The NXR Podcast - March 22, 2023


THEOLOGY APPLIED - 3 Reasons Why “The Chosen” Does More Harm Than Good ｜ with Pastor Gabriel Hughes

Topics
Lonnie Frisbee and The Chosen movie The Chosen and Children's Bible Stories
Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Gospels Lonnie Frisbee Gabriel Hughes Jonathan Rumi Peter R.C. Sproul Jerry Jenkins Chuck Smith Greg Laurie Tom Buck Mad Lib Jesus Revolution Movie The Holy Spirit Reformed Baptist Roger Shiller Pastor Gabriel John Wimber Joel Webin C.S. Lewis Joe Biden and 6 more
DAILY TRUTH - Did Jesus Descend To Hell？ DAILY TRUTH - Jesus Is The Master Of “Church-Shrinking” Strategies

Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

187.09

Word count

10,530

Sentence count

601

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Pastor Gabriel Hughes joins Pastor Joel Webin to talk about The Chosen, a popular Christian TV series that has grown in popularity, yet Pastor Webin and I believe it does more harm than good to our faith.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 All right, listen, guys, I get it.
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00:00:40 Hi, this is Pastor Joel Weber with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another
00:00:44 episode of Theology Applied. In this particular episode, I was privileged to have as a special
00:00:50 guest, Gabriel Hughes. He is an associate pastor at First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, serving
00:00:56 underneath the senior pastor there, who is Tom Buck. He also hosts a podcast called
00:01:03 When We Understand the Text. Now, in this particular episode of Theology Applied,
00:01:08 I had Gabriel Hughes come on the show to talk about The Chosen series. This is a TV series
00:01:14 that has grown in immense popularity, yet Gabriel and myself, we want to provide a stark warning to
00:01:22 the people of God. We ultimately believe that the chosen TV series does more harm than it does
00:01:29 good. We list three primary reasons why Christians should avoid watching this TV series, why we 0.95
00:01:36 believe it does not honor God, and why it actually does detrimental harm to our theology and our
00:01:43 faith. If you're interested in this conversation, you're in the right place. Tune in now.
00:01:48 applying God's word to every aspect of life.
00:01:52 This is Theology Applied.
00:01:58 All right, here we are again with another episode of Theology Applied.
00:02:02 I am your host, Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries.
00:02:06 As I've already mentioned, our guest for today is Pastor Gabriel Hughes.
00:02:11 He's the associate pastor serving underneath senior pastor Tom Buck
00:02:15 at First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas,
00:02:17 and he's also the host of a popular podcast called When We Understand the Text.
00:02:23 Did I get that right, Gabriel?
00:02:25 Sounds good to me. Thank you, Joel.
00:02:27 Yeah, so thanks for coming on the show.
00:02:29 You've been in the podcast world for a while,
00:02:32 but I've noticed you on Twitter posting from time to time some negative press
00:02:37 with a wonderful biblical TV show called The Chosen.
00:02:42 So I wanted to get your scoop.
00:02:45 What do you think about The Chosen series?
00:02:47 We were holding off on this.
00:02:49 I was going to get to you a little bit sooner, but you're like, well, let me go ahead and finish it because I guess they have a few seasons now.
00:02:55 Full disclosure, I have not watched The Chosen.
00:02:57 I've heard much about it from many people, people who love it, people who hate it.
00:03:01 I have my opinions, and I do have some serious concerns, but I wanted to get a chosen expert whose favorite TV show is The Chosen, Gabriel Hughes, watching it religiously.
00:03:13 So what are some of your big takeaways?
00:03:15 Well, it's kind of funny that, you know, for us pastors, we've got accountability software that we use to know what each of us are looking at on our laptops.
00:03:24 You know, it's how as brothers, we keep each other accountable.
00:03:27 And I was concerned that with as many chosen links as were popping up in my browser history, I was going to get confronted by my fellow elders.
00:03:35 They're like, Gabe, we're a little concerned by how much of the chosen you've been watching lately.
00:03:40 So, yeah, the show is, of course, based on the story of Jesus and his disciples out of the gospel. 0.96
00:03:46 I would say it's even a retelling of those stories.
00:03:48 I don't think that they really make a very concerted effort to be faithful to the text or even the narrative that you read in the four gospels.
00:03:59 They will say that they do. They'll claim that they have experts that come in and they have their Bible consultants and all this kind of stuff.
00:04:05 But based on what I see in the show, just about every measure of dialogue that you see that could be lifted straight from the Gospels, they will change or manipulate in some way in order to fit the narrative or the story that they are telling.
00:04:19 So it's really a retelling of Jesus and his disciples based on what we might have in the Gospels, but I would by no means call it exact.
00:04:28 This is a show that is created by Dallas Jenkins. He's the son of Jerry B. Jenkins.
00:04:35 the name you probably recognize from the Left Behind series, that bestselling series of books
00:04:41 that I think almost every one of those books in that series was on the New York Times bestseller
00:04:48 list. Dallas is a filmmaker, and he's made some other Christian films that just simply didn't do
00:04:53 very well. But this one, which was entirely crowdfunded, has been an immense success. In fact,
00:04:59 it is the most successful crowdfunded TV show ever made. And that's kind of its claim to fame,
00:05:07 its success, though they've only finished three seasons. I think they're working on seven or eight
00:05:13 total. So we're not even halfway there yet. But what we've been able to see so far has not been
00:05:20 as faithful as they claim to try to be. Okay. And I've heard that there's Mormon influence,
00:05:28 Roman Catholic influence. Can you talk about a little bit of that? Or is everybody who's
00:05:32 involved, such as Jenkins, I don't know his theological disposition, but is everybody who's
00:05:38 involved within the realm of evangelicalism, or do we have a hodgepodge of some cults coming in?
00:05:46 Yeah, it's very much a hodgepodge. That's a good word for it. A lot of syncretism, a lot of,
00:05:51 well, I guess ecumenical would be the better way to say it rather than syncretism.
00:05:55 Like Jonathan Rumi, for example, who plays the role of Jesus in the show is a Catholic mystic, very Catholic, in fact, and very mystic as well.
00:06:03 There are various interviews that I've seen with him where he he says some things, honestly, that are very much in the realm of like the new apostolic reformation.
00:06:13 For example, one of the stories that has been going around about him lately is with regards to the role that he just played in the movie Jesus Revolution, in which he plays Lonnie Frisbee, the hippie from back in the 60s and 70s of that movement that led to the Calvary Chapel movement and stuff like that.
00:06:34 So he plays Lonnie Frisbee.
00:06:36 I thought you were going to say that it led to the AIDS movement.
00:06:39 Well, there was that, too.
00:06:41 Yeah, unfortunately.
00:06:42 So I, you know, I can talk about that. I'm going to play host and interview you and ask you a lot of questions. But in terms of the, you know, the revolution, Jesus revolution movie, I, you know, I, so I started out as a vineyard church planter and I grew up in the vineyard, you know, John Wimber came out of, you know, the Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel, hippies, Bible kind of thing.
00:07:01 And, you know, and basically the main difference was in regards to, you know, practical application of the signed gifts and things like that.
00:07:09 And moved along the way, you know, eventually became 1689, Reformed Baptist, Covenantal, Cessationist, you know, the whole nine yards.
00:07:16 But that was, you know, quite a journey.
00:07:18 But I originally planted as a vineyard pastor and, you know, lost a significant portion of my church when we, you know, we switched theological positions.
00:07:26 One of the big ones, less continuationism, cessationism, didn't really lose a lot of people there.
00:07:32 People weren't really offended by that.
00:07:33 The big switch was the Vineyard's egalitarian.
00:07:36 And so switching to, you know, complementarianism, and now I don't even really like that word because of some of the ways that I feel like it's been hijacked.
00:07:43 So I just stick to patriarchy.
00:07:45 But that was a big switch.
00:07:46 But all that being said, with Lonnie Fresbee, when you look into, you know, his lifestyle, you look into his doctrine, his theology.
00:07:53 I mean, he really was a catalyst for, you know, Calvary Chapel taking over Southern California by by storm at that time.
00:08:02 But he. Yeah, I mean, he was kind of like he was kind of the dirty little secret of Calvary Chapel.
00:08:07 I think Chuck Smith even declined to speak at his funeral.
00:08:10 I can't remember if that's if that's accurate.
00:08:13 I don't know if you know anything about that. I think that he did.
00:08:15 I think Chuck Smith did speak at his funeral.
00:08:17 And then there's been some efforts as well on Greg Laurie's part and others to try to whitewash Lonnie Frisbee, though he had a reputation for being what, you know, of course, it was his secret life.
00:08:28 As you mentioned, he was a homosexual and died of AIDS.
00:08:31 There are people like Greg Laurie have tried to say, well, he had a deathbed repentance. 1.00
00:08:37 And perhaps that's true.
00:08:39 Maybe he did have a genuine conversion, recognized his sin and the wickedness that he was in and repented of that and put his faith in Christ.
00:08:47 We could certainly hope that that happened. 0.92
00:08:49 But what's certainly true about his life is that he was a hypocrite throughout that entire movement and claimed holiness and even was a self-avowed prophet, but was living a homosexual lifestyle on the side. 0.97
00:09:03 So very unholy practices that were going on in that whole Calvary Chapel and Vineyard movement at that time. 0.97
00:09:11 Right. So the guy who plays Jesus was the same guy who was, you know, Lonnie Frisbee in that movie.
00:09:18 That's how we got there. But going back now to The Chosen and the Catholic mystic who plays Jesus.
00:09:24 You want to talk a little bit more about that?
00:09:25 Yeah, so what I was mentioning is that he, in an interview for that film, for the Jesus Revolution Movement, or yeah, Jesus Revolution Movie, said that he, in preparation for that role, went to Lonnie Frisbee's grave, and his grave is at what used to be the old Crystal Cathedral, the whole, you know, Hour of Power thing.
00:09:49 Is that Robert Schuller?
00:09:51 Schuller.
00:09:52 Yep.
00:09:52 Yeah.
00:09:52 Yeah. So he went to his grave. It's a Catholic. It's actually a Catholic church now. Yeah. It used to be the Crystal Cathedral. But anyway, went to his grave and sat at his grave and had a conversation with Frisbee. And he said he prayed the rosary with him and asked Frisbee, hey, if you can give me some kind of a sign that I'm supposed to do this role and play you in this movie, then give me a sign.
00:10:16 And he said, like, the doors of the church opened up and this chord played.
00:10:20 It was such a movie-esque, like, sort of a moment.
00:10:24 And that's how he knew I'm supposed to play Lonnie Frisbee.
00:10:28 So, like I said, the whole, even some new apostolic stuff kind of plays into Lonnie Frisbee or Lonnie Frisbee, Jonathan Rumi's theology.
00:10:38 So though he claims to be Catholic, you can see kind of some influences there with like the grave sucking and stuff like that that we've known from Bethel Church and their influence.
00:10:48 Right. Yeah. You almost wish with retelling of Bible stories, you know, if it's going to be done, I just I wish it would just be I almost wish it would just be divorced from. 0.92
00:11:01 We're going to try to get Christians because then you get guys who aren't actually Christians, but are pseudo Christians. 0.94
00:11:06 Like, just give me some professional actors and make sure that, you know, the director and script writer that, you know, that those guys are Christians and, you know, and whatever. 0.91
00:11:17 Now, I do have problems.
00:11:18 I'm curious to get your take on this.
00:11:20 I, you know, with the retelling of Bible stories, I don't appreciate retelling of gospel stories where Jesus is a character in the story.
00:11:29 So for myself, you know, my position on the second commandment, I, I just, I don't think that Jesus, you know, I appreciate, you know, Dr. Sproul, like, you know, we have my kids love, you know, his children's books.
00:11:43 And, you know, and he was very careful in each of these books to, to never show Jesus, he never depicts, you know, allows the illustration to actually have a picture of Jesus.
00:11:53 And I personally appreciate that. I understand that Jesus is the God-man. He's taken on flesh. He is forever the God-man. And so he's still in the flesh at the right hand of the Father. So it's different than the first or the third member of the Trinity in that regard.
00:12:09 but i would kind of lean towards knowing god and j.i packer and some of the things that he says in
00:12:15 terms of images and one of those things is that you you can't depict jesus because even even if
00:12:22 we had you know even if the disciples had technology and cameras they took a picture of
00:12:26 jesus it wouldn't be jesus because he's unique from the rest of humanity in the sense that he
00:12:31 is the god man and you cannot physically capture on film or camera or in a painting or depiction
00:12:38 or any of these things, the deity of Christ.
00:12:41 And so what you're doing is you're severing the humanity of Christ
00:12:43 from the deity of Christ, and so you're showing, in a sense, half of Jesus.
00:12:48 And so anyways, I'm curious, what do you think about just the whole idea?
00:12:52 Let's say it was done perfectly, it's according to the Scripture,
00:12:56 they're not taking any creative license with the script
00:12:58 and those kinds of things, and everybody's, you know,
00:13:01 a solid, reformed, evangelical Christian who's playing all the parts.
00:13:06 How would you feel about Jesus on screen?
00:13:10 Yeah, so when I did my blog, which covered season one, I went episode by episode through
00:13:15 the entire first season.
00:13:16 I said something very similar to that.
00:13:18 I said, this is really a fool's errand to try to accurately capture the Christ.
00:13:24 How can you possibly do that? 0.95
00:13:25 You're talking about the most perfect man who ever lived.
00:13:29 Yes, he is the God man, but he was also in his humanity, perfect.
00:13:33 the only perfect man who has ever walked this earth, what does that look like in terms of
00:13:38 nuance, in terms of inflection in his voice? All of that is going to be left up to interpretation.
00:13:45 In those lines where they do actually try to quote something Jesus actually said from the
00:13:51 Gospels, I'm left hearing the line going, I don't know that it would have been said like that.
00:13:56 Now, as a preacher, and you as well, you know, when we stand in the pulpit and we quote Jesus'
00:14:02 words from the Gospels, what we're focusing on and what we're leading our people through
00:14:08 is understanding the message, the meaning of the text.
00:14:12 What did Jesus mean when he said this?
00:14:14 I think it's important that we have certain inflections and we think about those things
00:14:19 and we try to be as faithful to even the deliverance of those words as we possibly can be.
00:14:26 But we're not reciting a script when we preach.
00:14:29 we're trying to convey the message of God in his word. So this is not rehearsing movie lines. It's
00:14:35 not the same thing preaching as when a person is trying to actually depict Jesus. And so as I said
00:14:41 in my blog, it's a fool's errand to try to think that you can actually represent who Jesus was.
00:14:48 What would that perfection have even been like? What would it have been like to be in his presence?
00:14:53 It's something that we can only imagine, but we can never truly know, even in the information that is given to us in the scriptures.
00:15:03 And so in that sense, of course, when I'm looking at Lonnie, I still keep calling him Lonnie Frisbee.
00:15:09 When I keep looking at Jonathan Rumi's depiction of Christ, of course, I don't like it because they are doing a very happy-go-lucky, hippie Jesus sort of an interpretation.
00:15:19 But at the same time, you know, what you're what you're looking at in terms of nuance and different suggestions and things like that, you're watching a sinful man. 0.98
00:15:27 And something that I can't get out of my mind is he's also a Catholic man. 0.71
00:15:30 So he's not a believer anyway, with even some paganism that's mixed in with his with the other aspects of his Roman Catholicism.
00:15:39 And this is the man who is trying to he's giving us a version of Jesus from his Catholic mystic beliefs.
00:15:48 And by all accounts, it's blasphemy.
00:15:51 What he's doing when he gives the words of Jesus and gives this depiction is both in vain,
00:15:58 so it is a violation of the second commandment.
00:16:01 Whatever your view of the second commandment would be, whether you hold that Reformed view or otherwise,
00:16:05 I don't know how you can argue that it's not taking the Lord's name in vain. 0.89
00:16:09 And of course, a blasphemy in their misrepresentation of Christ as well.
00:16:14 Yeah, that's really interesting.
00:16:16 So you would say that it's, in a sense, it's more than just a second commandment violation, but it's the third commandment as well, that it's taking the Lord's name in vain.
00:16:24 Yes, I would agree with that also. 0.87
00:16:26 Yeah, right.
00:16:26 Because with second commandment, we're talking about the image.
00:16:29 What is the image that's being conveyed?
00:16:30 And with third commandment, the misuse of the Lord's name.
00:16:33 And this, of course, is, you know, when you talk about you shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain, this is not to probe into the hearts of the people who create this show necessarily.
00:16:45 It's just to judge by their words.
00:16:47 It's just to judge by what we're seeing there on the screen,
00:16:50 but they're not being faithful to scripture.
00:16:52 So can you honestly say that you are honoring God with this work that you're
00:16:57 doing, or is this all being done in vain?
00:17:01 Right. Yeah.
00:17:02 Images are like black holes for worship that you certainly don't want to have
00:17:06 images in the sanctuary for Lord's day gathered worship.
00:17:09 But even outside, I found myself still trying to remove certain pictures from my head that I saw as a child or as a young man depictions of Jesus.
00:17:24 Because when I close my eyes and I'm praying in private practices of piety or praying with the saints on the Lord's Day or worshiping through song, addressing one another with hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, and I'm thinking about the Lord.
00:17:39 It's hard for me to not think in terms of physical images.
00:17:44 And what I'm imagining is that, you know, that image that I've previously seen in my
00:17:49 past, you know, some coloring book about Jesus or Jesus storybook Bible or, you know, whatever
00:17:55 it might be.
00:17:56 But the reality is it's the reason why it's wrong to depict Jesus is because it's not
00:18:02 Jesus.
00:18:03 That's not Jesus.
00:18:04 So I don't want to think about something that's not Jesus when I'm worshiping Jesus.
00:18:09 I don't, you know, I don't want that image to, to, to, to take even a portion of my adoration and my worship and my devotion. I don't want to direct my worship towards something that's not Jesus.
00:18:23 And so, yeah, images are powerful in that sense that they, you know, they they direct our, you know, our our thoughts, our focus, our adoration, even images outside of the Lord's day find their way into our minds mentally on the Lord's day.
00:18:41 And they become kind of this magnet that just sucks worship away from the God who is worshiping him in spirit and in truth and to a God who's not a false God.
00:18:56 And so it's, you know, I think that's part of the hang up that Christians struggle with is like, well, what's wrong with depicting Jesus?
00:19:02 Because it's not Jesus.
00:19:04 That's what's, you know, there is no depiction of Jesus that's actually Jesus.
00:19:09 They all fail. Whether it's a Roman, so that's, you know, whether you got R.C. Sproul to play Jesus, you know, or whether it's, you know, this, you know, Catholic mystic, you know, and whether it's, you know, verbatim, word for word from the Bible, for the script, or whether it's taking creative liberty, no matter how you slice it, that's not Jesus. 0.54
00:19:32 But that is going to be now a mental focal point. When I'm closing my eyes and praying to the Lord Jesus, I'm not going to be able to help but think in terms of this is Christ, and it's not.
00:19:49 You know, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, it said that when Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one having authority and not as their scribes.
00:20:03 And the way that this roomy Jesus delivers his lines in the chosen is not anything like that.
00:20:10 Like, I'm not captivated by his speech in any way, shape, or form.
00:20:14 There might be some people that can say, well, I am.
00:20:17 I certainly love the way that he represents Jesus.
00:20:19 And I still think that you're letting your own biases dictate whether or not he's being faithful to what we've been told in the scriptures about Christ.
00:20:28 He does not speak with authority in the show.
00:20:31 And in fact, the lines themselves have been dumbed down so that they don't carry any kind of authority.
00:20:39 Now, there's a certain sense in which I appreciate that because I don't want you guys to think that you're actually speaking with the authority of Christ because you're not.
00:20:49 The way that you're manipulating text and changing the story and some things like that.
00:20:54 But even like I said, even when they are faithful to the actual words that Jesus said, like in the Sermon on the Mount or something like that, the way that he delivers those words, they're trying to create a Jesus that is palatable to the most number of people.
00:21:08 Because like you said earlier, you know, all the different faiths that are involved in this, you have Protestants, evangelicals, you've got Catholics, it's Mormon distributed through angel studios, and they even use the Mormon settings where they film everything like this.
00:21:23 There's the showrunner, I think, is Mormon or something to that degree.
00:21:27 So you have all these different people that seem to all be in agreement on this Christ that is being portrayed. 0.96
00:21:32 So they're not going to accurately represent a Christ that speaks with authority, that offends.
00:21:39 They're trying to create a Jesus that's going to appeal to the most number of people.
00:21:44 Right. Yeah, you're right.
00:21:45 That's a good way to put it, that if you have such a large tent that's not just ecumenical in the sense of including other Protestants of different secondary doctrinal persuasions, but you're actually going outside of Protestant evangelicalism and including Mormons and Catholics and mystics and all the rest, but they're all agreeing to publish this episode, publish this season.
00:22:11 then there is kind of, you can, you could assume at that point that, um, that they've brought it
00:22:16 down to the lowest common denominator and, and not just again, not just a lowest common denominator
00:22:22 within Protestantism, but, but within, um, that's a lowest common denominator that includes false
00:22:29 teaching and, and cults and false religions. And so, um, yeah, if everybody's giving their stamp
00:22:35 of approval, you know, uh, cut, let's move on. We got it. That was good. The Catholic thinks that
00:22:40 was good. The Mormon thinks that was good. And there's your sign. So what, what are some of the 1.00
00:22:45 scenes in, in the show that, um, that, that you had the most problems with the ones that,
00:22:51 cause I, I can guess, you know, just, I would, I would think, you know, John chapter eight,
00:22:55 you know, the woman caught in adultery. I feel like, you know, they probably had a field day
00:22:59 with that one. Have they gotten to the transfiguration yet? Thinking of second,
00:23:03 you know, second commandment violations, that one's going to be real tough.
00:23:07 Sure. There are certain things that I'm not sure if they've gotten to yet or not. Well,
00:23:12 full disclosure, I haven't seen the third season, so I've only watched seasons one and two.
00:23:16 I was watching it all on YouTube or on Amazon, and they haven't released the third season outside
00:23:21 of their app, and I don't want to download the app. So I've not seen any of the third season
00:23:27 episodes. I don't think that they have gotten to the transfiguration. There are some things
00:23:32 that have happened in the background that they haven't filmed. And I think that a lot of that
00:23:36 has been, uh, you know, it's been mostly related to, they probably just didn't have the budget to
00:23:41 do it. You know, for example, the scene where the, uh, where you had the miraculous catch when
00:23:47 Peter bowed before Jesus and said, turn your eyes away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. You
00:23:52 know, when, when Peter was first called to follow Christ, that scene honestly was pretty good. They
00:23:57 filmed that pretty well as far as like, you know, lowering the nets into the water. And then it
00:24:01 fills with fish and they're trying to pull that into the boat. I think that was around episode
00:24:05 four or something like that. And up until that scene, the show was pretty boring. There was
00:24:11 nothing interesting going on, but I think they captured that one pretty well. Nonetheless,
00:24:17 heading up to that scene is amusing because the disciples are coming in after a long night of
00:24:22 fishing and they haven't caught anything and they're coming up on the shore and Jesus is there
00:24:27 on the shore teaching a crowd of people well the crowd of course when we have it when we read about
00:24:32 it in scripture it's huge it's so big that jesus can't address them all he has to get in the
00:24:37 disciples boat push away from the shore a little bit so that he can address everyone in the show
00:24:42 it's like 60 people so it's it's odd it's awkward and this was in the very early stages of the show
00:24:49 in which they probably couldn't come up with that many extras or that many costumes for all the
00:24:54 extras to wear. So that's why the crowd is so small, but it's still like even forgiving them
00:24:59 for that. It's still just an awkwardly put together scene and doesn't really seem to work.
00:25:05 So there's stuff like that where you're watching it and you're going, I know in scripture,
00:25:09 this was portrayed way differently. But then there's other things that just are not even
00:25:13 faithful to the message. The very first two scenes I ever saw were not in an episode of the show.
00:25:19 it was the clips that they post on YouTube. And I can't remember in which order I saw these,
00:25:25 but it was the story of Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3, and then the story of Jesus and the woman
00:25:30 at the well in John 4. And I remember them just coming up in front of me in a YouTube search one
00:25:35 time. I wasn't even looking for chosen clips. I had a few people that had told me, I don't know
00:25:39 if you've watched The Chosen before. And in fact, the feedback that I got was positive. People are
00:25:44 going, you know, they actually do a really good job with the show. I was skeptical. But then when
00:25:48 I was looking for other things on YouTube, these two clips came up. So I went ahead and watched
00:25:52 them both with the interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus. And then of course the woman at Sychar
00:25:57 and, and, and it is not only, not only is there a lot of dialogue added to it because of course
00:26:05 they're trying to fit the narrative of the story that they're telling in the chosen, but even the
00:26:10 lines as you read them in scripture are moved around. So you think you're hearing the exchange
00:26:17 as you know it, between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3, but when you actually go to the text and
00:26:22 read it, you realize, oh, Jesus actually said this before Nicodemus answered this way, and that
00:26:29 changes the whole conversation. There is a particular reason why John arranged that dialogue
00:26:37 the way that he did. We have to believe that the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus was longer
00:26:43 than the, the, the three back and forth that we, you know, if you read the whole conversation in
00:26:48 John three, it takes you a minute and a half, if that, and they're stretching it out to 10 minutes.
00:26:53 So of, of course the conversation was going to be longer, but John still writes that conversation
00:26:59 in just such a way to convey the message. And when the creators of the, of the show move lines
00:27:05 around and add dialogue, they change the message and they don't even, they're not even trying to
00:27:10 be faithful to what the intention was behind that conversation and where it sits in the gospel of
00:27:17 john so that was the first thing that i ever saw those two conversations were the first ones i saw
00:27:22 from the chosen and really every other problem that i've identified in the show you could have
00:27:28 come back to those for those two scenes and and really dissected the entire show from just those
00:27:35 two conversations. Yeah. So what are some of the other problems? What are your biggest concerns?
00:27:43 If you were pastorally talking to somebody in your church and trying to persuade them
00:27:48 against watching The Chosen, what would be the biggest things that you warn them with?
00:27:54 Well, really, the gospel is not there. This is not going to be a show that is going to lead
00:27:59 people to Christ. Now, I've heard stories. I've talked about this on my podcast. I've heard
00:28:03 stories from people who've emailed me and have said, like, we started watching The Chosen and
00:28:09 then my wife went and grabbed the Bible and started reading the Bible. And we love the Bible
00:28:13 and we quit watching The Chosen and started reading the Bible. That's great. I love to hear
00:28:18 that. That's exactly what you would hope would happen. But that's the Holy Spirit working
00:28:23 against the show. That's not with the show to bring somebody to the knowledge of the Word of God.
00:28:28 that's working contrary to what it is that they're doing with the narrative that they're
00:28:34 creating in this program. They're not trying to be faithful to the Bible. No matter how hard they
00:28:39 try to say that they are, they're not. You just have to go to the text, listen to their lines,
00:28:43 compare it with what scripture says, and you can see that what they're doing is something
00:28:47 different. They're more faithful to their own narrative than they are faithful to what scripture
00:28:52 says. So it's going to lead to a lot of confusion. First of all, the gospel isn't there. Secondly,
00:28:57 it's going to lead to confusion. I think one of the things you just mentioned a little bit ago,
00:29:00 Joel, is that when you're watching this and you're seeing this version of Jesus, it's going to be
00:29:06 really hard to get that out of your head when you're reading the gospel accounts. How are you
00:29:11 seeing anything other than what you're used to Jonathan Rumi doing when he's portraying Jesus
00:29:16 in The Chosen? Now, I have a little more ability to switch that off. That doesn't even cross my mind
00:29:22 when I'm reading the Gospels, and I'm about to jump into a teaching of Matthew in my podcast,
00:29:27 so I'm not concerned about that as much. But with a person who is not in the Word,
00:29:32 who is not making this a regular part of their diet to read Scripture and understand it and
00:29:37 glean from it the exhortations that we need to live by, when a person is getting their
00:29:46 understanding of Christ and even the understanding of these words from the chosen, then it's going
00:29:51 to lead to a lot of confusion as to what the Bible actually says. I've known people who are
00:29:57 very faithful Bible readers who study their Bibles daily, who were watching The Chosen and they
00:30:03 thought it was pretty good. But when they read my review of either the first season or they read my
00:30:08 breakdown of the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, they wrote to me and said, I didn't
00:30:14 even see some of those things that you said. And once you pointed it out, then it made a lot of
00:30:18 sense. And I didn't realize how much of my own mind was trying to fill in the blanks. I've referred
00:30:23 to this before as Mad Lib theology. If you've ever played Mad Libs, where it says write a noun here
00:30:29 and write a verb here, or an adjective here, and then you create this funny story you all kind of
00:30:34 laugh about. Well, in Mad Lib theology, it's when somebody tells a story, but they're not really
00:30:39 telling it accurately, but you know it accurately. And so it's like in your mind, you're filling in
00:30:45 the blanks. And so you think what you're hearing is an accurate telling of either the text or the
00:30:50 narrative. But really what's happening is your own mind is filling in the blanks that they're
00:30:54 leaving. And so you think you're hearing something faithful, but it's not. I think a lot of that is
00:30:58 going on with The Chosen, even among faithful Christians who love the Bible and understand 0.88
00:31:03 the Gospels, that they'll see this story and they think what they're seeing is an accurate 0.63
00:31:07 depiction. But so much of the story has been changed. It's going to lead to a lot of confusion,
00:31:13 especially if you're really not careful. So those would be the top two things that I would say the
00:31:19 gospel isn't there and that it's going to lead to a lot of confusion. Now, given that, of course,
00:31:25 John 3.16 is quoted in the show. So somebody is going to object and say, well, the gospel is there
00:31:30 because the gospel is in John 3.16. But with all the words that are around it, that message has
00:31:36 been diminished significantly right before Jesus says, for God so loved the world that he gave his
00:31:42 only son, he says, I did not come to the world to deliver it from the Romans. And then Nicodemus
00:31:51 says, then what did you come to deliver us from? And Jesus said, from spiritual death.
00:31:55 And I'm like, what does that mean? What in the world are you talking about? Somebody could think
00:32:01 that depression is spiritual death, or they could think the job promotion that I didn't get is
00:32:06 spiritual death. And so then when you hear John 3, 16, then, then you're going, you know, God came
00:32:13 to save me from spiritual death that they're, you know, of course in their mind, they're filling in
00:32:18 the blank with what they think spiritual death is. So it's, you can say the gospel's there,
00:32:23 but it is not accurately presented. This is not going to lead to anybody's salvation,
00:32:28 except that the Holy Spirit would work against those things that are being depicted and said
00:32:33 in the show. Right. And with that, I, I like what you said earlier about how certain individuals,
00:32:38 you know, they were watching the show and you've heard that, you know, their testimony,
00:32:42 I've watched the show, Gabriel. And then, you know, we ended up, we, you know, just reading
00:32:46 the Bible and then we stopped watching the show and we're just, because we love the Bible and we
00:32:50 came to salvation and to play the devil's advocate. I could imagine somebody saying, well,
00:32:55 but isn't the show good, at least in that regard, as a, as an appetizer to the scripture,
00:33:01 That maybe the show itself isn't biblical, but that it would provoke in people a desire and a hunger for the scripture.
00:33:09 Maybe it doesn't for everybody, but even if it did it for a few people, or just even 10% of all these people who are watching, they move on from the show to the Bible.
00:33:18 Whether they stop the show or finish the show, they end up finding the Bible, and in the Bible, they find Christ and salvation.
00:33:24 And I think for me, what I would think is, you know, I remember when I first became Reformed in my soteriology, my understanding of salvation, one of the things that was really difficult for me and one of the things that I'm commonly having to do in pastoral ministry as others come into Reformed theology is help them basically go back in time with a new understanding to re-understand their personal testimony.
00:33:53 Because I've noticed one of the biggest hangups for people, including myself back in the day, you know, 15 years ago or whatever it was, was this theology can't be right because that's not what God did with me.
00:34:07 And then you rework and you begin to understand, well, wait a second.
00:34:11 It's like, well, this can't be right because I chose God.
00:34:13 And it's like, well, okay, but okay, you did choose God.
00:34:17 All we're saying is that regeneration precedes faith.
00:34:19 And yes, you did make a conscious, willing choice to submit to Christ and his lordship, to trust in him alone as your substitute for salvation.
00:34:31 But what we're saying is that God did something first, that God, by the power and work of the Holy Spirit, removed your heart of stone, replaced it with a heart of flesh, that faith is a gift.
00:34:41 So even that choice made available to you was a gift of God, not something that was conjured up by you.
00:34:47 the, and, and, and then I'm able to, you know, go back and say, okay, I don't have to give myself
00:34:52 a lobotomy. I don't have to, um, pretend like something didn't happen. No, this thing really
00:34:57 did happen, but I, I misunderstood at the time what was actually going on. And I now have these
00:35:03 pieces. I don't have to choose between my, my experience and my theology. Um, I can actually,
00:35:09 um, I can actually, uh, use my theology that that's infallible, that comes from the word of
00:35:14 God, the word of God is infallible. And I can, um, and I can then just simply put on that lens
00:35:19 and, and view my testimony in light of that. And, and actually have, I don't have to get rid of my
00:35:25 testimony, but I can actually have a better understanding of it. So all that with the person
00:35:29 who watches the chosen and then that, you know, works as an appetizer, you know, and stirs up a
00:35:34 desire for the word and they move on from the chosen to the Bible and they get saved. You know,
00:35:38 the devil's advocate would be saying, well, don't we need the chosen at least for that? If it does
00:35:42 that, that's good. And I would say within that Reformed theology, looking at that person's
00:35:47 testimony, I would say, well, who's to say that what was actually taking place is that the Holy
00:35:52 Spirit was drawing that person unto salvation, drawing them to Christ, the Son of God, drawing
00:35:58 them to the scripture. And the chosen didn't give them that desire for the Bible, but they were
00:36:03 actually being drawn by the Holy Spirit of God to the scripture. And the chosen was actually a
00:36:09 They actually got hung up on the chosen for three months and actually would have come to the Bible even quicker had it not been for this hindrance.
00:36:17 So the chosen didn't spark a desire for the scripture.
00:36:20 The Holy Spirit was drawing them.
00:36:21 That's where the desire was coming from. 0.92
00:36:23 And the chosen actually slowed them down.
00:36:25 Right.
00:36:25 So we're not saying this thing that the person's claiming in their testimony happened didn't happen.
00:36:32 And we're giving simply proposing, suggesting another way of interpreting this thing that objectively happened and saying, yeah, but in biblical terms, it means this and not that.
00:36:44 Do you have any comment on that or thoughts?
00:36:47 No, I think you're spot on with that.
00:36:49 So couldn't it have been, I mean, you're looking at it from the perspective of thinking that the chosen brought them to Christ, but why couldn't you see it from the vantage point of the chosen was actually hindering them?
00:37:02 from being able to come to a knowledge of the understanding of the truth and that's going to be
00:37:05 the case with most people you're also talking about exceptions to the rule if a person comes
00:37:10 to a knowledge of christ because they watch the chosen and then they went to the bible that's not
00:37:16 going to be the common story that you're going to hear coming out of this what what you're commonly
00:37:21 going to hear are people who are very very unlearned in scripture that are going to stay
00:37:26 ignorant of the scriptures because they're watching the chosen and they think that they're getting
00:37:30 the Bible or whatever else, because I watched this TV show. One of the things that the apostle 0.90
00:37:35 Paul said to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 4, 6, learn by us, talking about himself and Apollos
00:37:40 and Peter, learn by us not to go beyond what is written so that you will not be puffed up against
00:37:46 each other. So by, oh, sorry, hit my mouse here. So by going beyond what is written, it actually
00:37:55 creates arrogance and division. It does not unify. It divides us. And so that would be,
00:38:02 if I could put a third problem on this particular show, it would be that it's going to be divisive.
00:38:07 It's not going to unify people. It breaks people up. The only thing that's going to bring us
00:38:11 together as a church is the word of Christ. This is something that for a lot of people has got to
00:38:16 supplement the word. The word is not sufficient for them. The Bible is not enough. I need something
00:38:22 else. I wasn't able to understand this until I saw it in the show. And now it makes more sense to
00:38:27 me. But you don't realize that what it is that they're giving you in the show is not really
00:38:31 faithful to the text. So these things, like you said, are going to be much more of a hindrance
00:38:36 than they are going to be guiding or helping people come to a knowledge of Christ. The sad
00:38:43 thing is the creators of the show, you learn this when you watch some of the other interviews and
00:38:47 things like that, behind the scenes footage and stuff that they've done. They really think they're
00:38:52 They're positively enhancing people's lives in the name of Christ with this program.
00:38:58 Yeah, well, I'm sure they do.
00:39:00 Everybody has to believe something to sleep at night.
00:39:05 That's the presuppositional mantra.
00:39:07 But with that, I guess one of my thoughts is just, well, I guess I'll pose it as a question.
00:39:20 Did you ever see a scene?
00:39:22 Did it get in the first, you know, season or two to John chapter eight and the woman
00:39:27 caught in adultery?
00:39:28 Is that depicted?
00:39:28 I haven't seen that yet.
00:39:29 No.
00:39:30 Okay.
00:39:30 But you said you saw the scene of John chapter four, right?
00:39:34 With a Samaritan woman.
00:39:36 Is that right?
00:39:36 Yes.
00:39:37 But how did they, you know, you gave us a little bit of detail in regards to John three
00:39:41 with Nicodemus, but with the Samaritan woman, you know, I perceive you are a prophet.
00:39:47 You know, you've had five husbands.
00:39:49 The man you're now with is not your husband.
00:39:51 And how did you said they switched the order of the language there?
00:39:55 How did they depict that?
00:39:57 Well, really, it was the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus where they're switching
00:40:00 the order of things, which really very much changed the message.
00:40:04 Yeah, things were moved around with the woman at the well as well.
00:40:08 One of the things I remember happening is that when Jesus does reveal to her that he's
00:40:14 a prophet, you know, saying to her, you've had five husbands and the man that you're
00:40:17 with now is not your husband.
00:40:18 And she says, Oh, I see you're a prophet and you're to preach at me. And he said, No. Yeah, that's exactly why he was there. He was there to preach and lead an entire town to a knowledge of who he was. And all of this flows through the text.
00:40:35 When you read John 2 of Jesus purging the temple and then doing miracles, and there were people that wanted to be around Jesus because he was doing miracles, at the end of chapter 2 it says, but Jesus did not entrust himself to them because he knew what was in the heart of man.
00:40:50 So then you go right from that into the story of Jesus and Nicodemus, and Nicodemus is not coming to Jesus as some good faith actor just asking some questions because I want to be a believer, but I need to get all this stuff straight.
00:41:03 Nicodemus does not believe Jesus is the Christ, and Jesus doesn't reveal himself to Nicodemus
00:41:09 as the Christ.
00:41:10 When he talks about the Son of Man, when he says, just as Moses lifted up the serpent
00:41:15 in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, Jesus used that language, did
00:41:20 not personally apply it to himself directly because he was not revealing to Nicodemus
00:41:27 that he was the Son of Man, and Nicodemus, in his clouded judgment, wouldn't have recognized
00:41:31 that anyway.
00:41:32 But then you go from that story into John 4 with Jesus and the woman at the well, and while he would not reveal who he was to the Jews, here he is in Samaria, and he reveals who he is to this woman who goes back into town, tells everybody, could this be the Christ?
00:41:50 He stays there for two days. He preaches the gospel to them. And they say, now we know that this is the Christ because we have heard it for ourselves, not just because of what the woman had said, but because they heard it for themselves.
00:42:03 That's not depicted in the show. The very last scene of season one is that encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well.
00:42:10 So when you start season two, you're picking up in Sychar with Jesus ministering there as the season would have finished with that exchange at the well of Jacob.
00:42:25 And when you're watching it in the show, he's there for like several days.
00:42:29 I was trying to figure out if they put a timeline on it.
00:42:32 It almost seemed like it was several weeks when the scripture says he was there for two days.
00:42:36 And he's also seen like helping people with daily chores.
00:42:41 So they're trying to show Jesus being like hands and feet and look at how charitable he was.
00:42:47 That wasn't what he did.
00:42:49 He preached.
00:42:50 He preached to them for two days.
00:42:53 And in Mark, he even tells Peter, let's go to the other towns to preach because that's what I came out to do.
00:43:00 So they diminish the fact that Jesus is there to preach.
00:43:04 He tells the woman that I'm not going to preach at you. 0.74
00:43:07 They show him in Sychar.
00:43:08 And yeah, he does a little bit of preaching in Sychar, but he also is doing all these chores and work and trying to help people and things like that.
00:43:15 And that's not what's depicted in the text.
00:43:17 So over and over again, you're seeing this diminishing of the importance of the words of what Christ actually said and how people came to faith through what he said.
00:43:26 and instead are trying to throw, you know, a works righteousness into this testimony of Jesus that they're giving.
00:43:35 Interesting.
00:43:36 Well, is there any part in the show, this is one of my last questions,
00:43:40 but is there any part that talks about the wrath of God, that Jesus, you know, that your problem, mankind,
00:43:48 is that you're currently under the just condemnation of God, that you're under his wrath,
00:43:56 That Jesus, is there anything that says, you know, that it's one thing to ask, you know, what is God saving us to or for?
00:44:06 But it's another question to ask, you know, what does God save us from?
00:44:10 And, you know, at one level, the answer is sin.
00:44:13 He saves us from sin.
00:44:14 But at another level, it's God saves us from his own wrath for our sin.
00:44:21 And is there anything in the show that depicts, you know, that Jesus is going to be enduring the wrath of God?
00:44:28 That it's not just that the cross isn't just, you know, the moral example of sacrificial love that a man would lay down his life for his friends,
00:44:36 but that Jesus actually dies as the Lamb of God under God's wrath that takes away the sins of the world?
00:44:41 I have not seen anything about the wrath of God.
00:44:44 The closest that I've heard, there was a scene where Jesus was teaching some people in the house.
00:44:50 This was right before he healed the lame man who was the paralytic who was lowered through the roof.
00:44:56 And so they have him teaching and they're just, you know, pulling together a bunch of different sayings that Jesus said throughout the Gospels.
00:45:02 None of that is necessarily wrong.
00:45:04 One of the things that he says, he quotes from Luke 13, where he says, how about the people in in Siloam when they perished, when the tower at Siloam fell on them? 0.85
00:45:14 Do you think that they were worse sinners than all the rest of these in Jerusalem?
00:45:17 I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will likewise perish.
00:45:21 Now, that's probably the closest they've come in the show to saying anything like the wrath of God.
00:45:26 There has been a statement where Jesus has said, I came to save them from sin, but that's never explained.
00:45:32 So like I said, he could say that and somebody could just take that as, you know, all the wrong that people have done to me.
00:45:39 Jesus is saving me from sin.
00:45:40 Or even your personal sin, but just reinterpreting what sin is. 0.62
00:45:45 like the sin of Jesus is coming to save me, not from the sin of homosexuality, but the sin of
00:45:51 hate speech against homosexuality, you know, whatever. So, yeah, that definitely leaves it
00:45:55 wide open. Well, as we kind of come to a close here, do you have any final thoughts about the
00:46:01 show or anything that, you know, you want Christians to be aware of? Well, there's a lot 0.73
00:46:06 of people that have said to me, you know, can't I just watch it for entertainment? Or they will
00:46:10 criticize me and say, oh, you're against any kind of Christian entertainment or whatever. And that's
00:46:15 not true at all. I'm constantly looking for things that I know is safe for my kids to watch.
00:46:21 And I would love for them to be able to watch some things that are good tellings of Bible stories.
00:46:26 There are some cinematic depictions of Bible stories that I've enjoyed. I'm not going to say
00:46:31 what they are, though, because some of that is so subjective. And I just don't want to cause
00:46:37 anybody to stumble. All of that just simply to say that I'm not opposed to depictions of things like
00:46:43 this. But like you had said early on in the interview, it's not about showing a Bible story
00:46:49 on screen. It's the depiction of Christ himself that's really problematic with the chosen.
00:46:54 I think you can go through Old Testament stories, even New Testament stories, 0.88
00:46:58 doing a story of the Apostle Paul or something like that. And I think that you would come up
00:47:02 with something that's way better than what they're showing in the show. You can be faithful
00:47:07 to the text and come up with a good cinematic depiction of a Bible story without it having to
00:47:11 be Jesus and his disciples. Which, by the way, having said that, I think that the times when
00:47:16 the show is best, when the show excels, is when Jesus is not on screen and will actually have
00:47:24 very little to do in that show. It's what people are saying about him rather than what you're
00:47:30 seeing them do. That's always the most intriguing parts of the show. And when I'm seeing them do
00:47:36 that. I thought that that's what the show was originally when people were first telling me
00:47:41 about it. And they're telling me about, well, the chosen is like the life of Jesus through the eyes
00:47:45 of his disciples. I thought it was going to be like them talking about what Jesus did, but you're
00:47:49 not really seeing Jesus until I actually saw the show. And I'm like, well, no, this is another
00:47:53 Jesus show. It's all centered around entirely Christ. I think you could do something like that
00:47:59 where the, you know, maybe it's after Jesus has ascended and then the disciples are telling people
00:48:05 here's who he is and here's what he did. I think that that could be a really compelling program,
00:48:10 but unfortunately that's not what the chosen is. So yeah, if somebody asked me, just as a matter
00:48:16 of entertainment, can I just watch this to be entertained? And I would implore you not to,
00:48:22 simply because there's too much risk of whatever you think about the second or third commandment,
00:48:29 there's too much risk that you could potentially see that as an accurate depiction of Christ
00:48:34 And now you're imagining that when you come to the Bible and you're reading the scripture.
00:48:39 Or the other warning that I gave before is it could lead to confusion.
00:48:43 And it doesn't matter how faithfully you've been in reading the Gospels or how well you think you know the Gospels.
00:48:49 I encounter Christians all the time that think that they know the Gospels extremely well and then come to find that they really don't know them all that well.
00:48:56 These things are going to lead to confusion as to what the text actually says.
00:48:59 you're seeing an ecumenical, broad faith version of Jesus that is going to be appealing to the
00:49:06 most number of people. It should just give a lot of Christians pause to recognize that the show
00:49:12 is extremely popular and look at the different people that are promoting the show. That's enough 0.96
00:49:16 to make you go, it's probably not something good about this when that many questionable teachers
00:49:21 are on board with this and think that this is such a great thing. So I would encourage you
00:49:26 not to watch The Chosen. Go to the scriptures, especially if you're not as regular in Bible 0.83
00:49:33 study. You need to be reading the Bible and leading your family in that a lot more than
00:49:37 you're coming to these kinds of TV shows and watching them. But look for some other things
00:49:42 out there to watch or read or just turn the TV off altogether. That's not a bad game plan either.
00:49:50 Great. Just one final disclaimer here at the end for anybody who's thinking,
00:49:54 well, what about Narnia? What about Aslan? Or what about, um, it's worth noting that there's
00:49:59 a dynamic difference in terms of second commandment violations between, um, Christ and
00:50:06 a Christ figure. Um, there's, you know, we, we could, we can have a, the arc encounter for
00:50:12 instance. Um, and the arc is a type of Christ, but it's not Christ. Um, you know, you can have
00:50:18 a lion in another world like Narnia. And so you can have, you can tell powerful Christian stories
00:50:25 with Christian characters and even a Christ figure himself. I have a painting behind me
00:50:33 in my studio that has, you know, it's a, it's a painting of the church personified corporately
00:50:39 as one individual soldier. So it's the church militant on earth. There's a dragon, you know,
00:50:44 It's coming to the ground. It's just been fatally wounded. It's crashing to the ground, but its hole is opening up and all these other inferior monsters are coming out of its hole. And there is a Christ figure who has his hand on the shoulder of the church militant saying he's drawn back his bow. He just gave the fatal wound to the Satan figure and bound, you know, binding Satan.
00:51:07 But there's all these minions. There's still a lot of work to be done. And he's giving directions to the church militant on earth to go and finish the job. But it's not a picture. Sometimes people will ask, it's not a painting of Christ. It's a fictional painting in the same way that the church isn't one human being.
00:51:26 It's a it's a fictional painting of a fictional scenario with a church figure and a Christ figure.
00:51:34 And so that's entirely different than saying this is a depiction, a retelling of Jesus.
00:51:40 It's not a it's not a parallel story, you know, in another universe that has a savior type figure who, you know, does it kind of thing and is modeled after Jesus.
00:51:50 I think that that's totally appropriate and, and, and powerful, you know, whether it be Tolkien's, you know, his series, you know, or C.S. Lewis or other things like that. That's, that's a wonderful way to do it. And I think we need more fantastical fictional stories, especially for our children that are good Christian stories. But without saying this is Jesus, and this is what he said when it's literally not. That's, that's the difference.
00:52:15 Yeah. Any any any comments on that? If not, we'll go ahead and call it quits here.
00:52:21 No, I appreciate it. And you had drawn the lesson from R.C. Sproul earlier about how cautious he was about not depicting Jesus or showing the face of Christ in his stories.
00:52:31 My kids love R.C. Sproul stories. I think we got every one of his kids books and it's all allegorical.
00:52:36 but yet my kids are really able to easily grasp the message that's being said in the book because
00:52:44 they compare that with the devotional lessons that I lead them through or the catechism that
00:52:48 we do and so when they see it in the in the story that R.C. Sproul does as an allegory
00:52:53 then they're going oh yeah I see a Jesus does that for us you know and they're able to make
00:52:57 the connections so especially when you're looking for family friendly entertainment and stuff like
00:53:01 this be aware that your children are absorbing a lot more than you think they are that should
00:53:06 encourage you more in Bible study and less in shows like this in The Chosen. Right. Especially
00:53:13 for young kids. I mean, I just imagine, you know, I have a five-year-old, three-year-old, two-year-old
00:53:17 and six-month-old. And, uh, if we sat down and watched The Chosen, like my, my little girls are
00:53:23 going to be like eyes, you know, all aglow, wide opened, you know, this is Jesus. And like, that's,
00:53:30 that's what they're going to be thinking. And it's, uh, no sweetheart, that is not Jesus. And
00:53:35 even with all of my, you know, careful guardrails and conversation before the show and after the
00:53:40 show, it would not be helpful for my little children. Yes, sir. I think you're wise in that.
00:53:46 Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Pastor Gabriel. We appreciate
00:53:51 it. How can our listeners keep track with what you're doing? So the podcast that I do is Bible
00:53:57 teaching five days a week. I do New Testament Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Old Testament
00:54:01 on Thursday. And then my wife and I do a Q&A where we take questions from the listeners on
00:54:04 Friday. And you can find that at www.utt.com or whatever podcast app that you use, just type in
00:54:14 www.utt. Even through Spotify, you'd be able to find us. And of course, the videos on YouTube as
00:54:20 well under those same letters. And we've done so many videos now up to this point. I think it's
00:54:25 pretty close to 400. You can type in a Bible topic and the letters www.utt and any video that
00:54:31 I've done on that subject will come up in your YouTube search. Great. All right. Well, thank you
00:54:36 so much for coming on the show. Thank you, brother. God bless you. Can I be frank with you for just a
00:54:41 second right here at the end? Look, some of you guys, you're financially supporting this ministry
00:54:46 and from the bottom of my heart, I say, thank you. I cannot thank you enough. However, some of you,
00:54:53 you just, you can't afford it. In fact, some of you, you shouldn't afford it. Let's be honest.
00:54:59 I mean, we're living in Joe Biden's ridiculous economy. 0.96
00:55:03 Our nation and our totalitarian political elites lost their minds over the last three 0.91
00:55:11 years due to COVID.
00:55:13 We have written checks that we simply cannot cash.
00:55:17 It doesn't matter if people change the definition of a recession.
00:55:21 We are living in a recession right now, regardless.
00:55:25 Some of you are struggling to afford a carton of eggs at the grocery store.
00:55:30 You cannot support financially this ministry at this time, nor should you, but you could
00:55:36 still help us tremendously.
00:55:39 I am asking you, please, if you're willing to do so, take one minute of your time.
00:55:45 Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, iTunes, Spotify, whatever
00:55:51 that might be.
00:55:52 This is the way the system works.
00:55:54 We want to be innocent as doves, but shrewd as vipers.
00:55:58 We need to be strategic.
00:56:00 You leave us a five-star review, and our podcast shows up for more people.
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00:56:16 Thanks for tuning in.