Confessional Idolatry

Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler.
And I'm still Woe.
On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be revisiting a few concepts
that we've discussed in the last year or so.
One year ago, January twenty fourth of last year, we did an
episode on apostasy.
And this is going to be a continuation of that, basically a
part two of okay, now that churches are becoming apostate, here's what
it's gonna look like.
And we're gonna refer back to a number of examples.
That's a really good series to revisit from the beginning of last
year. Yeah, if you haven't heard it in a while or if
you're jumping around, the first five episodes that we did in 2024
really stand the test of time very well.
It's much worse now than it was when we did them.
That's the way this stuff is going to keep going.
So what we're going to talk about today is when churches are
apostatizing, how are the men inside those churches going to behave?
Because we said in that episode, we're not talking about individual apostasy,
which is really kind of the good case of such a thing
can exist for the notion of apostasy.
When an individual steps away from God, rejects God, it's obvious.
He says, I don't believe in God anymore.
I'm just gonna go away.
This is all crap.
It's a very noticeable heel turn.
And he goes in the other direction.
He basically repents of his repentance.
It's obvious.
You can tell by someone's confession, by his words, by his life,
this man no longer believes in God.
When churches apostatize, they don't do any of those things, not overtly,
at least not at first.
When a church apostatizes, it pretends that it continues in the faith
of whatever fathers it claims.
And for the purposes of our discussion today, we will just assume
for the sake of argument that whatever your favorite confession is is
true. It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
I'm not conceding anything as Lutherans, anybody else is right, but it
doesn't even matter who's right about those facts.
Because the problem that we have in our respective churches is that
given those confessions, assuming that they're infallible, assuming they're true, they're a
correct exposition of what God says, the problem is how do apostatizing
churches employ those confessions in service of Satan.
So we're going to talk about today some historical examples.
We're going to revisit examples from the apostasy episode.
And we're going to deal with the fact that Satan wants us
to be making true confessions.
He doesn't want everybody making true confessions.
He loves it when someone apostatizes and is an individual and says,
I hate God, I don't believe in God anymore.
This is all dumb.
I'm gone.
I'm just gonna go live a wicked life 'cause nothing exists.
Satan loves that.
But he's just as happy for us to be sitting here inside
the churches making true confessions because he can use that to his
benefit exactly the same.
One year ago this week, we released the episode called The Required
Confession, where we talked about one of Dakotas had just proposed, I
think it subsequently passed a law related to anti-Semitism.
And it makes it illegal the confession of what scripture says about
the crucifixion.
And the point that we made in that episode is that there
are five things at least that you can say about who killed
Christ. My sins killed Christ.
And so did yours.
Pontius Pilate killed Christ.
The Roman Centurions killed Christ, the Pharisees killed Christ, and the Jews
collectively as a group, those who were present, killed Christ.
All five of those things are true, and only the last two
will get you into any trouble.
And the last one is illegal in a number of states now,
and it will probably be illegal soon nationally, because that's the way
things are going.
And so in the required confession episode, we made the case that
it doesn't matter which of those other confessions are true when you
are challenged and told you cannot confess what's in scripture, when you
go along with it and say, well, sure, I'm not going to
say that the Jews did anything, because my sins killed Christ.
Obviously that's true.
So let's just leave it at that.
That contradicts Scripture, which means that you're apostatizing, even while you're saying
the very thing that Scripture says about your sins crucifying Christ.
The thing that is true becomes a lie because it is used
specifically in service of telling a different lie.
This is a trick that Satan has played from the Garden of
Eden and the apostasy episode we began with.
I'm just gonna briefly revisit here.
When you read Satan's encounter with Eve, what happens?
The first thing that Satan said to Eve was, did God actually
say? Which tricked her, as we pointed out, into making a true
confession. She went on to elaborate on what God had said, what
Adam had taught her.
And for the purpose of this argument, it doesn't matter if the
fact that the additional words that she used above and beyond what
God is recorded to have said to Adam doesn't matter if that's
an elaboration that was false, if she was making stuff up, if
Adam made stuff up.
We can assume for the sake of argument that that was true
because it doesn't change anything.
What happened was that Satan said, Did God actually say?
And then she confessed what God said, and that's when Satan had
her. Satan goaded her, goaded Eve, our mother, into confessing truly what
God had said.
Because when he did that, Satan shifted her focus.
He wanted her to focus on the fruit that was forbidden for
her to eat so that he could make her envious.
He wanted her to desire that which God had forbidden.
And when she responded with a true confession, then he told a
half-truth, you will not surely die, which was false in the long
run, but it was true immediately.
She didn't die on the spot.
And she got the benefit.
She got the upside.
She knew good and evil, just as the fruit was intended for.
But it wasn't intended for her or Adam at that time.
So right from the outset, with two perfect human beings, the only
perfect human beings who have ever lived with the exception of Jesus
Christ, who's the exception to every rule for men, they were tricked
into telling Satan something that was true and that's how he had
him. Satan's been replaying that same attack over and over again ever
since. And the reason for this episode today is that we don't
believe that we can possibly be tricked when we're saying things that
are true.
And that's the whole point of this.
It is entirely possible for us to sin and to in fact
apostatize as individuals and collectively as churches by telling the truth when
it's the wrong truth at the wrong time.
Because Satan continues to change up his attacks and we have to
pay attention to those changes.
And so the purpose of putting this in front of you and
putting in your mind is that we're all vulnerable to this.
Every one of us is going to tend to cling to whatever
our confessions are.
Whatever it is that we've inherited or adopted as a matter of
our personal faith, again, we're not going to get into who's right
or wrong, even if you're completely right.
We're Lutherans.
The book of Concord would suffice for our confession for these purposes.
It's true.
The arguments that it makes are true.
It is also used today by Lutherans as an idol.
It is idolatrous the way Lutherans treat the Book of Concord, because
what do they do?
They will use it to argue against scripture or to argue against
reason and to argue against creation whenever anything comes up that isn't
addressed. This is the whole problem.
You can take a confession that's true that's solving a particular problem
at a particular time.
And when you try to morph it and make it do something
it was never intended to do, you know, the authors of the
book of Concord had a particular problem in mind they were trying
to solve.
They knew what problems those were, and they addressed them as best
they could at the time.
It's a good confession.
It's a solid confession of the Christian faith for those purposes.
It is not a complete confession of the entire Christian faith.
You need scripture for that and you need a reason for that.
And without all of those things, you're gonna go flying off into
space. Part of the reason that this approach that Satan is taking,
where he tricks people or goads people into making these true confessions
that are narrow is that we have to have them.
It's not that it's bad to have a confession, if it's the
Book of Concord or the Westminster Confession or the Pope, God help
you guys who are Roman Catholic, if that is the root of
your faith, if that is where you have determined this is my
North Star, as long as I have this in view, I know
where I am.
I can keep my bearings.
We all need something like that.
Now, scripture is also that, and scripture should be the ultimate source
of that.
But there's nothing wrong with having creeds.
There's nothing wrong with having a confession, assuming it's true, assuming it
doesn't disagree with scripture, but you can make it an idol.
And we're saying something here today that a lot of people say
in a lot of different contexts.
Oh, you you're making the family an idol now, which is a
modern degenerate thing to say.
It's like, well, you're obeying God.
You're creating families.
That's not idolatry per se.
And these guys freak out at the notion that obedience to God
could possibly make people think, okay, I'm obeying God, so no, I
don't need God.
It's a completely irrational Protestant fear, but it's one that's very pervasive.
We need to be able to have something to help us keep
our bearings in these creeds and these confessions serve that vital function.
Just as Eve's confession that she gave to Satan was a vital
confession. He specifically attacked something that God had said.
He lied about it with his question.
And she correctly confessed.
She said back what Adam had told her, God said.
She did it right, and she fell for it.
What should have happened, I think, you know, this is extra scriptural,
so you can take it or leave it.
I think that the correct form of that entire situation where Eve
was having a conversation with the serpent, with Adam standing right next
to her, just passively listening, maybe he should not have permitted the
serpent to speak to her.
Certainly after the serpent denied what God said, I think he probably
should have killed the serpent on the spot.
I think personally that probably wouldn't have been sin.
That could have gone a different way because they had free will.
They had perfect free will to behave differently than they behaved.
And although the eating and the envy, the covetousness of that fruit
was sin, I think the failure to stop the evil that Satan
had introduced into the garden with his lies, one could argue, and
I I would make the argument that that was a sin even
further back than the eating.
In any event, Satan was able to get away with it because
they went along with it.
They played his game.
And this is the problem that we don't understand that we all
face all the time.
We are always forced to contend with Satan because he is our
adversary. He is always the ultimate adversary in anything that we deal
with that's difficult in life.
We die, we get sick, we suffer, we're miserable, we're sad, we're
lonely. Whatever bad things that happen are downstream from the fall that
are downstream from Satan's attacks.
And then he tags right along every day, trying to amplify the
stuff to harm us, to separate us from God's love.
So we're constantly enduring those attacks.
And we understand when the attacks are bad.
We understand when the attacks are deliberately saying the opposite of what
God said.
Sometimes Satan will come to some people, maybe some of you, and
say, just apostise, stop believing God altogether.
Forget that stuff.
That's nonsense.
Go do this other thing.
Forget about Jesus.
You don't need any of that crap.
Sometimes that's the pitch that works for some people.
The problem is that's not the only pitch that Satan has.
The pitch that he used for Eve and the pitch that he's
used many times since and he uses to this day, especially in
this day, is to goad Christians in especially Christian denominations as a
whole into making partially true confessions that serve his purposes.
Because just like in that situation with the Dakotas Law where it's
illegal to say that the Jews killed Christ, most Christians are happy
to go along with that.
They don't believe that anyway.
Scripture says it, and they don't believe it.
What do they believe?
They believe something is true.
They believe that their sins killed Christ, which is absolutely true.
But there are other things that can also be said that are
scriptural that if you deny them, what have you done?
If you deny that the Pharisees killed Christ and that the Jews
killed Christ, are you Christian?
You cannot be, because what are you doing?
You're calling God a liar.
Scripture could not possibly be more clear about the fact that the
Jews killed Christ.
It's reiterated over and over again after it happens by numerous authors,
and they're all inspired.
You can't be a Christian if you don't believe that the New
Testament's not inspired.
And if you do, then you're confessing that God said this.
And so when you say, Well, I don't believe that part, you're
calling God a liar.
And that's where all this stuff comes down to.
You can have a narrowly true confession, which Satan loves.
I made the point in the episode on the true confession.
Satan loves it when Christians run around saying, My sins killed Christ.
Yeah, it's all my fault.
Not in denial of that fact.
That's absolutely true.
And it is the most important thing.
I'm not getting the slightest bit of slander against that true confession.
It is not the only one, but it's the one that Satan
wants us to focus on because if you If you stop saying
that the Jews killed Christ, it opens up the door for a
whole nother avenue of attack.
And this is how Satan works.
This is how Satan's warfare against the church works.
There are direct attacks and there are indirect attacks.
And if we believe that we're better than Eve, who was perfect
when she fell for this crap, if we believe that we can
do better than that, we are setting ourselves up for apostasy and
for damnation.
That's the purpose of this episode.
Churches, individuals, collectively, we're all subject to trying to keep our eyes
on whatever we know to be true.
Because we have to.
You can't possibly fit all of scripture in your head all the
time, but God warns us that we have to be watchful.
And the problem that we're trying to solve here today with this
episode is that confessions at some point become an excuse for not
being watchful for saying, well, this stuff is going on.
I don't really I don't really understand it.
It sounds like, you know, some people who aren't really all that
great with their theology are making some some weird arguments I've never
heard anyone make before.
It's not in my confession, so I'm just not going to participate.
They're all bums, they're all bad.
I'm over here with my confession.
I'm above it all.
I'm not going to fall for it.
That is what Satan wants.
Because maybe the guy who has a true confession that's actually competent
theology, unlike some of the people who are entering the fray when
these new attacks come, sometimes they're pretty bad at it.
The guys who are off on the side with their noses up
in the air would be better contenders for the faith.
If only they would enter the fray and say, okay, there's a
new attack.
Maybe we need a new argument for it.
The idolatry of confession comes in when we say, well, I don't
care what's happening now because my confession doesn't say anything, so it
must not be important.
Satan cheers when we do that.
And he's cheering a lot lately because this is the default position
that we find churches in today, to say, well, this new stuff
is just Satan being weird and the world being weird.
It's got nothing to do with me.
I'm going to cling to my confession and I know I'm going
to be fine.
That makes us Pharisees.
The Pharisees weren't unique.
They were abominable, but they embodied the natural human sinful nature to
cling to whatever is self-justifying.
And true confessions ultimately become self-justifying.
Even faith alone, when your confession is that faith is the only
thing that can save me, it doesn't take too much back and
forth before ironically someone concludes that the fact that they confess that
faith saves them alone is what saves them.
If I hope you're following that.
It's one level of indirection.
It's no longer my faith that saves me, but it's my confession
that my faith is the only thing that saves me.
As long as I'm confessing that right, then I'm in good shape.
Because it's no longer rooted in the gift of faith that God
has given to me.
It's now rooted in, well, I'm clinging to this.
And although we need things to cling to, they have to be
everywhere word from the mouth of God.
That's how Satan fragments the church into a million pieces by driving
these wedges where he successfully sets one part of the word against
another. He gets us fighting each other, he gets us ignoring the
word entirely.
And then he has us.
Because it's perfectly fine in hell for you to have a true
confession as long as it's not a complete confession.
And this nature is played out over and over again.
And we're warning you about this today because we're already seeing it
a bunch this year.
We've seen it continuously.
It's probably going to continue to be amplified because it's one of
the last fig leaves that are left in in the church's impotent
attempts to prevent Satan's attack.
Satan is coming in new angles, new avenues, and churches are saying,
Well, I've got the old confession, I'm fine.
The Roman Catholics say, Well, I've got the Pope, I'm fine.
Sure, the Pope might not be great some decades, but overall tradition,
you know, going back, yeah, they claim Peter was, even now it's
news to him.
Not trying to pick on you guys, but like when you root
anything outside of what's directly scriptural, that's all it takes, even if
it's true.
The Lutheran confessions are true, but they're not complete.
I've mentioned before I had an argument a few years ago on
Discord with a guy where I made an argument from scripture and
he refused to believe it because I couldn't point to where it
was in the book of Concord.
And that was his argument.
A scriptural argument from me could not possibly be true because I
could not cite the Lutheran confessions.
Any of the men who authored the Lutheran confessions would tear their
hair out if they had any to hear that someone who thought
he was a good Lutheran made that his confession.
Yeah, that's why this is so dangerous.
Because you're doing it in good conscience.
It's an appeal to good conscience that is in fact an attack
on heaven.
That's why Satan loves it.
That's why it's apostasy.
The one thing that we think we've gotten right are historical confessions
Satan is going to use as a weapon against us.
When
we swear in witnesses in our courts, we have them typically swear
something along the lines of do you swear to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
And all three parts of that, the fourth as well, if you
include swearing before God, are important, because it is insufficient simply to
tell the truth.
You need to tell the whole truth and obviously not embellish it
as it were with lies.
In previous episodes, we've gone over the different kinds of lies and
how in some ways, yes, you can in fact lie with the
truth, which is why we have the inclusion of the whole truth
in that oath.
Because if you tell only part of a narrative, it is very
possible to use just that portion, that true portion though, in order
to manipulate, which is one of the ways, of course, that you
can lie.
You can lie by omission, commission, or manipulation.
And so
obviously commission is the most obvious when that's that affirmative lie, so
you aren't embellishing your story with things that are in fact not
the truth.
Omission is what is addressed by the whole truth.
You don't get to leave out parts of the truth and pretend
that you have still given a full and true accounting of events.
Because you haven't.
You've neglected to include things.
Now that doesn't mean that just because you left out some ancillary
fact, if you are a witness in a murder trial and you
leave out the color of a garment that someone standing by was
wearing. Some bystanders wearing a red shirt and you neglect to say
that his shirt was red.
That doesn't matter.
These are facts that are relevant, truths that are relevant to the
matter. And this is
one of those centrally important points in this discussion.
As Wo said, obviously you cannot hold the totality of scripture in
your head at any given time.
That isn't a requirement.
That's not something that you have to do as a Christian.
However, when a truth is relevant, when a truth is attacked, then
indeed you must defend it, and then indeed you must confess the
full truth and not simply a part of it.
And for those who object to confessions or think that the argument
that we're making here maybe it doesn't make any sense to you.
Just think about church history.
We have three ecumenical creeds.
We don't have three ecumenical creeds because the men who made the
Nicene and the Athenasian thought we should have longer creeds considerably longer
in the case of the Athanasian.
We have them because they confessed truths that were being attacked at
that time.
We have them because the previous creeds were not wrong, but we're
not complete in the sense of being a full confession of the
Christian faith.
That's not to say that if you confess the Apostles' Creed and
understand everything that is in the Apostles' Creed, that you can't be
saved. In fact, if you believe what's in the Apostles' Creed, that
is a sufficient saving faith, but you have to believe what's actually
there. The reason we have the Nicene is to explain some of
the additional matters.
For instance, I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
That's not in the apostles Creed.
It is in the Nicene.
And then of course the case of the Athanasian is to deal
with Trinitarian issues that had arisen in the church.
So these confessions that we have are to address issues that were
live at the time.
It doesn't mean the issues have gone away, because obviously Unitarians still
exist, so for instance, we still need the Athanasian Creed.
Satan's not going to stop attacking things just because we have a
confession that addresses it.
He will continue to attack those things.
However, by and large he is going to move on to new
tactics because he is going to choose things that are undefended.
A good analogy for many of these issues in this area would
be a military analogy.
If you have a protected position and it's protected on three sides,
well a smart enemy is going to try to attack that fourth
one that isn't protected if he can do so.
That is what Satan does.
Satan is constantly testing for weak points in the wall.
He's not going to attack the place where you are most strongly
defended. Now, if you happen to attend a church that does not
have a confession, he may have more opportunity to attack you because
you haven't built up that wall in really anywhere, except for possibly,
hopefully you at least confess the three ecumenical creeds.
So Satan is going to attack the weak point, and he's going
to constantly be looking for that weak point.
Not for nothing does he take the form of a snake and
is he described as a snake?
As we've mentioned before, and as those who've dealt with snakes know,
if a snake can get his head into a place, the whole
snake is getting into that place.
And so that's what Satan does.
He finds whatever little opening he can, and he slithers through.
But there's an additional layer here when it comes to the military
analogy, that is perhaps the more important one for our discussion today.
If you look at military history, and the American Revolutionary War is
actually a great example, many times you will have forces on one
or more sides of a particular conflict employing tactics from previous wars.
That's not always bad.
Sometimes it works because sometimes technology and tactics haven't changed much between
one war and the next.
But sometimes they have.
And so for instance, in the American Revolutionary War, the British were
employing tactics from continental warfare of centuries past.
fine at the time, perhaps not great, but workable at the time
under certain conditions, did not work in the American theater.
It's part of the reason that they lost.
Because Americans, on the other hand, employed tactics that had been learned
during conflicts with the Amerindians, that had been taught by von Steuben
and Lafayette.
They had updated their tactics, they were employing tactics that were more
effective than those used by the British.
Satan does the same thing.
He updates his tactics.
He is not going to employ old tactics in a new conflict
unless he thinks that you've forgotten how to address those old tactics,
because he'll certainly do that.
But the confessions that we have
do not address all of the problems we are facing today.
And that is true regardless of which confession you happen to have
in mind.
If it's the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the
Augsburg Confession, the Full Book of Concord, Satan is not primarily attacking
those issues today.
He's attacking creation.
Because if you look at the confessions, particularly the ones from the
Reformation era, they are largely addressing issues such as justification.
There are many other issues that are addressed in the Book of
Concord and in other confessions, of course.
There's predestination, election, all of these things.
But Satan isn't attacking those.
As we pointed out previously, what he's attacking to attack now, with
a great deal of success in some cases, is creation itself.
Because if Satan can get you to deny creation, well, that's an
implicit denial of the creator.
So he doesn't need you to reject justification if he can simply
get you to reject God in toto, if he can get you
to reject who God is, then he doesn't need you to give
a confession that is by its words false.
Because what you mean when you confess it is false.
Because it's one thing to say the words.
It's another thing to say the words and mean the right thing
by them.
Because it's entirely possible to say something that the other person hears
as being entirely true and yet it's not what you meant.
This is something that Muslims use all the time when deceiving non-Muslims.
They lie about Islam, and they lie in a number of different
ways. Sometimes it's simply that lie of commission.
They just outright lie about it.
But other times, they deliberately mislead by saying something that they know
you will hear one way, but they mean it another.
Mormons do the exact same thing, incidentally.
I don't believe Mormons have a particular term for it, the
Muslims have four different terms for their different kinds of deception.
Not the topic for today, but Just because the words themselves on
their face are true does not mean that the thing being said
is true.
Because for a thing to be true, with regard to the person
making the confession, the words must be true, the meaning must be
true, the understanding must be true.
Now that doesn't mean that it's bad to confess the creeds, even
if you don't completely understand them, because they're guardrails.
They serve as a bulwark against Satan and against heresy, against false
doctrine, and so it is good to confess them, but obviously, it
is better by far to actually understand what you are saying.
Because again, as wo said in his introduction, Satan can get you
to focus with a sort of monomania on a true confession and
get you to miss everything else, other truths that are also important.
Because there's not truth just in Scripture.
There's not truth just in the confessions.
There's truth in creation as well.
And that's why Satan is attacking creation.
If he can get you to deny these other truths eventually, he
will get you to deny the faith.
Because the consequence of denying the other truth will inevitably be denying
the faith.
What he'll do effectively is turn you into a Gnostic.
Because if you deny the reality of creation, that's effectively what you're
becoming. If you are the kind of person, and we've all encountered
this sort of person recently, who simply says that's not a gospel
issue? That's not about salvation, that doesn't matter.
How is that about Jesus?
Almost without exception, when someone uses that objection, he's a Gnostic.
He may not know it, but he is a Gnostic because he
is denying the reality of creation and trying to spiritualize everything.
So that's a case in which Satan is bringing back an ancient
heresy. Really, it never went away, but it is an ancient heresy,
and he's using it in a new form, to get men to
confess things that often are in their own sense, in a minimal
way, true, but in the way they are employed by Satan, they
are getting those men to give a false confession, getting them to
deny the faith.
Because you can say that's not about Jesus, and maybe that's true.
But that's not an objection.
If someone, for instance, raises the reality of race, because that's part
of creation, we see that in creation.
It is a Abundantly obvious to any man with eyes.
If he can get you to deny that, if Satan can get
you to say, well, that's not real, it's not a gospel issue,
it's not about Jesus, well, he's turned you into a Gnostic.
Because now you said the flesh doesn't matter, the flesh isn't real,
it's only the spirit.
Well that's denying God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,
in the words of both the Apostles in the Nicene Creed.
Satan is getting you to deny
reality, getting you to deny a truth that isn't explicitly mentioned in
Scripture. It's everywhere in Scripture, of course.
You have the Table of Nations, you have Acts seventeen, you have
all these places where it is mentioned, and it is assumed throughout
the pages of Scripture.
But you're not going to find a specific verse that simply says,
God created the races of men, races real, and that lists a
bunch of the things that we know from looking at creation.
Just because it's not there in an explicit verse does not mean
it is not true.
And if Satan can get you to deny any truth, he is
eventually going to get you to deny all truth.
least if you don't repent of rejecting that initial truth.
Which is part of the problem when it comes to these confessions
from the Reformation era.
They state things that are true.
Again, we're not going to say that they're all correct, but certainly
as Lutherans, we're going to say in the case of the Book
of Concord, it's correct.
In so far as it addresses matters, it is accurate, it is
a true statement of the faith because it agrees with scripture.
But it does not address the problems we have today.
And so when men try to bring up the Book of Concord
and try to use it as a cudgel in order to attack
men who are addressing other problems, well now the Book of Concord
has become an idol.
And incidentally, you can in fact do the same thing with Scripture.
In the case of Scripture, it takes a slightly different form, but
it's a form that is familiar to all of us because it's
something that Satan loves to do, and I just went over how
he does it.
If Satan can get you to set two truths against each other
and reject one, that's his opening.
And so if you think that you find a truth in creation,
and then someone tells you well that conflicts with scripture, be very
careful, because the truth contained in scripture is from God, and the
truth contained in nature is from God.
Those things will not conflict.
It's one of the reasons that evolution is so dangerous because evolution
makes claims about truth with regard to reality, with regard to creation,
and then attempts to set those at odds with scripture.
And so the problem that you are faced with when you look
at that is well either scripture is false
or evolution is false.
That's the actual problem there.
That's the actual decision you have to make.
But how they try to spin it, because how Satan tries to
spin it is
that evolution is just obviously true because it's just making these assertions
about things that we observe in creation, that we observe in of
course they wouldn't call it creation, but these things that we observe
in the natural world, so obviously this is true, so now you
have to reinterpret what you believe about scripture, because obviously that can't
be true at the same time as this.
The issue, of course, is that the claims asserted by evolution, are
ultimately false.
The minor claims are true to some degree, but the major claims
are false.
We've gone over this in previous episodes.
But what Satan wants you to do is deny some truth, any
truth, wherever it is.
He doesn't really care which one it is, because he just wants
that opening.
And if he can get you to lie with the truth, That's
so much better.
Because it is much more difficult to get a man to realize
that he has been confessing the truth but in a false way
than it is to get a man to realize he's simply been
confessing a lie.
Because if you've been confessing a lie and someone can prove to
you it's a lie, only an insane man is not going to
reject that and reform what he believes.
But if you've been confessing the truth and someone is trying to
tell you, yes, but
you're missing this part of the truth, or you're confessing it in
a way that is effectively false, that is a much harder argument.
It is much more difficult to get someone to repent in that
case. And that's why Satan loves it.
If he can get you to entrench on whatever it is, one
of the confessions, some particular aspect of Christian doctrine, and in doing
so, get you to reject other truth
He's got you.
Because now it is going to be almost impossible for anyone else
to convince you that what you're doing is wrong because what you're
doing is true, right?
You're telling the truth.
You're speaking the truth.
The things you've said are true.
Perhaps. But it's not the whole truth.
And that's the issue, because it has to be the truth, and
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Not just some little portion of the truth and certainly not some
little portion of the truth used in a way that is misleading
or even outright false.
The summer of my junior year of high school, I went to
a week-long summer camp for basically law school.
And it was brought to mind by Corey's beginning and ending in
that segment where he talked about the whole truth.
One of the exercises that we did was a moot court where
we were all given a fact pattern and each of us was
given assignments for our roles.
I was assigned to be the defendant.
Yeah, I don't remember exactly the details, but I think the gist
of it was that I had been a father at my kids
baseball game and I hit somebody.
There was some sort of altercation in the parking lot.
There was some verbal disagreement that turned into a physical altercation.
And so I was being put on trial for assault or for
battery. And I remember it because it was a fun exercise.
But as the defendant, I wasn't given any information.
Everyone else wasn't given, I don't think.
I could be wrong about that.
But when I took a look at the fact pattern that I
had been given, my own conclusion as me was that well, this
guy's clearly guilty.
But when I was on the stand, I wasn't going to tell
the whole truth.
I thought I was guilty.
Because I was a defendant.
And so I tried to be as clever as I could, because
it was the competition against the other kids and to show off
and whatever.
And so I was exonerated on the stand and moot court.
And it And as soon as I was found not guilty, I
laughed and said I was so guilty, which triggered subsequent discussion about
double jeopardy 'cause some of the kids were really offended.
And I was reminded of that because obviously, we all have an
incentive not to tell the whole truth when we're going to get
in trouble.
And that's one of the big problems with these long-running theological disputes
or cases where there's men no theological dispute, but suddenly something comes
into dispute that no one's ever really thought about, there's a good
chance that you're gonna get it wrong at some point.
Not because you're a bad person or because you're evil or because
you're stupid.
You might just get it wrong.
You were missing something.
Maybe you didn't have all the facts.
Maybe you couldn't put it all together.
Maybe you personally are not the right person to be figuring out
complicated theological problems.
That's almost universally true.
So don't feel bad if it applies to you.
In these circumstances, as fallible human beings, when we are faced with
fact patterns in real life where we can get stuff wrong, and
theology is on the line, which means that morality is on the
line. Calling God a liar is on the line.
Suddenly the willingness to tell the whole truth is paramount because the
natural incentive to say I'm gonna be really clever when I'm engaging
here, I'm not gonna say anything that's gonna give up any ground
in a debate or in you know some sort of trial, that
makes a kind of sense.
Doesn't necessarily make moral sense, but it makes logistical sense.
Because if you just give away the whole game by conceding your
opponent's point, then why have the dispute in the first place?
Just admit you were wrong.
We don't have that tendency.
I'm not saying necessarily we should, but the problem is that the
armor that we have as individuals, as human beings, is to push
in the other direction, to never give an inch, even when we
should. So, say in some of these theological disputes, like evolution, we
did six thousand years in counting as an episode where one of
the things we talked about was evolution.
And we made the case there that it's completely incompatible with Christianity.
And yet at the same time, there are a lot of Christians
who in good conscience believe that it's okay because they've they've not
heard the arguments that we made there.
They've not given it much thought.
You know, it kinda makes sense, and you know, I guess Genesis
maybe could be allegorical, so I believe in God, I believe in
scripture. I just think that it took longer than six, seven thousand
years for all this stuff to come into being.
We made the case in that episode that the only way evolution,
macroevolution, can exist is with death.
And so either scripture is lying about when death entered the world,
or evolution is impossible.
You can't have it both ways.
And that's not an argument that most people have heard.
So there are a number of people when they heard that are
like, okay, I believe that evolution is false now.
Some people had their minds changed just based on that fact, because
it's a black and white situation where the observable universe, portions of
it, for example, the age of the earth and the age of
the universe itself, which doesn't suggest evolution, but those ages are much
older than the age given in Scripture.
It does not necessarily follow that Scripture is wrong, but it does
imply that different things are happening.
So the argument we made is that Adam had an age when
he was created.
He was zero days of living, but he wasn't a baby.
He was a fully grown, sexually mature man.
And And as I mentioned before, after doing that episode, in the
episode, I speculated, you know, maybe he was 40 years old.
I realized after the fact he had to have been 70 years
old. I believe that now that Adam was created as a 70-year-old.
Because A, it would have made him an elder, and B it
would have meant that he died when he was a thousand years
of age.
So a speculative maybe I'm wrong, but he had an age, and
that was the point.
Adam was created with an age.
The earth was created with an age.
The universe was created
with an age.
And it is entirely up to God that those don't have to
be the same age.
In order for everything mechanically to work out with the universe, they
have to be different ages.
And so that is what we observe.
And so there are cases where reason when apprehending creation is going
to seemingly contradict scripture.
And that doesn't mean that we just have to give up on
either. There may be sometimes a clever solution that lets both accord.
Some things are just flat out miraculous.
The examples we've given the past are things like baptism and communion,
the hypostatic union, God, Jesus Christ being fully man and fully God,
which is incidentally why there are three ecumenical creeds, battling that out
for centuries, because it's such a big deal and it's such a
hard problem to wrap our heads around because it's miraculous.
If you try to be completely rational when you're talking about the
nature of Christ, you're gonna be a heretic.
You will absolutely 100% be a heretic if you try to take
reason and shoehorn Christ's nature into that because it is irrational.
You're dealing with a God and B supernatural happenings.
So there are very limited cases where our reason fails.
Our reason fails all the time.
There are limited cases where what we observe is plainly contradictory to
scripture, but it's exceedingly rare.
Most of the time, places where scripture is silent are places where
creation testifies.
And so they're in accord because scripture says that God made everything.
So anything that you find, God made.
There's no adversarial nature there.
That's why it's called God's two books.
Both of these things testify his glory.
And you know what?
Scripture says the same thing.
Scripture says that God points to creation as testifying to his glory.
So it's not a wacko position to say that you can believe
all those things at once, even when they don't talk to each
other. You're never going to discover what's in scripture in nature.
There are things in nature that you will find described in scripture.
We need both to understand the glory and the might of God
and to understand his love for us.
And scripture is more important because it fills in all the blanks
we can never apprehend with our reason.
It's only by that faith being passed down as fact as the
written word of God, which at one point in history was the
oral word of God.
One of the other examples that we used in the apostasy episode
that I mentioned from last year was King Josiah, whom whom scripture
describes as having been a boy king, having been a faithful king,
and yet when it describes and we went into great detail in
that episode we read the whole section where it described all the
things that were going on in King Josiah's temple at the time
that he was king.
And it was profound wickedness.
There were ashera poles, there were altars to false gods, to demons.
All of this wickedness was being worshipped in and around God's temple
with Josiah's permission, and he thought he was serving God.
And that was the purpose of that illustration.
Josiah believed with a clean conscience that all the evil that he
was participating in before they found the book of the law in
the temple, they found it in some rubble or in some dust,
it was completely forgotten.
When they rediscovered scripture, he he repented.
He had it read to him and he immediately knew that he
had been engaged in the most grievous, idolatrous wickedness.
He repented on the spot.
He didn't try to synthesize the two.
He didn't ask his priest to pour through that to find some
example or some reason, some out, for him to say, Well, I'm
not actually guilty of this, because you know, it was like this
when I got here, so it's not my fault.
That's the human impulse to try to find some excuse.
He was horrified properly because he was a faithful Christian.
And that's why God credited him as righteousness, his belief, even in
the face of the wickedness he'd participated in for nearly a decade
of of his kingship when they rediscovered scripture and put it into
practice again, and again as we said there, not only did they
forget where the book of the law was, but they forgot it
existed. That's how far gone they were.
They had forgotten the existence of the written word.
And so when this was rediscovered, it was telling them things they'd
completely forgotten, things they didn't have any access to.
Because again, you can't find it in nature.
You can only find that which God reveals in his word through
his word.
You're not going to find it on gold tablets.
You're not going to find it in the stars.
You're only going to find it in Scripture.
He repented.
He had no excuses.
He didn't blame anyone.
He said, Lord have mercy, let's fix this as soon as possible.
And he spent the rest of his kingship addressing those problems and
he fixed it very quickly.
And so
his kingdom again fell into wickedness as soon as he died 'cause
his son was evil, but at least for his sake, there's a
period of time where his people were blessed by faithful teaching.
And that gets into the other thing that Corey said.
Satan doesn't necessarily even need our individual churches to apostatize conversation.
Completely in one generation.
So it's fine if you go from having strong belief to having
a syncretist mixture of beliefs, but you still go to heaven somehow.
God sorts it out.
You're forgiven for your errors, of which we all have.
And you go to heaven despite having held some false beliefs.
Satan still wins because he's playing a multi-generational game because what you
have done is created an inheritance for the next generation that's worse
off than the one that you found.
So when it's passed down, what everyone is taught is this messed
up version that's riddled with lies and has some truth in it.
What do you think's gonna happen in that circumstance?
Is it gonna somehow emerge even better in another generation?
Or is it gonna continue to deteriorate?
Satan knows how to play this game, and he plays it for
the long run.
He's perfectly content to let some generations to go to heaven.
He'd like to get everybody, but if he has an intermediary generation
that's in decay, such that, you know, maybe they preserved the temple
before Josiah, somebody preserved the temple in some knowledge of God, and
then just misplaced scripture.
Maybe they were still Christian.
They were still believers, but they forgot where the Bible was.
And then a generation passed and a generation passed and soon nobody
remembers anything.
That's how Satan plays this game, which is why we have to
always be vigilant at every point.
We can never let air creep in.
And wherever we find error, wherever we find it, we have to
respond as Josiah did.
We have to be horrified.
And we have to personally repent the moment we realize we've been
in error.
It is possible, it has happened to you.
It has happened to me.
It will happen again.
We're not perfect creatures.
We are imperfect.
We're fallible.
We're foolish.
We're selfish, we're gonna stick to whatever makes us feel good.
And the things that are true generally don't meet that criteria.
The things that are true that are of God genuinely, they're usually
unpopular. They're usually going to get you into trouble.
So when people start screaming and shouting and saying, you can't do
that. That's evil.
That's wicked.
That's not what we've done since the 1960s, you're going to have
to face an uphill battle and you're going to have to choose
do I fit in or do I obey God?
When a generation fails to meet that test head on, that generation
is going to apostatize.
And then the inheritance passed on to future generations of the church,
the entire church is going to be false doctrine, false belief, and
spiritual weakness, where there's no notion of fighting or contending for that
which is true in a from God.
At this point, when someone actually wants to contend with things that
are godly, contend for them in the face of adversaries in public,
the guy's usually going to get shouted down.
Why are you fighting?
Why are you you're angry about stuff?
you're causing dissent.
Everything was so peaceful and happy, and then you said somebody was
wrong about God and everyone's riled up.
Look at all the disruption you're causing.
Well, it's possible that there's actual harm being done by someone doing
that, if everyone was right in the first place, or it's possible
that someone's pulling the fire alarm.
And the dire situation that we face today is that all of
us individually are in put in a situation where we have to
discern as best we can, has someone messed up in a previous
generation? Have they made a false confession or has Satan tricked us
into taking a true confession and twisting it and using it for
purposes for which it was never intended.
Another example I point to frequently is the bronze serpent that Moses
held aloft at the command of God, he had him fashion a
bronze serpent, to hold up on a pole in front of Israel,
because they were being bitten by snakes, poisonous snakes, that incidentally God
sent. And God told Moses to have Israel look at this serpent,
this bronze serpent on a pole, and those who gazed upon it
would be saved from the venomous stings and not die.
And it worked.
Those who obeyed God were saved from poisoning and dying.
And then later on, a few books later, we find out that
they kept that bronze serpent and they gave it a name.
They named it Nehushton, and they were worshipping it as a god.
So this is what confessions often end up doing.
You have something that was good at the time, it was true,
it served a purpose, it was entirely in accord with God's will.
And yet somebody decides we're gonna hang on to it and we're
gonna s reuse it for some other purpose for which it was
not intended, it was not ordained by God.
And next thing you know, you have idolatry.
In that case, it was straight up idol worship.
They gave the name of a demon.
They were worshiping it instead of God.
That's how easy it is for us to do these things.
You know, in the case of things like creeds and a good
sound Christian confession, you don't throw it away after a generation 'cause
it served its purpose, but you must always acknowledge that it only
served the purpose of answering the questions that those men faced at
that time.
There can be no doubt that if the exact same men who
wrote all the books in the Book of Conquered, the Lutheran Confessions,
or your Confessions of Your Church, whatever it is, if all of
those men were alive today in our churches and our circumstances, those
men, if those confessions did not exist, they would write very different
confessions. Does that mean that the old ones are wrong?
No. It means they were solving a different purpose.
A faithful contender for God's word is going to deal with what's
in front of him.
And sometimes that's going to mean talking about things that people haven't
talked about before.
And when that happens, you're going to have men who are going
to try to cling to the old confession just like that bronze
serpent. They're gonna wave it around and say, well, what what about
this? We've had this for centuries, and it it clearly applies here
because of the old use.
Like, well, the old use doesn't apply here because we have a
different problem now.
The reason the pattern keeps repleting is that it's human nature to
fall for it and it's Satan's playbook.
He loves this crap because it's easy, it keeps working, we keep
gobbling it up, and it's deadly.
It's deadly to souls.
Maybe not in one generation, maybe it takes three or four.
Do you think Satan cares?
No. He can keep attacking people in many different ways as he
wants. He doesn't need to corrupt every church instantly all the time.
He'll take his time if it means that he can ultimately destroy
a church, especially one that once had a sound confession.
What greater victory for hell than to take something that was once
true and faithful and to gradually corrupt it and get it to
turn its own confessions that once pointed to God and then have
it point to hell.
That's as satanic as it gets.
That is what we're dealing with as an enemy.
And the problem is that we don't believe it.
We believe that as long as we just keep mouthing the correct
words, we're going to be saved from everything.
As long as we cry, Lord, Lord, we're gonna be honky dory.
God warns us about that.
For
anyone who happens to be thinking that this could never happen, this
is obviously something about which we don't really need to worry because
Satan couldn't possibly
Well, I would direct you to look at the various church bodies
in the United States.
Because we've seen exactly this play out over time.
Each and every tradition has bodies ranging from relatively conservative,
traditional, to wildly liberal and outright and openly apostate.
In the case of the Presbyterians you have the OPC, the PCA
and PCUSA.
In the case of even the Methodists, you have the Wesleyan and
then you have all the way down to the UMC.
For the Anglicans or the Episcopalians you have Acna and Tech, and
you even have the same thing with regard to the Baptists from,
say, the IFB churches, SBC is middle of the road, and then
there's ABC USA, which is the very liberal Baptist body.
In the case of Lutherans, we have the LCMS, NALC, LCMC, and
Elka. Now those of us who are Lutheran would not call Elka
Lutheran. We would in fact say they should not be allowed to
use the name Lutheran.
Because they're not even Christian.
But they didn't start out that way.
They started out as a faithful Lutheran body.
They started out as a merger of a number of bodies and
the organization chart, as it were, starts to get complicated, but they
didn't start out apostate.
That happened incrementally over a number of generations.
Because they would yield on an issue here, or they would stop
confessing this truth in the right way there.
And eventually, you wind up flying the so-called rainbow flag and the
BLM flag, and suddenly your churches are empty and you're having to
sell them to balance your budget.
We've seen this play out time and time again.
And it hasn't played out just in the US, it's played out
everywhere there have been Christians when they didn't guard the deposit of
faith entrusted to them by their forefathers, or when their forefathers themselves
were corrupt, as often happens.
This is very much a playbook that Satan has been running for
a very long time, and he will continue to run it, because
it will continue to work.
What we're saying is this is something against which Christians have to
guard, because not only do we have to guard against it for
ourselves, but we have to guard against it for those who will
come after us as well.
Because as Woe was saying, and as we've addressed in previous episodes,
it may be that your errors don't damn you, but your children
will be worse off, and their children will be even worse off.
And unless you have something like a reformation, like a restoration of
right doctrine and teaching, eventually you are going to wind up with
bodies calling themselves churches
that are nothing of the sort.
Because the things they teach aren't true, and the things they teach
do not save.
Can you be a member of an Elka Church and possibly be
saved? Sure.
Felicitous inconsistency does exist.
But you don't want to rely on that.
As I've said before, if you are out hiking, generally
speaking, unless you're one of those people who has some issue with
adrenaline, you don't try to get as close to the cliff as
possible. When it comes to issues of religion, when it comes to
doctrinal issues, you should absolutely avoid the cliff.
You don't want to get as close as possible to the line
of apostasy.
Well, I'm not over the line, so I'm fine.
The issue is you don't know exactly where that line is.
You don't know how many false beliefs you can hold and still
be saved.
We're not saying that you should doubt your salvation, we're not addressing
this topic in order to cause you to fear.
We're just calling you to think about these issues, to be mindful
of what you believe, why you believe it, what you confess, why
you confess it.
Because again, it's not sufficient.
Just to confess the thing mindlessly.
A parrot can do that.
It is important to understand the words you're saying, what they mean,
and why you're saying them.
Because even if, let's say you understand all of that perfectly, if
all that you pass on to the next generation is the words,
devoid of understanding, devoid of the why, then they are in a
precarious situation.
It may be sufficient for them.
But what about the generation that comes after them?
All of these issues are generational.
Because that is simply how it works for mortal men.
We're only around for eighty-ish years, depending on genetics and other factors.
Misadventure. And generally speaking, there's twenty-five to thirty years between generations, so
you have that overlapping time in order to transmit the faith to
the next generation, but you have to make sure that what you're
transmitting is the truth, is the whole truth, and is nothing but
the truth.
Not just certain sub-segments of the truth, not the truth with some
bits distorted.
Because Satan is going to be around for that next generation.
He's still going to be here, working at destroying the faith, working
at leading men astray, long after you're gone.
He's been at it for thousands of years.
We don't have thousands of years.
We have a limited time in which to get these things right
and then to pass them on to future generations.
And if we don't take those issues seriously, it's very possible to
go from something like what the LCMS was in the 1800s and
the early 1900s to what Elke is today.
And it can happen a lot faster than most men believe.
It doesn't take a hundred generations to become apostate.
As Woe mentioned with Nehushtan, that took less than a generation maybe
one generation, essentially.
And they went from I won't say good and proper worship of
the true God, because obviously they had their problems at that point
in Israel's history, but they went from recognizing and understanding at least
at least part of the truth, to open idolatry.
And the example of what has happened in the US with Lutheranism
is a great warning.
It's not just Lutheranism.
I'm not picking on Lutherans.
It just happens to be that I'm Lutheran, and I'm most familiar
with their history.
Obviously, the same thing has happened as I mentioned with the Presbyterians
and the Baptists and others as well.
But But it is very possible to go from conservative Christian bodies
that confess right doctrine and two generations later
have essentially empty pews with female so called pastors preaching Marxism from
the pulpit.
We've seen that happen.
There are men alive today They who watched it happen within their
own lifespan.
Because there were men when they were children who were attending Elka
churches, or what would become Elka in many cases, faithful churches
and they've watched that change in their own lifespan.
They should have left those churches long ago, but some of them
have not.
This is not something that is theoretical or something that is just
some possibility out there that this is something that is you should
think about it, because maybe it'll happen.
No, this is something that Satan actively exploits and actively pursues every
single day.
Because it works.
It's effective.
Satan is not going to use ineffective tactics over the long run.
Because he's not dumb.
If he were dumb, he wouldn't be a threat.
If he were dumb, we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with these
issues. Because then he'd basically be a court gesture and we could
just ignore him or laugh at him.
We should certainly still laugh at him, but we should also take
him seriously
as the enemy that he is.
Because he does prowl about as a roaring lion seeking to consume
whom he can.
And one of the ways that he does that is leading men
astray by getting them to turn into an idol that which is
in fact true, but true only in so far as the things
it addresses and when it is used true used truthfully
because
there's a certain Latin phrase that comes to mind when dealing with
this issue, and of course that is abusus usum non tolit, which
is a general Latin maxim, a legal maxim, but also a logical
one, and essentially it just means that the abuse of a thing
does not destroy the use of a thing, which is to say,
a good A good thing can in fact be abused.
We all know that.
I'm holding a pen right now.
I always wind up using my pen as an example because it's
usually in my hand when recording.
But I can write with my pen, which is a good use.
I could also stab someone in the neck with my pen, which
is usually a bad use, unless it's self defense, which is a
different matter.
Don't really want to destroy the pen, but there is a good
use for the thing, and just because there's a bad use does
not mean the good use is destroyed.
But perhaps we need a sort of corollary.
Usus bonus abusum non precludit a good use does not preclude abuse.
Just because a thing has a good use does not mean you
cannot abuse it.
And so the standard maxim is that the abuse doesn't destroy the
use, but we should keep in mind the corollary as well.
The good use does not mean that the thing cannot be abused.
And so just because there is this good use for our confessions,
just because they are true They are true in
the matters they address, in the way in which they address them,
when you understand what they're saying, does not mean that Satan cannot
use them to mislead, because he can certainly get you to give
a false confession with words that on their face appear to be
true. Now I know this is going to sound horrible to some
of you some of you, because quite frankly it is a horrible
thing. The idea that you could give a false confession that you
could lie effectively with the truth is a terrifying possibility.
But it remains a fact.
It is something that can occur, and we all recognize this, from
the examples given with regard to the courts, for instance, that's one
people can grasp quite readily.
Another example would be the use of words that are not univocal
but in a univocal fashion, essentially equivocation.
If you speak a certain a certain sentence will abstract it a
bit. If I say X is true, well it depends what X
is, rather heavily, doesn't it?
And so if I mean one thing by X, and in that
case it's true, it doesn't mean that it holds for all senses
of that.
A more concrete example.
If you told another person I saw Tom at the party.
Well if you know more than one Tom, there's an ambiguity there's
the problem there.
That can be exploited to mislead.
Because maybe you know the other person will think one person One
friend, Tom, but you actually saw the other one.
Maybe there's a reason you're attempting to mislead.
That's what Satan attempts to do.
He wants you to say something that is false.
He doesn't care if there's a particular sense in which it could
be true, because the goal is to get you to give the
false confession, or to get you to distort the confession and pass
it on as a false confession.
Because sure Satan would love to drag you personally to hell.
But if he can't get you, he will definitely settle for your
grandchildren. And so these are things against which we have to guard,
because if we lose this deposit entrusted to us, if we lose
the faith, the truth, the good confessions, the things that have been
entrusted to us as part of our patrimony, we
Then we are passing on a burden to the next generation, and
it may be that they will lose the faith.
Because that certainly happened all over the world.
As we have mentioned so many times, all three of Noah's sons
walked off the ark, knowing the Christian faith.
Now there's some doubt as to what particularly Ham believed, but he
knew of the Christian faith.
Did they all pass it on?
The answer is no.
In fact, at some point that chain was broken in all cases,
because all of humanity apostatized.
To varying degrees and at varying times.
That may have happened in this very way, getting men to state
something that's true, but not in that sense.
For instance, Nehushtan
God did command Moses to create that.
That was something from God.
It had a legitimate use.
It was then used in a way that was an abuse.
It was used in a way to mislead.
It was turned into an idol.
Because if you looked at it, if you used it in the
way that God commanded, it would save you from death from being
bitten by the serpents.
But if you start to worship it instead, if you turn it
into an idol, you're using it in this false way.
It doesn't change the nature of the thing, because the thing was
still from God and had that legitimate use.
But what you have done with it, what Satan has got you
to do with it, Is idolatry, is apostasy.
It is entirely possible to apostatize while speaking words that on their
face that on the surface appear to be true.
The phrase it's true, but is something that should really weigh on
us much more.
I think that when we see these arguments playing out in public
or in private, there's not
the inherent impulse to guard against the butt part.
All the guys want to argue about, especially if they're not particularly
good at hammering these issues out, then in the case where someone's
not particularly adept, all they're going to be able to lean on
is whether or not it's true.
And if it's true, that's gotta be good enough.
As I said earlier, it's necessary for us to have these North
Stars, to have these frames of reference so that we don't lose
our way.
And sometimes they are just summaries and distillations, like the creeds.
And we've mentioned a previous episode when we were talking about the
creeds. One of the reasons that typically the either the apostles or
Nicene Creed is put right before or right after a sermon is
so even the man who doesn't know a lot about theology, if
he hears a sermon and the very next or the very previous
thing that he hears is a creed that contradicts something in the
sermon, he's probably gonna notice.
He might not be the one to figure it out or argue
correctly how to fix it, but he might have enough awareness, situational
awareness, to say, hey, the creed says this about Jesus nature and
the pastor said something that I don't understand.
That doesn't mean that the pastor is a a liar or blasphemer
or anything.
Hopefully it's just a good teaching moment, where there's some subtlety that
you know a good teacher can tease out and explain to someone.
But those are also there as curbs to say whatever you say
in the pulpit it had better accord with these creeds, because these
are many centuries old.
These North Stars of a Basic Confession of the Christian faith.
And they're not complete.
I reread all three of them earlier just to prepare for this.
And I noticed one thing I was looking for, whether and to
what extent they refer to scripture.
And scripture is pretty much an afterthought.
One of them mentions that it talks about Jesus as being raised
from the dead.
And so the creed confesses that scripture exists and says some good
stuff, but you know, that's you just have the gospels and you'd
be set there.
That doesn't imply or certainly state that all of scripture is breathed
out by God.
And it wasn't that the men who crafted the creeds denied scripture
in the slightest.
That's my whole point.
They didn't mention it because it wasn't what they were fighting over.
When we get in this position where we wanna make arguments where
we'll say it's true But I'm gonna go in this other direction.
That's when we're in real danger.
I want to leave you with something that John the Baptist said
at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry for Matthew 3.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to
his baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned
you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, and do not presume to say
to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father.
For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise
up children for Abraham.
That warning should be a warning to each of us, because this
tendency that the churches have and that we have been taught is
to become Pharisees.
I want you to remember the words we have Abraham as our
father. Because every time someone picks up his confession and waves it
in the air is proof of what a sound theologian he is.
That's exactly what he's doing.
He is saying, I have Abraham as my father.
How can I possibly be wrong when I'm waving this confession in
the air.
It's a carnival Barker's trick, even if it's true, because it's not
a sound argument.
That's the distinction here.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that what he is holding
up in the air is a true true and faithful confession of
the word, it doesn't mean that whatever else he's saying is also
true just because he believes that thing.
Each argument needs to stand on its own and it needs to
be consistent with other arguments, and all those arguments need to be
rooted in scripture.
Any departure from that is an opening for Satan to attack, and
he always will, without fail.
He's the one orchestrating these departures from Scripture.
He's the one orchestrating these departures.
And sometimes he begins the way he began with Eve, by tricking
her into confessing truly, and that was his opening.
Every time you hear someone saying, I have Abraham as my father,
Other, you're dealing with a Pharisee.
Doesn't mean that he's apostate, but that is a Phariseeal argument to
presume that because of the genealogy of one set of ideas that
everything else is legitimate.
That's not reason, it's not borne out by scripture.
it's an absurdity, and it's one that wouldn't work on us if
we were being vigilant.
That's really what this episode is about.
It's a call to vigilance in whatever circumstances you find yourself.
They're gonna be different than my circumstances.
That's fine.
And we're gonna have differences of opinion about what our confessions should
be. We should all be on the same page, because only one
of us can be right.
But even if your confessions are true, if you are met with
the impulse to wave them in the air and say, I can't
be wrong about this other thing because I hold to this, you're
being a Pharisee.
You're being a tiny little Pharisee and you're doing something stupid and
you're giving Satan a foothold.
Even if you're right.
Even if you're right about the thing you're arguing about, never mind
the confession being true.
Even if you're also right about the thing you're opposing, if you're
using that pharisaical argument, I have Abraham as my father, that's the
opening that Satan might use 20 years down the road.
We can never let ourselves get away with doing that.
Because that's it.
That's the whole shooting match as soon as we start making those
arguments. And it was prophetic when John the Baptist mentioned that because
throughout the rest of the New Testament, that's what they act like.
They continuously say, you can't be right because we have Abraham as
our father.
We were never slaves, which is a lie.
Incidentally, it's absurd.
The lengths that they went to to point to Abraham being their
father is justification for everything else.
It's an absurdity, it's a falsehood, it is a bad argument, and
it's the first step to hell.
Or not necessarily the first step.
It's one of the steps to hell.
For some it may be the first step.
For others, it's probably not.
But it's never a good argument.
We have We have to catch ourselves when we say it's true,
but and then realize that we are we're on shaky ground.
If you're asserting something true that's irrelevant, you're making a bad argument
in any context.
And if you're doing it with theology, you're getting into very dangerous
territory. Because another thing we've said many times, when you make a
scriptural argument, a doctrinal Christian argument, if someone believes you, if they
agree with you, you're binding their conscience.
In this particularly a problem with pastors and clerics, because they automatically
get that sort of respect accorded to them by virtue of their
office. When someone attains the teaching office in public, everyone is naturally
going to tend to defer to him.
When in doubt, you're probably not going to argue with a pastor.
And that's a good tendency.
I don't want people going around arguing with their pastors all the
time. That's disruptive.
You're probably wrong if the guy's half competent.
Even if you're both wrong about stuff, he's probably gonna argue it
better than you.
So frankly, picking these fights is not a good idea until you've
done a ton of legwork, which you may or may not be
competent to do.
But it's not a question of being disruptive.
It's a question of just understanding, are we getting into trouble here?
Maybe all you can do is go talk to someone else who
has his head on straight better than you do to help you
check what's going on, to maybe straighten you out.
In a lot of cases that's going to be the case.
You just misunderstood something.
The pastor said something true you didn't understand, you got upset, you
were wrong.
That can happen.
Repent. Figure it out and repent.
Part of the episode that we did a while back called You
Are Forgiven, when we discussed repentance.
The essence of repentance is turning away from your sin, from your
error, realizing that you were wrong.
Repentance is not sorrow.
It's not a feeling.
It's a behavior.
It's a change of direction.
And that's part of the Christian life.
To realize, oh crap, I screwed up.
I didn't know what I was doing wrong.
I did it in good conscience.
I've realized it was evil.
I'm doing a 180 right now.
I'm going in the opposite direction.
That's repentance.
And every Christian is capable of that.
A man who's not capable of that is not Christian, regardless of
what his confession is.
You can confess with your lips all day long.
If you can never possibly be wrong under any circumstances, if you
can never have sinned, you can be guaranteed that you're not a
Christian. And those are often the guys who are the most insistent
that they're free from sin, basically hold themselves up as examples to
others. look how great you can be if you're just like me.
What a nightmarish thing to say to someone.
God help you, please be better than me.
When we're dealing with God's things, we have to take exceptional care.
And that's especially true of teachers and of pastors.
And part of that is realizing, just as Josiah realized, that he'd
made a mistake.
He was in sin.
Satan's been doing this for seven thousand years, and he knows that
one of the most effective strategies is to get men to confess
true things so that he can destroy them.
We're not immune to that.
We're vulnerable to it.
The man who's just straight up apostate who says I hate God
I'm out of here.
I'm I'm gonna be an atheist now, I'm gonna live a degenerate
life. He's no threat when it comes to this.
No one's gonna be misled by his life and think, well, this
is what godly living looks like.
He's not going to bind anyone's conscience with his wicked ways.
He's going to be a bad example, maybe an appealing example to
some. But it's the man who says, no, this is what God
wants us all to do.
And I'm gonna hurt you if you don't agree.
The man who wants to make arguments that aren't in scripture that
aren't consistent with scripture, that's the man who's a real danger.
Well, the earliest episodes that we did was on neglected matters in
scripture. And one that's I've thought about more and more lately is
the directive from Jesus Christ to curse those who reject the gospel.
He said to shake the dust off your feet against a town,
against an entire group of people.
And the apostles did it.
In fact, Paul did it to the extent that he said to
the Jews, Your blood be upon your own heads, I'm gonna go
preach to the Europeans.
And that's what he said.
He cursed them in the name of God for rejecting God.
And he was obeying Jesus Christ when he did it.
Now Now find a pastor who's going to say we must curse
those who reject the gospel.
As we said in that episode, and I'll reiterate here.
I don't know exactly what that looks like.
I I'm not advocating for the church of going around and cursing
people. that's not the point.
But if you're dealing with someone who, when he sees those passages
that say, curse those who reject the gospel, if you say that's
not my God, you're a Pharisee, you are saying I have Abraham
as my father, because I've got all this stuff.
Oh, but I don't believe that.
That's a bunch of crap.
Whatever God said here in Scripture is clearly wrong, because I have
all this other stuff that he said that I believe.
And this is my God.
This is the problem that we have today.
Inside the church people are picking and choosing which parts of scripture
they like and don't like, and reinventing a new god from the
pieces. It is untenable, it is a danger to souls, and it's
everywhere around us.
So beware of those who say, I have Abraham as my father.
Beware of those who waive their confession as the proof of their
legitimacy. If their words and their actions are legitimate, they'll be borne
out by Scripture.
And if their words and actions are not borne out by Scripture,
then they're not legitimate, and they have something of which to repent.
And the same is true of each of us.
Same is certainly true of me.
It's just that simple.
We can't say that we're perfect.
We can't say that we're locked in and because we have the
genealogy of past performance that we're not going to make any mistakes
in the future.
Nothing ever works that way.
And the fact that that's become a normal thing in the church
today is a tremendous danger.
So just watch out for it.
Watch out for guys who are saying, I have Abraham as my
father. You don't worry about it.
I I got this I got this settled.
This confession says that whatever else I'm saying is right, because this
confession is true.
It's a sales mechanism.
It's a logical fallacy.
It's all manner of deception.
If any of this sounds like Satan, congratulations.
You're starting to get a whiff of the sulfur that's emanating here.
It is possible for individuals to apostatize, it is possible for churches
to apostatize.
It is possible for your church to apostatize.
And when your church is doing it, that's probably when they're gonna
scream the loudest about their confessions while they're doing all the other
things that are not consistent with scripture.
Anything that's limited in its nature of its confession is going to
have holes that Satan can drive right around.
In the past, we've described the confessions of Lutheranism as a maginot
line. They were in impenetrable bulwark against certain attacks.
So what has Satan done the last five centuries?
He drove around.
He went over.
He didn't need to attack the impenetrable fortress of arguments about justification
and sanctification.
Fine, whatever.
You can say all that stuff all you want.
Satan has new attacks.
We have to be prepared for new attacks as Christians.
We have to be vigilant for false teachers who are incompetent or
who were actively malicious, because not only will they get these things
wrong, but they will tell us in the name of God that
we have to obey them while they lie.
We don't want this to be an unsettling or upsetting episode, but
in some ways it is.
Because to say that you have to be vigilant, even in the
face of true confessions, is deeply upsetting and disruptive.
It's a terrible situation, which is how you know it's from hell.
No man could cause this on his own to just if something
were true and men tried to attack it, it would withstand that
attack on its own.
But Satan is the ultimate rules lawyer.
He invented this crap.
He invented sitting on the stand like I did in moot court
and lying with the truth.
I told just enough that I wouldn't get in trouble.
That was play acting, I wasn't being duplicitous, but I also wanted
to be really clever.
I wanted to impress the other kids by beating the system.
That impulse is in all of us.
And when we bring it to bear in these situations that are
eternal life and death, we cross the line.
We can't do that.
We have to recognize if we have erred, we have to have
the confession of Josiah.
We have to rend our robes and beg for forgiveness.
And we have to repent on the spot.
Because Because anything else is doubling down and saying, I have Abraham
as my father, I'm gonna be fine.
On the last day, everyone who has that confession is gonna be
in the line with the goats