Tel Aviv Ted vs. Tucker Carlson dismantles Senator Ted Cruz's dispensationalist theology, exposing his $1.8 million AIPAC funding and debunking the false claim that U.S. aid to Israel is merely $3 billion against actual figures exceeding $100 billion since 1949. The hosts refute Iran's nuclear threat as technologically implausible while clarifying that New Covenant theology supersedes Old Testament bloodline distinctions regarding Samaritans and Talmudic Jews. Ultimately, the episode argues that Christian support for Israel stems from spiritual obligation rather than geopolitical strategy, urging a focus on legal reforms over militia rhetoric to prevent unnecessary war. [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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Why We Ask for Reviews00:14:54
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
In the rubble of two world wars and the establishment of the modern state of Israel, A relatively novel theological system exploded in popularity here in America.
What was it?
Dispensationalism.
Now, while dispensationalism traces its roots back to the mid 19th century and steadily grew in popularity in the beginning of the 20th century, it was only with Hal Lindsey's 1970 book called The Late Great Planet Earth, published at the height of Cold War fears and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, that this idea of dispensationalism.
Began to firmly grip the American consciousness.
For Hal Lindsey, the supposed return of Israel to the land, the recapture of ancient Jerusalem, and the evangelism of the known world all pointed to an imminent rapture and the end of days.
It is understandable that in a world teetering on the brink of mutually assured nuclear annihilation, books full of apocalyptic prophecy began to catch on.
But here we are a generation later.
The Cold War long over, and many Christians are realizing that we are in this for the long haul.
And one of the first orders of business is to convince our leaders, especially our political leaders, that the dispensationalist framing they assumed from decades prior no longer works.
A case in point of the collision of dispensationalism with the new right wing is Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
Cruz sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson this past week.
Thinking that the same old answers about blessing Israel and describing them as our greatest ally would work.
Spoil alert, they did not.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our generous donors.
You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash rightresponse ministries, or you can make a donation today by simply going to rightresponseministries.com forward slash rightresponse ministries.
Forward slash donate.
So tune in now as we discuss this incredible interview, the fallout, and the quickly approaching end of dispensationalism.
And let me personally say that the end of dispensationalism could not come possibly any sooner.
GA, GA, GA.
Good to see everybody.
It is Friday afternoon.
In the chat, I always see, you know, everybody saying GA for good afternoon.
Every now and then we'll get someone in the chat and God bless them.
I love it.
And if this is you, please don't take offense.
Don't feel bad.
It is an honest mistake.
Anybody could make it.
It's probably because you're touching grass, you're outside, you're living your best life now.
You're not terminally online like Wes.
But sometimes people say, you know, like NY or TX.
And they'll think that, like, hey, everybody's saying where they're from, what state they're from.
And there's just a A ton of people say, Someone say hi from here.
There's all these guys from Georgia, GA, but GA actually stands for good afternoon.
We are talking about dispensationalism.
We're going to be talking about the Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz interview.
And we're going to be talking about Israel, right?
And something that we've talked a lot about, and people that you're obsessed with Israel.
Well, I mean, we're talking about something that very possibly could throw us into World War III.
Okay, so you're just going to have to cut me a little slack.
This is not an obsession.
I would argue that the people who are advocating for our country, that is separated by 3,000 miles of ocean, to for some reason be completely involved in everything going on in the Middle East, I would say that that's an obsession.
The position, the guy who's saying, hey, I just think we should stay out of it, that doesn't sound like an obsessed guy to me.
That sounds like a realistic guy to me.
The people who are like, hey, I think we should be involved and we should topple this government and we should help Israel spark World War III.
That sounds like an obsession to me.
All right.
Now, you may have noticed that we have a different character.
Who is joining us today for the live stream?
Michael Belch, our very own.
He is out of town for a little while, about a week or so.
A little longer, yeah.
I think a little longer, actually.
And so for the next couple of live streams today and then also on Monday and maybe on Wednesday, we'll see with Michael's schedule when he's coming back.
We wanted to, instead of just me and Wes doing it, we could do it.
We're capable.
But we decided, hey, let's go ahead and fill the seat with one of our friends who is a member in good standing in our local church, Covenant Bible Church.
If you're looking for a church, Central Texas.
And his name is Antonio.
Antonio, welcome to the show.
Glad to be here.
Great.
Okay.
So we don't want to waste too much time.
Let's go ahead and dive in to the first clip.
It's a little bit unbearable.
It's going to be hard to watch.
You'll probably cringe.
Hopefully, you don't die of cringe.
But just, you know, grit your teeth, power through.
This is about two minutes in length.
Tucker Carlson and old despy Ted Cruz.
Here we go.
But you suggested it was a strange thing that I said a minute ago that when I came into the Senate, I resolved that I was going to be the leading defender of Israel.
And what you didn't ask is why.
So let me tell you why.
No, you said I was obsessed with Israel.
You had just told me that your driving motive to get to the Senate was to defend Israel.
I'm like, I don't think I'm the one who's obsessed with Israel.
Okay.
So, Tucker, words matter.
And you know that.
I said I resolved to be the leading defender of Israel.
And you said your driving motive, the reason you're in the Senate.
You want to be the leading defender of Israel.
I would think if I ran for Senate, I'd be like, there are people dying of drug addictions on the street.
My driving motive is to fight for Texas and America and to fight for jobs and to fight for the Constitution.
And you played a very, very careful word game of eliding.
You're the one who said it, not me.
So you still haven't asked why, but I'm going to tell you why.
Okay.
And the reason is twofold.
Number one, as a Christian, growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.
And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things.
Those who bless the government of Israel?
Those who bless Israel is what it says.
It doesn't say the government of, it says the nation of Israel.
So that's in the Bible.
As a Christian, I believe that.
Where is that?
I can find it to you.
I don't have the scripture off the tip of my head.
You pull out the phone and use the Zoom.
It's in Genesis.
So you're quoting a Bible phrase.
You don't have context for it.
You don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology?
I'm confused.
What does that even mean?
Tucker.
I'm a Christian.
I want to know what you're talking about.
Where does my support for Israel come from, number one?
Because biblically we're commanded to support Israel.
But number two.
Hold on.
Hold on.
You're a senator and now you're throwing out theology, and I am a Christian and I am allowed to weigh in on this.
We are commanded as Christians to support the government of Israel?
We are commanded to support Israel.
What does that mean, Israel?
We're told those who bless Israel will be blessed.
But what?
Hold on.
Define Israel.
This is important.
Are you kidding?
This is a majority Christian country.
Define Israel?
Do you not know what Israel is?
That would be the country you've asked like 49 questions about.
So that's what Genesis refers to.
That's what God is talking about today?
The nation of Israel, yes.
So does that the current borders, the current leadership?
He's talking about the political entity called Israel?
He's talking about the nation of Israel.
Yeah, nations exist, and he's discussing a nation.
A nation was the people of Israel.
Is the nation the size of Abraham?
They're the size of Abraham.
Is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
Yes.
It is.
And by the way, it's not run by Benjamin Netanyahu as a dictator.
It's a democratic country that elected.
He's the prime minister, right?
What?
All right.
So Ted Cruz said, you know, growing up, I went to Sunday school and I was taught that those who bless Israel, and I was taught, he says, from the Bible.
And I just want to go ahead and clarify for a moment here.
I have no doubt.
That growing up in Sunday school, he was taught that.
He was not taught that from the Bible.
I think that part should be left out because it's not in the Bible.
And Tucker, I think, did a great job in typical Tucker style, you know, playing coy, playing dumb a little bit, you know, with his Tucker Carlson charm that was not appreciated by Ted Cruz whatsoever.
But he was like, the government of Israel?
And he's like, what does that even mean?
And at that point, Ted Cruz responds by saying, well, Israel means Israel.
And I understand that seems pretty straightforward, but.
Okay, so anything that calls itself Israel, well, there's a town in Texas called Israel.
So if we go over there and give free car washes to all the residents of Israel, Texas, will we be blessed by God?
I said, well, come on, Joel, you know what he means.
No, but seriously, that is a worthwhile question.
When you say, what is Israel?
Matt Walsh did, what is a woman?
Somebody, probably not Matt Walsh as long as he's working for the Israeli Wire, but Matt Walsh actually would be great, but he probably would burn the bridge.
With his current employer, but somebody needs to do a documentary.
What is Israel?
Because I would argue that yes, there actually is, even in the New Testament, for New Testament Christians in the New Covenant, there is a blessing for those who bless Israel, but Israel has to be defined.
Is it a place that just popped up 75 years ago in the Middle East?
Or is it the town in Texas that we can go and do the free car washes for, or give them free puppies for all the kids?
And who knows?
We wake up the next morning and our bank accounts are just overflowing.
To illustrate the point, I texted or tweeted this out today.
I said, I will be opening an LLC called Israel TM.
There's approximately a 1,875 year gap between the total destruction of Israel of the Bible, biblical Israel, Old Covenant Israel in 8070, and the formation of a new modern Israel.
And there's only a 1,955 year gap between the Israel of the Bible and my new LLC, Israel TM.
Please send checks to receive your blessing.
Can we not see how ridiculous this is?
All right, Wes, you've lined out the episode.
First, we want to give some credence.
There's not a whole lot to give, but at least credence, not so much to the doctrine, but to the people, because there are salt of the earth, precious Christians who just by default have been hoodwinked for 150 years into dispensationalism.
So we want to break down what is dispensationalism and then do our best to steel man the arguments and especially show charity to the people.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the origins of dispensationalism, there are those that try to root it farther back, sometime in the Middle Ages, to first kind of identify dispensational systems.
But mostly, for the most part, it's the 19th century, around the mid 19th century.
That as a system, it emerges, and it emerges from an Anglo guy named John Nelson Darby.
And Darby was part of a schismatic group, the Plymouth Brethren, which then went on to form some group called, it was like the Exclusive Brethren.
And so you have kind of the worst of Protestant schism.
And so you have a group that splits off and splits off.
I was very prepared for them to be Baptist.
I was like, this has got to be something born of the Baptists.
But no, it turns out he was actually a former Anglican minister, and he was frustrated with the worldliness of the church.
He was frustrated with all the structure of it.
And he's kind of the prototype of.
Dispensationalism.
And what dispensationalism is, just to describe it, to steel man it, to equip you so you understand how it works, is dispensationalism is a system that says the overarching arrangement of the Bible and of God's work in human history is not by covenant.
So, Old Covenant, New Covenant, that would be covenant theology.
That is not how God has arranged history in the Bible, but He's arranged it in dispensations.
And you can see in this chart here, there are some dispensationalists that hold to eight dispensations, some to three.
Dispensationalists love.
Them some charts.
You think we love charts?
Not like they love charts.
So you'll see on the screen here, and I'll describe it if you're listening.
But most dispensationalists hold to there are seven dispensations.
So the dispensation of innocence, that is Adam in the garden.
So he's in a time where God is working in a certain way with man, and God works with Adam in a time of innocence.
Man is set up with a test, and he fails that test.
The next dispensation is the dispensation of conscience.
You don't have the written law yet, as you get with Moses.
You don't have God's chosen people called out with Abraham, but it is a time of conscience, and that ends with.
The flood.
So man fails the first two dispensations.
The next one is the dispensation in the time of Noah of human government.
So again, there's no Abraham, there's no promised people, there's no law written on tablets.
But here in this third dispensation, human governments are set up.
And man, again, is wicked.
And that forms the need for God to call Abram out and to say, I'll make of you a great nation.
I'm going to send the Messiah through your line.
So you have the dispensation of innocence, the dispensation of conscience, the dispensation of human government.
Then with Abraham, the dispensation of promise.
Then with Moses, the dispensation of law.
And those first five lead all the way up to The cross, and in each of those, they're kind of arranged as tests.
My dad's actually a pastor and he's a dispensationalist, and so we've talked about this a good bit.
And so, I'm literally describing what I love him he's a good godly man, what a good godly man who I disagree strongly with on eschatology would view.
But he says, in each of these, there's a test at the beginning, and man fails it.
So, with Moses and the law, God gives a law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and he sets up Israel, but Israel ultimately fails it.
And so, then, here between the dispensation of law and the dispensation of grace, you have the cross where Jesus dies for the sins of all those who believe in him.
A good dispensationist is never going to say that there's two ways to God, that prior in the time of Moses, there was salvation through the law, but now after Christ, it's through the cross, and kind of there was kind of two ways up.
They would, of course, hold that through all time, the way anyone's ever been saved is by faith in Jesus.
And so that sixth dispensation is the dispensation that we are in right now, the dispensation of grace, where again, God has given his only son, he's died for our sins, and people of the world are commanded to believe in him.
But just like the prior five dispensations, where man is set up favorably and fails, the expectation is that in the same way, Man will also fail this test.
God's Premeditated Plan of Grace00:04:35
And this will dovetail nicely with the history lesson we're about to talk about.
But man fails this test, and this leads to the seven year tribulation.
And at the end of the seven year tribulation, there's the return of Christ.
And he sets up one final dispensation, and this is the dispensation of the millennial kingdom.
Christ rules and reigns for a thousand years.
And again, at the very end, you see this in Revelation 20, once again, Satan is loosed and he deceives man.
And so there you have it at the great white throne judgment.
God says, at every moment, be it human government, be it innocence, be it sending my son, be it me reigning here on earth in the millennium, You have failed every test and I am vindicated.
That's the best way I can kind of describe dispensationalism as a system.
Again, that differs from covenant theology that views God having worked in a certain way under the old covenant with the anticipation of the new, and then here in the gospel age, the new covenant.
But that, in a nutshell, is dispensationalism.
Covenant theology is, in a nutshell, the idea that there's continuity that runs all the way from Genesis to Revelation.
It's the idea that God isn't, he's not changing the dispensationalists, again, to steal man.
They don't believe that God is mutable.
That God's changing, but they kind of believe that God has an A plan and then a B plan and then a C plan and then, you know, and so on and so forth.
Whereas covenant theology is saying, no, all the way back before the foundations of the world were laid in the covenant of redemption, which would be chronologically and logically the first covenant, that the Father covenants with the Son and the Son covenants with the Father.
And they do so by the Spirit to save a people for themselves and their eternal glory by grace.
And so it was always grace.
The idea of Well, you know, like, why even, you know, was the fall a happenstance?
Was this something new to God?
Is God in process?
So, this gets into open theism and process theology.
And is God learning?
Is God evolving as time goes on, as he's taking in new information, new events throughout human history?
And, you know, did God foresee the fall?
And if he foresaw the fall and he knew that it was happening, did he just foreknow it?
Or does his foreknowledge imply also ordinance that God is?
Involved in orchestrating, and then you can say, Well, is God evil then if He orchestrated the fall of man?
Uh, well, it depends on His purposes.
What are the ends of this plan?
And if the end of this plan is so that people would be saved by grace, I mean, even in the New Testament, it speaks of angels longing to look into these things, these things being the gospel of grace, not just a gospel of merit or a gospel of works, which is no gospel at all, but a gospel of free grace.
Angels long to look into these things as bystanders because.
Because they don't actually experience grace.
Angels, a third of them approximately, they sinned against God and have never been offered a single opportunity of redemption.
All they know is God's wrath and judgment.
And then other angels, they know God's love.
Those unfallen angels who remain faithful to the Lord, they know God's love, but they don't know God's grace.
Grace is not just love, grace is unmerited love, unmerited favor.
It's undeserved love.
Angels long to look into these things because they have not experienced.
These things for themselves.
There's not one piece of all of creation, both earthly and heavenly, whether it's birds or fish or beasts of the field, or whether it's cherubim or seraphim or angelic beings, there's not one piece of all of God's creation, earthly or heavenly, that has ever been offered grace, except for God's elect, human beings made in the image of God who have sinned against him, but God determined before the foundations of the world were laid to save them by his grace.
And so we believe that grace, Ephesians chapter 1, to the praise of his glorious grace, To the praise of his glorious grace.
It's mentioned three different times that the idea of God premeditating, that God preordained that he would have a fall and he would have his son and he would have his death and his resurrection and redemption is because God is glorified by saving people by his grace.
And people, how does it benefit us?
People also will benefit for eternity, knowing not just the love of God, which angels know.
But knowing a side of God's love that even the angels have not experienced themselves, namely the undeserved, unmerited love of God, which is the gospel of grace.
Unhitching from Divine Sovereignty00:16:01
So, why did God do it this way?
Because it's good for us and brings glory to Him.
For the same reason, God does all things.
God does everything, everything that God does, He does for His glory and for our good, for His glory and for our good.
And to save people through His Son, the atonement that Jesus makes by His death on the cross.
For sinners who did not deserve it to save people by grace, God determined before anything was ever made that this would bring him the greatest degree of glory and us the greatest degree of peace and joy and benevolence.
And so God did this.
That's covenant theology the idea that God knew what he was doing.
He had a plan.
None of it is happenstance.
He's not in process.
He's not evolving.
He's not learning and changing with B plans and C plans as he goes along.
But he did this from the outset because it's best.
What do you think, Antonio?
Yeah, no, I think what you just laid out is classic, you know, systematic theology and like this idea that there's continuity and you can talk about typology and seeing this sort of arc of redemption both in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And I think, you know, Wes, you've already sort of steel manned the dispensationalist position, but I think really what it boils down to is an intellectual chasm.
I really think it's an intellectual fault, especially with modern dispensationalists, to Do the hard work of evaluating scripture that way, letting scripture interpret scripture in the New Testament, sort of doing that diligence is really how you arrive at this position of covenant theology.
Right.
And regardless of where dispensationalism started, like what was the theological lay of the land at the time of Darby and Schofield, I can tell you how it ended up.
And how it has ended up, yes, there are a few outliers.
John MacArthur would be one of them.
But even in the case of John MacArthur, by his own admission, he says, Well, I'm a leaky dispensationalist.
So even John MacArthur is like, well, I don't want to be fully in that camp because there's some pretty glaring problems.
But what I was going to say is that by and large, with the few exceptions of your outliers like John MacArthur, here's my point.
By and large, dispensationalists do not have a big biblical view of God's sovereignty.
Most dispensationalists are Arminian.
Most, not Armenian, Not speaking of their nationhood or their ethnicity, but Arminian, theologically speaking, in other words, they don't believe that God is absolutely sovereign over all things.
They believe that when it comes to salvation, for instance, soteriology, how God saves, that it's synergistic rather than monergistic, that God is reaching down and he's reaching down to all.
And it's those who choose in their own human strength to reach up.
And, you know, it's like God did this and I did that.
And teamwork makes the dream work.
You know, why are you saved?
Well, God did a lot, but he couldn't quite bring it home.
But I came in, you know, bottom of the ninth, you know, in the clutch.
And, you know, God did, I mean, he deserves some glory.
He did a lot, you know, and he did a pretty good job.
But if it wasn't for me, You know, I remember when I came into Calvinism, which would be the alternative view to Arminianism, I remember I, you know, I was kicking and screaming, you know, like, no, this isn't right.
You know, free will, free will, man makes a choice.
And I remember, you know, trying to somehow resolve the tension between these two positions.
I remember arguing with a Calvinist friend of mine who was just kind of laughing at me as I'm screeching into the void, you know, struggling with this doctrine.
And I remember saying, well, okay, all right, God did a whole, whole, whole lot.
But imagine it, you know, this kind of analogy.
I said, It's as though salvation is everybody's at the bottom of a staircase and it's a really, really tall staircase, and God is sitting on his throne at the top.
And God determines who to save by who will at least step on that first stair.
And of course, nobody can make it all the way up the staircase.
And I'm not even saying that you have to make it halfway because it can't be half of the credit goes to man and half of the credit goes to God.
We'll give God 99.9% of the credit.
But in terms of his determination of which people to save and which people to not, it comes down to human free will, who at least.
Attempts the ascent of this staircase, who lifts up their leg and steps on that first staircase.
And then the moment that you do, it's like you can't do it.
And you take one step and you start to falter, but God gets off his throne and his mercy and kindness, and he runs all the way down and catches you and carries you the rest of the way.
And I remember my Calvinist friend looked at me and he said, Congratulations on making that first step.
And here's the reality at the end of the day, he's like, And you are superior.
To every single person who's in hell and will be in hell, because you did something in your own strength that they did not or could not or refused to do.
You took one step further than all those who are unbelievers.
And you're better than them.
And I want you to feel that.
You're better.
You're seething.
Joel, Joel.
And I remember hearing him, you know, and I was like, yeah, and I was seething.
I was mad at the time, you know, and I was like, But what I was mad about is he was calling me out on my arrogance.
Like, there's no way around it.
And so, anyways, my point back to dispensationalism is that most dispensations, this would be your independent fundamental Baptists.
This would be at least half, if not more, of your Southern Baptists.
This would be your General Baptist Assembly.
This would be pretty much any Baptist you could think of, your Anabaptists.
This would be, you know, this is, but here's the thing it's not just one sector.
I say Baptist, and you're like, okay, well, that's fine, but we still, you know, there's Presbyterians and Anglicans and Episcopalians.
No, Baptist is like 90% of Protestants.
90% of Protestants are Baptist.
And so the vast majority of Protestants reject covenant theology.
And so my point is going now on the Calvinist side, God speaking of God's sovereignty, the vast majority of people who hold to God's sovereignty in all things, including salvation and including his redemptive plan, his covenant from beginning to end, his plan of how he's going to save a people for himself.
The people who hold to covenant theology instead of dispensationalism, 99% of them also hold to Calvinism as opposed to Arminianism.
There are only a few outliers, and they are rather novel of a Baptist who is a Calvinist when it comes to how God saves his sovereignty and salvation, but is not really Calvinistic in a consistent manner across the board, God being sovereign and everything else.
And so they are a leaky dispensationalist.
And so my point is just to say that for Protestants, there's covenant theology, and those are the guys who hold to a high view of God's sovereignty in all things.
And then there's Dispensationalism, and those are the guys who are Arminian.
For those who are Reformed Protestants, who have an older Protestant view, think Reformation, the Protestant Reformation.
Those who hold to a more historic Protestant view, they are Reformed, they are Calvinistic, and they're consistent in their Calvinism.
They're also covenant theologians.
Those who don't embrace a macro view of God's sovereignty in all things, they're the ones.
Who reject not only Calvinism and the Reformed tradition and historic Protestantism and have adopted some very novel, very recent endeavor, but also have embraced dispensationalism.
And that accounts, again, in terms of Protestants here in America, that would be the vast majority of Baptists, and Baptists are the vast majority of Protestants.
So that's most Protestants in America today.
And I'll give an example of where this shows up in other areas.
For example, the law.
About a year to a year and a half ago, Ted Cruz got into an exchange with Tom Askell, a Baptist pastor from Florida.
Over the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality in Uganda.
And Senator Cruz was criticizing it because he literally cited Jesus saying, Well, hang on, we're in the New Testament and it's Judge not.
When you begin to slice and dice up the Bible, well, this age is this and this age is this and the law has been fulfilled.
When you start to do that, you lose exactly that continuity.
All of a sudden, you don't have the ability to go back and say, Well, no, God was teaching us something when He made homosexuality up to the death penalty, when He made this crime punishable by this.
Then you have to say, Well, that was then, that was in that dispensation.
We don't really have anything more to add to it.
You unhitch from the Old Testament.
Right, yeah.
Anti-Nomianism is the natural conclusion from dispensationalism, right?
The law is of a different dispensation, right?
We're done with that.
Right, and so they would still hold to some measure of a hangover of the moral.
A dispensationalist would still say, well, you shouldn't steal or you shouldn't commit adultery or you shouldn't murder.
They'd go explicitly to what's republished in the New Testament.
They're not fully like.
The New Testament is preeminent.
For the Christian today.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
So the laws that they would still hold to, moral laws, are those which are restated again in the New Testament.
But anything that's not explicitly restated by one of the apostles in the New Testament, they would say that that law is done.
And so there are certain laws that they would say.
And the problem with that is, for instance, okay, so as a New Testament Christian, bestiality, it's on the table.
The New Testament, the apostles, there's not one place in the Gospels.
In the words of Christ or any of the apostles in the entirety of the New Testament that tells me that I can't commit bestiality with my dog.
And we would all say, yeah, you can't do that.
Still off the table.
That's still off the table.
That is not on the menu.
You cannot do that.
But then if you're saying, well, chapter and verse, chapter and verse, actually, chapter and verse, well, there is a chapter and verse and it's in the Old Testament, which is still a part of our Bible.
It still matters.
Yeah, so there are massive problems with.
If you really embrace dispensationalism, then you're unhitching from God's sovereignty in all things, including soteriology, his salvation, and there is some portion of synergism, man's works, human works that are baked into the equation of how God saves.
You're losing the general equity of much of the Old Testament law and how it applies for societies and individuals today.
There's all these things.
That you lose.
And again, the thing that we're trying to express is that is not the historic Christian position.
That is not what Christians have believed down through the ages.
And in a big way, because dispensationalist view God is essentially having, because Israel so fully rejected him, they're essentially put on pause, still God's people in a state of rebellion, and the church is almost there to incite envy.
So then God says, All right, you guys, my goodness, you are stiff necked.
Now you're still my people, and they hold all of those promises.
You heard Ted Cruz do it, promises in Genesis chapter 12.
Well, that applies to.
Not Christians, but that applies to still the literal state, the modern state of Israel.
And so that big thing that dispensationalism does, and it gets us into this mess, as it says, nope, now the church has come in, and it doesn't fulfill the role of God's people.
It comes alongside.
And so that's exactly what Ted Cruz is doing here.
And let me show you just the verses.
This is the verse he goes to reference, and it's from Genesis.
Now the Lord said to Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee.
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing, and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curses ye, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
So, for one, Ted Cruz misquotes it because it doesn't say Israel, it's speaking specifically of Abraham.
But watch what Paul does in the New Testament.
Galatians is your book for this.
Galatians 3 7 through 9.
Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, The same are the children of Abraham.
The children of Abraham are those that have faith in Jesus.
And the scripture, foreseeing, God knowing, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith that's the unrighteous, the sinner, through faith preached before the gospel unto Abraham.
So he's saying God knew he would do this.
And so, all the way back in Genesis, he preached the gospel, the good news to Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed.
So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.
Paul literally in the New Testament says that verse, that promise, which is good and well and true, here's who it applies to.
He's saying it's not applied to the rebellious Jews today that are persecuting the prophets, that are persecuting the church, that are driving us out.
He says that blessing, that's for those who have faith in Jesus.
That's what the Old Testament always arcing towards.
And that's the historical Christian position.
And Ted Cruz's novel position requires him to carve out this novel view where we have to bless and support and give billions of dollars to.
The modern state of Israel, where the Bible is very clear that blessing is not about modern Israel.
That blessing is about God's people, the church.
Right.
I will bless those who bless you, speaking about Abraham and his descendants.
And then Galatians tells us who Abraham's descendants are.
It is not those who are a Jew outwardly, but those who are a Jew inwardly, not circumcision of the flesh, but circumcision of the heart.
And these are Abraham's descendants, ye who have faith.
It's funny because he references, you know, growing up, his childhood, and, you know, his church experience and going to Sunday school.
But even in Sunday school, and this is another massive inconsistency that you find in many Baptist churches, but even in Sunday school, yeah, you probably would be taught that if you, you know, if you're an old lady who's sending a portion of your fixed income check, you know, your social security check to, you know, to Netanyahu, you know, once a month, then you're going to receive a blessing.
You probably will hear that, sadly, in some Sunday school.
But here's another thing that I remember learning in Sunday school Father Abraham had many sons, and many sons had Father Abraham, and I am one of them, and so are you, fellow Christian.
When we sang that, even in the kids' songs in Sunday school, when we sang that, we weren't saying, and Bibi is one of them, and so is Shapiro, and let's just like, no, we weren't singing that.
Father Abraham had many sons, many nations, right?
He's a father of many nations.
And spiritually speaking, what it means to be one of his sons, a son of Abraham, a descendant of Abraham, is me and you.
And I wasn't taught in Sunday school that if I was a Gentile, I wasn't allowed to sing the song.
The point of the song was to say, You are spiritual sons of Abraham.
And that's precisely what Galatians chapter 3, verse 7 through 9 teaches us.
The blessing is for Abraham and his descendants, and his descendants are spiritual, not physical.
His spiritual descendants, And it's those who have faith in the seed, not seeds, plural, as Paul elsewhere speaks of, but singular, the seed is Christ.
He's the promised seed that would come from Abraham, and all those who are attached to him, have union with him through faith by the Spirit, they are the true sons of Abraham.
Israel Aid and Lobby Influence00:17:22
And when we bless God's people, Christians, those who have faith in Jesus, Abraham's true spiritual descendants, we will be blessed.
And when we're seeking to monetarily, And with our political might, our influence, our military might, our financial might, when we're giving this to bless a country that is literally known, if we're talking about theology, if we're talking in the spiritual realm, you're talking about a country that is built upon not the fact that it believes in Christ and has received Christ, but its rejection of Christ.
So you've just turned the whole thing on its head.
You're saying, I'm going to be blessed.
And I can just imagine God in heaven saying, Why?
Why are you going to be blessed?
Um, well, because I am blessing those who hate Christ, and I can see God just like, huh?
I'm sorry, what?
I'm sorry, come again.
Like, you're saying that I'm going to bless you.
I love my son Jesus, and I'm going to bless you because you are supporting an entire nation of people who believe that my son is a bastard and is currently burning in human excrement in some of the lowest regions of hell.
Like, could you run that by me again, Ted Cruz?
That doesn't make sense.
Any sense?
Yeah.
Let's hit our first commercial break and we'll talk about the money we give them, the lobbying they do here, and the many ways we have supported Israel.
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So, welcome back.
We're going to go ahead and play another clip from this interview.
I would just say you should watch it.
It was a very engaging, fascinating discussion.
Ted Cruz is not a dumb guy.
To be a U.S. Senator, it's not you won your local 5K.
He's probably the best that has to offer, and he loves him some Israel.
And they sat down for two hours, and you kind of got to see the strength of each position.
So, we'll roll the next clip and respond to it.
I'm hardly the one who's.
I've never taken money from the Israel lobby.
Have you?
Taken money from the Israel?
From APAC.
So APAC raises a lot of money for me, but it's actually a misnomer because the people who raise money are individuals.
So it's not the PAC itself, but they're individual members who believe in the American Israeli friendship and relationship.
Is APAC a foreign lobby?
No, it's an American lobby.
APAC stands for the America Israeli Political Action.
What is it lobby for?
So, to be honest, not a whole lot effectively.
Listen, I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate.
And I've worked every day to do that.
APAC, a lot of times, I wish we were much more effective.
Like, there's folks on the line who are in the fear swamp of terrified of APAC.
And APAC.
I'm not terrified of APAC at all.
You're the one who seems a little uncomfortable when I'm asking.
No, I'm not uncomfortable at all.
I'm just asking what APAC does.
My understanding, having known a lot of people who have been to APAC, Is that it lobbies on behalf of the Israeli government?
Wrong.
Oh, okay.
When was the last time AIPAC took a position that deviated from Prime Minister Netanyahu?
All the time.
Okay.
Let me go back and give a little history.
So you heard it here first, right?
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee doesn't lobby for Israel.
That's what we hear from Ted.
That's good to know.
I am relieved to hear that.
That's great.
Yeah, right.
So it's the feigning of.
You know, uncertainty or a lack of specifics on what exactly AIPAC does is completely disingenuous.
Senator Cruz knows exactly what AIPAC does.
Anything that benefits Israel, that is in the interest of Israel, is the legislation they push for.
And almost primarily, I'm not familiar with anything that AIPAC has ever supported outside of sort of those kinds of initiatives.
And so, this whole unwillingness to get specific about it.
There's a reason for that, right?
It raises actually more questions than answers, right?
So, yeah, I mean, I think what it tells us is that AIPAC is.
I mean, any politician taking money from AIPAC and Ted Cruz being one of those that's higher on the list is.
He took $1.8 million across his career.
$2 million.
You're bought and paid for on that issue.
Right.
I don't know how.
I mean, it would be one thing if it's a PAC that's sort of a broad initiative.
We're an economic PAC and we want to see small businesses thrive, right?
And there's all sorts of ways that that could manifest.
But it's like on this specific pack has one specific intention, one motive, and any politician who's taking money from them is standing behind that motive.
Right.
And especially if they're, if, you know, of all of your fundraising, they're a large percentage, it's like, what are you going to care about when you're in Congress?
Right.
That issue.
Yeah.
Well said.
It's one thing if you have a lobbyist group that lobbies for an issue that's domestic, that's related to your country.
Right.
Like what you were saying, you know, like if you had like some pack that's lobbying, you know, for small businesses or a pack that's lobbying for, The National Oilers Association is one of the biggest lobbying groups.
Yeah, there are groups like that.
We're not saying that they're, but the point is, but there's at least some kind of domestic value that they have in mind.
Like, we want to benefit this sector of America or this class of Americans, this group.
But the idea that there would be a lobbyist group and that it would be one of the largest ones that is for a foreign entity outside of America that's literally lobbying for another country.
I just, I.
Well, at least they're registered as a foreign agent.
Right.
They're not.
Yeah, they're not.
But my point is, I don't see how that is beneficial to America.
The idea that we would allow a foreign country to lobby in our country with millions and millions and millions of dollars that are going to hold all of our American politicians hostage or at least morally obligate them, bind them to benefiting someone else rather than America.
Yeah.
You can take a look on the screen here.
So, when we're talking about PACs, we're not sitting here talking about a very small political action committee.
There are shadow money.
We've talked about it before.
You could have shadow money divested to a little PAC here to win a local race or whatever.
These are the top three PACs that gave money to candidates in the United States Never Back Down Inc.
That's a Republican PAC.
National Association of Realtors.
That's a very bipartisan real estate, realtors, all of that.
And right below it, the third largest one as far as PACs, two candidates.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
We're talking about one of the biggest PACs, one of the most influential lobby groups.
There was a house race here in Texas, and it was two candidates.
The one guy was a really good right wing candidate.
I think Brandon Hara was his name.
And APAC came in and they asked him questions.
He didn't come out and say, I don't think they should exist.
I think we should nuke them.
He said basically, Hey, they have a right to exist, but America exists for America.
They poured, I think, $1.3 million into his house race, and he lost it by something like 400 votes.
That's the type of influence.
So they'll come in, they'll talk to a candidate.
I'm all in, I'm for Israel, I'll vote for this legislation.
You write the check.
And a big amount of that money, huge donor, do you know, is OnlyFans.
In 2023, the owner of OnlyFans came out and said, I'm writing $11 million to AIPAC for their lobbying efforts here in this year.
It was a big story.
So you have this lobby group that isn't required to register as a foreign agent, unlike all other, if you had a China one that advocated against.
Boycotting China for economic aid to China.
All of them would have to register.
This one doesn't.
So you have a lobbying group that doesn't have to register as a foreign agent.
You have it taking money from some of the most degenerate activities that are happening on our soil.
And all that would be good, I think, honestly.
Not good, but like I would get it.
If Ted Cruz could sit there with a straight face and just be honest yeah, here's what they do.
They want us to send them weapons, they want us to send economic aid, BDS, boycotts, divestiture, and something else.
We try to avoid them getting boycotted.
It's just what I do.
I root it in my biblical theology.
But he gets so squirmy through the whole thing.
And this interview is incredible.
It's the reason we're doing this whole episode on it.
Because this is really the first time I think you've seen someone on the side of Ted Cruz publicly get cross examined like this.
Like, I have not seen a politician of his caliber have to sit down for two hours and answer questions.
And Tucker could have been a lot harder.
Like, for the record, like Tucker's, I mean, these are just like basic questions.
Why don't they have to register as a foreign agent?
What have you taken this money for?
What do they actually do?
Funny pressure.
Funny comment from Comic Treason.
He said that I looked up, Nathan, if you can scroll down.
He said, I looked up the OnlyFans owner in an attempt to prove that all porn is not, in fact, owned by Jews.
But turns out he was Jewish.
Again.
I just thought that was funny.
Yep.
All right.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
One of the other claims that he made that I'd like to cross examine is that the U.S. only sends $3 billion to Israel.
Because practically speaking, if we're talking about $10 million, like in comparison to our budget, that's not a big deal.
Take a look at the economic and military aid that we've given Israel since 1950.
In 1950, just a.
Or 1949, just a year after the Marshall Plan, which was economic recovery for World War II, $100 billion.
$100 billion.
You can see there the economic aid, that's the pink line, and then the military aid, averaging around $40 billion per year in economic aid.
And your military aid, varying again up and down, between $10 to $20 billion.
And there's always something going on.
So Ted Cruz said, hey, $3 billion is earmarked for this.
But then what'll happen is there'll be an event like Iran attacking, or there will be an October 7th, and Israel will come to America.
With the politicians that they've happened to pay and support and donate to, and say, We really need an extra $2 billion here or an extra $500 million here.
We need armaments.
We need weapons.
And that's how it works.
So Ted Cruz is trying to tell you, Look, we're talking about $3 billion as a line item.
It's not that much.
That's the cap.
Completely wrong.
We have given hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel to support them.
Now, of course, there are reasons, especially if your nation is healthy.
And this is what Tucker Carlson is getting at.
It's one thing if you have a healthy nation where people are thriving and you say, We have some strategic allies.
That we want to support, like Vietnam and Korea.
I can understand the impulse to say these poor little nations are going to be crushed by communism unless the US comes in and does something.
That's maybe a potential calculus.
When your nation is thriving, your border is secure, people have jobs, sure, but hundreds of billions of dollars now, when American, I mean, home prices are higher than ever, Americans are struggling, be it with rent or with groceries, to sit there and say, all right, I'm elected by the American people, I represent them, and what the American people need most.
Is billions more to Israel.
You have lost the plot.
It's a phenomenal return on investment, too, right?
$100 billion.
You cut a million dollar check to 30 senators like Ted Cruz, you get $100 billion over 70 years.
Well, even one of the ways that we give money to Israel is most foreign nations, if they're in a pinch and they need our help and we consider them an ally, then you would give it in the form of charity.
It would be a donation.
But when it comes to charity, any nation that America gives a donation to, They have to actually give us an account on how they're spending it.
But in the case of giving loans to a foreign nation, then that rule isn't held.
So if it comes in the form of a loan, then that country that receives the loan from America doesn't actually have to be held accountable.
They can spend it in whatever way they want, and we don't ever see the records of that.
So in the case of Israel, it's the only nation, as far as I know, that we give a loan.
So we do it in the form of a loan so that they don't have to give an account for how they're spending the money.
But then we forgive every single time.
We forgive the loan.
So it actually is a charity, but we give them the form of a loan so that Israel has complete, you know, they're completely anonymous in how they spend it.
And then with that loan, at least a portion of it, they turn right back around and buy US Treasury bonds and begin profiting financially off of the interest of our bonds.
So they take our money as a loan so that they're not held accountable for how they spend it.
And then they take a portion of that and buy our bonds.
And then they make interest off of our bonds and then spend it all however they want.
And for the most part, we have no idea.
Some of it, you know, they may choose voluntarily to say, yeah, we're doing this and we're doing that, but they don't have to say anything.
And so a lot of it we don't know.
We've got to take a moment, though, real quick.
Somebody in the comments brought up an excellent point.
And they said, if you don't subscribe to the YouTube channel right now, like the video and share so that the algorithm is triggered, share the video so that it gets out to more people, then you are a Zionist and you hate Christ and you hate America.
And so I wouldn't say that.
I think that's a bit much for myself personally.
But under Christian nationalism, we don't make the rules.
But these are, in fact, the rules.
So you need to subscribe on YouTube right now.
You need to share the video.
You need to like the video, or your very soul is in danger.
And that's outside of my jurisdiction, and I won't be able to save you.
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Okay.
Let's hit one more angle that Cruz attempts to defend the United States' relationship with Israel.
So we'll play this last clip.
All right.
Or this second to last clip.
Mossad Spying on Epstein00:04:33
Massive benefits from Israel.
Israel shares the Mossad as one of the best intelligence sources on the planet.
The enemies of Israel, the people who hate Israel, they all hate us.
It's almost a perfect overlap.
And so if we tried to recreate, if we're just trying to defend America, we tried to recreate the national security benefits of our alliance with Israel, it would cost, I don't know, $30 billion, $300 billion each year.
So can you elaborate?
And again, I'm going into this as someone who's always liked Israel and still does.
But I also think at this point, given where we are, it's fair to ask rational questions about what the benefits are.
Good.
So, does Mossad share all of his intelligence with us?
Oh, probably not, but they share a lot.
We don't share all of our intelligence with them, but we share a lot.
It's a close alliance.
Do they spy domestically in the United States?
Oh, they probably do, and we do as well.
And friends and allies spy on each other.
And I assume all of our allies spy on us.
And that's okay with you?
You know what?
One of the things about being a conservative is that you're not naive and utopian.
You don't think humans are all part of the reason socialism doesn't work is the mantra from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs doesn't work.
As a conservative, I assume people act in their rational self interest.
Is it conservative to pay people to spy on you?
It's conservative to recognize that human beings act in their own self interest and every one of our friends spies on us.
And I'm not.
Do you like it?
Yeah.
So, I mean, this whole point about what we get in return, right, from all of this aid that we provide Israel, you would expect at minimum to hear they give us a lot of intelligence.
They're our best ally.
There's no spying.
And you would expect crews.
You know, a big proponent of giving aid to Israel to say something like that.
Right.
But instead, he balks totally at the notion of whether or not allies spying is okay and makes this weird argument about self interest.
It's just what I think we're seeing here is that even Cruz acknowledges that Israel, that we're not really getting a unique ally in Israel, a unique ally, right?
We've got the UK, we've got many nations in Europe that are allies with us and we share intelligence with.
But this, this, The notion of a special relationship with Israel is not evident in his response.
Right.
Yeah.
And to connect it to this is why I kind of wish Tucker had brought it up, but one of the Mossad spying activities was almost certainly Jeffrey Epstein here.
So his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, her father was a Mossad agent.
His connections to all types of, from your Barry Weiss's, whatever.
For one, it's all over conservative political thought, political action.
You have tons of conservatives that have ties here, ties there.
They're mentored by or took money from.
But a big one was Jeffrey Epstein.
And it's almost certain that the big thing that Jeffrey Epstein was doing, he was most certainly a pervert, but he wasn't just doing it for the love of the game.
What he was doing was collecting blackmail.
That's one of Mossad's trademark activities you collect blackmail on a politician by means of recording them doing something terrible.
And then you have that.
And you don't call it in immediately.
You don't call that in for your $250,000 line item for your district, getting maybe another Holocaust museum.
What you call that in for is when the big vote comes, the big guy picks up the phone and says, I would hate for this to get out.
I don't need this.
I don't need that.
I'm just going to need a no vote.
And it's likely, I mean, we're talking Bill Clinton.
We're talking guys like Bill Gates.
Tons and tons of people, high profile people, visited Jeffrey Epstein's private island.
And it is not at all unthinkable that he has blackmail on all of them.
And by virtue of having blackmail on all of them, himself, then you go to his partner, then you go to her father, it's very likely Mossad had all of that.
And I mean, think about that.
That is a way that you just run a country.
If you have blackmail on all of its politicians, and I'm not talking blackmail like, you know, when he was in high school, he listened to emo music.
I'm talking real career ending blackmail.
You can legitimately, without firing a bullet, without launching a missile, you can literally run a country.
And for the record, he trafficked American girls.
So, well, they spy on us, but who doesn't?
Oh, oh, so we have to tolerate foreign agents being here, trafficking our daughters, because we get good info on sand people who blow themselves up?
Tolerating Foreign Agents Here00:06:09
I just, I hate it.
And we can talk about the consequences of that kind of activity, right?
So imagine a scenario where Israel is pulling all sorts of levers to get legislation and get specific, you know, American foreign sort of actions, foreign diplomacy.
And the consequence of that is that we've stood by Israel in every major conflict in the Middle East without fail.
And as a consequence of really alienated, All of their neighboring nations.
And so the consequence is that we are hated, that there are chance death to America.
Correct.
That's a really good point.
Yeah, no, that's a great point.
When Ted Cruz says, that's a great point.
I'll tell you what's not a great point.
Senator Ted Cruz, when he says, you know, briefly, he mentioned, well, there's this, you know, almost perfect overlap, right?
If this was a Venn diagram, you know, just be a circle of people, you know, all these countries in the Middle East, all the sand people, you know, who hate Israel and they also hate America and they chant death to America.
That's true.
That's true.
But I think that that argument falls apart pretty quickly when you simply ask the question, why?
Do they hate America because we're 3,000 miles away doing our own thing?
Do they hate America just because we're Christian?
I think there's some of that.
Muslims hate Christ.
I think there's some of that.
But in large part, they hate America.
It's like, well, they don't just hate Israel, they hate us too.
And Israel is actually right there on the ground, kind of our stalwart in the Middle East, on the ground, that's holding back the tides of Islam.
It makes me think of like Napoleon Dynamite, where he's like, I can throw this football over that mountain.
These people, these Muslim countries, they're not going to be, they throw rocks, guys.
They throw rocks.
They're not going to be able to throw a rock and hit us on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
That's just, that's not going to happen.
Even the nuclear and all this kind of stuff, they've been days away from nuclear weapons for what, 30 years now?
I saw a meme, it's like, we uncovered an ancient stone in Persia from 2,000 years ago.
And what does it say?
Iran is 14 days away from nuclear weapons.
Right, exactly.
And to be fair, I actually think, you know, I think this.
Time is more valid than some of the other times, but I'm just saying that this, you know, boy who cried wolf rhetoric has been going on for about three decades.
They're days away from, you know, from nuclear weapons.
And I actually think that, you know, there are some valid, you know, objective signs that this time there's, you know, there's some truth in that.
But even with their nuclear weapons, there is no discernible objective proof that they're going to be able to actually shoot missiles.
Just having nuclear doesn't give them the technology.
To actually be able to reach us.
And so my point is well, the same people who hate Israel, they also hate America.
Yeah, they hate America because we back Israel.
That's why.
They hate America because all of Israel's conflicts in the Middle East, we side with Israel.
They hate America because we're funding the people who are bombing them.
We're funding the people who are killing their babies in the Gaza Strip.
We're funding, and we've been doing so for within minutes of Israel declaring itself a country.
It was LBJ, right, who came out within.
Truman came out, yeah, minutes and said, yes, we recognize Israel as a sovereign nation state.
And so to just say that, well, one good reason that we should ally ourselves with Israel is because all these enemies that they have are actually our enemies too.
And if it wasn't for Israel on the ground holding back the Islamic tide, then they'd be getting us.
One, technologically speaking, they can't reach us, right?
They just can't throw rocks over the ocean.
Number two, they hate us because of our participation with Israel.
If we weren't backing Israel, number one, they couldn't get to us as it currently stands.
And then number two, they would be far less motivated to try to hurt us, even if they could get to us.
And these are things that we need to take into account.
Real quick, I want to mention no more clips.
We had one more clip synced up and ready to go, but we've already shown three clips at this point from the Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz interview.
And we're not going to show any more because for a second we dropped the stream.
So we lost people in the chat.
Thank you guys for making us aware of that.
We figured it out.
We're back online.
But for a little bit there, we lost the live stream due to copyright problems.
So, to be fair, right, I want to be fair here.
People in the chat are like, Israel, cut the stream.
You know, Netanyahu, Bibi, he's asking.
That's still probably dead somehow.
Somehow, someway, I am convinced that they had their hand in it.
But as far as we know, I don't think it was Bibi watching Right Response Ministries and cutting the stream, you know, personally himself.
Shut it down.
I think it was actually Tucker Carlson's team saying, no, we did this interview and you guys are not going to get all the credit for it.
So you got to cut it down.
Which legally we are allowed to.
It's called fair use when you're providing commentary.
We're providing commentary.
But it's just.
But the big guys, we've noticed that pretty much any clip, and we don't show a lot of clips, but anytime we're doing like some kind of response to something, it's not like we're firing up the live stream and showing the full two hour interview.
And then at the end, we're like, hope you enjoyed it, like our page.
We're not some, I mean, there are some shameless YouTubers who actually do precisely that.
We never do that because we have some sense of dignity and try to have a conscience that can allow us to sleep at night.
But the few times that we have shown clips, pretty much without fail, I think it's exclusively Joe Rogan.
Yep.
And now Tucker Carlson, this is the first time that his network.
So, some of the big guys, they're pretty, in terms of legally, it's perfectly fair to show.
Lord knows it's fair because you know who gets clipped out and shown on other people's YouTube channels all the time?
This guy right here.
Right wing watch.
They clip me out and there's no commentary at all.
It's just the clip.
They just repeat your words.
They literally say.
They're like, our commentary on this is repeating what he said.
Grafting Gentiles Back to Christ00:16:21
Isn't this shameful?
So, you know, people do this all the time.
We actually do it legally by providing, you know, it's an hour and a half, two hour episode and we're showing a grand total of.
You know, seven minutes of content, uh, but we are not going to show anymore because we don't want the stream to get cut again.
And Tucker Carlson, as much as we love him, uh, somebody over there is a little trigger happy on his team, you know, uh, trying to punish right response ministries.
All right, so, um, we got some super chats and we'll close with thoughts on Iran.
Let's head to our last commercial break, yeah, real quick, uh, before the commercial break, because when we get done with the commercial, I want you to be able to give some concluding thoughts with Iran and me and Antonio to respond to that, uh, and do the super chats.
But there's one, and Wes is going to hate it because he's heard me do this a million times, but I'm going to do it as quickly as possible.
But there's one comment in the chat that I have to address.
Somebody is saying, Well, what about Romans 11?
What about Romans 11?
In a nutshell, this is my position.
And I think it absolutely matters.
So, first, see my published works.
So, me and Pastor Andrew Risker, we did a nine part series a few months back on all things related to Israel and especially as it comes to dispensationalism and covenant theology.
And what do you do about Romans 11?
So, for those who are wondering, Romans 11 is the text where the Apostle Paul.
He says that, but Israel will be saved.
He's basically speaking to all these Gentile Christians and saying, don't get arrogant, right?
Don't be conceited.
Don't be prideful, for you are the wild olive shoot branches that were grafted in, but the root supports you.
You don't support the root, the root supports you.
And the root, for the record, there is not the modern nation state of Israel.
It's Netanyahu, Ben Shapiro, they're not the root.
The root is Christ.
But what has sprung out of Christ, who is the root, is this.
Israel tree.
But then what God did in his sovereignty and his mercy, and this was his plan from the very beginning all the way to the end, continuity, covenant theology, was that the natural branches of this Israel tree, who the root is Christ, the natural branches, by their rejection of Christ, they were cut off.
And then a wild olive shoot with wild olive branches was grafted in.
So there's not, this is a big hit to dispensationalism, there's not two trees.
Two different sources of God's redemptive plan.
These are not two things running parallel.
That God's got one plan for Israel, you know, that's his natural born children that he really, really likes.
And then there's the, you know, the redheaded stepchild over there, you know, the Gentiles.
And he likes the Gentiles.
They're his, you know, adoptive children.
And he likes them as far as they're, you know, kind and respectful towards their older brother, the biological son, who is Israel.
That is not the biblical story.
That is not the story of redemption.
It's not two parallel paths.
It's not two plans of salvation.
God's doing one thing with Israel and then he's doing something else over here with Gentiles.
No, there's one tree.
The root is Christ.
He was always the root.
Old Testament saints before Christ, they were saved by looking forward to the Messiah and trusting in Him.
New Testament saints after Christ, we're saved by again, trusting in Jesus and looking back at Christ and His finished work, and His person, His life, death, and resurrection.
So, anybody from Adam and Eve all the way to you and I, people have only been saved through one source, one means, and one way, and that is faith in Jesus.
Looking forward to Jesus, Or looking back to Jesus, depending on your point in human history and redemptive history.
That said, there's one tree, the root is Christ, and the trunk was Israel, according to the flesh.
But then the branches of this tree, individual Israelites, were cut off because of their rejection of Christ, their unbelief, their lack of faith.
And then the Gentiles, all of branches, were grafted in.
And Paul, the argument that he's making in Romans 11, is he says, Don't be conceited, you don't support the root, speaking to Gentile Christians.
But the root supports you.
And he goes further and says, and if the natural branches were cut off for unbelief, can they not also be grafted back in?
If you, a wild olive shoot, if you could be grafted into this tree that's separate from you, then the natural branches that were already a part of the tree, it's actually an even easier, more natural grafting process for them to be grafted back in.
And then here's the final thing he says, if their removal, if these natural branches, Branches, the Jews who rejected Christ, if their removal and separation from the tree meant your salvation, you being grafted in, then what will their inclusion be?
So he says there will be a point.
He says for now, it's temporary and partial.
For now, there's a partial hardening over the Israelite people, according to the flesh.
Meaning some Israelites were still being saved at that time, but many were not because there was a partial hardening.
So there's a bunch of Gentiles that are not trickling in, but they are.
They like a torrent, they're flowing to Christ.
So, there's all these Gentiles that are being saved in mass numbers, and there are some Jews that are being saved, but there's a partial hardening, so there's less, there's a trickle there.
And what Paul's saying is that this hardening is a corporate hardening over natural descendants, natural Israelite people, and that it's partial and that it's temporary.
And what he says is that eventually they're going to be grafted back in.
He says, When they were taken out, it meant your salvation, your inclusion.
When they're brought back in, That'll mean even more.
It'll be even better.
That's going to be life from the dead.
Now, here's how it pertains to Christians today.
Many Christians, even those who adopt covenant theology instead of dispensationalism, I still have a problem with many of them because what they'll say is, well, I'm not a dispensationalist.
I'm a historic Protestant, or I'm a Catholic for that matter, Roman Catholic, or I'm Eastern Orthodox even for that matter.
And so what they'll say is, I'm not a dispensationalist.
So what I reject is.
Is any physical promise that's still in our future, right?
Something that's unfulfilled but will be later on at some future date.
I reject any future promises that would be physical, any land promises.
So I reject the idea that, you know, like if Israel somehow collapsed and they no longer had the land and they were no longer a nation state and they became exiles and were kicked out of that country, you know, their own country, and that made 110 now in countries that they've been kicked out of over the centuries.
And now they're nomads again, they're exiles, you know, refugees.
The guy who's not a dispensationalist and is saying, I don't believe there's any physical land promises still in our future for Israel.
Natural Israel, according to the flesh.
They're basically saying that wouldn't shake my faith.
That wouldn't mess with my theology.
I would be just fine.
The only thing that I'm holding, Joel, in terms of a future promise yet to be fulfilled, but that will be fulfilled in our future, is spiritual promises.
So I'm not a land physical promise guy.
I'm a spiritual promise guy.
And I'm just holding to Romans 11, Joel.
I'm just holding to Romans 11 that eventually natural Israel, right, the Jews physically, not spiritual, That these people, physical descendants of Abraham, that they'll be grafted back into Christ, that they'll get saved.
So I believe that there's going to eventually, one day in our future, be a spiritual revival among the natural Jewish people, and that they're going to come like a flood to Christ.
And when that happens, that's going to mean, like Paul says in Romans 11, life from the dead for everybody else, all the other Gentile nations.
So essentially, their position theologically is this.
They believe that there's a spiritual revival, salvation in mass for physical Jewish people still to come in our future, and that that will function as a catalyst that when that happens, all these other Gentile nations, all the other nations of the world, that we're experiencing some measure of salvation, some measure of Christendom, but there's a giant piece of the pie of God's global revival for all his people,
the Christianization of the world.
Christendom reaching South America and reaching Africa and reaching.
There's a great degree of the blessings of God, salvific blessings of God for all the other Gentile nations in the world that hinges upon the Jews getting saved.
They've got to come back in so that everybody else can experience real revival.
We've had a good run these last 2,000 years, right?
The gospel has spread to a lot of places.
And sure, there was like a thousand years, a millennia of Christendom in the West when it came to European peoples.
And there's cathedrals and there's biblical case law and all these different things.
And that's good, but that wasn't it.
We're still waiting for this global life from the dead revival for all these other non Jewish nations.
And the contingency is that first Israel has to get saved.
Now, what does that mean for your geopolitics, right?
Theology applied.
If you think theology applied isn't a thing and that's just for Christians, Ted Cruz, we're talking about world politics that are being guided.
By theology, Ted Cruz is applying his Sunday school theology, and not just him, but a ton of other American politicians are doing exactly what Ted Cruz did, and it could mean the difference in World War III or not.
Okay, so theology matters.
Theology applied.
Here's the deal if you say, Well, I'm not a dispensationalist, it's not a physical land promise thing, they could have the land or not, and we'll see what happens, what God does in his providence.
But one thing that I hold to, Pastor, is Romans 11, a spiritual revival for Israel.
Physical Israel, according to the flesh, they've got to have a revival.
They've got to get saved in mass and become Christians.
And until that happens, there's a huge blessing of God for every other nation on the planet that we have to sit around and wait for.
What does that obligate you to?
Well, what it obligates you to is this you can say, well, it's not the land, and so that changes everything.
It changes nothing.
Here's the point if we're all waiting, the entire world is waiting for the blessings of God to happen for us, and what has to happen as a prerequisite first is Israel getting saved.
Well, for them to get saved, even if it's just spiritual, a spiritual revival for Israel, what that means at bare minimum is they have to at least exist.
They have to survive.
And you're talking about a particular people that likes to pick fights with everyone, a particular people that has been kicked out of 109 countries.
And so you're saying that the Christian now, right?
If I love the world, so even if I'm not particularly fond of Israel, if I love Jamaica, if I love Uganda, if I love the Sudan, and I want the whole world to experience.
The blessings of God and the peace and joy that comes from having union with Christ and being a Christian.
If I want 8.3 billion people to not die and go to hell and to receive the blessings that are found in Christ, I am obligated, morally obligated, to make sure that Israel gets saved.
And guess what?
Right now, when Christians go to do evangelism in Israel, they spit on them.
So they're not getting saved anytime soon.
I think we can all agree with that.
So then what do I have to do in the meantime?
Well, for them to get saved, at least one thing has to happen.
They have to at least survive.
And they are doing their darndest to commit suicide pretty much every year.
They're literally the squirrely kid on the playground that goes around and is just, you know, sucker punching every single kid.
And some of those kids are twice their size.
And they're just going around doing this year after year after year after year.
They have a plan if they lose, they'll just blow the world up.
The Samson option.
The Samson, that's literally their plan.
Like, if you don't come to our defense, America, well, we will blow you up too.
Right.
If we're about to go down, there's no world without Jews.
And so, my point is theology matters.
Theology is always applied, whether somebody's just a professing Christian or whether they're truly regenerate.
Like, people are all applying this theology of Israel, whether they're dispensationalists and it's like, it's got to be the land.
Or even if they're not dispensationalists and they're like, well, I'm a historic Protestant or I'm a Roman Catholic, they still, their interpretation of Romans 11 is Israel has to survive.
We as a Christian nation are morally obligated to see to their survival so that eventually they can get saved, so that all these other countries don't die and go to hell.
That's the theology.
So, my position is I think that this already happened.
And you can watch a nine part series, nine hours of content with me and Pastor Andrew Isker as we talk historically and biblically why we believe that that's the case.
In 8070, God destroyed the nation state of Israel.
In 8070, we believe leading up to that and at that time that people saw.
Titus coming, the Romans coming, sacking Jerusalem, destroying the temple, not one stone left standing on another.
And they saw this before their very eyes as the exact fulfillment to what Jesus explicitly said in the Olivet Discourse of Matthew chapter 24, where he said, You, before this generation, it's not a metaphor, he was speaking literally, before this generation passes away, and 40 years later, lo and behold, one generation, the words of Jesus, one of the greatest prophecies ever given by Christ himself, they come to fruition.
One generation, they do not pass away.
There's still many of them are still alive who heard the words of Jesus at the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 when he says, This is a local judgment.
He's not speaking of the end of the world.
He says that you can escape it, right?
Don't go and get your tunic.
You can run and avoid and escape the smog of desolation, but you're going to see this thing happen.
And I believe, and there are historians like Josephus, who was a Jew, and others that confirm this that when this took place, that many of the Jewish people in AD 70, they saw it as the exact fulfillment to the words of Christ.
And they realized in that moment, oh my goodness, he was right.
We crucified our Messiah.
And they actually got out.
Many were destroyed and died in Jerusalem who did not believe.
They stayed thinking, oh, we'll make it.
God will defend us.
They stayed and they were conquered and they died.
But the ones who escaped, they escaped because they saw it as a fulfillment to Christ's words and they believed, they heard and believed his words.
They said, whoa, this is what Jesus said would happen before us, this generation, passed away.
He actually was the Messiah and we should believe in him, salvation.
So they became Christians and also we should practically obey him by getting out of dodge.
And so The Jews who lived were the Jews who became Christians.
They converted to Christianity.
They believed the words of Jesus and they fleed.
They escaped from that desolation in AD 70 and they mingled.
Therefore, they no longer have a nation state, which means they're now refugees and other places.
They committed themselves.
This is the logical conclusion committed themselves to the apostolic teaching of the New Testament that says it is not about one who is a Jew outwardly of the flesh, but inwardly, not circumcision of the flesh, but circumcision of the heart.
So they no longer put stock in their Jewishness according to the flesh.
Believed that Jesus was the Messiah, converted to Christianity, escaped the judgment.
All the ones who didn't have this heart change died, stayed, and died in the judgment.
And so now these guys, they're Christians, they're alive, and they're not putting stock in the flesh anymore.
And they don't have a nation state to mingle in anymore.
So they're dispersed, a dispersion among all these other Gentile countries.
And they likely, logically, intermarried with them.
Spiritual Descendants vs Flesh00:02:49
And so who are the physical Jews today?
Here it is.
Nobody.
Nobody.
There are Palestinians.
They've swabbed 2,000 year old catacombs underneath Israel.
And there are Palestinians that actually match up more than Ashkenazi Jews.
And there are people who argue for the Black Hebrew Israelites and people who argue, well, the Caucasians because they dispersed above the Caucasus Mountains.
I love all those views.
You know why I love them?
Not because I believe them.
I love all those views because I love every time somebody comes to me and says, white people are actually the physical descendants, black people are the descendants, Palestinians are the descendants, Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants.
Or here, here's an alternative.
Titus destroyed the temple.
The birth records were literally kept in the temple so that God, in his providence, saw fit that no one would be able to prove who actually was a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Why?
Because it doesn't matter.
Because now what matters is faith in Christ.
Faith in Christ.
And that revival, that life from the dead revival that Paul speaks about in Romans 11, I'm not saying that God did not keep his word.
I'm not saying that the word of God returned void.
God forbid.
I would never say that any verse in Holy Scripture is not true and that it will not come to pass.
What I'm saying is that Paul in Romans 11, which I date Romans being written probably 8055, 8060, something like that, he writes this.
And for him, it was in his future.
And for the immediate audience that received his letter to the Romans, it was in their future.
And it was fulfilled.
It's not fulfilled 2,000 something years later, but it was fulfilled relatively soon, 15, 10, 20 years later.
Later, that all of a sudden the fulfillment to what Jesus said in Matthew 24 actually took place.
A bunch of Jews still not believing Jesus stayed and were destroyed and died.
Other ones saw that as a confirmation that Jesus was the Christ.
They repented of their sins.
They repented of crucifying the Messiah.
They put faith in Jesus and practically believed now that he's the Messiah, his words are true.
They ran, like he said to do in Matthew 24, escaped, intermarried over centuries.
And today, what does it mean to bless Israel?
In Jesus, there is no Israel of the Bible anymore.
God saw to it through apostolic teaching that is explicit and by providence that is implicit that we would not, even if we wanted to, we would not be able to identify, oh, these are the natural descendants of Abraham and I should give them my money or give them missiles so that God might give me a blessing.
That's my spiel.
Let's go to a commercial break and we'll come back for our final segment.
Blessing Israel in Jesus Today00:03:12
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Corrupted Bloodlines of Ashkenazi Jews00:15:39
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All right.
So, as Joel alluded to, I had one more clip.
It was incredible.
39 million views it had on X.
And it was of Tucker asking Ted Cruz how many people live in Iran.
And he was just straight up like, I don't know.
Now, for one, that's why you need to listen to the live stream.
We literally talked about the ethnic makeup, the religion, the size, the GDP, and the population of Iran on Monday.
So, Ted Cruz didn't watch.
40 million people saw it and he looked stupid.
Don't be like Ted Cruz.
Watch the live stream.
But he basically said, You want regime change in this country, but you don't know much about it.
And also, the whole point of kind of the conversation was two hours long.
What does that get us?
And the one element, this has kind of been our position as we talked about it on Monday, as we're thinking through all of this.
When it comes to Iran, like you said, it's probable that they are enriching uranium towards the end of nuclear weapons.
And so, the narrative that you'll hear, and I think Ted Cruz is probably the one that's best able to do it.
He loves him some Israel.
He's on their side.
Decently smart guy.
He's a U.S. senator.
So he's the one pushing forward and saying, this is why we need to do it is that once Iran takes out Israel, if they're able to do so, they will turn around and attack the U.S.
I was just listening to Tucker.
He had a guy from the Pentagon, Dan Campbell, on.
And he said the same thing that we said on Monday Guys, Iran does not have the capability to reach us.
So when it comes to the Iran war, there's all the theological reasons.
There's not a theological basis to support Israel.
But also, practically speaking, We are just separated by an ocean.
And that is something I have not heard again and again and again, be it Tucker, be it others that are supportive of this.
Guys, they just don't have a way to reach us.
Well, do you want Iran having nukes?
No.
Do you know what I want more, though?
Not going to war.
Yeah.
Well said.
All right.
Let's go ahead and get to our super chats.
I'll go ahead and read the first one.
This comes from Tyler.
He says, from the Christian perspective, should we view the Talmudic? Jews similar to how the Jews viewed the Samaritans.
Is this a good parallel?
Corruption of bloodline, perversion of theology, and rejecting the prophet?
Talmudic is, that would speak specifically to the Talmud, is a commentary upon, I believe it's the Mishnah, which is then a commentary upon the Pentateuch, the moral law.
And so Talmudic refers more to a religious orientation than an actual.
Innate group of people.
So I don't think particularly, however, the people that have been shaped by the Talmud, Orthodox practicing Jews, we should certainly say there's a lasting effect of having built your identity around rejecting Christ.
So I wouldn't speak of it the same way that you could speak in racial terms.
I wouldn't root it that strongly because, again, Talmudic, the Talmud is a commentary upon a commentary.
It's a religious orientation.
I mean, Marx, for instance, was not a practicing Jew.
His family was Lutheran, but I still think he imbibed much of Jewish religious practice, which is to be.
Obsessed with money, greedy, and ultimately wanted to flatten all distinctions.
So there is an effect.
However, I don't know that the Samaritan angle is as helpful.
Yeah, certainly not at the individual level.
I mean, there's a sense in which, you know, you think about the Jews in the covenant, Samaritans outside of the covenant.
There's a sense in which we should view all people not in Christ as outside of the covenant.
In that sense of covenant keepers and covenant breakers, it is true that we ought to recognize Jews as outside of the covenant.
Right.
But what follows from that is that all people not in Christ are outside of the covenant, particularly, again, at the individual level.
You know, cultural assessments and talk about some cultures who are sort of more poignantly or pressing in a pressing way against Christ and Christ's kingdom being furthered.
But at the individual level and in the general sense, I think that framework, covenant keepers and covenant breakers, is the right way to view.
Yeah.
Go back to the question, Nathan.
Yeah, the reason I was hesitant to answer is, you know, he said, should we view Talmudic Jews similar to how Jews viewed the Samaritans?
And then he kind of.
Parsed it out what he means by that uh, and one of the aspects he included was corruption of bloodline, um.
So the reason why it's kind of like a, a blurring of categories is like what West said, talmudic Jews um, is really just a reference to uh, religious affiliation.
It's that's not a, that's not an ethnic.
You know people.
That's that's not um, that's there's no genetic.
You know designation of talmudic Jews.
You could be uh, you could be black and be a talmudic Jew.
You could be, you know, Latino and be a talmudic Jew, or Anglo or whatever.
So So, no, I don't think that's helpful.
But if you're just saying, should we view, like if you had said, for instance, should we view Ashkenazi Jews, right now we're talking about an actual ethnicity, Ashkenazi Jews in the way that biblical Jews viewed the Samaritans as genetically corrupted, that they've intermarried and that it's not pure.
Sure.
I think that that would be a fine analogy, except even with that, the disclaimer that I would want to offer.
Is that it doesn't matter.
Like we give a lot of times, like Old Testament Israel, a hard time, and rightfully so.
I mean, they usually got it wrong.
You know, God would say this and they would do the opposite.
You know, they're always grumbling in the wilderness with Moses, and, you know, like Moses is gone for 15 minutes and they're already worshiping golden calves.
And so, you know, Israel, I think in the Old Testament, in many ways, stands as just a testimony to God's grace.
Um, you know, and even Deuteronomy, I believe it's chapter seven, says, I did not choose you because of anything significant in you, in yourselves, um, in your own merit.
I didn't choose you because you were the greatest people on the planet.
In fact, you were the least.
Um, and and obviously, he's talking about uh Israel's number at that point and choosing Abraham, one family of all the earth.
Um, but but I think you know implicitly more, um, can can be read out of that in a fair, you know, justifiable interpretation.
What God is saying essentially is, I did not pick Israel because they were mighty, because they were strong, because they were numerous, um, or because they were.
You know, had a particular fidelity in their worship and allegiance to me.
I didn't pick them for any of those reasons.
If anything, I picked them because they were small, because they were weak, and because they were, if anything, Israel, according to the Old Testament, was supernaturally hard headed and stiff necked and rebellious.
And God chose them to magnify His grace, to show how long suffering He is, how patient He is, how steadfast He is, how He keeps covenant to the thousandth generation of those who fear Him and love Him and obey His commands.
And so, all that being said, I think that, you know, when you look at Israel in the Bible, Old Testament Israel, it's easy to give them a hard time.
And I would say, for the most part, rightfully so.
That said, when they're thinking of the Samaritans and these kinds of things, I guess what I'm trying to say is they had a point.
At that time, they had a point.
So, when, you know, the way they treated the Samaritans, obviously, when Jesus came on the scene, there were some, you know, some corrections that he offered to them.
You know, like the parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance, you know, or the conversation that Jesus has, you know, with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4 at the well, you know, and says, you know, neither, neither this place or that place, but, you know, but a day is coming where true worshipers will worship God and spirit and truth.
And so Jesus corrects this notion, but it wasn't completely illegitimate.
And the notion that I'm referencing is that they put some stock, some measure of value in being physical descendants of Abraham.
John chapter 8 is another reference where, again, Jesus corrects it by saying, Do you not know that I can make children of Abraham from the rocks?
You know, like this is not, you know, because the Pharisees are insisting, they're like, We're not illegitimate children.
You know, we're children of Abraham.
And Jesus is like, No, you're not.
And they appeal even higher than, Well, we're actually just, we're children of God.
And Jesus says, No, you're actually, I mean, You thought.
You're not fatherless.
You are children of someone, but it's actually the devil.
The devil is your daddy.
But my point is that there are multiple places where Israel, Old Covenant Israel in the Bible, puts some measure of value in ancestry and being actual physical descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
Our father Jacob built this well or this.
And my point is to say that, yes, Jesus corrects those things, but there's a reason why it mattered because in the Old Covenant, it actually was significant.
And that's not to say that no one could be grafted in.
Right, you have Rahab, you have Ruth, and there are plenty of others, but there was something to be said for Abraham had descendants as many as numerous as the stars and the sand on the shore.
And ultimately, there's a reference to his spiritual descendants, Christians, those who have faith in Jesus, but also his physical descendants.
And if you think that the flesh is of no account, especially under the old covenant, well, then why didn't God just get it done with his heir Eliezer?
Right, or why did God not just get it done with Ishmael?
Right, that's that's you know, that's Abraham's descendant, but it wasn't Sarah's.
No, it had to be Isaac.
It had to be the child of the promise.
And that child who was the child of the promise also happened to be the genetic offspring.
He was a physical descendant because it actually did matter.
And so, all the way back to the question, the reason why I don't think it's particularly helpful is you're doing a religious category and then an ethnic, right?
So you're saying Talmudic Jews instead of if you said Ashkenazi Jews and Samaritans, you're saying Talmudic Jews and Samaritans, which is more of a religious affiliation than a particular Jewish ethnicity.
But even if you had said Ashkenazi Jews and Samaritans, I would agree with you that the Samaritans were actually a blend intermarried of Jews and other tribes.
And Ashkenazi Jews, based off of what I said earlier, I also believe is a corrupted bloodline and not necessarily in a negative way with spiritual implications, but just no, you guys are not 100% descendants of Jacob.
No way.
I'm going to call BS on that.
And so that would actually be a better, it's not a blurring of categories Ashkenazi Jews and Samaritans, but even then, My point is that in the old covenant, that would carry some stock.
It would matter, you know, at least some.
But under the new covenant, it literally doesn't matter at all.
The old covenant Jews, when they looked at Samaritans and they had some problems with their pedigree, Jesus corrected them, but also they were on to something.
Today, 2,000 years after the coming of Christ and the tearing down of the division between Jew and Gentile, to say that there's any stock at all in being a 100% 23andMe genetic descendant of Abraham, Is just retarded, like that just doesn't make any sense at all.
Number one, it literally can't be proven.
Number two, um, biblically speaking, it has no spiritual um implications or value whatsoever or merit.
Um, so yeah, so I would just long answer, but my point is, yeah, I you know, you put it on the chat, God bless you.
Um, but I yeah, I would keep that one probably uh to myself.
All right, let's do Justin H, he left a hundred dollars between two super chats and had a great question.
Antonio, do you want to read it?
Yeah.
So Justin says, I go to a John MacArthur church.
I am a post mill.
Do you think the current issues in the Middle East and the dispensational view will come up more in John MacArthur's sermons?
Do you think they will call for support?
What do you think?
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's certainly on the table.
From what I understand about John MacArthur, I don't know him to step into those kinds of issues all that much.
But yeah, I mean, I. Again, harking back on what we've talked about in the episode, it would be consistent for them to call for support for Israel and for America to get involved in the war.
So, again, that's why I say it's not off the table.
I think there are many people in John MacArthur's congregation that would think precisely that thing.
But in terms of whether or not there will be some top down recognition of that, I think it's a little bit harder to tell.
Yeah, I don't know.
You're right.
It's not his MO to have specific political applications, but it's also not non existent.
Like MacArthur has, in some cases, things that I really appreciate, but like weighing in on elections and even like voting for Trump and things like that.
So it is something that he's done before.
And so I think it's possible.
But I'll also say that John MacArthur, his health, from what I hear, has improved.
But he is also, I mean, I'm not sure.
I think he's like 157 years old at this point.
Something like that.
He's only been in the pulpit, I think, once since July.
Right.
And so I just think we're going to probably see less and less of him.
There's other things on his mind.
And there's a flair of kind of West Coast Christianity, too.
So, Mark Driscoll's church, for example, they're kind of agnostic on eschatology.
You go down to like Westminster West.
Same, like they were Amil, but it wasn't like the defining feature of them.
That's a little bit more of a Southern Baptist thing, especially your Tim LaHaye, your Hall Lindsays.
And so I think, honestly, that trend continues that as people vary across eschatological spectrums, that you see a lot of pastors, unless they have a strong view.
I would say, even you, Joel, in the last couple of years, you're still postmill, we're still postmill, but just in speaking to it, like practically, you could be any of the three views and be hardcore we're going to take this town for Jesus, even if practically speaking, he comes back next Thursday.
Or you could be any of those three views and absolutely retreat culturally.
So it's not about like the exact view that you have.
So I think a lot of pastors are coming to that.
And then hopefully for you, Justin, I would hope at your church, the pastors there that are filling the pulpit, that are caring for the saints, that they can kind of recognize the times and say, there might be some import here.
And privately, I think the end times are near.
But practically, as far as their day in, day out instruction to the sheep, they're content to say, we recognize that more and more people just hold different views on this.
Taking Town for Jesus Anyway00:10:04
Yep.
Well said.
Antonio, you want to read the next one?
Let's do Appeal to Heaven at the top.
Yeah.
So Appeal to Heaven says, IFB pastor, beer with meal equals not Christian.
IFB also not supporting Israel, also not Christian.
Grew up IFB, make it make sense, keep up the fight.
Well said, appeal to Heaven Seven.
If you're sitting here telling me that independent fundamental Baptists don't make sense, you're not going to hear any argument out of my mouth.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It's funny because we were talking before the show that if you took every dispensational and you put them up in Canada, right now America would be a third world country.
That's right.
Practically speaking, probably at its height, the best estimates, it was like 10 to 15% of Americans were dispensationalists.
But all that being said, the inconsistencies, sadly, it drove a lot of people away from the church.
So it's kind of, you know, dunking on IFB.
I get it, and it's fun.
But sadly, a lot of people, those inconsistencies, like it's don't go to R rated movies, don't smoke a cigarette, don't have a beer, support Israel with every extra dime you have, and also don't build anything because the world's going to end.
I mean, a lot of orientation towards environmentalism.
Like Teddy Roosevelt was big early on in the 1900s.
We need to protect our environment, our American heritage.
Well, that went out the window in the 70s and the 80s because it's like, who cares about national parks?
Jesus is about to come back.
There's more important things to be done.
And so, absolutely agreed, but it's also sad because it made a shipwreck out of a lot of people's faith.
Right.
Yeah.
Wes brings up a good point that, like, dispensationalists, and I'll clarify this, but let me say it this way first dispensationalists are the salt of the earth.
Like, you take every dispensationalist out of America and we are doomed in terms of voting.
Yeah.
That said, the more accurate way I think is that Christians are the salt of the earth.
You take every Christian out of America and we're doomed.
And just currently in this moment of human history or church history, in this case, the vast majority of American Christians are Protestant.
And the vast majority of Protestants happen to be dispensational.
So I would say, yeah, dispensationalists are kind of like, you know, Stephen Wolfe, you know, when he says white evangelicals, you know, are the lone bulwark, you know, holding back the tide of wokeness and all these different things.
That's true in terms of speaking of voting patterns, which was his point.
And likewise, you could also say Zionist dispensationalists are the lone bulwark holding back, you know, a Kamala Harris presidency.
Yeah.
And that would be true.
But what I want to say is that, It's Christians that are doing that despite their dispensationalism, not dispensationalists doing that despite their Christianity.
And that difference makes all the difference in the world.
Yes, I think that a bunch of dispensationalists are helping to barely keep America sane, but they're not doing it because of their dispensationalism.
They're doing it despite their dispensationalism.
And I'd like to believe, and I think it's true, that we'd actually be in an even stronger position.
If we didn't have the poison of dispensationalism, I think we'd have number one, more Christians.
I actually do.
I think you're right, Wes, that dispensationalism is so wacky and so silly that it's actually turned a lot of people away from the church.
So, one, I think we'd just have more Christians.
And then two, we'd have more Christians who have a place, a higher stock in the future.
Dispensationalists are, for the most part, premillennial in their eschatology.
And dispensational premillennialists, by and large, this is a generalization, but it's generally true.
They don't just believe Jesus is going to return eventually, but they think he's going to return any minute now.
And when you think that Jesus is coming back any minute now, and you think that it's kind of The story's already been written in terms of things are going to get worse and worse until he comes back.
Then you're not necessarily taking on 500 year projects and looking way out to the future, planting a tree today so that your grandchildren can sit under its shade, or protecting a national park or doing this or doing that.
So, yeah, so dispensationalists have done a lot of good, but I think it's despite their dispensationalism, not because of it.
And if there wasn't dispensationalism and it was just Christians, I think one, we'd have more of them.
And two, I think they'd be more future oriented and fighting with even more resolve.
All right, what's our next super chat?
Deacon St. John, great supporter.
Always see him in the chat.
Yeah, thank you.
$20.
Thanks, St. John.
He asked this Can a single man change his name due to psychological stress from sharing it with an abusive father who passed away without sinning?
As in, can you change your last name due to that?
The associations there.
What do you guys think?
I love.
I love the idea of God redeeming a last name.
So, you think of very often in scripture, we even read it just there in Genesis the families of the earth.
So, instead of nations, it says families.
So, there's this real sense of continuity that you have ancestors, and by God's grace, you'll have children in the future.
And so, when even in the changing of the name, you're certainly legally changing what's on paper, but you're not changing the nature that you're descended from a long line of men.
And it sounds like men that were not good, but you yourself, by God's grace, have placed your faith in Jesus.
You're living a moral life in obedience to him.
And so, You're really talking about, can I change and alter the name that goes along with it?
I think the Christian's conscience is open.
However, again, I think I would love to view it in the sense of here's a name that was tarnished, that was associated with wickedness, that tons of evil was done under, not just to themselves, but to other people.
But in God's grace, here I am, and I'm taking this name that actually resembles something good.
It's a name that's now associated with the people that know me with virtue, with a man who keeps his word, who's upright in his community.
But All that being said, you just say practically, that might be my son if I have children.
But that's your position.
I don't think you necessarily sin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd agree.
I think it's permissible.
Obviously, in the state that we're in in America, I think this is a very common thought, right?
Absent fathers, abusive fathers.
I mean, this sort of stuff runs rampant in our culture.
And so, you know, I think it's a valid question because a lot of people are considering it.
I would just say, You know, a point of encouragement on this, I think, you know, which is the ethos of the reform tradition too, is to reach further back into history, right?
You know, our immediate fathers, I think this is true generally in our country, our immediate fathers did fail in quite a lot of ways.
But if you go further back, you go to your grandfathers and their fathers and their fathers, at some point you do get to a point of genuine pride.
And even if there's all sorts of disappointment and stress related to your relationship with your own father, those men certainly were thinking of their progeny, were most certainly thinking of you and their actions and the sacrifices they made.
And so I would say to honor them, the encouragement would be to keep your name and to redeem it in the short term in the life that you have.
That's a really good point.
I didn't even think about that.
But yeah, it's kind of like the old adage with feminism when they're like, I'm not going to take my husband's last name, I'm going to keep my.
Uh, my last name, it's like you mean your father's last name, yeah.
You're sticking it to the patriarchy by honoring your father.
Um, anyway, you slice it, but you're right.
It's like, so if your immediate father, um, was a deadbeat, uh, and and you know, and now he's died, you know, or whatever, he you know, od'd on drugs and was absent and and did nothing for you except for you know, abuse you and mistreat you and all these different things.
It's like, I don't want to honor him, I don't want to bear his last name, but his last name didn't come out of the ether.
You know, his name is your grandfather's name, and that name is your great grandfather's name.
And you're right.
In our American history, chances are, if you go back far enough, that person was an upstanding, God fearing person.
At one point in our country, not that long ago, 90% were Christian.
And so, yeah, so I would be considering, instead of just thinking, I don't want to bear my deadbeat dad's last name, I'd be thinking, well, your deadbeat dad is somebody else's deadbeat great grandson who ruined his great grandfather's name.
And you have a chance to redeem it.
So, doing it not just for your immediate father, but for your father's father's father, that lineage and restoring it.
So, the redemption factor, I think, is a fantastic argument.
The only thing that I'll add to it is in the sense of not advocating for doing it, but an argument in terms of permissibility that it's not sin, is that God does change names in scripture.
There are occasions, whether it's Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, or Jacob to Israel.
There are cases where God sets someone apart.
But I do want to mention, though, like in the case of Abram to Abraham, that being one of the greatest examples that we could think of biblically, he's at that point coming from a lineage of a bunch of idol worshipers, stretching back as far as you could possibly go.
God Changing Names in Scripture00:05:30
I mean, I guess eventually you get back to Adam and Eve or Noah.
But he's got like generations and generations and generations of idolaters.
And he's starting something new.
He's starting, exactly.
So God's goal is not to redeem in that case, but to start.
I'm setting you apart.
And that's a very, very particular thing that God does in Old Testament scripture in the case of Abraham.
And that's not really something that God is doing today.
God's not setting someone apart.
To be a nation that's going to be a holy nation, a particular nation through whom the Christ, the Messiah, is going to be brought forth like that.
I mean, that's kind of one of those things that God did once and he doesn't do again.
So, again, permissibility, sure.
In terms of the ideal, man, I would be really, really, really hesitant to do something like that.
Any other super chats?
Four, they're just comments from faithful supporters, mostly peaceful merch.
Send a $10 super chat.
Thank you so much.
It says, it's not just envy.
No, it is not.
Nope.
Thank you for handling this previously third rail topic with maturity and accuracy.
We're going to make it.
Hey, Ben.
It is funny, like a year ago, it would only be like hushed tones.
And then there's this lobbying group called APAC.
Now it's just, APAC's the worst.
Yep.
Jeff Halfley, Joel, do you want to read these?
He references your talk at all.
Sure.
He said, Tucker versus Ted is the best TV I have seen in years.
Yes, it was highly entertaining, even if you disagree with both of them.
It was really good.
Some good TV.
He also said, Jeff Halfley, another super chat.
Thanks, Jeff.
He said, Great talk at NCP, that's New Christendom Press Conference.
Joel, great to see you there.
It was great to see you too.
Thank you for the encouragement.
I remember walking down from the stage and my wife was asking, How'd you do? or How did you feel about it?
And she had watched the live stream back home.
And she was like, I think you did good.
I was like, I don't feel great.
And she said, That's just because you weren't yourself.
Typically, your MO is you go up with a napkin and crayon, and Four or five words of notes written down and shoot from the hip.
Spelled incorrectly.
Yeah, spelled incorrectly.
And you're shooting from the hip.
And that's kind of like quintessential Joel Webbin.
Whereas in this case, for those of you who were there at the conference or who purchased the live stream and have heard it, I had like four pages of notes and a sizable amount of that, like 80%, were quotes.
And so it was just, for me, it was just kind of out of my wheelhouse.
It was just unusual to actually be reading.
Quotes for 15 minutes.
So, after, like, when I was done with the quotes and I gave my concluding thoughts, I feel like I hit my stride and had some good insights that I think were helpful for people.
And I got a lot of encouragement, but bogging down and sitting and reading was just different for me.
Some guys, that's what they do.
You know, like, there's a lot of guys who are great preachers, great speakers, and they manuscript everything out, every sentence, every word.
But that's just never been me.
So, but thank you, Jeff.
I appreciate your encouragement.
And I think that does it for two more super chats.
Okay.
Jeff, one more time.
He said conservatives are by their very nature not rioters or revolutionaries.
Rather than playing at 1776, we should be concentrating on getting based DAs, district attorneys.
What do you think?
Yeah.
That's why we're not conservatives.
We had an episode a couple of weeks ago.
He's exactly right.
Like there's a conservative impulse and it's to preserve.
And there is a time for that.
Right.
Namely, when you have a great, wealthy, Happy populace.
Right.
I'm not trying to conserve what's happening right now.
Yeah, we're not trying to conserve 2025.
Yeah, so we are like for just for the listener, I don't want them to be confused.
When we say we're not conservatives, we're not saying so we're liberals or we're leftists.
Right.
Of course not.
So you're a liberal then?
Right.
Oh, no.
No, but what we're saying is that we have gotten so far off the rails that to merely conserve and to simply set up a hedge towards further leftward drift is not sufficient.
That we actually do.
Um, we actually do need to get way back.
Um, and then he also said, Jeff Halfley, uh, the right has got to stop LARPing about guns and militias and start taking action to get laws and lawyers and judges in place to act.
Amen.
Yep.
Um, and hopefully, I don't know, I'm struggling to trust the plan right now.
I'll be honest, I'm not a plan truster.
Uh, but you know, I am hoping we're not in that war in Iraq and Iran yet.
We're not, thank the Lord.
Yeah, so Trump is being hesitant.
I appreciate that.
Um, hopefully, we do not go to war, and then also, I was thinking of just like the big beautiful bill.
Hopefully, that gets passed and you have the funding for ICE and are able to just override judges and deport people.
So, I think there's still a chance.
Deacon St. John, he gave us $2 here at the end and said, Thank you for answering his question.
You are very welcome.
Hoping We Avoid War00:01:00
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