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Sept. 23, 2024 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:19:41

Psalm 24: Jay Dyer

American author, comedian, TV presenter and committed Orthodox Christian, Jay Dyer, joins James for a contemplation of one of the Messianic Psalms, Psalm 24.↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

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	Psalm 24.
	This is the Miles Coverdale version for the Book of Common Prayer.
	The earth is the Lord's and all that therein is, the compass of the world and they that dwell therein.
	For he hath founded it upon the seas and prepared it upon the floods.
	Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?
	Or who shall rise up in his holy place?
	Even he that hath clean hands and a pure heart, and that hath not lift up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour, he shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
	This is the generation of them that seek him, even of them that seek thy face, O Jacob.
	Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
	Who is the King of Glory?
	It is the Lord, strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty in battle.
	Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
	Who is the King of Glory?
	Even the Lord of Hosts, he is the King of Glory.
	Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dangpole, and I'm delighted to be talking to Jay Dyer.
	Jay, I just sprung on you that we're going to be talking about Psalm 24.
	And the reason I've chosen this one is because I was thinking who am I going to do Psalm 24 with?
	It's quite a short psalm and I think it will therefore require a bit of digression to fill out an hour and a bit's discussion.
	I'm particularly interested in your take, because you are Orthodox, and you are, I think, the first Orthodox guest I've had to discuss the Psalms, and I think every branch of the Church has slightly different takes.
	Now, Psalm 24 is one of the Messianic Psalms, isn't it?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	No doubt.
	Which means what, basically?
	They predict the coming of Christ.
	Essentially, yeah, and then you also have a statement in Peter where Peter says that it was the Spirit of Christ that prophesied through the Old Testament authors when they were authoring these texts.
	So we see it even more Christological perhaps than some people in that it's not just David.
	It's also Christ who's speaking of his own life, his own travails, his own experiences, preaching, ministry, descent into death, descent into Hades, resurrection and ascension.
	Throughout many, many Psalms and not just the predictions of Christ as the Messiah, but the Gentile nations converting and coming into the covenant.
	So the the world essentially experiencing this message is also found in many, many, many songs as well.
	Good.
	Well, I'm glad we're more or less on the same page.
	I mean, as you've probably guessed, I'm a massive fan of the Psalms.
	And it's not, it's not always the case that Christians love the Psalms or even know the Psalms.
	Whereas for me, they are essential to understanding.
	They're essential.
	Yeah.
	Tell me a bit more about why you think that.
	Well, my own personal life, aside from theology ideas, um, That's kind of one of the first things I started reading when I was interested in Christianity, going through a tough time many, many years ago.
	It was the Psalms that played a big role in finding comfort, finding solace in those times, and so they played a key role in my original interest in converting.
	Or I guess being more serious about my Christianity, I should say.
	And of course, in the Orthodox Church, they play a very central role in, well, particularly monastic life and the bishops.
	They are supposed to be consistently going through the Psalms at all times.
	In terms of our readings of the scriptures and the lectionaries and whatnot, we also read through the Psalms.
	Pretty sure that we read through the entire scriptures, at least on a three-year cycle, I think is how it works, if you follow the daily readings.
	So they're definitely central to the Orthodox Church's spirituality.
	I'm saving Psalm 118 for another Orthodox guest.
	I don't know who yet, but I understand that that's a really key one in the Orthodox calendar.
	It's one of your morning psalms, but I think it has special, special significance.
	Since we started on your autobiography stuff, tell me more about your Christian journey.
	Were you raised a Christian?
	I was raised Baptist.
	My family are pretty much just sort of standard Bible Belt, Southern Baptist, conservative, Republican family.
	I went to Sunday school, all of that when I was a kid, but we didn't take it super seriously.
	We would kind of go in phases.
	Some months we were really in the church, some months we didn't really go.
	And then by the time I was 18, I was invited to a Bible study.
	I started going to different churches with my friends, some Protestant, some were Catholic.
	I didn't really find at that time Catholicism convincing, but I got more and more interested in church history, more interested in Protestant Bible studies and whatnot.
	I went to Bible college for a year, maybe two years, can't remember exactly, but ended up not staying at a Bible college, but I went to a Secular University and then I got really interested in theology church fathers back here around 2000.
	I bought this set around 2001 and really dove into that because I wanted to know what the history of the church was that led me to Catholicism for about 8 or maybe maybe 10 years 8 or 9 years.
	I'm in my twenties.
	I was very serious about Catholicism.
	I have my Summa Theologica over here.
	This is my Catholic phase over there.
	All the Catholic books.
	You've been around the block.
	Yeah, well, I was very serious about it.
	I've, you know, read my way into a lot of these things.
	And I don't mean to say it was all head knowledge.
	I mean, I was, you know, attending the Latin mass, attending the church regularly.
	But then I delved into the controversies of pre- and post-Vatican II theology and tried to reconcile a lot of that and ended up just coming to the conclusion that the Orthodoxy really is the only church that's consistent with the first thousand years of Christianity.
	So, I almost became Orthodox in 2007, but I held off and studied it more and more.
	And eventually became Orthodox 2017 and then have been Orthodox since.
	Yeah, well, I want to I want to I'm really glad I've got you on actually because because I mean you are in a way my dream podcast guest for a psalm podcast because apart from your massive and broad knowledge about Christianity and its history.
	You're also like me down the rabbit hole.
	And I think that there are a lot of Christians, perhaps even most Christians, who have what I would call a normie take on Christianity, in that they trust the experts.
	And in this case, the experts would be their vicar, their pastor, whatever.
	Whatever they say goes.
	They've never questioned, they've never asked questions like, say, the Masoretic text, you know, they probably aren't aware that there are controversies over that.
	They're probably not aware that there are controversies over the translation of the word Jew or the word Gentile.
	That there are discussions to be had over, you know, the Book of Enoch and so on.
	They just take it as read that the version of Christianity they're given is the right one.
	And I suspect that you, like me, have approached it from a rather different angle, which is, okay, so I get that Christianity is real, I feel that in my heart, but I would like to get to the essence of what is real Christianity and strip away all the accumulations over the years, all the heresies, all the politics, and get to the heart of it.
	Is that a fair summary of where you are?
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, no doubt about it.
	I found in my journeys through Christianity over the years, different churches, people in each group I was involved in, Protestant, Catholic, now Orthodox.
	Awake people to the rabbit hole geopolitical issues.
	And then in all these groups, people who were not so the, the sort of normie.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I've found a awake and non awake people in all these groups, but you know, there is a lot of one thing I'll say about the Orthodox church that I think is unique in this regard is that It seems to retain quite a bit of this notion of battling the demonic.
	And so, because we still see that warfare as ongoing and pretty central to everybody's spiritual life, maybe there's a tendency to be a little more awake amongst, maybe that's just my circles and people I know, but you know, a lot of our sphere is pretty awake to stuff.
	That's interesting.
	In my journey through Christianity, I was raised Church of England.
	I was confirmed when I was at school and so on.
	So I was a typical Church of England person, you know, Easter and Christmas and kind of said my prayers now and again, but what I would probably now call a cultural Christian.
	But since I've got serious in the last For four or so years, I've been looking around very interestedly at all the different churches.
	And what I found, number one, is there are good people, very good people in all the churches.
	It's not like, you're never going to hear me sneering at the Catholics or mocking the happy clappers, because Each denomination, if you like, has special qualities which are not so strong on the other ones.
	Some have really deep Bible knowledge, which others are lacking.
	I suspect the Catholics are not so good on their Bible knowledge.
	It's almost like they're discouraged to really know what goes on in the Bible.
	I really feel And you'll probably agree with this, that the Orthodox are probably the most spiritually connected, or they have an understanding of the numinous in a way I think some of the other churches really don't.
	The Church of England, for example, finds the whole element of the supernatural kind of embarrassing, whereas I think Orthodox, am I right?
	The supernatural is the very essence of it.
	Yeah, I don't think you find the The tendencies of now, I mean, you can go to certain areas of the Orthodox Church.
	For example, the Greek Orthodox Church in America can be very liberal in those fears.
	There's sort of a, maybe a downplaying and an overemphasis on academia, but the.
	The emphasis on academia, scholastic ideas, higher criticism, a lot of that has not really infected the majority of the Orthodox.
	So when you go at the parish level, you're not going to be typically dealing with people who are textual critics who don't believe in the Torah or something like that.
	I think overall, yes, the general sense of the battling that we have to do with the demonic.
	Because in our worldview, it's so closely connected to the vices.
	I don't mean to overemphasize this, it's not like everything that's happening is demonic or angels, but there is, again, a deep connection in our anthropology, in our Um, Orthodox psychology could call it where, uh, every person who's going to their confessor and who's expressing and confessing their sins is usually getting, uh, ideally some sort of medicine that involves the opposite virtue to correspond to the vice.
	And so, for example, if a person's struggling with lust, well, the, the, the, Answer to that is the not just self-control, but also things like fasting and magnanimity, because lust is where you're desiring things.
	And so this part of the solution is the corresponding virtue, which is to be giving rather than to be craving.
	I mean, obviously, again, fasting and other things play into that.
	But the reason that we have all these rules, you know, prayer rules, fasting rules, and this kind of stuff in the Orthodox Church is intended to So it's really just fundamental to our whole ethos, our whole process of why you go to a confessor.
	For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, they do have the idea of father confessors, but It's a little more mechanical there in the sense that I can confess anywhere in a Roman Catholic Church if I'm a Roman Catholic and it's just sort of a transactional thing.
	The guy that I'm confessing to doesn't necessarily know all of my history and where I'm at in this process and in this battle.
	Um, and the idea in the Orthodox Church of his spiritual father is much more intimate.
	It's much more you, much more tailored to you rather than me confessing to somebody in a anonymous booth.
	So do you see the difference in terms of like, yeah, it's like a, it's like a personal doctor.
	My family doctor knows my history, my medical history or whatever.
	And where I'm at and what I need as medicine versus a sort of a anonymous transactional situation.
	So yeah, I think again all of that to say that the the notion of battling the vices is an intimately connected to the demonic and the temptation in our theology.
	So I think it's just it's just more it's just still there even if there are liberal elements within orthodoxy as there are everywhere.
	When did you come to realize that demons are real?
	I had a really bad experience when I was 17 and I was doing acid at the time and I had a really really bad acid trip and of course obviously I'm aware that it could potentially be purely the effects of the drug but I blacked out and I had an interaction with something for about four hours
	Uh, I don't think it was all mental because I don't, you know, typically I don't see how you could have this kind of a back and forth for that for that amount of time.
	Um, but.
	That I didn't immediately become a Christian or, you know, start reading the Bible that time because I was foolish enough to continue to do acid.
	But, uh, but yeah, I think, I think it was something demonic and that's always, uh, it's always convinced me that I've been in a couple other cases I've been around people that I felt like, uh, something else was stepped in and it was speaking through them.
	It wasn't the person that I knew.
	Um, they were significantly, Messed up, they were having issues themselves.
	This was a different, totally different time.
	I feel like they were possessed.
	So I feel like in two instances of possessed people and one instance myself of a bad acid trip to me is enough to see that there is a demonic realm.
	Weirdly enough, I think the only occasion when I've seen what may have been a demonic entity was when I was tripping.
	on acid and I had a really, really bad, bad trip.
	And I've told this one before, but I feel you on that.
	This, there was this creature on the end of my cigarette and his name was Mr. Migaret and he had this tall hat.
	And like a tall black hat.
	And however much I flicked the ash, he would never disappear.
	He was always there.
	And it freaked me for a long... you know, I was haunted for weeks, months.
	I thought he'd stolen my soul.
	I'm not sure I ever did do acid up to that.
	I do think that drugs potentially open up the portals for demonic entities.
	Definitely.
	Yeah, so I believe in that stuff, and I've seen loads since.
	I really don't actually get Christians who don't engage with this sort of stuff, because I'm thinking, well, why not just go to a sort of social club where you do good works?
	If you don't believe that this is about the supernatural, then Um, yeah.
	Yeah, no, exactly.
	I mean, the whole message is essentially presupposes the supernatural.
	I mean, if price didn't resurrect, then what's the point of it?
	Right.
	So, um, yeah, I totally agree.
	Yeah.
	My situation, it was more like a, When I blacked out, I was out in the bathroom for about four hours and there was this point of light that I was interacting with and it was talking to me, communicating to me.
	I've always felt like it was some kind of demonic entity.
	I don't remember what The exchange was what we were talking about or what was trying to be communicated.
	It probably wasn't anything good.
	But I came away from the experience feeling terrified, feeling dirty, feeling unclean, weird.
	So it definitely wasn't any kind of positive thing.
	It had to be, I think, something demonic.
	Do you think you may have been protected though by the fact that you had a Christian background?
	Well, when I came out of that, yeah, because I felt like I shouldn't continue doing this, even though I did do acid a few more times, like I still felt bad.
	So I think my conscience was definitely aroused and was convicted over this.
	And so it wasn't too much longer after that that I basically quit a lot of that stuff, so.
	Before we ramble entertainingly any more, let's just briefly focus on the psalm so that we can at least do it justice.
	The Earth is the Law.
	I'm using the Coverdale translation, which I rather like.
	I prefer it generally to the King James Version, which I know a lot of Americans use.
	Which translation do you Orthodox people use?
	We pretty much all use the Orthodox Study Bible.
	And this one, it's great.
	It has a lot of excellent notes.
	But it uses the New King James.
	Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
	I'm going to quote from the Coverdale just because when I learn the psalms by heart, those are generally the ones I do.
	And I won't do a psalm podcast unless I've learned the psalm already.
	So, the first line, the earth is the Lord's and all that therein is the compass of the world and they that dwell therein.
	I mean, that's a statement of sort of We're not, we're not here without God.
	Yes.
	And also, uh, in, in ours, because the Orthodox Bible goes from the Septuagint and because that's the, the normal Bible for the Orthodox church is not the Masoretic text.
	Um, things that differ a little bit.
	Right.
	So for example, we have a, an intro, I mean, it may be in the empty.
	I'm not sure.
	Let me see.
	Cause I have my Masoretic version over here as well.
	Um, from the, my Protestant days.
	It doesn't, it looks like it doesn't have this introductory statement, but there's a statement called Psalm of David of the first day of the week.
	A lot of church fathers would, would read into that, that, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but they would say this the first day of the week, of course, is a reference to the resurrection.
	So a Psalm of David of the first day of the week is letting you know that this, the context is the resurrection of Christ because that's the first day of the week.
	That's its significance.
	Anything else I'm missing from my translation of the Masoretic Text?
	What does your version say?
	Yeah, the Earth is the Lord's in the fullness, and its fullness, the world and all who dwell therein.
	Yeah.
	So, we realize that You know, a lot of times you'll hear, uh, I mean, I'll be thinking of this in terms of apologetics as well as Christology and all that, but, um, you'll hear, oh, the God of the Old Testament, you know, that's, that's a localized deity of the Jews.
	Right.
	I mean, it's already in the texts that, no, this is the God of the whole world.
	So he's not a localized deity.
	Yeah, I'm with you there.
	We can talk about that some more because it really annoys me that.
	It's one of the things that really puts me off CS Lewis.
	CS Lewis did this book about the Psalms.
	I read it.
	Yeah, I read it.
	It's bad.
	It's really bad.
	I don't like it.
	I never recommend it.
	I always recommend his other books but never that one.
	Yeah, so were you annoyed by the same things that annoyed me?
	Yeah, it was...
	You know, there's traces, I think, of higher textual criticism in that book, which influenced what he said there.
	So, yeah, it was disappointing when I read it too.
	And I read it when I was a Protestant.
	I was very Very interested in C.S.
	Lewis.
	I mean, I still am.
	I still love his works, obviously, but I've never, never recommended that book.
	Yeah, although, Jay, as a fellow conspiracy theorist, are you aware of the Michael Mathis thesis that C.S.
	Lewis... Oh, Miles Mathis.
	Sorry, sorry, Miles Mathis, that C.S.
	Lewis was basically a wrong-un.
	It's quite an elaborate thesis.
	A what?
	A rongan.
	He was a baddie.
	Oh, no.
	I quit paying attention to that guy a long time ago.
	I'm familiar with him.
	Anyway, that's a distraction.
	I'm totally with you.
	The point I was going to make about the C.S.
	Lewis thing really annoyed me.
	His take on the Psalms was that, yes, these people In the Old Testament, called the Jews, had these Psalms, but they were a kind of Jewish thing, and we Christians have our New Testament, which is our thing.
	I think you don't get it, do you?
	You can't just have the New Testament and not have the Old Testament as well.
	No, in fact, this is a huge issue that I've encountered in the last five years debating Muslims.
	Now, we haven't had a lot of debates with Jews, but a few Jews have hopped on, but one of the key things that I've ended up coming to in debating Muslims is that you really have to be really familiar with the law and the prophets.
	If you don't know those texts really well, you're not going to be proficient in countering Muslim claims because It's absolutely necessary, for example, to show that the Trinity and the deity of Christ are from the Old Testament.
	And that really undercuts the Muslim argumentation that the God of the Old Testament is a bare generic Unitarian deity.
	No, it's not.
	In fact, modern Jewish scholarship has, in large part, begun to admit that the Torah and the prophets do not depict a generic Unitarian deity who's abstract and not connected to the world, but rather a deity who is
	Imminent who can become manifested or what we call a theophany I mean, it's just amazing to see they're still Jewish scholars, but they're admitting this point that well It kind of looks like the God of the Hebrew Bible Has more than one person and can manifest in time and space and do all these things and I'm thinking yeah That's what Christians have been saying the whole time, but that's where we are.
	Actually.
	I've got I've got all those Jewish scholars books right down there I reference them all the time in the debates with Muslims.
	But, yeah, you have to have this understanding or else you're going to fall into this trap where, unfortunately, in that Psalms book, C.S.
	Lewis fell into it, to where you're saying, well, there's like this Old Testament God who's this sort of mean thing.
	It's just Marcionism, basically.
	It's another form of what the early church called Marcionism.
	Briefly, because I love digressions and I like to keep people up to speed on all these terms.
	Tell us briefly who Marcion was and what he said.
	Marcion was, I can't remember if he was a presbyter or a deacon or something in the very early 2nd century church, who thought that The depictions of God in the Old Testament couldn't in no way be reconciled with the God of love that's portrayed in the person of Christ.
	And so he had to sort of Introduced this fissure between the two deities and this led him for, I'm not sure why, but to come up with a really arbitrary New Testament canon.
	So actually Marcion, ironically, is the first person to have a canon of the New Testament and the Old Testament.
	And it was very arbitrary with something like a couple of Paul's letters, the gospel of John and something.
	I mean, even his choices didn't make any sense because the Gospel of John, in many places Christ, affirms that the God of the Old Testament is his father.
	So, it really doesn't make any sense.
	But anyway, there's a great tech...
	Academic text that was written on this by Rada Galwitz called the transformation of divine simplicity and Rada Galwitz argues that actually Marcion was really influenced by Greek philosophy.
	It was one of the reasons that he was led to this position.
	It wasn't just textual issues about God of love versus God of wrath.
	It was also these commitments that he had to Greek metaphysics, which led him to think that The sort of absolutely simple God of his position.
	In other words, it ends up being connected to not just to his position of Christ as a God of love, but also to what would become Arianism.
	So, he was kind of a proto-accidental Arian before Arianism was a thing.
	Arianism is the idea that Christ was the first of God's creatures.
	He pre-exists his incarnation, but he's the first thing that God created at the beginning of the world.
	That's the controversy of Nicaea.
	They dealt with Arianism, but before Arianism, there was this second century controversy with Marcion and St.
	Irenaeus, the famous Bishop of Lyon and his against heresies.
	He's one of the first to really deal with Marcionism there in that text that he wrote in 180 and he talks about how it's pretty obvious throughout many New Testament texts that over and over and over we have citations of the validity of the Old Testament.
	We have citations of, you know, Christ himself.
	Scriptures cannot be broken.
	He says in John, uh, he says many, many times over again in John that he was at Mount Sinai.
	Abraham believed in him.
	Moses wrote and believed in him Luke 24.
	So it really makes no sense to say that this is different deity of the Old Testament, but throughout Church history, many people have fallen back into this mistake because of an emphasis on or a mistaken idea that The New Testament.
	I think a lot of it just has to do with sort of ignorance of these these topics and these issues because if you read the Bible from the perspective of continuity Christ is all over the Old Testament.
	So it would make no sense to put a fissure between the Old and the New Testament.
	Yeah, I would think so.
	And yet, you see it cropping up a lot.
	It's like the creature in the Terminator.
	It just keeps coming back.
	I mean, in discussions, I often see Christians or would-be Christians or fair-weather Christians saying, yeah, well, obviously the Old Testament God is something different from the Well, for example, in Leviticus, I think it's either 17 or 19, you're commanded to love your neighbor.
	Okay, so you weren't allowed to hate people in the Old Testament.
	In Deuteronomy 10, it says that God loves the stranger and the foreigner.
	So even the foreigner and the stranger are part of, you know, God's protection and he cares for them.
	It's not just Jews, even in the Mosaic Law.
	And in the New Testament, we have the wrath of the Lamb.
	We have, you know, essentially God's justice and judgment.
	So both Old and New Testament Well, Jesus is a God of love.
	And how could he be a God of justice?
	to not portray right so there's love in the old testament there's justice in the new so this idea is just again really based i think on people having assumptions and then picking and choosing certain things right like well jesus is a god of love and how could he be a god of justice and so there's an there's an assumption that these things are pitted against each other when the text themselves actually don't say that um let's move on to that
	uh for he hath founded it upon the seas and prepared it upon the floods.
	Uh, Um, does that tell us anything about the shape of the world or anything?
	Maybe not.
	I don't usually go into that.
	I don't think that necessarily it does.
	I think what's more important is the, a lot of times in the, the text of scripture, Earth is compared to the waters or the seas.
	Earth oftentimes represents Israel or the nation or the land, the people of the land, and then the seas are often Throughout the Old Testament depicted as the Gentile nations.
	So I think the point again here is that God owns not just Israel, the whole earth and also the seas.
	And that's the Gentile nations.
	And we're going to, and that's another motif you see throughout the scriptures as well.
	Um, that land and sea come together, particularly under the new covenant land and sea, but where the whole, all of the earth, Is the Lord's not just in the sense of creation, but in the new creation all of the earth also is the Lord's because Christ's incarnation is the uniting of God and man not just in human nature, but also that that human nature that he assumed will affect all of created reality.
	So in the Orthodox Church, we have a different take on the cosmic significance of the incarnation that it actually affects all of the created order.
	So I think that Cosmic expansion here.
	I mean, I know it's not cosmic yet, but throughout the Psalms it is cosmic.
	Anyway, that's my take on it.
	Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord or who shall rise up in his holy place?
	So as I understand it, this psalm would have been, was a sort of processional hymn.
	Sung, I think, as the Ark of the Covenant, changed its location.
	So it was carried out, I think, into the city, into the temple.
	And this would have been, we'll see the responses later on in this.
	So is this not asking the question of the people about to enter the holy place?
	What qualities do they require to gain admission?
	It is that and of course you know Jesus repeats this in the Sermon on the Mount essentially that those who have a pure heart will see God and so forth.
	So we know that again the Spirit of Christ is the one that's speaking through David here as Peter says that the Spirit of Christ prophesied through the Old Testament prophets.
	Because this similar language is used in the Beatitudes that innocent hands pure heart.
	Those are the ones that will ascend and we'll see God.
	It also though is a direct reference to Christ because of course the only person who are the first person to truly ascend in our restored nature is the son of God himself who ascended on high and then prepares the way for us to ascend.
	What about Elijah didn't hit wasn't he assumed into heaven?
	Well, Elijah went to, we believe to paradise.
	So he did, he did go to wherever, uh, paradise is where, uh, you know, like when the thief on the cross says this, Jesus says, you, this day you will be with me in paradise.
	But from Hebrews seven, we know that, and in, in terms of what happens at the beginning of the book of Acts, Hebrews seven tells us that no one could actually ascend into the third heavens, God's throne until our nature had been restored.
	And so the purpose of the incarnation death or resurrection, Is the healing of human nature so that it could go back into the throne room of God and then Christ could in the heavenly tabernacle be our priest and representative there in our nature and now our nature can go back.
	That's why he says, you know, don't talk about me yet or say anything yet until I send to my Heavenly Father and then I will send the Holy Spirit.
	So the there's a logical process is what I'm saying to the To those actions of ascension and in the sinning of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost.
	But it had to be in a restored in our nature restored in other words.
	So the next the next lines are would have been imprinted the generation say I would have thought up till about maybe 1945 every educated English person would be familiar with this phrase, and probably would have been familiar for centuries before.
	Even he that hath clean hands and a pure heart, that hath not lift his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour.
	I mean, I've heard that phrase, he's clean hands and a pure heart, and it does seem to be one of the sort of the requirements of being a No, I think that's symbolic language for having pure heart in the sense of loving God and keeping the commandments, not just externally, but also internally.
	doesn't mean you've got to richly purify yourself.
	No, I think that's symbolic language for having pure heart in the sense of loving God and keeping the commandments, not just externally, but also internally.
	This is another point too that a lot of people think, "Oh, the Old Testament was about these externals and you could hate people." No, no.
	The Old Testament required the same things as the New.
	It's just that there's an emphasis, I think, in the New Testament on the power of the Holy Spirit in us to live these things.
	That's not to say that the Old Testament saints didn't have the Holy Spirit.
	They did.
	But Pentecost is definitely something new and redemptive history.
	So, um, there's a greater outpouring, a greater empowering that we have in the New Testament to actually have a pure heart, to actually have and participate in these things in the truest sense, uh, which is lacking only in the sense of power and perhaps quantity in the Old Testament.
	Um, So, I would say that the ritual elements in our view, in terms of what you see with the Old Testament Levitical Law, most of that itself was symbolic for the inner state and inner purity.
	So, you had a lot of ceremonial cleansing that was necessary, hence the reference to clean hands and whatnot.
	That was always supposed to signify inner cleansing.
	For example, Jeremiah says, circumcise your hearts.
	You know, circumcision outwardly was something that was necessary and what God asked for for a certain time period until the coming of the Messiah.
	But even during that time period, it was expected that, as Jeremiah says to the Jews of his day, circumcise your hearts.
	Likewise, the ceremonial commands and, by the way, the unclean animals were always supposed to signify and reference the demonic.
	So it's not that God is so much concerned with whether I plant two seeds in a field.
	That don't, that are different types of seeds.
	It's rather that I should not unite good to evil.
	That's Paul's exegesis of his passages.
	And the point is that it was always intended to be that pedagogically.
	I wanted to ask you about that actually.
	Um, because I've spoken to some Christians, um, of, of, of, you know, who think on similar lines to the way we do, uh, who, who've said adamantly that, For example, that we should observe the same dietary norms that they observed in the Old Testament.
	So, I mean, do you think that one can be a good observant Christian and eat pork, for example?
	Yeah, I think Paul makes it very clear that what God has cleansed, let no man call unclean.
	And so, this is an issue that's resolved in the book of Acts itself.
	And so, when we read through the book of Acts, by the time we get to Acts 15, Peter himself has already struggled with this very issue in Acts 10.
	He doesn't want to eat with Gentiles.
	He doesn't want to Partake of anything that's ceremonially or ritually unclean animal wise and God has to three times over send him a vision to tell him that what God has called clean let no man call unclean and so Peter should not have that perspective and this is in fact what
	So,
	So, in Jewish tradition, the Jewish dietary laws and ceremonial laws and the Jubilee, the land laws, those are only for Jews.
	Because most of them, or many of them I should say, can only be kept in Israel to begin with.
	Because they're like land laws or laws relating to the temple and its ceremony.
	So they can't be kept by Gentiles.
	So in other words, guess what?
	This is thankfully already been resolved because in Acts 15 when they meet to decide how to receive Gentiles in the church and what to expect of Gentiles converting.
	They say, well, we ought not expect anything more than what was required of righteous Gentiles in the days of Noah.
	So if you could be made right with God in Noah's day, Before Abraham, before the Mosaic Law, we ought not require anything more than that.
	Well, what was required in the Mosaic Covenant?
	Well, excuse me, the Noahic Covenant.
	Well, a few things, and so we will make those, that's the limit of the ceremonial requirements.
	Don't eat, you know, strangled meat, something like this.
	So basically, it's just reaffirming the Noahic Covenant is the minimum expectation for Gentiles to be received into the church.
	So, that's the logic.
	Yeah.
	I don't want to sound Martianist here, because I don't think he was right.
	But, can you answer me a question?
	How come by the time of Acts, God is okay about what his followers eat?
	But I'm struggling through numbers at the moment.
	And it's not my favorite book of the Bible.
	And it's full of all these just ridiculous laws.
	You know, if somebody dies near you, that means you're tainted and you've got to go through this process and you've got to chop off your hair and do this and do that.
	And all these rules about who's allowed to come near the temple and not.
	Why is God so incredibly anally retentive?
	I mean, God is surely immutable.
	So how come he does all this stuff then, but then becomes much cooler about, you know, yeah, you can eat prawns or whatever, bacon sandwiches.
	What's that about?
	Yeah, well, great question.
	So, two books are essentially devoted to explaining this issue in the New Testament, and that's of course Galatians and Hebrews.
	Some of the Book of Romans also deals with this, but I think it's more specifically addressed and explained in Galatians and Hebrews and what Paul and we believe in the Orthodox Church that Paul is the author of Hebrews.
	So what we have explained there is the true sense and the spiritual sense of these things.
	So a lot of these things are Christological, a lot of these things are Paul says, for example, that the law was given for a time period for a temporal situation that was unique to the Jews.
	And there are certain things about the laws that were intended to only before the Jews as a pedagogical means.
	So a lot of the penal sanctions, a lot of the ritual uncleanness was intended to pedagogically instruct Jews about the moral and spiritual principles.
	But what even happens throughout the Old Testament, of course, is that They miss this point.
	They turn it into a thing where you get Pharisees who focus on the externals and the minutiae to be better or more righteous than other people.
	That's of course the point that Jesus has when he argues with the Pharisees in Matthew 23.
	But the law had a few functions, one of which was to show us that we're unclean, to show us that we could never keep these commands.
	They're not intended ultimately to be perfectly kept, hence why even within the law you have the ways to make atonement or to show that you need somebody else to do this for you or to help you.
	That's the purpose of the animals being a kind of a scapegoat or a replacement for you or a thing that you offer in your stead.
	And so thus, as Hebrews and Galatians say, all of those things are ultimately just pointing to Christ.
	Christ is the one who ultimately keeps the law for us.
	He's the only person who could do this was the Son of God Himself.
	And this, I think, is the point of a lot of Paul's argumentation about the law tells us that we can't do it, that it's impossible to keep, and so we have a person who does it for us, God Himself.
	And then we participate in that divine life in order to actually live out basically the Ten Commandments, right?
	Which is the essence of the law.
	So, again, Paul's point was just simply that many of the commands you're talking about were intended to be temporal.
	They were intended for a specific dispensation, he says.
	And then when that dispensation was fulfilled, when the Messiah comes, many of those things are no longer necessary because he calls them Weak, beggarly, childish elements.
	Right.
	Thank you for explaining that.
	That's cleared a lot of stuff up.
	So, he shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
	Well, for us again, obviously as these things apply in the grammatical or immediate historical sense to David, they also apply in a Christological sense to Christ, the Messiah.
	They also apply in an anagogical or a moral sense to the individual believer and what they're supposed to do.
	So, this is, to sum up, that's, I don't know if you've heard of the four senses of scripture, but this is kind of a classic.
	Uh, approach to a lot of these texts where there's four senses, there's the literal, uh, there's the allegorical, there's the, the moral anagogical and so forth.
	Um, so just playing on that, I would say that, uh, the one who receives this blessing.
	Is ultimately the son of God because this is a messianic prophecy where in our nature.
	He receives the blessings of the father that then deified the human nature that he assumed that is in the Orthodox Church.
	The essence of how we are saved is that he's assumed and do and and deified and healed our nature.
	And so that is coming to him from God the father here in the state of incarnation.
	That's how I would execute that passage in that by extension.
	We participate in that.
	Actually, on that, just briefly, have you looked into Tolstoy and his religious faith?
	Well, I think you asked me that in an email and I said no, actually.
	Once I heard he was a pacifist and kind of a weirdo, I never found him interesting.
	I do like Dostoevsky a whole lot.
	Jay, you've got to rectify that.
	You've got to read some Tolstoy.
	I mean, even if you disagree with him, he's the greatest of all the novelists.
	Well, I love Dostoevsky.
	I've thought he's great.
	I'd say he's got the edge over Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky is pretty awesome.
	I'd say, I just think Anna Karenina and Warren Peece are the two greatest novels written and Dostoevsky would be third, either with, you know, Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment.
	I think Crime and Punishment is probably less messy.
	But yeah, anyway.
	This is the generation.
	I like this.
	I always think of the who when I think of this one, and I know I shouldn't really.
	This is the generation of them that seek him, even of them that seek thy face, O Jacob.
	Who's that addressed to?
	Well, the immediate context, of course, David is writing, as you said, a psalm.
	I presume you're correct there about a liturgical psalm about the Ark of the Covenant.
	And of course, the Ark of the Covenant is A big time predictor of Christ's incarnation.
	The Ark is intended to be a sign and symbol and an actual manifestation of God's presence amongst the Israelites.
	It is Immanuel, God with us.
	The ultimate Immanuel is the Son of God with us in the incarnation.
	And so he's the ultimate Ark of the Covenant.
	So David, I think is writing to the people who already know and believe in the Son of God who are awaiting the coming of the Messiah in the Old Testament.
	But I would say beyond that, The generation of those who seek Him is the new humanity, as Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 15.
	Those who are in Christ as already the new humanity, even though we haven't resurrected yet, those in the church are the sons of God, the generation, the new generation, that is in the sense of regeneration and baptism.
	So those who are in the church, who believe in Christ, who love Him, are the new generation.
	Oh, and by the way, I would add too, this reference to God of Jacob is also important because in the Old Testament, Jacob, along with many other people, sees God face-to-face, right?
	We have these theophanies in the book of Genesis, and I recently did a talk through all of the theophanies in the Old Testament.
	So, excuse me, in the Torah.
	It took me about three hours to do all of them.
	You know, we wanted to do that as part of an exercise in understanding that the Old Testament is not a Unitarian book, but a God who's imminent, who's manifest, and who is three.
	So you have Yahweh, his angel messenger, the angel of the Lord, who is identified also as Yahweh, and his spirit.
	And those three are all throughout the book of Genesis, all throughout the Old Testament, but specifically with, in the case of Jacob, You know, Jacob wrestles with God and sees God face-to-face.
	Well, Jesus says in John 5, no one sees God, the Father, at any time.
	No one has seen the Father, Jesus says very clearly.
	Well, who was it then that was the face of God that Hagar saw in Genesis?
	Who was it that was wrestling with Jacob?
	Well, according to Jesus and according to most of the early church fathers, This is Jesus in the Old Testament.
	This is a pre-incarnate theophany.
	So it's very important to understand that face of God and just like many other passages in the Old Testament that talk about the glory of God, the image of God, the form of God, the word of God appearing has to be the son of God because it cannot be the father.
	Yes.
	Do you think the son of God has a distinct personality from God from the father?
	Yeah, this is the Doctrine of the Trinity, right?
	So there has to be a distinct person between father and son, and this is known as, in Christian theology, it's the Trinity, it's the doctrine of three hypostases, three persons, that share one common essence.
	So the Doctrine of the Trinity, I believe, is taught all throughout, it's actually grounded in the Old Testament.
	Right, now I understand that theological point, I just meant, like, Does Jesus have different sort of personal characteristics?
	I don't mean physical, I mean obviously he can be seen, whereas the Father can't be seen.
	But do you think he has different personality traits?
	Do you think Jesus is kind of more, I don't know, less sort of hardcore?
	I don't know what you're saying.
	No, no.
	So I would say they share all of the same powers, attributes.
	You know, Jesus says, for example, in John 5 and in John 16 and 17 that everything that the father has, he has every work that the father intends he does.
	So he has perfect obedience to the father and orthodox theology is called monarchical Trinitarianism where we see the father as having a kind of superiority in terms of origin, in terms of source, in terms of being the cause in the triad.
	But that doesn't mean that there's any diminution in power or ontological status.
	So the son is equally, Right, yeah.
	as the father um but he doesn't have any unique attributes or powers that the father doesn't so because they share the same nature so in other words any anything the son does if you remember in the gospel of john jesus says everything that the father says to do i do so he operates always in perfect obedience so there would never be any kind of like thing he does that the father is not doing right yeah which makes it all the more remarkable
	um that jesus allowed himself to be put to death in this way when he could have just completely destroyed them all for the Life's like that.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's why in orthodox theology it's always emphasized that his life was not forcibly taken.
	He did it willingly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's tough.
	Okay, so now we've got... Now, this bit, I don't... Have you... Well, I'll read it out first.
	Well, real quick, I would add to the last point on that face of God.
	Again, notice that this is not a generic Unitarian God.
	A generic Unitarian God with no likeness to the created order.
	For example, what we read about Allah in Quran 42.
	Allah is nothing like the creation.
	Nothing like the created order.
	He has no form.
	He has no likeness.
	Even though they contradict because they say that Adam was created in the likeness of Allah.
	But we'll set that aside for a minute because the generic Unitarian God doesn't have a face.
	Well, this God has a face.
	So how does God have a face if he cannot have a theophanic form or manifestation, you see?
	It's just another indicator that, no, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Hebrews, is not a formless, unitarian, abstract thing.
	It's a very personal, manifesting type of God.
	And there's a great book on this I recommend.
	Well, it's not down there, but it's called Bodies of God by Benjamin Sommer.
	And he's an unbelieving Jewish scholar. - I'm a killer.
	But his whole book is just dedicated to pointing out, inadvertently, the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament like this.
	It is one of the things I really like, that we are made in the image of God.
	I think I mean, I don't think one can understand morality and things like that without understanding that.
	Yeah, I think I made that point too, right?
	Like we have to be made in the image of God.
	That's what gives man dignity, right?
	Because if there's a transcendent origin for man's meaning, man's morals, then morals' meaning can be objective and not purely subjective, not purely, you know, just based on human whims.
	If there's a transcendent objective basis, then that gives man the ability to say, no, it's wrong to murder.
	It's wrong to do these things.
	There's got to be limitations on these things.
	The state can't just say it's God and, you know, murder at will.
	Yeah.
	So this is a kind of religion, a kind of theology where man has dignity.
	There's a basis for that dignity.
	It's not just arbitrary.
	Now, lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
	Now, I wanted to tell you something here, Jay.
	I don't know whether you've ever come across... Have you ever come across Jesse Sabota?
	I did a podcast with her a while back.
	She tells the story about how she was selected at a very early age, like three or something, to be one of the mothers of darkness in the satanic I don't know whether you call it a church or what, but I think there were five Mothers of Darkness altogether and a bit like the Prince of Persia and stuff, you know, they're given certain realms over which they, certain domains over which they control the kind of the dark forces.
	And one of the things she told me, you must have been down the Antarctica rabbit hole, that there are these kind of These portals and things that you can enter only through submarines and things.
	And that there are these gates which can only be opened through singing certain heavenly psalms and things.
	So I always think about that when I read that line.
	You're not familiar with any of this about sort of portals and things.
	I mean I've heard of the Mothers of Darkness theory of you know that there's a high-level coven of witches and so forth and I'm aware of the theories about Antarctica and portals I didn't know there's anybody connecting the two but I mean just from the exegesis of The Old Testament itself, angels are spoken of at times as gates.
	So it's almost like an angelic being.
	It's himself or themselves are and can be gateways or portals or spiritual dimensions, so to speak.
	And that's why this of course is quite obviously a very famous liturgically read passage for the ascension of Christ.
	And so I kept mentioning ascension at the very beginning, you know, the eighth day, that's the resurrection and ascension.
	That's why I said in the, Septuagint, this has the introductory clause that this is a Psalm of the first day of the week.
	Hence the resurrection of Christ and hence the reference to the Ascension.
	So, and this doesn't just refer to the Ascension, it also refers to, you know, when Christ comes into Jerusalem, right?
	When he's hailed as the King.
	So, entering into the gates of Jerusalem on the donkeys with the palm branches, the entrance into Jerusalem as it's called, that's a type of the entrance that he would make Foreshadowing the entrance that he would make when he ascended into the heaven of heavens into the third heaven Uh, as the king of glory.
	So this tells us again, uh, Christ is divine.
	He's not purely human because he couldn't be the king of glory.
	If he was merely a man that would make him a idolater and a blasphemer.
	Um, the gates are the angels that are welcoming him as he enters into, they are the rulers, the heavenly principalities, Paul calls them.
	Uh, and this is a reference to the eternal doors, which obviously couldn't be, uh, just merely the, Temporal gates of Jerusalem the city on earth.
	So the heavenly Jerusalem is the real entrance that we're reading about here So you then got who is the king of glory?
	It is the Lord strong and mighty even the Lord mighty in in battle now wasn't one of the problems that Judas had was that he'd become one of the disciples in the hope that the Messiah, that Jesus, was going to be this kind of warrior who was going to unite the resistance against the Romans.
	And one of the reasons he betrayed Jesus is a kind of loss of faith in Jesus.
	You know, I thought this guy was going to be my fighting hero.
	I mean, Michael Heiser has a good I've written some good stuff about this.
	I'm sure you're aware that part of the trickery perpetrated against the forces of darkness was to lull them into thinking that the guy who was going to be the Messiah was going to be, you know, fight them in battles.
	And they were completely wrong-footed by the fact that he was Jesus riding in on an ass.
	Yes, I would add too, so two key points on that before we get to what sense the battle was had here.
	This parallels with Psalm, again the numberings are different, so in the Masoretic it would be 68, 17 and 18.
	In mine, it's 67.
	But that's where we read.
	It's another reference to the Ascension.
	The chariots of God are ten thousands upon ten thousands, thousands in number.
	The Lord is among them in Sinai and in the holy place.
	So again, this chariot that the Son of Man rides, this is the victory imagery of being victorious over death.
	If you read Ezekiel 1 through 10, you'll find that same chariot, which is, it's a cherub, it's a throne that's a chariot throne that the Son of Man, one like the Son of Man rides in those passages of Ezekiel.
	They're not aliens like a lot of conspiracy theorists say.
	If you read the passages talking about Well, one thing that's missing in a lot of Western theology in the last thousand years that the Orthodox Church never lost was the doctrine of the harrowing of Hades.
	And so if you look up icons of the harrowing of Hades, typically you'll see pictures of Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of Hades, out of the realm of death.
	Peter says that when Christ descended, he went and preached to the spirits in prison.
	And the context in Peter is talking about Hades.
	So this idea of Christ descending when he died, you have the severing of his human soul from his human body.
	We believe Christ is a divine person.
	So a person is not something that's identical to soul or body.
	It's a unique characteristic based on the Trinity.
	Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.
	He descends in that human soul when he died to Hades, which is the realm of the dead where Satan had dominion, and he despoils Satan of that power.
	So Christ descends in our nature, in a human soul, unjustly brought to Hades because he didn't deserve to die.
	He destroys the power of Satan in that domain.
	And then rises to heal our nature, restoring it in the resurrection.
	That, for the Orthodox, is the gospel.
	And so you can't separate Christ's descent.
	Remember, we read about the descent and the ascent.
	Paul talks about who ascended before first descending, talking about the descent.
	So this is very crucial to Christology and to soteriology, this idea of Christ descending into Hades.
	Most Western churches have lost this.
	It's not a doctrine they teach anymore.
	It's all throughout the Eastern Church Fathers, it's all throughout the first seven centuries.
	Technically, the Roman Catholic Church confesses this, but they don't really give it much significance in their theology.
	I don't know about Anglicans, maybe some Anglican churches still confess the descent and its significance.
	I'm sure that doesn't the Anglo-Saxon literature, I think, mentions the harrowing of hell.
	Very possible, and I think that's probably because, in our view, the Church of Britain, they were Orthodox for a long time, so they probably still maintain a lot of this tradition.
	Right.
	But what happened in the Reformation is that many of the Reformers, took the descent into Hades and they turned it into an idea of that just means Christ being rejected by the father on the cross to pay the penal substitution transaction.
	So they sort of allegorized it into or spiritualized it into a transactional occurrence on the cross of legal debt and whatnot and got rid of this idea of Christ descending to Hades and Now that's Luther.
	That's Calvin.
	I'm not sure about the various Anglican divines at the time of the time of the Reformation.
	They could have had varying views on that.
	But anyway, All that just to say that for us, that's the significance of that warfare is that he's doing that in the spiritual realm.
	He's gaining victory.
	This is why the book of Revelation says when he resurrects that he now has in our human nature, the keys to death and Hades.
	So for us, that's very crucial.
	So we'll just whisper the last bit, because it's just a repeat of those previous verses.
	Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
	Who is the King of Glory?
	Even the Lord of hosts, He is the King of Glory.
	Now notice, that's a clear reference to the deity of Christ.
	So if this is a messianic psalm, which we think it is, if it's a psalm of the Ascension, We have Christ clearly being called the Lord.
	Now, I'm not exactly sure.
	I have to look and see which term is being used.
	It could be Yahweh.
	It could also be just Elohim, right?
	I'm not sure which Lord word is it, but usually Lord is for Yahweh.
	So that would mean Christ is being called Yahweh.
	I've got to ask you about this.
	There is a lot of discussion.
	awake channels about the translation of the word Yahweh.
	Has it deliberately had its power removed by translating it as Lord?
	Should the word be Yahweh?
	What are your views on that?
	Typically in the Orthodox Church, we don't make a huge deal of whether or not the actual Jewish terminology is used because it's essentially, as long as it's referring to the same thing, right?
	So for example, a lot of modern Protestant evangelical groups have come up with this idea that you have to call Jesus Yahshua, and this is somehow the word.
	Yeah, what's that about?
	Thank you.
	Well, it's just sort of a Judaizing tendency that's arisen in modern, what are called Hebrew Roots movements.
	And a lot of these groups have, there's a lot of, for example, the people behind, who put a lot of money into the Daily Wire.
	They happen to be... Oh, I see!
	They happen to be billionaire groups, or a couple billionaires that are actually funding, not just Daily Wire, but also very aberrant Hebrew Roots Judaizing sects, basically.
	Thank you for explaining that one.
	So there's a large push for this?
	What's that?
	I was wondering, it's like you hear these new terms, they come apparently out of nowhere.
	Yeah, those are two examples, like the people that fund that.
	There's other groups as well, but this is also close.
	There's other sects that are spawning from this.
	Black Hebrew Israelites, Hebrew Roots movements, they're all kind of centered around this idea that The church paganized or corrupted Christianity and so we got to recover or go back to some kind of like proto-Judaic form of it, which again, What did we talk about at the beginning of this discussion?
	This is already settled in Acts 15, so we don't have to resurrect all these problems that were already settled in Acts 15.
	But anyway, no, I don't think that... I think there's nothing wrong with using the word Lord to stand for Yahweh or for the I Am or whatever, as long as I signify the correct thing.
	I really wish I had another hour, because I've got to go quite shortly, unfortunately.
	We'll have to do another podcast, Jay, because it's great talk.
	Yeah, any time.
	We mentioned earlier the Masoretic texts versus the Septuagint.
	Can you give us a sort of TLDR on the difference between the two?
	There's a good book on this by a guy named Woodward, and I don't even think he's Orthodox.
	I forget exactly what Tradition he's from I think he's Protestant, but he wrote a good book that many Orthodox people use Call it's called rebooting the Bible and he kind of gives an overview of this issue, which is that it's not so much that It's a little complex, but there's not one ancient Masoretic text.
	What we call the Masoretic text is something that kind of developed out of the second, third centuries of post-Christianity Judaism.
	So, the idea is that, we don't even know if there was a, quote, Council of Jamnia of the rabbis or whatever, but there's this theory that there was this Council of Jamnia of rabbis that sort of decided what would be the rabbinical texts.
	And what's missed by many people, especially Protestants, is that whatever's going on with this Proto-Masoretic text of the Rabbis, it was done in contrast to the Christians.
	The Christians were unanimously of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century, and especially the Apostles, utilizing the Septuagint as their Old Testament.
	Now, to be precise, to be very clear, that doesn't mean exclusively.
	There were some cases where in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, because Matthew knew his audience was Typically Jewish, it was written for a Jewish audience.
	He will at times cite a Proto-Masoretic version because he wants to appeal to what the Jews of his day in his circle saw as authoritative.
	Typically, however, the Apostles, especially Paul, when they cite text, they're citing the Septuagint version.
	The Septuagint also have the Deuterocanonical books, as they're called, and that's another indicator that the Apostles are also at times referencing and citing what's called the Deuterocanon.
	This is why the Orthodox and Catholic Bibles have those extra books.
	Sometimes, I know the Church of England will include them or translate them, but they're always just sort of ambiguous in terms of status-wise.
	But actually the Deuterocanon does play into this because this is why we don't have the canon of the Jews.
	And Protestants, deferring to the Masoretic text, don't have all those extra books like Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, etc.
	But just briefly, I thought the Septuagint was the Greek and best translation of the New Testament.
	No, it's the Old Testament.
	It's the Old Testament?
	Oh, OK.
	But it's in Greek.
	So the LXX, the 70, this is the term for the Septuagint.
	This comes from under Ptolemy.
	The story is that he commissioned a bunch of Jews in, I think, second century to translate the Jewish texts for a Greek audience.
	And because the early church, for the most part, everybody spoke Greek, throughout the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century most people in the Roman Empire spoke Greek, Koine Greek, the natural Old Testament they would use would be the Greek Old Testament.
	Okay, so the Septuagint is actually, which obviously is a translation of an earlier Hebrew text.
	Correct, but keep in mind.
	But it's more accurate than the subsequent sort of tinkered with text.
	The rabbis later decided that What would be the official rabbinical canon?
	Yeah, and this is like second third century post Christ, right would be what becomes the Masoretic text and they specifically cut off texts that like to do for example in the deuterocanonical books like wisdom there's prophecies of Christ and So many of the early church were citing these texts the rabbi said let's just not even use these.
	Okay, they're out and Um, but it's not, it's not like we could never cite a Masoretic reading or text.
	I mean, I've got, I've got both here in front of me.
	Yeah, yeah, sure.
	Um, because, again, Matthew cites them at times.
	Like, if I was arguing, if I was going to try to convince a Jew, I would be like, all right, let's go to your, let's go to your text and I'll show you where it still teaches, you know, Messiah, Christ and Messiah, right?
	So, but, The essence of the whole dispute is just ultimately that Protestants deferred to the rabbinical 2nd, 3rd century versions of what's called the Masoretic Text.
	And they didn't want the Septuagint, but the irony is that, we believe, Christ set up a church who decided that they would typically use the Septuagint as the normal Old Testament.
	And that's what the New Testament itself does.
	So it really makes no sense for Protestants to think that, why would 2nd or 3rd century Jews have any authority in this matter?
	Okay, final question before I go.
	Because, and this is kind of key.
	Like you, I am drawn to the Psalms because they seem to confirm me in my faith, because they prefigure Coming of the Messiah.
	We've talked about all that.
	And Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross.
	He's familiar with the Psalms and he endorses them because his dad wrote, I mean, he endorses the whole of the Old Testament effectively because he's saying, look, this is what, he wouldn't be quoting this literature unless it were kosher, as it were.
	But suppose I were an Orthodox Jew who argued that the Messiah had never come.
	Could you not argue that Jesus was just a very, very learned man versed in the scriptures and that he was quoting all this stuff in order to kind of burnish his reputation as the Messiah?
	Do you see what I mean?
	How would you answer that?
	Well no, I would say if you look at collectively what's considered all of these messianic psalms and prophecies.
	So now a Jew might take issue with us calling this passage or this chapter messianic and okay well let's go to many of the passages that you do think are messianic.
	For example in Genesis 49 we have a prediction of The, the notion that the scepter will not depart from Judah until Shiloh comes, until Messiah comes.
	And then the, the implication is that there will no longer be a royal house.
	Well, guess what?
	When Messiah Jesus came, the temples destroyed.
	And we don't know after that, after the diaspora, what happened to this Davidic lineage.
	So there's many, many, many other examples.
	Daniel nine predicts that when this Messiah comes and by the Jews, Orthodox Jews pronounce a curse on people that read Daniel 9 because it was so often cited by Christians to prove that Christ was the Messiah.
	Because Daniel 9 says that when the Messiah comes, you'll have the doing away of the temple and the sacrifice, eternal righteousness and atonement for sins will come in and the Messiah will be cut off.
	The Prince will die in the midst of this, this sequence here.
	So Daniel 9 is of course one of these most super famous messianic prophecies.
	Um, And keep in mind too, there's many more predictions about where will the Messiah go.
	He comes from Bethlehem, as the minor prophets say.
	Bethlehem of Judea, right?
	So, I mean, there's many, many, many messianic prophecies, so it'd be very difficult to
	Conspire to arrange a false figure who does all of this and even does this when the Destruction of the temple happens 40 years afterwards because remember in Luke 21 and Matthew 24 Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple that happens 40 years after his prediction in 70 AD when Titus comes in and destroys and raises the temple all of which is predicted clearly clear as day in Luke 21 now
	What I'm saying is that even if you were to posit that all of this is a construct or some sort of ruse, like there's so many specific precise predictions.
	Including the death, right?
	Psalm 22, or is it 22 or 23?
	22.
	Isaiah 53 and 54, suffering servant.
	I mean, there's so many of these passages that, by the way, when Jews are confronted with this, they might say, well, you know, we believe that when Messiah comes, he won't have to do any of this death and all that.
	That's not actually true.
	Did you know in the Talmud, they have two Messiahs to deal with these passages?
	They have Messiah ben Joseph and Messiah ben David, one of whom dies to fulfill the passages that refer to this death.
	But when Jews debate with Christians, they will say, there is no passages that refer to a Messiah dying.
	That's not true.
	In their Talmud, they believe there's two Messiahs.
	So they have come up with many, many constructs to actually deal with these passages.
	And, let me add, by the way, too, that the exegesis that we're giving, that I'm giving, you might say, well, how do you, where do you come to this?
	Well, I'm a Christian, so obviously I'm going to have a Christian paradigm for how I exegete these passages.
	The basis for me reading this passage in a Christological way is that when Jesus is resurrected in Luke 24, it says, this is Luke 24, 44, Then he said to them, all of these words are what I spoke to you when I was with you, that all things might be fulfilled that were written in the law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms concerning me.
	And then Jesus opened their eyes to understand and comprehend the scriptures.
	So you couldn't even understand or comprehend the messianic, Christological import and meaning of these passages without Christ opening our eyes to see that.
	Jay, I'm so glad I selected this psalm for you.
	I think you'd have been good on all the psalms.
	Please, let's do another podcast.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you so much.
	I was sort of thrown for a loop with the psalms.
	I've never had anybody say that.
	It was great.
	It was great.
	I'm glad.
	We had a great chat.
	Tell us where we can find you, where you can read your stuff.
	Yeah, my website is jaysanalysis.com.
	It has all my material going back, essays and whatnot that I've written for many years.
	All of those are collected into the books as well that you can get in the shop at the website.
	You can find me on YouTube under Jay Dyer, Twitter as well, all the social medias under my name, and then every Friday I host the fourth hour of the Alex Jones Show.
	Great.
	Thank you, Jay Dyer.
	Thank you, dear viewers and listeners.
	Especially thanks to those who support me on Patreon, on Subscribestar, Substack, Locals.
	Thanks to my sponsors, and thanks to people who buy me a coffee.
	And please spread the word about The Psalms.
	Thank you very much.
	Thanks again, Jay.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you, James.

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