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Dec. 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:09:05
John MacArthur | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 29
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So then they tell you, you've got to join the Me Too movement, you've got to join the LGBTQ movement, you've got to join the transgender identity movement.
And so what happens to the church is it chases the world until it abandons its own message.
We are here on the Sunday special with the great John MacArthur, who is the president of the Masters University, and we are going to get into an enormous amount of his philosophy and work.
We're going to get into religion and free will and politics.
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Well.
Mr. MacArthur, Pastor MacArthur, thank you so much for showing up here.
I know that we had more anticipation in the office than we've had for, I think, virtually any other guest that we've ever had on the Sunday Special.
That's amazing, but I'm honored to be here.
Well, I'm honored to have you.
So let's jump right into the issue of the day, and that is religion and politics.
So you're not known as an overtly political preacher.
You talk more about values than politics.
What do you think the relationship should be between folks who are in the business of religion and trying to inform people about religion and politics?
How often should they be speaking about politics?
Should they be doing so openly or just preaching values?
My calling, my mandate, the command from heaven to me is to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.
That's the message that I am committed and mandated by God to preach.
It's the gospel.
Politics is the art of reordering human society on a temporal basis.
The message of the gospel has to do with eternal issues.
That doesn't mean I avoid everything political because I also want to do anything I can to elevate justice and righteousness in the world.
And so as a Christian, I want to take responsibility for whatever political avenues that I can go down that are going to increase the order of society, the blessing of society.
I want to be pro-family, pro-life, pro-character, pro-virtue, pro-morality, all those kinds of things, pro-honesty, pro-kindness, pro-mercy, pro-grace, all of those things in my culture.
That's mandated to me as well.
I'm to be a citizen who submits to the powers that be.
I am not to be a revolutionary.
We don't start riots.
That's not a Christian thing to do.
We don't even start revolutions.
And you could argue about the American Revolution, whether that was actually legitimately a Christian act or not.
We don't start revolutions.
We submit to the powers that be and we work to change the culture from the inside one soul at a time.
Okay, so let's talk about that for a second in terms of the leadership that we pick.
So, obviously you're talking a lot about submitting to the temporal nature of government.
If you go back to the Old Testament, it was prophets who were anointing kings.
What should our role be in a democracy in terms of shaping the values of that democracy for political reasons?
You see a lot of pastors who endorse particular political candidates.
Do you think that that's worthwhile, especially because A lot of the issues that you talk about are inherently political.
They may not have been political 50 years ago, but when you say pro-life, pro-family, pro-religion, these actually do have real-world consequences in the world of politics.
Yeah, it was a little different 50 years ago when we might have been talking about some sort of social structure and economics.
We're not talking about that anymore.
We're talking about morality now.
We're talking about whether we kill babies or don't kill babies.
We're talking about what is marriage.
We're talking about what is a family.
What is male?
What is female?
Those are the issues now that have made their way into the political world so that it's fraught with moral issues.
And if you are one who has a moral authority, which would be the word of the living God, the Creator, then your responsibility in any society is to make sure that God's moral standards are heard.
I can't force people to take those things, but when it comes, for example, 2 Samuel talks about rulers are to be just and to fear God and not take bribes.
I mean, that is what the Old Testament says.
So, that means if I'm looking at a politician who has a history of being bribed, who has no fear of God, who is atheistic or practically atheistic, that's not a divine qualification that I can support.
Somebody, for example, who advocates the slaughter of babies, which is murder by any biblical definition, any moral definition, that is not a just ruler.
That is not a man of mercy.
When Moses was selecting the rulers who would come under him in the book of Exodus, the qualifications were very, very clear.
They had to be just, and they had to be moral, and they had to fear God.
So, as much as I can, as a Christian, that's the kind of leader that I want to see.
That's the direction I want to see a society go for, temporally, the benefit of that society, the immediate benefit of that society.
Ordered families are a tremendous common grace.
Obedient children are a common grace, an ordered culture where people submit to the authorities, as it talks about in the New Testament, the powers that be are ordained of God.
God has ordained structure.
So I want to vote for the structures that produce the most ordered society.
And so how do we distinguish in leadership terms?
Obviously we have a serious problem as religious people.
I had a big problem personally in 2016 because the representative of the party to which I am an adherent typically, and I have voted straight line Republican as long as I can remember, the leader of that party was somebody who, while he stood for some of my values and has turned out to stand for many more of my values than I thought he would in 2016, that On a personal level, he doesn't fulfill certain basic moral precepts about character, about the necessity of cleanliness in business dealings, about the decency with regard to women, for example.
As religious people, how should we approach issues like that, about how to choose between candidates who may not be personally moral but may forward our priorities, and disengage completely?
What do you think the solution is?
Yeah, I mean, it's a challenging reality.
It's less challenging today than it used to be.
Because again, you have a party that advocates the killing of babies.
I can't vote that.
I don't care who the other guy is.
You're looking in some ways at the lesser of two evils, but you always are in society anyway because nobody is perfect.
So what I'm looking for in a leader, and it may come down to a simple analogy, If I'm going to have a brain surgeon open my brain, I'm really not too concerned about his moral life.
I would like to know that he's been in somebody else's brain and done the right thing whenever he's been there and he knows his way around.
There's a certain skill set for leadership.
There's a certain ability that people need to affect change.
And if you have a guy who manifests the ability to do that, the presidency is not a moral job.
It's not a position of moral authority.
It never has been.
We don't want to make it into that now.
You choose the best you've got, which would be someone who does justice, fears God, that is to say there's a transcendental ought that binds his heart.
An atheist doesn't have that.
Even the founders of America who were not Christians, they were deists.
New God had to be in there somewhere because there had to be some kind of existential power that had exerted a threat over people if they misbehaved.
So, you're looking for that in a president and then you're looking for competence.
And competence is really defined, in my judgment, at that level as leadership ability.
So who has the leadership ability?
Who can move things in the right direction?
And who's closest to a biblical moral standard?
Without expecting that he would be faithful to that fully, who's closest to it?
So it sounds like you think that as a society we've made a pretty grave mistake in trying to see the president as a moral figure anyway.
I mean, there's been a lot of talk that the presidency is basically two jobs.
One is implementing policy, making sure certain things happen.
And the other is, as sort of a moral leader of the country, creating a sense of social fabric in the country.
On one of those scores, the current president has been good on policy.
He hasn't been very good at putting together social fabric, from my point of view.
But maybe it sounds like what you're saying is that What we ought to be doing is stop looking to the presidency at all as the builder of the social fabric.
In other words, it's our job in our communities to build the social fabric, let the president do what the president needs to do policy-wise.
Yeah, and look, you can't blame him for the complete destruction of the family.
Sure.
He had nothing to do with that.
That's why the fabric's coming apart.
You know, when you think about how God looks at this or any society, the default position of humanity is brutally corrupt.
I mean, you read the Bloodlands.
So between Soviet Russia and Germany, between the late 1930s and 1945, 13 million people are killed.
None in a military uniform, none in a war.
13 million people were massacred by Russians and Germans in those brief years.
That is a testimony to what will happen to people when evil is not restrained.
Evil is restrained.
God has designed evil to be restrained three ways.
Number one is conscience.
And everybody has a mechanism.
It's a skylight that reacts, the Bible says, to accuse or excuse you.
But conscience only works if you have a defined belief system.
The 9-11 guys blew up a building.
That worked in their conscience because they had a faulty belief system.
So you can tamper with conscience when you alter belief.
When you tamper with truth or when you eliminate truth, the conscience is lost.
The second mechanism God put in society to govern and constrain is parents.
And the Old Testament is so clear.
That's the one commandment with a promise.
Children obey your parents for this is right and it'll go well with you and you'll be successful.
And the way to destroy that mechanism is just to tear the family to shreds, redefine it, abuse men, turn men into some kind of joke, dispossess them of all moral authority, There's only one other mechanism God has put into place to restrain evil, and that is the government.
The government is to, according to the New Testament, honor the good and punish the evildoer.
And the Bible even says they don't bear a sword for nothing.
They even have the power of capital punishment.
Which was instituted back in Genesis.
So, if you attack the conscience by destroying the belief system, if you attack the family by destroying the roles there, and then the next step you're going to face, you attack all authority.
You just do anything you can to just strip authority of its power and its honor.
You literally have decimated a culture.
Then you take a guy and stake him in a presidential role.
You think he's going to restore moral authority in a culture?
That's an impossible task.
So when we talk about restoring moral authority in the culture, it seems like there are a couple of ways that have been pursued, with regard particularly to young people.
And one is a biblical path, and one is, for lack of a better term, the utilitarian Judeo-Christian path.
The biblical path would be, get people back in churches, tell them about the veracity of the Bible, in your view the New Testament, my view the Old Testament, and then Train them basically step-by-step.
Believe in God.
Believe in the Bible.
Believe in biblical values.
Enact those values in your own life.
Build social fabric around that.
The other way is, I think, tailored more to a secular audience, which is take the same messages of the Bible without actually mentioning biblical text and use those values and say that these values work.
These are the values that have worked.
These are the values that built civilization.
These values are useful and that's why you should bear them out.
Do you think that one is preferable to the other?
Are they both useful, these two paths?
And which audiences should we tailor to?
And the reason I ask is because what I've found is that, as an Orthodox Jew, I never cite the Bible in any of my lectures.
And the reason I do is because most of the people I'm talking to don't have that common frame of reference.
And what I find is that I get a lot of emails from people then saying that they've started to re-engage with biblical thinking Not because I've cited the Bible, but simply because they've heard the values I'm talking about and now are interested in those values.
But that's only one way of coming at it.
Another way is to actually inculcate people in the reality of the religion itself.
Which one do you think is preferable and when are these useful?
I think both of them could be useful.
I think the biblical approach is preferable by a long shot.
Because, again, you're taking the authority to an existential level.
You're moving the authority up to its highest level.
If I tell people that they ought to do this because it's reasonable to do this, and it's historically the way it works, they can show me in history where it didn't work.
They can go back to the bloodlines and show it didn't work then, it didn't work when they killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
It doesn't work.
The Lord of the Flies is the default position of human behavior.
I don't like to be caught in the trap of trying to make history authoritative.
Because there are too many exceptions to that.
We've got the best of it, in a sense, in Western civilization.
It doesn't really look so good if you go some other direction, like Africa or something like that, or even the Middle East.
I need something that is a rock-solid, immovable, unchanging and absolute authority.
I really don't have enough power.
I don't have enough verbal power or enough persuasive, convicting speech in me to convince people to live a certain way.
I'm not ever going to be anybody's moral authority, but if I say what the Old Testament prophet said, the Word of the Lord came unto me.
The Word of the Lord came unto me.
Now I understand that I have a divine authority.
I don't ever want to speak without referring to the Bible.
And I don't want to apologize for that because it's a secular culture and they don't like it.
I really feel badly that they don't like that, but if they don't ever connect with that, they're lost.
They're lost, both in life and eternity.
I have to connect them to the Word of God.
Okay, so in just a second, I want to ask you about how that view meshes with sort of the Enlightenment values that are enshrined in the Constitution Declaration of Independence.
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Well, let's get back to the sort of meshing of biblical values with American values.
So early on you mentioned that you weren't sure that the American Revolution is in consonance with biblical values.
I was wondering if you could expound on that a little bit because I think it's an interesting idea.
Well, the Scripture says, submit to the powers that be that they're ordained of God.
That does not mean that every ruler represents God.
Clearly that is not the case, but that governmental authority is a God-given institution to repress evil and to reward good behavior, just as parents have that role and the conscience has that role we've talked about.
So when I talk about the government, I'm not saying that the government is a divine authority or that the rulers are divine authorities.
But what I am saying is that they represent a God-given constraint to human behavior.
And that's why they have to be upheld and not broken down.
So Christians don't attack the government.
We don't protest.
We don't riot.
We don't start shooting people who are in the government, even if the government is King George from England and we don't like him.
And even if we're upset with taxation, we don't start riots and we don't start revolutions.
We live quiet, according to the New Testament, peaceable lives.
We pray for those that are over us.
We pray for rulers.
We pray for all those who are in authority.
We pray that they might come to know God.
Through the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
So we pray regularly for our rulers.
We do not overthrow them.
And that is how a Christian, a real biblical Christian, would look at the American Revolution.
I mean, I hate to say that because that's not a popular idea, but it is nonetheless what the Scripture says Christians are to do.
Submit, pray, pray for the salvation of your leaders, live a quiet and peaceable life, and let the The character of your life, the godliness, the virtue of your life affect that society one soul at a time.
So what does that mean for individual rights?
Because obviously the American Revolution is based on the idea that we are individuals with certain rights that are inherent in us.
I think that has history going all the way back to Genesis talking about us being made in God's image with certain creative faculties.
And that comes along with the ability to think for ourselves, the ability to worship God, the ability to build these families.
The founding ideology was based around the idea that if the government itself was a threat to your fundamental rights, including as a religious person, then the government had lost its legitimacy.
Is there a point in your philosophy and theology where the government loses its legitimacy?
It's the Soviet Union.
They're cracking down on churches.
It's Nazi Germany.
Is there a point where a revolution would be justifiable or necessary?
Not in a biblical sense, no.
I don't think there's ever a time when you would be justified in starting to kill the people that are in power.
I don't see any justification for that.
That is not what Christians do.
We would rather suffer, but I don't want to say we don't dissent, because we do.
And one of the things that comes up in this is freedom of speech.
Is freedom of speech a biblical right?
It's not really an issue in the Bible, freedom of speech.
Speech is controlled.
We're to speak kindly.
We're to speak with grace.
We're to speak what edifies and builds up and encourages and comforts.
We're not to lie.
We're not to curse.
We're not to blaspheme.
So speech is controlled in the categories of righteousness as opposed to sinful speech.
So we don't have complete freedom of speech.
We are also in the New Testament told to speak what edifies.
But, we also are commanded necessarily to dissent in our speech when the government is asking us to do something that is wrong, or that God is telling us to do one thing, they're telling us to do something else.
Illustration in the New Testament, the apostles go out and they preach Christ.
And the Jews arrest them and say, stop!
And so they said, you judge whether we obey God or men.
And they went right back out to preach Christ.
Freedom of speech for us is freedom to preach the truth of Christ even when the society says that's against the law.
And then you don't get an army, You go to jail.
They went to jail.
They took the consequences.
They suffered the consequences of the faithfulness they had to preaching the truth.
So we do dissent.
Christians have always dissented through history.
They've always had a dissenting message when persecution came.
And inevitably, just to generalize that a little bit, When persecution of free speech comes, it always comes against the people who have the religious absolutes.
Always!
Because that's what threatens people's freedom to sin.
So we're always going to be the culprits.
At that point, we become dissenters because we continue to preach the truth no matter what the price.
So my question with regard to sort of your vision of government is that, on the one hand, it seems as though in a utopian world there would be a biblically-based government that is theocratic in nature.
And that is scary to a lot of folks who are Enlightenment fans.
It's scary to me, frankly.
I'm not a big fan of theocracy, even as an Orthodox Jew.
And at the same time, It could lead to the possibility of, as I say, a tyrannical government that we can't do anything about except, I guess, complain.
So how do we live that life?
Are you advocating for a theocracy in a utopian world?
Would that be a good thing?
That was what Israel was supposed to be, a theocracy, right?
I mean, the people who ran the government were priests.
Essentially, the orders of the priests, they were the officials of the government.
That was a theocratic kingdom, and God was king.
There was a very, very deep-seated difficulty in pulling that off.
And we know the history of that because of disobedience, because of rejection of God.
God had even punished the people He loved, you know, with captivity.
The northern king goes into the Assyrian captivity.
The southern king goes to Babylon.
You have the history of the Old Testament.
It's a sad history of punishment.
And yet God continues to extend grace to Israel and still does to this very day.
There's not going to be, even though it would be, God would want a theocratic kingdom with him as king and everybody subjected to him.
That doesn't work in this world and that's why he had to send a savior.
The New Testament teaches us this.
That there will never be a utopian kingdom.
It's impossible that there would be.
That's why you have to keep the restraints in that God has placed there.
You have to have absolute laws.
You have to have absolute convictions, absolute precepts, moral precepts that you believe because that's what makes your conscience work.
You have to have ordered families, and you have to have authority with the power to restrain evil and reward good.
And as those break down, it just gets worse and worse.
In fact, the New Testament says evil men are going to get worse and worse.
This is going to continue to get worse.
New Testament says in the future, the Messiah will return and establish his kingdoms.
The kingdom he promised, really, starting in Genesis 12 with Abraham.
The kingdom he reiterated to David, that when the Messiah came, the greater son of David would establish his kingdom forever.
The kingdom he promised to the prophets.
The kingdom he promised with salvation to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31, that he would put in Israel a new heart and a new spirit and they would walk after his laws.
And the New Testament says the Messiah came the first time to be the sacrifice for the sins of his people, the second time he comes to establish that kingdom.
So we can't do that in this world with a fallen humanity.
It's not possible.
The Lord will do it in the future when he returns to establish the kingdom on earth.
And the New Testament teaches that that's a real, actual kingdom.
Even Isaiah defines the lion lying down with the lamb and the desert blossoms like a rose.
There's a lot of elements that are physical as well as spiritual.
With all of this said, how do you view the Enlightenment?
Right now there's a big debate that's happening in conservative circles, but I think it's crossed across Ideological lines.
With regards to the Enlightenment.
On the one hand you have folks who basically argue that the Enlightenment is a break with religious tradition.
That religious tradition is about submitting to a governmental authority that may in fact be pushing certain theocratic ideals.
And that the Enlightenment comes along, it tosses out the Bible, it replaces it with the deistic concept of God and reason.
And that we get human rights flourishing, great economies, iPhones, all sorts of cool things because we tossed out the Bible.
That's sort of Sam Harris's view, Stephen Pinker's view of the Enlightenment.
And I think to a certain extent the view of some thinkers who are not so pro-Enlightenment, who look at the downsides of the Enlightenment, people like Alistair McIntyre, who look at the Enlightenment and they say, well, this kind of cleaned out Western civilization of meaning.
Sure, we got iPhones, but we gave up meaning in the trade.
And then there's the other view of the Enlightenment, which is basically that the Enlightenment is, in fact, an outgrowth of 2,000 years of Christian history and 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian history as filtered through historically.
I think you have to get the bigger picture.
religious sectarianism, and that without Judeo-Christianity, there is no Enlightenment.
So there is no iPhone without Judeo-Christianity.
The Enlightenment was just sort of a midpoint in that view.
So do you see the Enlightenment as a break from religion?
Do you see it as good?
Do you see it as bad?
I think you have to get the bigger picture.
When Christianity comes and the The church flourishes in the first century.
By the time you get to the third century and you get Constantine, you have organizational Christianity, institutional Christianity.
They decide that everybody's going to be a Christian, so they baptize all the babies, and everybody is a Christian, and you have essentially state-sponsored Christianity.
That launches a thousand years of the Dark Ages.
Where religion and relationship to God is not personal.
The church is a surrogate.
It's a surrogate for God and you connect to the church.
You don't connect by faith.
You don't connect in your heart by loving the Lord or knowing Him.
You connect by mechanical means and all the fall to all that made up that thousand years of developing Christianity, where wherever there's a shortage of reality, there's an overabundance of symbol.
So they started dressing like, you know, they were going to a five-year-old's birthday party as a clown.
And you had this institutionalized kind of Christianity that was dead, cold, and the gospel was lost and truth was lost.
But it had massive power over people.
And what kept that power was, don't put the Bible in their language.
Don't let them read it.
The church is the only interpreter of the Bible.
They can't interpret Scripture.
If anybody tried to do the interpretation on their own, they would be murdered.
We know the story of William Tyndale.
He translates the Bible into English.
They chase him all over the place until they finally kill him.
What was his crime?
Translating the Bible into the language of the people so that every, quote, plowboy in England could read the Scripture.
That is a crime that brings down that kind of false system.
But it led to the Reformation.
What happened in the Reformation was the power of that institutionalized, detached, surrogate God Church was broken, and Christianity went personal, and the gospel was preached to individuals, and faith became the way you access salvation, personal faith in Christ and His work.
That was the massive transformation.
Sad to say, the Reformation might have turned out differently if they hadn't decided to take it and make it state churches and then baptize all the babies into it, which is what they did.
But having said that, I think it's important to note That in all those European countries, for example, where the Reformation went, you have high levels of advancement.
They are the leading edge of Western civilization.
Those countries that remained profoundly Catholic were restrained in their ability to develop on any level, educationally, scientifically, industrially, and we know that historically.
It was the Protestant countries that flourished.
They developed the education, they moved us forward.
But inevitably, you have the same problem again, because this is the default of sinful humanity.
It wants to control, and it overextends its control, so it wants to make everybody a Christian, get everybody on board, and eventually, if everybody's a Christian, then really nobody knows if anybody's a Christian, and that descends really fast into what I see as the enlightenment Where people didn't have a personal relationship with God at all.
They only had another form of an institutional relationship because the Reformers never protected the personal character of Christianity.
It descended into the Enlightenment and I see the Enlightenment as the abandonment of Judeo-Christianity.
And it was okay for a while because there was still the vestiges of believing in absolute truth and they hung on to that.
But one or two generations go by, and if they're like the generation that knew not Joseph, if they don't know what the principles are for that, it all disappears and disintegrates.
And now we're at a point in postmodernism where not only do we not know what is absolute truth, we don't even believe there's such a thing.
So I want to talk to you about that.
What are the great threats to the development of Western civilization right now?
And why is it that if we have this great biblical history and this possible connection with God that makes our lives richer and better and more profound, why everybody seems to have abandoned that?
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So let's talk a little bit about why it is that the church seems to have fallen away pretty dramatically in the United States.
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Go check it out right now.
So let's talk a little bit about why it is that the church seems to have fallen away pretty dramatically in the United States.
So the United States was sort of the last bulwark of Western religion.
We're a much more religious country than any of the other European countries.
And church attendance remained relatively high in the United States up until the 1950s.
It's been steadily declining.
Religious adherence has been steadily declining.
The phrase spiritual, not religious has been introduced into the lexicon.
What do you think happened with all of that?
And do you see the sort of spiritual but not religious movement as a good thing?
Like it's an indicator that people are still looking for something?
Or is it just the last vestige of people trying to graft to something?
Yeah, if you just take what you said about spiritual but not religious, which is kind of a popular little mantra for people today, essentially what that means is I'm my own God.
That's what they're saying.
There's no authority outside me.
I'm spiritual.
I'm not religious, which means I don't subscribe to any transcendental religion.
I don't subscribe to any higher authority.
I'm spiritual.
That just means I contemplate my own navel and I develop convictions about spiritual reality from looking inside of me, which is a form of insanity, really.
To think that you can Navigate the realities of eternity and life and death and life after death and the great questions by looking into your own brain is pathetic.
It's sad, but that's what people are saying when they say, I'm spiritual, I'm not religious.
That means I don't look For spiritual reality, anywhere but in my own self.
That is a formula for total disaster because there has to be external authority.
There must be God.
You cannot believe that nobody times nothing equals everything.
That's insane.
There has to be a God.
He has to have personality.
He has to be relational because we are.
He has to be able to reason and think.
He has to be able to love.
And He has to be righteous and holy and just as well as gracious and merciful and kind because we see that manifest.
He is the Creator.
We're in His image.
We create.
You have to have God to get out of yourself and find someone who can deliver you from what you are and where you're headed.
Well, I mean, I certainly see and agree with you that reason alone can't get you to morality.
It's one of the big debates that I've been having with Sam Harris repeatedly for the past couple of years, where Sam basically thinks that just by reason alone we can get to a sort of moral system.
Kant tried it.
He tried it the best.
He failed.
Everyone fails.
Because it turns out that the moral law is not within, in fact.
The moral law has to come from someplace without.
What do you think is the best proof to people who don't believe?
of why there has to be a God?
Why should they take any of this seriously and not just think, okay, it's a compilation of various texts by various old people over time?
Why should they take the Bible seriously in the first place?
Well, I think the Bible is its own defense.
I've never defended the Bible.
I've just preached it for almost 60 years.
I have basically gone through the Bible verse by verse by verse, every single passage from Genesis 1-1 to the final verse of the book of Revelation, Old Testament and New Testament, and I can only tell you that I have never ever questioned the veracity and the divine character of Scripture.
And this is, I'm talking about in-depth study of every passage in the Bible.
And I'm not the authority, but I can only tell you that under the most The most intense scrutiny that my feeble brain can bring to the Bible, it stands the test.
You can talk about defenses of Scripture.
You can say, well, the Bible predicts things that came to pass.
There are Old Testament prophecies that came to pass in the Old Testament, like the destruction of Tyre and Sidon.
Those are recorded after they were predicted.
So you can look at that.
You can look, for example, Hindu writings say that the earth is on the back of elephants who produce earthquakes when they shake.
Well, that's ridiculous.
The Bible says in Isaiah, he hangs the world on nothing.
He rolls the earth like clay to the seal, which means it rotates on an axis like you were rolling your signature over soft clay.
The hydrological cycle is completely explained in the book of Isaiah.
There's not foolishness.
Sacred writings say that the world is on layers of honey and butter and cheese and crazy things like that.
You can argue for a fulfilled prophecy in the birth of Jesus Christ that He would be born in Bethlehem, that He'd be born of a virgin, that He'd be in a line of David and all of that, and that all comes to pass and the genealogies are laid out in the New Testament.
So there are things external to the Scripture that, and not totally external, but you can look at the history that is tied to Scripture.
But I think the The power of Scripture is in the Scripture itself.
I think God has a glory all His own, and He manifests that in the Old Testament.
His glory is on display.
We see that glory of God throughout the history of the Old Testament.
His glory comes to worth in His Son.
He is the glory of God personified.
God has a glory also that manifests itself in Scripture.
Scripture has in itself a glory, a power that comes through.
For someone who hasn't studied it, that sounds odd and maybe a little mystical.
But what I'm continually overwhelmed by is the absolute truthfulness of Scripture.
And I don't ever have to defend it.
I've been doing this for a long time.
I've never been in a position where I had to try to explain something that was a legitimate contradiction in the Bible.
So what do you do with the so-called difficult sections of the Bible?
So the case that, to play devil's advocate for a second, and obviously it's interesting to do this because you and I agree about the veracity of at least the first half of the Bible.
We have a disagreement on where to file the New Testament.
You put it in the non-fiction section, and I don't, I'm Jewish.
But with that said, and we'll get to those disagreements in just seconds, I'd be remiss if we didn't.
To take the difficult sections of the Bible.
Sam Harris makes the case.
And I use Sam, but Richard Dawkins does the same thing.
People who sort of have a cursory glance at the Bible, read it once, through on their nightstand at a hotel, and now are experts.
And I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do.
But the idea is that they will pick out a section that is particularly awkward.
And they will say, okay, well the Bible was fine with this.
So let's do a couple of those sections if you don't mind.
So let's take slavery.
This is the example that's very often used, that the Bible is okay with slavery.
There are particular sections in the Old Testament that specifically talk about, for example, taking female captives and then shaving their heads and then marrying them, forcing them into marriage.
How do we square this with the basic sense of Western morality now, which is that slavery is a terrible evil?
Why didn't the Bible just abolish slavery 3,000 years ago?
Well, first of all, the Bible would never condone taking women as slaves, shaving their heads, and turning them into some kind of abject slavery.
That would never be advocated.
The Old Testament elevates women, obviously.
So does the New Testament.
But let's talk about slavery.
The Bible never condones mistreating anyone, not even an animal.
The Bible never condones mistreating anyone.
I want to make that very clear.
The Bible calls for love and kindness and support and encouragement and protection and provision.
One of the social constructs in which that occurred in the purposes of God was a form of slavery.
And the fact that slavery and being a servant were so close is shown in the word ebed, which could mean both.
Which is to say that the only difference between being a servant who showed up in the morning at nine o'clock and left at six and being a slave was you lived, you had been purchased.
What that meant was you had food, you had family, you had protection, you had provision.
This was for many people the most secure Kind of employment they could have ever hoped for with a good master, with a faithful master, with a loving master.
And in the New Testament, fascinating, the New Testament word for slave is doulos and it's the equivalent to ebeth in the Old Testament, but doulos is the word for slave and it is used dozens of times to refer to a Christian.
When we confess Jesus as Lord, we are saying, He is kurios, Lord, I am doulos, His slave.
I can't think of a more wonderful relationship that any human being could ever have than to be the slave of one who loved and died for Him, who provided everything he or she would ever need Who promises eternal protection, eternal blessing, who raises that slave to become a son, adopts that slave into his family and makes him a joint heir of everything he possesses in the eternal kingdom.
So just taking the concept of slave and turning it into some kind of a pejorative thing misses the point that there were lots of social constructs.
Some of the safest places people could be in the ancient world would be with a master who loved them and cared for them.
The Bible explicitly rejects any mistreatment of slaves ever.
They are to be treated with kindness and love in a way that honors God and demonstrates care for them.
That's very different, that kind of thing, than transporting people across an ocean, putting them in chains, making them basically nothing but an elevated animal, if even elevated.
That the Bible would never tolerate.
But keep this in mind.
There were probably 70 million slaves in the Roman Empire during the life of Jesus.
Jesus never tried to abolish slavery.
If Jesus came to abolish slavery, he failed.
If the apostle Paul came to abolish slavery, he failed.
If the rest of the apostles' agenda was to change the culture, knock off Caesar, and wipe out slavery, they failed.
If that's true, then Jesus went to the cross and said, it is finished, but it wasn't.
He didn't pull it off.
But if he came To prevent us from going to hell forever by bearing our sins in His body on the cross, then He did accomplish His mission.
That was His mission.
Not to restructure the social order of society.
There's a book in the New Testament called Philemon.
And Paul writes this letter to Philemon because Philemon had a slave named Onesimus and he ran away.
So he ends up in Rome and he runs into the Apostle Paul and Paul tells him about Christ and he becomes a brother in Christ.
So Paul says, go back.
Go back to Philemon and tell him you're his brother and tell him you're sorry that you left and make it right with him.
And he writes this letter to Philemon and says take him back.
Contrary to abolishing slavery, Paul is saying go back and fulfill your responsibility to him as his brother.
So slavery is just a social contract.
At its best.
At its worst, it is the horrible kinds of thing that people sort of depict it as today.
That's unacceptable.
So let's talk about a couple more of these issues, because it's, I think, edifying for folks and informative.
The one, obviously, the hot-button issues that have come up now.
The big one, obviously, is Leviticus 18.22, which bothers the hell out of people.
The same references in the Book of Romans and the New Testament.
Any reference that has to do with the sin of homosexuality, obviously, is hot-button these days.
When to even mention this in a biblical context offends people to no end.
Even in a free society where religious people are not forcing anything with regard to this sort of behavior, to even suggest that certain behavior is sinful is extraordinarily bothersome to folks.
How do you defend that in a society where our general perspective is, if it's not an act that violates consent, then we haven't done anything wrong?
Well, first of all, let me say this.
The Bible identifies, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, homosexuality as a sin.
Clearly.
There's no getting around that.
That's the story of Sodom, where you have homosexuals in the city of Sodom trying to attack angelic beings who are at the house of Lot.
That's why the term used to be Sodomite.
The Bible is clear on that.
It's clear on that in the Pentateuch about that kind of behavior.
It's listed with things like bestiality, sex with animals.
The New Testament affirms that.
But I want to hurry to say That's a sin, but that's not some kind of sin that leads the parade and is separated by light years from all other sins.
That is a sin to which humanity is susceptible, and some people have more strong desires in regard to that sin than other people do, for reasons that may be psychological, may be part of their history and their past.
It is a sin.
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says, such were some of you, homosexual, effeminate.
Then he says, but you are washed, you are sanctified in Christ.
This is a very basic question.
The whole purpose of the Christian message is to confront the sinner's sin so you can call the sinner to repentance and forgiveness.
The center doesn't like that.
We had a question on the little questionnaire that your people sent me.
It said, do you feel like you might be offending Democrats with some of the things you say?
And my response to that is, look, my goal is to offend everyone.
That is my initial goal, to tell you that you are without God in the world, that there's only one Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you're in sin, that sin brings death and punishment, but the good news is Jesus Christ is the Savior who has provided a way for you to be forgiven by burying your sins in His body on the tree so that God's justice is satisfied and His love can be extended to you by putting your trust in Christ.
So I offend people all the time because that's necessary.
If you try to develop a kind of Christianity that's inoffensive, it's not Christianity.
It's not the gospel.
So I'd be remiss if we didn't actually talk about the differences between Judaism and Christianity, because on so much of this stuff we're on the same page considering that legitimately half of the book is the same.
But when it comes to the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, as a Jew, whenever I hear pastors speak about Christianity, Very often I think to myself, right, all that stuff's in the Old Testament.
So when they say things like, you know, sin has to be cleansed by God, right?
We have an entire day, Yom Kippur, that is for that.
I say three times a day a paragraph about doing repentance before God, plus an additional section for repentance in the morning prayers.
The idea of repenting and confessing your sins before God is something that is endemic to Judaism and has been for thousands of years.
The idea that God is sovereign, obviously, the two religions share.
Philosophically speaking, putting aside the basic crux of belief in one story or one historic incident in your view, If you put that aside, what do you think is the key distinguishing factor between the philosophy of Christianity and the philosophy of Judaism?
Well, first of all, I don't like to talk about it as a philosophy.
I'd rather talk about it as a revelation, because it's divine.
So, the same God who wrote the Old Testament wrote the New Testament.
That's my conviction.
The Scripture has one author.
And I need to say this, I am a Christian because of the Old Testament.
Without the Old Testament, I don't know whether I could believe the New Testament.
And that may sound strange to you, but how do I know that Jesus is the Messiah?
If I don't have all the predictions of the Old Testament defining Him when He shows up.
For example, I wrote a book called The Gospel According to God, and it's from Isaiah 53, that great chapter.
And you read Isaiah 53, and it's the biography of the Messiah, the servant of the Lord, and it lays out his arrival, and his rejection, and his death, and his resurrection, and his ascension, and his coronation.
It explains the gospel in more specific terms than any chapter in the New Testament.
He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace fell on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.
Wow!
That sounds like the Christian doctrine of justification, because that's exactly what it is.
And then it says His life was cut off, and then it says He will see His offspring.
Well, if His life was cut off, how could He see His offspring?
When I die, I'm not going to see my offspring.
That's the resurrection.
And then you have the coronation.
You even have in that chapter, A shift, because the chapter begins with the plural, we, you know.
We saw him and he was like a root out of dry ground.
He was like a root sticking up you trip over.
He was like a sucker branch.
You whack it off.
He was meaningless, useless, and there was no beauty that we would desire him.
He didn't fit our messianic picture, and he didn't do what we thought he would do.
He didn't knock off the Romans, and he didn't set up the kingdom.
He just didn't fit our model, and so we considered him as nothing.
And the language there, they considered him as non-existent.
And that's exactly what happened because they completely rejected him and the Romans took him as a criminal and crucified him.
And then you have this stunning reality in that chapter.
It's like time stops and you hear this in the past tense.
He was bruised for our iniquities.
He was chastised for our peace.
Whoa!
What happened?
Zechariah says, the day will come when they look on him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as an only son.
Wow!
That's what they will say.
That's what the Jewish people will say when they look on the one they pierced and mourn for him as an only son.
They'll say, we thought he was stricken by God.
We thought we were doing the work of God and taking his life because he was a blasphemer.
Now we see He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities.
And then, says Zechariah, a fountain of blessing is open to Israel and a fountain of salvation.
And then you have that followed by the kingdom and all the fulfillment of the old covenant.
And all of it comes when Israel looks at the Messiah and sees him for who he is.
The interesting thing about Isaiah's prophecy of that is, he doesn't say it's going to happen.
He doesn't use future verbs.
He uses past verbs because he's looking past Christ to when the Jews look back on the past.
Now we see it.
Now we see it.
And the New Testament, Paul says in Romans 11, all Israel will be saved.
That is the purpose and plan of God.
There is a Christian kind of popular doctrine that I Reject with all my heart and that is that the church has replaced Israel and the promises of God.
It's called supersessionism.
I don't believe in that.
I think that honestly, hate to say this, but I honestly think it is a latent form of anti-Semitism to say that.
You can't tell me that God made promises in the Old Testament to his people Israel concerning his future kingdom and salvation and that he would give them a heart, a new heart and a new spirit and he would write his laws in their heart and they would be saved and he would be their king and they would be his people and all those kingdom prophecies.
You can't possibly tell me that God didn't mean what he said.
That is one of the reasons I'm an originalist.
It's very popular in Christianity today to say the Old Testament is interpreted by the New Testament.
That's not true.
Because if that's the case, then nobody in the Old Testament had any idea what was going on.
Right?
That's not revelation.
That's obfuscation.
That's just a pile of riddles.
Other people say, well, you have to superimpose Christ, a Christological hermeneutic, over every part of the Old Testament.
That's not true either.
There's authorial intent.
I mean, you're an originalist when it comes to constitutional things.
I'm an originalist when it comes to the Word of God.
And I know you would say that you feel more comfortable probably in following a rabbinical interpretation than you do your own interpretation.
To some degree.
Sure.
So you've removed the authority one step from the one who said, the word of the Lord came to me and I said this.
You're looking to this guy.
So here's the take on rabbinical Judaism.
So rabbinical Judaism in the orthodox view, and I'm sure you know this already, but the orthodox view of rabbinic Judaism in the oral law is that basically at the time the Torah was given, There was an understanding of what the Torah meant that was orally transmitted to Moses and the rabbinic tradition is a part of that.
So basically me handing off authority to rabbis to interpret this stuff doesn't alleviate me of my duty to study, which is why Jews over time have been extraordinarily well educated, because we all study the Talmud, we do it daily, we study the Torah, we do it daily, we are obligated at least three times a week to read directly from the Bible itself.
All of the Jews have been extremely literate over time because we take the text very seriously.
But with that said, there always was an assumption that God had given a text to human beings who are fallible and live within the context of the time in which They live, meaning that if God were to come down and then speak in tongues to folks, they wouldn't understand.
So he has to give it to people.
Those people have interpretive faculties.
God knows that, which is why he gave the Torah to people with interpretive faculty.
So in other words, it's not me failing to Go back and look at the text of the Torah.
It's me understanding that the text of the Torah has been interpreted by people who have spent more time with it than I am, who are smarter than I am.
Sure, I understand that.
And who have, you know, spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out exactly what the Torah means in particular sections.
So, for example, the example we use in Orthodox Judaism most often is, there's one commandment that you're supposed to take the Sabbath, that you're supposed to guard the Sabbath and keep it, right?
Zecharta Shabbat.
You're supposed to remember it in one section, you're supposed to guard it in the other.
But there's no actual commandments as to what that means, right?
So what does it mean to keep the Sabbath?
So unless you actually have some sort of explanation of what Sabbath is, it could mean anything, right?
It could mean keep the teddy bear, right?
You have to actually have an understanding of what the Sabbath is, which is where the oral law comes in.
So me delegating out the interpretation of that to people who were trying to boil down what that meant at the time, is a form of originalism, but it does certainly have more of a common law aspect than the originalism of just picking up a Bible and saying, I can read it myself and understand every permutation of it.
Yeah, and I think that's really a good answer.
And I would say this, as long as you understand the Bible as revelation intended to be understood, that you believe in the perspicuity of Scripture— In other words, this is not mysticism, this is not fantasy, this is not some kind of allegory that isn't inherent in what you're reading.
To say, for example, as one rabbi I was reading said that Abraham's consonants in his name add up to 315, so that means he has 315 servants.
Well, I mean, come on, give me a break.
No, no, I mean, that kind of rabbinical allegorism, which is all over the place.
So all I'm saying is, when Jesus came, he said, the rabbis have said this, the rabbis, you've heard it said, you've heard it said, you've heard it said, but I say to you, but I say to you, but... So he was busy correcting what had developed as very complicated machinations that turned the Sabbath into a terrible burden, and he was assaulting that, that To the degree where he said, you've substituted the traditions of men for the commandments of God.
Here's a guy in a ditch.
You don't go over and pick the guy up out of the ditch because you're trying to conform to these machinations that have developed around it.
So I just think that when Jesus confronted the crowds and particularly the Jewish leaders, he would say, have you not read?
Have you not read?
He said it over and over and over, which is to say, That the Word of God can be understood.
The Old Testament is revelation.
Well, this is why it's so interesting, because when I read the New Testament myself, and I obviously am not a believer in the divinity of Jesus, but when I see what Jesus actually has to say about the Old Testament, it seems to me very similar to stuff that Zachariah is saying, or that Jeremiah is saying.
Jeremiah says that the sacrifices themselves are basically of no use unless there's actual meaning behind the sacrifices.
God wasn't there because He likes the barbecue, right?
It actually has to have some meaning.
And when Jesus comes along and He says, you're focusing in on all the details of the Sabbath without actually recognizing the rationale for the Sabbath, and then He exaggerates it beyond the point.
It's interesting.
Without loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Right, exactly.
And then he, even to make a point, exaggerates it beyond the scope of what Jewish law would permit.
So, for example, when he says, you're going to leave a guy to die in a ditch on the Sabbath?
That's against Jewish law.
You can't do that.
You have to violate the Sabbath in order to save a life.
This is like basic, black-letter Jewish law.
But he's making a point, which is, you guys are ignoring what's important in order to focus in on the mundane aspect of practice.
Like, that's not unique to Jesus, in other words.
There's a long prophetic tradition of people saying exactly that, and in the modern Jewish world it's called Musar.
It's basically just telling people what they should understand about the values beyond the black letter law.
And this is why I think it's fascinating to me when I talk with people who are real biblical scholars from the Christian side, that a lot of the areas where Christian scholars think that Christianity has departed dramatically from Judaism, I think are not really dramatic departures.
They seem to be reflections of Judaism from a slightly different angle.
Even so far as a lot of the stuff in the Sermon on the Mount about, you know, when it says that you're supposed to love thy brother as thyself and you're supposed to treat your brother as you would wish to be treated and all of this.
That's present in the Old Testament, too.
No, I think what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount was elevate the teaching of the rabbis.
Elevate it.
He went above them.
He said, well, you've been told you shouldn't commit adultery.
I'm telling you, if you look at a woman and lust after her, you've committed adultery in your heart.
He got to the heart of the law.
They were content with the practical application of the law.
He was not content with that.
So I would say that Jesus was the purest Jew that ever lived because he understood the elevation of the law to the heart and the soul.
It would be a monstrous responsibility for some committee to have invented Jesus.
You know, when you hear even the people in his time saying, never a man spoke like this man.
He is a person that doesn't seem to have been a product of human invention.
And you can say, well, Jesus is a good teacher, but good teachers don't claim to be God.
They don't say, I and God are one.
They don't say, I created the universe.
That's not a good teacher.
That's somebody who's crazy, is a lunatic, or somebody who's trying to pull off a huge deception.
So, you cannot come to Jesus and just patronize Him as a noble, good Jewish teacher, because He crossed a line.
He crossed a severe line, and the Jews saw that.
Either He's the Messiah, or He is a blasphemer, and He needs to be put to death.
And those are really the choices you have.
So, when you ask me to show the variation between Judaism and Christianity, morally, no, there's none.
And in terms of God, the same, we don't have the same God as Muslims.
Allah is not the same God as Jehovah.
We don't have the same gods as any other false religion, but we have the same God as Jews and Christians.
He is the one true creator God, the one true living God.
He has a seity.
That is, He is eternal by His own nature.
He is uncreated, the uncreated one.
We believe He is more than one person in one God.
That's why Genesis says, let us make man in our own image, and relationship comes from a God who has relationship within Himself.
But the distinction between Christianity and Judaism is what we do with Jesus Christ.
The writer of Hebrews says, if a sacrifice had been enough to atone for sin, they would have stopped making them.
But they never stopped.
Morning and evening, morning and evening, morning and evening, morning and evening.
You know, basically a priest was a butcher.
He had blood up to his waist.
That's true.
He was a butcher.
He had blood up to his waist.
And the frustration of it, even on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, all the bloodletting.
And year after year after year after year, this goes on, this goes on, this goes on.
You have this most amazing thing.
You come to the death of Jesus Christ, and at the death of Christ, the veil in the temple is rent from top to bottom.
The Holy of Holies is thrown open.
Wow!
That's a statement from God.
Because it couldn't have been ripped by men from the top down.
The way to God is open.
There's no more barriers because a suitable sacrifice has been found.
This is the Lamb of God.
And amazingly soon after that the whole sacrificial system ends because that's the final sacrifice and God validates that sacrifice by raising him from the dead.
The resurrection is a provable historical fact.
So I think that's the issue.
It's what do you do with Jesus?
That's the issue of Christianity and I would just say I have such a love for Israel.
I mean, all the people I love the most are Jewish, from Abraham, you know, to the Apostle John, who wrote the last book in the Bible.
I have the same passion that Paul had.
He could almost wish himself a curse for Israel's sake, because they have a knowledge of God, But they don't know him because he can only be known through Christ, and that's the Christian message.
This is Judaism's culmination.
So I don't see Judaism and Christianity as antithetical.
I see them as Perfectly complementary so that what the prophet said the Messiah would be, Jesus was.
That fulfills it.
The sacrificial system ends.
It's never been reinstituted again.
The one sacrifice, the writer of Hebrews says, he perfected forever those that are sanctified by his one offering.
He was God's lamb, a spotless lamb without blemish.
God put on him the sins of us all.
This is a stunning theological truth because All the people who will ever believe through human history, their sins are covered by Christ.
Even those who believe, going back to Adam, all of them had to have a sacrifice that paid the price for their sins, whether it happened before Christ, their belief, or after Christ.
Christ is the focal point.
He bears in His body all the sins of all who would ever believe through human history.
This is a stunning thing to think about.
God putting all the sin and all the punishment on Him.
People say, well, how could one person bear that?
The answer is because He's a cosmic person.
He's an eternal being.
He's vast beyond us with a capacity to take that punishment.
So He gathers up all the punishment for all the sins of all the people because sin must be punished.
God is holy.
And that frees God, satisfying His justice, to offer grace to all who believe in Him.
I think that the Jewish believers in the Old Testament, who were true believers in God, and who did repent, were waiting for that sacrifice, knowing that no animal sacrifice ever did it, because they had to go back and make another one, and another one, and another one.
When is the one sacrifice going to come?
And that's why that Isaiah 53 chapter is so critical, because that's the focal point.
That's the focal point of Isaiah, by the way.
Anyway, Isaiah, interesting book, 66 chapters, like the Bible.
The first 40 are judgment, kind of like the Old Testament.
The first 39, like the Old Testament.
And the 27 in the New Testament are about salvation.
The 27 chapters are about salvation.
The first nine are the salvation of Israel from nations around it.
The back nine are the salvation of the planet, the new heaven and the new earth, and the middle nine are the salvation of people personally and individually, and in the middle of the middle nine you have Isaiah 53.
It's unbelievable what that book of Isaiah, it pulls it all together, and as you narrow down and you end up with, He was wounded for our transgressions, and this becomes the confession of all who believe in Christ, including one day Israel.
So, I want to say this to you personally.
You are a testimony to the glory of God in man.
I see the beauty of God's creation in you.
I see the use of reason and compassion and care.
I see so many things in you.
So I'm not denying that reflection of God in you, but I'm saying You either believe Jesus is the Savior or you don't, and that's the distinction.
Apart from that, just this one conversation with you, I could spend endless hours with you and be far richer for it, but I would always be saying the same thing.
Well, I do have one final question for Pastor John, and that question is going to be about the future of Christianity in the United States, whether you're optimistic or pessimistic, and what the Church has done wrong.
But for that answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Pastor John MacArthur, I'm so glad that you could come by.
I really appreciate the time.
We need to go so that you can take pictures with everyone in the office, because we have a huge line out the door of people who want to take pictures with you.
It's really a pleasure to have you.
And again, you know, in the fight for Western civilization, I'm honored to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with you, even if we may part ways at the very end of the book.
It's amazing to have you here, and again, thank you so much for coming.
No, it's been my pleasure.
Anytime you'd ever want me to do it, I'd love to do it again with you.
Sounds great.
Thank you, Ben.
Thank you, Ben. Ben.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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