting Jesus' words on vows and oaths, certain passages from the 1689 London
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Baptist Confession of Faith. This is from chapter 23 that deals with oaths and vows, paragraph one.
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The 1689 says this, a lawful oath is a part of religious worship wherein the person swearing in
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truth, righteousness, and judgment, solemnly calls God to witness what he swears and to judge him
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according to the truth or falseness thereof. Now, this is an important point for us to understand
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from the outset as we're dealing with this topic of oaths. One of the things that Jesus condemns
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in oath-taking or vow-making is making any vow or taking any oath where the person is swearing
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upon anyone or anything other than the Lord Himself. That's one of the first things, clearly
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from our text, that the Lord Jesus condemns. He condemns the idea of swearing by Jerusalem.
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And He condemns the idea of swearing by the earth, or swearing even by heaven, or swearing even by
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the temple. What Jesus is saying in our text today, with all these examples that I've just listed,
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is that all of them, if they have any weight or merit whatsoever,
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it is only the weight and the merit that stems from God Himself.
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And that king not being Saul or David or Solomon,
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but the great king being the king of kings himself, the Lord Jesus.
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And just for the record, Jerusalem does not belong to the Muslims.
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It belongs to the Lord, and therefore it belongs to his people, to Christians.
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And by God's grace, my prediction is not that a third temple would be mounted.
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That's been attempted before by Judas the Apostate.
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If you read that story, very interesting in history, Julius the Apostate.
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What happened was that he commissioned different people to rebuild a third temple.
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and there were literally thunder and lightning that came from heaven and burnt the people up.
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So probably not a good idea. The red heifers, you know, and blood moons and stuff. Probably just
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leave that alone and don't put the Lord God to the test. Don't anger him. But I do believe that
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in Jerusalem there will be a structure built. I do believe that. It won't be a mosque and it won't
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be a Jewish temple. I believe that by God's grace eventually it will be a glorious Christian
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cathedral and that Jerusalem will be a centerpiece of Christian civilization and worship where the
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Lord Jesus Christ and the triune God is worshiped in Jerusalem to the glory of God saying that Jesus
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is the great king. Okay, back to our main point now. Jesus says don't swear by Jerusalem because
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if there's anything to swear by, what Jesus is implicitly getting at, it wouldn't be Jerusalem,
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the city, but it would be the great king of that city, the Lord. Don't swear by heaven,
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because heaven is simply the throne of God. And don't swear by the earth, for the earth is simply
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the footstool of God. Don't swear by the temple, because the temple only has significance during
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this time period because it's the place of worship of God. And don't swear even by your own head
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because you can't make one hair black or white, but swear ultimately by the one who knits you in
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your mother's womb and has numbered the hairs on your head. Swear by your creator, that is God.
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So in every single example that the Lord Jesus gives, notice that on the face, on the surface
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of our text, it's very easy to take away that Jesus is simply, in a broad brush, condemning
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all swearing, all oath-taking, all vows altogether. But by closer look, he's not saying that there's
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no oath that could be possibly righteous at all, but the particular kinds of oaths that Jesus is
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condemning is, one, oaths that break the ninth commandment. That would be oaths that are not
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truthful. Those who take an oath and then break it. And that could be one of two ways. That could
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be taking an oath towards something that's true, but then you failing and ultimately doing something
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that's false, betraying a true oath. So you actually made a good oath, but you didn't live up to it.
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like I mentioned earlier from the outset of the sermon,
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but your truthfulness then forces you to break a false oath. So you can take a true oath but be a
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false person or you can make a false oath and be a true person. And so both would be wrong to hastily
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enter into a good oath but as a bad man who's not prepared to keep that oath or a bad oath as a good
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man who simply missed it and was ignorant or unwise and then later realized I have to break this oath
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because keeping this oath would require me to sin
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So that's the first thing is Jesus condemning oaths
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is that another kind of oath that the Lord Jesus forbids
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is an oath that would break the third commandment.
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So an oath that would be a false oath that would require you if you are to be a truthful man to break or a true oath, but you do it presumptuously and you're not a good enough man to keep the oath.
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And so both of those would be examples of breaching the ninth commandment, which is bearing false witness, deceit, lies.
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And then also there's the instance of breaking the third commandment, which is do not take the Lord's name in vain.
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And these are the examples that Jesus is listing in our text.
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By swearing by anyone or anything other than God himself,
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that is, well, that's deifying and giving credence to something other than God
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as actually being capable of holding you to your vows.
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Only the Lord Jesus Christ, the triune God, the Lord of the conscience, the Lord of all men, King of all kings,
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he's the only one who's worth swearing by.
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So swearing by something other than Jesus is petty.
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And in some sense, could even, an argument could be made that that would be a breach of the first and perhaps even second commandment.
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to love something or to attribute to something or someone other than the Lord a deifying
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characteristic. The first commandment, have no other gods before me. You can't treat Jerusalem
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as a god. You can't treat the earth or heaven or the hair on your head as a god or the temple as
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a god. So you can't breach the first commandment by swearing by something other than the Lord
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because it's, in a sense, deifying something other than the Lord.
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That, you know, this will have the power to hold me and bind me to my oath.
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Well, no, it won't. Only the Lord has that power.
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So to swear by something other than God is, in a sense, deifying that something
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and therefore a breach of the first commandment.
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And in some sense, if you try to materialize and make visible that other thing that you're swearing by,
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then you could even make a theological argument
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And then to swear by God, which would be right,
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but to make a vow that's petty or false or muddled.
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Well, that would be swearing by the right person,
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And so that would be taking the Lord's name in vain.
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So to swear by anything other than God, breach of the first and second commandment.
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To swear by God, but to swear or vow to something that's not really worthy of a vow,
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not really worthy of your allegiance or your oath.
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Well, that would be a breach of the third commandment, taking the Lord's name in vain.
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And to swear by something true, but to live in a way that's false,
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would be a breach of the ninth commandment, bearing false witness.
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and therefore by necessity having to break that oath
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would also be a breach of the ninth commandment
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And this is the idea that the 1689 and the Westminster
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within the Reformed tradition for 500 years and largely, even more largely, beyond merely the
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Reformed tradition, within Eastern Orthodox traditions and Roman Catholic traditions,
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this has been the majority report of the Christian faith for a millennium. So this is why we don't
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want to be, I'll use a term here that perhaps you're familiar with and perhaps you're not,
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But this is why we don't want to be biblicist.
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Now, I remember when I was in my 20s and I came into reform theology and I adopted the five points of Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement or particular redemption if you want to church it up.
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And then, you know, going on, irresistible grace and perseverance of all saints.
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And I came into that, and like every young man in his 20s, I came into it, and within 15 minutes, I was, of course, a self-professed expert, and anybody who didn't believe what I have now held ferociously to for a week and a half, I made it my mission to prove how wrong they were.
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And that's kind of the way that a lot of times young men operate, and certainly the way that I operated when it came to the doctrines of grace.
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But my point in saying that is it wasn't until later in life that I became more largely Reformed in a robust and well-rounded manner.
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And not just adopting the five tenets of Calvinism or the five doctrines of grace, but coming to see the broader Reformed tradition.
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And that there's more, although justification by faith alone is what I would consider to be the linchpin or the heart of the gospel,
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there are still more important things, not more than the gospel, but additional important things
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that Christians must believe. The Bible is a big book. It's a collection of 66 books written over
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the course of 1500 years by 40 human authors, all inspired by the Holy Spirit. And the central
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message is the gospel, but far more is contained. And Christians should not be theological minimalists,
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but rather we should be theological maximalists.
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We should have a robust theological Christian faith
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And that includes certain things like oath-taking.
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just don't like the terminology, right? It's, you know, certain words, you know, it's the same thing
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with biblical gender roles, right? So patriarchy, right? There's a lot of guys who say, well,
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patriarchy is just, it has a negative connotation and people don't like it. And my, you know, I think
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one of the things that should be considered there is, well, is this word not liked because it
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actually conveys something sinful or it contains something sinful, or is it not liked because the
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culture in our modern era is sinful and therefore kicking against the goats. And I've determined
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that when it comes to a word like patriarchy, it's not that patriarchy is inherently sinful,
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but that our current culture is inherently feminist and therefore doesn't like patriarchy.
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So I have decided to use the word even more because it gets precisely the kind of reaction
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that I think is necessary. Sometimes, I've said this before, but there's a difference between
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charity and ambiguity difference between charity and ambiguity sometimes we think that we're being
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charitable but really we're being vague and sometimes you can avoid an offense but you
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didn't avoid the offense by being loving and charitable you avoided the offense by being
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unclear you know you knew what you were getting at and a few of your followers you know they got
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the wink and the nod they they heard the the patriarchy dog whistle but but you did it in
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such a way that when when it comes to your opponents they're not quite as angry at you
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but it's not because you were more loving than than some other patriarchal guy it's it's actually
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because you were more ambiguous and that's not loving that's actually deceit there's actually
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a problem with that so back to calvinism coming into the doctrines of grace you know there was
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a season there where I was in the cage stage, and then there was a season where I think I
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backtracked too far, where I tried to overcompensate for my prior cage stage years, and I started
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thinking, well, I'm not going to use the word Calvinist. I'll use the word Biblicist. I'm not
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a Calvinist. I'm a Biblicist. I just believe the Bible, you know, and the Bible does point towards
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Calvinism, you know, so I got you now. But it wasn't until even later that I began to realize
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that biblicism actually is a doctrine of sorts and it's actually a heresy which sounds funny
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right because it's like biblicist that sounds like a good thing right you just you just believe
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the bible but biblicism if you look throughout the reformed tradition the idea of biblicism is
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a particular hermeneutic that is a way of reading and interpreting the scripture
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that causes you to come to the plainest and simplest interpretation
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of each and every passage that you possibly could,
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but there are various instances where the plainest reading of the text
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doesn't turn out in the final analysis to be the truest reading of the text.
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So you could read a text and say, well, on its face it says X, Y, Z,
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and so I'm going to take the literal interpretation,
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and miss, ultimately, some of the typological and analogical meanings
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that the Lord actually baked into the text that we should understand and believe.
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again, that's simply the way we read Scripture and interpret it,
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I eventually, as I got older, and hopefully, by God's grace, a little wiser,
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grammatical, and typological reading of the text.
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that seems to kind of lower the defense measures
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And that's where you get LGBT affirming pastors
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And I have no intention of being disparaging towards MacArthur.
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But I believe that he teaches the gospel faithfully
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And so I don't believe that MacArthur is a false teacher.
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Anything like that, I'm grateful for MacArthur.
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one of the reasons why in the final analysis I land on various theological positions that would
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differ with Brother MacArthur is because the source that it's all rooted in is the difference
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of our two hermeneutics. MacArthur would have a literal grammatical and historical hermeneutic
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and to still man MacArthur to be both charitable and I think just just and fair towards him part
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of his motive and incentive in having the hermeneutic that he has is because he was in the
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trenches before I was born and he was battling against liberal theologians who were creeping
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into churches and seminaries and getting cute with the scripture and saying well you know
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homosexuality you know that you know Paul wasn't really talking about that you know and and and
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maybe there's a place for this and there's a place for that and MacArthur was standing in the
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trenches, God bless them, and say, no, read the scripture for what it says, a plain reading of
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scripture. You know, no creed but Christ. Give me the Bible, just the Bible. And MacArthur was a bit
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of a biblicist. Now, here's the problem, and I want you guys to think about this being fair to
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MacArthur, but also fair to some other theological views. The same hermeneutic that allowed MacArthur
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serving as a Trojan horse to smuggle in things like feminism, LGBT craziness, and even like BLM
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and critical race theory and these kinds of things, smuggle it into the seminaries and then
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indoctrinate young men who would then become pastors in churches. And part of the problem
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we're dealing with today is that guys didn't listen to MacArthur. And then part of the other
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problem we're dealing with today problem of i i believe it's a serious problem of zionism and
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judaism is that guys did listen to macarthur and so it's kind of you win some you lose some
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so i've opted for nothing less than macarthur's hermeneutic so his being literal grammatical
00:30:54.300
historical and i'm going to have all three of those pieces in the way that i read and interpret
00:30:58.500
scripture but i'm going to add not replace not as a substitute but in addition to literal historical
00:31:05.440
and grammatical, I'm also going to add that typological piece. Because there are certain
00:31:10.360
genres of scripture, like the Psalms, or like the book of Revelation, that actually say, the book of
00:31:17.000
Revelation actually says in the very first couple chapters from the outset, that it's speaking
00:31:22.580
in a typological, symbological way. And so to read Revelation as literal and not typological,
00:31:35.440
is actually not doing justice to what the book of Revelation itself says about how it should be
00:31:42.440
read. Does that make sense? So all that being said, Biblicism, although it sounds good, I'm not a
00:31:49.820
Calvinist. I'm not an Arminian. Those are just men. And I follow no one but Jesus. I'm not following
0.96
00:31:56.260
John Calvin. I'm not following Aristotle. I'm not following, you know, whoever. I follow Jesus.
00:32:04.360
and there's no confession but the Bible itself.
00:32:25.580
is the only infallible revelation that we have,
00:32:48.600
and Baptists can be extremely guilty of this
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00:33:00.760
for that the lutherans um and we'll say well baptists we just we just got back to the bible
0.82
00:33:06.720
just got back to the bible which you got to be careful with that because it's like
00:33:10.500
well the pentecostals say the same thing and the baptist's like well we're not the pentecostals
00:33:15.660
but they literally say the same thing they're like you know there's the first century church
00:33:19.320
then 18 years of wasting time and then azusa street revival 1906 and if we're not careful
00:33:25.660
baptists kind of have it's not with the gifts of the spirit but it's the same narrative of
00:33:30.060
There was faithfulness in the first century, and then there was a bunch of those, you know, pencil pushers and ivory towers, you know, that did all that theology stuff.
00:33:39.380
And then we got back to, you know, to the Bible.
00:33:43.400
And that sounds good on the surface, but it's actually immature.
00:33:51.000
What it asserts is that you're pitting up against one another two positions.
00:33:58.860
that one is the Bible as interpreted by the Westminster divines,
00:34:06.140
and all these different writers of Benjamin Keech of the 1689 Confession,
00:34:12.360
or the Bible as interpreted through Augustine, and Athanasius, and Ignatius, and Arrhenius,
00:34:21.840
See, that's a false dichotomy, because what it insists is that
00:34:25.140
there's the Bible as read through men, as interpreted through men,
00:34:28.280
and then there's the Bible, just pure and unadulterated. But that option is not actually
00:34:35.700
a real option. That option doesn't actually exist, because if you were honest and thought
00:34:40.220
about it just for a moment, what you'd have to acknowledge and admit is that when you say the
00:34:45.180
Bible is interpreted through men throughout the ages, and then just the Bible alone, what you
00:34:50.700
actually mean is the Bible interpreted by men throughout the ages, and then the Bible interpreted
00:34:54.860
by me because there's actually no viable option of just the Bible because when you say just give
00:35:02.520
me Jesus no creed but Christ or don't give me a confession just give me the Bible at the end of
00:35:07.680
the day when pressed I would still have to say okay so you just you opted for just the Bible
00:35:13.420
no confessions no history no creeds just the Bible great what does the Bible say about Mary
00:35:19.800
the mother of Jesus? What does the Bible say about the dual nature of Christ?
00:35:25.300
What does the Bible mean when it says that God is sovereign over salvation? What does the Bible
00:35:32.120
say about election? What is the Bible? And you know what you'll have to do? You'll have to begin
00:35:38.320
to interpret the Bible. You'll have to begin to explain the Bible's meaning. And so then
00:35:46.120
immediately what we have is the false dichotomy is removed and now we have the two actual choices
00:35:53.100
that are before us. The Bible interpreted by men who were better men than you and better men than
00:36:01.980
me. Or the Bible as interpreted by ourselves. See, every church actually has a confession.
00:36:41.080
and maybe put some of it, you know, 20 years ago
00:36:51.920
The idea of just having the Bible without a confession
00:36:58.980
So you'll either have a confession that's historic
00:37:00.940
and tried and true and written by better men than you and I,
00:37:38.480
don't ever make any vow, period. Jesus condemns all vows. Just let your yes be yes and your no be no.
00:37:44.720
But when we look at the whole of Scripture and we read Scripture not alone in isolation, but in
00:37:50.300
conjunction with all the men who have come before us as they sought to interpret Scripture and
00:37:55.980
understand it, the answer is a little bit more complex. The answer is not as simple as just
00:38:02.340
don't ever make a vow. Instead, it boils down to multiple facets. One, don't vow by anything
00:38:08.280
but the Lord. The Lord is the only one who can hold you to your vow. To vow by anything else
00:38:13.260
is a breach of the first. And second commandment is to deify something other than the triune God.
00:38:18.380
Also, if you're going to make vows by the only one who you should make vows by, appealing to the
0.71
00:38:24.580
name of God himself, then they better be good vows. And it better be something that's not petty,
00:38:29.680
but something that's valuable so that you're not taking the Lord's name in vain and breaching the
00:38:33.460
third commandment and then lastly of course you should only give your vows and make an oath with
00:38:39.260
something that is true so that you're not preaching the ninth commandment and you need to be a man who
00:38:45.160
is true who can lead live up to those vows so that you don't break them which would also be a breach
00:38:50.920
of the ninth commandment there's more quotes from the 1689 that i have in your notes you can read
00:38:56.040
them on your own time but i've given the synopsis of my point here so i'm going to go ahead and skip
00:39:00.540
on to a couple passages of my own words that I've written in your notes. I've written the following.
00:39:05.440
The concern of these verses is both the third and the ninth commandment. I've additionally added the
00:39:10.080
first and second. If you were to swear by Jerusalem or swear by the earth, swear by heaven, swear by
00:39:15.400
your head, swear by the temple, swearing by other things beside God would be to deify these other
00:39:21.360
things as though they had the power to hold you to your oath. Might call them swearing by the ring.
00:39:26.120
don't do that. Only swear by the Lord if you're going to swear at all. And Jesus is right.
00:39:33.700
Classic Jesus W, you know, like that statement that usually doesn't need to be made. Jesus is
00:39:39.140
right. Of course he is. For the most part, people make petty vows. We actually end up swearing far
00:39:46.220
more than we should. There are appropriate avenues and contexts to make a vow. When it's made, you
00:39:51.340
should vow by the name of the Lord. The vow should be true, should be vowing towards something that's
00:39:56.720
that's worth vowing towards. But in general, people make too many promises, too many swearing,
00:40:06.040
too many vows, too many oaths. And so Jesus is right that in general, on the whole, simply let
00:40:13.360
your yes be yes and your no be no. So the concerns in these verses are with a breach of the third
00:40:21.200
commandment and the ninth commandment the ninth commandment is in view regarding truthfulness
00:40:25.300
that humans find so difficult to uphold the tongue is guilty of false witness lying gossip
00:40:31.680
slander boasting flattery cursing and more oaths promises and contracts all have the same goal to
00:40:38.960
bind the conscience of men to keeping their word especially when it is tempting not to because of
00:40:46.000
sin. The third commandment comes into play because in lawful oath taking, the name of God is invoked
00:40:53.220
and therefore it must not be invoked in vain. In Jesus's day, rabbis concocted a system. This is
00:41:00.940
a classic Jesus W, classic Rabbi L. Just about, well, I was going to say just about always wrong,
0.96
00:41:08.240
but the just about isn't necessary as a disclaimer, just always wrong. In Jesus's day, rabbis
0.96
00:41:14.080
concocted a system that defeated the purpose of oaths. They taught that oaths might or might not
00:41:20.920
be binding, depending on how one swore. If one swore by Jerusalem, then it was not binding. But
00:41:27.300
if one swore toward facing toward Jerusalem, then it was. Imagine this for a moment. I mean, this is
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00:41:33.080
this Jewish rabbis in Jesus' day and in ours. Well, in our day, they're worse. But in Jesus'
1.00
00:41:38.740
day, they were really bad. And this is what they were doing. It was the equivalent of like
00:41:43.400
a four-year-old girl trying to trick her dad to get something that she wants. So a rabbi would say,
00:41:49.940
well, it's not swearing by Jerusalem. It's swearing while facing toward Jerusalem and then kind of
00:41:55.840
behind his back, pulling out his compass, you know, or his map and realize, okay, Jerusalem is over
00:42:00.580
there and we're 50 miles away. So hopefully this person that I'm trying to swindle right now won't
00:42:06.260
know his geography well enough. Jerusalem is there and I'm going to face this way, northeast,
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00:42:11.860
even though Jerusalem is is true north and so I'm going to be off by 15 percentages and then I'm
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00:42:17.520
going to swear as a Jewish rabbi and then I'm going to break my oath and steal from you and
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00:42:22.620
that's what they would do classic classic Jewish rabbis um that's so so in other words back to
0.99
00:42:29.780
like the five-year-old girl it would be like um that she just found out that crossing fingers is
00:42:34.420
a thing you know it's not really a thing it's you know it's superstition but she just heard about it
00:42:39.140
you know, from, I don't know, one of her friends or something like that. And so she's trying it
00:42:43.420
out, you know, and dad says, you cannot have a cookie before dinner. I want you to give me your
00:42:48.840
words that you will not get into the cookie jar. And she puts her hand behind her back and crosses
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00:42:52.660
her fingers, right? And that's sin. She's lying. The five-year-old girl crossing her fingers
00:43:00.320
behind her back while promising dad she won't get a cookie is the exact equivalent to Jewish
0.53
00:43:06.280
rabbis if you want to understand judaism think five-year-old girl crossing her fingers behind
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00:43:12.100
her back as she lies to death that's that's pretty much that's talmudic judaism okay so
00:43:17.040
that being said going on awful taking um must be invoked in jesus day rabbis concocted a system
00:43:25.620
of defeating the very purpose of those they taught that those might or might not be binding
00:43:29.420
depending on how one swore if one swore by jerusalem it was not binding but if you face
00:43:34.680
Jerusalem, toward Jerusalem, then it was. If one swore by the temple, it wasn't binding. But if you
00:43:40.320
swore by the temple's gold, then it was binding. If one swore by the altar or sacrifice, it was
00:43:47.320
not binding. But if one swore by the gift that was upon the altar, then it was binding. This
00:43:53.060
illustrates, here's another example. So the five-year-old girl with crossing her fingers, I
00:43:57.060
thought of that, but I just thought of another. Jewish rabbis would be the equivalent of the IRS.
1.00
00:44:03.560
That would be another great, I think, comparison.
1.00
00:44:06.280
So the IRS is like, well, we love to use the American people as a tax form for Ukraine and Israel and everybody except for America.
00:44:16.480
Well, one of the ways to swindle people is instead of having like the Ten Commandments,
00:44:22.040
G.K. Chesterton said this, if man will not live by Ten Commandments, he will be bound by Ten Thousand Commandments.
00:44:28.600
I mean, you look over the decades and it went from a book about this big to like, now it's like
00:44:32.960
volumes. You couldn't fit all the different, you know, tax codes in your own house. You would have
00:44:38.340
to like get a warehouse to fit all that. And so, and what is the IRS doing? Well, they're being
00:44:44.560
deceitful. That's what they're doing. I mean, think of this, just this alone is just so silly
00:44:49.280
to me. So I, each year I have to figure out how much I owe the IRS. But if I get it wrong,
00:44:56.120
the IRS will certainly tell me. So the IRS already knows exactly how much I owe them.
00:45:01.520
They know it clearly enough to tell me if I got the number wrong, but only to tell me if I got
00:45:06.300
the wrong number wrong by getting it too low. I'm sure it'd be just fine if I got it too high.
00:45:11.120
But so I have to figure out how much I owe the IRS. The IRS knows how much I owe them. That's
00:45:16.760
why they're able to hold me to account. And then they have volumes and volumes of tax codes to
00:45:22.360
where no private citizen could ever figure out the system to be able to plead their case and
00:45:27.880
defend themselves. So you basically just have to submit to whatever they say as, you know,
00:45:34.900
they're like, well, according to stipulation, 5,000 million, 100 and blah, blah, blah. You owe
00:45:40.560
us your firstborn son, you know? And it's like, it's ridiculous, but that's, that's the system.
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00:45:47.400
So whether it's the United States IRS, whether it's the five-year-old girl who just learned
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00:45:51.460
about crossing their fingers, or whether it's Jewish rabbis in the days of Jesus, or Jewish
00:45:56.660
rabbis in our day as well. In all these cases, what Jesus has in view at the heart of the matter
00:46:05.680
is not so much swearing is always bad and Christians shouldn't do it. See, that's a
1.00
00:46:11.720
biblicist approach to the text. It's oversimplifying it. What Jesus actually has in view
00:46:46.580
that is literal it's not less but it's more than merely literal it's literal historical grammatical
00:46:52.320
and typological and reading the text in conjunction not just with pastor billy bob
00:46:56.280
but but also with with all the saints of old through 2 000 years of church history and the
00:47:02.800
historic confessions that we have the conclusion that we come to and the final analysis at the end
00:47:08.020
of the day the conclusion is it is okay to make promises it's okay to make vows and it's okay
00:47:47.060
But historically, the military has done a lot of good,
00:47:51.580
a lot of bad, but also, I think, a lot of good in America.
00:47:58.060
those who are pro-military or serve in the military in America
00:48:01.200
tend to be the salt of the earth, the best people I know,
00:48:07.300
But to join the military, my point is, there's an oath.
00:48:41.920
young man. He's saying, I, you know, I want to be a Marine in 2024. I would not say no. I don't want
00:48:48.900
to bind the conscience so clearly because it's more nuanced and complex. But I would give some
00:48:52.960
cautions and say the military in 2024 is not what it was in the 1950s and 60s. And you do need to be
00:49:01.180
aware of some of these things. But by God's grace, hopefully it gets better. There's been some new
00:49:05.700
appointments. I'm grateful for some. Some of them I don't like. Some of them I really do like. And
00:49:10.100
and we can pray that our military would not just be exporting our sacred democracy and gay rights,
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00:49:15.780
you know, in the Middle East, but hopefully our military could actually do what it's designed to
00:49:20.020
do, which is to protect the American people. And hopefully, by God's grace, things improve,
00:49:24.460
and we'll see. So, but saying that a Christian can't join the military because of oaths
00:49:30.100
would be a silly reading of the text. All right, let me continue. We're almost done.
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00:49:34.160
um this illustrates the way in which certain teachers would manipulate god's word in the
00:49:41.960
first century um judaism in israel when they read a challenging law they reduced it to something
00:49:49.460
that was manageable when they heard love your neighbor as yourself they defined neighbor so
00:49:54.400
that everyone counted as a neighbor um or so that not everyone counted as neighbor so they didn't
00:50:00.180
have to love this person. Or what we do in our modern times is what we've done is we've said,
00:50:06.400
everyone is our neighbor, which I think is true. Okay, because that's the whole idea. Remember when
00:50:11.400
Jesus, he tells the story of the Good Samaritan, and he asked the question, who is my neighbor?
00:50:18.480
And so for the Jews in his day, they had made the law manageable by narrowing
00:50:30.340
well, really, my neighbor is only, you know, 14 people.
00:50:46.380
You can actually, I think if Jesus was to come today,
00:50:51.360
he would actually challenge us in the opposite direction.
00:50:54.660
what globalist post-war consensus modernist classical liberals do what we do
00:51:04.380
is we actually say well everyone is our neighbor and and that's true but then we get rid of the
00:51:12.380
order amoris that is the order of loves that there's a triage a prioritization of neighbors
00:51:17.640
and who we're actually bound to in a moral obligation in that sense and so what what
00:51:22.820
liberal theologians today would do is the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus day say, well, only a
00:51:28.900
handful of people are my neighbor, and so I don't have to do anything for anyone else. And what
00:51:32.780
people today, what evangelicals today do is say, well, everyone is my neighbor, so I can actually
00:51:38.120
forsake my own people here in America as long as I write a $15 monthly check to an orphanage in
00:51:46.720
Uganda. But it's still the same tactic of getting out of what Jesus is actually commanding.
00:51:55.120
So the Pharisees, the Jewish rabbis of his day, what they did was they said, well, you don't
00:52:01.460
actually have to love people, all these people, because you only have to love these three people
00:52:07.680
over here. And what modern day Pharisees, even in the evangelical church today do, is they say,
00:52:14.900
Well, you don't actually have to love your own people like it's fine.
00:52:19.400
It's totally fine if if our pastors and our seminary professors and our our politicians and every elite institution in America actually hates Americans.
00:52:33.580
That's totally fine, because Jesus said, love your neighbor.
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00:52:36.660
And what that means is you can't have any borders and you need to import the third world by the millions into the United States and you can't do anything about it.
00:52:47.860
And if you ever do something about it, then you're not obeying Jesus' words to love your neighbor and you're a racist.
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00:52:56.020
It's just the other side of the coin, but it's the same in principle.
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00:52:59.100
You have Judaizers in the first century saying, well, I only have like two or three neighbors and I don't have to love anybody else.
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00:53:07.920
And then you have Judaizers today saying, well, everyone's our neighbor.
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00:53:17.940
Did you ever watch The Incredibles, that animated film?
00:53:20.720
thinking of there's the little nerdy kid who wants to be a superhero and he felt blown off
00:53:25.600
when he was younger by Captain Incredible. And so then he becomes the arch nemesis, the villain at
00:53:32.480
the end of the movie. And he does it through, you know, he doesn't have any innate superpowers,
00:53:37.420
but he does it through technological innovation. You know, he's smart. He's your classic
00:53:42.040
Anon, you know, autist on Twitter and figures out how to be a superhero without actually being a
00:53:48.940
superhero. And so he creates all this tech and captures, you know, Captain Incredible and,
00:53:54.780
and subdues him and all this. And, and then his whole goal is not just to keep it for himself,
00:53:59.660
but he's going to, he's going to export, you know, manufacture a bunch of this tech so that
00:54:04.620
everyone can be a superhero. And his big line in the movie is this. He says, now everyone can be
00:54:09.680
a superhero. And when everyone's super, no one is. And he was just mad. At the end of the day,
00:54:15.680
he was just holding a grudge ever since he was a little kid he was just mad that some people
00:54:19.300
were more special than him well today guess what it's the same thing
00:54:24.920
everyone is not equal brothers and sisters you are all equal in terms of the merit and dignity
00:54:34.740
and worth of your soul in an eternal sense you're also all equal in a judicial sense under the law
00:54:42.820
but we are not all equal in terms of intelligence skills gifts wealth the time that you were born
00:54:54.220
the place that you were born the family that you were born into life is not fair get over it
00:55:02.100
it's not fair well people who were born in the sudan don't have the opportunities as those who
00:55:08.680
were born in America. Correct. Correct. But your job is not, therefore, to say, well, then we need
1.00
00:55:18.300
to import every single person to Sudan to America. No, the Sudanese need to bow their knee to the
1.00
00:55:25.640
Lord Jesus Christ, enact just laws, work hard, and eventually experience the blessings that we
00:55:31.980
experience here. It is actually a sin, a great and grievous sin for us to slap our American fathers
00:55:41.960
in the face and say, the inheritance that you built up for us, we're going to give it to the
0.99
00:55:49.760
third world. No, Jesus, remember even the words of Jesus, he says, you'll always have the poor.
0.83
00:56:06.880
but you're always going to have some poverty, some poor.
00:56:11.640
In this gospel age, until the final return of Christ,
00:56:14.900
until we're in heaven and perfected and perfectly sanctified,
00:56:18.120
until that happens, in this world, in this life, in this age,
00:56:23.320
You will always have poverty because you'll always have sin.
00:56:34.120
Sometimes someone is poor because of their own sin.
00:56:37.320
And sometimes someone is poor because of someone else's sin.
00:56:43.400
But one way or another, mark my words, poverty is always rooted in sin.
00:56:48.680
If there were no sin, there would be no poverty.
00:56:52.020
And to say anything otherwise is ultimately not to indict man, but to indict God himself.
00:56:57.600
It is to say that God created a world that was a zero-sum game with limited resources
00:57:03.900
and then command his image bearers to do the very thing that he knew would end in their own detriment.
00:58:54.460
And this is why we're in the mess that we're in.
00:59:36.860
and why, you know, that last check from Gavin Newsom
01:00:26.440
eventually, over centuries, things change.
1.00
01:00:30.040
So the solution is not to let the third world become American.
0.96
01:00:33.680
the solution is to say to the third world look at what america did and track the common denominator
0.92
01:00:41.500
the common denominator is submission to the lord jesus christ you should try that too and then to
01:00:47.320
say not only that to the third world but then to turn right around and say to america itself hey
01:00:52.300
guys stop being rebellious dummies you better start resubmitting to the lord jesus christ
0.85
01:01:21.720
They're the five-year-old girl with her fingers crossed.
01:01:27.600
because they're post-modern, classical, liberal, globalist Americans
01:01:35.460
in the way that we think today that are always, ultimately,
01:01:40.640
the end goal is always just simply trying to get out of obedience to the words of Christ.
01:01:46.880
So whether it's saying, well, I only have 14 neighbors,
01:01:52.040
and they're the only ones that I'm obligated to,
01:01:53.800
and isn't it convenient that none of them, you know, they're all rich,
01:01:59.820
That's one way of getting out of Jesus' commands,
01:02:05.360
well, the real neighbors that we should love
1.00
01:02:09.560
that are trying to come into the country and flood it.
0.99
01:02:11.860
You know, the real neighbors are the 500,000 Haitians,
0.99
01:02:14.920
you know, that have immigrated in the last 15 minutes
1.00
01:02:17.100
and are eating the cats and dogs in Springfield.
0.99
01:02:24.180
those are just two different ways of one two sides of one coin and what is the coin the coin is i
01:02:30.420
don't want to obey jesus well as christians we don't get get to do that we have to obey jesus
01:02:36.380
everyone is your neighbor but you do not have an equal obligation to eight billion people
01:02:42.640
you can't you can't you're finite so you start in and then you ripple out first your household
01:02:52.640
if a man is sending checks to uganda but not providing for the members of his own household
0.94
01:02:57.760
then the bible has a word for him it calls him an unbeliever he has denied the faith he's worse
0.86
01:03:03.360
actually than an unbeliever so you can love your universal neighbor and yet have jesus on the final
0.58
01:03:09.820
day say depart from me i don't even know who you are or you can do it in the opposite way
01:03:15.480
you can love your family and not love anybody else and that would also be a sin
01:03:20.580
in other words whether we're talking about oaths we're talking about vows we're talking
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about the order of more so we're talking about this talking about that here's the deal
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little one-liner cute cliches are not going to win the day for evangelicals in 2024
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we are going to have to get back to serious thought our fathers all of them were better than us
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that's the that's a cold hard truth you just you got to come to terms with it i've had to come to
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terms with it the christian nation that i am working towards this is ironic but it's true
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and if i don't acknowledge this then i then i will become a liability and not a blessing
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the christian nation that by god's grace that i'm working towards if we achieve it one of the
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implications of that is that um i will not be allowed to have a youtube ministry with over
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100,000 subscribers. Do you know why? Because I'm just not, I'm not qualified.
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I'm doing what I do today, not because I'm gifted. I'm doing what I do today because
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evangelicals are pathetic. And it makes me, by comparison, look gifted. That's what I'm doing.
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So by God's grace, I hope I continue to have a broader reach because right now the pickings are
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slim. But if God would be so kind, eventually they won't be. And eventually we'll have men
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of the caliber of Athanasius and Augustine and Calvin again, both in theology and in political
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philosophy. And they'll be able to think in categories without blurring lines. They'll be
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well-read. They'll be brilliant. They'll be scholars and yet also men of the people, men who can work
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with their hands as well as study books. And when those men come, then I will gladly
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delete my Twitter account, get rid of my YouTube channel, and hand it over to them. Say, take the
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reins. I've done my duty. Glad you're here. Thank you for relieving me. I'm just going to spend time
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with my kids. Maybe I'll start a small business and live happily ever after. But until those men
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get here, then I'm sorry. I feel just as bad as you do, probably worse, but you're stuck with me.
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So until the future Athanasius and Augustine come, then you've got to deal with blue collar,
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slightly stupid Joel Webin. Because when you look at the lay of the land and evangelicals
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as a whole, I'm nothing to brag about, but I'm one of the best we got. And it's not to say much
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of me. It is very clearly to insult evangelicals. I will never lose an opportunity to insult
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evangelicals. So not trying to brag about myself. I am very much trying to insult evangelicals.
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That's kind of, that's my ministry. So we need people who can think. We currently don't have
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them. And so until we have them, you're stuck. You're stuck with A.D. Robles and Joel Webben,
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the reasonable Latino. If you don't know A.D. Robles, he has a YouTube channel.
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And me and A.D., we each have like four cylinders, but we're firing on all four of those cylinders.
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You know, we're not a V8 or a V12, you know, but what we got, we're like,
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you know, we're giving it everything we got with what the Lord has given us.
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But I guarantee by the grace of God, it's only his grace.
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I'm going to take that one talent at the end of my life.
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I'm going to give that back to the Lord Jesus too.
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And the reason why I have to do that with a wide platform is because the few guys who
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actually do have IQs of 170 and were given 10 talents, they took those talents and wrote
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a check to some Zionist in Israel and are playing for the other team.
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and so here we are but that's not the way it was when you look at church history and by God's
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grace it's not the way it'll be in the future using little cliches to get out of obedience
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to Jesus Christ will not be the end of the story because Christ is good and faithful and he'll
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bring us along in due time so you can make an oath you can't you just have to make it rightly
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make an oath about things that matter not silly things not petty things if there's a statement