THE FRIDAY SPECIAL - Dismantling Zionism From The Book Of Ephesians argues that Ephesians 2 and Galatians unite Jews and Gentiles into one spiritual people in Christ, tearing down the dividing wall of hostility. Speakers contend this biblical truth eliminates any divine right to land or superior status for modern Jews, directly contradicting Dispensationalism and Zionism as pernicious ideologies. Citing figures like Owen Strand and Jonathan Edwards, they assert that while earthly distinctions remain, all believers are co-heirs without needing Old Covenant rituals. Ultimately, the episode concludes that maintaining special categories for Jews violates the core teaching that there is no longer Jew nor Greek in Christ. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Jew and Gentile Unity00:14:36
Paul's epistle to the church of Ephesus, like Galatians, deals with the central issue of the New Testament, the union of Jew and Gentile into the people of God.
Just like Galatians, it is pivotal to our understanding of this controversy today.
If Jew and Gentile are united into one man, into one people in the new covenant, does this distinction between the two still exist today?
No.
Thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you next time.
Yeah, we'll see you next time.
Yeah.
No, it does not.
All right.
So, what's the primary text that we're using here?
Ephesians.
Ephesians.
Yes.
Go ahead and see what it is.
Yeah, this is not just a prop.
We use this as a prop.
It's a good looking Bible, though.
Beautiful.
Look at the calf skin.
Yeah.
So, we could just go right through Ephesians 2.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world.
Following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him.
And seated us with him in the heavenly places, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith.
And this is not your own doing.
It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Amen.
So we'll pick that back up again later, but that.
Text, right?
Normally, right, if you go to a Reformed church and you're going through Ephesians and you go through Ephesians 2, right, what are you going to talk about there when you read Ephesians 2?
Right.
Justification by faith.
Right.
Right.
Which is good and great and glorious and wonderful, right?
It was funny.
I was making a joke with some of my PCA friends, right?
I haven't gotten to, I had one Sunday off when I was in Florida and I haven't been able to go to a PCA church in many years.
And I told him, guess what the text was?
Guess what the sermon was on this Sunday?
One random Sunday, I popped into a large PCA church.
Like, what?
It was on justification by faith in Ephesians 2, just randomly, right?
You go into a Reformed church, this is what we stress, is what we emphasize a lot.
And of course, that's great.
That's wonderful.
But there's a lot there in that passage that beyond justification, it's good, it's glorious, it's the foundation of the gospel.
Not denying that.
At all, but there, there are other things going on in that verse, in those verses, aren't there?
Yeah yeah well, help us see what some of those things are.
Yeah, so I mean just picking up on.
You know what we talked about in when we did uh, episodes in Galatians right, what?
What was the whole world under right?
Right, the prince of the power of the air?
Right, they're under the, under the elementary principles of the world.
They're in the old creation both, both Jew and Gentile, and Paul makes that clear whom we all once lived In the passions of our flesh, right?
Jew and Gentile all lived in the flesh and under, right?
Under these lowercase g gods that dominated everything.
And what does Christ accomplish?
What does he do?
Right?
He, we're dead in this.
We're dead.
You know, he describes it as slavery in Galatians, it's death in Ephesians.
We're dead.
And God, right?
Not ourselves, God in Christ makes us alive, right?
Makes us alive.
And verse six, Verse 6 is pivotal, it's key.
What does he do when we've been made alive?
We've been saved by grace through faith.
He raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Right.
All right.
So what does that mean?
Right.
What does that mean?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, it means that we are co-heirs with Christ and the inheritance that was promised to him belongs to his people, which are not Jews, but rather Christians.
Yeah.
Not Jews or Gentiles, but Christians.
Right.
And what is that inheritance?
God has promised Christ.
That he would inherit all the kingdoms of the earth.
The nations are his inheritance.
The nations are literally his inheritance, and not to be received at the end of the culmination of all of human history and time, but that he has received the nations now.
And one by one, in a progressive, gradual sense throughout this gospel age in human history, these nations are all being footstooled.
They're coming, flocking to Mount Zion in worship and paying homage.
To the king, Psalms 2 is a commandment that it's not just a messianic prophecy that one day will be fulfilled in the final physical return of Christ, but Psalm 2 is actually a moral commandment to civil rulers of the world now, then and now, that they would pay homage to the Son, kiss the Son, pay homage to Christ, lest He be angry.
That there are temporal judgments throughout human history.
Nations are brought, they are elevated and raised up, and they are brought low based on.
Their obedience to Christ.
And so the nations are promised to Christ as his inheritance that his kingdom would spread throughout all the earth, and that we, as joint heirs with Christ, that we are the meek who inherit not just the 17th dimension of heaven, but we inherit the earth.
And it's not just something that we will inherit in some future tense, but we are progressively, gradually inheriting the earth, even now, throughout this gospel age, as the little bit of leaven of the gospel works through the whole batch of dough.
That's The great promise, and that means all the earth.
There is no sidebar, there's no third category, halfway house of you know, unbelievers and then Christians, and then you know, there's you know, these Christian adjacent you know, Jews who get a piece of the earth with some divine right, land promise.
Yeah, that's that's not Ephesians, doesn't leave room for that, yeah.
And even you know, verse seven, some people might say, Well, what, what, here Joel, it says, right, so that in the coming ages.
He might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Well, coming ages, that means in the eschaton, right?
That means way off into the future, not now, right?
But what are the coming ages, right?
We're in them, right?
We're in them.
It doesn't mean that he's not showing us kindness and grace in Christ now, that's for later.
He's doing that, and he has been doing that for 2,000 years, right?
Right?
And so, right, continuing on in chapter two, and this gets to the meat of the issue, right?
Verse 11, therefore remember.
That at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one.
and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.
And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.
For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father.
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.
In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
Right.
Amen.
So, right, he says, right, you who are far off and you who are near are brought together into one, right?
Into one.
He creates a new man in one body in place of the two, right?
A new man in place of the two, right?
So, right, you could do the math for me, right?
There were two and they're now one.
Right.
That doesn't mean there's now this separation.
It doesn't mean there's two anymore.
Right.
Right.
The two are now one.
Right in Christ, which doesn't mean that this category is hanging out there of Jews as these covenant people out here.
What who are the covenant people?
It's Jew and Gentile united together into Christ, right?
Right, uh, and and so there isn't this room for something else for some other people that here are a handful, you know, a couple promises, right?
All of them are in Christ, all of them are in His one people, the church, right?
Every promise.
Is yes and amen.
All of God's promises are yes and amen in Christ.
In Christ Jesus.
Apart from Christ, though, there is no halfway house.
There is no way of receiving covenantal blessings without having union with Christ.
There's not this second category of tangential blessings that stream down from God to one people based off of.
An antichrist rejecting Christ's covenant or based off of blood or genetics.
And then there's this other covenant of blessing that belongs to the spiritual children who have been unified with Christ through faith.
There's no theological language to support that throughout the scripture.
Yeah, you have to construct it isojetically to get there.
And I mean, this goes back to things we've said in other episodes about the nature, the characteristics of the Old Covenant world.
The Old Covenant world is.
World land sanctuary.
Right.
Right.
World land sanctuary.
So there's those who are near, in the language of Ephesians, right?
Those who are near in the land and those who are far off, right?
That's the two groups of humanity.
And what does Paul say Christ has done?
He's torn down this middle wall, this barrier.
I mean, what's Paul referring to there?
He's talking about the temple, right?
In the temple, right?
There's this barrier, there's this wall.
Right, there's a court of the Gentiles, that's where the Gentiles go, and then there is the space for the Jews that's a little bit nearer to the entrance to the temple.
And it's interesting, right?
Why was Jesus so angry about the money changers in the temple and the people buying and selling and everything like that?
It isn't just that they were practicing commerce inside the temple.
In his father's house, which was meant to be a house of prayer, but it was meant to be a house of prayer for who?
For all nations.
And then what they were doing was not just practicing commerce in a place of prayer, but practicing commerce in a place of prayer for the nations.
And in that particular form of commerce, They were ripping off the nations.
Yeah, ripping off the nations.
They were extorting Gentiles.
Yeah, and because the Jews were fine, because imagine it like this it's not just that they had exorbitant prices for dove offerings and for, you know, for sheep and things like that.
It's not just that their prices were high.
They were treating the house of God like a Chuck E. Cheese, if you remember back in the day, you know, that what you have to do before you can, you know, do any of the games or these things is you have to exchange your currency.
Yeah.
Right.
So you take, you know, the American dollar and you've got to get Chuck E. Cheese tokens.
Well, that's what they were doing is that they wouldn't take the money of the Gentiles in order to purchase animals for sacrifice or grain offerings or whatever.
Instead, they first had to actually transition their money, their currency.
The denarii for shekels.
Yeah, exactly.
And then what they were doing was the currency exchange rate they were extorting.
It's like when you go to the airport and you've got to change your dollars into euros or something.
Right.
So it's not just.
It's going to be a higher premium there.
It's not just that they had high prices for animals to be sacrificed.
That extorted and oppressed both Jew and Gentile alike, but instead it was specifically extorting the non Jews, the Gentiles who had trapped, they had already paid a much higher expense than the Jews living in Jerusalem, just yeah, to take off work, to make the journey, and all these things.
So these are people who are flocking to Mount Zion, you know, who are coming to worship the true God.
From far away, from far, they're far off.
Exactly.
That language is in the text.
The Temple Tax Scam00:04:21
That's part of what Paul's talking about.
So from far off, here they come.
They make the journey at great expense to themselves, and then they have this Gentile currency that must be exchanged with an extortion rate from these religious rulers in order for them to then, after paying an arm and a leg, to be able to purchase a lamb or a dove and be able to make an offering to the Lord.
So it's not just setting up commerce in the house of God, but it's setting up an extorting form of commerce in a house of God that is meant for prayer for.
the other nations.
Yeah, I mean, imagine if you had like a really large church and it's in this old covenant setting where you have this division, right, that God has set up, right, this division, Jews over here, Gentiles over here, and then the space for the Gentiles that they're coming in, there's not seats and places for them to sing psalms and hymns and worship along with you, right?
No, now you've got, you know, crates of doves and lambs and pigeons and things like that taking up space.
You've got tables set up for guys to exchange money.
There's no the place where they're supposed to worship is being occupied by all of this stuff.
They said, oh, well, we won't have the money changers over here.
We'll cram it over into the space for the Gentiles.
We don't care about the Gentiles at all.
They don't really matter.
And so we'll set these things up.
So that's why Jesus goes in there and makes a cord of whips and drives these people out.
Not because that wasn't a necessary function.
They needed that.
You're not going to carry a lamb with you all the way from Asia Minor.
You're going to buy one when you get there.
And so that's a necessary function.
that they have, that should be outside of the space for worship.
That's the problem.
And what Paul says here is what has Christ done?
He hasn't just driven out the money changers and driven out all of that.
He has torn down that wall.
Right now, the Gentiles have access to God, right, in the same manner that the Jews do.
And this is.
And he offers himself as the spotless and final lamb without the lamb.
He's that lamb.
Right, that they don't have to pay for.
Right.
Yeah.
All right, the clock is running out.
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That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
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God's True Temple Now00:11:17
And so, right, you read in the book of Acts, right?
Paul, right, what does Paul do?
He goes to Jerusalem and The elders in the church of Jerusalem are like, hey, we've been hearing you say, we heard people saying, like, you know, you shouldn't be going to the temple and sacrificing and doing things like this anymore.
You want to clear that up for us?
And well, Paul is taking a Nazarite vow.
He has to offer his hair on the altar to fulfill that vow.
So he shaved his head.
He's going to offer it.
And he says, yeah, I'll go with these guys into the temple and we'll make these offerings, right?
The old covenant's still operating.
It's not sinful for him to do this, but he's not, right?
He's just, he's obeying God within the construct of the old covenant.
Covenant.
He's allowed to still do it.
Which still has some effect at that time.
Yeah, he still can do it, but it's not, he knows there's no salvific, you know, nothing happening there via that mechanism.
And he goes in, and what happens to him?
Right?
A crowd mobs him and begins rioting and tries to lynch him in the temple because they say he brought, because we saw him with a Gentile, with a Greek walking around in the city, and he must have brought that Gentile. past this wall into the court of the Jews, and he has profaned the temple of God by bringing a Gentile into here.
What is the thing that nearly got Paul killed in Jerusalem?
It's what he's describing here in Ephesians.
It's what he's describing here that Gentiles now have access to this, but it's not to that temple that Christ is about to tear down when Paul is writing this.
Which temple is it?
It's the true third temple.
It's the temple that is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Christ as the chief cornerstone.
It's continually being built up.
Through the people of God.
Of living stones.
Of living stones that are Jew and Gentile together.
Yeah.
The third temple is the church.
And there will be never any other third temple.
And all those attempts have failed.
And as we've stated in other episodes, some of those failures were pretty epic.
What was the name of the guy who was commissioned to build a third temple?
Well, Julian the Apostate, the Emperor of Rome, commissioned it.
Yeah.
And it was a spectacular failure.
The world, the ground opened up and swallowed them up.
There was lightning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
and fireballs and everything else.
And so you don't want to do that.
You don't want to say God's temple, he needs another one.
He already has his new covenant temple.
It's his people.
And so this major point, Paul again, he's making this point all throughout the pages of the New Testament, again and again and again and again, that there no longer is Jew or Greek.
There's one man.
In Christ Jesus, that has access to God, because that's within the Old Covenant.
We think, oh, in the Old Covenant, God was mean and nasty, and there's all this wrath in the Old Testament.
God is extremely gracious, right?
He kicks man out of the sanctuary, out of his presence, and he doesn't owe us anything.
He doesn't owe us his presence, he doesn't owe us anything at all, but he allows man to come right up to the gate of the sanctuary.
And offer worship right from the very beginning.
And even after he destroys that world under Noah, what does he do?
He allows man to draw near to him in the tabernacle and he sets up a system in which they're able to draw near to him, drawing near to him.
He establishes another sanctuary.
So whether it's the antediluvian world before the flood, you have those three categories of world and land.
And sanctuary.
So the world at large, and then the land would have been Eden, and then the sanctuary would have been the garden.
Because of sin, they're kicked out of the sanctuary, the garden, Adam and Eve.
And then because of sin in the land, Eden, Cain is kicked out of the land.
And then eventually, humanity is kicked out of the world and the flood.
And then you see that same paradigm established, reestablished again.
And so now, instead of world, Eden, garden, it's the world, land, and sanctuary becomes world.
Israel becomes the land and tabernacle, and then later temple.
That's the sanctuary.
And there you see again, well, and even just in John chapter 2, you see Christ himself kicking the Jews out of the sanctuary, out of the temple, driving them out, the money changers.
And then you see him ultimately in his final judgment, in a spiritual coming and judgment through providence and God's sovereignty with Titus.
You see that in AD 70 that he comes and he destroys.
And, you know, with the Garden of Eden, you know, the garden, man is kicked out of the garden.
When it comes to the temple, there's a sense of like, you know, Christ is driving the money changers out.
But in 8070, in the final completion and finality, the end of the Old Covenant, it's not just that man is kicked out of the temple, but the temple is actually done away with.
It's destroyed so that there's no return, so that God makes it apparently clear that there is another temple.
Namely, the Christian church, living stones built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ as the capstone.
That's made clear.
But this human temple made with human hands, it's not just that man has been removed from it, but the temple has actually been removed.
It has been removed.
It has been removed.
So, in other words, there's no going back.
And any attempt at going back is to defeat the very heart of the gospel and the Christian faith.
That God has laid out for us so plainly in scripture and so plainly in the finished work of his son.
So, this idea of, well, there's still a land in a physical sense of, you know, the nation state, the modern state of Israel is still this special land.
And there's still even a temple.
It's eventually, you know, the Temple Mount, we're going to, the third temple is going to be built and the red heifers are going to, you know, sprinkle the ashes.
Yeah.
That is missing the thread of the New Testament and the Christian faith.
If you want to draw near to God, And that's, I mean, that is what the book of Leviticus is about how can man with flesh draw near to God?
Well, God is extremely gracious.
He doesn't owe it to them to allow them to draw near to Him, but in His grace sets up a system where they can.
Because if you have flesh, you can't come near to God, you'll be burned up.
He dwells in unapproachable light, which no man can approach.
And so, what does He do?
He creates, right?
He does what He does for Adam and Eve in the garden, right?
He creates coverings.
Right.
That's why, right, why, why are lepers not allowed to come into the sanctuary?
Because they're unclean.
Right.
They're unclean.
Why are they unclean?
Because their flesh is exposed, right?
Their skin, it's not just like leprosy, like we think of now where your body parts are falling off and things like that.
It's just, it's any, any disease where your skin is, is exposed and what the flesh of your skin is exposed.
Well, you can't, you can't draw near to God that way.
Your flesh is out there for the whole world to see.
And, and all of these things, all uncleanness is, is like that.
That's why the system is set up the way that it is.
And in the new covenant, God has made all men clean by the blood of Jesus Christ.
So there's no, all those things are no longer necessary.
No longer necessary whatsoever.
And all men can draw near to God in the church.
You want to draw, that when we are worshiping, this is important, I think, for Christians to understand what worship is when God's people gather together on the Lord's day.
Is you are going into the tabernacle, you are going into the temple, right?
Into the holy place and into the holy of holies where Christ dwells among his people, and you have direct access to God Himself in a way that in the old covenant the Jews did not have, right?
They could only come up to the entrance of the tabernacle, and only the priest could be inside there, and only once a year, and only the high priest could go into the holy of holies one time a year, right?
And now, right, we can draw near to God in that way, right, every Lord's Day.
And every time the church gathers together, whenever, not just on the Lord's Day, but when the church, you know, it used to be throughout Christendom, you would have services every single day, right?
You would be able to worship every single day if you wanted to.
And maybe someday we'll get back to that.
But, right, you have this access to God to draw near to him, and you don't have to go through the rites and the rituals.
really expensive burdens.
Like you think about, maybe we don't often think about the economic burden that the old covenant law was to the Jews or to Gentiles who would want to worship, right?
Then is now even more expensive than now, although thanks to Joe Biden, animals are expensive, right?
But if you're going to sacrifice a bull, I mean, have you ever thought about that?
Like when David is bringing the ark into Jerusalem and every six paces he stops and he sacrifices a bull.
Right.
And they're miles away from Jerusalem.
Think about how much that cost.
I mean, how much does a bull cost now?
Like thousands of dollars.
And every six bases sacrifice that costs thousands of dollars, even a lamb, still hundreds, maybe $1,000 for a lamb today.
And we have a much more efficient system of breeding and raising animals.
In the ancient world, it was far more onerous to do this, far more expensive.
And that's how they would worship.
And very inconvenient, too.
You would have to wash, you'd wait seven days, all these different rites and rituals.
If you had a baby that was a male child, your wife couldn't come into the assembly after so many days and it was twice as long for a daughter.
All of these things seem really, really inconvenient, but they're gracious because God doesn't owe anybody that access.
In the New Covenant, all of that is taken away by the blood of Christ that this expensive, economically onerous and burdensome system is lifted because he pays for all of it.
And now we can draw near on the Lord's Day in the same way and have full access to God.
Righteous Power for All00:15:00
And it isn't just Jews.
It isn't just priests and Levites.
It is, right?
It is all of the people of God, Jew and Gentile, everyone, everyone on earth can draw near to Christ by faith.
And there's no distinction.
That's one of the things that we've talked about again in Other episodes that we've done, but you know, the Galatians 3 28, one of the most misinterpreted verses in all the scripture.
Maybe after Matthew 7 1.
Yeah, that's right up there.
Yeah, judge not.
Yeah.
Well, there are still temporal earthly distinctions.
Yeah.
Right?
There is grace that does not eradicate or destroy nature, but it elevates nature.
So there is still a difference between male and female.
It's not as though, oh, now we just have, you know, one.
One gender, one sex.
No, we still have the two sexes and they're still distinct.
And we still have different ethnicities.
Of course we do.
And there are still even some, that means something.
Nationality and ethnicity and those things, it still means.
So it's not just a distinction but without a difference.
No, there's a distinction and there are differences between different nations and cultures and peoples.
And they're not all equal.
Not all cultures are equal.
Some cultures are better than others.
And by what standard, Joel?
Better because you like it because you're white?
No, by God's standard, a nation is superior, culture is superior to other cultures insofar as it conforms to the Christian worldview and the truth of Christ.
So, for instance, like, you know, like remember during the whole wokeness of 2020 and 2021, you know, like being on time, right?
Promptness is like white oppression, it's racism.
And we would say, no, not only is it not, it's not racism, so it's certainly not a bad thing.
But we don't need to stop there.
It's not just not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
It is a superior thing.
I have visited cultures that are notoriously three hours late.
I have gone to tribes in Africa on mission trips that I shouldn't have been on short term teenage mission trips that are pointless.
I did some of those in my teenage days.
And it's not as though the message was lost in translation.
We would go with interpreters.
Every day of the week, Monday through Saturday, knocking on doors in the village, letting everyone know that there's going to be a church service, and they wanted to come.
This isn't, it wasn't that we miscommunicated the details of the time or that they didn't want to come.
They know exactly what time it is, where it is, and they have the desire to come and earnestly wanting to be there.
They arrived three hours late because that's what you do.
Oh, well, that's just different.
No, it's not just different.
It's worse.
Yeah.
It's worse because there's actually a Christian, not a white value, but a Christian.
Value that became a Western value because Western civilization conformed itself to the Christian worldview.
And so, and what is the value?
The value is respect.
The value is respect.
So, all that being said, Galatians 3 28, there's still distinctions between male and female, and distinctions between Jew and Greek, insofar as that pertains not to religion, but to ethnicity, to nationality, to different peoples.
And certainly, there are still distinctions, economic distinctions, and roles and offices between master and slave or employer and employee.
So, all these distinctions still matter.
But what Paul is getting at in Galatians 3 28 is saying that in Christ, in the ultimate eternal sense, in terms of our worship being received by God, in terms of union with Christ through faith, that union is not merely reserved for only Hebrew men get the sign of circumcision.
No, now both men and women are baptized.
Not just that Jews get to come into the temple while Gentiles stay out in the Gentile outer court.
No.
No Jew and Gentile can approach the throne of God on the Lord's day in worship, Christian worship, and not just this idea of, you know, well, masters and slaves.
But you see, even in America, certainly there were abuses with slavery, but there were also benevolent masters like Jonathan Edwards, like George Whitefield, who would, on the Lord's day, on a Monday afternoon.
Now, there's a very different, there's a distinction between what Jonathan Edwards is doing on a Tuesday afternoon and what his slaves are doing.
But on the Lord's day, Jonathan Edwards and his slaves.
In the same church, at the same table of the Lord.
And so, my point is these human, material, temporal, earthly distinctions, Galatians 3 28 is not advocating for transgenderism.
No more male and female.
It's not getting rid of the earthly, temporal distinctions.
Or multiculturalism.
But it is getting rid of, in the spiritual sense, the dividing wall of hostility.
And what have we done?
I mean, think about this for a moment.
Think of just the complete and total.
Twisting and perversion.
What so many evangelicals have done is they've gotten rid of something like patriarchy, for example.
And they would point to Galatians 3 28, and they'd say, No distinction between male and female.
No more male headship.
Husband's not the head of his home.
We don't have to have male pastors.
We can have female pastors.
No distinction there.
But what distinction do they still keep, these same evangelicals?
Dispensationalism, Israel, Jews are still special.
So we'll keep that distinction.
There's Jews and then everybody else.
But we won't keep.
A distinction of male and female.
We're egalitarian.
We have women pastors.
That is the exact opposite way to read the Word of God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That what he is saying is not, again, that there are not, you know, distinctions, natural distinctions between men and women and different groups of people and things like that.
He is saying that all of humanity has access to draw near to God.
All of humanity in faith in Christ are equally.
Heirs of the kingdom of God with Christ.
So that husbands are the head of the wife, and yet in Christ, my wife is a co heir in grace.
Yeah, when we, when my family, you know, when our families go to the Lord's table, right, it's not like I get an extra portion of bread and wine, and then my wife gets a little bit less, and my kids leave even less than that.
It's not, we all equally are the same at the table of the Lord and in his kingdom.
Right.
But then when we leave church, right, I'm dad, she's mom, the kids are the kids.
We all have different roles in our society, right?
Some of us are bosses, some of us are the workers, some of us are really rich, some of us have been blessed but are not super rich, and some of us don't have a whole lot at all.
And all of those people, when we draw near, like, you know, if, you know, if Elon Musk decided to drive down to or up to Georgetown last Sunday, And if he confessed Christ and was showing works of repentance and a faithful Christian and comes into the church, he is worth many, many, many, many billions more than all of us in the church combined.
And yet, he would have the same access to God and the same part in the kingdom of God as you do.
No less, no more.
Yeah, that's what it means.
Exactly.
And that's what Galatians 3 28 is getting at.
And to cross.
Reference over to Ephesians 2 in our primary text for today's episode.
That's the same thing.
That's the wall of hostility.
Jesus is not tearing down hierarchy, human earthly hierarchy, and categories.
He's not tearing down ethnic distinctions.
He's not tearing down the distinctions between the sexes or distinctions economically and different roles in the marketplace.
He is tearing down spiritually, he's tearing down that dividing wall of hostility in the spiritual sense that divided.
Jews and Gentiles, to where Gentiles are now welcomed in, and in the spiritual sense, there is no difference between Jew and Gentile.
And so, for us to say, Well, there's a big difference between uh Jew and Gentile, still 2,000 years after he tore down that dividing wall and destroyed the temple in 8070, all that to say, Well, no, there's still this really big difference, and we do that.
There's still the people that are near, and we're far off, right?
And the funny thing is that we, you know, you hear Christians all the time saying, you know, race, you know, conservative Christians, you know, they're like, race is a construct.
There's no such thing.
Right.
There's only one race, the human race.
And I know what they mean.
We all bleed red.
Right.
So I don't counter signal, you know, but like, I know what they mean.
And, you know, they'll say, well, there's no such thing as different races, but there are different ethnicities.
And what does that difference amount to?
It's a distinction without a difference.
It amounts to nothing.
What is it good for?
Absolutely.
So they say, you know, no different races, just one.
And there are different ethnicities, but there's really no.
That amounts to nothing.
That difference is moot when it comes to the kingdom of God except, absolutely so they'll say, the different ethnicities don't matter at all, except there is one arena where all these evangelicals, all of a sudden they they, they become big fans of kinism.
Have you noticed?
Yeah, but for one group, you know, they're kinists.
For Jews, you know, when it comes to Jews, they're like, yeah, protect that bloodline.
And these people gotta be preserved because Jesus is not coming back, otherwise these people exist.
Send them another 10 billion dollars, you know, protect that that spot of earth.
And you know, and and Turn Palestine into a sea of glass.
What did Owen Strand tweet out?
He was like, destroy Hamas, destroy Gaza.
I said, not even talking about physically with bombs.
I wasn't talking about that at all.
But I said that as Christians, we do, power is not inherently evil.
Some Christians, all Christians in varying capacities and in different spheres, are called not to forsake power, but to wield power righteously.
So whether it's a father and a home, that is a Authority, or whether it's a pastor in a church, or even a church member has a certain measure of authority, or whether it's a Christian who's called to hold office in the civil magistrate.
In all these different realms, Christians should not be saying, Oh, power is icky.
We should embrace power, but simply wield it righteously.
And part of wielding it righteously, especially for Christians in the civil magistrate, is to reward righteousness and to punish the evildoer, per Romans 13.
Crush it.
So I said, I want to see Christians wield.
Power righteously, rewarding their friends, that is, fellow Christians, and punishing, crushing.
I said, crushing enemies.
And Owen Strand said, This is not New Testament Christianity.
This is not the gospel.
And then, you know, and then just a few weeks prior, though, he had this tweet where I wasn't talking about physically crushing, but he was.
He was saying, He certainly was.
He was saying, bomb the crap out of Hamas and kill them all.
Yeah.
And that's allowed.
So my point is this.
And of course, like in terms of warfare, you And he's understanding.
You're allowed to be a kinist.
Right, friend enemy distinction there.
If you're a Zionist.
Yeah.
You're allowed to be someone who believes in crushing, literally, physically crushing and killing enemies if you're a Zionist.
Yeah.
You're like, there's all the.
And so, what do we need, aside from Owen Strand to delete his Twitter, aside from that, what do we need is we need, in the spirit of crushing, since we're on the topic, we need to crush Zionism.
Yeah.
Zionism is pernicious.
It has been terrible for the world, for geopolitics, for economies.
It's been absolutely.
And for the record, when I say crush Zionism, I'm speaking of an ideology.
I'm not saying crush a set of people, individuals, in a physical sense.
No, I'm saying there is a particular.
I mean, it would be good to put John Hagee in prison.
That would be good.
But what I'm saying is the modern state of Israel could continue.
Now, it has no prophetic significance.
We can let them do their own thing.
But as a nation, they can continue and we can wish them well.
Just like I have the same view of Israel today, the modern state of Israel, as I do Brazil or Portugal.
So, I hope that they would be at peace and that they would prosper, and especially that in the salvific sense, that the people there would repent of their sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
All those things.
So, I'm not saying crush Israel, but I am saying crush Zionism as an ideology.
It is pernicious and it has infiltrated so much of evangelicalism, and the Bible dismantles it.
A clear reading of scripture, Galatians, Ephesians, Hebrews, dismantles.
Yeah, I mean, reading these.
Verses, reading these passages and how Paul deals with the Jew Gentile issue, with the end of the Old Covenant, the coming of the New, right?
You can't read it and not come to the conclusion that all of that is over, that all there is is Jew and Gentile united in Christ, and that, again, right, those two are united in one, right, in Christ.
And it doesn't mean, right, again, because, right, that Old Covenant world, Right, you have the people that are far off and the people that are near.
Well, they're brought together in one, which means right there aren't far off and near people now.
And for you to say that the biblical category of Jew is still in existence today means that you are saying that there are people who are categorically nearer to God, right, than you are, right, as a Christian.
And that is false, right?
That is not true at all.
That Gentile Christians today, 19 and a half centuries after the fall of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem in the 80s.
And most importantly, the ending of the old covenant, that 19 and a half centuries later, you're saying that Gentile Christians are still technically God's stepchildren.
Yeah, we're still far off.
They're still second class.
Yeah.
We're seated at the far end of the table.
We can catch a glimpse of Dad, you know, and a smaller portion of the meal gets passed down to us.
And Dad tolerates our presence there and allows us to sit at the table, but he's really infatuated with his biological children.
False Nearness to God00:02:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is terrible theology.
It's horrible.
Horrible.
What does that do?
It's not a blessing to Jews.
It doesn't help them.
And it's certainly not a blessing to Christians.
You know, the modern people called Jews, it keeps them further away from the kingdom if we think of them that way.
That's right.
Because it really tells them you don't need repentance.
You don't really need Jesus.
That's right.
Not really.
Right.
You don't really need him at all.
And they do.
Right.
That's true.
You're the apple of his eye.
And so you're already blessed, already favored.
And the reality is, no, you are not the apple of his eye.
If you've rejected Christ, then you're actually under his just condemnation and wrath.
You're not the apple of his eye.
The apple of his eye is the seed, who is Jesus, and all those who have union with him, which are Christians.
Yeah.
We've gone over this so many times, but it's good.
It's good, but it keeps coming up because we keep going through more parts of the Bible.
Exactly.
What we want to do is we want to communicate not just the major theme, but we want to show you how this major theme is not from two or three verses.
This major theme appears in scripture again and again and again.
So for this episode, any final thoughts to land the plane?
Yeah, just that.
Right, that distinction, right?
Those who are near, those who are far off, right?
If you are saying that this group of people is the same group of people in the same category as the people in the old covenant, right, you are denying that Christ has made the two one in one man, in Him, in Jesus.
And so saying that modern Jews, those who call themselves Jews today, saying that they need Jesus is good.
Yeah.
But there are a lot of evangelicals who would acknowledge, yeah, they do need to repent and believe in Jesus.
Yeah.
But they still are at least giving credence to, but this is the people of God in some sense.
These are the ones that are near.
And no, we're saying that even that is actually a detraction, not a full detraction, but it's still a partial perverting and twisting and detraction from the fullness and sufficiency of what Christ has done for both Jew and Gentile in him.
Denying Christ's Work00:00:05
And that's a mistake.
All right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in.
We hope it's been a blessing to you, and we will see you next time.